In the Midst of Philosophy - #2 - Federica Frabetti

I would like to express my gratitude to Federica for helping me create this list. I would also like to thank her for doing her best to help me get a good recording of her side.

• 0:00: This guitar part is inspired by something that Marty Friedman has played. But it is not the original, and the problem is that I don't remember the original. I've tried many times to search different variations, but to no avail. If it reminds you something, please let me know!
• 3:17: You can find the rest of the episodes here.
• 4:18: You can find the book e.g., on Amazon in multiple formats.
• 4:33: For anyone who's wondering, the full list of books is:
  • Bernard Stiegler - Η Τεχνική και ο Χρόνος 1, Το σφάλμα του Επιμηθέα (i.e., the (incredibly accurate) Greek translation of Technics and Time #1)
  • Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels - The German Ideology
  • Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death
  • Martin Heidegger - Basic Writings (Edited by David Farrell Krell)
  • Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics (Translated by Hippocrates G. Apostle)
  • Samir Okasha - Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (I have the 1st edition, but there's a 2nd edition too)
  • Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media
  • Mary W. Shelley - Frankenstein (Third Norton Critical Edition)
  • Ψηφιακός ανθρωπισμός (unfortunately, there's no English translation; I hope some day to have Theofanis Tasis on the podcast)
  • Tor Nørretranders - The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
  • Luciano Floridi - The Ethics of Information
  There's a reason why each and every one of these books is in this list (even the particular editions). I won't include the reasons to save space, but if you're interested, you can comment or contact me.
• 4:56: Timothy Clark
• 5:58: Since this discussion, I [Stefanos] tried to educate myself on the field of British Cultural Studies. I found the book British Cultural Studies, Third Edition, by Graeme Turner. I haven't read all of it, but I definitely liked the first couple of chapters.
• 14:40: Joanna Zylinska.
• 21:46: See CCITT and ETSI.
• 25:02: Monoskop has collected a great and extensive reading list on Software Studies. We also refer readers to this weirdly cool website: aesthetic-programming.net. Finally, we particulary recommend the book Critical Code Studies. Here's Federica's commentary on Software Studies vs Critical Code Studies: Essentially, Software Studies wants to identify itself as a separate field from Digital Media Studies, because of its object of study (it broadly studies the political, social and cultural implications of software), while Critical Code Studies, which emerged after Software Studies and from it, claims that it is possible and relevant to read source code as a text (in fact, as a literary text, working on the "hermeneutics", i.e. the interpetation, of this text) to find these implications literally inscribed in source code. For example, it is worth reading source code to analyse style, comments, etc. and this can be taken even further. Mark's first example of this was the implicit heterosexuality inscribed in the code of a virus that invited users to click on the image of a female tennis star to see some pornographic images of her.
• 33:04: Regarding "Originary Technicity", we refer the readers to the book: Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida.
• 34:09: If you're interested in this very aspect of Kant's philosophy, someone has written a paper on exactly this topic: French, Stanley G. "Kant's constitutive-regulative distinction." The Monist (1967).
• 36:11: Gary Hall.
• 36:28: Indeed, it is the "Letter to a Japanese Friend".
• 37:14: This is not in the Letter to a Japanese Friend, but in Structure, Sign, and Play.
• 44:10: For example, look at how many talks have popped up the last couple of years on Kubernetes (one of the biggest infrastructures behind cloud applications) + WebAssembly: 1) Kubecon EU 2021 Keynote: WebAssembly & Cloud Native: Better Together, 2) Keynote Panel Discussion: Revolutionizing Cloud Native Architectures with WebAssembly, 3) Tutorial: Cloud Native WebAssembly and How to Use It.
• 46:14: It's interesting to read An SMS History by Alex S. Taylor and Jane Vincent (Chapter 4 of "Mobile World: Past, Present and Future"), written in 2005. At that point SMS was already a success, but they describe some of the early reservations people had. For example: "[...] the SMS protocol imposed some serious restrictions and raised glaring flaws in usability [.]" or "With its limitations and the apparent primitive character of the technology, it was hardly surprising that the mobile phone operators and manufacturers had no strong business model for SMS. The emphasis for the launch of GSM was on the delivery of talk and international roaming; its unique selling points were the ability to use your own mobile phone anywhere in Europe and improved security and quality of service. The operators’ vision for SMS was limited; its broad-based appeal was initially as a unidirectional system for sending “mobile terminated” messages to customers, such as voice mail notifications. Early SMS campaigns to promote the delivery as well as receipt of messages, rare as they were, almost exclusively targeted at business users and positioned the service as a second-rate add-on to voice transmissions [...] the decidedly unsexy SMS was of little interest to an industry bent on promoting itself as exclusive and futuristic".
• 55:34: It seems the term was popularized in the Anglophone world by Lewis Mumford's book Technics and Civilization. But Mumford doesn't seem to give a definition in this work. Instead, something closer to a definition appears in his book Art and Technics: "We ordinarily use the word technology to describe both the field of the practical arts and the systematic study of their operations and products. For the sake of clarity, I prefer to use technics alone to describe the field itself, that part of human activity wherein, by an energetic organization of the process of work, man controls and directs the forces of nature for his own purposes." Another related article is Bryan Norton's Our tools shape our selves, which talks about Stiegler specifically, and also Oswald Spengler's Man and Technics (both of which give "definitions" that align with what Federica said).
• 57:05: My [Stefanos] wording here is probably confusing. I'm using “logos” (λόγος) in a way that is more common in Modern Greek, i.e., the ability of a human to communicate through language (speaking, writing, etc., although this doesn't require the ability to physically write or speak; see Look Up for Yes). This may have confused non-Greek listeners because in the Western philosophy tradition, “logos” is usually understood as “reason” (and that's definitely one of its meanings in Modern Greek still—e.g., “ὀρθὸς λόγος”, i.e., rationality) without a direct connection to language. In my opinion, “logos”—the way I meant it—requires “logos” in the way Western philosophy understands it, but this is a different discussion. Long story short, I think my question makes more sense if you image someone speaking versus imagining someone deducing a theorem in her head.
  Thankfully Federica understood what I meant, and she also recommended the following related books:
  • Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
  • Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print.
  • Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
• 1:07:17: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow.
• 1:27:01: For folks interested in more technical content, one of the best papers that exemplifies what I said is the GoFetch attack (which is explained pretty well in this video). In that work, folks had to uncover how the hardware works through micro-experiments.
• 1:43:53: I'm referring to Stiegler's “General Introduction” in Technics and Time #1. Stiegler never gives a direct reference, but Stiegler probably refers to two works. First, to The German Ideology, and in particular “Part I, Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks”, Section “A. Idealism and Materialism, First Premises of Materialist Method.” The second is Engels' essay The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, where Engels writes: “[T]he hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations [...] have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael [.]”
• 1:52:13: Here's my Discussion with Sebastian Hack.
• 2:01:55: References to the concept of “conjuncture” and “conjunctural analysis” are interspersed throughout Stuart Hall's vast production. For a synthetic explanation, see Jeremy Gilbert's editorial to New Formations, Volume 2019, Issue 96-97.
• 2:03:25: Some famous works from these authors are Bodies That Matter by Judith Butler, and Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad. Interestingly, Judith Butler has written the Introduction in the 40th Anniversary Edition of the English translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology. In her theory of gender, Butler draws a lot on Derrida's rereading of the theory of speech act, as defined by J.L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words. Derrida's rereading of Austin is detailed in Signature Event Context. For Austin there are some utterance that are performative but for Derrida all language is performative (Butler also draws on Foucault and discusses some psychoanalysis, but the idea of performativity is the most spectacular way to describe both sex and gender, in my view [Federica], and it can be taken further in so many directions).