Tanushree Core Post #4 (Labour)

Several of the readings for our module on Labour, contend with the idea of “invisible labour”, an almost subterranean “underwater” layer of work that is made invisible to cultivate the myth of the internet as a space of smooth flows, of a direct interaction between platform and user with no middlemen. 

I was quite intrigued by the connections the authors forged between race, gender, class heirarchies and this invisible labour. D’Ignazio and Klien, and Beller, all forge a connection between slavery, capitalism an computation. D’Ignazio and Klien, insist on the need to trace the virtual products of digital technology back to their source. In “Show Your Work”, they argue that forms of labour, beyond the writing of the code also need to be considered. This “underwater labour” - of managers, content moderators, customer service employees, among others - which puts together emotional and affective labour, and technical expertise, needs to be made visible. 

Roberts adds another layer of complexity to these ideas, arguing that there are many layers to the process of content moderation. First, the free labour of the users who flag content, and the labour of the content moderators. This work, which is usually outsourced to women in the global south, working at minimum wage, involves a great deal of emotional and affective labour, because they are confronted with a barrage of disturbing and violent content. 

These content moderation workers occupy an ambivalent sort of position - they are often underpaid and overworked, but they also have a key role in screening the content that we see online, often deciding the tone or “flavour” of the website. However, this is further complicated by the idea that social media sites have their own rules for content moderation, and image to uphold - all of which are quite inextricably connected to ad revenues and profit motives. So even when YouTube ostensibly takes on the responsibility of advocacy, by hosting testimonies against abusers on their platform, this must also be viewed through the ethical/moral prism of the idea that with each click, YouTube earns ad revenue. 

Sometimes, the jokes write themselves. (Tanushree, non-core post #2)

 

Tanushree Core Post #3 (Waste)

I found many continuities between our module on labour and the one on waste. Particularly in the authors’ engagement with the idea of the “invisibility”, first of digital labour, and then of digital waste. Questions of materiality and the digital have long dogged scholars of new media. And I was struck by the parallels between the excavation of the materiality of the digital image and its relation to the body, and the authors’ excavation of the invisible geographies and materials of information technology and computation.

Ensmenger, for instance, argues that if we only consider the consumption of digital technology, and don’t probe the circumstances of their production, we risk losing sight of its connection to older modes of production. He contends that the ostensible immateriality of the digital comes from a deliberate obfuscation of the circumstances of its labour, its geography, and its raw materials. Materiality then was never lost, and ideas of information technology as heralding an era of “clean” production without large material and environmental costs, were inherently flawed. 

Hogan’s ideas regarding Facebook and the “invisibilities of the archive” tie in with this quite neatly, the “cloud” and discourses of ephemerality that surround it, only serve to invisibilize the massive amounts of energy, resources and labour that goes into their creation, functioning and upkeep. 

If the “places and processes used to produce virtual commodities are very similar to those in traditional forms of manufacturing” - a more serious link could be forged between neo-liberal capitalism, the production of information technology, older forms of infrastructure, and older structures of power. Ensmenger, notes that sites for Bitcoin mining clustered around the power grid and nuclear power plants, which themselves built parallel to (and perhaps even in service of) railroad networks. This layering of infrastructures which challenges the idea of a the digital as a “break” of sorts from older infrastructures and production processes, also brings to light the question the idea of a layering of a politics of extraction, as countries in South America and South East Asia grapple with human rights violations and environmental degradation, in the tussle for rare earth minerals.

Final Project / Profiling as proto-predictive policing (Tania)

 

 

(Pages 12 and 16 of the December 1986 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin)

It’s 1958, and a LAPD cop tires of the slog of research via the old media of teletype and library reading rooms; so he dreams up a national archive of criminal information that might be used, among other things, to track down the kind of criminal—a serial killer—he suspects he’s currently investigating. Fast forward to 1984, and a Reagan-era moral panic about increased crime provides the perfect constellation of forces for the FBI to set just such a plan in motion. It’s called VICAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), and it takes the initial form of a computer program designed to detect patterns in large amounts of data—this data being input via a 15-page VICAP Crime Report designed by the FBI and hawked to local law enforcement. Three things emerge from this experiment: the design of a kind of bureaucratic apparatus (i.e. the specific division created within the FBI to administer VICAP and related programs: the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC) that could interface between the scales of nation, state, and city; criminal data aggregation; and the development, via this data and through the figure of the serial killer, of the ‘science’ of criminal profiling as a highly specific expression of forensic psychology.

My project hopes to put this history in conversation with a contemporary offshoot of these early experiments in bureaucracy, data collection, and algorithmic pattern generation as techniques of law enforcement—a formation we now call predictive policing. Specific examples I’d look at (might) include PredPol, LASER, and the ‘new’ invention of fusion centers. Wendy Chun’s work on correlation and the repressed history of statistics informs this project, as do Mark Andrejevic’s ideas on ‘post-disciplinary’ forms of surveillance/control, and also (in contrast to Andrejevic) Foucauldian formulations of the continuity rather than distinction between individual and population, discipline and security.

The FBI Bulletins are also just incredibly fun literary and visual objects. Artwork in the style of pulp fiction, criminality as always at least partly a fictional/aesthetic project…

 

 

Final Project (Sebastian)

    For this post, I will include a brief written summary of my final project alongside screenshots of the slides I originally intended to present tomorrow (primarily because the slides provide specific quotes, sources, additional context, and fun images).

    My plan is to write a research paper tentatively titled “Star Wars, Digital Culture, and the Politices of Indigenous Fandoms.” As a franchise, Star Wars has a long history of featuring characters or groups of characters who are heavily coded as Indigenous, often in adherence to settler stereotypes about Indigenous peoples being “savage” and “primitive.” For those familiar with the franchise, notable examples include the Tusken Raiders, the Ewoks, and the Mandalorians. Despite this, scholars and journalists like Jordan Maison (Ponca), Dan Taipua (Waikato-Tainui), Darren Edward Lone Fight (Three Affiliated Tribes, Mvskoke Creek), and Suzanne Newman Fricke have all documented the pan-Indigenous embrace of Star Wars, noting that the franchise’s opposition to its imperialist antagonists has often resonated with Indigenous audiences.

    I am further interested in how the dynamics of this fandom – and the representations of Indigeneity in mainstream cinema and television more broadly – have mutated in light of digital technology and digital culture. As we have discussed extensively throughout this class, digital technology is frequently imbricated in the logics of capitalism, colonialism, extraction, surveillance, etc. Nevertheless, scholars like Bronwyn Carlson (Australian Aboriginal) contend that Indigenous communities often manage to use this technology to construct “digital assemblages of care.” And scholars like Marisa Elene Duarte (Pascua Yaqui) and Cynthia-Lou Coleman (Osage) document the many ways that Indigenous communities have conscripted digital technology to combat settler colonialism, such as the strategic use of social media during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Indigenous fandoms can be seen using many of these same strategies when they assert their cultural sovereignty and recontextualize a property like Star Wars for their own political ends. 

    At the same time, the recent surge in Indigenous representation – both in front of and behind the camera – in Hollywood productions is also intertwined with digital technology, specifically streaming services. Examples of these productions include Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs, The Book of Boba Fett, Prey, and Echo, all of which are first and foremost distributed via streaming services like Disney+, Hulu, and Peacock. For better or for worse, the business model of streaming services appears to have opened up a space for Hollywood to finally acknowledge the existence of Indigenous audience (and, undoubtedly, the profit potential they may entail). 

    I intend to center this paper around an analysis of The Book of Boba Fett, a show which streamed on Disney+ earlier this year, precisely because the various tensions between Indigenous fandoms, the Star Wars franchise itself, and the corporate entities that own the franchise (Disney and Lucasfilm) become evident in the show’s text, production, and reception. The Book of Boba Fett is a spinoff of The Mandalorian, which ran its first season in 2019. Notably, the breakout character of The Mandalorian, “Baby Yoda,” was almost immediately embraced as Indigenous by Indigenous fandoms and online meme communities. Thus, it is likely no accident that The Book of Boba Fett is not only the first entry in the Star Wars franchise led by an Indigenous actor – namely Temuera Morrison (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Rarua) – but also substantially engages with the politics of Indigenous sovereignty and the Land Back movement (which, as Lindsey Schneider (Chippewa) documents, also largely began online in its contemporary iteration). However, the show completely jettisons these political considerations after the first three episodes, reflecting a tension between the ways Indigenous fans have often read Star Wars as an Indigenous text and the incentives of a company like Disney. By examining the text, production, and reception of The Book of Boba Fett, I hope to trace these tensions and their implications, as well as consider how they are heavily informed by the proliferation of digital technology.   

Also, here’s a clip for the scene where The Book of Boba Fett references the Land Back movement in a fairly explicit fashion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipm96H5Pmeg&t=69s

The YouTube creator economy

I highly recommend this video by Wendover Productions explaining the economics of being a YouTube creator. Specifically:

1:42: They explain how YouTube creators make money from advertisers through AdSense. More relevant to our class, though, is that they also describe how creators who attract different types of audiences (e.g. English-speaking, older, people with disposable income) earn higher RPMs (revenue per mille). This reminded me of Chun's and Cheney-Lippold's writings about how personal data gets plugged into ML models and algorithms.

9:23: Good illustration of how YouTube is so successful at platform capitalism.

14:10: The platformization of creators?

My new housemate Jasper

 

CAT to brighten up your day. Jasper is very shy and skittish. His sister, Jane even more so (I haven't even been able to get a picture of her). But I think slowly we are becoming friends!! They are the first felines I have ever lived with, so tips on how to win them over are very appreciated :)

[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Blog #15/15] Wake up babe, it's almost Cyber Monday

Are y'all finding amazing Cyber Monday deals? I am currently flying back from NYC, giddy with the delights of early employee-access discounts from Aesop. I return victorious.

What is it about the holidays makes you want to splurge? As the origin of Cyber Monday goes: "The name Cyber Monday grew out of the observation that millions of otherwise productive working Americans, fresh off a Thanksgiving weekend of window shopping, were returning to high-speed Internet connections at work Monday and buying what they liked." (New York Times) It's interesting to see in the above stats provided by Adobe the relatively steep increase of Cyber Monday sales in 2020, most likely due to our homebound-ness during the pandemic; however, data from 2021 demonstrate an unprecedented decrease of Cyber Monday sales, most likely due to lingering pandemic effects, including the supply chain crisis. And look, I know all these fake holiday shopping days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Super Saturday, Cyber Week II, etc.) are all part of the system of data collection and surveillance... but I take so much joy in them! Please share rad deals on espresso machines if you see one.

[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Blog #14/15] Stroke a digital cat

Another attempt at invoking "the cat exception"... but I am as perplexed as I was in my last blog post. The world just does not seem to run out of enigmatic digital feline content. Click and drag to stroke your "good vibrations" cat.

"Inside The Safest School In America" - Pratik Nyaupane Non core post

 This video is a feature piece from NBC News, showcasing a high school in Indiana that is supposedly the "safest school" in the United States, which essentially is a dystopian example of the school as a carceral institution. Besides the fact that this video is not a parody, there is an endless commentary to be had about the media's role in manufacturing the relationship between technology and the police state. Even with the assumption that police protect people, the law enforcement office that monitors the school via technology is still 10 miles away. In case of any horrific incident, the sensors or cameras are designated as the tools that keep the school safe, but obviously the technology itself doesn't do anything besides maybe notify authority who may choose to do something about it after the fact.

Mainly, I think this video is a significant example of technology as it mediates notions of security, privacy, and safety. The carceral techonologies implemented in the classroom construct this reality of the smart school/campus, but entirely ignore the conditions in which issues of gun violence and threats to school safety are enabled. Rather technology and digital instruments are viewed as solutions to the instances of problems as opposed to dealing with the systemic issues at hand.

Max Berwald – Non-Core Post 10/10

It will shock no one that the Google News aggregator is bad, but I wanted to use the "Technology News" filter to meditate on US journalism's general consumer focus. It's probably the starkest on the "Technology" "beats" than anywhere else. These are the top stories the aggregator was feeding me on 11/26 for Technology News. Every story without exception addresses a consumer of consumer technology, with varying levels of commitment to understanding the relationships between prices and tech specs. Everything else is effaced. This is a media component of the foreclosing of the political I keep ranting about. Every relationship a person could have with technology (as a victim of surveillance, as a worker involved in the production of these technologies, in their sale, even in their development, as someone forced to live with the waste they produce, as someone involved in a battle surrounding their regulation...) is eschewed in favor of the consumer relationship: will you buy these things or will you not buy these things?

Dalia Hatalova Blog Post #18/15 (total core posts: 5; total non-core posts: 13)

Kelly Gates's presentation on forensic documentaries last week made me reflect on an older series that I used to watch on the New York Times website called Retro Report. The particular episode below is interesting because it describes an environmental disaster that caused a media uproar and led to the establishment of a Superfund site, bringing to mind Ensmenger's description of the polluted and highly populated Silicon Valley. However, what is also relevant, particularly about the older segments in the series, is an engagement with past televised news, which is sometimes deconstructed to a degree while being utilized by present-day filmmakers (even though their own modern-day footage is left to leave the appearance of objectively on the viewer). 

The distance that enabled putting the past media into quotation marks as an object for examination is enabled through time, though it is less extensive than in "Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol" (2021). As Gates pointed out, contemporary documentaries have begun to attempt an interrogation of even recent footage but also alter it while doing so. With cropping, cutting, editing, and overlaying footage to be able to perceive it more clearly (as these documentaries purport to do), the question is not about whether this should or should not be done – as to a greater or lesser extent, all cinema seems to treat footage in these ways for artistic or other ends – but how to deal with the original from which such footage derived. Perhaps, given the digital possibilities, a documentary that effaces its own devices could treat footage in a similar way to academic texts' treatment of citations, giving the viewer an option to revert from the text as a quotation to form their own assessment through direct access to an unprocessed version. As the digital provides new possibilities of interconnectivity, these could be utilized for reformating the viewing experience by adding metatextual levels that allow for a greater dissection of forensic documentaries. 

[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Blog #13/15] Blockchain bros ruin everything

Attempted to invoke the "cat exception." Immediately closed my eyes and the browser upon discovering this. Apparently, you can "breed" your CryptoKitty *shudders* with other users' CryptoKitties in the "Marketplace"? And there are *checks notes* “cooldown” periods where a CryptoKitty cannot breed while it’s expecting offspring or recovering from "Siring." 

Why must blockchain bros ruin everything?

On a biopolitics of waste (Tania, Core Post #5)

What might a biopolitics of waste look like? Jussi Parrika notes the need for such a project in the introduction to Medianatures, writing: “We need to be looking at the intensity of the waste as living dead material–whereby ‘waste’ is not just waste but also a form of life, and thus is in need of its own biopolitics” (9). This call is in keeping with the rest of the introduction, framing as it does a set of orientations for the study of digital waste that would specifically attend to its “topological entanglement” within “layers of globalization” (4). What jumps out in this indication towards a biopolitics of waste is, immediately, the emphasis on life; not necropolitics but biopolitics, not dead media but zombie media (“living dead material”).

But biopolitics comes with its own set of investments. Chief among these is that of scale, or the vantage from which the biopolitical sees i.e. that of the population. We’ve engaged the divide between techniques of power that operate at the level of the individual vs. those that operate at the level of the population a few times in this class (e.g. with Andrejevic’s construction of so-called post-disciplinary, preemptive surveillance). The frictions of that debate are operational in the context of biopolitics as well. Thus: in a biopolitical, top-down view, would we inevitably have to consider the lives that are lived literally in and through waste (i.e. waste pickers whose livelihood draws on waste) as merely bare life? What would such a vision have us betray? I’m reminded here of anthropologist Bhrigupati Singh’s stellar Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India. Set in a community of bonded laborers in Rajasthan, India, Singh’s ethnography attempts a vocabulary of life that could exceed economists’ quantized notions of what constitutes quality of life. In milieus where bare life and abjection are the obvious concepts to reach for, what might be gained by trying instead to attain other points of view?

I’m also interested in what sort of models would best account for the incompleteness that seems an inherent feature of the politics of waste. By “incompleteness” I mean the ways in which the political measures meant to control it fall far short of the “precise controls and comprehensive regulations” that Foucault identified as a core feature of the techniques of biopolitics. The Basel Convention, for instance, continues not to be ratified by the U.S.; shipments of “all kinds of waste” continue to mysteriously appear on the shores of the global south. A good account of the topology of global waste would account for such instances not as irregularities but as features of the designed world of waste.

All of this to say: yes, a biopolitics of waste. But also a micropolitics, an embedded politics, and an immanent non-politics.

Citizenship as mediated through technology (Pratik Nyaupane non-core post #7)

 I wanted to share this insightful talk by Itty Abraham on the relationship between postcolonial states and their citizens through technology. According to Abraham, the citizen is not merely a person, nor an individual with certain legal rights, it is a character, one that is political and is the ideal of a liberal society. Through technology, the state can construct and legitimize the liberal notion of a good citizen, especially where colonial pasts have disrupted, delegitimized, and devalued the individual as a citizen. 

Inserting technology into the discussion of citizenship changes the meaning of citizenship in vast ways. It challenges the notion that technology may be value-neutral and states use  Implementations of technology by postcolonial states can be a significant tool by design to further particular interests of class, race, nation and even obstruct and stifle social progress and political change.

The notion of citizenship is now understood differently in postcolonial states because of the impact technology has. To the postcolonial state, technology serves as a utopian future, a way to think or at least attempt to think in a decolonial manner. To the postcolonial state, technology is the rationale for colonialism. However, they believe that through technology, the lasting effects of colonial destruction can be undone, and so technology is an object that is understood as a utopian fix, to legitimize and establish a powerful relationship between the postcolonial state and its people. Therefore to the postcolonial state, the intersection of authority and modern technoscience produces this utopic future.

“Asian states have long had an intimate relation with modern science and technology as an economic prophylactic” 

Dalia Hatalova Blog Post #17/15

Today's conversation in class about the possibilities for creating more ethical technologies made me think of the work that Neri Oxman does in architecture, which I became interested in through a curatorial course that I took a couple of years ago. Oxman weaves together (quite literally) natural and technological approaches, building on principles of biomimicry to create bio-informed designs. While her work anticipates the possibility of replacing structures with more nature-attuned ones, these principles may also be applicable to other technology in the future. The images above are of Oxman's silk structures which are domes "made out of silk fibers, woven by a robotic arm, which was then finished by 6,500 live worms" (Surface). This combination of modern technology and natural processes reminds me of historical structures, such as the windmill and watermills, as ways that nature can be harnessed to human ends without significantly damaging the systems upon which that technology depends. While silkworms in data centers may seem a far stretch, thinking of ways that nature is fostered to become a part of technology may be a fruitful way to imagine the future. 

Book Recommendation (Mahnoor, Non-Core Post #10)

This book was recommended to me a few months ago by a friend: Painting By Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth Century Art by Diana Seave Greenwald. In college, I worked in an art museum as a tour guide. As guides, we were allowed to design thematic tours, and in mine, I asked visitors to think about people, places, and cultures often left out of dominant visual narratives. It never occurred to me that data-driven approaches were being used to dismantle cultural hierarchies within the art world/museum space. From the publisher's website: "Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity." I've only read the introduction so far, but I am really impressed by Greenwald's methodology and her very intentional balance of quantitative and qualitative analysis. I'm excited to continue reading and wanted to share this positive, non-dystopic use of data for anyone interested in art history! 

[Hamsini] Links from presentation

Microsoft's "We Live in the Cloud": https://news.microsoft.com/stories/microsoft-datacenter-tour/

Solar Protocol Network: http://solarprotocol.net/index.html (as of posting, opening on a server in Queens!)

Julia Rose Camus - Additional Post 10

Cats! Kittens! Meet my friend's cats Louise (adult) and Francis (kitten). Tangentially related to technology, I spent a couple of hours the other night entertaining them with a laser pointer that produces various whimsical shapes. Please enjoy some action shots: 

[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Blog #12/15] Might wreak Luddites-style havoc on food delivery robots

Someone had written a blog post on the food delivery robots before, but I must double-dip to share a quick rant and a word of advice: If you see one in the wild, do not hesitate to strike first. On a UCLA-bound Uber ride last weekend, en route to a conference, my driver almost got into a car accident because of a delivery robot crossing the road. The Uber driver initially didn't notice the robot because it was too short, and its color blended in with the road. 

I repeat: DO NOT HESITATE TO STRIKE FIRST. Do not be fooled by its anthropomorphic and care-instinct-cueing design.