Long Thoughts

Digital life between machinic partnerships and algorithmic institutionalism

Luciano Petullà · September 9, 2024

Being a citizen of the 21st century involves having an increasing intimacy of use – and even bodily hybridization – with technologies of all kinds ( bio, info, nano and neuro) as well as with algorithmic organizations/entities that have become, as matter of fact, cultural and social global institutions. We exist and operate in the world as composite and interacting assemblages of materials deriving from what we call nature, culture or technology, and in doing so we move within certain normative and value frames. Processes of hybridization have distinguished human beings …

For the social sustainability of an algorithmic culture

Luciano Petullà · June 1, 2024

Ted Striphas' book Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet has been translated in Italian language and is forthcoming from the publisher Mimesis in the “philosophy of digital” series. This is the English translation of my Italian preface. La cultura algoritmica prima di Internet is about the development and emergence of a human and social life’s new condition due to the growing intertwining between computing and culture. The argument is an enormously and relevant issue thinking about how systematically such an encounter marks us as “onlife” beings (Floridi, …

Origins and Social Meanings of Algorithmic Culture

Luciano Petullà · October 10, 2023

Abstract The social sciences have much to say about the cybernetic turn our lives have taken thanks to the use and intermediation of software applications spread through the Internet. The book Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet by Ted Striphas takes the burden of explaining with originality and expertise the deep cultural history of this epochal turn, offering us useful reflections to interpret and make sense of the current expansion of our relations with the machinic world. Introduction The mass diffusion and adoption of information and communication …

ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence, in the technical-moral jumble of new cultural software

Luciano Petullà · March 25, 2023

The popularity of the ChatGPT software is an opportunity to discuss the merits of a problem that will mark the 21st century’ scenarios in many areas of our life – namely the growing development of intelligent devices that autonomously carry out tasks previously supported only by human beings, intervening in sensitive contexts for their economic, social and cultural value. From a historical point of view it is time that discussing Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer considered as an area reserved only for a certain professionalized elite. Starting from the 2000s – …

The environmentalism communication between shock, reason and allurement

Luciano Petullà · January 18, 2023

The last months of 2022 have seen an escalation in the demonstrative actions by the younger generations aiming to combat the substantial indifference of national governments with respect to the growing degradation of the environment in which all beings (human and otherwise) try to live. After years of debates on the unsustainability of the economic and social development models established in the world almost everywhere, thanks to the perverse effects caused by climate change we have come to verify with growing concern, day by day, the guilty weight of such …