Category: political economy

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Museum of Contemporary Commodities

I have meant, and singularly failed, to blog about this fantastic project for a while, so I mean to makes amends now:

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is an artistic, collaborative and activist project cooked up by the excellent Paula Crutchlow – who just so happens to be a PhD student in Exeter Geography Dept. The project is a collaboration with my colleague Ian Cook and several other interesting and exciting people – not least the folk at Furtherfield.

Funnily enough, I learned about MoCC when it was in its larval stages before I joined the department at Exeter – Ian and Paula held a ‘Thinkering Day’ here in Devon and we explored some ideas around what MoCC could be… the event was supported by REACT (hence why I learned about it) – here’s a snazzy video:

You should definitely explore the MoCC website to learn more, but here’s how MoCC is explained on the Furtherfield website:

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is neither a building nor a permanent collection of stuff – it’s an invitation. To consider every shop, online store and warehouse full of stuff as if it were a museum, and all the things in it part of our collective future heritage.

Imagine yourself as this museum’s curator with the power to choose what is displayed and how. To trace and interpret the provenance and value of these things and how they arrived here. To consider the effects this stuff has on people and places close by or far away, and how and why it connects them.

What do we mean by things or stuff? Everything that you can buy in today’s society. The full range of contemporary commodities available to consume.

Please join us on our journey by browsing and adding to our collection, attending an event, and becoming a researcher. We are currently curating connections between trade-place-data-values.

There are further events planned and lots more exciting things to come so keep an eye on both the Furtherfield and the MoCC websites.

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‘Wide’, not ‘big’, data

Saw this article a while ago on the NetworkWorld website, not sure if it’s a more broadly adopted concept – but the idea of ‘wide’ data appeals. Can’t remember if Rob Kitchin addresses it in his excellent book The Data Revolution… will have to check!

(I’m blogging this so I can finally close the tab in my browser!)

Why businesses should focus on wide data, not big data

In these heady days of big data, a lot of organizations treat data collection like a Pokémon game: Gotta catch it all. But Dane Atkinson, CEO of cross-platform marketing analytics specialist SumAll says most organizations need to think wide, not big, when it comes to data.

“The real impact of data always comes from the intersection of different data sets,” Atkinson says. “You don’t get into the earth shattering discoveries until you start to link disparate data sets.”

This idea of ‘wide’ data is what some marketing people have called ‘horizontals’ – the ability to stitch together different kinds of data to create a particular kind of value proposition (see Irene Ng’s book on this…)

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Reblog> Reading list on the digital divide/digital inclusion

This looks like a really helpful resource over on the Social Media Collective blog –– although I’m sure Mark Graham may want to add to it… 🙂

Reading list on the digital divide/digital inclusion

We compiled a bibliography on the digital divide (including gender gaps) and ICTD. Please let us know if we missed anything interesting and we would be glad to add it!

1. Allen, Steven G. 2001. “Technology and the Wage Structure.” Journal of Labor Economics 19:440-483.

2. Anderson, B. 2005. “The value of mixed-method longitudinal panel studies in ICT research.” Information, Communication & Society 8:343-367.

3. Anderson, Ben. 2008. “The Social Impact of Broadband Household Internet Access.” Information, Communication & Society 11:5-24.

See the other 191 references on the Social Media Collective blog.

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Reblog> The Urban Politics and Governance of Social Innovation in Austerity

Over on his blog CityFragment, Colin McFarlane recently posted about an interesting new project:

The Urban Politics and Governance of Social Innovation in Austerity

I’m excited to be part of a new project investigating the connections between austerity, social innovation and urban politics in Europe. The project is led by Joe Painter as Principal Investigator, and the co-investigators are Paul Langley, Sue Lewis, Antonis Vradis, and myself (all based in Geography at Durham). It is funded through the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Urban Transformations programme (coordinated by the University of Oxford).

2008_0803Berlin0063 copy

In the project, we will compare whether and how austerity impacts social innovation across three
European cities that are experiencing quite different forms of austerity – Athens, Berlin and Newcastle – and will examine the implications for urban politics. We will do so by investigating alternative finance, grassroots mobilisation and community provisioning in the three cities.

Although I live near Newcastle and know one of the other two cities – Berlin – very well, this is the first time that I’ll be involved in a research project on European cities. It’s also the first sustained opportunity I’ve had to be part of a team examining the geographical impacts of austerity on cities. So being part of this is an exciting and challenging prospect!

More information is available here.

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The web and its territories

(Well… DNS and territories)

Two things I’ve read recently converged in my mind and reminded me of work in geography undertaken a while ago about the ways apparently abstract or immaterial aspects of the internet are intimately tied up with traditional geo-political borders and territories.

First, as James Bridle finishes his essays about geographic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) for the Citizen-Ex project – its really interesting to reflect on the often fraught and muddy geo-politics of the domain name system (DNS), which Bridle expresses beautifully. The stories about the Libyan (.ly), Syrian (.sy) and British Indian Ocean Territory (.io) domains are especially arresting.

Second, over on Culture Digitally, Adam Fish wrote a post about the growth in interest in the high seas, the upper reaches of the atmosphere and space for creating extra-legal territories for ‘unencumbered’ innovation and for the delivery of services without the need for territorial wrangling:

Technical approaches towards national internet sovereigntyincluding IP address blocking, domain names, key words, and packet filtering. Non-technical forms of censorship include laws, regulations, threats, bribes, and arrests of publishers, ISPs, and authors. Reporters without Borders identifies 19 countries – including the US and the UK – along with Cuba, China, Iran, and North Korea, all of which use one or several of these tactics to create a distinct national internet.

Certainly, what governments want for their people and what the people want for themselves frequently diverge. But while we may agree that internet censorship by authoritarian dictatorships is an affront to free communication, can we really put our faith in Facebook’s drones? It is possible to overthrow a government and depose a dictator but it is nearly impossible to revolt against corporate drones and extraterritorial CEOs.

Both of these reminded me of a few things in geography: of work in  by Mark Wilson about 15 years ago and (of course) by Matthew Zook (also about 15 years ago [e.g.]) concerning the economic geographies of the infrastructures of the internet(s). It also strongly reminded me of Alexander Murphy‘s paper in the Annals of AAG a couple of years ago about ‘Territory’s continuing allure‘. It is interesting, amongst the hyperbole of immateriality and of ‘off-shore’ data centres through which our exhaust data are analysed and sold on, that (the idea of) territory maintains certain kinds of political-economic importance in particular circumstances.

As Murphy contends (in a different context but I suggest the argument holds in relation to the examples above):

if Agnew (1999, 504) is right that the spatialities of power will change “as material conditions and associated modes of understanding of them change” (italics added), then the continu- ing hold of modernist conceptions of territory on the political–geographic imagination (see Gregory 1994) must be seen as fundamental to any effort to understand the character and prospects of the current system (p. 1214)

…

Novel spatialities of power call out for a reinvention of the linguistic terms and conceptual frameworks we use to make sense of the world (see, e.g., Allen’s [2011] call for a consideration of what he terms topologies of power). At the same time, if we are to make sense of the circumstances and struggles shaping the political future, we must not underplay territory’s continuing ideological hold and practical significance … We also need to factor in the enduring significance of territorially based worldviews that continue to shape the perspective and ideas of billions of people–and by extension the institutions and regimes that circumscribe their lives.(p. 1224)

 

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Reblog> The Internet of Someone Else’s Things

In a post on TechCrunch Jon Evans runs through the various ways we might have to rethink ownership in a tightly vertically integrated economy of an ‘internet of things’. The article resonates with the talk “Dancing with Data” by Chris Speed that I posted a few weeks ago, about markets, value and how we can understand our everyday uses of digital technologies.

As Chris argues, you/we are already enrolled into markets through the ‘data exhausts‘ of our stuff and as Jon Evans argues in the article, even as the ‘owner’ of the physical device you have no real control over whether or where that data exhaust goes. As Evans goes on to say, there is increasingly a variety of forms of ownership of any given device: there’s physical possession, legal ownership and the ultimate power to command it (what you might call “root” access). Likewise, in an article in The Atlantic (to which Evans links)  Madrigal and Meyer point out the peculiarities of interoperation that an Internet of Things requires:

Most “smart-home” devices right now aren’t talking to each other directly over a local wifi network. Instead, they’re talking to enormous and  centralized data centers, which are then talking to each other, which are then (finally) sending instructions back to different devices in your home.

Evans goes on to argue that we could think about ownership another way:

the possibility of a decentralized Internet of Things; smart things which don’t communicate with any central server, but rather with a peer-to-peer, perhaps blockchain-based network. Consider the way FireChat is being used in Hong Kong, so that protestors can communicate despite the authorities’ control of the mobile networks. You don’t always actually need a central server, especially if you have a distributed-consensus system – like a blockchain – for longer-term data storage and algorithmic coordination.

It’s an interesting, relatively short, article with plenty of links to follow up – worth a read!

The Internet Of Someone Else’s Things

Trojan Horse

The Internet Of Things is coming. Rejoice! “¦Mostly. It will open our collective eyes to petabytes of real-time data, which we will turn into new insights and efficiencies. It will doubtless save lives. Oh, yes: and it will subtly redefine ownership as we know it. You will no longer own many of the most expensive and sophisticated items you possess. You may think you own them. But you’ll be wrong.

They say “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” but even if you physically and legally own a Smart Thing, you won’t actually control it. Ownership will become a three-legged stool: who physically owns a thing; who legally owns it; “¦and who has the ultimate power to command it. Who, in short, has root.

Read the rest of the article.

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Lessons in automation from Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry

I’ve been idly thinking about the automation of everyday life and the kinds of vision of a future that have been represented (repeatedly) by technology makers, not least in terms of ‘ubiquitous computing‘, and been thinking about the rich history of this from Worlds Fairs:

New York World's Fair 1939 -

And the forms of spatial imagination that were inherent within these visions of the future were leapt upon in popular culture, especially in cartoons. What I mean is: the ways in which the relationships between  people, buildings, locations, things and the sorts of ways of living that thereby emerge form a kind of vernacular for understanding possible futures, which are grounded in (broadly) speculative extrapolations of the experience of space and place.

From the obvious ‘space age’ Jetsons, to the less obvious reinterpretations of technologies of convenience (using Dinosaurs and stone tools) in the Flintstones, there was a lot of co-opting of the futures being sold by the likes of General Motors in their “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and Disney’s “Epcot“.

And so we get a Tom and Jerry cartoon that resonates with contemporary stories of the loss of jobs to automata – with ‘Thomas’ replaced by a robotic cat:

Another famous GM depiction of an automated home that draws on the forms of spatial imaginary of futurama and its ilk is the film “Design for Dreaming”, in which Thelma Tadlock guides us through the kitsch depictions of a cars and the kitchen of the future.

It is interesting (and heartening) that at the same time you get a satirised version of this with Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd in the Looney Tunes cartoon “Design for Leaving”, in which (of course) everything goes wrong [and in this vision there’s no Robert DeNiro plumber to fix it]:


Elmer Fudd – Design for Leaving by DwightFrye

These cartoons are somewhat emblematic of a satirising of visions of the future, almost contemporaneously, which is probably rather healthy. We (academics, anyway) have a tendency to take these future visions rather seriously and in many cases it is justified – ways of relating a future have politics and they do particular kinds of political work. Nevertheless, it seems like I (and possibly others) have missed a trick in not paying a little more attention to how popular culture addresses these lofty visions of an automated future everyday life.

I wonder if we might count the recent darkly humorous ‘speculative fictions’ Black Mirror, by Charlie Brooker in this tradition. For example, if we have the vision of a day with “Glass” by Google:

Then we have the accompanying tale of obsessive and creepy behaviour such forms of life-logging and AR might produce with “The Entire History of You”, the third episode of Black Mirror:

These of course stray from the topic of automation but they serve to illustrate the power of satire in relation to visions of the future. It would be great to see more cartoons that comically critique and reimagine the kinds of stories we are being currently told about a future of automated everyday life.

Incidentally, I’ll be touching on some of this in a ‘paper’ (talk) I am giving at the RGS-IBG annual conference this year (in Exeter!), as part of the ‘Algorithmic Practices‘ sessions.

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Psychometrics

Marvellous:

Psychometrics

By Alan Warburton

Psychometrics from Alan Warburton on Vimeo.

Late capitalist networked culture is obsessed with improving performance. TED speakers are cult idols, sharing their commandments for success and productivity. On social networks our friends become brands, and brands become our friends. Self-help books are interchangeable with business philosophies. In the conference room – and the weekend supplements – we learn how to shape ourselves, how to be consistent, how to operate. Reduce entropy. Maximise consistency. Become an industry of one.

You are an engine. One day you’ll fly away.

Created by Alan Warburton.
Music by Alan Warburton and Tom Hatfield.

Via @timoarnall

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Clive Barnett – new paper on segmentation practices & policy

My colleague Clive Barnett has blogged about a new paper he has coming out with Nick Mahoney in Policy and Politics concerning segmentation methods for marking practices and how these are used in the public and ‘third’ sectors.

Clive says, on his blog:

This paper seeks to open up some interpretative space for exploring what is going on when marketing practices get used in non-commercial sectors, without presuming in advance that what is going on is something to be called ‘neoliberalism’.

I find the paper interesting not only for this reason, but also because when preparing my article “Memory Programmes” I briefly looked into segmentation systems (like MOSAIC and Tapestry) when looking at supermarket loyalty card schemes like Tesco’s ‘Clubcard’ – and the sorts of (monitoring/ surveillance) apparatus they construct.

As Clive and his co-author argue, there is:

a shared rationale underlying the strategic use of segmentation methodologies. First, across these varied fields, segmentation methods are used to generate relatively stable images of public attitudes and values. Second, these images are used to inform strategies that seek to either change these dispositions or to mobilise them in support of new behaviours.

This stabilising of categories of attitude and value that can then be used as a parameter in/with a dataset that is continually interrogated and processed in order to attempt to gain ‘insights’ that may influence behaviour. I argued in my article that:

The geographical imaginary Clubcard invokes is of populations of consumers, segmented by lifestyle preferences and socio-economic factors, distributed and delimited (or ‘bordered’) through particular categorisations of space. The consumer is thus enrolled into an industrial system that retains habits of consumption in significant detail, both at an individual and collective scale, and operates on that historiography in order to influence prospective future habits.

In addressing the public sector use of segmentation Clive and Nick Mahoney argue that

the configuration of fields of agency should be the core focus of further research focussed on the critical evaluation of the deployment of ‘dividing practices’ such as segmentation methods

I think this call probably stands for the commercial use of segmentation too…