I remember sitting in the lecture hall and the professor was talking about the COMPAS recidivism algorithm-one of the most canonical “tech ethics” examples-and people had never heard of it before. So I’m curious if you could tell us more about how that discourse is developing in CS departments, and how Reboot relates to it.ĮL: My school had a CS ethics course that wasn’t mandatory for the major, but it did fulfill a writing requirement, so CS majors often took it for that reason. XW: When I was in college, there was no “tech ethics” discourse at all. So I went to Twitter to find people who shared my frustration, and that’s where I first met Jasmine. How come no one told us about Logic? How come our friends at school don’t know about it? How come other CS students and young tech workers aren’t reading it?”Įmily Liu (EL): At the time, I was in college in Durham, and I was feeling pretty frustrated about the state of “tech ethics” discourse on campus. And when she told me about it, I was like, “This is so cool. JS: I very distinctly remember Jessica’s messages from when she went to the Cambridge event. For me, some of the life went out of the project when we slowed down our pace of events and then stopped altogether. Events always felt like the most satisfying way to do that.
You don’t create a little magazine for an audience-you create your audience through the magazine. Out of that mix, we wanted to cohere a new public. In particular, the constituencies we had in mind were tech workers, scholars and researchers, and organizers and others doing political work. We wanted to bring people from different backgrounds together not only in the pages of the magazine but also in physical space. Events were a big part of the Logic project from the beginning. And I realized that the type of work that Logic produced could fill that gap for me.īT: I’m so glad to hear that. I was in college spending my days on CS problem sets, but I felt like something was missing. That event was pivotal for Reboot existing in the way that it does now. So I got on the train and came up to Cambridge for the issue four launch party. I was an undergrad at Brown and one of my professors, Wendy Chun, told me I might like Logic. Jessica Dai (JD): I first found out about Logic in 2018. Logic was a substantial part of the inspiration for Reboot. We have all been Logic fangirls from a while back. Jasmine Sun (JS): We’re very excited to be doing this. But Moira has been telling me that every day. And one of those differences is generational: we’re a bit older, you’re a bit younger.īT: Yes. We’ve tried to make similar interventions, I think. And we thought of you all at Reboot as ideal conversation partners for that reflection, because our projects feel like such kindred spirits. If Logic did have to come up with KPIs, we could do worse than measuring our success by the amount of criticism we get from the next generation.īen Tarnoff (BT): As we transition to Logic’s next chapter, we wanted to create space in this issue to reflect on the project so far: what we’ve achieved, where we’ve failed, how and why we did what we did. Logic has tried to do its part to advance the ruthless criticism of all that exists we turned to our friends at Reboot to help put ourselves under the microscope. Reboot is a community for young technologists that is active on many fronts, from hosting events to running an email newsletter to publishing a print magazine. How do they engage with Logic? Do they find it useful? To help explore these questions, and to reflect on the story of Logic thus far, Ben Tarnoff and Xiaowei Wang from Logic sat down with Jasmine Sun, Jessica Dai, and Emily Liu from Reboot.
We’ve always been particularly interested in how our work was being received by younger people. But over the years, we gradually found an audience, and managed to both irritate and inspire some number of readers. When we first launched Logic in early 2017, we weren’t sure who would read it. In an industry that measures impact through KPIs (key performance indicators), it’s hard to quantify, or even start to explain, what the effects of creating a print magazine are.
0 kommentar(er)
