Spatial Machinations
What happens when you replace one bogey man with another…? Substitute ‘algorithms’ for ‘migration’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and it maybe says something about the kinds of rhetoric around those words.
Both of these are spoofs taken from news stories on the web yesterday (19th Sept 2016).
[Click the images for links to the original stories.]
Canny commentator and provocateur Prof. Paul Dourish has a relatively recent piece in the journal Big Data & Society concerning the fashion for ‘algorithm studies’, the definitional wrangling that has ensued (i.e. people arguing over what the word means) and some proposals for what he suggests is an alternative approach
“which might put aside the question of what an algorithm is as a topic of conceptual study and instead adopt a strategy of seeking out and under- standing algorithms as objects of professional practice for computer scientists, software engineers, and system developers.” (p. 9)
Dourish proposes a kind of Foucauldian STS-style strategy for sketching out what Doreen Massey might call the ‘geometries of power‘ of specific instances of what gets called algorithms, and what kinds of power the idea of ‘algorithm’ does or doesn’t have in those (for want of a better term) institutional assemblages.
The article is an incisive and authoritative overview of the contemporary interdisciplinary debates around ‘algorithms’ and deftly outlines the frictions and tensions between the current fashion for ‘algorithms’ and the other terms that may or may not be important to the study of the phenomena we mean when we use that word. In this case Dourish offers some discussion of (software) architecture, automation, code, (big) data structures, and programs. This is a really thoughtful exposition of the stakes of the debate and a level-headed attempt at moving on the discussion. Useful interlocutors (to my mind) throughout are Alexander Galloway and Adrian Mackenzie, references to whose work are present at key points in Dourish’s discussion. This is a really clear article and probably should be an essential read for those concerning themselves with ‘algorithms’.
A really important point, which isn’t often considered, that Dourish makes very clearly is that:
One reason that an algorithm can be hard to recover from a program is that there is a lot in a pro- gram that is not ”the algorithm” (or ”an algorithm”). The residue is machinic, for sure; it is procedural, it involves the stepwise execution of one instruction followed by another, and it follows all the rules of layout, control flow, state manipulation, and access rights that shape any piece of code. But much of it is not actually part of the – or any – algorithm.
…
An algorithm may express the core of what a program is meant to do, but that core is surrounded by a vast penumbra of ancillary operations that are also a program’s respon- sibility and also manifest themselves in the program’s code. In other words, while everything that a program does and that code expresses is algorithmic in the sense that it is specified in advance by formalization, it is not algorithm, in the sense that it goes beyond things that algorithms express, or even what the term ”algorithm” signals as a term of professional practice. (p.4)
I suppose the one point of caution I’d suggest is that while excellent, Dourish’s article highlights to me the narrowness of the discussion – the relative closeness (and perhaps closed-ness) of those involved and the ways in which ‘discipline’ (and I suppose, then, ‘authority’) might thereby becoming enacted. Indeed, following Dourish’s strategy it might be (ironically) interesting to chart the forms of ‘professional practice’ through which ‘algorithm studies’ take place. The list of people and institutions Dourish acknowledges at the close of his article offer a possible starting point…
Via Tony Sampson. All the names you’d expect/want to see and a few more… (can’t help finding it amusing that Thrift is opening the event).
It’d be interesting to hear what Rouvroy has to say…
16.15 to 16.30: COFFEE BREAK
An interesting blogpost by Pip Thornton on the Royal Holloway Geopolotics & Security blog:
Over the last week several media outlets, and many more Twitter feeds, have been spreading news of a series of ‘glitches’ in Google Translate which saw the word Russia being synonymised with Mordor when translated from Ukrainian to Russian. Furthermore, Russians became occupiers and for a short time the name of the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned the result sad little horse.
Twitter / Vadim Nakhankov (wired.co.uk)
Noting that ‘the terms mirror language used by some Ukrainians following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014″², some suggested the possibility of foul play; that the algorithm was ‘hacked by spies‘, ‘jokers’ or ‘mischievous pro-Kiev activists’, or that the words had been inserted manually by users as alternative translations presumably in order to ridicule Russia and humiliate Lavrov. Other sources referred to a ‘bug’ or an ‘automated error’ in the algorithm, an explanation seemingly substantiated by the way Google quickly issued an ‘embarrassed apology’, stepping in to ‘fix’ their wayward algorithms as soon as the matter came to light.
This trailer for Herzog’s new film about the ‘connected world’ looks interesting:
This issue of Fibreculture on “apps and affect” from last year (2015), stemming from a conference of the same name, has some fairly substantial looking contributions from interesting people. These include a conversation between Alexander Galloway & Patricia Ticineto Clough, the ‘algorithmic agartha‘ paper by Nandita Biswas Mellamphy & Dan Mellamphy I’ve linked to before and (of particular interest to me at the mo) a paper by Melissa Gregg on speculative labour & app development. It’s edited by Svitlana Matviyenko, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, and Andrew Murphie.
Introduction
In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue.
This issue of the Fibreculture Journal explores a moment along this hypothetical trajectory by investigating the contemporary intersection of ‘Apps and Affect’, publishing papers from a conference of that name organised in October 2013 by faculty and students at Western University (specifically from its Faculty of Information and Media Studies and Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism). By recognising apps as objects that are related to the constitution of subjects, as a component of biopolitical assemblages, and as a means of digital production and consumption, our conference aimed to make an intervention in what had – since the announcements of the App-Store and the iPhone3 in 2008 – been a largely technical and rather technophiliac public discussion of apps.
Isn’t it paradoxical, we asked, that instead of becoming ‘transparent’ and ‘invisible’ – as envisioned by the thinkers of ubiquitous computing decades ago – the app-ecosystem manifests itself as permanent excess: excessive downloads, excessive connections, excessive proximity, excessive ‘friends’-qua-‘contacts’, excessive speeds and excessive amounts of information? How does the app as ‘technique’ (Tenner), indeed as ‘cultural technique’ (Siegert) and as ‘technics’ (Stiegler), channel our ways of maintaining relations with/in the media environment? Do the specific and circumscribed operations of individual applications foster or foreclose what media theorists call the transformative and transductive potential of collective technological individuation (Simondon)? How might we think about the social, political and technical implications of this movement away from open-ended networks like the internet towards specific, focused, and individualised modes of computing? Do apps represent ‘a new reticular condition of trans-individuation grammatising new forms of social relations’ (Stiegler) or do they signal instead the triumph of ‘regulatory’ networks over ‘generative’ ones (Zittrain)? If apps are micro-programs residing by the hundreds and thousands on cell-phones, mobile-devices and tablets, and affects are corporeal excitements (and depressions) running beneath and beyond cognition, what is the relation of apps to affects?
– See more at: http://twentyfive.fibreculturejournal.org/#sthash.6y9K3uyP.dpuf
Another interesting article out in the ‘Online Early’ section of Social & Cultural Geography is by Gillian Rose, from the “Provocations of the Present” OU event, way back in 2014(!).
Gillian gave an interesting talk on the day, which resonated with things I’ve written, and it’s interesting to read the ‘final’ version, entitled “Cultural Geography Going Viral“.
Using the example of Emily Thorberry’s injudicious tweet concerning white vans and the St George’s cross, Gillian explores how the techniques of analysis of such an image and how it is audienced, interpreted, circulated, and so on and, provocatively, discusses how “the skills of the cultural geographer are now widespread”:
In fact, they are probably no more widespread than they ever have been, but social media and online commentary is making them more visible than ever before. Everyone is reading cultural texts and coming to conclusions about their meaning and sharing their interpretations, it seems – and if they can’t understand what’s going on, they ask and they get an answer. Those answers unpack both the symbolism of specific cultural texts but also the production and circulation of those texts by specific forms of media institutions. In other words, cultural interpretation has gone viral.
This resonates in many ways with some of what I argue in my own ‘provocation‘, in which I argue that we (cultural geographers, and others) need to attend to the various ways on understanding mediation when discussing popular culture (and that we need to discuss popular culture more!)
Anyway, all this is simply to say that I recommend reading Prof. Rose’s article.
Some great observations by Gillian Rose on her blog about exhibitions visualising data and some healthy scepticism ~ which I share!
One’s at Somerset House in London, focussing on data and called Big Bang Data, until the end of February.
Another is called Animated Wonderworlds at the Museum fur Gestaltung Schaudepotin Zurich. It’s curated by Suzanne Buchan and runs til 10 January. I was hoping to get to this one, but my plans were scuppered so I’ve had to make do with the exhibition catalogue and a YouTube video. It’s focussed on animation rather than on digital data specifically but does include some data visualisations, and the catalogue has a great essay by Suzanne, which talks about just how pervasive digital animations are now.
And the third is at the Institute for Unstable Media (what a great name – though I guess all institutes are made of unstable media”¦) in Rotterdam. Its title is Data in the 21st Century and it’s on until 14 February, exploring the frictions between ‘data’ and ‘reality’, according to its homepage.
As I haven’t actually been to any of these shows, this is more of a hand-wave than a proper blog post. Interesting, though, that there’s so much work by artists, designers and digital humanists (Lev Manovich features in all but Digital Wonderlands, I think) using visualisations to interrogate data. The claim that data – especially the big data sets generated by so much of the digital infrastructure of everyday life now – is understood more easily if it’s visualised is one that’s made very often. I’m not so sure. As others (like Johanna Drucker) have worried, once data is visualised, certain questions about it are prioritised over others. A visualisation (as Suzanne Buchan argues about animations) invite affective responses, they let us “see the unseeable”, to quote Suzanne, and we can get carried away into their beautiful, glowing worlds. That can be a wonderful thing. But it also makes the robustness of the data, and the process of visualisation (both the technical process and the labour process) much harder to see, in fact. Making something visible always seems to entail making something else much less visible.
This new article in Geoforum [paywall] by Lizzie Richardson (@LizzieCIRich) looks really good – I’ve only skim read it so far but looking forward digging in 🙂
Here’s the abstract:
The sharing economy converges around activities facilitated through digital platforms that enable peer-to-peer access to goods and services. It constitutes an apparent paradox, framed as both part of the capitalist economy and as an alternative. This duplicity necessitates focusing on the performances of the sharing economy: how it simultaneously constructs diverse economic activities whilst also inviting the deconstruction of ongoing practices of dominance. Such performances hold open the question of what the (sharing) economy is, suspending it as a space for both opportunity and critique. Drawing on participant observation at a sharing economy ‘festival’ and analysis of the vocabularies of online platforms, the paper outlines three performances of sharing through community, access and collaboration. It argues through these performances that the sharing economy is contingent and complexly articulated. It has the potential to both shake up and further entrench ‘business-as-usual’ through the ongoing reconfiguration of a divergent range of (economic) activities. Whilst offering an antidote to the narrative of economy as engendering isolation and separation, the sharing economy simultaneously masks new forms of inequality and polarisations of ownership. Nonetheless, the paper concludes in suggesting that by pointing to wider questions concerning participation in, access to and production of resources, the sharing economy should not be dismissed. Instead, it should serve as prompt to engage with ‘digital’ transformations of economy in the spirit of affirmative critique that might enact the promise of doing economy differently.
Interesting… (love the Bradbury reference too!) via Steve @Bowbrick
After a three-year campaign, the IETF has cleared the way for a new HTTP status code to reflect online censorship.
The new code – 451 – is in honor of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451 in which books are banned and any found are burned (451 degrees Fahrenheit being the auto-ignition temperature for paper).
The idea is that rather than a web server, proxy or some other system returning a 403 code to a browser when information is blocked – i.e. you are not authorized to see it – the 451 status code will mean “unavailable for legal reasons.” Specifically, according to a draft RFC:
This status code indicates that the server is denying access to the resource as a consequence of a legal demand.
The server in question might not be an origin server. This type of legal demand typically most directly affects the operations of ISPs and search engines.
The IETF published the proposal late last week; this should encourage some people to start using it early. There will be a few more steps before it becomes official. It was first proposed back in June 2012 when British ISPs started being forced to block The Pirate Bay.