ogxref

[ogxref]

ON MODERNIST ETHOS IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE  / Reiner de Graaf

New Book → vivid, uncompromising narratives contextualised with shrewd essays about architecture’s lost ideals, its false pretentions, and utter dependence on forces far more powerful than design.

“In essence, I don’t think humour is ever depressing. It can, of course, be a sign to conceal a tragic reality.”

Russia → where there was a desire to progress and an inherent inability to do so. It is deeply tragic, but also almost admirable to see how skilful they were in crafting that tragedy. I’m wondering to what extent that is symptomatic of our profession as a whole. In its current form, architecture is an elaborate ritual to avoid the inevitable, namely if history continues the way it does, our ongoing and increased marginalisation in the future.

“The book is a wake-up call, which I felt could only be written with a light touch and with funny stuff in it. The alternative would have been a highly moralistic book. There are highly moralistic issues that I address, but I haven’t been raised to preach, and I don’t think preachers make very good writers.”

Notion that thought production by the architectural profession has come to a standstill...

Your book is an engaging intellectual product, but I’m left wondering what your intention is because it refrains from setting an agenda → I think the architecture profession is in such a state of denial that providing a quick fix solution would almost be like letting them off the hook, and allowing them to collectively run towards that answer. I thought it was more productive to analyse the state of affairs without sugar-coating things. Ultimately the solution to every problem begins with the frank acknowledgement that there is a problem. I don’t think our type of people are anywhere near ready to acknowledge the extent of the problem or even that there is a problem...

Professional daily reality is also tainted by very banal setbacks, by very mundane, and sometimes quite deflating behaviour on the part of clients or the world at large.

Notion that the circumstances in which you work seem incredibly mundane, but all the while world history is a kind of tumultuous spoilsport of ongoing affairs. My recommendation is that architects become more aware of the context in which they work and take more time to look around at the world that asks them to do what they do so that they can for instance recognise the motives behind it.

The essay about Thomas Piketty deals with something else to consider, namely that modern architecture was once based on efficient, rational, fast industrial production to give as many people as possible a decent home. It made buildings cheap, so they were available to many people.

→ That same ethos is still very present in modern architecture, but it makes buildings – cheap not to be sold cheap or to be rented cheaply – it makes buildings cheap so that they generate the highest possible return on investment! → That same aesthetical ethos of saving, of an economic minimalism, now serves an entirely different purpose. It serves not the happy many, but the happy few. 

In other words it’s the same architecture in the context of a different system. I don’t think anybody who practices modern architecture is even vaguely aware of this. They were all educated with Le Corbusier and Gropius, and they consider themselves the heirs of those heroes when they actually operate in a system where they are complicit in things completely at odds with the ideals of that movement and those heroes!

All that is left of modernism are the stylistic principles? → the stylistic and organisational principles help very different interests at the moment. So it’s not just that the original modernists once were a positive force and the current ones are simply a neutral force. By continuing that legacy under current circumstances, today’s modern architects are contributors to negative forces...

“An architect is not supposed to be nostalgic but forward-looking. But I’m nostalgic for a time when mankind was a lot more forward-looking than it is today; for a gradual optimism about the future. That’s the paradox.”

Notion that from a sociological perspective, 2100 might look dangerously like 1900...

Look at the social housing estates from the 1950s and 1960s: they are either vilified and demolished, and social housing is eradicated, or they are preserved as historic monuments and converted into luxury apartments that are unaffordable for ordinary people. So even if the buildings stay, the social housing is no longer there.

“We need very different politics. I think it is essential that the left reinvents itself so that it acquires a new mass appeal. I’m quite jealous of the appeal that populist right-wing movements manage to have with big groups of people. If the established left-wing parties would only have ten percent of that same appeal, they would be in a lot less trouble.”

“I deliberately wrote the book in a type of language that is understandable. A lot of writing about architecture is pretty dense, and that is a friendly description. But I also wrote like that because I wanted the book to be accessible to more people than just architects.”

Architects don’t generally like the idea of having too many people meddling with their labour, and I understand this instinct.

Essentially, a reconnection with users, even if those users are not the ones financing the buildings per se. Buildings are now speculative tools for users we don’t know. Since we don’t know them, there’s also no dialogue with them and that’s where I think the crux is. We should try to break the almost unbeatable cycle of architecture merely being real estate, being a tool of capital.

“After making a convincing case of being for the masses in the twentieth century, architecture will have to be with the masses in the twenty-first.” →  idea of participation is less about asking people what kind of window frames they would like and more about.. It’s about mobilising the people as a political force. They can say what window frames they want, but ultimately, the architecture is a detail.

Any realised project is inevitably only a percentage of what you intend, and whether the percentage is above or below 50% determines the project’s success...

interesting to see what kind of role architects can play in the trench warfare, the shadow boxing, between public interests and private greed. You are almost forced into the role of a manipulative mediator, to make sure that greed, at least to some extent, works for the public good. But that’s a far cry from the role of the heroic building master who triumphs over his uncompromised vision.

our wake-up call. It makes you realise that architects have very little power. And what you have power over, you can wonder how much it matters in the end.

Was it worth it, becoming an architect? → I would not advise my children to go into the profession. There are more interesting topics to pursue in this day and age, and architecture is ultimately an old-fashioned discipline. There is nothing wrong with that, there is a need for an arriere-garde. 

I get very tired of an architecture that desperately tries to stay up-to-date with computer forms → The essence of the digital is that it is the digital. It is a revolution in another domain, and not per se in building materials. When there is a revolution in building materials, there will be a revolution in architecture again. → Until that moment, we ought to be happy being the enablers of other intellectual and technological revolutions. The most forward-thinking thing to do about architecture today is a kind of reflection on what it actually means.

Parallel to Rem Koolhaas noteing in the context of preservation that abstinence, doing nothing, is hardly ever considered. How do you think about that regarding the production of space? → I agree with that. It would probably not be bad to take a time-out as a profession, to stop the mad and meaningless race that we are caught up in, and simply introduce a pause where you look around and assess situations.

That’s probably a different kind of abstinence than the one Koolhaas is talking about, but I do think that the unintended by-product of abstinence could be a bigger realisation of context.

Notion that “Freedom has been sacrificed in the name of freedom.”

“The market is a mundane pursuit of the radical, but I’m interested in projects which revert that relationship; a radical pursuit of the mundane.”

#reiner #graaf #modernism #ethos

[ogxref]

ON VERTICAL ZONING / Anastasia Kubrak + Sander Manse

Today, technologies are mainly implemented / instrumentalized by platform economies (serving the big capital of tech) → acquiring a tight grip on the way our cities work. The main strategy here is to capitalize on the information that is being generated by the augmented city. (They capitalize on patterns of our movements, monetizing the extracted data, or the so-called ‘behavior surplus’ generated by mechanisms of surveillance.)

Over the past few years the city has quickly become a mesh of hectic laws and virtual borders.

Notion that one physical location → virtually occupied by multiple zones, different actors on a vertical axis.

The process of urban zoning → traditionally defined as dividing topographically defined areas into zones (e.g. residential, industrial) in which certain land uses are permitted or prohibited by a political body. → As a result of technological augmentation, zoning today is not limited to regulations on building heights, but extends to new, intangible spaces.

New types of Zones, or vertical spaces → allow digital behemoth corporations to quickly exploit them as new markets and colonize the virtual ground outside of traditional jurisdictions, taking advantage of grey areas in the law.

The business model of the platform is based on: 

the principles of militant growth over profit

extraction and aggravation of free user data, 

and a hostile approach towards laws and legislation. 

By implementing new services without consent, by default, platforms leave citizens and governments to opt out or object their effects retrospectively.

But what is life like in the privatized city, structured by this new urban zoning? →  How can we benefit as citizens from the increase in sensing technologies, remote data-crunching algorithms, leaching geolocation trackers and parasite mapping interfaces?

Main question → Can the imposed verticality of platform capitalism by some means enrich the surface of the city, and not just exploit it?

Maybe our cities deserve a truly augmented reality → reality in which value generated within urban space actually benefits its inhabitants, and is therefore ‘augmented’ in the sense of increased / made greater...

Is it possible to consider the extension of zoning not only as an issue, but also as a solution, a way to create room for fairer, more social alternatives? Can we imagine the sprawling of augmented zones today, still of accidental nature, being utilized or artificially designed for purposes other than serving capital?

Free Trade Zones → Originally developed for purposes of warehousing and shipping, the early free trade zones, sprawling between 1500 and 1930s, were located along major trade routes. Further spreading around airports, manufacturing centers and container ports from the 1950s to 1970s, or offshore financial districts and office parks in the 90s, zones eventually formed mini-cities and even developed into megapolises on their own, as was the case with Shenzhen (established as China’s first SEZ in 1980, growing from 30.000 to an estimated 18 million inhabitants in the following decades).

The EPZ was initiated in the mid-twentieth-century as an economical accelerator that could help developing countries to enter the global market. But ‘rather than dissolving into the domestic economy, as was originally intended, the EPZ absorbed more and more of that economy into the enclave’. Today these zone-projects are increasingly built from scratch outside of existing cities, on the outskirts of state territories and even on reclaimed isles off the mainland. The Zone as an island provides an ideal blank canvas, clean slates for extralegal experiments.

The Zone → does not necessarily encapsulate an existing part of a city or a social community, it prefers to create new land, and to bring in new citizens to populate it.

Notion that from door handles to sensors, this ‘city in a box’ can be purchased as one singular item and reproduced anywhere in the world, becoming a spatial product on its own. Prime example of this type of city is Songdo. 

The technologically enhanced city promises a life of luxury, while simultaneously turning the zone into a gated community. In a place devised for economic activity and designed to generate capital, its inhabitants might be assessed on their added value to the city. This brand new city of the future, in a box, won’t be for everyone. 

“When new Zones are created as clean slates, tech companies quickly move in to develop the city’s infrastructure, introducing hardware and software that circumstantially pushes certain people out and helps to enforce the borders.”

Gated urban enclaves also proliferate within our ‘normal’ cities, perforating through the existing social fabric. Privatization of urban landscape affects our spatial rights, such as simply the right of passage. But how do these acts of exclusion happen in cities dominated by the logic of platform capitalism? What happens when more tools become available to scan, analyze and reject citizens on the basis of their citizenship or credit score? Accurate user profiles come in handy when security is automated in urban space: surveillance induced by smart technologies, from electronic checkpoints to geofencing, can amplify more exclusion.

“This tendency becomes clearly visible with Facebook being able to allow for indirect urban discrimination through targeted advertising. This is triggered by Facebook’s ability to exclude entire social groups from seeing certain ads based on their user profile, so that upscale housing-related ads might be hidden from them, making it harder for them to leave poorer neighborhoods. Meanwhile Uber is charging customers based on the prediction of their wealth, varying prices for rides between richer and poorer areas. This speculation on value enabled by the aggregation of massive amounts of data crystallizes new forms of information inequality in which platforms observe users through a one-way mirror.”

The Zone emerges from special legislation for finance, and subsequently also attracts tech giants for reasons other than merely tax holiday. This is not surprising → Silicon Valley has long been nurturing the libertarian dream of a lawless laboratory, an island outside of territorial waters, beyond the traditional nation-state jurisdiction. A Burning Man-like environment for new technologies, “a safe place to try out new things and figure out the effect on society”, as recurrently articulated by Larry Page... 

Notion that the principle or promise of flexible citizenship is that there is a Zone for each of us, without exception

So if Seasteading is the ultimate liberal, capitalist utopia, what could be its social and more inclusive counterpart? And if there could be a test-site not for the rich technological libertarians, but for a more inclusive society, could that also be mapped onto existing cities instead of having to seek liberation in endless variations of offshore enclaves?

Vertical zoning → allows such exceptions to be located anywhere, granting users access to different regimes inside existing cities, without the requirement to physically move to a different location.

We need to imagine a type of counter-spaces that could be mapped on top of actual cities and profit from the temporary nature of new spatial zoning. The vertical aspect of this other sort of zone could enhance its elasticity, allowing it to change its shape and size according to circumstances. Elastic zones: fleeting, flexible and stackable → Could a meta-economic level of planning strategically transform the city, reinforcing governmental control and enabling measures against a Cisco, Amazon or Google monopoly on the digital infrastructure?

This ethereal urban density of Kijkduin relied on legal action and adjustments in the geo-spatial coding in the software: the creation of a No-Pokémon Go-Zone.

If platform economies take the city as a hostage, governmental bodies of the city can seek how to counter privatization on material grounds. The notorious Kremlin’s GPS spoofing fence sends false coordinates to any navigational app within the city center, thereby also disrupting the operation of Uber and Google Maps.

Following the example of Free Economic Zones, democratic bodies could gain control over the city again by artificially constructing such spaces of exception. Imagine rigorous cases of hard-line zoning such as geofenced Uber-free Zones, concealed neighborhoods on Airbnb, areas secured from data-mining or user-profile-extraction.

Can we think of more subtle examples of zoning that do not trigger new partitions in public space? Verticality can provide multiple options and platforms for one geolocation. Zones can be stacked on top of other zones, truly augmenting reality – adding onto what is already there. 

“The platform economy extracts capital from the behavioral patterns of citizens in public space. What if physical zoning could allow citizens to gain agency over the systems of data extraction? GoogleUrbanism proposes a model which makes the added platform value, produced by – in this case – Google, flow back into the public space where the value is ‘mined’. This happens through exclusive licenses sold by the municipalities that allow companies to extract data from certain locations, forcing them to reinvest part of their profits in the maintenance of public space. Cities currently may not have a leverage to enforce such a platform/citizen partnership with Google, but they might get hold of their streets again by implementing and testing different kinds of legislation that bring forth new mechanisms of value creation.” (GU)

To prevent a total Songdo-like smart technology takeover, new urban zoning might enable citizens to self-organize and provide services themselves. The ideal utopian platform would be owned and controlled by its users, serving as a cooperative service where everyone is able to invest and everybody benefits. But building such a model from the ground up can be problematic (see platform co-ops such as the Green Taxi Cooperative), and gaining leverage through user numbers is difficult due to a lack of resources and the network effect. After all, the platform is only valuable to its users if enough people join in. Therefore we can think about a more practical, middle ground approach, utilizing existing corporate platforms and the network they provide. Even though the platform still profits off the user’s activity, the user begins to extract new, unintended value from its operation, exploring alternative social functions of augmented urbanity.

What characterizes this self-regulated hybrid space is that it offers entrance and exit by choice

Notion of “Vertical Futures”

In the future, we can imagine this soft zoning might offer counter-mechanisms that enable citizens to take action, utilizing the same tools and methods that generate so much value for the tech giants.

Taking action within the context of vertical zoning can be translated as a shift:

... from being approached as a user – one who benefits from the easiness and luxuries of the platform (and surrenders to its monopolistic tendencies) 

...to being approached as a citizen – one who is politically empowered and bears legal rights to demand alternative models. 

Political bodies can enhance citizenship through vertical zoning, repelling the current smart-city dogma based on information exploitation and the uneven nature of the user-platform relationship.

Notion of creating the circumstances for citizens to experiment with alternative approaches to new technologies, and creating financial instruments that support new initiatives → New Zones don’t necessarily have to draw out new land to reclaim and populate; they should be mapped onto the city as it is. A more collective, inclusive and social approach to Zoning might enable the city-state to prevent disbandment of urban life.

#vertical #zoning #anastasia #kubrak #sander #manse #gu

[ogxref]

BENEDICT SINGLETON + KELLER EASTERLING IN CONVERSATION / Glass-Bead

It’s common to consider architects and designers as opportunistic figures consorting with the industrial, financial and political powers in place → From this standpoint, their alliance to critical voices and to potentially emancipatory ends is often seen to be rather dubious...

But notion that... 

...playing with the rules of the game...

...manipulating things from within...

...diverting and subverting various power agendas... 

...could be more productive critical strategies than direct opposition...

Critical strategies → may come closer to the multiple meanings of forging: “At once shaping a metal object by heating it and hammering it, constructing, by extension, something that is strong, enduring or simply successful, as well as falsifying, imitating, producing a copy of something in order to turn it into something else.”

Notion that architecture has more to learn than to teach about global politics and global urbanization

Define yourself less as a theorist than as a strategist

See not only buildings with shapes and outlines but also the matrix of activities and rules in which those buildings are suspended.

Notion of trying to change a habit of mind about form making and political activism → We are very good at “knowing that” (pointing to things and calling their name. In our most primitive moments we even regard this cumulative identification as a primary form of knowledge...), but “knowing how” redoubles that knowledge.

We are less attuned to the ways in which information resides in the lumpy, heavy objects of our world → We are more aware of their name than the repertoire they enact. It is harder to see the ways in which objects are exchanging and generating information.

Benedict Singleton → I have a professional interest in ideas that unlock new ways to proceed in a given situation: understanding how things really work in order to produce an effect; the relations (actual and possible) that design has with outside forces that set and are unset by its agendas

Value ideas more for their efficacy than by their claims to being comprehensive;  more interested in diversifying possible courses of action than of creating a “theory of design.”

“Perhaps the major one for me has been a view of design as something innately subversive: design is really what you do when you can’t straightforwardly impress a pattern on the world, but must rather devise a sequence of oblique and well-timed actions in order to coax effects from unpromising materials –materials that are remote, volatile, stubborn, obscure, or otherwise resistant to manipulation.”

in order to rethink architecture and design, in order to expand their understanding beyond buildings and beyond what can be called a “solving problems” logic, it is necessary to rethink the type of spatiality in which they intervene, and the spatial logics in which they can engage...

On “Plot”:

“Plot’s initial, spatial meaning, the demarcation of an area, transferred into the language of the workshop. One plots out a design on paper before acting on other, more expensive materials. So a constructive sense of plot arises, relating to diagrams, maps and charts. And within a few decades, this graphical ‘plotting’ was adopted into the lexicon of the early modern theater, where its artisanal meaning deepened into a narrative sense: plotting as the arrangement of people and things over time, so as to tell a story.

Up to this point, ‘plot’ shares a substantial similarity to ‘plan’. Both words couple the idea of a spatial arrangement with a schedule of unfolding action. Plot’s connection to territory (and the politics of its division), cartography, and stories make it, perhaps, the richer word. But most interesting is that, on the back of its theatrical use, plot acquired a further, specifically subversive, sense, which planning does not possess: plotting as the subtle orchestrations of an unseen director, manipulating the course of events from behind the scenes

So ‘plot’ encodes a particular form of creativity, too, which can be glossed as the production of a plot twist. This is the point at which one plot is subverted by another one”

Plotting is always re-plotting → discerning the contours of an unfolding situation and locating the opportunities it presents for ‘leverage’, points in space and time at which an action can generate an effect disproportionate to the physical effort put into it...

Rather than conjuring an image of how the world should be and then trying to force it into being, plotting takes a site’s particular structure, its fixity or at least predictability, as the platform for new and potentially unlicensed operations... (GU)

Notion that recovering the full sense of plotting, as an intervention that starts from a point of comparative weakness and proceeds through guile and ingenuity → forges a deep conceptual link between the creation of artifacts and political intrigues, dissident stratagems, and other ruses

Notion of discrepant characters: pirates, swindlers and others who have mastered the art of decoupling what they are saying from what they are doing

Keller Easterling: “Perhaps the only thing of note that I bring to the study of space is a training in theater where this decoupling is routine, as is the understanding that actions are primary carriers of information.”

“For both designers and activists, the forthright, the direct, the sincere is often valued over the discrepant and the sly. But learning from Rosalind Williams and others, the formulas and spatial products of infrastructure space are nowhere in particular. Infrastructure space is a distributed condition organized by mixtures of state and non-state players.”

i.e. there is no place and there is no guarantee that the righteous duel of the activist or the directness of the designer address will register change... (GU)

Gregory Bateson → “A switch is a thing that is not.” Active forms are not finished but dispositional and unfolding in time. There is no object or master plan but something more like the identification of linkages and interdependencies that remain in place to counterbalance each other.

Design → a snaking chain of moves that can gradually get leverage in difficult political situations

Notion fo figures and strategies that seem to have a lot to do with the notion of game

“It seems that, in order to avoid some kind of cynical free play so commonly praised nowadays, we need to be able to draw a line between mastering the game and being able to transform its rules…” → but maybe there is no possibility of working “from the outside” (yet still labor under the assumption that one can manipulate without collusion...)

Singleton → becoming attuned to the rules of a very complex game indeed, becoming a player of great skill, can itself be a set of blinkers, and, under the right circumstances, a terminal flaw.

As Keller suggests, apparent errors in the established script can function as footholds for other forms of action. When we see our ideals flounder in practice, there’s a temptation to fall back on simply affirming them anew; maybe if we refine the way we phrase them just one more time, we’ll have found the correct combination for the safe that’s rumored to contain a better world. Clearly that doesn’t often work, and other approaches are necessary...

a more subtle temptation is to see the exploitation of these apparent discrepancies simply as opportunities to bring down The System, which can then be forgotten once we’ve replaced it with The Better System. As noble as the envisioned substitute might seem, it, too, will come with its side-effects, backfires, and off-label uses… Notion that we need a gyropolitics capable of reckoning fully with these complex reversals, escalators and complicities

Notion of the city as a “zone of deals”

Anthropologist Mary Helms describes a level at which design and trade become equivalent → rather than assuming the former simply provides the material for the latter, the two practices become comparable when they’re seen as acts of negotiating an ambiguous environment, one traversed by complex and partially concealed forces, in order to procure an object.

Cities → the psychological epicenter of this procedure, the place where deals proliferate and stakes become extravagant. “They are accordingly rich with typologies of ascent and shipwreck, trouble and oasis. This quality seems inherent to the city. Its enduring richness as a model of the maximally artificial environment, compared to say the submarine or spaceship, is not just a function of its scale and heterogeneity. These latter qualities are themselves a function of the city’s generative paradox: a bounded space, but open to the outside; a stable zone, but predicated on arrivals and departures. Such an environment is configured to continually test expectations.”

Notion of outer space exploration caught in a logic of colonization: a logic of spatial expansion that relies on the preservation of the same.

Keller Easterling → “Maybe the whole atmosphere of newness also seems to align with or reinforce our larger cultural mistakes about the advent of new technologies—anticipation of either the dystopian crisis or the redemptive universal platform for exchange. Are these the melodramas of the teenaged or the middle-aged? I am not sure.”

…Any deviation from the proper techniques, even in an attempt to aid and broaden activism, may be interpreted as a betrayal of ethical principles. → Manipulating the market is mistaken for collusion. Giving positive attention to agents of systemic change rather than negative opposition to a series of enemies is mistaken for an uncritical stance. Relinquishing the grip of resistance is mistaken for capitulation or ethical relativism. Answering duplicity with duplicity is mistaken for equivocation or lack of conviction rather than a technique to avoid disclosing a deliberate strategy...

Maybe the word “indeterminate” is a stumbling block because it signals to some equivocation, lack of conviction or the “cynical free play” to which you refer in your question.

The most powerful players in the world rely on indeterminacy, so that, in the winding road of political manipulation, they can be Goliath one day and David the next. The notion that there is an ethical consensus and proper realm of political negotiation plays into the hands of this elusive behavior. It is easy to trick dissent if declaration is the only thing that counts and information

To acknowledge an indeterminate and changing set of techniques is to stay light on your feet and exercise the same political agility that the most powerful characters enjoy. You can never congratulate yourself for being finished

“If it’s a type of game we’re talking about–and it’s an odd type of game indeed when one competes for the right to set the rules–it’s premised on seduction...”

#keller #easterling #benedict #singleton #strategy #gu

[ogxref]

ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND ALGORITHMIC IDENTITY / Rob Horning

According to the common story about our fall into postmodernity, being yourself has become hard work... → Once, people were born into relatively stable situations in which identity was prescribed based on where one was born and to whom. There was little choice in the matter of what sort of life one would lead, and little social or geographical mobility. The social categories (class, gender, ethnicity, religion) that determined the possibilities for one’s life were essentially fixed, as were the way those categories were defined. → But then industrialization and the advent of mass media scuttled those categories over time and rendered social norms more fluid and malleable. 

Identity was no longer assigned but became a project for individuals to realize → It became an opportunity and a responsibility, a burden. 

“You could now fail to become someone.” Some sociologists and psychologists label this condition “ontological insecurity” → In The Divided Self, R.D. Laing defines it as when one lacks “the experience of his own temporal continuity” and does not have “an overriding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness.” Laing argues that without this stable sense of self, every interaction threatens to overwhelm the individual with the fear of losing oneself in the other or of being obliterated by their indifference. A stable sense of self across time makes life meaningful; it allows us to experience and transmit a sense of “authenticity” → But this stable, authentic self tends to be represented as the means to its own end... → “You achieve a self by being yourself and finding yourself...” This tautology sets us up for failure, and for the endless labor of trying to express and realize ourselves. “Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviors, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves … The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.” Under economic conditions in which maximizing our “human capital” is paramount → we are under unremitting pressure to make the most of ourselves and our social connections and put it all on display to maintain our social viability. We are perpetually “unable to measure up”: we must, like any other capitalist firm, demonstrate an ability to maintain growth or become obsolete. The neoliberal demand that we convert our lives into capital and grow it systematically seizes on the ideal of self-expression and strips it of its dignity and allure. This is the context in which social media have thrived → solve the problem of the self under neoliberalism, extending a platform for human capital development while still offering a seemingly stable basis for “ontological security.” “It may seem that social media, by making social interaction asynchronous, shifting a portion of it online to an indefinite “virtual” space, and subjecting it all to constant monitoring, measurement, and assessment would not be a recipe for producing a sense of personal continuity. The way our self-expression gets ranked in likes and shares in social media would seem to subordinate identity to competition over metricized attention, dividing peers into winners and losers. And the creation of identity in the form of a data archive would seem to fashion not a grounded self but an always incomplete and inadequate double — a “self partially forced from the body.” You are always in danger of being confronted with your incohesiveness, with evidence of a past self now rejected or a misinterpreted, misprocessed version of one’s archive being distributed as the real you.” If Laing is right about ontological insecurity, then social media seem designed to generate it → They systematically impose a sense of insubstantiality on users, turning identity into incoherence by constantly assimilating and demanding more data about us, making our self a vacuum that never fills, no matter how much is poured in → Our identity is constantly being recalibrated and recalculated, and we can forever try to “correct” it with more photos, more updates, more posts, more data... But this same destabilization opens up the possibility for compensatory reassurances: the serial pleasures of checking for likes and other forms of micro-recognition made suddenly meaningful by the acute insecurity. Even as social media destabilize the lived experience of our self’s continuity, they address the dissolution of identity with a dynamic system of identity capture. The profile → takes over for the old identity stabilizers (family, geography, religion, etc.) and becomes the sturdy blank slate on which various roles can be inscribed while we remain open to the saturation of as many different influences as possible. It can hold our lives while we are busy constantly reinventing ourselves for labor markets → Social media exacerbate ontological insecurity while masquerading as its cure. “The algorithmic bubbles that social media construct around us are key part of the consolation the platforms provide. Their constant, reliable presence let us consume a sense of the ontological security the platforms are in the process of eroding. The filter bubble is not an unfortunate accident, as Mark Zuckerberg suggested in his “global community” manifesto, but an essential source of social media’s appeal: the aspect that allows it to counter postmodernist vertigo.” If all the content on Facebook is tailored to suit the company’s construction of who we are, then consuming it is like consuming a coherent version of ourselves. It also reinforces the idea that the best place to glimpse your stable social identity is on Facebook. Engagement with social media then signals our assent to this algorithmic figuring of the self Digital studies professor John Cheney-Lippold’s We Are Data → explores algorithmic identity, but not in terms of the subjective reassurance or pleasure it may provide. He is more concerned with the control algorithmic systems impose through the way data aggregators structure various social categories. He outlines the way social media companies, marketers, and state institutions use our data trails to calculate what our age, race, gender, class, nationality, and so on are likely to be, and how those probabilities are used to reshape our individuated realities. As more information about ourselves is captured within Big Data systems by phones, social media platforms, fitness trackers, facial recognition software, and other forms of surveillance, algorithms assign identity markers to us, place us in categories based on correlations to patterns drawn from massive data sets, regardless of whether these correspond to how we think of ourselves → We become, to an extent, what other people do, as their data contributes to how ours is interpreted. The system will infer our identity, according to categories it defines or invents, and use these to shape our environments and further guide our behavior, sharpen the way we have been classified, and make the data about us denser, deeper. As these positivist systems saturate social existence, they nullify the idea that there is something about identity that can’t be captured as data. Frank Pasquale → “black-box scoring” in The Black Box Society Data-driven identity systems → perpetuate the social significance of categories while removing the negotiation of what any category means from the social, interpersonal sphere, placing them instead in opaque, private systems Unmappable to any pre-existing social category, these submerged, unseen identities in theory can be pushed into the social world and made reflexive there. In other words, the systems can invent races, and perpetuate the logic of racism: that it is “rational” to seek data patterns about populations and make them overt and socially salient, definitive for those so identified. On an individual level, bespoke discrimination by algorithm may make it impossible to know when and why one is being excluded or singled out From the start, we are not self-inventing. We are born into a social context that forms the framework and the limitations of our self-knowledge. Knowing ourselves means understanding this immutable context that we didn’t choose. Algorithms promise a simple solution to the riddle of the self, should we want one → They promise the certainty that data alone suffices to make a self: just generate data and you are significant, a somebody, a unique identification number at the very least → One can accept the ready pleasure of consumerism rather than pursue the freedom of autonomy, which is always imperfect and requires boundless innovation in our techniques of resistance. We can learn the secret of ourselves, as long as we consent to be controlled.

#rob #horning #social #media #algorithmic #identity #ontological #insecurity

[ogxref]

DIGITAL TARKOVSKY NOTES (Strelka Press) / Metahaven

In US alone, an average adult spends 2 hours and 51 minutes on their smartphone everyday → that is 8 minutes longer than Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker...

We surround ourselves with and immerse ourselves in digital devices that command this type of duration → the fact that we spend so much time on it prompts a question: we wish to investigate the kind of duration that we experience whilst staring at, and interacting with these tiny screens, our little beacons of orientation in an increasingly uncertain and illegible world…

In an age of seemingly omnipresent attention deficit syndrome, we never hesitate to spend hours on end, immersed in a flat world that is each person’s own private universe, each person’s process of motion and emotion, horizontal and vertical, taking place on a surface no larger than the smallest pocket book, but infinitely smaller than the largest film screen. And we are interested in calling this something else than smartphone addiction → We are interested in calling it cinema...

Duration is measured with time, and appears as irreversible.

Philosophical, mathematical and physical speculations about time all face the practical confrontation with the moving “Now” that forces itself to the foreground every time we are trying to think temporal abstractions, or better, every time we are trying to escape time.

“Early cinema was a revolutionary art form that was served by a new technology. Nowadays, going to the cinema is already a bit like going back in time, to a velvet-upholstered chair equipped with a cup holder, fixing one’s spatial position in front of a giant moving image as if it were the only thing in the world that matters.”

In comparison with their surrounding visual culture, cinemas → have become spaces of enforced watching. Moviegoers are told to switch off their phones before a film begins. And this is understandable: the phone competes with, and distracts from, the big film playing out on the big screen.

That being true, there still is something odd about the no phones warning. In spite of film having already ostentatiously “won” the competition for biggest screen, it still deems it necessary to set rules to avoid distraction from other durational devices. Film aggressively enforces its claims in space, because it may have lost its monopoly on controlling time.

Since the early days of cinema the moviegoer has been imagined as a human being, but in the early 21st century, moving image is also created, as well as “watched,” by artificial intelligence (AI) → Unlike a human being, to see, an AI does not need to even look at anything visual; it can experience the image without vision. All the temporal rules of cinema are also ignored by AI, because these rules were based on human limitations that the AI overcomes.

In postwar France → the historian Fernand Braudel introduced an equivalent of the cinematic long take: the longue durée. It was nothing short of a paradigm shift in what it meant to write history and how this was supposed to happen. Braudel criticized how economists reduced historical time to cycles of growth and decline. The focus on the “short time” (as opposed to the longue durée) had been au bénéfice de l’histoire économique et sociale, au détriment de l’histoire politique.

The idea that the perceptual experience of the Now in the everyday is opposed to the longer historical trajectory, or, that there is more than just one social time, shifts the perceptual frame up to a scale where the “heat of the moment” comes to form a dialectic opposition to that scale itself. In a sense, Braudel’s analysis of long-term historical change is a bit like pattern recognition beyond the human frame of experience

Unsurprisingly, a field for which Braudel’s work holds a special significance is that of climatology → The massive, irreversible, climate change associated with the anthropocene is a development that can politically uniquely be assessed as one of longue durée, as it is not simply the tragedy of a natural inevitability, but an outcome of an accumulation of distinct developments usually described by distinct scientific and scholarly disciplines. The longue durée is a frame of understanding that is especially suited to assess these fundamental shifts.

Notion of the “fallacy of the Now”

Notion of interpreting and appreciating the time we spend on our smartphones, and our intention to see this as a form of cinema, of cinematic duration. And perhaps ask another question, why are we doing this? → Why then bother cinema’s temple with its surrounding digital camping grounds, with social media fluff, YouTube clips, disappearing Snapchat pictures, manic text messages, gifs, heavily doctored Wikipedia articles, Instagram stories, fake news websites, failing Skype calls, Pokemon Go, stickers, overlays… → why bother cinema with interface?

Watching Tarkovsky films is neither a short, nor a light pastime, but the difference between them and all mainstream films is no accident. → They are conceived outside the normative, visual and narrative standardization of cinematic time by the rules of commercial film production studios and television broadcasters. They are also intimidating on a conceptual, philosophical level.

Tarkovsky’s films are long and slow. On a superficial level this seems to put them out of touch with contemporary reality, or rather, contemporary reality out of touch with them. Indeed, some fear that we may be losing the very sensory and mental capacities to engage with their time and duration. The writer Geoff Dyer complains that “we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last—and no one can concentrate on anything—for longer than about two seconds.” → One way to see this is that the films become simply inaccessible over time; another is that they become more like Dostoevsky novels or Mounts Everest, harder to conquer and more resilient and demanding as artworks whose very texture and “temporal weight” resists quick consumption. If this is true it would make Tarkovsky’s films still better and more profound as artworks; the troubling confrontation with time itself would become progressively more difficult, but also, more meaningful.

It’s hard to sit and watch a clock tick, to experience time consciously, and to watch, feel it happen → There seems to be a kind of “horizontal gravity” at work on the timeline, a backward drag, the presence of which is as hardly acknowledged in most films as it is in most lives. Insipidity, drowsiness, all of these are closely related to the slow passing of time and our ability, or inability, to achieve goals and realize what we desire.”

“Some artists who make us feel the true measure of things. It is a burden which they carry throughout their lives, and we must be thankful to them.”

Tarkovsky →  the script has to “die in the film”

Dyer →  whilst Tarkovsky often felt frustrated by the control exercised by the state over his and others’ artistic freedom, in the West, a subtler kind of censorship and tyranny (that of the market) would have made it extremely unlikely that he could ever have obtained permission (raised the funds) to make Mirror or Stalker...

Tarkovsky → “An image is not some idea as expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected in a drop of water.”

“We suggest that in Tarkovsky there’s not so much a typical storyline with its irreversible turning points and cliffhangers, but an ambient plot.”

The ubiquity of screens destroys our ability to see film as a distinct medium anymore. Will Self → film is dead now because it is replicating “our own neurological capacity for absorbing imagery.”

#digital #tarkovsky #metahaven #newnormal #strelka

[ogxref]

ON CRISIS IN ARCHITECTURE / Venkatesh Rao

A crisis → too good a thing to waste. Not only should you have as many as you have time for, you should succumb to each as quickly and completely as possible, and then bounce back as quickly as you can so you can have another one → Resistance is not just futile, it is counter-productive. “You could point in any random direction right now, wherever you are, and yell “Crisis!”, and architecturally, you’d likely be right. This is called “issuing a provocation,” a sort of architectural fatwa...” Notion that it takes spectacular levels of incompetence to be wrong in architecture... “In architecture, urgent means “not urgent” and conversation means “sit down and shut up, I’m discoursin’ here.” If you are feeling particularly aggressive, instead of having an urgent conversation, you can “interrogate something problematic”.” “In architecture (and its parent discipline of Critical Theory) interrogate means “aggressively question a suspect who is not in the room”, and problematic  means “something that is functioning smoothly, making somebody you dislike steadily more powerful”. Usually the suspect is a rich, white, straight, cis-male who is driving around in a silver-grey sports car with a trophy younger wife on the other side of the planet from wherever the interrogation is going on. The problematic (noun) is usually some obscenely lucrative neoliberal monopolistic platform that he owns.” A midlife crisis is about suddenly being forced to contemplate the possibility that you might be irrelevant at every scale, from quark to quasar. If you are on the critical path → your delays delay the universe. Your accelerations accelerate the universe. The order in which you say or do things matters. If you’re not on the critical path, however, nothing particularly significant hinges on whether you show up late or early, or indeed, whether you show up at all. So an architectural crisis → really an urgent critical conversation designed to interrogate a problematic critical path that you’re not on. Or a problematic path on which your design conversation is not urgently critical. Or a conversational path on which your criticism is not urgently interrogated by design. Or something... Paul Graham’s definition history → “simply all the data we have so far...”

History has historically been how we choose what data to forget. Our brains work that way too. We don’t form memories to write our stories. We write our stories to suppress inconvenient memories.

Notion that history is the technology of forgetting, not the technology of remembering...

They say Big Data → when saving the data is easier than deciding what to do with it. So tomorrow, Big History will mean saving everything in an unstructured Big Data slum in the cloud, and making sure almost everything is hopelessly buried and largely undiscoverable except in the form of psychedelic Deep Dream images.

“At a startup event I was at recently, I heard a founder remark that roughly 99% of the data collected is never analyzed. I doubt it will ever be, but maybe one day it can be psychoanalyzed...” Notion of the Narrative Industrial Complex

The only thing worse than Big History is Little History...

Little History is exactly like Big History, except that Big Men and Women are excised from it with extreme prejudice, and replaced with Big Process → Little History reaches out just as broadly, and with as much overweening authority... Little History / Big Process: “Instead of a dent in the universe, you get a pimple on a uncritically proceduralist conceptualization of the frontier of knowledge as the sum of all the peer-reviewed academic literature in the world.” A mid-life crisis : not a way to recenter yourself in the universe through an act of epistemology → It is a way to recenter the universe around yourself through an act of architecture...

#crisis #architecture #big #history #process #venkatesh #rao

[ogxref]

SLOW CRIME / Geoff Manaugh

Slow Crime → looking at the emergence of urban-scale AI through the lens of police forensics. The hypothesis of "Slow Crime" is that a ubiquitous, multi-scalar Artificial Intelligence network will be able to detect (and make legible) otherwise invisible long-term events that diverge from expected norms. 

Notion of "crime"→ in this case is a euphemism referring to any deviation from the status quo...

To discuss "Slow Crime" would require at least two areas of focus:

Look at unexpected sensory inputs through which an urban AI could piece together, or detect, indirect evidence of something happening elsewhere (for example, imagine an Artificially Intelligent sensor-network using acoustic information to produce a visual map of an urban ecosystem, or an AI sensor-network extrapolating evidence of human movement from ambient electromagnetic data in the landscape)

As a research methodology, utilize the police narrative as a hermeneutic device, foregrounding detection, or the detective, as an unusually engaged form of explanation for something that otherwise defies straight-forward accounting. 

Causes, effects, circumstantial evidence... → "Slow Crime" is about piecing together something that prior to AI could not even be detected...

#geoff #manaugh #slow #crime #ai

[ogxref]

MEDIUM DESIGN NOTES (Strelka Press) / Keller Easterling

MEDIUM DESIGN

Medium Design → begins a rearrangement of neurons to alter ingrained habits of mind or get to the other side of some dominant mental partitions. That altered habit of mind relies on a simple observation: Humans like to be right, they like to know the answer, they are good at pointing to things and calling their name but not so good at describing the relationships between things or the repertoires they enact... 

Captivated by circular logics, declarations, determinations, objects, solutions, universals, telos, elementary particles... → mind shaped as a closed loop: “Since superiority cannot abide contradiction, the loop lashes out with a binary fight when it is challenged. Fighting is essential to being right. There is no growth or ideation without argument or debate.”

One common script → adheres to modernist belief that the newest technology automatically delivers some essential intelligence, and updates tired old thinking with the fresh information needed to survive the future. Favoring successive rather than coexistent thoughts or practices, bombastic arguments must wipe away incumbent thought to establish the new and transcendent...

In other well-worn templates for thought, the narrative arc bends a struggle towards a utopian or dystopian ultimate.

These default scripts seem to confine humans within a small fraction of their potential. With limited capacities for addressing perennial problems, culture is often banging away with the same blunt tools that are completely inadequate to address contemporary chemistries of power:

If economic and military templates of causation provide no explanation... 

if new technologies do not provide the solution...

if the consensus surrounding laws and standards provide no relief...

 then little sense can be made of the problem. 

Smart is confused with new. Empowered is confused with free. Even dissent, adopting the very same loop and binary dispositions, sometimes knows what’s “good for everybody”, existing in a world of enemies and innocents or chalking up its failures to a lack of purity...

Since the world’s political superbugs (bullies, strongmen, countries, or instruments of market conquest) thrive on this oscillation between closed loop and binary, it’s as if there is nothing to counter them → only have more ways of fighting and being right and providing the rancor that nourishes their violence...  

“Where nothing is new and nothing is right, there are no dramatic manifestos.”

Rather than only declarations, right answers, objects, determinations → you can detect and manipulate the medium or matrix in which they are suspended and in which they change over time:

Just as this medium thinking inverts the typical focus on object over field...

...maybe medium design can be used to invert some habitual approaches to problem solving, aesthetics and politics.

Medium thinking is ever-present in many disciplines:

The oncologist follows not only the tumor but also the chemical fluctuations in surrounding tissues. 

The actor in theater stores information not only in text but also in interdependent actions. 

The architect sees not only buildings with shapes and outlines but also the matrix of activities that inflects them. 

The geologist doesn’t merely taxonomize specimens but rather reads them as traces of a process.

Medium design → uses space to prompt productive thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems. It treats the lumpy, heavy material of space itself as an information system and a broad, inclusive mixing chamber for many social, political, technical networks.

“Space does not need the screens and sensors of the internet of things to make its stiff arrangements dance. It is already dancing. And even at a moment of digital ubiquity and innovation, it may be space that is the under exploited medium of innovation with the capacity to make other information systems dumber or smarter.” 

Good starting point → the largest sociotechnical organizations of space, the repeatable formulas for formatting space all around the world... → they are too large or too widely distributed to be assessed as a discrete object with a name, a shape or an outline. They don’t respond to singular solutions or determinations, and they can really only be assessed by the activity or disposition immanent in their organization as it unfolds over time and territory. 

Designing medium → managing the potentials and relationships between objects, the activity or disposition immanent in their organization, the disposition of any organization makes some things possible and some things impossible. → “Like an operating system, it sets the rules of the game that link and activate the components of an organization.”

“Stock narratives of history about the succession rather than coexistence of knowledge, sci-fi futurologies, persuasions about lubricated freedoms or righteous activism don’t make sense. Right answers are mistakes. Multiplying problems can be helpful. Messiness is smarter than newness. Obligations are more empowering than freedom.“

INDETERMINACY:

A reasonable world of norms gives authority to declarations, master plans, standards or laws... → Medium favors indeterminacy: Since unreasonable politics easily unravel reasonable master plans, earnest manifestos, and right answers, being right is a bad idea in infrastructure space. It doesn’t work against gurus and totalitarian bullies. It’s too weak.

Designers are very good at making things, but medium design is less like making a thing and more like having your hands on the faders and toggles of organization → It is the design of interdependencies, chemistries, chain reactions and ratchets. It benefits from an artistic curiosity about spatial wiring or reagents in spatial mixtures, about designing not a single object but an updating platform for inflecting populations of objects or setting up relative potentials within them. (GU)

There is a comfort with dynamic markers and unfinished processes that are indeterminate to be practical. The dispositions of space are manipulated not with solutions but with time-released active forms (multipliers, switches, governors or other machines of interplay) To assess and manipulate medium, it is almost as if you have to cultivate your canine powers Extending the temporal dimension allows them to unfold and remain in play. 

“Instead of freedom, maybe empowering situations gain strength through interplay—mutual obligation, checks and balances, offsets, and bargains. It is not a solution but something that shouldn’t always work.”

Medium design would then be something like being good at playing pool →  where knowing about one fixed sequence won’t do any good but being able to see branching networks of possibilities allows you to play longer, add more information to the table and make the game more robust... In pool, you don’t know the answer; you only know what to do next. The balls are sometimes attached to known forms or rules of play, but the art of pool involves assessing their collisions → The player “knows how” to respond to a string of changing conditions over time with an organ of interplay.

DISCREPANCY:

To assess and manipulate medium, it is almost as if you have to cultivate your canine powers, develop a canine mind → You see things with names and hear humans speaking words but those things can’t be comprehended in the absence of a thousand other affective cues and relative positions between things in context: The position of the human relative to the door or the dog bowl, their posture or potential for violence is all being assessed equally with the sound of words and their assigned meanings... 

Notion of being able to detect the difference between what an organization is saying vs. what it is doing (i.e. how organizations decouple their messages from their real activities and underlying dispositions) → the authority given to declarations may camouflage the undeclared activity that is hiding in plain sight

“The world’s superbugs and bullet-proof forms of power may be masters of monistic demagoguery and binary head-on brutality, but they are also masters of the split screen.”

On Lies → Telling one lie is a bad idea, but telling many lies works very well. One lie calls for reconciliation and truth. Many lies create a Telfon surface on which rationality slips and slides. They know how to make words dance around and fascinate in the absence of meaning and information. Lies are everywhere, animated and in color. They lubricate and insulate. Unburdened by truth and running rings around the earnest declaration, the discrepancy that others are futilely trying to reasonably reconcile is the raw material of fully mediated rumor and contagious fictions that batter the walls and work the back channels with stunning success... It’s not what the lies say but how they bounce that is important.

Superbugs just want the bare power. They are mediated, but, more than that, they become medium: activity divorced from content or meaning.

GU! → Design that has any hope of actually making change manipulates the organization as well as the narrative that attends it. That narrative that may not be about the rational explanation of the design and its problem-solving capacities in the mode of elevator pitches and TED talks:  

Instead, it may be a dissonant story that however non-physical has physical consequences 

It may be a narrative makes something contagious or that generates a Teflon of its own. 

It may have an emotional message that renders some power more vulnerable. 

Or it may have a surprising cultural bounce because of its irrationality, outrageousness, cuteness or violence. 

TEMPERAMENT:

While temperament is a construct usually associated with the human psyche, any organization possesses a potential for either concentrating or distributing power (as well as a potential for escalating or reducing violence) → Attuned to temperament, medium design can adjust stories and organizational potentials on both sides of the screen.

LATENCY:

Notion that disposition does not happen, because it is ever-present as a latent property. → “Just as glass doesn’t have to break to be brittle, dispositional qualities are changing and unfolding.”

Medium design → enhances an ability to detect and manipulate latent potentials in the absence of event or declaration → the slow-moving, persistent violence or the interplay of rich potentials for which there is often no history...

Notion of “histories of things that don’t happen” → might be structured like an epidemiology or a branching set of thresholds and points of leverage. More like a chemistry than law, they would highlight agents of change that become contagious or seemingly immovable deadlocks that suddenly dissolve

-

“Even when it is clear that the exclusive or pure embrace of the new and the modern makes culture dumber, the impure embrace remains under-rehearsed.”

With the ability to detect discrepancy, latency, temperament and indeterminacy is there a way of productively engage the things that don’t make sense? Maybe the documents of medium design are unusual mixtures of popular stories and technical specifications or explicit architectural instructions, like a cross between a novel and an actuarial table or a film and a blockchain.

#keller #easterling #medium #design #newnormal #strelka

[ogxref]

ON MEDIUM THINKING / Keller Easterling

Media → vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible

Media theorists → John Durham Peters, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Regis Debray, Nikolas Luhmann, Vilem Flusser join an array of thinkers in the arts and sciences including Herman Melville, Jacob von Uexküll, George Sanders Peirce, Walter Benjamin, Gregory Bateson, Bruno Latour and Arjun Appadurai among many others

McLuhan → “what the medium is saying sometimes prevents us from seeing what the medium is doing”

Foucault → dispositif is “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid.

Agamben → dispositif as literally everything that has in some way the capacity of capturing, determining, orienting, intercepting, shaping, guiding, securing or controlling, the behaviors, the gestures, the opinions, the discourses of living beings or substances...

Ryle → disposition as the latent agency or potential immanent in arrangement, a property or propensity within a context that unfolds over time

Ryle also describes the difference between “knowing that vs. knowing how” → the difference between knowing the right answer and knowing how to do something like telling a joke. Knowing how is dispositional and essentially indeterminate because it requires the deployment of practical skills unfolding over time and the ability to react to a changing sequence of cues

Stephen Mumford → describes the ways that this immanent disposition may exist as, not event, but “promise” or “threat”

Bruno Latour foregrounds an indeterminate matrix of human and non-human activity in the sociotechnical networks of the medium → he argues that we often observe active phenomena until we think we can declare “what it is”—its stabilized, essential “competence.” But “what it is” can never be separated from “what it does.”

Walter Benjamin → conjured a “medium of perception” in which culture is both made and received, a medium inflected by atmospheres as well as the apparate (apparatus) for making a reproducing it.

Notion that Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education could inspire political actions that were never expressed in the texts... Characters act within their staged context even as they also act on meta-narrative forms. Bovary, is an agent within the novel as well as a reagent in culture. Her actions ricochet against conditions in culture to inspire liberatory behaviors she never enacted herself. Narrative forms and cultural forms in plural overlapping networks have capacities or affordances that are inherently political, that alter the ways in which power is organized.

“While the authority of the determinate somehow sidelines medium thinking as soft, magical, or ephemeral, it is not somehow unmoored, invisible, unknowable, or magic.” → ultimately practical, does this knowledge constitute most of what we know and more of what we might know?

Gregory Bateson analyzed potentials in human and non-human arrangements and exchanges as if they were information systems → he observed that a man, a tree and an ax is an information system...

Notion that “Information is the difference that makes a difference.”

Wwhile culture may be more comfortable focusing forms for which they have some familiar markers (objects and things in a steady state) → perhaps those markers deliver their information or measure difference when forms combine or bounce in the chemistries of medium...

#keller #easterling #medium #thinking #newnormal

[ogxref]

ON RESILIENT URBANISM + BODY AS INFRASTRUCTURE / Ross Exo Adams

Many ruptures have occurred in the composition of whatever may be called "normality" today → such ruptures are themselves a stern reminder of our need for new forms of knowledge altogether, forms that reject the assurances of a professionalized architectural discourse

There is a history (yet to be written) in which key representations of the human body at once call into existence and justify certain modes of government, while simultaneously suggesting ideal ways to organize the spaces of the world.

Representations of the human body → coded diagrams that collect certain knowledges of the human condition in order to grant access to the ways in which power and space intersect.

Such a schematic history may begin with the many ancient traditions of depicting the body as a divine replica (a metaphor central to early modern political epistemologies, where its various parts and proportions could lend themselves to an overall order of the state in what Jacques Le Goff has called a “political physiology”)

This history would show how this paradigm of the body (whether a supreme metaphor, divine model, or vessel of the eternal) maintained its persuasive consistency until well into the 18th century when it began to wane as it was challenged by a new epistemological horizon → The body that would appear in its place, no longer seeking its reflection in the perfection of the divine, emerges instead as a map of imperfections.

By the 19th century, the body is seen as constantly in need of correction, which, through a new faith invested in technology, opens itself both to technology and as a technology itself → we see a radically new mode of government install itself in response to this new topography of the human condition, inserting its techniques in the new instabilities seen to reside in the bodies that now “freely” circulate throughout the state.

This new representational regime replaced divine metaphors for biological ones (organisms, organs, systems) as the tools that mediate a new relation between body, space and governance.

The systematic coherence that emerges over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries is unprecedented in part because it develops itself as a non-representational scheme → a form of power embedded in space that operates in and on life itself (the name for such a space-power for Ildefonso Cerdá was urbanización, a term he coined in 1861)

For it to exist as such, human life now seemed to require this new universal, bio-economic space to support it → Its unprecedented expansion across the surface of the planet over the span of just two centuries stands as a testament not to capitalism or technology but to a regime of the body that naturalizes both.

To call for such a history is, of course, an indictment of the present → an attempt to illuminate the preconditions of our moment that allow us to anticipate how the codes of the human body may once again be shifting

“For my part, I believe that such a shift in the relations between body, power, and space is evident in a new mode of urbanism: so-called resilient urbanism” → Resilient urbanism is essentially smart city urbanism having come of age in the era of climate crisis

If the smart city’s techniques aimed to optimize the city... → resilient urbanism would adopt these techniques to manage crisis, conceiving the city and its surrounding environment as a single expansive space of data to be monitored and intervened upon in real time.

Yet what makes resilient urbanism unique may have less to do with the technologies it deploys than in the cumulative effect they have on the bodies they organize → unlike its 20th century counterparts, resilient urbanism situates one of its innovations in making-infrastructural the body → The body, in other words, is now a primary site of urbanization.

Though impossible to locate precisely, the origins of resilient urbanism dwell amidst the Cold War cult of individualism in America and the simultaneous emergence of the environmental movement → In this space, a motley assortment of voices—from the bourgeois liberalism of a Jane Jacobs to the military-funded technopositivism of second-order cybernetics—coherent only in their rejection of modernist planning, would unwittingly set out the axes on which a radically new approach to urbanism could be plotted...

On its surface, RBD seems to respond to a certain tendency today of localist, community-oriented, DIY design: there are in total ten different projects that stretch a collective site along the greater NYC coastal region, all of which embrace strategies that in one way or another construct new relations between urban life and water. Opening urban design as a collaborative effort between architects, marine ecologists, climate scientists, and, tellingly, insurance experts, design becomes less a question of transforming space than of augmenting it → giving it over to new uses, exposing coastal areas to new activities, finding hidden opportunities for a “hopeful” eco-urban life to take root in the spaces that Sandy’s destruction inadvertently revealed

Further, there is a clear agenda to rewrite the human relation to nature as one of entanglement.

Infrastructure, in this new conception of design (such as systems of flood mitigation and storm surge abatement) → to be designed with and inclusive of natural processes: no longer drawing a boundary separating society from nature, infrastructure now appears as the thing that brings the two together.

Yet RBD is also a highly technological space → in as much as it blurs the boundary between infrastructure and nature, it also blurs the line between environment and technology.

Resilient urbanism → may be understood as the smart city retooled to mitigate the effects of climate crisis. In this sense, it expands the application of ubiquitous sensing to include the monitoring of and communication between natural ecologies of the NYC region → Nature-based infrastructures, much like their traditional urban counterparts, are now to be laced with networks of sensors and ubiquitous computing.

RBD aims to expand its monitoring capacity by encouraging a culture of “ecological stewardship”

In total, the broad application of environmental sensing → an effort to transform an entire coastal region into a data-intensive and extensive site. As a mode of urbanism, its use of these infrastructures aims to integrate ecosystems and weather patterns through vast new algorithmic techniques of analysis and intervention.

Notion that nature + bodies + infrastructure → to be monitored continuously (what one team calls its “situation analysis”) in a space defined by its propensity to crisis.

This is why almost all projects go to great lengths to integrate a lexicon and history of environmental crisis into the banality of everyday urban life, through placards marking out flood levels, apps, and displays that purport to monitor levels of risk in real time. Here, “stewardship” reveals another side: its other aim is to provide a vast new trove of data to be farmed at the interface of human life and ecology.

When nature-based solutions are seen as data-intensive infrastructures → their local practices of care double as techniques to expand the quantity of data that can be mined to correlate the uncertainties of human life and extreme weather as a means to manage both

“Is it plausible to think that resilient urbanism could mark not only the emergence of a new body, but also assist in fundamentally altering the relations between power and space that traverse it?”

In order for the modern, deficient, exposed, and machinic body to be uniformly governed in the emergent horizon of biopower → space had to be universally transformed into a functional instrument. Yet for early urbanists like Cerdá or Haussmann, this was never given by an overt mandate: space, in other words, was not to be remade as an outcome and representation of some new power structure; rather, the construction of a new spatial order they contributed to would assist in providing a template on which a new, non-representational power-in-space could discover its techniques...

Resilient urbanism clearly marks a departure from this history → Aesthetically, it rejects any of the aseptic spaces of 20th century urbanism, or even the idea that space is being transformed, and instead embraces a non-modern attitude that affords romantic, nostalgic relations to a kind of “found-object urban space”

Its understanding of nature as edgeless and entangled (both process and resource) → widens its object of design from the built environment to simply “the environment”

In this way, bodies + ecologies + infrastructures → become the vectors of a “natural” distributed agency, suggesting a mode of governance no longer seen as external to life, but rather built into a participatory form of self-governance internal to the contours of social and natural complexity.

The Site as the User → What fundamentally marks a departure from the history of modern urbanism is the way in which resilient urbanism reimagines the body. The environment can only be taken as a site of intervention by, at the same time, suggesting a body ontologically internal to it, marked by its malleability and responsiveness to its environment across many scales. Its entangled, more-than-human relation to its environment thus opens the body up as a site of urban design (GU)

The expanded use of ubiquitous sensing technologies → unwittingly turns the bodies of resilient urbanism = sensors operating within its cybernetic form of knowledge and algorithmic modes of control → “No longer simply the subject of urban design, the body now doubles as its object—as infrastructure—making everyday life indistinguishable from its permanent technological modulation. Resilient urbanism, we could say, is the urbanization of the body.”

Modern urbanism → implemented strategies that sought to eliminate the possibility of crisis... 

Resilient urbanism → a project that integrates crisis in its tactics, crisis is not something to exclude, but its very condition of possibility. 

I.e. Resilient urbanism is an urbanism of crisis management.

The blurring of bodies + natures + infrastructures → reveals a power-in-space built not on standards, norms, or the rule of law, but as a means to engage crisis as its “reality,” a condition whose contours can be endlessly extracted from the incomprehensible quantities of data that now constitute the knowledge of the urban...

Resilient urbanism → conceiving the body as a site of urbanization in a space made visible as an arena of crisis. 

It coincides with the birth of a post-historical body → a steward of complexity bound up in the machinic feedback of a nameless, invisible algorithmic governmentality...

“If resilient urbanism corresponds to the emergence of a new form of governance, its effects cannot be due simply to its use of environmental sensing or its large-scale rollout of ICT infrastructures → What matters is rather how these technologies make legible a historical, social and political sensibility toward climate change, technology, nature, life, and politics, thus producing it as reality.”

“This body, made visible in its eco-cybernetic urbanization, is no longer a site of infrastructural control, but infrastructure itself—a shift which profoundly inscribes crisis into the experience of everyday life.” (GU)

Our exposure to post-historical time, as well as our bodies becoming-infrastructural, de-historicizes the human condition just as it depoliticizes climate change, presenting it as an inevitability for which a new, spectacular optics must be designed.

In this space, the modern urgency to accelerate toward a universal, predestined future gives way to a static anxiety of an endless and totalizing present in which “stewardship” substitutes for political agency. Here, tendencies and speculation replace history and futurity and a new diaphanous body-of-effects emerges, coherent only as its digital shadow, registered by its flickering illumination in data space. Yet the experience of an endless present is also the endless production of future scenarios...

Notion of a new, somatic horizon of our coming political resistance...

#resilient #urbanism #body #infrastructure #ross #exo #adams #gu #politics #surveillance

[ogxref]

ON INVENTING THE FUTURE / Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek

Every “future” inscribes a demand upon the present → whether at the level of human imagination, or within the sphere of political or aesthetic action necessary to reach towards their realization...

Futures make explicit the implicit contents of our own times, crystallising trajectories, tendencies, projects, theories and contingencies...

The manifesto-form is the embodiment of this futural orientation → It brings with it a particular mode of address: declares, declaims, demands, and all in relation to some incipient future that it hopes to will into existence.

“The seeming impossibility of certainty in today’s political world, and in particular on the political left, renders the manifesto a slightly curious mode of address: just who would stand as prophets and pronounce the new world just beyond reach? Yet to do so is a painful necessity not because of the certainty of this or any other future, but because of the certainty of the persistence of the neoliberal alternative in the absence of attempts to move beyond the reactive and into the register of the prospective.”

More simply: we must begin to imagine alternatives to the present, however gauche, or risk the permanence of the trajectories of today.

Notion of “futures functioning as a heuristic fiction” (what elsewhere is described as a ‘hyperstition’) → In this sense, their relative truth value (or feasibility) is less relevant than their ability to break down existing prejudices, shibboleths and received wisdoms amongst the various silos and tranches of the political left. In posing these demands, a future orientation might emerge which, even were it not to fully realise these demands, would functionally transform the horizons of leftist politics.

Noiton of the taskification of labour

The consequences of the left’s abandonment and evacuation of the territory of the future → the left has relinquished the imaginative-libidinal terrain of the future. This can be identified across an entire range of different left-political phenomena:

from the collapse of European social democratic parties,

to the over-valorisation of critique in political academia,

and in the widespread reactivity on the part of radical left campaigns and activists, always keener to prevent and protect against neoliberal incursions rather than propose and propound some viable alternatives.

I.e. the left’s capacity to determine (or influence) the course of the future has also declined → “the future” has been abandoned by the left not just because it lacks the desire to design it, but also because of its declining hegemony, its relative weakness in the balance of forces.

As Lyotard’s epochal definition puts it, we have grown suspicious of the metanarrative, and in its wake historical teleology and even grand-scaled meaning-making have collapsed into an impossible to summarise plurality of fractured, partially overlapping micro-events → there is of course some truth to these claims, yet as we argue, Lyotard moves too quickly to dismiss the mass belief in ‘the future’ and the big picture trajectory → What has disappeared is faith in the future in the more depressing sense of a better future, while looming dystopian perspectives, of a future of hyper-neoliberalisation, rising surplus populations, and environmental catastrophe have become all-too ubiquitous...

The task of elaborating futures, both within the sphere of ideas and the domain of action, might be deemed on such a basis a classically modernist one. This is a frame which we partially endorse: Modernism’s emphasis on the future, on the possibility of human accomplishments to determine a better future, is certainly not to be abandoned.

Notion of futures operateing as complexly hegemonic operators: investing and re-engineering pre-existing fields of ideology and organisation...

#nick #srnicek #alex #williams #inventing #future

[ogxref]

SELF-DRIVING CARS & CARTOGRAPHIC SUBJECTIVITY / Shannon Mattern

Self-driving cars → have sparked a “billion dollar war over maps” (but the cars are the most boring thing about it...) The industry has swept up cartographers, GIS specialists, roboticists, and engineers and technicians of all kinds...

“We now take it for granted that our machines can sense almost any space in the world, from deep sea trenches to the chambers of the human heart.”

Google’s parent company Alphabet → positioning itself to lead that economy, with synergies among Waymo (self-driving cars), Waze (navigation), Sidewalk Labs (urban tech), and Google Maps, plus search and advertising (and maybe law enforcement and private security, too!). (GU)

The applications go well beyond self-driving cars → everything from autonomous warfare to logistics to geo-targeted advertising depends on map superiority... With the stakes so high, we need to keep asking critical questions about how machines conceptualize and operationalize space.

“We must also ask how those artificial intelligences, with their digital sensors and deep learning models, intersect with cartographic intelligences and subjectivities beyond the computational “Other” → (there are a lot of other Others — including marginalized and indigenous populations and non-human environmental actors — who belong on the map, too, and not merely as cartographic subjects...)

Notion of Maps Made for and by Machines

Beyond those tools of looking and listening, most self-driving cars also generate a real-time map of the world → Light detection and ranging (Lidar) sensors bounce super-fast laser pulses off surrounding objects and measure reflection times to create a high-resolution 3D model of the immediate environment. Engineers are rushing to develop smaller, solid-state designs, which would simplify manufacturing and cut costs, even if it won’t solve the problems with environmental sensitivity. (all this sensory processing, ontological translation, and methodological triangulation can be quite taxing)

Tesla → for now, insists that its cars can function without Lidar. It has built a “deep” neural network to process vision, sonar, and radar data, which together provide a view of the world that a driver alone cannot access, seeing in every direction simultaneously, and on wavelengths that go far beyond the human senses...

The company also has a virtual driving environment → Carcraft, in which engineers can run through thousands of scenarios to generate improvements in their driving software.

Like humans, machine pilots do not operate on real-time sensory input alone. Just as we have Siri and Google and mental maps, driverless cars tap into external sources of geospatial data → Standard GPS is accurate within several feet, but that’s not good enough for autonomous navigation. Industry players are developing dynamic HD maps, accurate within inches, that would afford the car’s sensors some geographic foresight, allowing it to calculate its precise position relative to fixed landmarks.  Layering redundant forms of place-awareness could help overcome ambiguity or error in locally sensed data. Meanwhile, that sensor data would feed into and improve the master map, which could send real-time updates to all vehicles on the Cloud network. 

In other words, autonomous vehicles will rely on an epistemological dialectic, balancing empiricism with carto-rationalism, and chorography with geography.

Google / Alphabet:

Send their own Lidar-topped cars out into the streets;

harvest “probe data” from partner trucking companies;

solicit crowdsourced information from specially-equipped private vehicles; 

and they use artificial intelligence, human engineers, and consumer “ground-truthing” services to annotate and refine meaningful information within the captured images...

In a recent Morgan Stanley report, 40 percent of survey respondents identified Alphabet as “best positioned to capitalize on shared, autonomous mobility”; Tesla came in second, at 25 percent. (GU)

Yet achieving real-time “truth” throughout the network requires overcoming limitations in data infrastructure. The rate of data collection, processing, transmission, and actuation is limited by cellular bandwidth as well as on-board computing power.

“If nothing else, the system has given us a memorable new term, “Time to Reflect Reality” → which is the metric of lag time between the world as it is and the world as it is known to machines.”

“The car itself is less interesting to me than the critical terrain it’s mapping” → what I really want to discuss is how can we use all these new and old technologies to improve the physical world that we humans (and our non-human companions) read and inhabit? Some urban designers imagine that the containment of vehicular traffic will allow more street space for walkways and bike lanes and parks. Others note that we need to be intentional about how we redesign cities to accommodate the semantic preferences of our robot companions

In a coming age of robot warfare and policing, we could see designers specializing in the creation of robot-illegible worlds rather than machine-readable ones.

Designers long accustomed to the overhead view of GIS and satellite imagery, which emphasizes “large-scale associations, systems, and infrastructures,” can now operate from a “lower and more individualized oblique” vantage, sensitive to the “near-scale” qualities of place. Kullmann proposes that these two machine views (representing two different altitudes, scopes, and perspectives) are complementary ways of sensing and knowing a site. They embody distinct, though reciprocal, politics of vision and ethics of engagement.

“The operational premise here is similar to that underlying the self-driving car. We take it on faith that redundant data and multiple perspectives will yield greater precision, a better outcome, a higher truth.”

Self-driving cars → bring together a bunch of really interesting technologies (such as machine vision and intelligence) with crucial social issues such as the atomization and changing nature of labor, the shift of power to corporate elites and Silicon Valley, and the quasi-religious faith in computation as the only framework for the production of truth — and hence, ethics and social justice.

We need to grapple with what it means to create an unprecedentedly robust map of the world meant mostly for non-human agents?

“From Amazon to Amazon” concept → “The same tools and methods used in business planning to evaluate prospective sites for Marriott hotels or Amazon distribution centers can be used in hazard forecast mapping, to determine where landslides or floods might occur.” Some clever cartographic triangulation is also happening in the real Amazon, where environmental advocates have used satellite and drone imagery, supply-chain maps, and interviews with local farmers to identify newly cleared lands in Bolivia and Brazil.

“Neural network learning algorithms are commonly used in geospatial analysis to identify changes happening on the Earth’s surface (from deforestation to coastal erosion) and to predict future changes.”

Notion that it’s difficult to use maps to address structural inequality when geospatial data aren’t equitably distributed.

Urban planning should not be mistaken for an algorithmic “pattern language” → a city plan is more than a mere aggregation of spatial features

Notion of a well-funded and widely publicized attempt to map the world as a code-space legible to machines

The politics of the overhead satellite view and the universal GPS grid (even the Euclidean demand for points, lines, and areas) do not always “map onto” the way traditional cultures relate to or conceive of their own environments.

Rather than merely incorporating the Other as a map subject, we should think more deeply about Othering cartographic subjectivity...

Notion that shifts in scale and perspective abet a new spatial awareness.

Non-human mapping agents (from Lidar sensors to drones to plotting robots) can be critical agents in the cartographic enterprise → Yet the non-human Other is also an agent in those landscapes we seek to map.

“In most Western frameworks, non-human Others, from animals to plants to minerals, are represented as resources to be exploited: things to eat or mine or look at in a national park. But now the convergence of certain new ways of thinking (Anthropocene studies, new relational ontologies, Latourian actor-networks, feminist ethics, and what Donna Haraway describes as “SF” thinking, science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far) has inspired many contemporary mapmakers to think about how to represent these Others not merely as human resources, but as entities with equal claim to the landscapes they inhabit, and with their own spatial intelligences.”

Animals are, in a sense, cartographers, too → they use cognitive maps for migration, foraging, nectaring, defining territory, ranging, predatory avoidance, and so forth. And they’ve evolved sensory techniques for spatial perception and memory: bats rely on echolocation, bees on scent, and fish on electroreception. Some researchers argue that chimpanzees are capable of mapping forest terrain in both Euclidean and topographic modes. Slime molds use their slime trails to remember where they’ve been. Even the “crown-shyness” of some tree species, i.e. the maintenance of channels within their canopy, “could be seen as a map-like striation of space, a sort of territorialization.” Animal space is “a lived space, multisensorial,” argues Dennis Skocz, and GIS and other conventional mapping techniques are ill equipped to represent it.

The ways that maps are created, funded, studied, and mobilized have profound implications for policymaking, governance, and the deployment of conservation resources, which may determine “the very survival” of the Other, or even ourselves.

Increasingly, we turn to artificially-intelligent sensing machines, with their purportedly more objective, efficient, exhaustive, and reliable means of observation and orientation, to shape the protocols and politics of interaction among the various beings who share our cartographic terrain. 

Yet we must never forget that those computational instruments operationalize space differently from one another and from other “species” of intelligent agents, including us. Drones and dragonflies sense and navigate the world in unique ways. Sonar and Lidar construct distinct empirical terrains, hearing and flashing their environments into existence. Satellites abstract terrestrial realities into macro patterns: from 500 miles up, the geography of hardship is a patch of thatched roofs.

These new, artificially intelligent agents may well generate efficiencies in transit and logistics. They might offer insight into how certain groups of people messed up the world, and how we can fix it. Yet these computational intelligences, and ours, aren’t the only ones that have a stake in that world’s evolution. We need to recognize the world’s myriad intelligent agents not only on our maps, but also in our cartographic methods.

#gu #mapping #machine #vision #cartographic #subjectivity #shannon #mattern

[ogxref]

ON MODEL-BASED DESIGN / The Atlantic

When we had electromechanical systems, we used to be able to test them exhaustively, once you’d built and tested it, you knew exactly what you were dealing with... → Software is different. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. 

This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly changed; and because it’s unmoored from anything physical (a program that is a thousand times more complex than another takes up the same actual space) it tends to grow without bound. 

“The problem is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”

Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures → developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break.

Faulty threshold example → not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do → In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing. i.e. Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination.

The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors

This is the trouble with making things out of code, as opposed to something physical. “The complexity is invisible to the eye.”

Technological progress used to change the way the world looked (you could watch the roads getting paved; you could see the skylines rise...) Today you can hardly tell when something is remade, because so often it is remade by code. → When you press your foot down on your car’s accelerator, for instance, you’re no longer controlling anything directly; there’s no mechanical link from the pedal to the throttle. Instead, you’re issuing a command to a piece of software that decides how much air to give the engine. The car is a computer you can sit inside of. The steering wheel and pedals might as well be keyboard keys.

Renowned Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra → “The programmer has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.”

Notion of spaghetti code → programmer lingo for software that has become a tangled mess. Code turns to spaghetti when it accretes over many years, with feature after feature piling on top of, and being woven around, what’s already there; eventually the code becomes impossible to follow, let alone to test exhaustively for flaws.

Question: Computers had doubled in power every 18 months for the last 40 years. Why hadn’t programming changed?

Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating. The problem with programming was that it violated the principle. That’s why software systems were so hard to think about, and so rife with bugs: The programmer, staring at a page of text, was abstracted from whatever it was they were actually making.

The notion of liveness → being able to see data flowing through your program instantly (made its way into flagship programming tools offered by Google and Apple...)

Imploring professional software developers to stop pouring their talent into tools for building apps like Snapchat and Uber → “The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems. Instead, they should focus on scientists and engineers; these people that are doing work that actually matters, and critically matters, and using really, really bad tools.”

“Nobody would build a car by hand. Code is still, in many places, handicraft. When you’re crafting manually 10,000 lines of code, that’s okay. But you have systems that have 30 million lines of code, like an Airbus, or 100 million lines of code, like your Tesla or high-end cars; that’s becoming very, very complicated.”

Bantégnie’s company → one of the pioneers of model-based design, in which you no longer write code directly:

Instead, you create a kind of flowchart that describes the rules your program should follow (the “model”), and the computer generates code for you based on those rules. (if you were making the control system for an elevator, for instance, one rule might be that when the door is open, and someone presses the button for the lobby, you should close the door and start moving the car)

In a model-based design tool, you’d represent this rule with a small diagram, as though drawing the logic out on a whiteboard, made of boxes that represent different states (like “door open,” “moving,” and “door closed”) and lines that define how you can get from one state to the other. The diagrams make the system’s rules obvious

It’s not quite Photoshop... → the beauty of Photoshop is that the picture you’re manipulating on the screen is the final product. In model-based design, by contrast, the picture on your screen is more like a blueprint.

Making software this way is qualitatively different than traditional programming:

In traditional programming, your task is to take complex rules and translate them into code; most of your energy is spent doing the translating, rather than thinking about the rules themselves...

In the model-based approach, all you have is the rules. So that’s what you spend your time thinking about. It’s a way of focusing less on the machine and more on the problem you’re trying to get it to solve...

“Typically the main problem with software coding is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”

On this view, software becomes unruly because the media for describing what software should do (conversations, prose descriptions, drawings on a sheet of paper) are too different from the media describing what software does do, namely, code itself. → Too much is lost going from one to the other. 

Therefore the idea behind model-based design is to close the gap → The very same model is used both by system designers to express what they want and by the computer to automatically generate code.

“Of course, for this approach to succeed, much of the work has to be done well before the project even begins. Someone first has to build a tool for developing models that are natural for people—that feel just like the notes and drawings they’d make on their own—while still being unambiguous enough for a computer to understand. They have to make a program that turns these models into real code. And finally they have to prove that the generated code will always do what it’s supposed to.”

The idea behind Esterel → while traditional programming languages might be good for describing simple procedures that happened in a predetermined order (like a recipe), if you tried to use them in systems where lots of events could happen at nearly any time, in nearly any order (like in the cockpit of a plane) you inevitably got a mess. And a mess in control software was dangerous.

Bantégnie → the beauty of having a computer turn your requirements into code, rather than a human, is that you can be sure (in fact you can mathematically prove) that the generated code actually satisfies those requirements. Much of the benefit of the model-based approach comes from being able to add requirements on the fly while still ensuring that existing ones are met; with every change, the computer can verify that your program still works. 

“Human intuition is poor at estimating the true probability of supposedly ‘extremely rare’ combinations of events in systems operating at a scale of millions of requests per second. That human fallibility means that some of the more subtle, dangerous bugs turn out to be errors in design; the code faithfully implements the intended design, but the design fails to correctly handle a particular ‘rare’ scenario.”

TLA+ (stands for “Temporal Logic of Actions”) → similar in spirit to model-based design: It’s a language for writing down the requirements of computer programs. These specifications can then be completely verified by a computer. That is, before you write any code, you write a concise outline of your program’s logic, along with the constraints you need it to satisfy (say, if you were programming an ATM, a constraint might be that you can never withdraw the same money twice from your checking account). TLA+ then exhaustively checks that your logic does, in fact, satisfy those constraints. If not, it will show you exactly how they could be violated.

For Lamport, a major reason today’s software is so full of bugs is that programmers jump straight into writing code. “Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered. But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.”

The same regulatory pressures that have made model-based design and code generation attractive to the aviation industry have been slower to come to car manufacturing. “There are lots of bugs in cars. It’s not like avionics, in avionics it’s taken very seriously. And it’s admitted that software is different from mechanics.” → The automotive industry is perhaps among those that haven’t yet realized they are actually in the software business.

“Computing is fundamentally invisible. When your tires are flat, you look at your tires, they are flat. When your software is broken, you look at your software, you see nothing. So that’s a big problem...”

#model #software #design

[ogxref]

ON “THE FIELD” + MANUFACTURED NORMALCY / Venkatesh Rao

Somehow the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening→ future perfect rather than present-continuous... We live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy → There are mechanisms that operate (a mix of natural, emergent and designed) that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. → To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. (how, as a species, are we able to prepare for, create, and deal with, the future, while managing to effectively deny that it is happening at all?)

Futurists, artists and edge-culturists → like to pretend that they are the lonely, brave guardians of the species who deal with the “real” future and pre-digest it for the rest of us → But this explanation falls apart with just a little poking. It turns out that the cultural edge is just as frozen in time as the mainstream. It is just frozen in a different part of the time theater, populated by people who seek more stimulation than the mainstream, and draw on imagined futures to feed their cravings rather than inform actual future-manufacturing. The two beaten-to-death ways of understanding this phenomenon:

Marshall McLuhan → “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

and William Gibson → “The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”

Both framing perspectives have serious limitations → what is missing in both needs a name, so I’ll call the “familiar sense of a static, continuous present” → A Manufactured Normalcy Field.  So we can divide the future into two useful pieces:

things coming at us that have been integrated into the Field, 

and things that have not. 

Normalization → the crossing of the Field threshold by a piece of futuristic technology. Normalization involves incorporation of a piece of technological novelty into larger conceptual metaphors built out of familiar experiences.

The example of “air travel” → A great deal of effort goes into making sure passengers never realize just how unnatural their state of motion is, on a commercial airplane. This means that even though air travel is now a hundred years old, it hasn’t actually “arrived” psychologically. A full appreciation of what air travel is has been kept from the general population through manufactured normalcy. 

So the way the “future” of air travel in 1900 actually arrived was the following:

A specialized future arrived for a subset who were trained and equipped with new mental models to comprehend it in the fullest sense, but in a narrowly instrumental rather than appreciative way. A fighter pilot does not necessarily experience flight the way a bird does.

The vast majority started experiencing a manufactured normalcy, via McLuhan-esque extension of existing media

Occasionally, the manufactured normalcy broke down for a few people by accident, who were then exposed to the “future” without being equipped to handle it...

Air travel → also a convenient metaphor for the idea of existential nausea (if you experience air travel in its true form and are not prepared for it by nature and nurture, you will throw up.)

The Future arrives via Specialization and Metaphor Expansion → this is a very different way to understand the future: it doesn’t arrive in a temporal sense. It arrives mainly via social fragmentation. 

And in many cases, arrival-via-specialization means psychological non-arrival → Not every element of the future brings with it a visceral human experience that at least a subset can encounter... There are no “pilots” in the arrival of cheap gene sequencing, for instance. 

Arrival-via-specialization requires potential specialists. Presumably, humans with extra high tolerance for g-forces have always existed, and technology began selecting for that trait once airplanes were invented. This could suggests that only those futures arrive for which there is human capacity to cope, but this conclusion is not true, because a future can arrive before humans figure out whether they have the ability to cope. (for instance, the widespread problem of obesity suggests that food-abundance arrived before we figured out that most of us cannot cope. And this is one piece of the future that cannot be relegated to specialists. Others cannot eat for you, even though others can fly planes for you)

What about elements of the future that arrive relatively successfully for everybody, like cellphones? Here, the idea I called the Milo Criterion kicks in: successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically → In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated into the Field. In this sense user experience design is reductive with respect to technological potential...

Just because something is technically feasible does not mean it can psychologically normalized into the Field...

The Web → arrived via the document metaphor. Despite the rise of the stream metaphor for conceptualizing the Web architecturally, the user-experience metaphor is still descended from the document.

The smartphone → is nothing like a phone → Voice is just one clunky feature grandfathered into a handheld computer that is engineered to loosely resemble its nominal ancestor. The smartphone could have developed via metaphoric descent from the hand-held calculator; “Oh, I can now talk to people on my calculator”. That it was the phone rather than the calculator is probably partly due to path-dependency effects and partly due to the greater ubiquity of phones in mainstream life...

“I haven’t done a careful analysis, but my rough, back-of-the-napkin working out of the implications of these ideas suggests that we are all living, in user-experience terms, in some thoroughly mangled, overloaded, stretched and precarious version of the 15th century that is just good enough to withstand casual scrutiny.”

What about edge-culturists who think they are more alive to the real oncoming future? I am convinced that they frozen in time too → The edge today looks strangely similar to the edge in any previous century. It is defined by reactionary musical and sartorial tastes and being a little more outrageous than everybody else in challenging the prevailing culture of manners. 

Notion that edge-dwelling is a social rather than technological phenomenon → if it reveals anything about technology or the future, it is mostly by accident... Art occasionally rises to the challenge of cracking open a window onto the actual present, but mostly restricts itself to creating dissonance in the mainstream’s view of the imagined present

Futurists as a subculture → seem to organize their lives as future-experience theaters. These theaters are perhaps entertaining and interesting in their own right, as a sort of performance art, but are not of much interest or value to people who are interested in the future in the form it might arrive in, for all.

Most futurists are interested in the future beyond the Field → I am primarily interested in the future once it enters the Field, and the process by which it gets integrated into it. This is also where the future turns into money, so perhaps my motivations are less intellectual than they are narrowly mercenary. 

This is also a more complicated way of making a point made by several marketers: technology only becomes interesting once it becomes technically boring: 

Technological futurists are pre-Fieldists. 

Marketing futurists are post-Fieldists.

This also explains why so few futurists make any money → They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered.

Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human behavior could change; marketing is about finding money by making sure it doesn’t... The future arrives along a least-cognitive-effort path. This suggests a different, subtler reading of Gibson’s unevenly-distributed line:

It isn’t that what is patchily distributed today will become widespread tomorrow → The mainstream never ends up looking like the edge of today. Not even close. The mainstream seeks placidity while the edge seeks stimulation...

Instead, what is unevenly distributed are isolated windows into the un-normalized future that exist as weak spots in the Field → When the windows start to become larger and more common, economics kicks in and the Field maintenance industry quickly moves to create specialists, codified knowledge and normalcy-preserving design patterns...

The future is simply a landscape defined by two natural (and non-temporal) boundaries:

One separates the currently infeasible vs. the feasible

and the other separates the normalized vs. the un-normalized 

The Field is manufactured out of the feasible-and-normalized → We call it the present, but it is not the same as the temporal concept (in fact, the labeling of the Field as the ‘present’ is itself part of the manufactured normalcy. The labeling serves to hide a complex construction process underneath an apparently familiar label that most of us think we experience but don’t really)

What gets normalized first has very little to do with what is easier, and a lot to do with what is more attractive economically and politically. Humans have achieved some fantastic things like space travel. They have even done things initially thought to be infeasible (like heavier-than-air flight) but other parts of a very accessible future lie beyond the Manufactured Normalcy Field, seemingly beyond the reach of economic feasibility forever.

The future is a stream of bug reports in the normalcy-maintenance software that keeps getting patched, maintaining a hackstable present Field.

The Field does evolve in time, but this evolution is not a delayed version of “real” change or even related to it → In fact movement is a bad way to understand how the Field transforms → Its dynamic nature is best understood as a kind of stretching: The Field stretches to accommodate the future, rather than moving to cover it...

It stretches in its own design space: that of ever-expanding, reifying, conceptual metaphor. Expansion as a basic framing suggests an entirely different set of risks and concerns:

We needn’t worry about acceleration; we need to worry about attenuation... 

We need not worry about not being able to “keep up” with a present that moves faster; we need to worry about the Field expanding to a breaking point and popping, like an over-inflated balloon...

We need not worry about computers getting ever faster; we need to worry about the document metaphor breaking suddenly, leaving us unable to comprehend the Internet...

Borrow terms from John Friedman and distinguish between two sorts of conceptual metaphors we use to comprehend present reality: appreciative and instrumental

Instrumental conceptual metaphors (what Friedman misleadingly called manipulative) are basic UX metaphors like “scrolling” web pages, or the metaphor of the “keypad” on a phone. They allow us to function. 

Appreciative conceptual metaphors help us understand present realities in terms of their fundamental dynamics. They allow us to make sense of our lives and communicate such understanding. 

Notion of asymmetric incomprehension: we possess good instrumental metaphors but poor appreciative ones...

The Field actively prevents us from ever understanding our own present on its own terms → We manage to function and comprehend reality in instrumental ways while falling behind in comprehending it in appreciative ways

An indictment of the very methods of futurism → We build conceptual models of the world as it exists today, posit laws of transformation and change, simulate possible futures, and cherry-pick interesting and likely-sounding elements that appear robustly across many simulations and appear feasible. And then we stop. We do not transform the end-state conceptual models into the behavioral terms we use to actually engage and understand reality-in-use, as opposed to reality-in-contemplation. We forget to do the most important part of a futurist prediction: predicting how user experience might evolve to normalize the future-unfamiliar.

Element of the future that does arrive on schedule, uncensored →  its emotional quality. The pace of change is accelerating and we experience this as Field-stretching anxiety. Another dimension is a constant sense of crisis (which has, incidentally, always prevailed in history). A third dimension is a constant feeling of chaos held at bay (another constant in history), just beyond the firewall of everyday routine (the Field is everyday routine).

The uncertainty of the future is about this long tail of waiting events that the Field hasn’t yet digested. “In a way, when we ask, is there a sustainable future, we are not really asking about fossil fuels or feeding 9 billion people. We are asking can the Manufactured Normalcy Field absorb such and such changes?”

We aren’t really tied to specific elements of today’s lifestyles. We are definitely open to change. But only change that comes to us via the Field. We’ve adapted to the idea of people cutting open our bodies, stopping our hearts and pumping our blood through machines while they cut us up. The Field has digested those realities. Various sorts of existential anesthetics are an important part of how the Field is manufactured and maintained.

Our sense of impending doom or extraordinary potential have to do with the perceived fragility or robustness of the Field → We’re coming off a very long period (since World War II) of Field stability → When larger global Fields break, we experience “dark” ages. We literally cannot process change at all. We grope, waiting for an age when it will all make sense again. So we could be entering a Dark Age right now, because most of us don’t experience a global Field anymore. We live in tiny personal fields. We can only connect socially with people whose little-f fields are similar to ours.  When individual fields also start popping, psychic chaos will start to loom.

The scary possibility in the near future is not that we will see another radical break in the Field, but a permanent collapse of all fields, big and small → The result will be a state of constant psychological warfare between the present and the future, where reality changes far too fast for either a global Field or a personal one to keep up.

“This is already starting to happen: Instead of a newspaper feeding us daily doses of a shared Field, we get a nauseating mix of news from forgotten classmates, slogan-placards about issues trivial and grave, revisionist histories coming at us via a million political voices, the future as a patchwork quilt of incoherent glimpses, all mixed in with pictures of cats doing improbable things.”

We aren’t being hit by Future Shock → We are going to be hit by Future Nausea. You’re not going to be knocked out cold. You’re just going to throw up in some existential sense of the word...

#future #venkatesh #rao #field #manufactured #normalcy #normal

[ogxref]

ON PROTEST + FOLK POLITICS / New Yorker

Smartphones and social media → supposed to have made organizing easier, and activists today speak more about numbers and reach than about lasting results... 

Is protest a productive use of our political attention? Or is it just a bit of social theatre we perform to make ourselves feel virtuous, useful, and in the right? Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams → question the power of marches, protests, and other acts of what they call “folk politics” → These methods are more habit than solution...

Protest is too fleeting → ignores the structural nature of problems in a modern world: “The folk-political injunction is to reduce complexity down to a human scale.” This impulse promotes authenticity-mongering, reasoning through individual stories, and a general inability to think systemically about change... In the immediate sense, a movement such as Occupy wilted because police in riot gear chased protesters out of their spaces → But, really, its methods sank it from the start by channeling the righteous sentiments of those involved over the mechanisms of real progress. “This is politics transmitted into pastime—politics-as-drug-experience, perhaps—rather than anything capable of transforming society.” The left (despite its pride in being progressive) is mired in nostalgia → Petitions, occupations, strikes, vanguard parties, affinity groups, trade unions: all arose out of particular historical conditions... According to the classical model of protest, strategy (the big idea, the master plan) falls to a movement’s leaders, while tactics (the moves you make, the signs you wave, the action in the street) fall to the people on the ground → One of Hardt and Negri’s cornerstone ideas is that the formula should be flipped: strategy goes to the movement masses, tactics to the leadership. In theory, this allows movements to stay both nimble (an emergency on the ground is when you call in the brass) and on guard against autocracy (no group can decide for the many).  Folk politics → prefers that actions be taken by participants themselves (in its emphasis on direct action, for example) and sees decision-making as something to be carried out by each individual rather than by any representative “Sometimes you protest just to register a public objection to policies you have no hope of changing.” Movements might have lost their leaders, gained force, and offered personal autonomy. Yet they hadn’t acquired the crucial thing—a good crack at success. Tufekci → believes that digital-age protests are not simply faster, more responsive versions of their mid-century parents → They are fundamentally distinct. At Gezi Park, she finds that nearly everything is accomplished by spontaneous tactical assemblies of random activists—the Kauffman model carried further through the ease of social media. “Preexisting organizations whether formal or informal played little role in the coordination,” she writes. “Instead, to take care of tasks, people hailed down volunteers in the park or called for them via hashtags on Twitter or WhatsApp messages.” She calls this style of off-the-cuff organizing “adhocracy” Today anyone can gather crowds through tweets, and update, in seconds, thousands of strangers on the move. At the same time, she finds, shifts in tactics are harder to arrange. Digital-age movements tend to be organizationally toothless, good at barking at power but bad at forcing ultimatums or chewing through complex negotiations. The missing ingredients, Tufekci believes, are the structures and communication patterns that appear when a fixed group works together over time. That practice puts the oil in the well-oiled machine. It is what contemporary adhocracy appears to lack, and what projects such as the postwar civil-rights movement had in abundance. And it is why, she thinks, despite their limits in communication, these earlier protests often achieved more. Tufekci describes weeks of careful planning behind the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, in 1955 → That spring, a black fifteen-year-old named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a bus and was arrested. Today, though, relatively few people have heard of Claudette Colvin. Why? Drawing on an account by Jo Ann Robinson, Tufekci tells of the Montgomery N.A.A.C.P.’s shrewd process of auditioning icons. “Each time after an arrest on the bus system, organizations in Montgomery discussed whether this was the case around which to launch a campaign,” she writes. “They decided to keep waiting until the right moment with the right person.” Eventually, they found their star: an upstanding, middle-aged movement stalwart who could withstand a barrage of media scrutiny. This was Rosa Parks. What is striking about the bus boycott is not so much its passion, which is easy to relate to, as its restraint, which (at this moment, especially) is not! No outraged Facebook posts spread the news when Colvin was arrested. Local organizers bided their time, slowly planning, structuring, and casting what amounted to a work of public theatre, and then built new structures as their plans changed. The protest was expressive in the most confected sense, a masterpiece of control and logistics. It was strategic, with the tactics following. And that made all the difference in the world. Tufekci’s conclusions about the civil-rights movement are unsettling because of what they imply. People such as Kauffman portray direct democracy as a scrappy, passionate enterprise: the underrepresented, the oppressed, and the dissatisfied get together and, strengthened by numbers, force change. → Tufekci suggests that the movements that succeed are actually proto-institutional: highly organized; strategically flexible, due to sinewy management structures; and chummy with the sorts of people we now call élites. The Montgomery N.A.A.C.P. worked with Clifford Durr, a patrician lawyer whom Franklin Roosevelt had appointed to the F.C.C., and whose brother-in-law Hugo Black was a Supreme Court Justice when Browder v. Gayle was heard. The organizers of the March on Washington turned to Bobby Kennedy—the U.S. Attorney General and the brother of the sitting President—when Rustin’s prized sound system was sabotaged the day before the protest. Kennedy enlisted the Army Signal Corps to fix it. You can’t get much cozier with the Man than that. Far from speaking truth to power, successful protests seem to speak truth through power. And it forces one to reassess the rise of well-funded “Astroturf” movements such as the Tea Party: successful grassroots lawns, it turns out, have a bit of plastic in them, too. → Democratizing technology may now give the voiceless a means to cry in the streets, but real results come to those with the same old privileges (time, money, infrastructure, an ability to call in favors) that shape mainline politics. Hardt and Negri, as well as Srnicek and Williams, rail at length against “neoliberalism”: a fashionable bugaboo on the left, and thus, unfortunately, a term more often flaunted than defined. Srnicek and Williams don’t reject working with politicians, though they think that real transformation comes from shifts in social expectation, in school curricula, and in the sorts of things that reasonable people discuss on TV (the so-called Overton window). It’s an ambitious approach but not an outlandish one: Bernie Sanders ran a popular campaign, and suddenly socialist projects were on the prime-time docket. Change does arrive through mainstream power, but this just means that your movement should be threaded through the culture’s institutional eye. The question, then, is what protest is for. Srnicek and Williams, even after all their criticism, aren’t ready to let it go → they describe it as “necessary but insufficient.” A truly modern left, one cannot help but think, would be at liberty to shed a manufacturing-era, deterministic framework like Marxism, allegorized and hyperextended far beyond its time → Still, to date no better paradigm for labor economics and uprising has emerged... What comes undone → the dream of protest as an expression of personal politics. Those of us whose days are filled with chores and meetings may be deluding ourselves to think that we can rise as “revolutionaries-for-a-weekend”(Norman Mailer’s phrase for his own bizarre foray, in 1967, as described in “The Armies of the Night.”) If that seems a deflating idea, it only goes to show how entrenched self-expressive protest has become in political identity...

#protest #folk #politics

[ogxref]

ON FACEBOOK AND THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS / John Lanchester

Facebook → 2 billion users → The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient technologies such as television or cinema or radio...

Flaubert → sceptical about trains because he thought “the railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid” (Julian Barnes’s paraphrase)

FB changes its old mission statement (”Making the world more open and connected”) to new mission statement → “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”

In that overlapping area of novelty and ignorance and unregulation, it’s well worth reminding employees not to be evil, because if the company succeeds and grows, plenty of chances to be evil are going to come along.

As Tim Wu observes, Facebook is a business with an exceedingly low ratio of invention to success. What Zuckerberg had instead of originality was the ability to get things done and to see the big issues clearly. The crucial thing with internet start-ups is start-ups is the ability to execute plans and to adapt to changing circumstances. (OG)

Peter Thiel → became interested in the ideas of the US-based French philosopher René Girard (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World). Girard’s big idea was something he called “mimetic desire” → Human beings are born with a need for food and shelter. Once these fundamental necessities of life have been acquired, we look around us at what other people are doing, and wanting, and we copy them. In Thiel’s summary, the idea is “doing, and wanting, and we copy them. In Thiel’s summary, the idea is “that imitation is at the root of all behavior”

Man → the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires

The reason Thiel latched onto Facebook with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a business that was Girardian to its core → built on people’s deep need to copy

“Fake news” + “Post-truth”→ were made possible by the retreat from a general agora of public debate into separate ideological bunkers. Why would Facebook care if the news streaming over the site is fake? Its interest is in the targeting, not in the content...

If your only interest is in connecting people, why would you care about falsehoods? → They might even be better than the truth, since they are quicker to identify the like-minded.

The newfound ambition to “build communities” makes it seem as if the company is taking more of an interest in the consequence of the connections it fosters...

FB internal security division → “Fake news” is an unhelpful, catch-all term because misinformation is in fact spread in a variety of ways:

Information (or Influence) Operations – Actions taken by governments or organised non-state actors to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment

False News – News articles that purport to be factual, but which contain intentional misstatements of fact with the intention to arouse passions, attract viewership, or deceive

False Amplifiers – Co-ordinated activity by inauthentic accounts with the intent of manipulating political discussion (e.g. by discouraging specific parties from participating in discussion, or amplifying sensationalistic voices over others)

Disinformation – Inaccurate or manipulated information/content that is spread intentionally. This can include false news, or it can involve more subtle methods, such as false flag operations, feeding inaccurate quotes or stories to innocent intermediaries, or knowingly amplifying biased or misleading information

Anyone on Facebook is in a sense working for Facebook, adding value to the company → In 2014, the New York Times did the arithmetic and found that humanity was spending 39,757 collective years on the site, every single day→ Jonathan Taplin points out that this is “almost fifteen million years of free labour per year” (That was back when it had a mere 1.23 billion users)

Notion that fake news (which gets more clicks and is free to produce) drives out real news (which often tells people things they don’t want to hear, and is expensive to produce)

2012 big shift around monetisation → when internet traffic began to switch away from desktop computers towards mobile devices. If you do most of your online reading on a desktop, you are in a minority. The switch was a potential disaster for all businesses which relied on internet advertising, because people don’t much like mobile ads, and were far less likely to click on them than on desktop ads. In other words, although general internet traffic was increasing rapidly, because the growth was coming from mobile, the traffic was becoming proportionately less valuable. If the trend were to continue, every internet business that depended on people clicking links  (i.e. pretty much all of them, but especially the giants like Google and Facebook…) would be worth much less money.

Facebook solved this problem by means of a technique called “onboarding”, connecting several entities:

Physical address identity (ex: Antonio Garcia Martinez, 1 Clarence Place #13, San Francisco, CA 94107)

Mobile Device Identity → quasi-immutable device ID, broadcast hundreds of times a day on mobile ad exchanges (ex: 38400000-8cfo-11bd-b23e-10b96e40000d)

Laptop Identity → the content of the Facebook re-targeting cookie, which is used to target ads based on your mobile browsing (ex: +/- 70 character number) 

“Though it may not be obvious, each of these keys is associated with a wealth of our personal behaviour data: every website we’ve been to, many things we’ve bought in physical stores, and every app we’ve used and what we did there … The biggest thing going on in marketing right now, what is generating tens of billions of dollars in investment and endless scheming inside the bowels of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, is how to tie these different sets of names together, and who controls the links. That’s it.”

That was crucial to Facebook’s new profitability. On mobiles, people tend to prefer the internet to apps, which corral the information they gather and don’t share it with other companies. Because everyone in the world is on Facebook, the company knows everyone’s phone identifier. It was now able to set up an ad server delivering far better targeted mobile ads than anyone else could manage, and it did so in a more elegant and well-integrated form than anyone else had managed.

So Facebook knows your phone ID and can add it to your Facebook ID. It puts that together with the rest of your online activity: not just every site you’ve ever visited, but every click you’ve ever made → the Facebook button tracks every Facebook user, whether they click on it or not. Since the Facebook button is pretty much ubiquitous on the net, this means that Facebook sees you, everywhere. Now, thanks to its partnerships with the old-school credit firms, Facebook knew who everybody was, where they lived, and everything they’d ever bought with plastic in a real-world offline shop.

Even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business → Facebook in fact is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens...

Note that the company’s knowledge about its users isn’t used merely to target ads, but to shape the flow of news to them.

Notion of the “disenchantment effect” → Wu’s history of attention merchants shows that there is a suggestive pattern here: that a boom is more often than not followed by a backlash, that a period of explosive growth triggers a public and sometimes legislative reaction. When the commodity in question is access to people’s minds, the perpetual quest for growth ensures that forms of backlash, both major and minor, are all but inevitable.’ Wu calls a minor form of this phenomenon the disenchantment effect.

Facebook seems vulnerable to these disenchantment effects. One place they are likely to begin is in the core area of its business model: ad-selling. The advertising it sells is ‘programmatic’, i.e. determined by computer algorithms that match the customer to the advertiser and deliver ads accordingly, via targeting and/or online auctions. The problem with this from the customer’s point of view (remember, the customer here is the advertiser, not the Facebook user) is that a lot of the clicks on these ads are fake. There is a mismatch of interests here. Facebook wants clicks, because that’s how it gets paid: when ads are clicked on. But what if the clicks aren’t real but are instead automated clicks from fake accounts run by computer bots?

Therefore it isn’t hard to imagine how it could lead to a big revolt against ‘ad tech’ on the part of the companies who are paying for it. I’ve heard academics in the field say that there is a form of corporate groupthink in the world of the big buyers of advertising, who are currently responsible for directing large parts of their budgets towards Facebook. That mindset could change

Personalised prices → ability to create them depends on tracking us across the internet. That seems to me a prima facie violation of the American post-Bork monopoly laws, focused as they are entirely on price. “It’s sort of funny, and also sort of grotesque, that an unprecedentedly huge apparatus of consumer surveillance is fine, apparently, but an unprecedentedly huge apparatus of consumer surveillance which results in some people paying higher prices may well be illegal…”

The one time Facebook did poll its users about the surveillance model was in 2011, when it proposed a change to its terms and conditions, the change that underpins the current template for its use of data. The result of the poll was clear: 90% of the vote was against the changes. → Facebook went ahead and made them anyway, on the grounds that so few people had voted. No surprise there, neither in the users’ distaste for surveillance nor in the company’s indifference to that distaste.

The Indian government ruled that Facebook shouldn’t be able to ‘shape users’ internet experience’ by restricting access to the broader internet. A Facebook board member tweeted that “anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?” → That remark unwittingly revealed a previously unspoken truth: Facebook and Google are the new colonial powers...

#surveillance #attention #politics #economy #john #lanchester #merchants

[ogxref]

POLITICAL HOBBYISM AND THE FOLK THEORY OF POLITICS / Vox Media

A common understanding of how politics works → voters have some beliefs about how government should work, they identify candidates who share those beliefs, and then they vote for those candidates. Elected institutions like Congress and the presidency thus reflect the aggregated wishes and desires of the people. This is what political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have called the “folk theory of democracy.” The problem is that the folk theory is totally wrong. → The vast majority of people don’t sort themselves into political groupings based on firmly held beliefs. Most people don’t have firmly held beliefs about political issues at all, and most people aren’t and don’t want to be deeply involved in politics. When people do express political opinions, they’re typically copying the beliefs of elites such as elected officials, rather than the other way around. And for people who do follow and want to be involved with politics, participation has started to take the form of fandom rather than deep engagement in local parties and organizing. Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh calls this “political hobbyism.” → Public spiritedness can take a back seat to partisanship when politics is treated as a game," he warns. And indeed, that’s what we’ve seen in recent decades. Political scientists and pollsters have increasingly noticed that partisanship in the modern era is driven less by loyalty to a given political program and more by animosity toward one’s political enemies → "Partisan affect is inconsistently related to policy preferences" (political scientists Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes wrote in a 2012 paper) In other words, being a Democrat might mean that you support Democratic policies, but it definitely means you don’t like Republicans. Trump → by attacking Clinton and other Democratic hate figures (as well as his other perpetual target, the media), able to capitalize on his supporters’ strong negative feelings toward them, feelings which are likely stronger than any loyalty to a specific political program...

#politics #folk #theory #democracy