This is Jaron Lanier’s memorable description of social media in his new book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Social media is a technology for asshole amplification. To be clearly seen in the fact that “since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world” (pg 43). His […]
Tag: Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression
There’s a fascinating mea culpa in Jaron Lanier’s new book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. On loc 411 he describes how early design decisions, inspired by the libertarian ethos taking hold within the tech community, created the openings for the global monopolies we now see emerging: Originally, many of us who […]
Saving this interesting CfP for later look up Contributors are invited to submit abstracts (about 200 words) toward our new edited collection entitled: *Social Media and the Production and Spread of Spurious Deceptive Contents,* to be published by IGI Global (Hershey, PA), under the series: *Advances in Digital Crime, Forensics, and Cyber Terrorism* (ADCFCT) […]
I’ve been reflecting on a dark but plausible prediction by Edwards Snowden in his forward to The Assination Complex by Jeremy Scahill and the team from the intercept. On loc 195 he argues that the technological barriers to ubiquitous drone surveillance are now minimal: Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the […]
How exciting does this look? Call for Papers: Special Issue on Computational Propaganda and Political Big Data We welcome manuscripts from scholars across the social and computer sciences, and are particularly interested in research from teams of authors from both domains of inquiry. Please submit your papers online to our web-based manuscript submission and peer-review […]
One of the arguments which pervades Uberworked and Underpaid, by Trebor Scholz, concerns the materiality of digital labour. As someone whose back and neck start to ache if I spend too much time at a computer, I’ve always found the tendency to assume there is something mysteriously immaterial about using computers to be rather absurd. […]
I’ve recently found myself thinking back to an argument which Jeff Weeks makes in The World We Have Won. From pg 7: The real achievement is that inequality has lost all its moral justification, and this has profoundly shifted the debate. Inequality now has to be justified in ways it never had to be before. […]
Submit your abstract (English or Spanish) by March 1st. [Español abajo] Deadline for abstract: March 1st Big Data from the South: From media to mediations, from datafication to data activism Organizers: Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) & Emiliano Treré (Scuola Normale Superiore, Italia). Critical scholarship has exposed how big data brings along new […]
I find this suggestion by Audrey Watters extremely plausible. Full interview here. I think that education data should be a top priority under the new Trump regime. Schools are wildly obsessed with collecting data. They have been for a very long time, but new digital technologies have compelled them to collect even more, all with […]
In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, there’s an interesting remark about the structural position of first time authors which I think has wider purchase. From pg 200: Ironically, in a world preoccupied by numbers, the author with no track is in some ways in a strong position, considerably stronger than the author who has published […]
By far the best film I’ve seen this year was The Childhood of a Leader. It recounts a number of episodes in the life of a nascent tyrant, exploring the emergence of what is hinted to be a boundless rage that might one day transform the world: I’ve been thinking about this film since encountering Auden’s […]
From this week’s Economist leader. I suspect they’re underestimating the extent to which Trump will largely enact the Ryan-ist mainstream in economic policy. However they’re surely correct about the underlying dynamic: Trump’s policies intensifying the conditions which gave rise to him, creating more anger and encouraging the ethno-nationalist channeling of that anger as a political […]
Special Issue, State Crime Journal (May 2018) STATE CRIME AND DIGITAL RESISTANCE Sign up for 6th January 2017 workshop here: http://statecrime.org/state-crime-research/call-for-papersworkshop-special-issue-of-state-crime-journal/ This special issue of State Crime seeks to investigate how changing patterns of state crime are being shaped by the massive growth of a digital communications infrastructure which permeates everyday life for billions of […]
I just came across this remarkable estimate in an Economist feature on surveillance. I knew digitalisation made surveillance cheaper but I didn’t realise quite how much cheaper. How much of the creeping authoritarianism which characterises the contemporary national security apparatus in the UK and US is driven by a familiar impulse towards efficiency? The agencies not only do […]
I like this contrast drawn by Arlie Hochschild on loc 2780-2795 of Strangers In Their Own Land: Not only her values, but even the kind of self she proudly exhibited—an endurance self—seemed to need defending, because it too seemed to be going out of fashion along with all the blue-collar jobs. “They used to brag […]
Are journalists personally afraid of a Trump presidency? That’s the suggestion of this Vox article: In my experience, it goes yet deeper than this. Quietly, privately, political reporters wonder if Trump is a threat to them personally — if he were president, would he use the powers of the office to retaliate against them personally […]
In a near future America, the world is locked into an inglorious decline while the majority of its population is locked into an intoxicatingly expansive virtual world. Ecological crisis and economic ruin operate hand-in-hand to leave the 99% living in sprawling slums, consisting of endless stacks of trailer parks, around the periphery of the surviving […]
There’s an interesting extract in this Guardian article about the growing civil war in the Republican party, concerning the adoption of Trump’s tactics by aspirant politicians within the party: Trump’s refusal to support McCain and Ryan comes exactly one week before Ryan faces a primary challenge from the businessman Paul Nehlen, a candidate who has […]
From Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot pg 2. He argues that the return of the riot reverses a long term trend observed by Charles Tilley, in which the riot had given way to the strike as the foremost tactic in socially available repertoires of contention: As the overdeveloped nations have entered into sustained, if uneven, […]
This is the second time I’ve encountered this idea recently. How plausible is it? From Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, by Douglas Rushkoff, loc 1384: Digital technology, though, might finally give corporations the autonomy they need to make decisions without us, and even the bodies they need to execute their choices in the real […]
