Book review forum on Andrew Barry’s Material Politics

I’m a bit late to this but… In the latest issue of Dialogues in Human Geography there is a book review forum on Andrew Barry’s Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. This book review forum follows on from an excellent ‘author meets interlocutors’ session at last year’s RGS-IBG annual conference.

The book itself is an interesting foray into thinking through the kinds of politics Barry was already moving towards in his Political Machines, and ties together a variegated assemblage of people, ideas, events and artefacts.

The contributions (which include one from my colleague Gail Davies) are thoughtful and provocative, ranging across the various intellectual terrains Barry addresses and I encourage people to read the whole forum. Unfortunately, this journal is behind the paywall and so access is limited.

3 July, 2015

Computing the human – biometrics and our dividual selves

Over on the excellent Aeon website there’s a beta section called ‘Ideas‘ that poses questions and solicits responses. One such question is: “How will biometrics transform surveillance culture?“. To which Kelly Gates (UCSD) offers an adroit response in the form of a short essay entitled ‘Computerising Humans‘.

Gates unpicks the technological deterministic fatalism of the expectation that the widespread deployment of biometric technologies is a foregone conclusion. She argues:

There’s also an assumption that in the very near future, these technologies will be capable of automatically identifying us with near-perfect accuracy, free of the messy cultural baggage that muddles the way humans identify one another. Human perception is inherently biased and flawed, according to this logic, while computers are inherently objective, free from error and prejudice.

It follows that, and as Gates goes on to argue, to invent the technology, be the owner of the data upon which it operates and then verify the ‘accuracy’ of that technology (as Facebook do with their facial recognition systems) means that one necessarily invents the accuracy of that technology as well. Likewise, in creating such systems and the parameters in which they (must) operate (to be effective) we necessarily circumscribe and predetermine their uses, and thus also invent their usefulness. Therefore, in this sense, by inventing the technology and its usefulness we invent the future in which it is necessary:

In other words, inventing the accuracy of biometric technologies involves making bigger claims about what they can do than their limited experimental results can support.

Of course, such a process of invention is also, necessarily, a (re)invention of our ‘selves’, in multiple. It is a kind of ontogenetic (and more specifically here, technogenetic process, as Gates highlights – although I prefer Simondon to Hayles on this point). The multiple nature of the data representations of our ‘selves’ convenes the various ways in which we are conceived as entities, in data and in flesh, and thus the multiple ways our identities are performed. We are reinvented by looking back at our-selves through the ‘eyes’ of the technology: the surveillant relation between the unblinking gaze of the technology and our performance of identity is co-constituted.

Understanding ourselves as fully enmeshed with technologies might help us get a better sense of what biometrics portend for our already surveillant culture. We already conceive of ourselves as people with official identities composed of disembodied aggregates of transaction-generated data–digital representations of ourselves that circulate over networks. In fact, it is a necessary precondition of biometric system development that we conceive of ourselves in this way. In short, if computers are getting better at recognizing humans, it’s because humans are getting much better at looking at, and seeing themselves, much like computers.

A helpful way of understanding this is through the brief exposition of the ‘dividual’ Deleuze makes in his Postscript on the Societies of Control: “a physically embodied human […] that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via the modern technologies of control, like computer-based systems” (as Robert Williams has it). If we look at the production and performance of our selves, as ‘dividuals’, we are, I would argue, confronting the necessity to un-think “the subject” (following J-D Dewsbury’s Deleuzian reading of Badiou). We accordingly consume our selves by trusting in the apparatuses of multiple surveillance (Facebook etc.) and are invited to deny what is incalculable.

Stiegler would perhaps argue that to combat our rendering as biometric surveillant subjects we must take care of our selves, of our incalculability; believe in that incalculability, and make that care a basis of our political economic relations. Of course, that is far easier said than done. Biometric technology does not necessitate the rendering of ‘dividuals’, that future is not a forgone conclusion, but it will take a lot of work to invent an alternative.

2 July, 2015

Robot-caused death

A robot has tragically caused the death of a VW worker, we learn in today’s news coverage. According to Wikipedia (yes, I know…) this is, quite remarkably, only the third reported industrial robot-caused fatality.

The first two reported deaths of workers caused by manufacturing robots happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s:

Robert Williams was killed in Detroit by a parts recovery robot in the Ford Flatrock Casting Plant (Michigan) in January 1979. A circuit judge in the US found the manufacturer of the equipment criminally liable and ordered Unit Handling Systems USD$10m to the Williams family.

Kenji Urada was killed in Akashi (near Kobe) by an industrial robot in a Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant in July 1981.

There is a temptation to think about some kind of intentionality (however weak) or malign tendency by the machine here, largely because of the word ‘robot’ and because of the detailed imagination of what constitutes the entities we might commonly understand to be referred to by that term. The chatter on Twitter about the sad VW incident certainly seems to invoke the kind of Asimov-style Sci-Fi robotics of I, Robot and the Terminator.

The corollary to this is, of course, that we have become very used to seeking blame located in a single figure of a ‘wrong-doer’. Indeed, we have sought (in the UK) to enshrine this in law after a fashion by holding senior manager personally to account in corporate manslaughter cases. Thus it is unsurprising that TIME magazine report that:

Prosecutors are still deciding whether to bring charges and whom they would pursue.

One can argue, however, that a desire for singular culpability is misconceived. The workers tragically killed in all three of cases were involved in complex assemblages or systems that, even with contemporary safety systems, have contingencies that might lead to undesirable ends. In this way, while the contexts are very different, the worker in today’s robotically enable factory is a distant relation of the 19th century mill worker powerfully described by Friedrich Engels.

Workers both in the 19th century and today have to be alive to the operation of a complex and continent manufacturing system, with many kinds of rules and procedures that circumscribe a place for the human body and its function within industrial manufacturing. If one places their body outside of that circumscribed place, or if the rules of circumscription shift (by accident or design) then the body is at risk of harm.

There may all sorts of factors that lead to a manufacturing accident, but I would hazard that they are more often than not a condition of what it means to work and how that work is designed: how the body fits within the system, or how that system is programmed to accommodate the body, rather than a malign or supernatural robotic agency.

For example: Urada was trapped by the work arm of the robot which pinned him against a machine which cuts gears and was killed. He had entered a prohibited area around the robot to repair it. According to factory officials, a mesh fence around the robot would have shut off the power when unhooked, but instead of opening it, Urada had apparently jumped over the fence. He set the machine on manual control but accidentally brushed against the on-switch, and the claw of the robot pushed him against the machine tooling device.

A grizzly story and one might look at the safety procedures and equipment. There are of course standards and codes of practice for safe working with robots (by the ANSI and the HSE for example). Nevertheless, it remains the case that Urada transgressed those procedures putting himself at risk. We can only speculate about why he did so, but again that is a condition of work, not of robots as such.

All three of the deaths caused by manufacturing robots are tragic and all three have and will no doubt prompt questions about how complex systems of manufacture that may be hazardous to the human body can be made as safe as possible. They could, and perhaps should, also prompt questions about how we work (see, for example, this article in the FT).

2 July, 20152 July, 2015

Reblog> Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points

Political economy via blogging… Yannis Varoufakis’ blog makes for an interesting read – extraordinary that a finance/treasury chief keeps a blog, and indeed has time to do so!

Here’s his powerful and succinct (and remarkably polite) six bullet points for voting ‘no’ in this weekend’s referendum in Greece:

Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points

Negotiations have stalled because Greece’s creditors (a) refused to reduce our un-payable public debt and (b) insisted that it should be repaid ‘parametrically’ by the weakest members of our society, their children and their grandchildren
The IMF, the United States’ government, many other governments around the globe, and most independent economists believe – along with us – that the debt must be restructured.
The Eurogroup had previously (November 2012) conceded that the debt ought to be restructured but is refusing to commit to a debt restructure
Since the announcement of the referendum, official Europe has sent signals that they are ready to discuss debt restructuring. These signals show that official Europe too would vote NO on its own ‘final’ offer.
Greece will stay in the euro. Deposits in Greece’s banks are safe. Creditors have chosen the strategy of blackmail based on bank closures. The current impasse is due to this choice by the creditors and not by the Greek government discontinuing the negotiations or any Greek thoughts of Grexit and devaluation. Greece’s place in the Eurozone and in the European Union is non-negotiable.
The future demands a proud Greece within the Eurozone and at the heart of Europe. This future demands that Greeks say a big NO on Sunday, that we stay in the Euro Area, and that, with the power vested upon us by that NO, we renegotiate Greece’s public debt as well as the distribution of burdens between the haves and the have nots.

Via: For Another Critique of the Pyramid, Nicholas Crane’s blog.

1 July, 2015

Reblog> Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine

On his blog Andrew Iliadis shares an excellent book symposium article published in Philosophy and Technology (paywall), for those interested in the philosophy of technology and in the work of Gilbert Simondon this is a really valuable addition to the scant material in English. It also includes a stellar cast of interlocutors, so kudos to Andrew!

I’m happy to announce that our Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine has just been published online at the journal homepage of Philosophy & Technology. Many thanks to Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Marc J. de Vries, and especially Nathalie Simondon for contributing to the volume.Link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-015-0205-z

PDF: Book Symposium on Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine

30 June, 2015

Greenfield on the politics of Uber as ‘socially corrosive mobility’

On his occasional blog Speedbird, Adam Greenfield has written an entertaining and incisive blogpost about the ‘mobility brokers’ Uber – the software-sorted unlicensed alt-taxi providers.

The post is worth a read for the trenchant dissection of how Uber is a kind of sigil of some of the questionable politics arising from the so-called ‘smart city’. For example:

– Interpersonal exchanges are more appropriately mediated by algorithms than by one’s own competence.
This conception of good experience is not the only thing suggesting that Uber, its ridership or both are somewhat afraid of actual, unfiltered urbanity. Among the most vexing challenges residents and other users of any large urban place ever confront is that of trust: absent familiarity, or the prospect of developing it over a pattern of repeated interactions, how are people placed (however temporarily) in a position of vulnerability expected to determine who is reliable?

Like other contemporary services, Uber outsources judgments of this type to a trust mechanic: at the conclusion of every trip, passengers are asked to explicitly rate their driver. These ratings are averaged into a score that is made visible to users in the application interface: “John (4.9 stars) will pick you up in 2 minutes.” The implicit belief is that reputation can be quantified and distilled to a single salient metric, and that this metric can be acted upon objectively.

Drivers are, essentially, graded on a curve: their rolling tally, aggregated over the previous 500 passenger engagements, must remain above average not in absolute terms, but against the competitive set. Drivers whose scores drop beneath this threshold may not receive ride requests, and it therefore functions as an effective disciplinary mechanism. Judging from conversations among drivers, further, the criteria on which this all-important performance metric is assessed are subjective and highly variable, meaning that the driver has no choice but to model what they believe riders are looking for in the proverbial “good driver,” internalize that model and adjust their behavior accordingly.

What riders are not told by Uber – though, in this age of ubiquitous peer-to- peer media, it is becoming evident to many that this has in fact been the case for some time – is that they too are rated by drivers, on a similar five-point scale. This rating, too, is not without consequence. Drivers have a certain degree of discretion in choosing to accept or deny ride requests, and to judge from publicly-accessible online conversations, many simply refuse to pick up riders with scores below a certain threshold, typically in the high 3’s.
This is strongly reminiscent of the process that I have elsewhere called “differential permissioning,” in which physical access to everyday spaces and functions becomes ever-more widely apportioned on the basis of such computational scores, by direct analogy with the access control paradigm prevalent in the information security community. Such determinations are opaque to those affected, while those denied access are offered few or no effective means of recourse. For prospective Uber patrons, differential permissioning means that they can be blackballed, and never know why.

Uber certainly has this feature in comment with algorithmic reputation-scoring services like Klout. But all such measures stumble in their bizarre insistence that trust can be distilled to a unitary value. This belies the common-sense understanding that reputation is a contingent and relational thing – that actions a given audience may regard as markers of reliability are unlikely to read that way to all potential audiences. More broadly, it also means that Uber constructs the development of trust between driver and passenger as a circumstance in which algorithmic determinations should supplant rather than rely upon (let alone strengthen) our existing competences for situational awareness, negotiation and the detection of verbal and nonverbal social cues.

Interestingly, despite its deployment of mechanisms intended to assess driver and passenger reliability, the company goes to unusual lengths to prevent itself from being brought to accountability. Following the December 2014 Delhi rape incident, police investigators were stunned to realize that while Uber had been operating in India for some time, neither the .in website nor any other document they had access to listed a local office. They were forced to register for the app themselves (as well as download a third-party payment application) simply so they could hire an Uber car and have the driver bring them to the place where he believed his employers worked. Here we see William Gibson’s science-fictional characterization of 21st-century enterprise (“small, fast, ruthless. An atavism”¦all edge”) brought to pungent life.

Read the whole article.

26 June, 2015

Reblog > CFP: “Critical Data Studies” – Big Data & Society Special Theme

Andrew Iliadis has blogged this interesting Call For Papers:

CFP: “Critical Data Studies” – Big Data & Society Special ThemeGuest Editors: Andrew Iliadis (Purdue University) and Federica Russo (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Critical Data Studies (CDS) is a growing field of research that focuses on the unique theoretical, ethical, and epistemological challenges posed by “Big Data.” Rather than treat Big Data as a scientifically empirical, and therefore largely neutral phenomena, CDS advocates the view that data should be seen as always-already constituted within wider data assemblages. Assemblages is a concept that helps capture the multitude of ways that already-composed data structures inflect and interact with society, its organization and functioning, and the resulting impact on individuals’ daily lives. CDS questions the many assumptions about data that permeate contemporary literature on information and society by locating instances where data may be naively taken to denote objective and transparent informational entities.

CDS may be viewed as an emerging field connected to Information Ethics, Software Studies, and Critical Information Studies in that it seeks to question the ethical import of information and Big Data for society. Problems of causality, quality, security, and uncertainty concern CDS scholars. Recent articles outlining the theoretical program of CDS offer a new platform from which to question data in this manner. We seek essays for this special volume that broaden these latest commitments in CDS to include new empirical research projects on information and communication technologies (ICTs) that fall under the umbrella of Big Data, while also seeking to question their attendant epistemological shifts. Through the critical lens of ethics and morality, this special volume opens up CDS to localizations where Big Data can no longer be seen as neutral, and where an ethics of Big Data might emerge.

Issues of interest include (but are not limited to):
– Causality: how should we find causes in the era of ‘data-driven science?’ Do we need a new conception of causality to fit with new practices?
– Quality: how should we ensure that data are good enough quality for the purposes for which we use them? What should we make of the open access movement; what kind of new technologies might be needed?
– Security: how can we adequately secure data, while making it accessible to those who need it? How do we protect databases?
– Uncertainty: can Big Data help with uncertainty, or does it generate new uncertainties? What technologies are essential to reduce uncertainty elements in data-driven sciences?

Proposals of 1000 words are invited for consideration and inclusion in the Special Theme to be published in Big Data & Society (BD&S), an open access peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes interdisciplinary work principally in the social sciences, humanities and computing and their intersections with the arts and natural sciences about the implications of Big Data for societies.

Manuscripts should be 8,000 words for an Original Research Article, 3,000 words for a Commentary, and 1,000 words for an essay in the Early Career Research Forum section. All submissions of Original Research Articles to BD&S are double-blind, and triple peer-reviewed. Commentaries and ECR submissions are reviewed by the Guest Editors.

See the full thing on Andrew’s blog.

9 June, 20152 July, 2015

The anti-social academic blogger? A post by Sam Merrill

Over on his (re)new(ed) blog/site Sam Merrill has posted about blogging and his uneasiness with some of the less collegial, more narcissistic, and perhaps more target-driven (in the vein of h-index etc. perhaps[?]) implications of blogging becoming a normalised part of academic practice. Its definitely worth a read in full [here] but I’ve copied some choice excerpts below…

It all reminds me just a little too much of Zygmunt Bauman’s keynote at the re:publica 15 conference that I attended last month. He discussed how today most people seek publicity rather than privacy, primarily through social media use, and they are thus replacing the community networks which previously belonged to them with the social networks to which they now belong. […]

There is now a widespread acknowledgement that academic progression, especially at the early career stage, often relies on one’s ability to develop their own recognisable brand. This narcissist factor of academic social media use is another that leaves me feeling inherently uneasy about blogging even as I engage in it more and more willingly (the narcissism that is, not the blogging). […]

Although there is little new about Bauman’s prognosis – that social media leads to the state of being alone together – the fact a future colleague later admitted that what Bauman had described sounded just like him made me shudder as I realised that if the pressure to use social media and the Internet for academic purposes was so apparent across the disciplines that I had already encountered (archaeology and geography in particular), then what must it be like in the field of social media studies that I was about to join – and how would I ever find enough time to relieve it!

I suppose I’m inclined to argue that including blogging in your academic practice is only really worth it if it isn’t a chore, if it doesn’t become another target to hit, and if it enables us to celebrate our collective exploration of ideas – otherwise, its surely (yet) another instrument of ‘governmentality‘ ~ those logics we internalise by which we are in some sense controlled, as workers, and become alienated from our labours… in the sense in which it seems that those that work in academia (at least in the UK) are really good at internalising and living out precisely those logics we critique as neo-liberal (i.e. the REF and so on…) and just to be crystal clear, I am just as guilty of this as any.

5 June, 20152 July, 2015

Professional web presence

Another post from a train (with very poor connection and so actually uploaded from my office)…

Re-reading the responses by Clive Barnett and Jeremy Crampton to my post about ‘being a sharing academic‘ reminded me, eventually, about the conversations held on the JiscMail list ‘Crit-Geog-Forum‘ about blogging in March 2011, the session ‘Between freedom and narcissism?‘ at the AAG in 2013, for which Scott Rodgers wrote a really useful blogpost (see below) and the useful publication by Wilson and Starkweather in the Professional Geographer on the ‘web presence of academic geographers‘.

Scott Rodgers reflected upon how he uses his blog, in 2013, and opened his thoughts out to consider how he has drifted away from ‘myopic blog-writing’ to engaging in discussion and sharing across several different kinds/platforms of media. Concluding his blogpost Scott argued, and I can only agree, that:

contemporary social media are becoming less and less tools that academics can opt out of. Rather, they increasingly comprise the basic environments of academic practice, and at a time of shifting priorities in higher education, these are environments academics need to claim.

The conclusions to the paper by Wilson and Starkweather are another useful way of framing some of the issues that arose between the blogposts written by Clive, Jeremy and myself and I think are worth quoting here:

The Web presence of academic geographers can no longer necessarily be described as a static online listing of the accomplishments of an individual scholar. Instead, the Web practices of academic geographers are increasingly marked by … a focus on online interaction and engagement, despite the lack of professionalization along these lines. Early-career geographers are likely not trained in this aspect of academic reproduction and might be flatly discouraged from “wasting their time” by producing online content. Given the continually shifting norms of online practices in society, and in academia itself, however, perhaps serious debate about strategies for using [social media] tools should enter into the training and professionalization of young scholars. The fact that academics would best avoid directing all of their writing energies into their Twitter account is all the more reason for explicit discussions about how to productively manage one’s Web presence.

We do not believe that it is wise to dismiss blogging, microblogging, and online social networking as nothing more than a distraction from the serious work of academic life. Not only are these new patterns of online engagement seemingly here to stay and are likely bound up in broader shifts in performance pressures but they also offer some notable potential scholarly benefits if used with intention.

First, pressures to publish and promote have spilled out into Web practices like blogging and microblogging. The blog can act as a way to claim intellectual territory, just as it can provide a space to share nascent ideas and work out scholarly thought in conversation with far-flung peers.

Second, and relatedly, online social networks and other informal venues for sharing scholarly productions have become important amidst the uncertainty of secure employment alongside the neoliberalization of the university. Junior academics, perhaps more than their senior colleagues, might rely on these Web practices to remain visible and viable among a growing body of recently minted PhDs.

Third, many junior scholars likely completed the bulk of their advanced degree post-Facebook. These online social networks provide the avenue for keeping informed of others’ engagements (scholarly and otherwise) and nurture the local and translocal collectives that are so important in the professional development of early-career academic geographers.

…
As institutions of higher education grapple with new pressures in a knowledge economy, academic geographers should incorporate everyday Web practices alongside the more observed and investigated techniques of a neoliberalizing academe.

(Wilson and Starkweather 2014, p. 79, additional emphasis)

I wonder, not least as a committee member of two RGS-IBG research groups, if the need for integrating the uses of various media into the training and professionalisation of early-career academics might be better-served by professional associations such as the AAG and the RGS-IBG. We could, for example, offer workshops as part of annual conferences and events. If nothing else, we could help one another by more-openly sharing things that have worked for us and perhaps where we may have slipped-up and how that might be avoided. This is definitely something I think is worth consideration by those involved in our professional associations.