Conspiracy theories (actually: hypotheses) are comforting, anthropocentric, affirming constructs. They assume that someone runs the world, that someo… - Johannes Grenzfurthner

The information age is an age of permanently getting stuck. Greater and greater speed is demanded. New software, new hardware, new structures, new cultural techniques. Life-long learning? Yes. But the company can't fire the secretary every six months, just because she can't cope with the new version of Excel. They can count their keystrokes, measure their productivity … but! They will never be able to sanction their inability! Because that is immanent.

Computer games are embedded in the cultural framework of technological developments. In the study of technological development and creativity, focusing attention on the failure, the error, the breakdown, the malfunction means opening the black box of technology. Studies have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over." However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed. According to Langdon Winner, there is a sense in which all technical activity contains an inherent tendency toward forgetfulness.

My nerdy teenage rebellion was to confront my parents with the scientific method, challenging their weird beliefs, asking for peer-reviewed data and scientific context. I remember that one day when I was 15, I asked my mother to use her divining rod and a piece of paper to determine the first 30 decimal values of pi. It took her three hours and not a single one was right. That felt like a huge success, but she just told me she had a bad day because of the full moon. Tomorrow she would try again and would succeed. And if not, who says that the 30 digits of pi in the math books are actually right? Maybe her version was correct in the first place and she had access to a higher knowledge? It simply wasn't possible to challenge her.