Category: observations

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Reblog> digital geographies event

May be of interest… via Gillian Rose.

The Digital Geographies Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers is holding its first event. It’s got lots of various kinds of short presentations, opportunities to engage and interact so it should be fun and productive.RevolutionEvolutionImpostion_2903.jpg

The event will be at the Royal Geographical Society in London on 30 June and if you have any kind of interest in studying or doing geography digitally, you’re very welcome to attend. You can book now, here, and the panel sessions will also be livestreamed on the day.

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Interesting papers: “The Taking Economy” & “The Myth of the Sharing Economy”

Deliveroo cyclists

These look interesting…

Via Frank Pasquale:

The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power

Ryan Calo
University of Washington – School of Law; Stanford University – Law School; Yale Law School

Alex Rosenblat
Data & Society Research Institute

Abstract
Sharing economy firms such as Uber and Airbnb facilitate trusted transactions between strangers on digital platforms. This creates economic and other value and raises a set of concerns around racial bias, safety, and fairness to competitors and workers that legal scholarship has begun to address. Missing from the literature, however, is a fundamental critique of the sharing economy grounded in asymmetries of information and power. This Article, coauthored by a law professor and a technology ethnographer who studies the ride-hailing community, furnishes such a critique and indicates a path toward a meaningful response.

Via Tom Slee:

The Myth of the Sharing Economy and Its Implications for Regulating Innovation

Abbey Stemler
Indiana University – Kelley School of Business – Department of Business Law

Abstract
A deflated air mattress rests in the corner of Airbnb’s world headquarters. It symbolizes how Airbnb allows regular, local people to earn extra income by renting out space in their homes. Yet, this symbolism fails to represent what the company has become–a unicorn receiving most of its revenue from professionals with full-time listings. That poorly folded wad of plastic exemplifies the Myth of the Sharing Economy, which has been consistently used to subvert regulation.
The Myth convinces people that the sharing economy is comprised of self-regulating platforms, which allow microentrepreneurs to utilize their excess capacity in an altruistic manner. However, the sharing economy is actually comprised of companies driven as much by market forces and failures as any taxicab company or hotel chain. The Myth possesses a simple and seductive appeal. It uses the familiar idea of sharing to make the claim that platforms are unique and should be subject to new and different regulation or no regulation at all. This Myth not only harms platform users, the environment, and the culture and diversity of communities, it has helped sharing economy platforms become powerful influencers in Silicon Valley, state legislatures, and beyond. 
While much has been written the benefits of the sharing economy and how to regulate it, this Article is the first to critique the sharing economy by exploring the intersection between narrative and regulation. It also distills lessons for regulating future innovations and demonstrates the importance of questioning rhetoric and reality in order to achieve public policy goals.

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Farmers hacking tractors

Promotional image for the 1995 film Hackers

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America’s heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that’s cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform “unauthorized” repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

“When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don’t have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it,” Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. “Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix].”

Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware

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Choose how you feel, you have seven options

A great piece by Ruben Van de Ven stemming from his artwork of the same name, published on the Institute of Network Culture site. Van de Ven, in a similar vein to Will Davies, deconstructs the logic of ‘affective’ computing, sentiment analysis and their application to what has been termed the ‘attention economy’. The article does a really go job of demonstrating how the knowledge claims, and the epistemologies (perhaps ontologies too), that are at work behind these technologies are (of course) deeply political in their application. Very much worth reading! (snippet below).

 ‘Weeks ago I saw an older woman crying outside my office building as I was walking in. She was alone, and I worried she needed help. I was afraid to ask, but I set my fears aside and walked up to her. She appreciated my gesture, but said she would be fine and her husband would be along soon. With emotion enabled (Augmented Reality), I could have had far more details to help me through the situation. It would have helped me know if I should approach her. It would have also let me know how she truly felt about my talking to her.’

FOREST HANDFORD

This is how Forest Handford, a software developer, outlines his ideal future for a technology that has emerged over the past years. It is known as emotion analysis software, emotion detection, emotion recognition or emotion analytics. One day, Hartford hopes, the software will aid in understanding the other’s genuine, sincere, yet unspoken feelings (‘how she truly felt’). Technology will guide us through a landscape of emotions, like satellite navigation technologies guide us to destinations unknown to us: we blindly trust the route that is plotted out for us. But in a world of digitized emotions, what does it mean to feel 63% surprised and 54% joyful?

Please take the time to read the whole article.

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Reblog> We need to tell better stories about our surveilled future[s]

Via Cyborgology.

“We need to tell more diverse and realistic stories about AI,” Sara Watson writes, “if we want to understand how these technologies fit into our society today, and in the future.”

Watson’s point that popular narratives inform our understandings of and responses to AI feels timely and timeless. As the same handful of AI narratives circulate, repeating themselves like a befuddled Siri, their utopian and dystopian plots prejudice seemingly every discussion about AI. And like the Terminator itself, these paranoid, fatalistic stories now feel inevitable and unstoppable. As Watson warns, “If we continue to rely on these sci-fi extremes, we miss the realities of the current state of AI, and distract our attention from real and present concerns.”

Watson’s criticism is focused on AI narratives, but the argument lends itself to society’s narratives about other contemporary worries, from global warming to selfies and surveillance. On surveillance, Zeynep Tufekçi made a similar point in 2014 about our continued reliance on outdated Orwellian analogies (hi 1984) and panoptic metaphors.

Resistance and surveillance: The design of today’s digital tools makes the two inseparable. And how to think about this is a real challenge. It’s said that generals always fight the last war. If so, we’re like those generals. Our understanding of the dangers of surveillance is filtered by our thinking about previous threats to our freedoms. But today’s war is different. We’re in a new kind of environment, one that requires a new kind of understanding. [“¦]

To make sense of the surveillance states that we live in, we need to do better than allegories [1984] and thought experiments [the Panopticon], especially those that derive from a very different system of control. We need to consider how the power of surveillance is being imagined and used, right now, by governments and corporations.

We need to update our nightmares.

Read the whole post.

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Reblog> the Ideology behind the gig economy

Deliveroo cyclists

Via John Naughton.

The ideology behind the gig economy

Jia Tolentino has a very good piece in the New Yorker about the ideology that underpins the gig economy. The piece opens with the story of Mary, a Lyft driver in Chicago who kept accepting rides even though she was nine months pregnant – and even kept going when her contractions began!

In the end, it ended well. Mary had a customer who only needed a short ride, so she was able to drive herself to hospital after dropping him off. Once there, she gave birth to a baby girl – who appears on the company blog wearing a “Little Miss Lyft” onesie.

The point of the company blog post is to laud the spirit of workers like Mary. But, writes Tolentino,

It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”–as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars–recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”

Quite so. Lyft drivers in Chicago earn about $11 per trip.

Perhaps, as Lyft suggests, Mary kept accepting riders while experiencing contractions because “she was still a week away from her due date,” or “she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet.” Or maybe Mary kept accepting riders because the gig economy has further normalized the circumstances in which earning an extra eleven dollars can feel more important than seeking out the urgent medical care that these quasi-employers do not sponsor. In the other version of Mary’s story, she’s an unprotected worker in precarious circumstances.

Spot on.

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Call for Papers: “Charting trans and posthumanist imaginaries in future-making”

Rachael in the film Blade Runner

via SERRC.

Call for Papers: “Charting trans and posthumanist imaginaries in future-making”
(see Panel 53: http://sipsheff17.group.shef.ac.uk/index.php?option=24)Science in Public Conference, University of Sheffield 10th-12th July, 2017
Emilie Whitaker, University of Salford, e.m.whitaker@salford.ac.ukThe call for papers closes April 18, 2017.

Posthumanism and transhumanism are two emerging cultural movements that use recent developments in science and technology to challenge, in rather different ways, conventional conceptions of the human condition. Originally seen as more aligned with science fiction than science fact, they now straddle the divide, helped along with increasing media attention and capital investment. Whilst posthumanism continues to be theoretically explored within the social sciences and humanities, transhumanism remains an outlier to the academy. This is despite developments in science and technology which decouple traditional understandings of human/non- human action, agency, labour and capital. In this respect, both trans and posthumanism come very well adapted to our ‘post-truth’ times. We welcome submissions on this general theme, including the following topics:

  • Post- vs trans- humanist projections of the future of humanity, both utopic and dystopic
  • The appeal to post- and trans- humanist ideas and images in the general culture
  • Scientific bases – or not – for post- and trans- humanist knowledge claims
  •  The influence – or not – of post- and trans- humanist views on public policy
  • The place of capitalism in post- and trans- humanist imaginaries
  • The place of post- and trans- humanism in the academy: Do they bridge the ‘Ëœtwo cultures’?
  • How trans and post humanism conceive of the place of democracy in guiding the future
  • Exploration of how science communication invokes, borrows or rejects trans and posthumanist tropes.

We welcome ‘alternative’ contributions – for example, short pieces of prose or extracts of speculative near-future fiction – as well as empirically-based findings papers. We are also particularly keen to support early career researchers.