194 – Cultural Capture by Chokepoint Capitalism (ft. Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow)
This Machine Kills
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Introduction
In Australia, a combination of would-be 19th century robber barons and chaotic governance among the then-independent Australian states resulted in the middle-gauge model. Over some 150 years, hundreds of designs for multi-track rail cars have been tried and discarded. In the end, Australia solved this problem by embarking on a decades-long project to tear up thousands of kilometers of rails and replace them with standard gauges. But digital computers are possessed of a nearly mystical property of universality. All of them can run every formally correct program.
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