tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91283335026904099662024-03-13T20:21:05.181-07:00The Digital EnclosureFree Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-54767162241629840112022-10-29T16:50:00.011-07:002022-11-15T14:26:18.734-08:00 The Media Are Not Off the Hook: Silver Bullets, Hypodermic Needles, and Straw Men<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRpKf2N1brcj4p7cN_xRBtLxA3DlIBciouYMy8v1E83awNxn7qdVMpgaCFg_l7MDs0NVf0pysPK1yBmXRWPKJFqYyxrMW7Hhc9PGPUqV70fJ6nDA41ghKqcLadeGx-MhuCw0PzeWKCPNilTKZPKNn2vhjnnTFLLqkH2yWXOiTw_Wq5XoOgwk5lvqPAxg/s500/calvin%20hobbes.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="160" data-original-width="500" height="102" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRpKf2N1brcj4p7cN_xRBtLxA3DlIBciouYMy8v1E83awNxn7qdVMpgaCFg_l7MDs0NVf0pysPK1yBmXRWPKJFqYyxrMW7Hhc9PGPUqV70fJ6nDA41ghKqcLadeGx-MhuCw0PzeWKCPNilTKZPKNn2vhjnnTFLLqkH2yWXOiTw_Wq5XoOgwk5lvqPAxg/w320-h102/calvin%20hobbes.gif" width="320" /></a></div><p><span style="font-size: large;">I</span>n the wake of growing concern over the role played by social media and other pathological internet formations in shaping the tenor of contemporary political discourse, the discussion of so-called "media effects" keeps bubbling up to the surface. </p><p>The term serves primarily as an epithet (except in somewhat rarefied and self-enclosed realms of experimental research) sometimes shorthanded by the dismissive nomenclature of the "hypodermic needle model." </p><p>It is worth nothing, in this regard that the "hypodermic model" and the "silver bullet theory" are not actual theoretical approaches to the media. Rather these term emerges as <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Vo7goofWc28C&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=strawman+lubken&ots=m8Tf5jQqvK&sig=noeqCaCT_kMgjQVnc00F654b1lg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=strawman%20lubken&f=false" target="_blank">dismissive insult</a>s: foils for the so-called "limited effects" model. </p><p>Recently, when these models are invoked, it is with the goal of disparaging ostensibly overblown claims about the impact of social media on political polarization, shortened attention spans, and so on. </p><p>This is not to say that there have not been <a href="https://gizmodo.com/the-secret-twist-in-the-bobo-doll-experiments-that-turn-1632539974">attempts</a> to demonstrate media effects that embrace the media model implied by the charge of "hypodermicism". </p><p>The typical problem with all such experiments and with more general claims about the "direct effects" of media artifacts is that it is difficult if not impossible to isolate the media as a causal factor in a real world setting. When experiments are conducted in a laboratory setting there is the related problem of generalizing these findings to the world outside the lab. There is a very good reason for these difficulties: the "media" do not stand outside and separate from the social realm -- they are an integral part of society. This is the substance of the fundamental claim against "direct effects" models: that they fetishize and abstract "the media" from their broader social context. </p><p>But this same claim applies to the attempt to absolve the media through the dismissive charge of "silver bulletism" or "hypodermicism." When the accusation of naive "direct effects" is used to imply that the media are not to blame -- that the problem lies "somewhere else" in society, the same fetishization is at work. If the media cannot be abstracted from society, the converse is also true: society cannot be abstracted from the media. In other words, the pathologies of society are also the pathologies of the media, which play an important role in reproducing them, just as other communicative and representational practices do. To say, then, that polarization is caused "elsewhere" and the media merely "reflect" it is to inadvertently align oneself with a debunked hypodermic model, by underwriting the abstraction of media from society. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-86983498044029082212020-12-18T04:28:00.012-08:002020-12-18T13:30:10.111-08:00"Springs of Action"<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-iHe1PnReqtJo4hyphenhyphensSkj7MhzQiw9zZhH3ZwIoYkQHGp_iGvWUs043zmlQ8K_VMwGRn8w6DMfD2Fj6oVX2pEKyLdmLCqM98qJidn6GqMojTqBLzl8PFweq66OGF_kuiLDmCgs8rrMr1WwA/s255/slinky.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="198" data-original-width="255" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-iHe1PnReqtJo4hyphenhyphensSkj7MhzQiw9zZhH3ZwIoYkQHGp_iGvWUs043zmlQ8K_VMwGRn8w6DMfD2Fj6oVX2pEKyLdmLCqM98qJidn6GqMojTqBLzl8PFweq66OGF_kuiLDmCgs8rrMr1WwA/w200-h155/slinky.jpeg" width="200" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> I've long been a fan of the thoughtful work of Louise Amoore, whose interests touch on many of the themes that are at the heart of my own research, though from quite a different direction. So, I approached her recent, influential work on Cloud Ethics with great interest. However there is an inversion in one of the book's linchpin concepts that masks a symptomatic omission characteristic of the book's theoretical alignment with recent strands of so-called "new" materialism. It is hard not to miss this concept, because it is one of the book's key conceptual refrains: the notion of "spring of action" invoked by the philosopher Richard Braithwaite in a well documented exchange with Alan Turing on machine learning aired on BBC. For Braithwaite, the concept seems relatively straightforward: for some entity to think about the world, that is to focus on and isolate aspects of the environment in order to understand or make sense of them, there must be an underlying desire or motivation. The question of desire, of course, is crucial to any discussion of machine cognition, AI, or machine learning. A computer program may learn how to beat a chess grandmaster, but does it even want to play chess in the first place? Does it want to win? It may compose music and recognize cats, but does it care about music or cats, does it have any meaningful concept of music or cats and why they might be of interest? Could it care any less about the variation in the different tasks that might be set it? Does it matter to the machine if it is learning how to identify cats or anomalies in budget reports? I take this set of questions to cluster around Braithwaite's point about desire (which Amoore quotes, in part, as a chapter epigraph):</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">A machine can easily be constructed with a feed-back </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">device so that the programming of the machine is controlled by the relation of </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">its output to some feature in its external environment—so that the working of </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">the machine in relation to the environment is self-corrective. But this requires </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">that it should be some particular feature of the environment to which the </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">machine has to adjust itself. The peculiarity of men and animals is that they </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">have the power of adjusting themselves to almost all the features. The feature t</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">o which adjustment is made on a particular occasion is the one the man is </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">attending to and he attends to what he is interested in. His interests are </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">determined, by and large, by his appetites, desires, drives, instincts—all the </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">things that together make up his ‘springs of action’. If we want to construct a </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">machine which will vary its attention to things in its environment so that it </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">will sometimes adjust itself to one and sometimes to another, it would seem to </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">be necessary to equip the machine with something corresponding to a set of </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">appetites.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The somewhat surprising aspect of Amoore's uptake of the term, "springs of action," is that she transforms it from a motivating force to an outcome: the moment at which an action takes place. So, whereas Braithwaite sees appetite/desire as setting the whole process of learning in motion, Amoore takes the term "spring of action" to refer to the precipitation of desire into an action of some sort -- it manifests only when something happens. For example, in her description of how surgeons work together with a surgical robot, she frames the "spring of action" as the moment when a particular action results from the human/machine assemblage:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The spring to action of surgical machine learning is not an action that can be definitively located in the body of human or machine but is lodged within a </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">more adaptive form of collaborative cognitive learning. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Intimately bound together </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">by machine learning algorithms acting on a cloud database of medical the we of surgeon and robot restlessly seeks an optimal spring of action — </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">the optimal incision, the optimal target or tumor or diseased organ, the optimal trajectory of movement.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><p></p><p>The shift from "spring <i>of</i> action" to "spring<i> to</i> action" is perhaps significant in this formulation. She is interested in the moment when learning occurs: when the human and machine conspire to make an "optimal" move: an incision or some other (optimal, again) trajectory of movement. The "spring of action" is the result: something happens: a cut is made. Of course, what gets glossed over in this moving description of human-machine collaboration in the name of optimization, is what motivates the machine (or the human, for that matter). It turns out the "spring of action" as framed by Amoore requires a prior desire -- whatever it is that makes the human-machine assemblage "seek" in the first place. This is Braithwaite's point -- desire gets the whole assemblage moving. It is perhaps telling, again, that in this particular formulation, the "optimal" result is a cut -- we might describe it, drawing on Karen Barad's work as an "agential cut." What looks like a failure to distinguish between cause and effect, motive and outcome, desire as motive force and desire as a product of the assemblage, is characteristic of the fate of causality in recent versions of "new" materialism -- and its related Deleuze-inflected ontology of desire. In such formulations, causality is emergent -- there is no meaningful distinction between cause and effect, which means the version of desire invoked by Braithwaite is elided. The fact that a cut occurs retroactively constitutes the fact of the "seeking" -- in fact, this is perhaps the only meaningful way, in such a framework, that we might approach the notion of desire. It's hard to imagine that Braithwaite would endorse this reconfiguration of his formulation of a "spring" of action, which is what makes its repeated, inverted invocation come across as so jarring in Amoore's formulation -- not least because she fails to acknowledge this inversion, taking it as read. Perhaps the assumption is that whenever we talk about desire, we are only talking about it as a post-subjective, post-human formulation: something that is co-extensive with its effects and manifestations: the mark of desire is the optimal cut. </p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p>Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-21921230022833912692020-07-05T03:52:00.072-07:002020-07-05T17:47:28.598-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbykVcONWB-abcpX76vMO8VbG9hb1SYiAguO-4zKoVm3HAEFDD3sjz920IpXA8l0aE-prK7mObZEYTwKaX5YOSV_ho-Wc1JIUAjDD7w82OIau3Z3sv24qH8hMa2exk2S9sJRmqhrj8ifz7/s620/online+U.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="413" data-original-width="620" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbykVcONWB-abcpX76vMO8VbG9hb1SYiAguO-4zKoVm3HAEFDD3sjz920IpXA8l0aE-prK7mObZEYTwKaX5YOSV_ho-Wc1JIUAjDD7w82OIau3Z3sv24qH8hMa2exk2S9sJRmqhrj8ifz7/w625-h416/online+U.jpg" width="625" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Pessimism of the intellect...</div><div><br /></div>A couple of thoughts in response to Alex Burns's <a href="https://alexburns.substack.com/p/theta-race">mediations</a> on a somewhat <a href="https://twitter.com/MarkAndrejevic/status/1278892116031111170">anguished Tweet</a> I launched on a Friday afternoon. In most cases, the various responses to the Tweet took it in the spirit in which it was offered: as concern about the seemingly inevitable colonization of higher education by the tech industry, exacerbated by the restrictions ushered in by the current pandemic. <div><br /></div><div>Some read it, a bit more hostilely, as a selfish focus on cashing out before succumbing to a system that is antithetical to my academic values and commitments. </div><div><br /></div><div>Such is the destiny of Tweets. </div><div><br /></div><div>For the record, I intend to do what I can to resist the commercial platforming of higher education, in keeping with an academic career that has been devoted to identifying and critiquing the pathologies of digital capitalism. That does not mean I'm particularly optimistic with respect to the outcome. There is too much administrative support for such a move -- and, as Burns's post indicates, significant buy-in among academics, at least in certain contexts. At the same time, I've had the good fortune to work and be trained in academic institutions that will likely be among the holdouts, and for that I applaud them and will continue to support them however I can. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know Alex, though I take him to be a person of good will, and I suspect the future belongs to him and other like minded people. Maybe that's good news for them. I don't think I share their particular vision for the social role of higher education, and I worry about the consequences of such a vision for the character of our social world. </div><div><br /></div><div>I am just going by the one post - so I am likely missing some very important context -- but there are some moments in the post that prompted this response. The first is a conspicuous absence in the definitions of education on offer. The choices Burns provides are higher education as contributing to "knowledge creation," serving as a form of "elite reproduction," or, finally, one more version of capitalist alchemy: a way of turning student fees into land grabs and retirement savings (a dig at the original Tweet). </div><div><br /></div><div>None of these really speak to the core mission of the University, as I understand it: education. Missing, for me, in this list, is the process itself: fostering a community and culture of thought (for both researchers and students) informed by the achievements of humankind in ways that contribute to a critical and constructive engagement with the world. </div><div><br /></div><div>I realize the definition of "achievements" is a contested one, and the field for enabling and recognizing these has long been warped -- but this contestation and an ongoing reckoning with the forms of power that shape knowledge production seem part of the culture of thought promoted by such an education. </div><div><br /></div><div>I imagine the reference to elitism in Burns's post is meant to encompass this view of the role of education. The charge of elitism is often deflected toward the content of particular forms of thought and the knowledge with which these are associated, when perhaps the actual target is the conditions of its production and reproduction. To restrict the forms of understanding and knowledge to which I'm referring to a select, privileged, group (through, for example, making a liberal arts degree prohibitively expensive), is elitist. The way to challenge this form of elitism is not to do away with such an education altogether, but to make it available to all who are interested, and, in so doing to transform and enrich it (to reconfigure the content by addressing the deformations associated with the elite conditions of access that shaped it).</div><div><br /></div><div>By way of response, I would press against the ready equation of technology with the commercial tech sector. I realize that the latter is at the forefront of technological development, but I think there is still a meaningful difference between imagining constructive uses for new technological affordances and merging higher ed with the commercial tech sector.</div><div><br /></div><div>What worries me about the spectre of a tech-sector takeover is that the result may well be regressively elitist: reserving the type of education I associate with the University to a few pricey holdouts. Perhaps this is simply a function of my being woefully out of touch with my time. However, I would resist the accusation of nostalgia: the version of higher education to which I remain wedded is one that has only ever appeared as a potentiality. The commercial, corporate capture of the University would most likely extinguish it altogether. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's hard for me to get enthusiastic about the platform commercialization of research metrics. Burns refers to the prospect of commercial platforms showing us the, "20% of your research outputs that are having the 80% readership impacts." I suppose this is meant to shape our research the way audience ratings might shape the development of a TV show, or how market research might contribute to product development. Who wants to spend their time on research that doesn't have "impact"? </div><div><br /></div><div>Nonetheless, I don't think we should take for granted the currently fashionable term "impact" and its relation to the various proxy measures that represent it. In the highly metricised research environment in which we operate, it means how many times an article gets cited, shared, or mentioned (not necessarily read). It is a quantitative measure that doesn't tell me whether or how the piece changed how someone might see or think about or act in the world. It doesn't tell me how this research might influence the classroom experience of my students and their understanding of the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is, for all practical purposes, a metric that, through a series of transformation, can be monetized. (citations=impact=rankings=student fees). Platform capitalism, natch. That doesn't mean important qualities are necessarily excluded from "impact" or that citation numbers don't have any relation to what they're meant to serve as a proxy for. We all want our work to enter into the conversation. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, it does underwrite a tendency for the proxy to displace the real goal, and we know how that plays out. The notion -- imported from marketing -- that the proxy has some kind of predictive value is, I suspect, a deeply problematic one. I've got a couple of friends who, very early on in the era of digital media studies, started working on copyright issues. At the time, very few in the field were working on the topic, so who else would cite them, anyway? </div><div><br /></div><div>It turned out they saw something others did not, and they built successful careers on the foundations of this work. By contrast, platform algorithms give us the kind of endless repetition that has come to characterize so much of our data-driven culture. I doubt they're much good for guiding original, ground-breaking research. They can tell us after the fact, that the research got attention -- which is fine -- but that's about it. </div><div><br /></div><div>The other provocative moment in the post, for me, is the reference to the increasing cost and allegedly diminishing productivity of academic labor. I'm not sure what the reference point here is, but the stats I've seen show some measures of productivity on the rise. Research outputs have been increasing. Although this varies across fields, student-faculty ratios have also been increasing. I suppose this speaks to productivity in some way, but I don't greet either of these as positive developments -- they are driven by economic logics that have been promulgated by another trend: the increase in administrators per student (perhaps this speaks to the issue of diminished productivity?). </div><div><br /></div><div>None of this should be read as a blanket critique of technological innovation. My target is the commercialization of higher education. I have yet to see evidence that commercial platforms are equipped to support the type of intellectual engagement and culture that is crucial to higher education as I understand and experience it. There is certainly a version of higher education that tech companies will be able to implement, and they will likely do it much more efficiently and profitably than universities can. However, I worry it will be unable to provide the type of thought and understanding we will need to address the pathologies of the current moment -- many of which are associated with those companies most likely to take a lead in "disrupting" higher education. I'm wary of the recurring tech industry promise that only the spear that inflicted the wound can heal it. </div>Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-57938535708118246112020-02-25T23:22:00.010-08:002020-07-26T17:40:57.451-07:00A Response to Jill Walker Rettberg<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Note:</i> Upon first receiving a link to Jill Walker Rettberg's review of Automated Media in the journal <i>Convergence</i> from its author, I asked her if she would support my request to the journal to publish a response. Professor Walker Rettberg graciously agreed to this, so I approached the editors with this request. They replied that current editorial policy does not provide them with the latitude to publish my response, but agreed to promote it via social media.<br />
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Mark Andrejevic<br />
Monash University<br />
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For the record, I don’t believe journals or reviewers have any obligation to promote new books in the field or to be positive about them in the interest of collegiality, solidarity, or politics. I do think, however, that reviewers have the fundamental obligation to be roughly accurate in their description of the book under review. It is this belief that prompted me to ask the editors of <i>Convergence</i> -- and the author of its recently released review of <i>Automated Media</i> (2019) -- to support the publication of a response to the review.<br />
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This decision was bolstered by the fact that I first learned of Jill Walker Rettberg’s (2020) review from several tweets she directed toward me on the occasion of the review’s online publication. This social media flurry felt like a direct invitation to respond in some way. I replied that I thought her review misconstrued the book’s main arguments, but that I didn't feel Twitter was suited to productive academic discussion, especially when there are substantive misunderstandings to be sorted out. My goal in this response is not to take issue with Professor Walker Rettberg’s core arguments, but to suggest that they miss their target. The strange thing to me about reading the review is how much I <i>agree</i> with the arguments she arrays against what she takes to be my own -- precisely because she gets the book's central claims exactly the wrong way around. There may be the makings of a debate here, but it cannot get off the ground until the mischaracterizations in the review are addressed. <br />
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The main ones center upon what the book describes as “the bias of automation” and also upon the notion that automated data collection might live up to the promise of “total coverage” or what the book describes as “framelessness” (that is, the fantasy of digitizing information about the world “in its entirety”).<br />
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The book starts off by differentiating between two meanings of the term “bias”: the first is a familiar one that refers to the fact that automated processes can systematically privilege or disadvantage particular groups. The examples here are myriad, ongoing, and alarming, warranting the robust critical attention they receive. The second meaning of bias invoked in the book is less common and draws on the work of Harold Innis -- discussed in some detail -- to suggest that the very choice to use a specific media technology (in a particular social context) can privilege particular logics and tendencies. The book notes that critical work on the first version of bias is well developed and crucially important, and argues for the importance of considering the consequences of the choice to use automated systems in the first place (within a particular context). The book's goal is to examine the logical tendencies that flow from this choice, describing them as “biases” in the way that we might describe, for example, market transactions as “biased” toward the assessment of value in ways that can be quantified. Such transactions may also be biased in the first sense as when, for example, they result in discriminatory outcomes for particular groups. I take these two levels of bias to be distinct, but they can certainly overlap -- as in practice they so often do. <br />
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The review overlooks this distinction, proceeding as if all mentions of bias refer to the first version, and faults the book for not engaging in more depth with the relevant literature on this. I strongly agree with Professor Walker Rettberg regarding the importance of this work, and I do think there is room for further development of the connection between these two forms of bias. There is also an interesting discussion to be had about what happens to the first sense of “bias” when we concede its irreducibility. However, neither of these discussions would justify the review’s wholesale assimilation of one meaning of bias to the other. Perhaps she thinks the distinction is untenable -- an interesting claim -- but this is not the argument advanced in the review.<br />
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The most confounding misreading, however, is the attempt to attribute to the book the very perspective it critiques: that automation can somehow escape the constraints of finitude and representation. Professor Rettberg accuses the book of not recognizing that, “the fantasy of total knowledge, of there being no gap between data and reality, is just that, a fantasy” (2). However this is, almost verbatim, <i>the core repeated argument of the book</i>.<br />
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The chapter on “framelessness” for example, refers to the ambition of digitally capturing and reproducing the world in its entirety as an impossible fantasy (see, for example, p. 114: "The fantasy of automation is that in the breadth of its reach, in the ambition of its scope, it can approach the post-subjective perspective of the view from everywhere -- or nowhere: the purely objective representation that leaves nothing out"; p. 115: p. 122: "Conspiracy theory defaults to a choice between an impossible standard of completeness (framelessness) and...gut instinct..."; p. 126: "There is a seemingly 'democratic' cast to the fantasy of framelessness").<br />
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To drive the point home, the book summarizes the examples it critiques as representing, “tendencies and trajectories – many of which, I want to emphasize, head in logically impossible directions such as, for example, the attempt to dispense with a frame entirely, to envision the possibility of a purely objective decision-making system, and to capture all information about everything, all the time” (160). It is no accident that the book uses the language of fantasy to describe the logics of pre-emption and framelessness: these are only conceivable from an impossible, infinite perspective -- as the book <i>repeatedly </i>argues.<br />
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Something similar takes place in the review with respect to Professor Walker Rettberg’s attribution to me of, “the idea that there is no gap between data and reality.” The book takes this very gap as one of its defining themes, as illustrated from the opening pages and in a number of passages, including the following: “Critiquing the post-political bias of automation means engaging with the possibility that the world does not work this way: that it cannot be captured and measured ‘all the way down,’ because there are irreducible uncertainties and gaps in reality” (101).<br />
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The book argues repeatedly that the fantasy of total information collection -- of overcoming the gap between representation and reality -- is both a structural tendency of automated technologies (“if this system is inaccurate, all it needs is more data, so that it can be better trained”) and an impossibility. To treat fantasies as if they have real consequences is not the same thing as saying they are real, true, or accurate. The book’s concern is directed toward these consequences. <br />
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Consider, for example, Professor Walker Rettberg’s accurate claim that emotion detection algorithms do not measure actual emotion -- that the data do not capture the supposed referent. The book points out that from an instrumental and operational perspective, the referent drops out. Imagine (as many tech companies have), a system that links “emotion detection” to a marketing campaign: a designated “emotional state” of some kind is associated with the increased likelihood of someone clicking on an ad and purchasing a product. Whether the machine has correctly identified the user’s state (the “referent” of the identified emotion) is immaterial to this correlational system: the “emotional state” becomes a vanishing mediator. What matters is the robustness of the correlation between one set of variables (facial expression, for example) and another (purchasing behavior).<br />
<br />
Prof. Walker Rettberg attributes the supposed inability of the book to recognize the fantasy as such (despite repeated explanations for precisely why each of the fantasies it describes is incoherent and self-contradictory), as a function of its failure to engage with feminist and intersectional theory. This criticism overlooks the fact that much of the book's argument, including the entire final chapter, is influenced by the work of Alenka Zupancic (2017), a theorist who does groundbreaking work at the intersection of feminism, critical theory, and psychoanalytic theory. The chapter’s argument draws heavily on Zupancic's 2017 book, <i>What is Sex?</i>, which develops an original, psychoanalytically inflected argument to ground the very claim that Rettberg accuses it of ignoring: the non-identity of data and the world, sign and referent. As Zupancic puts it, "feminism (as a political movement) puts in question, and breaks precisely this unity of the world, based on massive suppression, subordination, and exclusion" (36). <br />
<br />
The conclusion develops an extended interpretation of Zupancic's discussion of the impossibility of the perfected "relation" as a way of highlighting the fantastical biases of automation. That the review misconstrues this argument to the point of getting it backward is perhaps testimony to the fact that Zupancic has not received the attention in the field she deserves.<br />
<br />
Professor Walker Rettberg’s review brings together interesting and important literature to make arguments that, in many cases, align with the book's key concerns. I find myself agreeing with most of the points she makes -- with the caveat that they do not apply to the book in the way she imagines. The review does an excellent job of demonstrating her familiarity with an important set of theories, arguments, and academics, but it does so at the expense of misreading and mischaracterizing the book's defining themes. <br />
<br />
<br />
References:<br />
<br />
Andrejevic, M (2019) <i>Automated Media</i>. New York, London: Routledge.<br />
<br />
Innis, HA (2008). <i>The Bias of Communication</i>. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.<br />
<br />
Rettberg, JW (2020) Book review. <i>Convergence</i>, first published online at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856520906610.<br />
<br />
Zupancic, A (2017). What is Sex? Cambridge: The MIT Press. <br />
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Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-7376095547710166782016-06-23T20:47:00.001-07:002016-06-23T20:50:06.734-07:00This is what ideology looks like<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiZKK64JtFfo2G8q8a5OyNHs2p6FP1osQhPkHSZrx_sPS1ylxbjGpnNAPJf_tYUdYXHQJuYfQW8ojcNYIF1_iXQOKYwjBYDnBrVNjtXXqB6chgtB8PIJDRyVKaJ02RHmMM0hK_f2VrYS6I/s1600/manovich+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiZKK64JtFfo2G8q8a5OyNHs2p6FP1osQhPkHSZrx_sPS1ylxbjGpnNAPJf_tYUdYXHQJuYfQW8ojcNYIF1_iXQOKYwjBYDnBrVNjtXXqB6chgtB8PIJDRyVKaJ02RHmMM0hK_f2VrYS6I/s640/manovich+image.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Lev Manovich had some interesting takeaway points from his recent visit to Facebook Korea that highlight familiar tendencies in contemporary media studies. The scare quotes serve as signposts for where he's headed in his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/lev.manovich/posts/10155134764232316" target="_blank">post</a>, as they designate the terms he deems obsolete in the Facebook era: "ideology," "control," "dominant logic," and, of course, "global capitalism" (as in: "There is no 'master plan' or 'global capitalism'"). This is a short step away from the familiar Thatcherian <a href="http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm" target="_blank">observation</a> about "society." All there are, in the end, are particularities combining in assemblages whose activities are spontaneous, emergent, and unpredictable -- irreducible to the crude terminology of critical theory and free of any discernible structuring logics. Ideology is dead: long live the new (?) ideology of new materialist pluralism.<br />
I suppose there are two ways to take these claims: the more reasonable (that ideology is complex and multi-faceted, but it still exists, that abstractions alway leave something out, but retain a certain utility) or the wholesale ingestion of the Kool-aid (once upon a time people may have been duped and propaganda existed, and capitalism was a thing, but now everything is so complex and particularized that abstractions themselves no longer have any use at all, everything is up in the air and free -- and because of that wonderfully liberating). There is certainly plenty to be said in the support of the first interpretation, but the second one seems to fit better with the conclusion of Manovich's post:<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.32px;">"The future is open and not determined. We are all hacking it together. There is no "master plan," or "global capitalism," or "algorithms that control us" out there. There are only hundreds of millions of people in "developing world" who now have more chances thanks to social media and the web. And there are millions of creative people worldwide adapting platforms to their needs, and using them in hundreds of different ways. To connect, exchange, find support, do things together, to fall in love and to support friends. Facebook and other social media made their lifes more rich, more meaningful, more multi-dimensional. Thank you, Facebook!" </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.32px;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.32px;">Wow -- this is a veritable paean to Facebook. Clearly there are interesting things taking place on Facebook, and there are plenty of constructive uses for it, but it seems a bit extreme to portray it as the savior of love, support, and the meaning of life. Not long ago, it seemed to me that perhaps the moment had passed for emphasizing a critique of the flip side of the benefits and conveniences of the online commercial world, because the moment of an unquestioning cyber-utopianism has passed, but it seems alive and well. </span></span><br />
<br />
To paraphrase Adorno:<br />
Just as the ruled have always taken the morality dispensed to them by the rulers more' seriously than the rulers themselves, the defrauded new media enthusiasts today cling to the myth of success still more ardently than the successful. They, too, have their aspirations. They insist unwaveringly on the ideology by which they are enslaved. Their pernicious love for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities<br />
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Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-41153065457537909822015-05-16T23:41:00.001-07:002015-05-16T23:41:37.709-07:00The Fate of Art<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It was very strange to see BoingBoing promoting this <a href="http://boingboing.net/2015/05/15/watch-why-is-modern-art-so.html" target="_blank">hackneyed critique </a>of contemporary art by "artist" and illustrator Robert Florczak or Prager "University." More on the scare quotes in a second. Why strange? Maybe it's the blender effect of Twitter which constantly recirculates the old as if it's new and the new as if it's already been around the block so often that by the time you get to it it's old news. Maybe it's because former WIRED editor Chris Anderson retweeted it with the following observation: "<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #292f33; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well argued and brave. Plus fun prank on his grad students." Really? Let's start with the last bit first. The prank that Anderson thought was so fun: giving his students a close up photo of a painting he claims to be by Jackson Pollock (but is actually a close up of his studio smock) and making them explain why it's so great, so that he can then humiliate them by revealing the true source of the image. This raises some interesting questions about his grad students (at Prager University?), who seemed to think that this: </span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYFmrgZ-Vir7kTZgC1B8K7eHcwTnARg-jI_h58TNlPJDga25BKT1ksNqaVAjuq5fvvsEjWKg298TBmnNyMjYCUwL_RFgYouiNfKKHuls6OgQ3Zi6fHD2tvGnw6DjLGjJZCWnuVjvai2NQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-16+at+11.09.54+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYFmrgZ-Vir7kTZgC1B8K7eHcwTnARg-jI_h58TNlPJDga25BKT1ksNqaVAjuq5fvvsEjWKg298TBmnNyMjYCUwL_RFgYouiNfKKHuls6OgQ3Zi6fHD2tvGnw6DjLGjJZCWnuVjvai2NQ/s400/Screen+Shot+2015-05-16+at+11.09.54+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #292f33; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">was pretty much indistinguishable from this: </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-NsrrlEb9CFCoZrQT5xygaa38xO4j_7TVIcyzkHu7e5bChl-yYNPTv3NBDM7bWehCmlw6MVg9bVxGNbL566YARGHSFJGhAjfGc2Bzsc6bJEjLOFbsqvPdUVeSkBKTyWHJFZ4a0QuFqko6/s1600/pollock.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-NsrrlEb9CFCoZrQT5xygaa38xO4j_7TVIcyzkHu7e5bChl-yYNPTv3NBDM7bWehCmlw6MVg9bVxGNbL566YARGHSFJGhAjfGc2Bzsc6bJEjLOFbsqvPdUVeSkBKTyWHJFZ4a0QuFqko6/s400/pollock.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #292f33; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ok, I get it, squiggles are squiggles, but these are supposed to be graduate students in art (history? studio art?) of some kind. Which makes one wonder what kind of university this is. Apparently it's the online creation of conservative talk show host Dennis Prager -- a venue for right-wing, low budget Ted-type Talks devoted to topics like "Feminism vs. Truth" and "The War on Boys," and why Christians are the "Most Persecuted Minority." Maybe the inability to tell the difference between these two images helps explain why Florczak, who paints things like this: </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #292f33; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAfbfofdFbosgwZMrhL2fFfmq1b5HjBwM7OZ1OuGroLcCGH-Nak9yv-qgiHsumIh6OuhUcYYvpT4GjHLzmdsCYIwMwe_xRYbf-w7ho_X5PAs3uCqBGmysUulSx4ryPYlgawoHAL3ehc5B/s1600/florzak.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAfbfofdFbosgwZMrhL2fFfmq1b5HjBwM7OZ1OuGroLcCGH-Nak9yv-qgiHsumIh6OuhUcYYvpT4GjHLzmdsCYIwMwe_xRYbf-w7ho_X5PAs3uCqBGmysUulSx4ryPYlgawoHAL3ehc5B/s400/florzak.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div>
seems to think that he's working in the tradition forged by the painters of images like this: </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS5czhVIwmjl7qLwTx5Zr0g-M23xYcv8Nl4ZOi1wb2DSlOVGgesj2w1NmUwRV0AahZ29Oye4_bZOWIi_c6zkTfgQZ5XiGYbnlA_-XLbJq8GW794BbC4OhDbttcSLQMUuDfBwfRGSPdJgpE/s1600/mona+lisa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS5czhVIwmjl7qLwTx5Zr0g-M23xYcv8Nl4ZOi1wb2DSlOVGgesj2w1NmUwRV0AahZ29Oye4_bZOWIi_c6zkTfgQZ5XiGYbnlA_-XLbJq8GW794BbC4OhDbttcSLQMUuDfBwfRGSPdJgpE/s320/mona+lisa.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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and this: </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNdQAd8Z1E902gq1jl151uMgVqroTQSCqIn1owPb7hgXBRl96ZQ5Cl9Hed75ZLNjE97FSZZqtSjkfKZMMPp2tW8FtCSgpCZ0EIJuXpslmrgsviDEcwbAzxbLtNvFIDxKUrJTWrT0nZZXwi/s1600/rembrandt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNdQAd8Z1E902gq1jl151uMgVqroTQSCqIn1owPb7hgXBRl96ZQ5Cl9Hed75ZLNjE97FSZZqtSjkfKZMMPp2tW8FtCSgpCZ0EIJuXpslmrgsviDEcwbAzxbLtNvFIDxKUrJTWrT0nZZXwi/s400/rembrandt.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Rather than the tradition forged by the creators of images like this: </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsmm37C__hUGsyQPIZSNs4dxiyeV_3sT81GyQD1FELZNlDCMjGefcfKSqLAWate-j3Tsy8dEbFHE-WSNHwLbyEu-BwYmxchxRimtj9TWOt9mIlsPDBSWdvlrUIsc-z71rUlH_U9OEIO20W/s1600/kinkade.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsmm37C__hUGsyQPIZSNs4dxiyeV_3sT81GyQD1FELZNlDCMjGefcfKSqLAWate-j3Tsy8dEbFHE-WSNHwLbyEu-BwYmxchxRimtj9TWOt9mIlsPDBSWdvlrUIsc-z71rUlH_U9OEIO20W/s400/kinkade.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #292f33; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">and this: </span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRL7DUX3pXNURG3OBHA8eVcBfuqx2JuQeXztxZTMf9Rzx5rq7movnc9Tgr2PPbQ7haHXJuJFR3swJap0IRQ7oac1nAiHv9SxhgvOQrXxPIjhSPmjDbxIgDzwx_PXTaWbDPD1Hruyy-nRI/s1600/black+light.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRL7DUX3pXNURG3OBHA8eVcBfuqx2JuQeXztxZTMf9Rzx5rq7movnc9Tgr2PPbQ7haHXJuJFR3swJap0IRQ7oac1nAiHv9SxhgvOQrXxPIjhSPmjDbxIgDzwx_PXTaWbDPD1Hruyy-nRI/s320/black+light.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div>
<span style="color: #292f33; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Florczak's claims seem to have something to do with technique and skill -- things that, for example, both Kenny G. and John Coltrane have mastered, but that don't make them the same type of artist. That this distinction is lost on the likes of Anderson and BoingBoing's Mark Frauenfelder (another former WIRED editor) is an indication of the cultural confidence of the tech world, in which expertise becomes fungible and the perpetual vindication of financial success a kind of all-purpose cultural qualifier. </span></span></div>
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Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-59795177985658023372014-02-12T21:04:00.001-08:002014-02-12T21:04:17.188-08:00Post-Critical Theory: Desire and New Materialism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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What to make of the recurring claim that matter
"desires" -- articulated perhaps most passionately by <a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/--new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext">Karen
Barad:</a> "Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and
remembers." I suppose the real question here is what one might mean by
"desire" in this context (or "converse," for that matter).
I suggest that these are metaphorical uses of the terms -- matter (except for
that which takes the form of human sociality) does not have recourse to
language even though it may "communicate" in the archaic sense of a
physical transfer (heat can be communicated, so too electrical signals -- even
quantum states). Without access to language, matter can no more desire, in a psychoanalytic
sense, than it can converse. Surely it can be entangled, embedded, or otherwise
caught up in some form of relations with other entities and with itself --
indeed it cannot <i>not</i> be. <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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But that is something altogether different from the
dimension opened up by language (as might be demonstrated in negative fashion
by, for example, by Ian Bogost's dismissal of linguistic forms of production as
not being on a par with more properly material ones. For more on this point,
see my <a href="http://thedigitalenclosure.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/drone-theory-and-goldfish-crap.html">critique</a> of <i>Alien
Phenomenology</i>). This is perhaps where the pendulum swing away from
discourse represented by "new materialism" goes a bit too far: in
conserving notions like desire while simultaneously setting aside any
engagement with the dimension of language (and, consequently, that of the
subject). <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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This setting aside has ramifications for the fate of
critique, as suggested by Barad's vociferous dismissal of critical approaches:
"I am not interested in critique. In my opinion, critique is
over-rated, over-emphasized, and over-utilized...Critique is all too often not
a deconstructive practice, that is, a practice of reading for the constitutive
exclusions of those ideas we can not do without, but a destructive practice
meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something down." This
is a response that reveals much about the stakes of critique in contemporary
academic (primarily literary-theoretic) circles. Critique has become a game of
one-upsmanship and can have unconstructive rather than deconstructive results.
If, once upon a time, the point of critique was to address human suffering,
reflexive critique can apparently, exacerbate it -- at least in certain
circles. Someone's (or something's?) feelings might get hurt. <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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For Bogost, the concern is somewhat different: overly humanistic
thinking -- even of the ostensibly critical kind -- can get a tad boring:
"Just as eating only oysters becomes gastronomically monotonous, so
talking only about human behavior becomes intellectually monotonous.” <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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It is hard not to read such observations as registering the
level of contemporary academic alienation. I'm worried that these are the types
of concern ("I"m bored" or "If you critique my argument,
then you're putting <i>me</i> down") that come to the fore when
you've lost any urgent sense of the point of what you're doing beyond
constructing an argument for argument's sake -- what Adorno might call the
wholesale aestheticization of theory. It seems absurd to even say this in the
current conjuncture, but what if social theory were, on some level, actually
about working toward making the world a better place for humans? OK, that might
bore some people who've eaten too many oysters, but presumably they have the
luxury not to worry about where the next oyster is coming from, and perhaps the
lack of imagination to consider the fate of those who do not. <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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It is this alienation that, I think characterizes the
critical inertness (or refusal) of what passes for "new" materialism
these days. I put "new" in scare quotes, since there is a strong
affinity between this versionof materialism and what Zizek describes as "Althusser’s
materialist nominalism of exceptions (or'clinamina'): what actually exists are
only exceptions, they are all the <i>reality</i> there is. (This is
the motif of historicist nominalism endlessly repeated in cultural studies...)
However, what nominalism does not see is the <i>Real</i> of a certain
impossibility or antagonism which is the virtual cause generating multiple
realities." This structuring or generative antagonism -- and for Zizek it
is, of course, the constitutive rift of capitalism -- is what falls by the
wayside in such materialist nominalisms. One symptom of this loss, is the
sidestep away from the register of language and its deadlocks -- and thus, of
course, from an engagement with the question of desire. Matter may desire -- in
some reconfigured, alinguistic conception of the notion -- but desire does not
matter. <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-23194658238271240582013-08-26T23:48:00.004-07:002020-12-18T13:21:32.787-08:00Drone Theory and Goldfish Crap<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCUd-ceoLNYAo2iQshuVHXytaQI-PEq6kscSHwuAEF4_WD4cVzJUwUh4bIsY_trMkBAc5dX_qp5UNBHgojqhq1_psGjZ0uwHMOaVx4AnZiZZ6GmS9tJryxTsQlj9J1h5UdbGSdkLugJ0r8/s1600/carp+crap.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCUd-ceoLNYAo2iQshuVHXytaQI-PEq6kscSHwuAEF4_WD4cVzJUwUh4bIsY_trMkBAc5dX_qp5UNBHgojqhq1_psGjZ0uwHMOaVx4AnZiZZ6GmS9tJryxTsQlj9J1h5UdbGSdkLugJ0r8/s320/carp+crap.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Generally
I like the idea of dividing academic labor up so I can read the theory I like and
apply it to things I don’t (“symptoms” of a damaged world). But these days,
that division is breaking down, and some of the hip “new” theories are creeping
disconcertingly into the symptomatic realm. In particular, some recent work on “object
oriented ontology” and new materialism leaves me trying to figure out why those
whose critical commitments I share might find them interesting or useful. </span></div>
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<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The problem
is not so much how to work out the theory, but to make sense of its uptake. The
more I engage with this work – and, I’m not sure how much more time I really
want to spend on it – the more it looks to me like a close relative of the enthusiasm
over data mining and the forms of “knowledge” it generates. The logics align
with one another – post-narratival, post-subjective, post-human – even though
the sensibilities are ostensibly opposed. The following is a bit of a rant that
emerged as a by-product of an offer to collaborate on a review of Ian Bogost’s <i>Alien Phenomenology</i>, a symptomatic book
if ever there was one. The invitation meant having to read the book, which I found largely a frustrating endeavor, as evidenced by the following observations (all citations are from the book, which I read on Kindle without pagination):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Ian
Bogost’s paean to the pleasures of the great outdoors – the “grassy meadows of
the material world” casts poor old Immanuel Kant in the role of the
stereotypical video gamer tethered to the tube.
It is hard not to hear in Bogost’s call to flee the “rot of Kant” seeping
from the “dank halls of the mind’s prison” the all-too-familiar admonition to
video game geeks to “get out of the house.” Perhaps this is a call Bogost has
heard so frequently that he has internalized it sufficiently to wield it
against others: the call of the great outdoors is a recurring refrain in his
celebration of the mysteries of the object world – primarily and paradoxically
incarnated for him in the form of high-tech electronics: digital cameras,
computer games, and cathode ray tubes. “Let’s go outside and dig in the dirt”
he enjoins us, but only metaphorically, really.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In
a sense, the entire book is a rejoinder to the call to get out of the house: “I’m <i>already</i>
outside -- that’s where I’ve been all along.” Bogost’s interpretation of what,
following <span face="" style="background-color: white; color: #5f6368; font-size: 14px;">Meillassoux</span> he calls “correlationism” (which he equates with seeing
things through the lens of how they impact humans) pits him firmly against any
attempt at developing an analysis that “still serves the interest of human
politics” (a charge he levels at Latour for not being anti-correlationalist
enough). But this opposition runs
headlong into the repeated theme of his urgent (though largely unexplained)
claim that “to proceed as a philosopher today demands the rejection of
correlationalism”: we need to get outside and romp in the “grassy meadows” so
we can collect the “iridescent shells” of realism and so on. If we chose to do
so because it turned out to be good for us, of course, we would have succumbed
to the trap of correlationism. Even animal studies is too anthropocentric for
Bogost’s tastes because, “we find a focus on creatures from the vantage point
of human intersubjectivity, rather than from the weird, murky, mists of the
really real” – what we might otherwise describe as “the view from nowhere.” Much
the same goes for Michael Pollan’s attempt at a “plant’s eye view of the world”
– for “he too seeks to valorize the apple or the potato only to mobilize them
in critiques of the human practices of horticulture, nutrition, and
industrialism.” </span></div>
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<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">We get the message: any perspective that is in any way
articulated to a human interest is ruled out in advance. There is something disconcertingly incoherent
about the Bogost two-step: step one is the unquestioned assumption that <i>we</i> might “wish to understand a
microcomputer or a mountain range or a radio astronomy observatory or a
thermonuclear weapon or a capsaicinoid [he apparently loves peppers] on its own
terms.” Step two rules out the appeal to a subject who might wish to do
something like this. He writes off science studies, for example, for retaining
“some human agent at the center of the analysis.” OK, we get the point, Bogost
wants to think about <i>really thingy</i>
things and not those other things called human scientists or engineers. But it’s pretty clear that what’s driving the
whole show is the desire on the part of humans to experience things as things
(other than human things) – even if this desire is anthropomorphically
projected upon (non-human) things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And
so we are left with the thorny question of why such a perspective might be
interesting. The philosopher Theodor Adorno neatly described the dialectic of
autonomy: a fantasy of independence combined with the utterly irrational form
this had taken. For Adorno, the autonomous artwork rehearsed capitalism’s crazy
(aestheticized) embrace of production for production’s sake. What is left but
to read Bogost’s injunction along the same lines: theory for the sake of
everything and thus for nothing. It is a pure position, perhaps too pure,
insofar as it does little to interrogate the goal of purity itself. The result
is that the argument’s normative framing takes the form of recurring and somewhat
mysterious demands on the reader: “the heroin spoon demands as much intrigue as
the institutional dysfunctions that intersect it.” Why? To whom? These are
questions that go unanswered – or perhaps such demands are only available to
those who hear them, which poses a challenge for any attempt to impose them on
the rest of us. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In the book’s conclusion, Bogost briefly nods towards Levi
Bryant’s claim that Object Oriented Ontology envisions “a new sort of humanism”
in which “humans will be liberated from the crushing correlational system.” But
after the wholesale dismissal of any attempt to frame his approach in terms
that serve human interests, it’s difficult to buy into this meta-correlational
gesture: the claim that we should surpass the attempt to relate knowledge to human
interests, because it might be in our interest to do so (!?). Bogost slips this
in so close to the final downhill run toward the blissful prospect of his
argument’s end, that the reader’s tendency is to just coast though it rather
than to give it the double-take it deserves. He follows with an explanation
that sounds a bit more like the one that characterizes his own affinity for the
extra-human – the “bored consumer” rationale: “Just as eating only oysters
becomes gastronomically monotonous, so talking only about human behavior
becomes intellectually monotonous.” This is not a particularly rare claim in
some circles of the humanities, although one wonders just how widely
distributed is the subject position that would take it as the most compelling
reason to embrace a shiny new, if somewhat nonsensical perspective: a kind of
intellectual ennui in search of the next big thing. Such a stance is surely
associated with the somewhat sheltered subject position of gastronomic satiety,
or surfeit. There is a certain luxury or self-anesthesis associated with the
charge that thinking about humans and their problems is just a tad dreary. (“Why
is it that one’s disregard for laundry, blogs, or elliptical trainers entails
only metaphorical negligence,” Bogost asks, “while one’s neglect of cats,
vagrants, or herb gardens is allowed the full burden of general disregard?”).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It
is telling that Bogost’s ostensibly random lists of beings in the object world so
often emphasize interesting sounding objects and words, both technical and
natural. He lures the reader with bright, shiny, and mysteriously magical
objects: “the obsidian fragment, the gypsum crystal, and the propane flame”
(these are a few of his favorite things: musket buckshot, gypsum, and space shuttles, redwoods, lichen
and salamanders, Erlenmeyer flasks, rubber tired Metro rolling stock, the
unicorn and the combine harvester, the color red and methyl alcohol, mountain
summits and gypsum beds, chile roasters and buckshot, microprocessors, Harry
Potter, keynote speeches, single-malt scotch, Land Rovers, lychee fruit, love
affairs, asphalt sealcoat, and appletinis). We don’t hear much about toxic
waste or shit stains (surely, the shit stain, too, demands to be understood on its own terms). The object world is by definition an intricately rich and
edifying one compared to that nasty, dank world of our own mind – an object
still, to be sure -- but not so salubrious or interesting as the grassy meadows, iridescent shores and
scoria cones. If “everything exists equally” for Bogost, some things clearly
exist more equally than others. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Conspicuously
absent from Bogost’s account is any explanation as to <i>why</i> being a philosopher today demands the rejection of what he
terms correlationism. From what position is this demand made? Surely, given his
round denunciation of “correlationalist” tendencies it cannot be made on the
basis of anything having to do with us humans (despite the supposed benefits of
escaping the dank prison of our minds). Such a perspective is ruled out in
advance by the hubris-slaying, egotism-deflating thrust of
anti-correlationalism. Is the demand,
then, made from the perspective of <i>truth</i>,
based on the claim that this way of thinking accurately reflects the way things
<i>are</i> for everything, everywhere,
forever and therefore we must adjust our
own way of thinking to match the world (damn you, correlationism! Back again!).
Well, why? What claim does reality have on us in Bogost’s universe? Perhaps the claim is less a normative one (we
<i>should</i> adopt the stance of
anti-correlationalism) than a descriptive one: inevitably we will come to think
this way thanks to the predictable and inexorable flow of certain types of
entities called thoughts (and the claim exerted upon them by other beings).
Such a perspective would embrace not a “new” materialism but the very oldest.
The use of the word “must” would imply not an injunction but an inevitability:
we <i>must</i> embrace object oriented
ontology the way a stone in the earth’s gravitational field must, absent any
obstruction, fall to the ground. Such a
formulation would certainly obviate the need for any kind of manifesto – (“a
specter is haunting the object world: the specter of gravity!”). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">After
ditching this book several times for failing to pass the basic
coherence-of-thought test, I came to the realization that it is modeled much
like the things it describes: unable to truly interact with other beings (like
me), it simply recedes infinitely into itself. How else to understand
statements like, “The construction and behavior of a computer system might
interest engineers who wish to optimize or improve it, but rarely for the sake
of understanding the machine itself, as if it were a buttercup or a soufflé.” He
seems to be making an <i>aesthetic</i> point
(along the lines of Kant, that dankest of thinkers): that his proposed way of understanding
a buttercup is different from figuring out how a computer works because it is
an apparently disinterested understanding – and emphatically not one that
reflects what Kant described (realizing a certain logical necessity) as a
disinterested <i>interest</i>. Once again,
any sign of interest on our part runs the risk of channeling us back into a
retrograde correlationism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It
is not surprising that one of the paradigmatic examples of the wonders of “the
list” world invoked by Bogost is that of Roland Barthes’s like and dislikes,
taken from his autobiography. Ontography, Bogost style, takes the form of the
database, and what is more characteristic of the database in its current
market-driven configuration than the preference list? Facebookers with their endless “likes”
rehearse this list-building activity, as do databases of purchases, search
terms and so on. IBM tells us that various digital sensors of all kinds gather
the equivalent of 4,000 Libraries of Congress worth of data a day. But these
are not books, poems, maps, plays, biographies, etc. Rather the data comes in
the form of list-like collections in which the human and nonhuman mingle with
the promiscuous abandon celebrated by Bogost:
credit card purchases, airline seating preferences, underground tremors,
EZ Pass records, atmospheric pressure, geo-locational data, levels of
particulate matter in the air, stock market fluctuations, and so on. Such data collection
rehearses the “virtue” espoused by Bogost: “the abandonment of anthropocentric
narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail.” And, of course, experiencing
this data flow becomes, necessarily, the job of various kinds of high-tech
objects. Perhaps this is the appeal of Bogost’s theory in the digital era: the
celebration of the very forms of post-human experience that characterize
automated data collection (and the simultaneous de-valuation of narrowly human
experiential and narrative alternatives). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Suggestive in this regard is Bogost’s explicit
rejection of the pursuit of knowledge as “metaphysically undesirable” because
it violates the adherence to “A fundamental separation between objects…the
irreconcilable separation between all objects, chasms we have no desire or hope
of bridging – not by way of philosophy, not through theism, not thanks to
science.” With a tweak to include information about things as well as humans,
this formulation readily recalls Chris Anderson’s manifesto on “the end of
theory” in the big database era: “Out with every theory of human behavior, from
linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows
why people [and things] do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can
track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Of course, “we” are not
really doing the tracking here but are offloading it onto machines that do the
work for us, offering up their experience of the endless litanies of
information captured by a proliferating array of sensors. We might describe
this reliance on the prosthetic extension of sensing -- combined with its
offloading onto the sensor array -- as a process of <i>dronification</i>: we oversee
seemingly endless databases of information collected by remote sensing devices
about everything from the online activity of consumers, to tweets, volcanic
activity, carbon monoxide levels, ocean currents, subway locations, factory
emissions, sales records, and on and on. The experience of our sensors can be
summed up in terms of Bogost’s broadened definition: “The experience of things
can be characterized only by tracing the exhaust of their effects on the
surrounding world.” Such a formulation has been explicitly embraced by the data
mining world in the term “data exhaust” – which does the added work of treating
data as something cast off, an almost passive byproduct (but something that can
be captured and recycled by those with the resources). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Bogost goes on to
suggest that the tracings of thing-exhaust can serve as the basis for
speculation, “about the coupling between that black noise and the experiences
internal to an object.” This is the part that is lopped off by Anderson’s
formulation, which in its fascination with instrumental efficacy has little
interest in such speculations. Rather the interest in capturing all available
data embraces what Bogost describes as “a general inscriptive strategy, one
that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity.” He calls
this process one of ontography: the writing of being, which “involves the
revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarifying
description of any kind.” Isn’t this the logic of big data mining, which
unearths patterns of relationship without explanation? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Clearly, Bogost would differentiate his goal
of pure philosophical reflection from those of data mining, insofar as the
latter (as outlined by Anderson) are crassly correlationist since the generated
patterns are only of interest to the extent that they serve human interests
(epidemiology, earthquake modeling, threat detection, marketing, etc.). And
yet, the form of “knowledge” on offer, reduced to an object-agnostic tracing of
the impact of objects “on the surrounding ether” models the “knowledge”
generated by the database. Indeed, if we could imagine a data mining operation
devoted to simply generating patterns independent of their utility to humans,
we would come quite close to the process of ontography described by Bogost. He
calls it alien experience, but given the ongoing development of new forms of
object sensors (which preoccupy Bogost in his discussion of digital
photography), we might call it simply drone experience. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">One
of the more baffling – and perhaps telling – moments in the book is Bogost’s
diatribe against academic writing. In tone, his critique takes the familiar form
of charges against pedantry, obscure writing, and, predictably, a cloistered
reluctance to pry one’s head out of the books and “visit the great outdoors”
(that again!). Academics, he tells us, are relentlessly crappy writers who,
even in public, insist on, “reading esoteric and inscrutable prose aloud before
an audience struggling to follow, heads in hands.” He implicitly embraces the
ready rejoinder that such critiques rehearse a familiar and fatigued set of
clichés with the observation that, “Clichés also bear truth, after all.” Fair
enough, but not ones that are interesting enough to warrant a multi-page
chapter introduction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Things
start to get a bit dicier when he proposes his alternative: we need to start
relating to the world not only through language, but through the things that we
make, through our <i>practice</i> in the
world (as if language, writing, etc. are not really real practices): “If a
physician is someone who practices medicine, perhaps a metaphysician ought to
be someone who practices ontology.” Academics he suggests in a distant echo of
Thesis Eleven, spend too much time writing, and not enough time <i>doing</i>. He notes in passing that it seems
“ironic” to even suggest such a thing in a book (rather than simply doing it,
perhaps). We might take this as a call for diversity – let’s not limit
ourselves to just one mode of object production (books); rather let’s make
other kinds of objects (computer programs, motorcycles, maybe even some sturdy
walnut shelves for all those books). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But
the argument does not stop at the call for diversity – it actively disparages
writing (as a form of doing that doesn’t quite count as one) by comparison with
other forms of doing. At this point a somewhat confounding binarism slips into
the argument. Why might it be “ironic” to advocate the making of <i>things</i> in a <i>book</i>? Isn’t making a book just as much a form of doing as other
forms of doing? For Bogost, a book (or at least its ideational content – as
opposed to, say, its binding) turns out not really to be a <i>thing</i> in the way that other things (tables, motorcycles, computer
programs, unicorns?) are. Why not? According to Bogost, “carpentry” (by which
he apparently means making something out of anything other than words), “might
offer a more rigorous kind of philosophical creativity, precisely because it
rejects the correlationist agenda by definition, refusing to address only the
human reader’s ability to pass eyeballs over words and intellect over notions
they contain.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Unlike
<i>really</i> thingy things, moreover,
“philosophical works generally do not perpetrate their philosophical positions
through their forms as books” (that is, their more material attributes: page
texture, shape, binding glue, etc. For a book to really perpetrate its position
this way, you’d have to be literally struck by it). By contrast the maker of material
things (like software?), “must contend with the material resistance of his or
her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy.” We might
describe this set of oppositions as “the separate but equal” clause of Bogost’s
book. He puts it this way, “all things equally exist, yet they do not
exist equally,” by which he means, from what I can gather, that although things
do not exist in precisely the same way, one group cannot be privileged over
another – or, more specifically, human beings ought not to be privileged over
other entities from a philosophical perspective, and vice versa. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And
yet, why are those beings called books <i>less</i>
“philosophical” in their construction than objects (like bookshelves and
computer applications) crafted by philosophical “carpenters”? What makes the “immaterial”
object less philosophical than the material? It is hard to extract any answer
from Bogost’s argument other than that ideas are less philosophical than things
precisely because their significance emerges through their relationship to
humans (whereas material things relate not just to humans but to other things
as well). In other words, humans are less equal than other things <i>from a philosophical perspective</i>,
because their form of relating (as opposed to that between, say a stone and a
stream) invokes a particular relation in which the mental capacity of humans is
involved. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps
the thrust of the argument here is corrective: we spend too much time thinking
of beings for humans and not enough considering the ways in which beings of all kinds exist for one another. But
the substance outstrips the tone of the argument, suggesting that as soon as
humans enter the equation in their ideational (as opposed to material) form of
relating, a relationship becomes necessarily <i>less</i> philosophical. Software (Bogost’s chosen form of “carpentry”)
escapes the fate of writing because it is more “material” – that is, there is
apparently more resistance in the symbolic substrate of machine language than
that of human language. As in the case of, say, truing a bike wheel, or
building a bridge, it is harder to make things work at a basic level when
writing code than when writing theory. And yet, Bogost’s own book provides a
compelling example of how, even in the realm of ideas (as in that of more
material things), “simply getting something to work at the most basic level is
nearly impossible.” It turns out that arguments and words can be just as
recalcitrant as more material things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">If in Bogost's account, human cognitive experience gets devalued vis-à-vis that associated with the
objects of “carpentry” – philosophers’ products come in for a special degree of
scorn: “For too long, philosophers have spun waste like a goldfish’s sphincter,
rather than spinning yarn like a charka.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Crap, it turns out, is less equal
than yarn in the court of flat ontology, although this valuation reeks of an allegedly
surpassed anthropocentrism: by what measure other than some presumably
surpassed correlationism is yarn more desirable as a product than goldfish
waste? What does that comparison even mean from the viewpoint of flat ontology
– is there a ready-made imperative that differentiates spinning yarn from
spouting crap? If Bogost imagines he’s doing the latter when he writes books it
would have helped to warn the reader at the outset. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-92176485681019282672013-08-05T00:28:00.003-07:002013-08-05T19:06:58.666-07:00Whipper-snappers!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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One of the distinctive punditry patterns that has emerged from the response to the Snowden revelations (and that recall Manning's leaks) is the focus on the "narcissistic arrogance" of some young whipper-snapper who thinks he knows better than all those four-star generals and security muckety-mucks. This approach clearly marks the pundit who is not particularly interested in addressing the question at hand: whether a democratic society can still live up to the name when it starts promulgating secret interpretations of laws that amount, in the end, to secret laws. Or, more specifically, whether the decision to implement a plan of total information surveillance merits public deliberation, or, on the contrary, is best left in the hands of those who like creating secret laws. Two classic examples of the "whipper-snapper" dismissal are Jeffrey Toobin's CNN <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq171XCmJFA" target="_blank">takedown </a>of Snowden and perhaps somewhat more surprisingly, Josh Marshall's <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/like_the_oj_simpson_trial.php" target="_blank">reaction</a> on Talking Points Memo. Both follow more or less the same pattern, but Marshall's starts off by sounding a bit more even-handed and nuanced. In the end, however, it boils down to this for <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/like_the_oj_simpson_trial.php" target="_blank">him</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">Who gets to decide? The totality of the officeholders who’ve been elected democratically - for better or worse - to make these decisions? Or Edward Snowden, some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with and is now seeking refuge abroad for breaking the law?"</span></blockquote>
Toobin makes a bit more explicit the appeal to patriotism that infuses Marshall's account:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Every 29-year-old who doesn't agree with what the government
is doing doesn't get permission to break the law, damage national security, and
then run off to China when it’s done. It is not the way you protest in the
United States...stealing documents from the NSA and turning them over to
glenn greenwald is simply not the American way. </span></blockquote>
Well, OK, he's a relatively young guy (younger than them, in any case), and they don't know him from Adam, and he clearly has some instincts of self-preservation combined with an awareness about what <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un" target="_blank">happens</a> to national security leakers these days. But that does not quite get to the heart of the matter: were the facts he disclosed legitimate instances of government malfeasance, including over-classification, promulgating secret laws, and creating a surveillance state behind the backs of the American public? Do these matters rise to the level of whistle-blowing? Might they be discussed without harming national security? Would it harm the nation not to discuss them? The "whipper-snapper" dismissal works to background these questions and foreground a sense of indignation over the sheer gall of today's youth. Moreover, it works to background the concerns about total surveillance that were once a part of the political mainstream, but that have faded into the background of the promised wizardry of digital surveillance. In his recent <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/?page=2" target="_blank">article</a> on the NSA, James Bamford recalls the Nixon-era concerns raised by Sen. Frank Church: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.</span></blockquote>
Who are these young whipper-snappers to remind us of such concerns? </div>
Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-55087962330686628172013-08-04T23:14:00.001-07:002013-08-04T23:28:52.494-07:00The Target is the Population <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFySk6jbQ5XBaRVfUInCfQiSofYpsgykcpSls2SaNHSbyDciweV6hFS7Eu2Fk1OWJdcp76pu_b2BkBIMp5VFhlN4w1loZMFBXdQ0aX-Lj89zhlwd2VmeH0BuUd7H7lOqs0eQrwa9YsSPFN/s1600/POI.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFySk6jbQ5XBaRVfUInCfQiSofYpsgykcpSls2SaNHSbyDciweV6hFS7Eu2Fk1OWJdcp76pu_b2BkBIMp5VFhlN4w1loZMFBXdQ0aX-Lj89zhlwd2VmeH0BuUd7H7lOqs0eQrwa9YsSPFN/s320/POI.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">During his <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/157268901/Wyden-Floor-Remarks-on-Ending-Bulk-Phone-Records-Collection" target="_blank">remarks</a> to the Senate Floor on the
National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, Senator Ron Wyden
exhibited a characteristic and well-meaning, but somewhat misleading response
to mass data collection and data mining for security purposes. The substance of
his challenge to the “dragnet” collection of data about the Americans (and
others) was that it was unnecessary because, “In every instance in which the NSA has
searched through these bulk phone records, it had enough evidence to get a
court order for the information it was searching for.” In other words, the NSA
already knew who its targets were, already had enough evidence to get a
warrant, and was simply using the program to bypass the inconvenience of having
to write one up and get it approved.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">While
Wyden’s observations may be accurate, they miss the heart of the shift in the
mentality that guides new database-driven forms of surveillance. In the era of
big data and predictive analytics, the standard logic of surveillance is
reversed. You don’t first identify a target and then unleash the full force of
the surveillance apparatus. You start with the population (and some priorities and preconceptions) and mine data about it in order to generate leads and suspects. This may not have been the approach
taken by the investigations Wyden described, and it may not even have had any
demonstrated successes (otherwise, we would likely have heard intimations of
them during the defense of NSA surveillance mounted by the Obama administration
in the wake of the Snowden revelations), but it is the speculative model upon
which the intelligence apparatus is building its case for mass data collection. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The model is not an unfamiliar one: it is borrowed from marketing strategies
that use data patterns to identify potential targets, as the CIA’s Chief
Technology Officer, Gus Hunt, has enthusiastically <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkIhHnoPpjA" target="_blank">noted</a>: </span><span style="color: #231f20; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">“</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">We have these astounding commercial
capabilities that have emerged in the market space that allow us to do things
with information we’ve never been able to do before.” The paradigm shift he
learned from Google et alia, is based on what he describes as the importance
of, </span><span style="color: #231f20; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“moving away from search as a </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">paradigm to
pre-correlating data in advance to tell us what’s going on.” This is a somewhat
opaque way of referring to data mining generally and predictive analytics in particular:
the goal is not to find out more information about a particular target, but to
learn from the data who should be a target in the first place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In
this context, it is not quite right to say that just because everyone is
monitored, everyone is being treated as a suspect (although no one is ruled out
in advance). Rather it is to understand that the vast majority of data will
necessarily be collected about non-suspects in order to provide the background
against which the actual suspects emerge. For data mining purposes the target
is the population: the entire population, the full range of data about it which
can be collected for as long as possible. The "complete" picture is needed in order
to allow the clearest patterns to emerge over time. As the CIA’s Gus Hunt <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUPd2uMiXXg" target="_blank">put it</a>, “The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect
it with something else that arrives at a future point in time...Since you can't
connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try
to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">These are the watchwords of
the new data surveillance era: “collect everything about everyone forever – or at
least within the limits of the current sensing apparatus and storage
capabilities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
fact that the target is the population means that critiques based on particular
individual targets (“since you already knew so-and-so was a ‘person of interest’
you could have gotten a warrant”) are unlikely to have much purchase upon a
system that has already committed itself (without much in the way of concrete,
publicly available evidence, as of yet) to the possibility that data mining
might help generate new targets and pre-empt threats in advance rather than simply providing evidence to act
against existing ones. The reversal of the relationship between
targeting and surveillance means we are unlikely to see the surveillance sector
back away from the programs revealed by Snowden and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6" target="_blank">others</a> (and <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130612/12291923424/previous-nsa-leakers-thomas-drake-mark-klein-speak-out-defense-ed-snowden.shtml" target="_blank">others</a>). Rather the pressure
will go the other way: toward flexible access to an ever-growing range of data
about everyone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-53636434525334947612012-02-01T21:29:00.000-08:002012-02-01T21:29:38.852-08:00Inequality is about the economy, stupid!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">It's been strange watching the media reaction to Mitt Romney's taxes systematically miss the point: that a highly regressive tax structure that favours the hyper-rich is not simply a question of ethics or inequality, but also one of economics. The media's focus on Romney's fabulous wealth and whether or not it's "fair" that he has so much money and pays a much smaller percentage of income tax than Warren Buffet's secretary has resulted in predictable accusations of the politics of jealousy, "class warfare," and so on. It works to the advantage of people in Romney's tax bracket when the focus stays on his fabulous wealth -- simply proof that he is living the American dream -- and not on the implications for the economy of the regressive taxation system from which he benefits. From an economic perspective, the question is not so much whether Romney deserves to make so much money for his work overseeing leveraged buyouts during the heyday of the gung-ho Mergers and Acquisitions Era (although I suspect it would be hard to argue for any meaningful relationship between what he's taken out of the economy and what he has contributed to it), but the impact that rising economic inequality has on the economy as a whole. The fact that the economy does better -- is more stable and creates greater general prosperity -- during times of tempered economic inequality should come as no surprise. Producers need consumers, and when the vast majority of consumers are economically squeezed, consumption falls, the multiplier effect kicks in, and most folks (except perhaps for the M&A) folks are worse off. A society that dismantles its middle class is one that undermines its own economy. So the core issue about Mitt's taxes do not have to do with how much more money he's got than the rest of us, but about how the gaping inequality that goes with the regressive taxation system from which he benefits contributes to economic instability and threatens economic recovery.</div>Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-54239786113580133942012-01-15T19:14:00.000-08:002012-01-15T19:19:29.719-08:00Firing Line<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDdWLwTPOFJ-a7PCSasvlggxMIAyLFCRp5gXzFilIR-QqmX1V41fn4_kDeOytXUEtm-6cmnNGvyBxONjHSfhWRF_2q_xLQea5YsqbCdTGXOMXVwieviXpxXHZVFz6KEP6lxjb878K9PBvG/s1600/romneyBain.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDdWLwTPOFJ-a7PCSasvlggxMIAyLFCRp5gXzFilIR-QqmX1V41fn4_kDeOytXUEtm-6cmnNGvyBxONjHSfhWRF_2q_xLQea5YsqbCdTGXOMXVwieviXpxXHZVFz6KEP6lxjb878K9PBvG/s320/romneyBain.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Mitt Romney scares me a lot more than he used to -- perhaps because it's looking increasingly possible that he might mount a serious challenge to Obama if he can just manage to keep his mouth from undermining his clean-cut politician/businessman looks. His latest bluster about how much he loves <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/mitt-romney-firing-people_b_1207525.html" target="_blank">firing people</a> who provide him with services deserves a lot more scrutiny than it has received -- and of a different kind. Set aside for a moment the irony of Romney getting bent out of shape because he's being taken <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/09/news/la-pn-mitt-romney-fire-people-remark-taken-out-of-context-20120109" target="_blank">out of context</a> -- and forget for a moment his own campaign's <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57329447-503544/mitt-romney-attack-ad-misleadingly-quotes-obama/" target="_blank">deliberate and disingenuous use</a> of out-of-context quotes by Obama.<br />
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Consider what this quote means about Romney's misunderstanding of how competition works in the field of health care insurance. In economic terms, health care is not a service like, say, a barbershop or an automotive mechanic -- in which the payment made by the consumer directly reflects the cost of the final service received. You pay health insurance, in the end, to receive medical care -- and, when you really need it, you end up paying much less than the actual cost of care. Otherwise, of course, you wouldn't buy health insurance.<br />
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It's possible for you to receive the care, and for the insurance company to make money, because insurance is based on risk sharing. That is to say, the economic transaction does not just involve you and the end-service provider. It also involves a company that distributes the risk across some portion of the population -- the larger the better, all other things constant. Because health insurance is based on risk-sharing there is an entirely different way of competing (than by providing a desirable service at a competitive price): companies seek to outdo one another in excluding people who really need health care.<br />
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In a world of unregulated free-market health care competition (unlike a world of free-market competition for, say, automotive oil changes), more providers does not necessarily mean a better choice of services. What it most likely means is that companies will find increasingly sophisticated ways of competing by refusing to provide services to those who have the greatest need of health care. That means using sophisticated techniques for screening customers before providing them with health insurance, and tangled legal loopholes that allow insurers to deny coverage to those who need it the most.<br />
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We've seen the free market for health care insurance in action in the United States and it's not pretty: the rational, economic goal of companies is to refuse to offer customers health insurance if there is any indication they might really need it. Even if the coverage is offered, the goal is to attempt to deny benefits if there is any way to do so.<br />
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This is not consumers "firing" the people who provide them with services -- it's wealthy corporations devising increasingly powerful ways to "fire" those clients whose health care needs prove too costly. Does Mitt Romney really believe that an insurance system based on risk-sharing across the population functions the same way as a fingernail salon? Is that what they teach at Harvard Business School. This conflation looks like the result of either ignorance or cruelty -- and either way it's frightening in a figure who might become the next US President. </div>Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-34169495657165538492011-03-09T18:25:00.000-08:002011-03-09T18:25:01.936-08:00First as Farce, Then as Tragedy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXmFgUhZfZtul2nBHjyMKvDTzEwl_nsvFmgvpU4avt_8mm0s-3el_ytKVuvDypYO_Xkjn_sCDX38qhaBHDg16RwGLE5xqXaN7b4ox6khz7D6ai6kFvHas1gXbz4Tjuk6VcFZ9slYRb4DLM/s1600/bergman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXmFgUhZfZtul2nBHjyMKvDTzEwl_nsvFmgvpU4avt_8mm0s-3el_ytKVuvDypYO_Xkjn_sCDX38qhaBHDg16RwGLE5xqXaN7b4ox6khz7D6ai6kFvHas1gXbz4Tjuk6VcFZ9slYRb4DLM/s320/bergman.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Was it really Sarah <a href="http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434">Palin</a> who started this conspiracy fear-meme with her claim that living wills amounted to "death panels" whereby government authorities would decide who is worthy enough to live? If so, she was continuing the time-honored strategy of Republican pre-emption which is to accuse your opponent of doing precisely what you are plotting, but to make the accusation <i>first</i> so that when it becomes apparent what you are actually doing, any attempt to point it out will look like a recycled charge, drained of the all-important novelty that comes to stand in for truth in the fast-paced, air-headed world of cable news. The result is that all critiques appear twice: first as farce and then as tragedy (to reverse the famous formulation). <br />
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We did not have to wait long for the tragedy -- it turns out the real death panel is the Arizona legislature, which has decided to <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20023102-10391704.html">cut</a> Medicaid funding for life-saving organ transplant procedures. Apparently, keeping the tax rate lower for businesses and top income earners is more important than saving the lives of low-income Arizonans. To paraphrase Sarah Palin: The America I know and love is not one in which the poor will be allowed to perish because they don't have the funds to purchase private health insurance. Do Republicans really want to live in a society in which the poor are allowed to die in order to secure the profits of the private health insurance industry? Is this what they mean when they say they don't want us to be like France -- a nation in which health care is available to people of all income levels? It is a strange definition of freedom -- one that looks a lot different from the top of the income scale than from the bottom.Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-19653671894952951102010-07-15T18:16:00.001-07:002010-07-15T20:16:19.747-07:00The Applet EnclosureMichael Hirschorn (with whom I went to high school way back when) is getting a lot of flak among the techo-libertarians for his untimely <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/closing-the-digital-frontier/8131/2/">prediction</a> in <i>The Atlantic</i> of the death of the Web browser and its replacement by the commercial "app." Setting aside the details of his claims (about the monthly fees for iPads, and so on), his polemic is clearly on the right track: Apple wants to find a way to carve out a more controlled corner of infospace and to present this corner as a premium realm for commercial content. The odd paradox of Apple is that, on the one hand, it has always been the "cooler" tech choice thanks to the premium it has placed on design and its success in developing cleaner, more intuitive hardware and software. On the other hand, however, it has always been the more oppressively controlling company -- not because Microsoft is any more benign and open -- but because Apple realized the importance of hardware and, in particular, of developing a seamlessly linked hardware-software system. I've always understood the appeal of iPods -- they're well designed, easy to operate and work better than any other MP3 player I've tried. But I never actually bought one because the way I use my MP3 player -- constantly downloading podcasts and moving from computer to computer, carrying my music files with me and changing them frequently -- is just too hard to do on such a tightly controlled device. Other MP3 players allow me to get music that has been obtained in different ways (ripping CDs, downloading, recording from streams) from different machines and to move, update and re-arrange without any hassle. Whether nor not Steve Jobs will succeed in creating a tightly controlled, proprietary commercial alternative remains to be seen -- whether this is something he <i>wants</i> to create, however, is beyond doubt. Which is not to say that the commercial alternative -- a monitoring-based, data-mined world of increasingly targeted advertising is necessarily any better. It will have its own costs. Again, I think Michael gets it right when he makes the comparison between the Google/Apple paradigm opposition and that between ranchers and farmers on the open frontier: they are both economic-driven commercial models. They are alternative ways of making money.Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-85419454527459862112010-03-24T23:51:00.000-07:002010-03-25T00:05:23.197-07:00MemeWatch: Do you "believe" in global warming?In Jon Stewart's recent appearance on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXyI1bJ6Y94">"The O'Reilly Factor,"</a> the host, Bill O'Reilly framed a question about global warming in what seems to becoming the preferred fashion on the right: "Do you <i>believe</i> in global warming?" This puts global warming on par with the Easter Bunny and Phlogiston. When did global warming become an issue of faith? Round about the same time that the Texas Board of Education <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-Enlightenment-Texas-Style/21791/">removed any reference to "Enlightenment ideas"</a> from the school curriculum. Coincidence? Perhaps not. The real question is, "do you believe in the scientific method and the process whereby it adduces empirical evidence and tests hypotheses?" Or, more simply, "don't you think that science is just another kind of faith -- perhaps a secular religion?" <div>Since then I've seen this formulation crop up in a number of different places -- sometimes in the form of an assertion by those who accept the scientific consensus: "I believe in global warming." Perhaps soon we'll have to say things like "I believe in the laws of gravity" (or not). In the face of the collapse of science, the goal is to couch everything in terms of a war of faiths. Or, more simply, war, which is what that boils down to. It should come as no surprise in this context that the response of right-wingers to passage of health car reform has been <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/map_a_guide_to_recent_vandal_attacks_on_democrats.php?ref=fpblg">threats and attacks</a>. Falling back behind the Enlightenment means returning to resources other than recourse to deliberation, evidence giving, and reason as means of settling debates. </div>Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-35166387389152112902010-03-24T23:34:00.000-07:002010-03-24T23:49:27.926-07:00MemeWatch: "The science isn't settled"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqvBCj8qHf-kQKObN41CRqOoWHfqthS3yuKmV-EHLYQHTT3TODJdOtuoyBCPH6W8A3kh9s2mBQ4me6HQBhz86A16A17PrAm1YvSBWCRElNHSAshiaQ03udUlty_QgMXCt1adRFOBO2I8ZU/s1600/amy-holmes-7158703.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqvBCj8qHf-kQKObN41CRqOoWHfqthS3yuKmV-EHLYQHTT3TODJdOtuoyBCPH6W8A3kh9s2mBQ4me6HQBhz86A16A17PrAm1YvSBWCRElNHSAshiaQ03udUlty_QgMXCt1adRFOBO2I8ZU/s200/amy-holmes-7158703.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452459945299947554" /></a><br />On Bill Maher <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/13/bill-maher-the-environmen_n_497781.html">the other night</a>, conservative talk radio host Amy Holmes trotted out the familiar right-wing talking point on global warming: "the science isn't settled." This then leads to a familiar, well-worn argument over various minutiae of the debate (what about the errors regarding the claim that Himalayan glaciers are melting? etc.). It would be nice to see someone like Maher respond by asking what it would mean for the science to be "settled." Would this mean that everyone who claims some kind of scientific credential would have to agree. If that were the case, the science still wouldn't be settled on whether the earth is round or flat. It would be a slightly less inane media world if every time someone tried this line they were forced to outline some kind of meaningful definition of what "settled" science is. I suppose the resulting danger would be some kind of vernacular postmodernism in which Republicans claimed that all scientific consensus is merely an arbitrary closure, an attempt to pin down the endless sliding of signifiers. Soon Frank Luntz will be talking like that -- when he isn't criticizing the lefty academy for preaching some combination of cultural relativism and Marxism.Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-30624584635829598362010-02-09T21:54:00.000-08:002020-06-15T05:00:32.067-07:00Everybody Loves the Negative<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEuwxmvhDaiR9ajH7MgZCDDKoGnDSFbcSgt7KZIwZ0ZkWXngT-OfDqxEjEDfqdq_eTpA70GXKEZrbySAffKn5MDqdCHDChSAirGll09JH1G_BjyFfVjmktpO3thEedWPrp8Sjup26XBQf4/s1600-h/baudrillard.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5436493847773200338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEuwxmvhDaiR9ajH7MgZCDDKoGnDSFbcSgt7KZIwZ0ZkWXngT-OfDqxEjEDfqdq_eTpA70GXKEZrbySAffKn5MDqdCHDChSAirGll09JH1G_BjyFfVjmktpO3thEedWPrp8Sjup26XBQf4/s200/baudrillard.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 200px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 200px;" /></a><br />
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I recently happened across a short critique of my reality TV book by Mark Poster (as I was trying to track down my 2009 publications at the behest of the University of Queensland). It was a familiar write off of arguments influenced by first generation Frankfurt School. Poster paraphrased the book's argument as follows: "Reality TV is merely one more sham perpetrated by the culture industry on a society that now must conform to the dictates of an 'interactive economy.'" And then the familiar rejoinder: "Although he credits himself a "critic," the rhetorical effect of his denunciation of reality TV is not an impetus to struggle but paralysis: nothing can be done that the reigning powers cannot co-opt." Then he closes with the final smackdown: "Academic cultural studies at the hands of such scholars betray a tendency to refuse any hint of a negative dialectic in popular culture."</div>
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In effect, the unkindest reflexive cut, the rhetorical Jiu-Jitsu move of turning what he imagined to be my own argument against itself: 'I know Adorno, and you're no Adorno.' </div>
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OK, granted. But the summation and the implicit definition of negative dialectics remind me of what I both like and dislike about media studies these days: there is such a wide range of theoretical influences, and such a shallow depth of philosophical history, that it's possible to get away with quite a lot. Like pretending you know what "a negative dialectic in popular culture" is without having to explain. This frees people up, but it runs the danger of reducing media studies to the facile pretentious gibberish that certain elements of the right and of assorted sciences and social sciences have suspected it of being all along. So, for the record, a few points. First, thanks to Poster for reading the book and giving it some play. But no thanks for accusing me of arguing that, "nothing can be done." Nowhere in the book is anything along those lines argued. Indeed, if such were the case, I'd be crazy not to drop the whole thing and start writing about how much I enjoy TV, or, better yet, go back to that gig on Wall Street and CASH IN. Poster seems to have read or at least skimmed some parts of the book, so I'm guessing he'd probably concede that I never actually argue what he accuses me of, but perhaps he sees paralysis as the unstated import of my argument. I think it would be more accurate to argue that the book's message is that <i>within the horizon of capital</i> nothing can be done -- without shattering the horizon. </div>
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But he seems to have something else in mind with the notion of "a negative dialectic in popular culture": something that I'm tempted to describe as the positive negativity of "popular culture" -- perhaps something he takes from the famous "two torn halves of an integral freedom" quote in Adorno's letter to Benjamin. Since Poster just throws the term out without explaining it, the reader is left to interpret what Poster imagines he means by the notion. My guess is this: that there is some emancipatory potential in "popular culture" in the sense that "it's not all bad": there is room to move, there are purchase points for critique, perhaps a covert but direct revolutionary impetus. This is what he takes away from his reading of Sue Murray and Laurie Ouellette on reality TV: "The genre thus opens to the audience the possibility of resistance to the broadcast." That may be so, but it is decidedly not what Adorno described by the term "negative dialectics." The automatic postmodern read of a "negative dialectic" (the one I suspect Poster of harboring) is that of some kind of open-ended unfolding: there's always a surplus or a lack, always something that overflows closure, always room to deconstruct, undo, reconfigure. Again, this may be true, but this is not Adorno's version. For Adorno dialectics (and all dialectics are, in the end, either negative or not truly dialectical) is a symptom of a wrong and damaged state of affairs, not a simple description of how things are once you cure yourself of metaphysics. </div>
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Negative dialectics is not some kind of precursor to the endless slippage of "differance," and so on. Yes, there is a gesture toward what might be described "room for resistance" but it is much fainter than Poster suggests with his invocation of Murray and Ouellette's description of reality TV as "Far from being the mind-numbing deceitful and simplistic genre that some critics claim it to be" because it provides a "multi-layered viewing experience that hinges on culturally and politically complex notions of what is real and what is not." </div>
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Again, while this may be true, it is not the same space as that defined by a "negative dialectic." A negative dialectic reveals the wrong state of affairs for what it is; it highlights the irrationality of what counts as rational, the administered character of freedom -- and even of the multiple layers of meaning that seem to constitute an opening. Moreover, "negative dialectics" is not an ahistorical description of how things are, but, as Adorno argues, the expression of a damaged world. They do not align with the metaphysical thrust of postmodern claims to perpetual openness, the impossibility of closure, and so on. A negative dialectic of popular culture does not so much open up the "complexities" of popular culture to the impetus of resistance, as display the barrenness of the wreckage for what it is. It is not quite as soothing as the familiar message of deconstruction: that arbitrary closures can always be undone to free things up. Negative dialectics are a bit more austere: they gesture only negatively at the possibility that things could be different by highlighting the irrationality of how they are. They even highlight the irrationality of the notion that freedom is nothing more than foraging for the usable bits amidst the wreckage.</div>
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Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-55555054603521681502009-06-10T18:58:00.000-07:002009-06-10T19:31:10.082-07:00"Birther" violenceThe right-wing extremist and conspiracy theorist who killed a guard at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. was, among other things a s0-<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnUyLgyUTYj6Mnb78F5KBz9Zgj8WDPeLFvPQwQfw0A6CSB15Bq9w0QBcQwdWEhcKd4-YB_a9HmVIe3lKP5bY1eMA-q22krbC30AFfxb5h00obk2SmsR3mp6KE0tTffMF9151I0Fb7bvbm_/s1600-h/vonBrunn.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 135px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 199px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5345885922926655234" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnUyLgyUTYj6Mnb78F5KBz9Zgj8WDPeLFvPQwQfw0A6CSB15Bq9w0QBcQwdWEhcKd4-YB_a9HmVIe3lKP5bY1eMA-q22krbC30AFfxb5h00obk2SmsR3mp6KE0tTffMF9151I0Fb7bvbm_/s200/vonBrunn.jpg" /></a>called "birther": one of the ultra-paranoid wingers who continue to insist, despite the wide circulation of proof to the contrary (see previous post), that Obama's birth certificate has been suppressed to cover up the fact that he was not born in the US and is therefore not a legitimate president.<br /><br />He represents the strange constellation of <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/06/writings_of_james_von_brunn.php">paranoia and racist hatred </a>that has come to characterize the right-wing fringe egged on in coded fashion by media commentators like Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Fox. The unifying theme is a sense of white victimization at the hands of a multi-faceted cabal that includes, in various paradoxical iterations, communists, bankers, Jews, Muslims, non-whites, the liberal elites, the state bureaucracy, and the mass media.Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-72159367571771382442008-07-10T18:52:00.001-07:002008-07-13T22:10:32.000-07:00Will the real elitist please stand up?A quick election '08 moment: One thing to keep an eye on is the curious mobilization of the e-word in US electoral politics. The Republicans have worked hard to disarticulate elitism, understood as an attitude, from elitism as a signifier or social or economic privilege. George W. Bush, a member of perhaps the most powerful and well-connected political family in the nation, is portrayed as the antithesis of elitism because of his folksy, brush-clearing, grammar-mangling style. By contrast, the favorite targets of right-wing charges of elitism are often those with negligible political or economic power: critics in academia, the literary world, and so on. In keeping with the time-tested strategy of branding opponents elitists, Karl Rove recently <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/26/obama.rove/">outlined</a> his preferred campaign strategy for the McCain/Obama election at a meeting of GOP insiders: "Even if you never met him, you know this guy...He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone." It's such a strange invocation, considering the long history of racial exclusion at country clubs, to portray Obama as the insider, and the GOP elite as the outsiders being sneered at. But then again, that explains a lot about the way people like Rove seem to see themselves -- as aggrieved and unappreciated outsiders, no matter how long they've been running the party and how rich and privileged they are.<br />What causes trouble for Republicans, interestingly, is not when they're busted being elites -- cutting taxes and deals for their wealthy buddies, but when they actual reveal their own insular privileged status, as when, for example, George Bush I reacted with fascination at the sight of a bar code scanner at a checkout counter. Or, more recently, when Phil Gramm claimed that economic concerns were purely a figment of the imagination of a "<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/10/mccain-adviser-americans_n_111857.html">nation of whiners</a>."<br /> <p:colorscheme colors="#ffffff,#000000,#808080,#000000,#bbe0e3,#333399,#009999,#99cc00"> </p:colorscheme><div shape="_x0000_s1026" class="O"> <div style=""><span style="font-size:178;"><span style="position: absolute; left: -3.83%;">•</span></span><span style="font-size:32;"></span><span style="font-size:32;"> </span></div> </div>Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9128333502690409966.post-67842422518777217902008-07-07T18:41:00.000-07:002008-12-09T23:33:24.594-08:00YouTelescreen<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuGZgOCQRbwyJkP7VoigWxXAOdNpiNBtGORQlKcM3HQ5RaqueCf8YWyhLYmoKlr7-4WkDiXIZrkd0xxGV5rZU1EJKNdpE92xSs9dtAzVc5gWYPELPqD3qz92XVYr2xpC1pFgs6tWlwekPH/s1600-h/telescreen.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuGZgOCQRbwyJkP7VoigWxXAOdNpiNBtGORQlKcM3HQ5RaqueCf8YWyhLYmoKlr7-4WkDiXIZrkd0xxGV5rZU1EJKNdpE92xSs9dtAzVc5gWYPELPqD3qz92XVYr2xpC1pFgs6tWlwekPH/s200/telescreen.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5220453949864545922" border="0" /></a><br /></div>"He thought of the telescreen with its never sleeping ear" -- G.O.<br /><br />What seems to get lost in the recent <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/the-privacy-risk-from-the-courts/?scp=1&sq=youtube%20viacom%20court%20order&st=cse">hullabaloo </a>over the <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2008-07-03-google-video-logs_N.htm?csp=34">court order</a> requiring Google to hand over details of YouTube viewing patterns to Viacom is the fact that Google has all this info in the first place. The EFF is bent out of shape because, as one of its staff attorneys puts it, the judge, should "have considered... a right to read or view materials anonymously." If Viacom doesn't know what we're watching, does that mean the process is anonymous even if Google/YouTube does? Alternatively, if YouTube does, hasn't such a right ALREADY been violated? One of the coverage highlights has been the spectacle of Google getting indignant about invasions of privacy: "In a statement, Google said it was 'disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order.'" Once again, an interesting double standard: if Google has non-anonymized info about user names and IP addresses it still apparently counts as "private." The goal here seems to be to naturalize Google's possession of this info. Or, more cogently, the privacy at stake here is not that of individual users, but of Google's claim to proprietary control over the information. Google isn't asking for our privacy to be protected, it wants its private control over the data maintained.Free Laborhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07175583665064125040noreply@blogger.com0