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Bernard Geoghegan, “Learning to Code: From Information Theory to French Theory”

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

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The History of Cybernetics

In the 2010s, recent Wesleyan University graduate and a wiener quit her job as a Manhattan literary assistant to join a booming digital startup in Silicon Valley. Her memoir of that time, Uncanny Valley, recalls not so much a change in industries as a shift in cultures of analysis. She found a vast database ordered in terms more evocative of cultural studies than electrical engineering. Data could be segmented by anything in collected, age, favorite movies, education, kinds, pro-clivities, end care, end user data. In the country city, cell phone app, weighty with information about people's habits; big data of Silicon Valley,. non-manetic codes governing signification

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