Worth a watch…
Investigating Google’s revolving door with governments – Tactical Tech Collective
Some really interesting work from the Tactical Team looking at the ways in which different people and their skills and knowledges move in and out of government and the ‘Alphabet empire’. Worth a full read, but here’s a snippet to whet the appetite…
The Alphabet Empire by Tactical Tech and La Loma as shown in The Glass Room in New York. Based on openly available information, this 3-D infographic combines a quote from its chairman, Eric Schmidt, with a mapping of its acquisitions and investments.
By Google’s own admission, the company, like many others, cultivates close relationships with governmental bodies and public officials. Google disclosed that in 2015 it spent over €4 million on lobbying the European Union – considerably more than the €1 million on lobbying spent just three years previously in 2012.But some of Google’s relationships with public bodies and officials come with a smaller price tag: Over the past ten years at least 80 people have been identified to have moved jobs between Google and European governments.
It’s this “revolving door” that formed the basis of our investigation. We started out with a number of questions: who were these people who had moved from Google to government or vice versa? Where exactly did they move from and to, and when? And most importantly how many of these questions could we find answers to using open, publicly-available information?
Affect & Social Media 3.0 CFP
Via Tony Sampson…
Affect and Social Media#3 2nd CFP
Call for presentations and artworks
Affect and Social Media#3
experience
engagement
entanglement
Including the Sensorium Art Show (the sequel)
Event Date: Thurs 25th May, 2017
Venue: University of East London, Docklands Campus
Confirmed keynote: Prof Jessica Ringrose (UCL)
https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=JLRIN58
Call for 15min presentations and artworks
The organizers of A&SM#3 welcome proposals for 15min presentations and artworks that interpret and explore the affective, feely and emotional encounters with social media grasped through the following themes:
- Experience
- Engagement
- Entanglement
Presentations and artworks can widely interpret each theme, but preference will be given to proposals that respond in two ways.
Firstly, the organizers are particularly interested in creative responses (academic and artistic) to recent social media events – the US election, for example. So proposals might address how the Trump win allows us to develop a fresh understanding of shared experiences, emotional engagements or new entanglements with social media.
Secondly, we ask presenters and artists to consider how their approach to affect and social media can be put to work in an education context. For example, how can the potential of affect theory reach out across teaching practices and develop novel understandings of the political nature and transformative possibilities of teaching.
The academic part of this call is open to experienced scholars, new researchers and postgrad students from across the disciplinary boundaries of affect studies and related areas of study interested in theorizing and working with emotion and feelings in a social media context. We welcome a good mixture of innovative conceptual and methodological approaches.
The Sensorium Art Exhibit will interweave the conference proceedings and bring it to a close with a special show, alongside free drinks and nibbles.
15min presentations and artwork proposals to: t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk
Please include 200 word max description and short bio including academic affiliation and relevant links to previous work and/or website profile.
DEADLINE: Tues 28th Feb 2017.
Full registration details will be made available from 27th Jan via UEL event page.
https://www.uel.ac.uk/Events/2017/05/Affect-and-Social-Media-3
CFP> Creative propositions and provocations on the heritages of data-trade-place-value
Paula Crutchlow, with Ian Cook and I, invite submissions for the following session for this year’s RGS-IBG conference. Please do share this with anyone (doesn’t have to be geographers) who may be interested. As we say below, we welcome any kind of creative response to the theme. The session builds on Paula’s PhD project The Museum of Contemporary Commodities, which will be active before and throughout the conference in the RGS-IBG building.
Museum of Contemporary Commodities: creative propositions and provocations on the heritages of data-trade-place-value
How do we open out the messy digital geographies of trade, place and value to the world? How can we work with the digital beyond beyond archives, spectacle and techno-dystopian imaginations? How do we do so in a ways that are performative, collaborative and provocative of the digital?
This session builds on the planned hosting of the Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) in the RGS(IBG)’s Pavilion in the days leading up to the annual conference (and its partial installation in the RGS(IBG) building during the conference) where it will join the V&A, Science and Natural History Museums on London’s Exhibition Road. Developed as acts of valuing the things we buy today as the heritage of tomorrow, MoCC’s artworks take the form of dynamic, collaborative hacks and prototypes; socio-material processes, objects and events that aim to enrol publics in trade justice debates in light footed, life-affirming, surprising and contagious ways as part of their daily routines.
We invite prospective participants to offer propositions and provocations that stitch into or unpick the complex and sometime knotty patchwork quilt of data-trade-place-value. This is an invitation to contribute to and convene conversations that enliven geographical understandings of the governance, performance, placings and values/valuing of contemporary (digitally) mediated material culture. The resulting session is not conceived as a ‘conventional’ paper session. We invite submissions of ten-minute contributions that might take various forms, which might include essay, performance, video and many other creative responses to the theme.
This invitation should be understood in its broadest sense. We are interested in the commingling and mash-up of the theme(s) data-trade-place-value. We very much encourage submissions that push back against the normative authorities or discourses surrounding ‘the digital’ (however that might be conceived). So, we hope that all involved in the session will thereby be challenged and inspired by creative propositions and provocations that begin to get to the heart of how we open out the messy digital geographies of trade, place and value to the world.
Themes could include:
- lively methods that work with and through participatory media
- intimacy, humour, trust and the internet of things
- mashups, subversions and hacks of big data from the bottom up
- discourses and practises of future orientation and the spatial imaginations of ‘the digital’
- an intersectional internet and the rise of ‘platforms’
- alternative trade models, value systems and networked culture
- DIWO (Do It With Others), scholar-activism & public pedagogy
- the economic geographies of the battle for ‘open’
- Please submit 250 word abstracts to us by email by 7 February and we will get back to you by 13 February.
When design fiction becomes the advert(?) Amazon Go and the refiguring of trust
I think I’ve been late to this. I saw the story about Barclaycard wanting to do “cardless” credit cards but, of course, Amazon want to vertically integrate. See the first video below. Interesting that this is incredibly similar to previous ‘envisionings’ of “the future” of retail/shopping. The first thing I thought was: ‘hang on, this is Microsoft circa 2004’, see the second video below… and I’m sure there’s been others, not least from the likes of HP Labs… I wonder where patents lie on this stuff, cos that will be a big bargaining chip.
This is interesting though insofar as, when I was writing about the Microsoft Office Labs videos in 2008/9, the ‘future’ they figured was always positioned at some distance, it was certainly not explicitly stated that this is something you should definitely expect to happen, more a kind of ‘mood music’ to capture some sensibilities of a possible future, by representing it and hooking ideas into our general imagination of technology and society. It certainly plays on the trope of the normalisation of heavy surveillance… what else can such a system be?
The Amazon Go video is an interesting confluence of lots of contemporary trends in attempts to refigure how we imagine digital technology. Implicit in the video is a normalisation of yet-more automation (of payment, of trust). Explicit here, as already mentioned, is that these kinds of places are not ‘private’ in any way – the system “knows” you, will know your habits, manages your money and that’s ok, in fact – it’s apparently preferable (trust, again).
Amazon seem to be fairly aggressively pushing this, taking the smooth apparently effortless aesthetics of many tech design fiction videos and using this as a means to capture the idea that such technology = Amazon. Apparently there is a “beta” shop in Seattle (where else?). No doubt someone will already be writing a journal article about this as code/space and, of course it is (and just as Kitchin & Dodge suggest about airports – I wouldn’t want to be in this shop when the servers go down), but I think the thing I find more interesting is that it seems to me that this is perhaps an overtly political manoeuvre to capture the public story about what ‘currency’ is and how payment works when we take for granted higher levels of automation, through what kinds of institution and who we can trust. This is quite a different story to the blockchain, Amazon seem to be saying “let us handle the trust issue” – a pitch usually made by a bank, or PayPal… That might be interesting to think about (I’m sure people, like Rachel O’Dwyer, already are), not least in relation to other ways ‘trust’ is being addressed (and attempts are being made to refigure it) by other companies, institutions and groups.
All this means I’ll definitely be re-writing my lecture about money for the next iteration of my “Geographies of Technology” module next term…
Planetary technics? “Technosphere”, HKW
Via: EnemyIndustry
The always interesting HKW and a project relevant to lots of geographers…
Technosphere
Research Project 2015–2018
The twentieth-century celebrated technology as a way to achieve planetary unity and control. Yet today technics, nature, and human activity seem to combine in increasingly disorienting, uncontrolled compositions in which once-reliable distinctions lose their stability. How did we end up in this world of technological vertigo, this Mobius strip of world and planetary technics, wherein cause and effect, local and global factors, human and non-human agency, perpetually confuse and confound one another’s borders? What governs this constitution (or collision) of forces? And what are the contingent, strategic, or historical events and networks that form durable apparatuses among them?
This dilemma of global technology and its identity will be the main theme of Technosphere (2015-18), a research project investigating origins and future itineraries of this technical world within a larger series of international events, performances, seminars, and conferences that will take place at HKW over the next four years.
Scientists and thinkers have introduced the term technosphere to describe the mobilization and hybridization of energy, material, and environments into a planetary system on par with other spheres such as the atmosphere or biosphere. The term emphasizes the leading role of the technological within this global system. At the same time this term encompasses the enclosure of human populations, forests, cities, seas, and other traditionally non-technical entities within systems of technical management and productivity. But where is that ominous technosphere to be found? How does it impact the everyday passions and experiences of humans, animals, a nation, or an ecosphere?
The coining of the term technosphere announces a conceptual innovation as well as a political challenge. As a conceptual innovation, the notion of the technosphere invites us to recognize and confront the reality of technical systems whose unintended consequences and internal dynamics have accumulated into a quasi-autonomous global force in the world today. Moreover, the very naming of these forces constitutes the posing of new political and social challenges that, though already widely felt, remain largely misunderstood. Their description and study will entail inquiries into physical and political science, but also topics as diverse as aesthetics, waste management, international law, social media, financial markets, animal studies, immigration, and colonialism.
From 2015 to 2018 the Technosphere project will host public events and seminars that explore the potential of this concept to coordinate conversations among scientists, artists, and the general public. It will explore the events, structures, and mechanisms by which the twentieth-century dreams of global unity and human hegemony morphed into disorienting compositions of technics and nature, of human and non-human actors. These investigative and experimental exchanges will ask how the technosphere operates today and endeavor to imagine alternative futures. The result will be a tentative vision of communities and understanding equal to the challenges of our world today.
Under the title The Technosphere, Now a daylong series of conversations and presentations that reveal the infrastructures and operations today will inaugurate the project on Friday, 2 October. Interwoven streams will address the infrastructural exploitation of earthly resources, how data monitors technical and social systems, and how the trauma maps out the dynamics of the technosphere on individual human bodies. The event is part of Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s opening weekend of 100 Years of Now, taking place from September 30th to October 4th 2015.
Concept and Realisation: Katrin Klingan, Bernard Geoghegan, Christoph Rosol, and Janek Müller
“Technosphere” takes place as part of the HKW series 100 Years of Now.
David Harvey on post-neoliberalism, Trump, infrastructure, sharing economy, smart city
Via Deterritorial Investigations Unit.
David Harvey talking to Evgeny Morozov, in the first few minutes he addresses the issue of the claims being made about the end of globalisation/neoliberalism. The conversation then quickly ranges over the gig economy and what Guy Standing calls the ‘precariat’ (it’d be interesting to stage that conversation!) and then a brief statement question about ‘smart’ cities (Harvey is dismissive). Worth watching.
Where’s the geography in the ‘end of globalisation’ trope pushed by the commentariat?
[T]here are abundant signs that localism and nationalism have become stronger precisely because of quest for security that place always offers in the midst of all the shifting that [globalisation] implies – The Condition of Postmodernity (adapted), David Harvey, p. 306.
Globalisation as ‘…a hegemonic ideology supporting the necessity and inevitability of the free movement of capital and goods, helped to create the institutional conditions which then contributed to making the free movement of capital and goods a reality’ – Paul Hirst “The global economy – myths and realities.” (1999), p. 424.
Actually existing globalisation is not the globalisation of neoliberal visions, the Utopia of friction-free global markets or Internet-driven virtual worlds, but the contingent and unsteady symbiosis of imperfectly transnational networks, institutions and firms, and the ‘ramshackle diversity’ of international bureaucracies, states, police, mafias and other sources of power struggling for shifting territorial authority in the post-cold war world. – Gerard Ó Tuathail “Political geography III: dealing with deterritorialization.” (1998) p. 87.
An all-to-brief and idle thought: Whatever happened to critique of ‘globalisation’? There was a time not long ago when commentators would’ve been on the side of those they seek to blame for voting for Brexit and Trump… the apparent ‘losers’ in the last thirty-odd years of ‘globalisation’ (or, perhaps, more specifically what Peter Dicken called a new international division of labour in his “Global Production Networks” framework in Global Shift).
When critical discussion of globalisation was a thing in geography people like David Harvey and Doreen Massey had something to say about this… indeed, this used to be a staple of a geography sylabus. I can’t help wondering what Massey would say about the last six months… Nevertheless, I haven’t seen any kind of comment by Harvey (if there has been, please point to what I’ve missed in the comments below).
Critical reflections on the rise of economic globalisation, the rise of TNCs, global commodity chains, off-shoring and so on brought about a critical discourse of globalisation that seems to be missing from the current commentary. Instead, we seem to see a conflation of a generalised (to the point of being unclear) idea of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalisation’ and, depending on your standpoint, the recent popular vote for Brexit in the UK and the narrow victory of Trump are meant to signify a backlash to this. Perhaps because of the toxic racist and misogynistic undertones of the ‘Leave’ and Trump campaigns, some commentators seem to be implying that actually the status quo of economic globalisation and ‘neoliberalism’ should’ve been retained (i.e. vote of ‘remain’ & Clinton, resulting in TTIP etc ). Maybe (I hope) I’m misreading the arguments (I’m not getting much sleep due to baby/child sleeplessness!), maybe this is a plea for global solidarity, but maybe, also, the rush to get into print is leading to forms of scapegoating too…
Either way, it seems to me that it might be prudent for more of us to revisit ‘globalisation’ in our research and teaching (I have no doubt that there is some great work going on that I don’t know about here).
Reblog> Postdoc job on ProgCity project – great opportunity
This is a great opportunity for someone broadly working in the areas of interest specified below…
Post advertised: Postdoc on ProgCity project
We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher (14 month contract) to join the Programmable City project. The researcher will critically examine:
- the political economy of smart city technologies and initiatives; the creation of smart city markets; the inter-relation of urban (re)development and smart city initiatives; the relationship between vendors, business lobby groups, economic development agencies, and city administrations; financialization and new business models; and/or,
- the relationship between the political geography of city administration, governance arrangements, and smart city initiatives; political and legal geographies of testbed urbanism and smart city initiatives; smart city technologies and governmentality.
There will be some latitude to negotiate with the principal investigator the exact focus of the research undertaken. While some of the research will require primary fieldwork (Dublin/Boston), it is anticipated it will also involve the secondary analysis of data already generated by the project.
More details on the post and how to apply can be found on the university HR website. Closing date: 5th December.
Event> Abbinnett & Fuller: The philosophy of Bernard Stiegler – capitalism, technology & politics of spirit
Birmingham’s Contemporary Philosophy of Technology group have an event with Ross Abbinnett and Steve Fuller in conversation. Abbinnett is asserting himself as one of the few anglophone interpreters* of Stiegler’s work, with a monograph due out fairly soon and a punchy article in Theory, Culture & Society interpreting Stiegler’s project in terms of a politics of spirit (in the vein of Ars Industrialis).
I suspect it’ll be a rather muscular affair, so if that’s your thing here’s the info:
* I use ‘interpreter’ purposefully, I don’t think Dr Abbinnett translates Stiegler’s works.