Category: surveillance

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A quantitative ideology? James Bridle on an algorithmic imaginary

The excellent artist James Bridle has written something for the New Humanist, which is published on their website, entitled “What’s wrong with big data?” Perhaps he’s been reading Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution? 🙂 Anyway, it sort of chimes with my previous post on data debates and with the sense in which the problems Bridle so incisively lays out for the readers of his article are not necessarily practical problems but rather are epistemological problems – they pertain to the ways in which we are asked to make sense of the world…

This belief in the power of data, of technology untrammelled by petty human worldviews, is the practical cousin of more metaphysical assertions. A belief in the unquestionability of data leads directly to a belief in the truth of data-derived assertions. And if data contains truth, then it will, without moral intervention, produce better outcomes. Speaking at Google’s private London Zeitgeist conference in 2013, Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman, asserted that “if they had had cellphones in Rwanda in 1994, the genocide would not have happened.” Schmidt’s claim was that technological visibility – the rendering of events and actions legible to everyone – would change the character of those actions. Not only is this statement historically inaccurate (there was plenty of evidence available of what was occurring during the genocide from UN officials, US satellite photographs and other sources), it’s also demonstrably untrue. Analysis of unrest in Kenya in 2007, when over 1,000 people were killed in ethnic conflicts, showed that mobile phones not only spread but accelerated the violence. But you don’t need to look to such extreme examples to see how a belief in technological determinism underlies much of our thinking and reasoning about the world.

…

Quantified thinking is the dominant ideology of contemporary life: not just in scientific and computational domains but in government policy, social relations and individual identity. It exists equally in qualified research and subconscious instinct, in the calculations of economic austerity and the determinacy of social media. It is the critical balance on which we have placed our ability to act in the world, while critically mistaking the basis for such actions. “More information” does not produce “more truth”, it endangers it.

You can read the whole article on the New Humanist website.

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Reblog> Improvised Publics :: Control and Calculation :: Inheriting Liberation :: 6-17 June 2016

This event looks really interesting, check out the website for more information…

Emergenc(i)es – an event in Bristol between 6th and 17th June

Emergenc(i)es is an invitation to consider the emergency of the current historical moment.

The exhibition will dwell in the question of emergence within emergency.

Performance, education activities, visual art, screenings, installations, workshops and a library-cum-pharmacy will create time and space to diagnose, explore and understand the world we live in.

Enter – Relate – Improvise – Diagnose – Inherit – Public – Liberate – Gather

All activities are free to attend, thanks to generous funding from Awards for All.

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“The dictatorship of data” (on BBC R4)

Just caught up with a programme aired on BBC Radio 4 last week called “The Dictatorship of Data“, presented by their Security Correspondent Gordon Corera. The role of the presenter certainly inflects the tone of the programme. It focuses on the growth in the collection of data, as the wholesale capture of data exhausts and meta-data from our devices and public platforms, and thus how that collection and then aggregation both allows and then presents problems for forms of surveillance.

It is an interesting programme insofar as it offers a general introduction to several key issues. The discussion of the geopolitical responses to the uses of social media platforms and how Russia in particular wants to capture some of that capability (particularly in relation to SORM) is good, and it mostly draws on the authors of a book that sounds good: “Red Web“. Likewise, there’s some entertaining and perhaps disquieting discussion of ‘The Hacking Team‘, purveyors of malware to governments. Again, this is understandably figured in geopolitical terms.

However, I’d say it is slightly wide of the mark in terms of the discussion offered of the prospects of social media enabling some kind of authoritarianism. The way it is discussed takes as it’s assumption that people are faithfully reporting their actual opinions, ‘real’ events and so on and that they are individuals (and not bots) – as though social media are some kind of unproblematic ‘social sensing platform’. Now, some will argue that there is a way to somehow ‘solve’ the ‘biasing’ of the sample represented by a given social media platform’s population and I’m no statistician so… meh. I remain skeptical that any kinds of claim about ‘representivity‘ are particularly meaningful.

I think those who want a more nuanced viewpoint on some of these issues probably ought to checkout Louise Amoore‘s The Politics of Possibility and her papers following on from this, likewise it’s worth checking out both David Murakami Wood and Francisco Klauser‘s work on surveillance too (of course, there’s more – but you have access to a search engine 😉 ).