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Dig Bos

The Dig - Boston's Only Newspaper

CURRENT STREET EDITION

DIG 23.02 – 1/28/21

holiday

DO WHATEVER YOU CAN TO HELP YOUR NEIGHBORS IN THIS TIME OF GREAT CRISIS

Written by JASON PRAMAS Posted December 17, 2020 Filed Under: Apparent Horizon, COLUMNS, News, News to Us, NEWS+OPINIONS

Image CC-BY Salva Barbera 2010

A holiday message

Filed Under: Apparent Horizon, COLUMNS, News, News to Us, NEWS+OPINIONS Tagged With: Apparent Horizon, assist, Boston, Christmas, Column, Democracy, donation, friend, Give, global, Hanukkah, help, holiday, holidays, Homeless, hunger, international, Jason Pramas, Kwanzaa, love donate, Massachusetts, neighbor, Ōmisoka, poverty, usa, volunteer, world

THANKSGIVING FICTION: WE LIVE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE THE BAD GUYS WON

Written by JASON PRAMAS Posted November 25, 2019 Filed Under: Apparent Horizon, COLUMNS, NEWS+OPINIONS

National Day of Mourning Plaque. Photo by Melissa Doroquez, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://flickr.com/photos/merelymel/3119433076/.

"Americans today live in a very real universe where the functional equivalent of Nazis—European colonists—committed genocide against Native American peoples..."

Filed Under: Apparent Horizon, COLUMNS, NEWS+OPINIONS Tagged With: african american, alternate history, America, Apparent Horizon, Book, Column, criticism, Democracy, DigBoston, genocide, holiday, Jason Pramas, Journalism, native american, nazi, Philip K. Dick, racism, review, science fiction, slavery, television, thanksgiving, The Man in the High Castle, United States

STEP ASIDE, NUTCRACKER: 10th ANNIVERSARY OF “WHAT THE DICKENS” BY THE CAMBRIDGE YOUTH DANCE COMPANY

Written by JILLIAN KRAVATZ Posted December 5, 2018 Filed Under: A+E, Performing Arts

The Fezziwigs. Photo by Jaimie Dudley.

 

“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me,” Charles Dickens’ famous Ebenezer Scrooge declares at the end of A Christmas Carol, giving up his miserly ways for a new life of generosity.


 ...  read more

Filed Under: A+E, Performing Arts Tagged With: Cambridge, Cambridge Youth Dance Company, Dance, Deborah Mason, Dickens, holiday

ON MAKERSPACES AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Written by JASON PRAMAS Posted December 19, 2017 Filed Under: Apparent Horizon, COLUMNS, NEWS+OPINIONS

 

Making can be cool, but conscious making is cooler

 

For many of us living in and around Boston in recent years, it has become common to see lots of communications from makerspaces around holiday time. Which is totally understandable. Such creative centers produce neat things year-round, so it’s only natural that their members would turn to producing gifts like busy elves (and holding workshops about how to produce gifts like… um… smart busy elves) as fall turns to winter.

 

However, if you’re someone who thinks critically about social institutions and their interaction with technology, then you might join me in feeling some concern about the trajectory of these spaces. Which boils down to this: Do makers and the makerspaces they found think about why they make, and for whom they make? Obviously, it varies from maker to maker and space to space, but my observation has been that the maker movement could do much better on that front. So I thought I would run through some of my apprehensions on that theme and make some suggestions for reform. In the spirit of holiday giving and all that.

 

There’s no question that makerspaces have been a boon to society in many different ways. Described by the Somerville nonprofit makerspace Artisan’s Asylum as “community centers with tools,” these logical outgrowths of the hacker and DIY cultures—and the older crafter culture, amateur radio culture, and cultures around magazines like Popular Electronics and Popular Mechanics—have grown to become a significant social force in the last decade. Particularly in places like the Boston area that have lots of colleges producing lots of engineers, scientists, and artists.

 

But it’s important to remember that—as with science, technology, and art in general—there is a problem with pushing “making” in the abstract without thinking about its social and political consequences. Because tools and techniques may be inherently neutral, but people and the institutions we create are not.

 

Including makerspaces. So it’s worth being aware that, according to PandoDaily, in early 2012 O’Reilly Media’s MAKE division —publisher of Make magazine, perhaps the best known popularizer of the maker movement—announced that it had won a grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to participate in the agency’s Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (or MENTOR) program. The money was to be used to start 1,000 makerspaces in high schools around the country.

 

Now DARPA may be most famous as the super clever agency that brought us the Internet. But it worked on that project in part—protestations from its fans and allies taken as given—to help solve the insoluble problem of how to keep America’s military, research, and control centers in communication with each other after an all-out nuclear war. And somehow help our government survive the unsurvivable.

 

It is also the super clever agency that has brought us an array of very nasty war machines in the last six decades. Notably, according to Air & Space magazine, the Predator drones that have killed hundreds of innocent people around the world—including many children—in recent years at the behest of presidents from Bush to Obama to Trump. Because they’re just not as accurate as our military and political leaders would have us believe. And because those leaders don’t really care about what they call “collateral damage” when they’re prosecuting what human rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights claim are extralegal assassination campaigns.

 

As it turned out, the DARPA MENTOR high school program never really got off the ground because it lost its budget in President Obama’s big “Sequestration” budget cut of March 2013. And it’s certainly worth mentioning that the program sparked protests from within the maker community.

 

But DARPA continues to participate in a variety of science and technology events aimed at high school kids—notably the young robotics crowd that overlaps with makerspaces.

 

And DARPA is also aiming events squarely at makerspaces… and some makerspaces are definitely participating. For example, according to the DARPA website, this November the agency held the DARPA Bay Area Software Defined Radio (SDR) Hackfest at NASA Ames Conference Center in Moffett Field, California. The relevant webpage explains that “Teams from across the country will come together to explore the cyber-physical interplay of SDR and unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, during the Hackfest.”

 

“Unmanned aerial vehicles” is another term for drones. Two of the eight teams invited to participate along with teams from military contractors like Raytheon were the Fat Cat Flyers from Fat Cat Fab Lab, a volunteer-run makerspace in New York City, and Team Fly-by-SDR from Hacker DoJo, a nonprofit community of hackers and startups in Silicon Valley… which is also a makerspace.

 

Whatever you in the viewing audience think about the Pentagon in particular and the American military in general, we can all agree that there are moral, ethical, social, and political questions that must be asked in a democratic society about the intersection of maker culture and makerspaces with those institutions.

 

For that reason, I think it’s critical that makerspaces raise and address such questions on an ongoing basis. That they maintain a scrupulous policy of transparency regarding who they work with and why. And that they hold classes and public forums on the moral, ethical, social and political dimensions of why makers make and for whom they make. Something you really don’t see much of at makerspaces at present. But should.

 

Anyhow, I’m keen to engage with the maker community on this topic and flesh these ideas out more. Folks interested in discussing the issues I’m raising at more length can drop me a line at [email protected]

 

A shorter version of this column was originally written for the Beyond Boston regional news digest show—co-produced by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and several area public access television stations.

 

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Filed Under: Apparent Horizon, COLUMNS, NEWS+OPINIONS Tagged With: Apparent Horizon, Art, Boston, Column, criticism, DARPA, drones, economy, holiday, Jason Pramas, maker, makerspace, making, Massachusetts, military, news, Peace, Pentagon, Politics, science, technology, war

COMMUTE OF THE LIVING DEAD: BUSIEST DAY OF THE YEAR

Written by ERIC BOEKER Posted February 19, 2017 Filed Under: Comics

Filed Under: Comics Tagged With: blood, brain eating, brains, coffee, comic strip, comics, death, disapproving girlfriends, eric boeker, flowers, free hugs, geek, heart, holiday, horror art, horror comedy, horror comic, humor, kale, laugh, Laugh Cartoon Comics, My Bloody Valentine, punk rock, Sunday Comics, sunday comics project, sundaycomic, undead, Valentine's Day, walking dead, webcomic, weird, Zombie, zombie art, Zombie Comedy, zombie comic, zombie webcomic

COMMUTE OF THE LIVING DEAD: MOSQUITOS

Written by ERIC BOEKER Posted February 5, 2017 Filed Under: Comics

Filed Under: Comics Tagged With: blood, brain eating, brains, coffee, comic strip, comics, death, disapproving girlfriends, eric boeker, free hugs, freeze, frost, geek, groundhog, Groundhog Day, holiday, horror, horror art, horror comedy, horror comic, humor, kale, laugh, Laugh Cartoon Comics, mosquitos, new year, punk rock, Sunday Comics, sunday comics project, sundaycomic, undead, walking dead, webcomic, weird, winter, Zombie, zombie art, Zombie Comedy, zombie comic, zombie webcomic

COMMUTE OF THE LIVING DEAD: PROTEST OR RALLY?

Written by ERIC BOEKER Posted January 15, 2017 Filed Under: Comics

Filed Under: Comics Tagged With: blood, brain eating, brains, coffee, comic strip, comics, death, disapproving girlfriends, eric boeker, free hugs, geek, holiday, horror, horror art, horror comedy, horror comic, humor, jogging, kale, laugh, Laugh Cartoon Comics, new year, Politics, Protest, punk rock, rally, Sunday Comics, sunday comics project, sundaycomic, undead, walking dead, webcomic, weird, Zombie, zombie art, Zombie Comedy, zombie comic, zombie webcomic

COMMUTE OF THE LIVING DEAD: EAT MORE JOGGERS

Written by ERIC BOEKER Posted January 8, 2017 Filed Under: Comics

Filed Under: Comics Tagged With: blood, brain eating, brains, coffee, comic strip, comics, death, disapproving girlfriends, eric boeker, free hugs, geek, holiday, horror, horror art, horror comedy, horror comic, humor, jogging, kale, laugh, Laugh Cartoon Comics, new year, New Year's Resolutions, punk rock, Santa, shakespeare, sunday, Sunday Comics, sunday comics project, sundaycomic, undead, walking dead, webcomic, weird, Zombie, zombie art, Zombie Comedy, zombie comic, zombie webcomic

COMMUTE OF THE LIVING DEAD: RED-NOSED REINDEER

Written by ERIC BOEKER Posted December 25, 2016 Filed Under: Comics

Filed Under: Comics Tagged With: blood, brain eating, brains, Christmas, Christmas Horror, coffee, comic strip, comics, death, disapproving girlfriends, donation, eric boeker, free hugs, geek, holiday, horror, horror art, horror comedy, horror comic, humor, kale, laugh, Laugh Cartoon Comics, punk rock, reindeer, rudolph, salvation army, Santa, Santa Claus, shakespeare, sunday, Sunday Comics, sunday comics project, sundaycomic, undead, walking dead, webcomic, weird, Zombie, zombie art, Zombie Comedy, zombie comic, zombie webcomic

COMMUTE OF THE LIVING DEAD: SEASON OF GIVING

Written by ERIC BOEKER Posted December 11, 2016 Filed Under: Comics

Filed Under: Comics Tagged With: blood, brain eating, brains, coffee, comic strip, comics, death, disapproving girlfriends, donation, eric boeker, free hugs, geek, holiday, horror, horror art, horror comedy, horror comic, humor, kale, laugh, Laugh Cartoon Comics, punk rock, salvation army, Santa, shakespeare, sunday, Sunday Comics, sunday comics project, sundaycomic, undead, walking dead, webcomic, weird, Zombie, zombie art, Zombie Comedy, zombie comic, zombie webcomic

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DigBoston is a one-stop nexus for everything worth doing or knowing in the Boston area. It's an alt-weekly, it's a website, it's an e-mail blast, it's a twitter account, it's that cool party that you were at last night ... hey, you're reading it, so it's gotta be good. For advertising inquiries: [email protected] To reach Editorial: [email protected] For internship opportunities: [email protected]