LOGIC BOOKS FESTIVAL

City Lights in conjunction with Gray Area and FSG Originals present three days of discussion exploring the way we interact with technology and how it affects on our lives.

with Adrian Daub, Tim Hwang, Ben Tarnoff, Xiaowei Wang, and Moira Weigel

More than three years ago, Logic launched its first issue at City Lights Booksellers. Now, the crew at LOGIC return in an exciting new collaboration. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much.

Together, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux and tech magazine Logic present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. This collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today. City Lights is pleased to be partnering with the cultural hub Gray Area in presenting this extraordinary event.

Events are Free, but registration is required. Click the links on each event listing to register.

Join us for three days of sessions

Monday, October 12, 2020, 6:00 p.m. PST
Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do–and How They Do It

Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel in conversation with Anna Wiener

(Click Here) to make reservations (link to be posted soon)

(PURCHASE BOOK HERE) Link to be posted

In Voices from the Valley, the celebrated writers and Logic cofounders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff take an unprecedented dive into the tech industry, conducting unfiltered, in-depth, anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, including a data scientist, a start-up founder, a cook who serves their lunch, and a PR wizard. In the process, Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation that has previously been dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley is a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives.

Moira Weigel is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Nation, The New Republic, and n+1, among other publications, and she is a cofounder of Logic magazine. She received a fellowship to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2016 and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ben Tarnoff is the author of the books A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians and is a cofounder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, Jacobin, and Lapham’s Quarterly, among other publications. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Monday, October 12, 2020, 7:30 p.m. PST
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet

Tim Hwang in conversation with Allison Arlieff

(Click Here) to make reservations (link to be posted soon)

(PURCHASE BOOK HERE) Link to be posted

In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising—the beating heart of the internet—is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008.

Tim Hwang is a writer and researcher. He is the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, and previously served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He lives in New York City.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020, 6:00 p.m. PST
Blockchain Chicken Farm

with Xiaowei Wang in conversation with An Xiao Mina    

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(PURCHASE BOOK HERE) Link to be posted

In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.

Xiaowei Wang is a technologist, a filmmaker, an artist, and a writer. The creative director at Logic magazine, their work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been finalists for the Index Design Awards and featured by The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and elsewhere. They are working toward a PhD at UC Berkeley, where they are a part of the National Science Foundation’s Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century Research Traineeship.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020, 7:30 p.m. PST
What Tech Calls Thinking
with Adrian Daub (interlocutor tba)

(Click Here) to make reservations

(PURCHASE BOOK HERE) Link to be posted

Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley’s ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.

Adrian Daub is a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, and the director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, music, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, and he is the author of several books published by academic presses. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, n+1, Longreads, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in San Francisco.

Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 6:00 p.m. PST
LOGIC PANEL DISCUSSION
with Adrian Daub, Tim Huang, Xiaowei Wang, Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel. (Host TBA)

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In this closing panel, the LOGIC crew revisit some of the ideas of the last couple of days and explore possibilities of reimagining our relationships to technology.

Gray Area is a cultural hub located to San Francisco’s Mission District. Their mission is to apply art and technology to create social and civic impact through education, incubation and public events. They use digital tools to create art and design projects that benefit society. They test and scale projects with high impact potential, teach digital tools to support artists and technologists, and inspire our community by promoting meaningful new work. They apply the promise and inspiration of digital art to a broader social context. Their programs are transforming cities into creative outlets, applying technology to solve problems, and shaping how art is created and consumed in the digital era. Visit them at: grayarea.org

To learn more about LOGIC MAGAZINE visit: https://logicmag.io/