Category: political

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Ash, Kitchin, Leszczynski on what ‘digital’ means for geography

Saw this only this morning, blogged over on The Programmable City website. Looks like a fairly comprehensive description of a set of issues within geography.

New paper: Digital Turn, Digital Geography?

James Ash, Rob Kitchin and Agnieszka Leszczynski have published a new paper entitled ‘Digital Turn, Digital Geography?‘ available as Programmable City Working Paper 17 on SSRN.

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the digital and geography. Our analysis provides an overview of the rich scholarship that has examined: (1) geographies of the digital, (2) geographies produced by the digital, and (3) geographies produced through the digital. Using this material we reflect on two questions: has there been a digital turn in geography? and, would it be productive to delimit ‘digital geography’ as a field of study within the discipline, as has recently occurred with the attempt to establish ‘digital anthropology’ and ‘digital sociology’? We argue that while there has been a digital turn across geographical sub-disciplines, the digital is now so pervasive in mediating the production of space and in producing geographic knowledge that it makes little sense to delimit digital geography as a distinct field. Instead, we believe it is more productive to think about how the digital reshapes many geographies

I would say, having only skim-read the paper, that it does sort of perpetuate a disquiet I’ve felt for some time about how a particular ind of discursive regime, with a particular set of power brokers, is being built around the “geographies” prefixed with ‘algorithmic’; ‘data’; ‘digital’… perhaps there are some others… and what that might mean… maybe its just that there are only a few people that actually write stuff about this and they all know each other… anglophone geography is after all quite a small discipline. Maybe I’m a part of that too, with the little I’ve written on the subject. However, its evident in other disciplinary contexts too, such as the way in which particular people seem to be the leading lights in ‘digital sociology‘.

Maybe I’m just performing my own anxiety about career, struggling to write myself and being on probation in an institution with rather lofty expectations, but maybe there’s also something to my observation about the politics of being a researcher of a modish subject. Perhaps people who do stuff on the ‘anthropocene’ and anthropogenic climate change feel similarly, perhaps not… Perhaps I’m also damaging my own ‘career’ by blogging like this. Who knows… I certainly don’t mean it as a slight to the authors of the above paper, or anyone else.

“How I learned to stopped worrying and to love discipline“

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Critical reflection on the ‘sharing economy'(?)

“Sharing is caring“, The Circle – David Eggers.

“the question of work time outside employment is posed with renewed vigour, having been totally ignored by the law reducing the working week to thirty-five hours, just as it ignored the exhaustion  of the consumerists industrial model, a model within which production and consumption constitute a functional opposition, but one that has now become obsolete”, For a New Critique of Political Economy – Bernard Stiegler.

I have had a bunch of tabs open in my browser with they intention of writing something about the ‘sharing economy’ and how one might begin to ask questions of the kinds of words we use to variously describe reconfigurations of labour/work in relation to peer-to-peer, precarious work, casualisation and (perhaps) the slow dissolution of labour movements but (as one can easily guess) I just don’t have the time to make something coherent about this… so here’s some notes, off the top of my head, with some pointers to things that may be worth reading…

In the Grauniad (as it struggles to contend with a Labour party that is significantly to the left of it) there was a piece by Alex Hern arguing that the term the ‘sharing economy’ should “die”. His argument is that what the ‘sharing economy’ supposedly denotes is no kind of sharing but rather the continuation of unequal labour relations between those with wealth and those in need of work – an example is TaskRabbit: a system to hire temporary labour, such as caterers, cleaners or someone to stand in the queue for the latest iPhone (probably without needing to ensure competitive remuneration, because people who are willing to stand in a queue for you are probably in a precarious position).

I have some sympathies with the argument  – it’s a reworking of the ‘precariat’ argument, best expressed by Guy Standing, in which the rejigging of the economy has created a new class of worker that is reliant upon ‘precarious’ (temporary, difficult and unpredictable) forms of work. However, reducing it to worrying over terminology seems to miss a broader point: regardless of what you call it, any attempt at novel economic activity will attract those who seek to be exploitative.

Before going on to think about how to address this state of affairs, it is worth noting that some have tried to think about how/why we are in such a situation. Izabella Kominska (on the FT website) offers a good overview of some of the ways in which economists have thought about post-Fordism ~ the kinds of automation that are (and are not) happening in manufacturing, the movements of labour (offshoring etc.) and why we don’t have the amount of leisure time and levels of productivity promised by greater automation.

Indeed, in order to extract more profit in an economy of apparently ever-increasing abundance many argue that it is only through business/industry clawing back a more exploitative relation with the labour force that they can continue to extract the levels of profit to which we have all become accustomed. We can look to the likes of the Italian post-Fordists, such as Berardi, Lazzarato, Terranova and Virno; to net critics such as Morozov; and to Bernard Stiegler for articulations of these latest forms of proletarianisation [you don’t have to agree, I’m just pointing out this is an argument that contextualises the ‘sharing economy’]. It is in this context of a decline in the amount of work – a decline of ‘careers’ and a growth of ‘jobs’, that Melissa Gregg articulates the need to rethink our words for labour and to critically think about what might underlie the push for a ‘sharing’ economy.

It is in this context that one might formulate a critique of the ‘sharing economy’ –– the talismans of this novel form of economic practice, the likes of Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb, all extract value out of people either rendering their traditional working capacities more ‘flexible’ (or precarious) or by those people seeking to monetise other parts of their lives, e.g. where they live, the stuff they own, or their ‘leisure time’.

The proponents of these kinds of work argue that this offers ‘flexibility’ – work when you want, how you want etc. but one might counter this with the argument that as flexible labour you have to be opportunistic and so you are precisely not working when you want but rather when there is a demand for your work.

Likewise, many of the kinds of ‘work’ that are offered through the ‘sharing economy’ platforms necessarily constitute unequal power relations. The two principal actors in the contract of ‘sharing’ work are not equal: the ‘sharing’ systems rely on creating competition, and thus a ‘scarcity’ of work such that the ‘customer’ has choice and the ‘worker’ doesn’t. The third actor, the platforms themselves, are also seeking to extract value out of the ‘sharing’ of labour by acting as the mediator, which means the system itself is always geared to the creation of a margin.

Seen as a precarious form of work, the ‘sharing economy’ has been labelled otherwise as the ‘gig economy’ and there’s been some interesting discussions about what such work means to us in terms of our mental and physical health. For example, these two pieces in the FT:

The silent anxiety of the sharing economy
New ‘gig’ economy spells end to lifetime careers

Both of which have lots of links to follow up.

The other aspect of an emerging critique of the ‘sharing economy’ is precisely the ‘platform‘ nature of the kinds of systems that are seeking both to further and to profit from these apparently new forms of work. As sebastian olma suggests in a piece for the Institute of Network Cultures:

These are digital platforms that roughly do two things: either making the old practice of re- and multi-using durable goods more efficient or expanding market exchange into economically uncharted territory of society.

Olma argues (as do other) that what these platforms do is render available to the market things that have not been previously…

They stand for a digitally enabled expansion of the market economy, which…is the opposite of sharing.

This is what Sascha Lobbo (amongst others – Gary Hall is good on this) has argued constitutes not a ‘sharing economy’ but a ‘platform capitalism’. Rather than marketplaces, platforms are a kind of generic connective infrastructure, what Olma calls an ‘ecosystem’, that connects customers and companies to anything, not just specific goods or services. He argues that

While it is absolutely true that internet marketplaces and digital platforms can reduce transaction costs, the claim that they cut out the middleman is pure fantasy.

the old ‘middlemen’ [sic.] are replaced by more powerful gatekeepers: “monopolies with an unprecedented control over the markets they themselves create”, through the quasi-autonomous systems (what get popularly referred to as ‘algorithms’) that facilitate such things as Uber’s “surge pricing“. In this way every transaction becomes an auction, which is tipped in the favour of the platform, and the worker is rendered always to some extent precarious.

Indeed, the reality of working in such systems is not only possibly very stressful, as argued in the FT piece linked a bit earlier, but also doesn’t even necessarily offer the positive outcomes that the proponents claim. As Sarah Kessler, a Fast Company journalist, noted in her extensive report of her attempt to become one of the ‘sharing economy’ workforce:

For one month, I became the “micro-entrepreneur” touted by companies like TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Airbnb. Instead of the labor revolution I had been promised, all I found was hard work, low pay, and a system that puts workers at a disadvantage.

This critique presents some interesting challenges to those who espouse alternative modes of working and performing economic activities, such as the P2PFoundation, and Stiegler’s push for an ‘economy of contribution‘ through Ars Industrialis. However, the ‘platform capitalism’ of Uber et al. is not the only way to run such a system.

Rather than resort to a gatekeeper model we might alternatively look to the (supposedly) radical transparency of the blockchain – in this way I’m left with some (probably quite muddled) questions:

  • What kind of economy/ economics is performed when the transactional infrastructure is decentralised?
    • Can you actually do without an intermediary (‘middleman’ [sic])?
    • Does a blockchain infrastructure facilitate enough of a commons to make a ‘no transaction cost’ economy possible?
  • Can we reduce ‘sharing’ to an issue of the negotiation of trust (not to be exploited), solvable by the blockchain?

There must be more/better questions but my brain is fried… I hope that this is at least useful for me to return to as a set of loose notes and perhaps even useful for others vaguely interested in such things. Likewise, as usual, if you’re better informed and want to pitch in – please do leave comments 🙂

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Reblog> “Sex, annotation and verité totale” Kurenneimi’s Archival Futurism

This new book co-edited by Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka looks interesting…

Joasia is a curator and was one of my undergrad tutors in Plymouth on the Digital Art and Technology programme and convened some great events during her time there, not least the excellent Hybrid Discourse. It was events like that which contributed to my interest in postgraduate study…

“Sex, annotation, and verité totale”: Kurenniemi’s Archival Futurism

Screen Shot 2015-09-18 at 8.41.43 AMI am very glad to announce that Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 is out from the printers, hot off the (MIT) Press! Edited with curator, writer Joasia Krysa, the book focuses on the Finnish media art pioneer Kurenniemi, and is the key international collection on the curious thinker, sound and media artist-tinkerer, who became known for his remarkable synthetizers and archival futurism. Kurenniemi has gathered attention in the electronic music circles for a longer period of time, and with Documenta 13 he become known in the international art world too. His thoughts and work resonate with the work of other early pioneers; Simon Reynolds once called him  a mix of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Buckminster Fuller, and Steve Jobs. In 2002, Mika Taanila directed the film The Future is Not What It Used to Be about Kurenniemi.

The book includes foreword by the eminent media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo and a range of critical essays on digital culture, archival mania and media arts. Key academic and art writers address Kurenniemi’s work but also more: the condition of the archive and sound arts, sonic fiction and speculative futures of singularity are some of the key themes that run through the book with contributions by many established names in media studies, art and sound technologies. In addition, we included many of Kurenniemi’ own writings over the decades, including some interviews that elaborate his wider computational views of the world, including his thought: by 2040s, the human brain can be completely simulated. His archive plays a key role, like an actor in itself: the archive also featured as a key “object” as part of the earlier Kiasma exhibition and we included some snippets, as well as an extensive visual section.

n-mika-taanila-erkki-kurenniemi-the-dawn-of-dimi-3458-4

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History sits as part of the Leonardo-book series, edited by Sean Cubitt. The book was started by Krysa through her curatorial work at the 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition. It is thanks to Joasia that I am part of the project and she deserves major praise for her amazing eye for detail, enthusiasm and energy in driving this project, from a major exhibition to a book, and more.

Here’s a preview of the book’s table of contents and Huhtamo’s Foreword.

For review copy requests, or other questions, inquiries about the book, please get in touch! We are hosting some book events in Montreal, Helsinki, Berlin and London over the coming months but more info on those separately.

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048, eds Krysa and Parikka

Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid–a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, “In 2048,” Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi’s multiplicities.

The contributors describe Kurenniemi’s enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his “video-organ,” DIMI-O. A “Visual Archive,” a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi’s achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi.

music with devices media archaeology kurenniemi AM

Endorsements

“Sex, annotation, and verité totale: Kurenniemi is a missing mixing desk between so many interesting aspects of late-twentieth-century culture. No wonder he ends up offering us a new archival futurism!”
–Matthew Fuller, Professor, Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

“Providing a long-overdue critical and historical introduction to the amazingly multifaceted work of media pioneer, visionary thinker, and self-archivist Erkki Kurenniemi, this book becomes both a media-archaeological excavation and engaging reflection on the challenges of writing media art history. The range of Kurenniemi’s fascinating practice–including electronic music composition, experimental filmmaking, robotics, and curation–defies traditional classifications, and calls for new historical narratives of media art. Started as a compilation of the long-term research that went into the exhibition of Kurenniemi’s work at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the volume combines highlights of his own writings and interviews with excellent contributions by scholars, contextualizing his archives, art, music, and vision.”
–Christiane Paul, Associate Professor, School of Media Studies, The New School; Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum

“This book is a major contribution not only to the unprecedented scientific and artistic imagination of Erkki Kurenniemi, but also to the whole research on media and ‘real time.’ The text unveils and critically presents the reader with a series of complex technological and artistic systems exploring the man-machine relationship under the assumption both do have consciousness. Kurenniemi’s work provides us with one of the most solid grounds to examine perception, the brain, the will to speculate and travel back and forth between several realms of knowledge. Kurenniemi is bold; this text is bold and a great contribution to new forms of studying risk taking in art and science.”
–Chus Martínez, Head of the Institute of Art, FHNW Academy of Art and Design

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Character assassinations? There’s an app for that…

Interesting article on the Washington Post  site, tweeted by David Murakami Wood (above), that talks about a service/app called “Peeple” that seeks to be a “Yelp for people” – to enable us to ‘rate’ and ‘review’ one another… A market-driven death-knell for treating one another like ‘people’ (rendering the name rather ironic) and another attempt to pull a further aspect of ‘ordinary’ life into the attention economy. This is an attempted renegotiation of the ‘normative’, what Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, in their book Blue Jeans, describe as the sense in which “the expectation that actions within a social field are likely to be judged as right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, proper or transgressive”. What if reviewing one another became ‘normal’..?(!!) *sigh*

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Jean Lievens introduction to Michel Bauwens’ Sauver le Monde

Earlier this year I posted rough translations of both Bernard Stiegler’s Preface and Dirk Holeman’s Postface to Michel Bauwens and Jean Lievens’ book Sauver le Monde: Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer [To Save the World: towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer].

I’ve translated a bit more now and I make this translation available, for free, to the publishers to do as they wish with it. I hope it helps in some small way…

These are the first few pages of the book following the Preface, in two short sections: Introduction and About this book.

As usual, clarifications or original French are in square brackets and I welcome any comments or suggestions – although I’m not trying to offer an ‘authoritative’ translation…

Introduction

“We do not live in a changing age, but rather a change of age”
Professor Jan Rotmans
(Professor of the Theory and Management of Transition,
Erasmus University Rotterdam)

It would be pointless to try to convince the reader of a book entitled To Save the World that life on Earth, as we understand it today, is in peril. Following a recently published study in the journal Nature Climate Change, more that half of terrestrial plants and the habitats of around a third of animals will disappear because of climate change if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the current rate. Scientists at the renowned Global Footprint Network (an international laboratory of ideas that measures ecological sustainability using ‘ecological footprints’) have calculated that, at present, we will need a planet and a half to maintain the current global economy. Furthermore, the growth rate required to maintain this system until 2053 would require the global economy to quadruple. In this case, we would need six planets. One does not need to be genius to understand that endless growth on a finite planet is a scientific nonsense and we are heading for a crash. Faced with this bleak perspective for the future, there are different ways to react: simple denial, to resign ourselves to it, or to attempt to do something about it.

To change the world, we can draw inspiration from the past, but we need a new way of addressing the challenges of the future. Michel Bauwens brings us such a vision. Not the visions, but a vision. The title of this book thus reflects a certain arrogance inconsistent with his character. Indeed, very intelligent people are often very modest, because they are very conscious of their own limitations. But who is Michel Bauwens? Beneath the title “The most stimulating Belgian thinker is an unknown philosopher” in the newspaper De Morgen (on the 23rd March 2012) presents him as follows:

“Do you know Michel Bauwens? Perhaps not. This 54-year-old cyberphilosopher is not well known. Bauwens is the first Belgian to figure in a list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He finds himself in the illustrious company of people such as Mahatma Ghandi (9), Martin Luther King (24), The Dalai Lama (28), Thomas Malthus (55) and John Kenneth Galbraith (70). Bauwens occupies 82nd place, a few rungs above Eleanor Roosevelt (87).”

The list referred to in De Morgen, “The (En)Rich List”, is a table of 100 people established by the Post Growth Institute, an international group of scientists that lobby for a sustainable society in which prosperity can be created without a need for economic doctrine [besoin de croissance économique]. The list of the “most enriching people” is a foil [clin d’Å“il – literally “a wink”, could be translated to ‘a nod’] to the 100 “richest people” in the world, published annually by the American financial magazine Forbes.

Cyberphilosopher, futurologist, economist, researcher, conference convener, entrepreneur”¦ These are some of the epithets given to Michel Bauwens by journalists. Wikipedia designates him as a “peer-to-peer theorist”, and he describes himself in this book as a commentator and thinker attempting to forge a coherent link between the theories, hypotheses and explications of peer-to-peer, and to do so in the most ethical way possible.

So what is ‘peer-to-peer’ (abbreviated to P2P)? This is a term not well known or understood outside of the world of IT enthusiasts and geeks, nevertheless the collaborative economy, forged through networks of peers, has rapidly gained in popularity throughout our countries. A year before the publication of that short article in De Morgen, the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper De Tijd (on the 23rd April 2013) published a detailed interview with Michel, across a double-page spread. Little by little, he has gained notoriety even in his country of birth. As is often the case, local recognition comes on the back of an international breakthrough, and not vice versa. It is well-known that: “No one is a prophet in their own country” [«Nul n’est prophète en son pays» – this is an idiom that some suggest traces back to the apostles Luke and Matthew].

About this book

This book is the outcome of twelve Skype interviews, of around an hour each, between January and February 2014. If I had arranged twelve more hours, if someone else had interviewed Michel, this would have been a different book. In any case, our aim is to share with you some ideas at the heart of peer-to-peer, production between peers, in the hope of inspiring you to further your understanding through other lectures, books and studies. As this book contains a number of important new and uncommon terms (for example, you may have already struggled with the term ‘peer-to-peer’ in the subtitle of this book), we have created a glossary that is situated at the end of the book.

Personally, I think that politicians, whether on the right or the left, have a tendency to see the future [l’avenir] through the rear-view mirror. Just as Marxism is an ideological construct of the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism find their origins in the 18th century. From a historical perspective these ideologies each have respective values but they no longer offer a response to the enormous difficulties that confront us today. This is also expressed in the way that politicians are unable to offer solutions. Not only because the political class tends to defend the status quo and their vested interests but also because many of the problems can only be solved at a global scale and thus local authorities are powerless. This certainly does not mean that nothing is possible at a local level, quite the contrary. On those occasions when everything is paralysed at national and international levels, only local level action allows real progress. This is reflected in particular by increased urbanisation (since the beginning of the 21st century more than a half of the global population has lived in towns and cities), or what Eric Corijn calls the emergence of “urbanity” as new form of post-national society, but also by the development of peer-to-peer mechanisms through which a number of people take their fate into their own hands by launching new projects from within the very institutional framework with which they have often clashed. In the face of the pessimism of the political world, there is optimism within the science of peer-to-peer. This is why solutions will come first from civil society.

We live in an era of enormous possibilities, but also of contradictions and gigantic obstacles to the full realisation of those possibilities. Machines have releaved us of a large part of manual labour (and increasingly of intellectual labour), but the automisation of production processes has not translated into the redistribution or the reduction of working time. Financial markets, often governed by mathematical algorithms upon which no one has a grip, have a greater impact than governments upon our lives. Our parliaments vote for laws that render collaboration and sharing illegal. Our economic model is founded upon the absurd idea of material abundance and immaterial rarity. We behave as if the world was limitless and exploit it to the utmost, to the point of jeopardizing the survival of the human species. Furthermore, we use copyright and patents to build artificial barriers around human knowledge to complicate sharing and collaboration as much as possible. Yet, from the society of the industrial revolution emerged new models and ways of working, heralding a new society. Thus, today, in the words of the Dutch Scientist Jan Rotmans: “We do not live in an era of change but in a change of era”.

The emerging model of peer-to-peer, inspired by the open source movement, seeks to circumvent the false logic of material scarcity and the artificial scarcity of the immaterial. In the apparent tangle of new phenomena such as the collaborative economy, peer-to-peer networks, open source, crowd-sourcing, FabLabs, micro-factories, the “maker” movement, urban agriculture and so on, Michel Bauwens sees a model that leads us to a post-capitalist society, in which the market finally submits to the logic of the commons (the common good). This book is a first attempt to articulate ideas concerning peer-to-peer formulated by Michel Bauwens. It is not simply the result of the reflections of a single person but rather the collective inteilligence of a growing minority of active pioneers who are developing and revealing thousands of projects and experiences amongst peers. Hopefully they will be an inspiration for all who are active in this area and work to build a new world, starting with what affects us directly.

Jean Lievens
9th July 2013

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Reblog> The pseudo-digital natives argument

Great, and incisive, post by Martin about the slips we all make in lapsing into easy-but-flawed theories… I’d say this argument also applies to how people talk about a spatial distinction between ‘offline’ and ‘online’, or mediated and face-to-face, communications as a ‘virtual’ / ‘real’ dichotomy. It’s nonsense but still has some residual appeal because we like to put space in a box (a la Descartes).

The pseudo digital-natives argument

When I did my degree in Psychology I remember a lecturer dismissing lots of theories of cognition as a ‘pseudo-homunculus” explanation. The homunculus explanations of psychology posited a little person sitting inside, driving your actions (think Inside Out). Of course, this was debunked hundreds of years ago, but a pseudo-homunculus explanation was one that went so far and then almost implied a little person. For example, theories of perception that posited a projection of the external world as if it was a cinema screen inside the head. It didn’t explain how that then led to action.

I was thinking about this with ed tech presentations. The digital natives myth has long been debunked, like the homunculus, but what we have are often pseudo-digital native explanations. I joked on twitter that we should ban presenters from talking about their children’s use of technology. I don’t really want to ban it (before people start telling me why a ban would be a bad idea), and I think sometimes it is used to effectively make a point. But often the deployment of these anecdotes (or videos even) is to sneak some pseudo-digital native juice in, without being derided for such. “Look, my daughter uses the ipad in a totally different way to me, we need to be ready for these kids in university” is often the implicit or explicit message. I blogged a while ago that there is something appealing about the digital natives idea, people want it to be true, and so it finds new ways to reassert itself. So when you hear a “my kids” anecdote in a presentation, I just ask you to do a pseudo digital natives check. Stay vigilant people.

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Interesting event: Cruel Design/Disobedient Design

Anna Feigenbaum posted this call for participation to Crit-Geog-Forum, looks like an event that’ll stimulate some discussion. Not entirely sure I believe Dismaland really does anything political but is rather already subsumed in the ideology it presumably intends to critique. I mean, I’ve just seen someone at the train station in a Dismaland t-shirt…

Nevertheless, Debbie Withers‘ involvement definitely recommends this as something that will be interesting.

The event is run by the Civic Media Hub which is worth checking out.

So see below for details:

Cruel Design/Disobedient Design

A showcase and discussion on the art and politics of designing for justice in association with Cruel Designs at Dismaland.

Event Information:
Saturday, 26 September 2015
Bristol, Hydra Books TBC
16:00 to 18:00

From anti-homeless spikes and border fences to DIY tear gas masks and union banners, design practices are used for social control and social change. In this public event with designers, curators and social justice campaigners we explore what it means to design for disobedience.

Free, ticketed event: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cruel-designdisobedient-design-tickets-18324462962

with:
Gavin Grindon / curator of Cruel Designs at Dismaland & Lecturer in Curating / University of Essex

Barnbrook / Creative Studio / London

MinuteWorks / multidisciplinary graphic design studio specialising in sustainable communications / Manchester

Occupy Design / Crisis graphics for crisis times! / London

Debi Withers / Curator, writer, researcher & publisher / Bristol

And More!

Facilitated by:
Anna Feigenbaum / Civic Media Hub & Senior Lecturer in Digital Storytelling / Bournemouth University

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture & Community at Bournemouth University, The University of Essex Centre for Curatorial Studies & the MeCCSA Social Movements Network

This event is the second in our series of public discussions on Civic Media and Social Justice. Our first event, Mapping for Justice, was held in London in June 2015.

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‘Escaping the Anthropocene’, Stiegler on the Anthropocene

Following on from the various discussions and reflections on geography’s disciplinary mobilisation of the idea/concept of ‘the anthropocene’ I thought I’d just link to a bunch of things Bernard Stiegler has written about/in response to the concept.

I cannot pretend to be totally on top of this work. Likewise, I am not totally sure I can buy into the argument Stiegler presents in these works but it is relatively interesting nonetheless…

These are all translated and made available by the inimitable Daniel Ross:

“The Anthropocene and Neganthropology“, lecture by Bernard Stiegler at Canterbury, 2014.

“Escaping the Anthropocene“, lecture by Bernard Stiegler at the University of Durham, January 2015.

“Automatic Society 1: The Future of Work – Introduction“, the Introduction to Stiegler’s latest(?) book Automatic Society 1: The Future of Work (another series apparently!). This has been published in the new journal La Deleuziana.

 

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CFP> Mapping (from) the minor of big data?

Here’s an interesting call for papers for the Association of American Geographers conference next year (2016), posted to Crit-Geog by Wen Lin…

Call for Papers:

Mapping (from) the minor of big data?
AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco
29 March to 2 April 2015

http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting

Organizers:
Wen Lin, Newcastle University
Matthew W. Wilson, University of Kentucky

“The minor is not a theory of the margins, but a different way of working with material. “¦ It is about the conscious use of displacement.” (Katz 1996, 489)

“Clearly, the technology has the potential to disenfranchise the weak and not so powerful through the selective participation of groups and individuals.” (Harris and Weiner 1998, 69)

Recent years have seen the explosive growth of geospatial data produced and shared by vast, diverse users, facilitated by an array of information and communication technologies and mobile devices. There is a burgeoning body of work attempting to theorize and investigate these processes and practices, with notions including neogeography (Turner 2006), volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Goodchild 2007), maps 2.0 (Crampton 2009), vernacular mapping (Gerlach 2014), alt.gis (Schuurman 2015), and a form of geographic big data (Mooney 2015). Significant efforts have been made to examine a range of issues derived from such phenomena regarding ways of mapping, data quality, and associated socio-political implications concerning power, equity and knowledge. Attention has been given to the empowering and emancipatory potential of new ways of mapping and storytelling, while questions have also been raised about possible implications of surveillance, population control, and unevenness of knowledge production.

Yet, there remains much to be known about those mapping efforts that are seemingly on and in the margins of ‘big data’, from those less active contributors, or by actors in relatively marginalized positions. Such efforts may constitute counter-hegemonic knowledge production (Harris and Weiner 1998, see also Elwood 2015) or may be alternatively understood as a kind of minor data (to draw upon ‘minor theory’ in Katz 1996).

This session intends to contribute to these vibrant discussions by engaging with documenting efforts of mappings and data construction that might be of a much smaller quantity in the wake of big data. We welcome papers addressing theoretical, methodological, and empirical investigations of these mapping efforts situated in a variety of contexts. Questions may include, but are not limited to:

  • How might we engage with mapping the minor in the context of big data?
  • In what ways are data generated, represented, or curated by those who might be from a more marginalized position in these mapping efforts?
  • In what ways are geospatial technologies used, reconfigured, or contested in these mapping efforts?
  • In what ways is knowledge (re)produced in these mappings?
  • What are the challenges of tracing and documenting mapping efforts from the margins?
  • What might be the broader implications of these accounts?

If you are interested in participating in this session, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Wen Lin (wen.lin[at]ncl.ac.uk) and Matthew W. Wilson (matthew.w.wilson[at]uky.edu) by Friday, 2 October. Please note that we are attempting to bring alternative perspectives and positions to this discussion, in alignment with this recent manifesto on the gender and racial composition of AAG panels (http://www.knowledgepolitics.org/2015/09/07/the-unbearable-white-maleness-of-aag/).

References:

Crampton, J. 2009. Cartography: performative, participatory, political. Progress in Human Geography, 33(6): 840-848.

Elwood, S. 2015. Still Deconstructing the Map: Microfinance Mapping and the Visual Politics of Intimate Abstraction. Cartographica, 50(1): 45-49

Gerlach, J. 2014. Lines, contours, legends: coordinates for vernacular mapping. Progress in Human Geography, 38(1): 22-39.

Goodchild, M. 2007. Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69: 211-221.

Harris T., Weiner D. 1998. Empowerment, marginalization, and “community-integrated” GIS. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, 25(2): 67-76.

Katz, C. 1996. Towards minor theory. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 14: 487-499.

Mooney, P. 2015. An Outlook for OpenStreetMap.  In J. Jokar Arsanjani, A. Zipf, P. Mooney, M. Helbich (eds.) OpenStreetMap in GIScience: Experiences, Research, and Applications. Cham, Springer, pp. 319-314.

Schuurman, N. 2015. What is alt.gis? Introduction to the Special Issue. The Canadian Geographer, 59(1): 1-2.

Turner. A. 2006. An Introduction to Neogeography. O’Reilly Media, Sebastapol, CA.

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Silicon Valley’s libertarian capitalism and Burning Man

I’m a fan of Fred Turner’s work – especially his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture that charts the shift from hippy-like communalism to libertarian cyberculture by Stewart Brand and a few other Californian countercultural torch-bearers associated with the Whole Earth enterprise.

In the book Turner outlines the ways in which the rhetorics of a kind of collectivised, networked utopian society became a rationale for a non-hierarchical way of living using internet technologies and a basis for offering strategic business advice about how these new technologies would ‘disrupt’ the status quo of contemporary life (and thus are a business opportunity). The book is, of course, more nuanced than that and it is well-worth a read!

In a separate journal article, around the same time, Turner charts out how a similar logic underlies the Burning Man festival and how this resonates with the core beliefs of those at the top of Google. Peer production and re-finding the social value of your labour using the kinds of communal working models that came out of the counter/cyber- culture nexus emerges as a key value at Burning Man, as people make and share and gain notoriety & kudos accordingly. But the article sort of paints too-rosy a picture of the benevolence and horizontalism of Burning Man.

For, we can also see how the ethos of peer production and forms of free labour has been something that Google has exploited from day one (they don’t make ‘content’, they index it and sell adverts alongside it back to us, who make it). And as the Valley millionaires increasingly use Burning Man as the highlight of their social calendar, and do not sully their own hands in ‘contributing’ to the festival but employ others to do so, we can see how that exploitation spreads…

In a recent article in Jacobin Keith Spencer compellingly articulates how this exploitation of forms of communalism is the basis for the creation of a wealthy elite constructing themselves as the benevolent harbingers of a different kind of society.

Burning Man foreshadows a future social model that is particularly appealing to the wealthy: a libertarian oligarchy, where people of all classes and identities coexist, yet social welfare and the commons exist solely on a charitable basis.

Its worth reading all of the above, but definitely read Spencer’s piece in Jacobin.