Sitting in my basement, a Zoom workshop about compassion for student trauma while teaching online during a pandemic on one screen, and a livestream of day 70 of well-equipped, highly technologized, militarized police violence enacted on journalists and peaceful protestors in Portland Oregon on another, I can’t help but feel the weight of the technological matrix in which I find myself already embedded. Much like the early empiricists understood our senses to be the fundamental mediator between us and the world, it makes just as much sense to point to our technologies as the meaningful mediator of our everyday lives. Of course, this idea is hardly new or generally insightful on its own, but when the world shuts down almost overnight and many schools and businesses transfer their operations to peoples’ homes, with vast wealth inequality reflected in who must remain in the risky, uncontrolled pandemic world and who gets to sit comfortably back and interact with the world safely from a technology-mediated distance, these questions press more heavily on all of us.

PAGES
309 – 314
DOI
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Issues
Also in this issue:
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Ryan Jenkins, David Černý and Tomáš Hříbek (eds) Autonomous Vehicle Ethics: The Trolley Problem and Beyond
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As open as possible, but as closed as necessary: openness in innovation policy
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Turning sportswashing against sportswashers: an unconventional perspective
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State secrets and compromises with capitalism: Lev Theremin and regimes of intellectual property
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In search of an author
Patrick Lin, Keith Abney and Ryan Jenkins, Robot Ethics 2.0: From Autonomous Cars to Artificial Intelligence
Book Review