As a project administratively housed
@Columbia
, we are appalled at the university president’s decision to authorize the NYPD to violently disperse the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and are suspending all operations until the student’s demands are met.
BREAKING: NYPD ARE ARRESTING COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDENTS FOR TREPASSING!! Students are being arrested for building tents for our Gaza solidarity enclosure on Butler lawns. COME OUT ASAP!!
#cu4palestine
Today, we’re launching something new: Logic School, an online, experimental school for tech workers, coordinated by
@xrw
.
Our goal is to give workers the tools and the knowledge to remake the industry from below.
An extended conversation with Donna Haraway about situated knowledges, "post-truth," cyborgs, climate activism, and why play is essential for politics.
Next year, Logic will enter a new chapter, under new leadership. Today, we’re excited to formally announce the transition with a note from Logic’s incoming directors,
@UpFromTheCracks
and
@xrw
.
The tech industry is a monopolizing force, and one of the many things it monopolizes is the means for producing knowledge about it. How can researchers do the difficult work of critique and resistance?
🎒🎒Applications are now open for Logic School 2023 year 2! Logic School is an online, community run, experimental school for tech workers looking to remake tech from below. It's stewarded by participants from our first cohort
@whyderrick
@emilychaosays
, with support from
@xrw
.
"Ultimately, we’re trying to center what good relations to the land means."
A conversation with Nick Estes about narratives of technological and scientific progress, the Red Deal, and the problem with land acknowledgements.
Introducing...the first of a ten part series of virtual public events !
This series will reflect transnational tech conversations from people and communities doing deeply important work but too often subjected to institutional marginalization ~
Announcing our seventh issue, "China 中国."
Our China issue explores the situation on the ground, from biometric surveillance of Muslims in Xinjiang to the new global map that Chinese tech is drawing.
View the table of contents at .
Announcing Issue 15: BEACONS. Guest edited by
@UpFromTheCracks
.
At a time when despair about our technological future has reached a high, the issue aims to go beyond mere critique to serve as a beacon of new possibilities.
Announcing Issue 12: COMMONS.
In this issue we explore the technologies that make new kinds of common places possible. Online, you are unique like everybody else.
Today, we're releasing the full text of THE MAKING OF THE TECH WORKER MOVEMENT by
@bentarnoff
, a ~50 page zine that tells the story of how the tech worker movement was made, and how it remade the people who participated in it.
Announcing our eleventh issue, CARE.
Digital technologies tend to be depicted as steely or ethereal. But technologies are not invulnerable—nor are the people who build and use them.
Subscribe now to receive the issue.
Our new issue, supa dupa skies (move slow and heal things) is here to kick off a whole new wave of global tech stories. This issue heralds the dawn of a new era for Logic(s), read the preview now:
Indigenous communities are building drones to make their own maps—and using them to fight erasure and exploitation at the hands of the state and capital.
An interview between
@UpFromTheCracks
and
@safiyanoble
on how to think about non-reformist policy, the state of tech criticism, and surfing as an antidote to predictive static models.
"They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics."
Fred Turner (
@fturner
) explains how Silicon Valley sees itself, and what it means when the tech industry says it wants to save the world.
We are now soliciting pitches for our Spring 2020 issue: SECURITY.
Possible topics include: hacks, leaks, and breaches; scams, catfishes, and honeypots; John McAfee; In-Q-Tel; food and housing security; financialization; militarization; “Im baby.”
Announcing our ninth issue, "Nature."
Inevitably, the end of the world looms large. But there are also grounds for hope. At least, Donna Haraway thinks so.
See the contents below, and subscribe to receive the issue when it appears in early November.
We will be releasing a more detailed announcement about our interim operations following a a staff town hall next week. For now, we want to make clear that we will be honoring all financial commitments to contributors, staff and others counting on us.
As a project administratively housed
@Columbia
, we are appalled at the university president’s decision to authorize the NYPD to violently disperse the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and are suspending all operations until the student’s demands are met.
We're live for the first event of Logic Fest, our three-day celebration of the launch our series Logic Books with
@FSGOriginals
, co-hosted by
@CityLightsBooks
and
@GrayAreaorg
!
We'll be lightly live-tweeting the events, but be sure to tune in by RSVPing @
“We have to recognize that technological innovation, and the reformism that animates it, is a carceral tactic.”
A conversation with Sarah T. Hamid about police software, militant research, and what it means to apply an abolitionist lens to technology.
“If regimes of algorithmic discipline are implemented without our consent, we will need a toolbox of resistance that can directly disrupt their effectiveness.”
A guide to algorithmic resistance by
@frnsys
.
"Privacy is the Trojan horse. Then when I get in the building, I'm like, 'Alright, let's actually talk about capitalism.'"
A conversation with
@flexlibris
about how to make information free.
Nikhil Dharmaraj wraps up their senior thesis with an 8-minute film that overlays a neoliberal ‘celebration’ of International Transgender Day of Visibility with gendered face-tracking software used by countless, recognizable brands and corporations.
To overcome the limitations of the algorithmic bias discourse, we need to ask a completely different set of questions about technology, drawing on the traditions of black thought and black freedom-dreaming.
Calling all Logic fans outside the US:
We now support international print subscriptions!!
We're about to send our Care issue to print—sign up today and you'll receive it as part of your subscription.
"Digital traces can be knit together so that circumstantial evidence looks like a comprehensive picture."
An inside look at how the LAPD uses Palantir to spy on virtually everyone.
We're very excited to unveil the cover for Issue 04: SCALE.
What new kinds of scale does technology enable and demand? How do we govern, mobilize, moderate, democratize at scale?
Subscribe now to receive the issue when it lands in April:
“Platforms appropriate the language of publicness. But if you look at their legal filings, they insist that they’re *not* a public square—because they don’t want the legal liability.”
@ksabeelrahman
#ttw18
We currently soliciting pitches for Issue 16 of Logic: CLOUDS.
This issue will explore tech’s many clouds and the interesting, hopeful, or destructive shapes they make in the literal or figurative sky.
Pitch window closes 11/8.
Inspired by tech worker organizing and community-based campaigns, we believe there is a strong desire for a more critical approach to technology among tech workers. Our curriculum draws from the worlds of activism, design, and software engineering.
Clouds are fuzzy. They have shifting dimensions and indistinct edges. They are vague shapes, so they make for vague metaphors.
Announcing Issue 16: CLOUDS. Shipping this month to subscribers.
In World War II, Britain invented the electronic computer. By the 1970s, its computing industry had collapsed—thanks to a labor shortage produced by sexism.
What would it mean to take the Black internet seriously? What if the Black internet offers a standpoint from which the rest of the internet can be seen, and critiqued, more clearly?
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it would be "carbon negative" by 2030.
Hopefully this includes terminating its cloud contracts with oil and gas companies—a partnership described in detail by a contributor to our current issue.
“We have people designing algorithms that exert enormous power over our society but who, quite frankly, have very little understanding of our society.”
In 2019, tech workers and community organizers teamed up to take on San Diego's surveillance state. Their methods might be a model for other struggles against carceral technologies in cities around the country.
"Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." RIP, Ursula K Le Guin.
"At Twitter, they're trying to fix things with code first, instead of hiring smarter people. And that can be really problematic. I don't think Twitter knows enough about harassment."
Solidarity to everyone participating in the
#GoogleWalkout
today.
A thread of relevant pieces from our archives, starting with
@miriamkp
on the feminization of front-end coding.
A wave of rank-and-file rebellion is sweeping the tech industry. How did we get here? And what comes next?
To discuss these questions, and to celebrate the release of our "Play" issue, join us for a discussion on the past, present, and future of tech worker organizing.
Issue 6: PLAY is coming.
Today we're publishing the cover, the table of contents, and the editors note. Subscribe now to receive the issue when it lands in December.
Issue 8: Bodies is coming! Today we're dropping the cover, by
@xrw
. Stay tuned for the table of contents and excerpts from the issue. And subscribe to receive Bodies when it lands in August:
“From West Virginia to San Francisco, workers rising up—let’s go!”
A chant at today’s picket outside the Lanetix office in SF to support tech workers’ right to organize and the
#LanetixUnion
!
"Software doesn’t actually eat anything, of course. The phrase is pure fetishism: relations between people reimagined as relations between things. Somebody is always doing the eating—and somebody is always getting eaten."
An inquiry into the failure of the free software movement, and a proposal for recovering its radical soul, by
@dellsystem
.
From Issue 5: FAILURE, coming soon. Subscribe by this Friday at midnight to get it as your first issue.
Good morning from Columbia University, where the Gaza Solidarity Encampment is now on day 2.
Yesterday, administration threatened to suspend all students in this demo & the specter of an NYPD sweep loomed among the rain clouds.
Protestors are starting to emerge from their tents
The pandemic has made the Everything Store even more ubiquitous. An engineer at Amazon Web Services told us about working in the “money machine” of the richest man in the world.
"The blessing and the curse of good infrastructure is that when it works, it is invisible: which means that too often, we don’t devote much care to it until it collapses."
"We don't talk about women of color creating their own online spaces, and hacking technology to make it work for us—even though we do it all the time.”
@tressiemcphd
discusses how to teach with technology, and how technology is taught.
ONLINE NOW: A groundbreaking report with
@ACLU
using exclusive access to data from the Allegheny Family Screening Tool—a pioneering pilot for predictive risk modeling in the family policing context.
On offer from Logic(s): free copies for non-rich organizations, including mail to carceral settings. Email us at logics at columbia dot edu for more information.
More on the issue here:
"It's very common for Western observers to focus on the Chineseness of Chinese science fiction. But I've always been very resistant to the idea that Chineseness is a meaningful analytical category."
If you're planning to join us on January 11th in New York for a conversation about tech workers, please RSVP at Eventbrite to attend. Looking forward to seeing you all there!
Our Justice issue has arrived! It's our biggest and best yet, at twice the length of our first issue (which we've restocked!). We'll be shipping out print pre-orders this week, and digital copies are already making their way to inboxes. Pick up yours at
Classes begin in March, and applications are now open. We welcome all tech workers — whether you’re a project manager, warehouse worker, software engineer, or ride-share driver.
One year ago today, Logic was born! And we crammed a lot more people than the fire marshall would've liked into our beloved
@CityLightsBooks
to celebrate Issue 01: INTELLIGENCE.
For our Care issue, we spoke with three government technology workers about careers tending to machines delivering critical services.
You can now read their stories for free on our website:
"I wasn't actually solving problems--I was just riding a wave of ridiculous overinvestment in social apps."
An Anonymous Engineer opens up about success and its failings in our forthcoming issue.
"We offer no singular way of knowing, no hope for messianic deliverance. We be needing logics."
Today we're releasing the editor's note for Issue 15: BEACONS, by issue editor
@UpFromTheCracks
. The issue ships this month.