Cultural criticism and ‘tech’

As an academic computer scientist, I frequently interact with the world of ‘tech’, as embodied by Silicon Valley, startups, etc. Many of my friends—from college, from graduate school—work there. My younger brother works there. One of the things that has kept me out of that world is my wariness of its politics, ethics, and aesthetics. I was delighted, then, when I was introduced to Model View Culture, a venue for cultural criticism of tech, sensu lato. They cover a wide range:

I’m writing because other academics—the audience of this blog—might be interested. Many students coming out of the elite CS programs (my academic home for more than a decade) are going to end up working in the world MVC writes about. They’ll go as interns and then as employees. What is it like there?

But I’m also writing because MVC has been subjected to tremendous blowback. I’m not going to link to it, but it’s not hard to find. Silence is complicity, so: Model View Culture is writing smart things about hard problems. If you’d like to support them, just reading is a fine place to start… but of course money is good, too.

PLVNET

I’m really happy to be part of the first PLVNET, a workshop on the intersection of PL, verification, and networking. I have two abstracts up for discussion.

The first abstract, Temporal NetKAT, is about adding reasoning about packet histories to a network policy language like NetKAT. The work on this is moving along quite nicely (thanks in large part to Ryan Beckett!), and I’m looking forward to the conversations it will spark.

The second abstract, Type systems for SDN controllers, is about using type systems to statically guarantee the absence of errors in controller programs. Fancy new switches have tons of features, which can be tricky to operate—can we make sure that a controller doesn’t make any mistakes when it talks to a switch? Some things are easy, like making sure that the match/action rules are sent to tables that can handle them; some things are harder, like making sure the controller doesn’t fill up a switch’s tables. I think this kind of work is a nice complement to the NetKAT “whole policy” approach, a sort of OpenFlow 1.3+ version of VeriCon with slightly different goals.

Should be fun!