| I want to introduce you all to a magazine readers of 5it will almost certainly enjoy. It’s called Logic and it was co-founded by Moira Weigel, Ben Tarnoff, Christa Hartsock, and Jim Fingal with creative direction by Xioawei Wang. It is not a glossy magazine but a manifesto-y one. You can check out their first issue, Intelligence, here. It is very smart.They’ve got a new book out called Tech Against Trump, which chronicles the rise of anti-Trump resistance in the tech industry. It launches officially this Friday at B4bel4b in Oakland. To mark the date, I asked Moira Weigel to pick links from the contributors to the magazine, which she has graciously done. (And here’s a bonus link to a story of hers for The New Yorker.) 1. Founding editor Ben Tarnoff wrote about the new internet privacy bill, why it matters, and how you can fight back--as well as the limits of net-neutrality as a concept for governance. "Net neutrality is a politically useful concept. As a rallying cry, it has focused public attention on the corporate domination of the Internet and guided important regulatory advances. But it has serious limitations that make it a poorly suited framework for the longer fight to democratize the digital sphere." 2. Ava Kofman explained the risks of improvements in real-time facial recognition. "For years, the development of real-time face recognition has been hampered by poor video resolution, the angles of bodies in motion, and limited computing power. But as systems begin to transcend these technical barriers, they are also outpacing the development of policies to constrain them. Civil liberties advocates fear that the rise of real-time face recognition alongside the growing number of police body cameras creates the conditions for a perfect storm of mass surveillance." 3. Miriam Posner broke down the feminization of front end coding. "Front-end developing is a feminizing subfield rather than a masculinizing one. But it’s governed by the same market forces that edged women out of programming in the first place. Prestige accrues to labor scarcity, and masculinity seizes prestige." 4. Laura Frost reported from the last shoot at Kink.com's legendary San Francisco sex dungeon (and, ever the professor, taught us the phrase "enema debutantes"). "In January, Kink announced that it would stop using the 103-year-old building for making adult films. Since 2014, Kink's been quietly moving its production studios 550 miles east to Las Vegas, a move that is symptomatic of broader trends of the Silicon Valley–fueled gentrification pushing sex-positive spaces out of San Francisco and, more specifically, porn companies losing ground in California because of increased state regulations." 5. Natasha Lennard explored how new tags might make for a better taxonomy of porn. “Think about the MILF/teen dichotomy,” pornographer and writer Stoya told me earlier this year. “There’s no third or other option for female age. The system demands the impossible—that you’re either a MILF or a teen. And sometimes, because of SEO [Search Engine Optimization], you get tagged as both in the same scene. It’s absurd!… And don’t get me started on a category like ‘interracial.’” + Cameron G. identified some possibilities and obstacles for inclusivity in #sextech.
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