Spot the difference:
2011
2018
Both Microsoft.
Groundhog IOT futures Day
Bernard Stielger and the Plaine Commune experiment
I’ve been following up some links concerning the experiment that the philosopher Bernard Stiegler has been instrumental in setting up in the Greater Paris borough of Seine-Saint-Denis as part of a sort of ‘special trade/economic’ area that has government funding called Plaine Commune.
I’ve (roughly) translated two pieces, below, which offer a little more detail on how the territoire contributif model might work and the sorts of things going on in Plaine Commune. First is short piece from Le Parisien talking about what the project is and a bit of the ‘how’ and ‘when’. Second is an interview with Bernard Stiegler by a staff writer for The Conversation – France specifically about Plaine Commune.
As I have written elsewhere, Stiegler has proposed Plaine Commune as a ‘territoire contributif‘ – a sort of region of contribution [a territory or zone delineated as an area in which the economy of contribution might take precedence, along the same lines as ‘free trade zones‘ perhaps, but with a very different ethics/politics]. The principle role in this enterprise is the role of the (academic professorial) ‘Chair of economies of contribution’, who is charged with overseeing the pilot of a kind of basic or citizens’ income (broadly akin to a universal basic income, though see the discussion below) that Stiegler suggest will be implemented through a formal agreement of ‘contribution’ – whereby the income is granted on the premise that the people given it will use it to subside their own personal development, in turn making them greater contributors to society.
Anyone who has been around or studied or even simply read about political projects that are led by well-meaning academics may well be fairly suspicious or cynical about such a scheme. It seems the project has not been without issues either, with (as far as I can tell) some of the governmental funding falling short of expectations and thus cuts to planned activities had to be made (there were PhD studentships planned but these it seems may have been cut).
If we are to be charitable we might applaud Stiegler for attempting to put into place his ideas about contributory – economies, incomes, territories and so on. I am also sympathetic to the issues of funding and so on that they’re having to wrangle with – doing this kind of work is hard. The project is still in train so it remains to be seen how it plays out. Nevertheless, I have a few questions.
First, the project is positioned as a means of helping local residents of a given area and yet a lot of the funding seems to be directed towards academic work that must be, in part, institutionally based – I wonder how this works out? Where does the ‘Professor of Contribution’ actually sit – where’s their office?
Second, I’m curious about the relationship between the processes and practices labelled as ‘contributory’ and the techniques and technologies from long-standing engaged/ participatory democracy activities, e.g. GovLab, MySociety and others. How is ‘participatory’ employment/economics different?
Third, towards the end of the interview, below, Stiegler claims that the aim is not to build a specific local economy but to ultimately transform the macro-economy, but we don’t really get any detail about how you get from Plaine Commune to the whole of France. It would be good to see more on that.
Finally, the tools that are suggested, and have been created through the Institute for Research and Innovation at the Pompidou Centre are very pedagogical – concerned with shared or collaborative learning, in the vein of educational technology – and so it would be good to understand if that is the sole focus or whether the toolset will broaden and if so how?
Anyway… please find below the two (rough) translations. As usual I have included in square brackets original French, where I’m unsure of the translation, or clarifications. I have also maintained, in the Conversation piece, all of the original francophone hyperlinks unless there is a clear anglophone alternative.
I welcome comments or corrections!
Plaine Commune wants to test a “contributive income”
The borough [territoire] of Plaine Commune* wants to trial a “contributory income”. The project is still in the hands of researchers and, if it takes place, it will not begin in the near future. The concept is supposed to respond to the massive loss of salaried jobs, due to automation and the growth and spread of digitisation. “According to a study, three million jobs will disappear by 2025,” notes the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, who works on the project for the borough [territoire]. This Wednesday, he presented the outline, in Saint-Denis, alongside Patrick Braouezec, president (Front de gauche) of Plaine Commune. The latter was commissioned in May 2015 by the Ministers of Economy and Higher Education to discuss the issue.
The contributory income, unlike a universal income, could be paid to a part of the population, on the condition that they perform, in one way or another, a service to society. Bernard Stiegler distinguishes here (salaried) “employment” from “work” (accomplished outside of any contract). And he cites the example of the ‘intermittents du spectacle’ [see: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/intermittent-support-how-cuts-are-hitting-artists-in-france/] “who continue to work when they are not employed by a director, by improving their abilities”.
Who could be involved in this contributory income, in a territory where poverty affects nearly one in three households? Nothing is stopped but Bernard Stiegler and Patrick Braouezec cite areas such as sport, music, street food, mobile mechanics [mécaniques sauvages] … There needs to be a way “to allow the entire population to feel their work is recognised, while also enabling young people who have skills without qualifications to contribute to society” says Patrick Braouezec.
With the support of the Ministry of Higher Education, last Autumn a Chair of Contributive Research was created at the Maison des sciences de l’homme in Saint-Denis. Orange and Dassault Systems are participating in the research, alongside the Institute of Research and Innovation headed by Bernard Stiegler. A report is delivered to the ministers concerned today. The implementation of the experiment cannot be decided upon before the elections: “In June, we will take up where we left off [reprendrons notre bâton de pèlerin],” insists Patrick Braouezec.
* Plaine Commune is something like a borough within the suburban department (a governmental and legislative geographical authority within France) of Seine-Saint-Denis, which is a part of what gets referred to as “Greater Paris“.
A conversation with Bernard Stiegler: “Making Plaine Commune in Seine-Saint-Denis the first territory for contribution [territoire contributif] in France”
Jennifer Gallé
A [demographically] young and economically dynamic territory facing mass unemployment and the challenges of social and cultural diversity is the location where, at the request of Patrick Braouezec, the president of Plaine Commune, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler is initiating an unprecedented and ambitious experiment: to make this community – which brings together nine cities of Seine-Saint-Denis – a “Contributory Learning Territory”. It will carry out contributory “research-action” projects, including the inhabitants; in the long term, it will be a question of setting up a contributory income to differently distribute wealth at a time when automation makes work precarious. In November 2016, a new Chair of Contributory Research joined the principle researchers, created within the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH-North Paris). The Conversation France met the philosopher [Bernard Stiegler] to learn more about this initiative, where new ways of doing research and reflections upon the nature of the work of tomorrow interact.
What is the purpose of this project?
It is a question of inventing a “French disruption” and to make the Plaine Commune borough, which is not privileged but shows a striking dynamism, into a laboratory, a school, a avant-garde location, including appropriating so-called smart cities [originally in English with “villes intelligentes” appended] – but not to become a smart city as it is defined today, and to us seems unbearable, unacceptable and probably bankrupt. It is about installing a true urban intelligence.
We are launching a process of borough-wide experimentation with a view to generating and supporting real social innovation opening the way to a new macro-economy where industrialists, financiers, universities, artists, governments and local politicians work in concert, and with the inhabitants, in this indispensable political and economic reinvention. The objective is ultimately to set up an economy based on a “contributory income”, which is based in particular on the principle of a gradual extension of the system for intermittents du spectacle into other activities.
When did this project take shape?
In December 2013, following the “The new age of automation” colloquium held at the Pompidou Centre, which focused on the effects of digital technology in the development of the data economy. I had discussions with industrialists and the president of Plaine Commune, Patrick Braouezec: we take very seriously the Oxford and MIT analyses which predict a job collapse because 47% of jobs current in the United States would be automatable, 50% in France, etc. – the Roland Berger corporation anticipate three million jobs will be lost in ten years. Something has to be done.
A minimum wage is not a solution on its own. If the issue of automation and job loss is taken seriously, new production processes and criteria for redistributing wealth must be developed.
[a video about the ‘top 10 roles that may be replaced by robots’ was originally embedded here]
Why is the distinction between work and employment essential?
If automatable work disappears, we can celebrate: this type of job consists of applying prescribed procedures by systems that mechanically control employees. The work is done more and more outside of employment. The pianist practices his scales in the same way that the mathematician practices his maths: outside of employment … Thus, to work is to first increase one’s abilities – and these abilities are what can bring a wealth to the world that is not yet present.
We borrow the concept of capacity to the Indian economist Amartya Sen. He has highlighted something significant that is the basis of our reflection: he showed that in Bangladesh, even during a period of famine, development indicators and life expectancy were higher than those of Harlem. Amartya Sen, who is interested in communities, not just individuals, has shown how these communities maintain what they call “capabilities“.
A capability is knowledge – a life-skill as well as know-how or intellectual knowledge. Many people in Harlem have lost this because they are caught in a process of proletarianization by patterns of production or consumption. In the twentieth century, the know-how of the worker disappears then it is the turn of the life-skills of the consumer, who begins to adopt prefabricated behaviours by marketing firms. Ultimately, Alan Greenspan himself declares before the Congressional Budget Committee that he has “>lost his economic knowledge!
Why Seine-Saint-Denis?
Principally, there is, the president of Plaine Commune, Patrick Braouezec’s keen interest, for over ten years, in the work we are doing as part of the Institute for Research and Innovation and the Ars Industrialis Association which I chair. There is also the extraordinary economic dynamism of this borough, especially in the south of the department with this very strong urban dynamic around the Stade de France, a development begun twenty years ago.
In the northern suburbs are also two universities, Paris 8 and Paris 13, with several excellent groups, the Condorcet campus in whicha number of researchers and graduate schools in the social sciences, such as the EHESS [School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences], will be concentrated, and it is also an urban space where many artists settle. Ultimately it is a territory that must find solutions to deal with mass unemployment. Extrapolating figures from Roland Berger’s study [Roland Berger is a business consultancy firm], unemployment for the under-25s, which was 38% two years ago, is set to increase catastrophically in the next ten years. The consequences for Plaine Commune are likely to be unbearable.
There is therefore an imperative need to open up new perspectives on making an economically viable means of developing that might otherwise become apocalyptic. The nation has the duty to support such a development. We believe that the potential of this transformation must serve as an exemplar, the aim is not to develop a “local” economy here.
How will the research component of the project be organized?
We identified a series of objectives with the elected officials and administrative staff of Plaine Commune. We have started a survey of a number of major stakeholders who validated the process and we are currently launching a Chair of Contributory Research whose first mission will be to produce a dossier to define the experimental scope of the project, in close collaboration with Plaine Commune.
In this context, we launched a call for applications for PhD studentships around a dozen themes, which closed on September 30, 2016. We initially had to select between 10 and 20 PhD students. The budgets allocated to us in 2016 by the Ministry of Research and Higher Education has not ultimately allowed us to hire doctoral students this year. We therefore recruited five researchers – in economics, political science, sociology, philosophy and education studies – into a one-year contract to start the work and put in place the methods of contributory research, which represents a whole series of constraints. Another researcher in psychoanalysis has been retained, who is self-financing.
In the first place, they will have to be able to explain the subject of their work to the inhabitants of Plaine Commune, whether they are fluent in French or not. We will of course help them by mobilizing actors, videographers, artists, media outlets … But they will have to make an effort to explain, even if their subject is theoretical. They will follow two seminars a week: one that I will lead and another that they will lead themselves, by presenting their work to one another and inviting [external] researchers or contributors. They will work together, share their notes and results, first with each other and then with the local residents.
Can you give a concrete example?
In the renovation of social housing, for example, a contribution economy for a building could be set up to create a “negentropic” – as opposed to entropic – environment which is also a site for building the skills of the inhabitants, in the style of the architect Patrick Bouchain [more information on Bouchain]. These are residents who innovate and produce sustainable value for themselves, as much as for the city.
More generally, what place is there for residents in this system [dispositif]?
For this project, which takes ten years to [attempt to] deeply change things, we hope to be able to involve the 400,000 inhabitants of Plaine Commune with this contributory research approach; it will start on a small scale to extend to what could be called a contributory democracy. The program is transdisciplinary, as all fields must be explored, such as sports for example. Here, the Stade de France is crucial and sport has been profoundly transformed by the digital in recent years. If we speak to the young people of Seine-Saint-Denis without being able to say anything about football, we will not get very far – especially as there is the prospect of the Olympic Games in 2024.
Why put digital at the heart of the project?
Because digital technology is changing all knowledge, and because knowledge is the key to the future. In 2008, Vincent Peillon, at the time Minister of Education, asked me to lead a group on the introduction of digital [technology] into school; I had then a little disappointed his cabinet by stating: “The digital is dangerous for schools”. I resigned pretty quickly. I’m working on these issues with Maryanne Wolf, an American neuropsychologist. She conducts accurate analyzes, based on medical imaging, and some of her findings are rather troubling.
I’m not saying that we do not need the digital in school, but I do say that it must be introduced deliberately. I continued to support this point of view, particularly at the National Research Agency where I sat for a few years; I had thus proposed to develop doctoral research in all fields to see what the digital “does” within disciplines. For it is not simply a new way of teaching or transmitting knowledge; it is first of all a means of producing knowledge, scientific objects; take nano-objects, for example, which are today entirely produced by the digital; biology and astrophysics also go through the digital, and in mathematics the conditions of proof are modified.
Digital technology is a scientific revolution on which no one works, because all the credits are put on innovation to develop the software and the interfaces of tomorrow … In 2008, I also told by a consultant of Vincent Peillon that it was necessary to adopt a rational attitude towards the digital world and to study it. He told me that I reasoned like an “intellectual” and that he needed quick results. I suggested that we could move forward through contributory research. That is to say, to bring digital into school by introducing, at the same time, research. I always cite Finland where all teachers in are obliged to do research – and this is clearly not insignificant in the quality of the results of this country. That’s what I call contributive research, it goes beyond the teaching profession and concerns the whole population.
What is the digital doing in research?
Digital technology is transforming all scientific activities, as the instruments of observation have been doing since the sixteenth century, passing through what Bachelard called phenomenotechnics [for further discussion]. Yet unlike previous scientific technologies, digital technology also modifies life-skills and know-how, that is to say, everyday life and social relations as well as linguistic skills, for example: these are the scientific objects that are changed.
We are also in a period where technology is evolving extremely fast; if we follow the normal circuits of scientific deliberation, we always arrive too late. This is “disruption“.
Faced with disruption, the social systems and the people who constitute them must also grasp technological development to become prescribers and practitioners, and not only consumers – and sometimes victims. The social system is being short-circuited, and so destroyed, by the technical system. To this end, we must do “concurrent engineering” [l’ingéniérie simultanée]; Thirty years ago, Renault and Volvo introduced such methods to accelerate the transfer of technology by working in parallel and not sequentially; it has become today what we call “agile development”. I have been practicing this for a long time, especially with engineers. For Plaine Commune, the idea is to elaborate – simultaneously with all the different stakeholders in the territory, including the industrialists – a debate, theoretical hypotheses, a required scientific oversight, and using action research methods.
What do you mean by action research?
This is a method developed in the United States in the 1940s by Kurt Lewin who used it in psychosociology; for him, when working with “subjects”, to use the vocabulary of psychologists, it is necessary that people themselves become researchers, because they are precisely subjects and not objects.
This method was then used in management, it is also why it is much criticized by the left and Marxists who see a method of integration and ultimately manipulation. Norway, in particular, has been advanced in transforming its industrial production tools. Action research has also been used in the field of psychiatry, such as at the Tavistock Institute in London.
We must mention here the works of François Tosquelles [this paper provides some context about Tosquelles], a refugee from the Spanish war who transformed a neglected psychiatric hospital in Lozère into a place that became experimental, somewhat by accident. Totally abandoned by the Vichy government in the 1940s, this hospital, like many others, had to face an extreme situation with patients dying of hunger. Tosquelles then completely reversed the situation by urging his patients to take hold of the state of affairs to make the hospital the object of care. The institution became the sick person to be cared for. This was the beginning of a revolution, which included Georges Canguilhem. At the Borde clinic Félix Guattari pursued this direction with Jean Oury.
[A francophone video about Francois Tosquelles was embedded here in the original]
Is there a place for industrialists in Plaine Commune?
Orange and Dassault Systèmes actively support us. Orange is seeking to develop local platforms and related local services, and together with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) we argue that we need to bring forward a new kind of web that cannot be transformed into a data economy. A contributory tool for people, not people serving the platform!
From Dassault Systèmes, whose engineering communities are already working on the contributory mode, there is a very strong interest for the research and experimentation that we carry out around the sharing of notes. They are also very sensitive to the problems of the contributory economy.
What will these new contributory tools consist of?
Tools [see the IRI website] for note-taking, for example, there is a system capable of making a contributory recommendations – allowing, through the algorithmic analysis of annotations, to recommend the work of other researchers, on various criteria, in order to emphasize convergences and divergences and thus activate the kinds of critical dynamics that make science. It is a kind of computer-assisted Socratic dialogue. When you have 24 students, it’s the teacher who does that; but it’s impossible with thousands of people.
The goal is also to develop new types of social networks that are built around a controversy or a common goal. This would connect not individuals but groups, restoring the social link. Today, social networks are antisocial; But this is not inevitable.
Mostly, then, it is about recreating links …
There is currently a big debate in California on big data and correlationist mathematics, the advances in which lead some to say that we will soon be able to do without theory: some, including Chris Anderson, claim that thanks to correlations theoretical elaboration becomes incidental. I am fiercely opposed to this delusional discourse, which is part of the basis of the data economy, and I criticise this in The Automatic Society.
Digital contributory technologies must be used not to bypass the decision of individuals and groups but to debate and consolidate decisions. The first time I thought about what could be a “truly smart city” , it was in the very small town of Loos-en-Gohelle with its mayor, Jean-François Caron, who ten years ago set up a system of sensors – for recording circulation, temperature, consumption – which does not trigger automated regulations managed by algorithms … rather they convene meetings of residents and associations.
How do you differentiate between contributory and collaborative?
[There is] a big difference. Collaborative is what enables working for free; it is the logic of the Uber, Amazon or Airbnb -type platforms where, progressively, under the pretext of sharing data, we create short circuits, we perform disintermediation, we completely deregulate and we become predatory because we have captured all of everyone’s data and we control all this in an occult way. It is a negative contribution; these platforms which redistribute nothing – neither money nor symbols [symbole] – proletarianise and de-symbolise [désymbolisent]. This is also a criticism that can be addressed to Google. I am thinking here of Frédéric Kaplan’s work which showed that the algorithmic exploitation of language by Google leads tendentially to a standardization of language, producing entropy.
A negative contributory economy is an economy that further aggravates the entropy of consumerism. Many people who work in the collaborative field and the sharing economy are doing very nice things but the collaborative economy is not yet qualified at the macro-economic level: it is only thought at the level of the firm, the small enterprise, and the problem is that it does not take all account for the issue of positive and negative externalities. As a result, it leads to the contrary of how it has been imagined.
It is to bring these issues to the macro-economic level that we have the ambition, in Plaine Commune, to contribute to the invention of a new national accounting plan [nouveau plan comptable national], obviously with other territories. The goal is not to remake the local economy, but an economy that is localized, externalisable and deterritorializable. In short, it is not a question of creating boundaries – but, rather, of creating limits: limits to the Entropocene that is the Anthropocene, and for a negentropic economy with a view to a Neganthropocene.
Tarleton Gillespie on “Custodians”
Over on the Culture Digitally site Tarleton Gillespie discusses his new book Custodians of the Internet, reflecting on some of the meanings of “custodian” and how they variously relate to the topic of the book – content moderators for social media services. Gillespie is an astute observer and analyst of contemporary ‘digital culture’ (I struggle to think of another noun right now) and the issue of moderation is certainly timely.
I thought I would explain the book’s title, particularly my choice of the word “custodians.” This title came unnervingly late in the writing process, and after many, many conversations with my extremely patient friend and colleague Dylan Mulvin. “Custodians of the Internet” captured, better than many, many alternatives, the aspirations of social media platforms, the position they find themselves in, and my notion for how they should move forward.
Data materiality – a new project by Scott Rodgers
This new project at Birkbeck by Scott Rodgers & Joel McKim looks really interesting:
Data Materiality: collaborative BIRMAC/Vasari project
[…]
Data Materiality
The expanded presence and impact of data, and arrival of so-called Big Data, has become an accepted, background feature of contemporary life. But while data clearly matters, the question arising now is: just how does data come to ‘matter’? What are the sometimes unseen material infrastructures that bring data into being, into circulation and into action? What are the social and political structures, policies and institutions through which data comes to have effects? And what might it mean to think about data – as suggested by Sarah Pink and others – as ‘broken’: as always already implicated in ordinary processes of maintenance and repair?
Data Materiality – a three-year collaborative project co-sponsored by the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture, and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology – seeks to address these questions. By data ‘materiality’ we mean not only the ways in which data crystallises into physical forms and depends on material technical and social infrastructures, but also the related ways in which data comes to matter, in and through practical action, collective imaginaries, or biological conditions. So we are interested in questioning the proliferating network of data centres, fibre-optic cables and server farms that underpin our data usage, but we also wish to explore perhaps less tangible or apparent infrastructures of data – materialities that might include, for instance, digital objects and artefacts, from network protocols to markup languages, as well as the labour and organizational structures putting data to work.
Our key aim in exploring data materiality is to get beyond the idea of data as a raw or unprocessed and, as Lisa Gitelman has suggested, understand the ordinary material conditions under which data is induced and deduced. We wish to ask, in other words, how does data leave its traces on the world? And how does the world leave its traces on data?
Read more on Scott’s website.
7th European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy 4-5 Oct ’18
May be of interest to people that follow this blog… Via Brian Hracs:
7th European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy
October 4-5, 2018 – Stockholm, Sweden
The myriad links between culture, creativity and economic practice are major topics of intellectual discussion. Culture and creativity are collaboratively practiced by a range of workers and communities — from artists to entrepreneurs— and in a range of occupational, organizational, institutional and spatial settings. Indeed, far from being restricted to global cities and urban settings, a growing body of research highlights the presence and uniqueness of cultural and creative activities in suburban and rural settings. Moreover, digital technologies and processes of globalization continue to create, destroy, and restructure the markets and conditions under which cultural creation, production, intermediation, dissemination and consumption are undertaken and experienced. These are in turn underpinned by a plurality of micro-spatialities and micro-processes through which the dynamics and spaces of culture and creativity emerge. More than ever perhaps there is a need for critical and radical debate that addresses questions about the value and values inherent in culture and creativity; questions surrounding the ownership and marketization of culture and creativity; and the dynamics of cultural and creative spaces, institutions, production and work.
The European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy is a European network of excellence and CCE Stockholm 2018 is the 7th annual meeting of the Colloquium. The Colloquium aims at bringing together junior and senior scholars from different disciplines (e.g. sociology, cultural and urban studies, geography) and locations around the world in an exciting, intense and dynamic meeting aimed at generating not only new networks but new knowledge, approaches, and practices. The Colloquium will be based for one day at Sweden’s arts grants agency and for one day at Stockholm’s largest modern and contemporary art museum. Each day the program will partly reflect discussion themes related to and inspired by the institution and space we are in; and will involve dialogue with people from these institutions. Day 1 will be, at least partly, focused on the dynamics of contemporary creative practice and work, and work organization in arts and cultural production. Day 2 will focus partly on cultural exhibition, public-private interactions, and cultural consumption. These issues will form a background agenda but as in previous years the Colloquium welcomes a variety of perspectives and aims to reflect participants interests and research on the multiple intersections between culture, creativity and economy. The event will give participants the chance to share ideas, receive feedback on current research and to preview cutting-edge research in the field.
[…]
Applying
The conference organizers will select up to 30 individuals to attend. To be considered you must send the following to Taylor Brydges (taylor.brydges@humangeo.su.se) by Friday, June 8, 2018. Late applications will not be considered. Participants will be informed of their acceptance late June. Please include the following information in a word document: – A short bio of approximately 200 words – A personal photo of sufficient quality to be included in the program – A 250 word statement of current interests or what you consider the most important research issue to address in the coming years
Once Accepted
By September 16, 2018, please send Taylor Brydges (taylor.brydges@humangeo.su.se) a paper for review and discussion. The choice of your contribution is open – it could be your latest published paper, a draft paper, a grant proposal, or an outline of an idea.
Event > Data Feminism with Lauren Klein (at KCL)
This event looks really interesting!
Via Pip Thornton.
Data Feminism
Lauren Klein, Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech
How might we draw on feminist critical thought to reimagine data practices and data work? Join us for a public talk with Lauren Klein (Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech) to discuss her recent work on data feminism. Hosted by Jonathan Gray at the Department for Digital Humanities at King’s College London.
With their ability to depict hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even millions of relationships at a single glance, visualizations of data can dazzle, inform, and persuade. It is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Visualization by whom? For whom? In whose interest? Informed by whose values?” These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data and its visualization that is informed by the past several decades of feminist critical thought. Data feminism prompts questions about how, for instance, challenges to the male/female binary can also help challenge other binary and hierarchical classification systems. It encourages us to ask how the concept of invisible labor can help to expose the invisible forms of labor associated with data work. And it points to how an understanding of affective and embodied knowledge can help to expand the notion of what constitutes data and what does not. Using visualization as a starting point, this talk works backwards through the data-processing pipeline in order to show how a feminist approach to thinking about data not only exposes how power and privilege presently operate in visualization work, but also suggests how different design principles can help to mitigate inequality and work towards justice.
Lauren Klein is an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. With Matthew Gold, she editsDebates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her literary monograph,Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and the Early American Archive, is forthcoming from Minnesota in Spring 2019. She is also at work on two new projects: Data Feminism, co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio, and under contract with MIT Press, which distills key lessons from feminist theory into a set of principles for the design and interpretation of data visualizations, and Data by Design, which provides an interactive history of data visualization from the eighteenth century to the present.
Ocado automated fulfilment centre & automation promo videos
Ocado, online groceries delivery service in the UK, some time ago pivoted into providing automation solutions for other retailers. They have a division, or separate company, called Ocado Technology, which offers other retailers systems for fulfilment centre automation: “Ocado Smart Platform” [buzzwords ahoy!]. So, while the above video is interesting, insofar as it demonstrates yet another not-exactly-hospitable factory-like code/space, what is perhaps more interesting is that this system seems to have been developed not only to fulfil Ocado orders in Wiltshire/Hampshire but also as an advert for what Ocado technology does. See this report from Reuters: Ocado’s robot army courts global food retailers.
Ocado have promoted previous automated systems through videos too. The same claims about ‘machine learning’ and so on were made about a fulfilment centre system that looks a lot more like an airport baggage sorting system around five years ago.
I’ve become mildly obsessed with these videos of automated factories and fulfilment centres – they have become a sort of genre unto themselves. There are clearly ways in which promotional videos–made by the equipment/tech firms responsible for creating the systems or the firm implementing them–get translated into video news stories. Likewise, there are ways of talking about the ‘robot’ nature of these things. All of this demonstrates our ongoing negotiation of norms of understanding, describing and rationalising the technology, it’s implementation and what it may or may not portend for work and so on. If you’ve read this blog in the last year you may remember I talk about this stuff as the formation/formalisation of an ‘automative imagination‘.
As a sort of throw-away aside – the displacement of labour involved by Ocado’s, and others’, systems of automation may well be important too. If you ramp up the capacity to ‘fulfil’ orders in the distribution centre then you need to expand the capacity to get them delivered. We don’t have driverless vehicles on our roads, yet, so this possibly means fewer pickers and packers and a lot more delivery drivers.
Reblog> CFP: The platformization of cultural production
City Road – Digital Cities [podcast]
I’ve been listening to the City Road podcast for a little while now, since seeing a link on twitter to an excellent conversation with Desirée Fields, and I think Dallas Rogers et al. are doing a fantastic job with this podcast. It is an academic podcast but presented and delivered in, I think, a really accessible way. To that end, I really think there are episodes that make good teaching resources. In particular this episode on ‘digital cities’ with Robyn Dowling and Sophia Maalsen will feature in the next iteration of my third year option about technology – it’s excellent.
Digital work and automation link dump
Ok. Whilst I was not blogging I kept finding things through twitter and reading blogs that I find interesting. I kept thinking “oh, I ought to write something about that”… the thing is, I haven’t had the time and I don’t have the time now. So… I’m going to do a sort of annotated link thingamajig so that I don’t lose these things (I have over 45 tabs open in Chrome on my phone, this is unworkable) and also to share and to maybe invite other people to comment on this stuff..?!
The future of work, a history by Kevin Baker – A relatively long piece of writing that charts a history of American worrying about the replacement of the human worker with machines. Some interesting historical details that help contextualise some of the alarmism today. What I like about this is that the piece ends by reminding us all that there are choices to be made, which are political, but it also highlights how inescapable forms of determinism are (as Sally Wyatt so expertly tells us).
Tech culture, unions and the blind spot of meritocracy by Wendy Liu in Technology and The Worker (#2) –an interesting piece by Wendy Liu that documents a conversation with Xavier Denis a former engineer at Shopify about what working in the US tech. market is like – the sorts of working conditions, norms and management practices.
Automation, skills use and training by Ljubica Nedelkoska and Glenda Quintin (OECD) — A report that builds upon and that authors claim improves assessments of the potential for the automation of particular kinds of work. “Beyond the share of jobs likely to be significantly disrupted by automation of production and services, the accent is put on characteristics of these jobs and the characteristics of the workers who hold them.” This contributes to the ongoing arguments around the likelihood or not of job/role/work automation.
What can machine learning do? Workforce implications by Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT) and Tom Mitchell (Carnegie Mellon) in Science – A short-ish “Insights” article that makes some fairly grandiose and sweeping claims about the ‘impacts’ of automation on the workforce (with an American focus). Some references are made but if you follow them up it seems to me that the statements they are used to support make fairly big leaps. This, in contrast to the OECD report, is a stoking of the now brightly burning fire of the imaginings of automation.
The Guardian view on automation: put human needs first – A Grauniad editorial that passes comment on the above OECD report. It’s interesting to see the reception, interpretation and sometimes misrepresentation (I don’t think that’s what the Graun are doing here) of these academic economic reports. This plays into the general, normative, discussions and senses of the risks and/or realities of automation (this is a part of what I want write a book about).
See how one woman and her team of robots move thousands of boxes in a Chinese warehouse. pic.twitter.com/WsiRC10Uoo
— BBC Click (@BBCClick) April 16, 2018
BBC Click offer a Twitter-length version of ‘what it’s like to work with robots’.
Shynola re-imagine/visualise the opening section of Matthew De Abaitua’s novel Red Men – a PKD-like imaginative exploration of the emergence of AI.
The Incomplete Vision of John Perry Barlow by April Glaser (Slate) – Reflecting upon Barlow’s “Declaration of the independence of cyberspace” and the rise of EFF following his death earlier this year. Fits nicely with Fred Turner’s work examining the hippy-libertarian nexus of Silicon Valley moguls. In many ways this gets at some of the ideological foundations and/or misgivings of automation talk.
Face Recognition Glasses Augment China’s Railway Cops by Bibek Bhandari (SixthTone) – An article about the alleged deployment of facial recognition through AR glasses for Chinese police. Predictable comparisons to “Black Mirror” and other forms of dystopianism.
The Ethics Advisory Group of the European Data Protection Supervisor Report on Data Ethics (2018) [PDF] – On the back of the GDPR and contemporary debates around privacy in light of perennial controversies with Facebook and others the Ethics Advisory Group published a report claiming that: “The objective of this report is thus not to generate definitive answers, nor to articulate new norms for present and future digital societies but to identify and describe the most crucial questions for the urgent conversation to come.” The report is written by J. Peter Burgess, Luciano Floridi, Aurélie Pols and Jeroen van de Hoven.
The network Uber drivers built by Alex Rosenblat – an article that addresses some of the ways that Uber drivers have collectively organised in order to manage working with a quasi-automated system in which the policies are not necessaerily in the best interests of the worker.
Artificial Intelligence Technology Strategy (Report of Strategic Council for AI Technology) ( a Japanese government report) [PDF] – A 25 page report written for the Japanese government. It’s fairly dry and dense and has some crazy Powerpoint-style diagrams but it is sort of interesting as a documenting of an apparently strategic governmental approach to “AI”.
Why the Luddites matter : Librarian Shipwreck – A good blogpost on who the Luddites really were and framing them as an interesting means of getting at how popular understandings of technology might be found wanting.
Sci-Fi doesn’t have to be depressing: welcome to Solar Punk by Tom Cassauwers – What if we don’t write dystopian science fiction but build imaginary worlds based on positive and affirmative uses of technology? That is the premise of what is called ‘Solar Punk’, as outlined here by Tom Cassauwers – who charts the movement with Sarena Ulibarri, an editor who is a key proponent of the sub-genre.
Our driverless future on CNN Money – a video feature on driverless cars with four episodes and a couple of additional videos. There’s some interesting interviews and it’s not all boosterism. It’s sort of emblematic of the current discourse on automation. If nothing else this is probably useful for teaching purposes as there are some clips that nicely sum up some of the key questions being asked.