We have a lot of proposals on how technology should work in this society, how we want to avoid all the dangers we can see that others cannot see. But we do a very very bad job at communicating it.
In a series of short talks we’re going to share examples of some of our past and upcoming work, alongside examples from our parent organization Global Voices. But I want to start by saying something about how we go about our work.
One of the things I found interesting about both of your conversations is that as we start to see code becoming a powerful force in society, we’re no longer just trying to change laws but we find ourselves—just as we’re citizens trying to encourage the government or congresspeople to change laws—we’re now standing outside of companies saying well, there’s code that affects our lives.
Liberal users comprise a larger percentage of these r/politics users, while conservatives will comprise a smaller percentage. Through those users and through their voting, they can control what is seen and what is not seen. So a liberal user, as a block, will downvote more often than not something they don’t agree with necessarily.
r/science is really the largest science forum on the Internet. We say that we have more than 18 million subscribed users. For a point of reference, the total combined subscriber base of the top ten newspapers in the United States is around ten million.
Experimentation is so commonplace on the Internet now that if you use a platform like Facebook you’re probably part of many experiments all the time.
Underlying this project is a pretty simple and we think powerful idea that provides a solution to a complex challenge that’s facing online communities like Twitter, like Reddit, within the CivilServant universe. That challenge is the increasing automation of the enforcement of legal rules and norms online.
Public Lab is a community and a nonprofit, and we do environmental work with people all over the world. And we really try to address environmental issues that affect people. What we do we call community science.
I’m a professor here in comparative media studies and I’m codirector of an organization called AnyKey which I’ll tell you a little bit about today. We launched 2016 with the help of Intel and ESL. We’re an organization dedicated to fairness, equity, and inclusivity in gaming and in particular esports.
I consider myself to be an algorithm auditor. So what does that mean? Well, I’m inherently a suspicious person. When I start interacting with a new service, or a new app, and it appears to be doing something dynamic, I immediately been begin to question what is going on inside the black box, right? What is powering these dynamics? And ultimately what is the impact of this?
When I talk about online harassment I’m referring to a very broad spectrum of abusive behaviors that are enabled by technology platforms and used to target a user or a group of users. So this can be anything from a flaming or the use of personal insults or inflammatory language, to things like doxing or revealing or broadcasting personal information about someone such as a phone number or address, to things like stalking and impersonation and things of that nature.
Online harassment is a huge problem today. Pew and Data & Society have done reports that show that 40 to 50% of people online experience online harassment. That’s a huge number of people.
By using these tools like the sockpuppets, and scraping, and using bots, and using APIs, we can look at a site for housing and maybe try to figure out if some discrimination is happening. Are these homes prioritized differently for different people based on their age, on their sex, and so forth? And it’ll help us actually understand why some of this might be happening.
What I’d like to do just with the few minutes that I’m up here is to set the stage. This is a huge set of questions, and I think a set of questions that are exploding into public view in a way that they hadn’t even just a few years ago. So I want to sort of like, set the broad place that some of these questions kinda live.
I think that it’s becoming harder for many people to feel like they can achieve social change either through the ballot box, or through protest, which is sort of our main mechanism where when we can’t win arguments at the ballot box we stand up and show that we’re not happy about things. I want to make the case that both of those methods are actually suffering as a form of social change.
I want you to know that in this slide there is more than just a dumpster fire. There are also people in suits who are training and dedicated to manage that fire.
I start the story in 1819 rather than 1980. And that allows me to do some very specific work, which is to talk about what I think of as the deep social programming of the tools that we’re now using in public services across the United States.
In pre‐modern societies there was no idea of waste; everything was going back into life—recycled, as we would say today. If there were more children coming into the world in a family, then obviously there was room for them, and extra work somewhere in the farmyard, in the field, in the stable. And of course a place around the table. So the idea of being redundant, having no place in society, simply didn’t occur.
Under capitalism, the problem is not there are evil people here and there. The problem is the basic logic of the system as it was developed by Zygmunt Bauman and many others. Some people even claim that if you look in a nonhumanitarian way just at the pure logic of today’s global capitalism, you arrive at a ratio even some people claim of 20–80%.
Disposable life. What comes to my mind is a set of dynamics, I think, that are marking the current period, that are marking a difference in the current period. And it is the multiplication of expulsions. And once something is expelled (and I’ll elaborate) it becomes invisible. And that is part of the tragedy, I think.
In the world of labor and work, the phrase “disposable life” refers to a new wrinkle in neoliberal capitalism. And that wrinkle is that it’s cheaper to dispose of workers in Europe and America than it’s ever been in the past.
My approach to the question of disposable lives is this: In an age of late capitalism, advanced technology, and mass media, are lives easier to dispose of now than in the past? And my response is, unfortunately, yes it is easier now. And this isn’t simply because of the technology that is available today that simply wasn’t available in the past.
I suppose Foucault has to be credited with talking about disposable life. And it’s interesting to me that at the very moment when he was giving the lectures on this topic, Henry Kissinger in the United States was admitting, or publishing, the results of the commission on sterilization. The idea was that sterilization should be encouraged in Third World countries in order to regulate the population.
It is very pertinent to talk associating this with the Zapatistas. Twenty years ago in January 1st, 1994, we had the beginning of the Zapatista uprising. And to understand it we need to see what was happening with these people before the uprising, how they came to that terrible decision of starting an armed uprising.
At the intersection of the politics of art or literature or film and political theory, I’ve been thinking about disposable life through a number of lenses, particularly through work on the Holocaust and work that I’ve been doing with Max Silverman on a slightly different element of it called “concentrationary memory.”
In usages of dispose, disposition, disposing, there is always a question of putting in order, and putting things in their place. Which also means of course having the power to do so.
It’s not the case of course that any contemporary philosopher or professor of philosophy has been particularly dealing with questions of political theory. I never thought about violence. But I want to recall the moment in which I specifically started to systematically work on that.
I’m not here going to think aloud about these various contestatory forms of evidence‐giving, although much might be said about that in relation to thinking about violence. But rather to think about the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri and the kinds of police response to it in relation to the history of violence and the way in which race shapes said history of violence in a country like the United States…
When I think about disposability, I think about namelessness. I think about whose pictures are taken in refugee camps. Or whose stones without names you look at at a mass grave, or just a ditch for that matter. To be disposable is to be nameless in somebody’s eyes.
I’ve been thinking about disposable life and the meaning that might have in societies today. And I decided that the kind of disposable life that most concerns me is the kind that we either resolutely don’t see, ignore, or neglect. Or the kind that we do see but can’t seem to deal with.
I think what is particularly striking about the question of disposable lives in the 21st century is what seems to be a new global common sense about poverty, the ways in which poverty and particularly poor others have become visible. And how that in turn, particularly for millennials in the Global North—college students, young professionals, so‐called ordinary global citizens of the world—how this has mobilized them to action.
I think of larp in a couple different ways. And one of the ways that I think of it is as storytelling for the network age. This is storytelling in the first‐person present tense plural, and it is not very often that humanity comes up with a new tense in which to tell stories. That’s actually kind of a big deal.
With our team of policymakers, academics, former military, of playwrights, we explore why people refuse political compromise, go to war, attempt revolution, or resort to terrorism, focusing on what Darwin called “those virtues highly‐esteemed and even sacred,” that give immense advantage to any group with devoted actors inspired to sacrifice for them.
As a person who’s been criminalized and arrested for the sole act of being poor in the US, it’s probably something I’m always walking with, speaking on, and trying to effectively change just by…in some ways not so much raising awareness, which seems very passive to be, but more about sparking people’s understanding and change.
There’s a lot of beautiful things. And I think if there’s one thing I’m most deeply disquiet about it’s…power. Why are we doing almost nothing about climate change? It’s because despite the fact that most people on earth and many government on Earth do, the oil corporations and the governments most closely allied to the oil corporations, notably ours, don’t want to do anything.
We have even in the United States serious and growing water scarcity challenges. We have contamination problems with chemicals that we have not adequately regulated here in the United States. We have conflicts between states in the United States about who gets to use what water to do what. We have evidence that climate change is already influencing water demand, affecting water availability, changing extreme events. There are a whole suite of water‐related problems, here, unrelated to these basic human need challenges that’re pressing in other parts of the world.
I vacillate…between thinking that we’re doomed because we have given ourselves over to a stupid system that’s now backed up by guns. And then a much more utopian view that we’ve always lived in stupid systems and that we’re always making them better.
To have the hunter tell it, Africa is full of meek stories about desperation and despair. So when artists like myself offer an alternate vision, often we’re asked to defend our imagination. Why do we feel we have the luxury to create? Shouldn’t we be dealing with more important issues like corruption, or war, or AIDS, or poverty?
If you were to ask me what the crisis in the present is, as an evolutionary biologist I have to go back millions of years and try to connect all the dots, going back to man as a single‐celled organism to present time, and saying what is it that is causing modern consternation? More importantly, is there a pattern? Has this happened before? Were there some ordinary people like you and I, shopkeepers in Rome, who were standing around and saying, “You know, our leaders don’t seem to be on top of our problems. They seem to be getting worse one generation after another.”
As we’ve moved into increasingly digital spaces, so online worlds, we’re moving away from your traditional physical spaces where you have public streets; where you have public squares; where people can go to protest, and into areas, if you would call them that, that are entirely controlled by corporations.
Where did this evil stuff come from? Are we evil? I’m perfectly willing to stipulate you are not evil. Neither is your boss evil. Nor is Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And yet the results of our work, our best most altruistic work, often turns evil when it’s deployed in the larger world. We go to work every day, genuinely expecting to make the world a better place with our powerful technology. But somehow, evil is sneaking in despite our good intentions.
We’re in an era of overlapping crises, and I think that’s what makes it sort of unique. We’re aware of the financial aspect, which is sort of exponential increase in debt. We’re also aware that energy, the cost is going up because we’re reaching to deeper and more expensive reserves of energy, at least fossil fuels. So that’s another if not crisis then um… Well, actually it is a crisis, because the world we’ve constructed is based on cheap fossil fuels.
I think our work is much more interested in questioning the notion that architecture is a static entity. Part of our thinking in terms of architecture is how we make a building breathe. How do we give a building a kind of like, almost a nervous system.
What I’ve seen as a founder of MoveOn is that we’ve become increasingly polarized. And in fact we have gotten to the point where we have separate…realities? when it comes to a whole raft of facts. And so how can we possibly make good decisions together when we don’t even share basic facts? You first have to have a relationship, and you have to have shared values.
Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the people have gone from not having it around to having it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a little younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t really need to be explained. It does however need to be contextualized.
We are here to talk about fucking machines. In London, on a foggy evening, on a Tuesday, for yet another debate about fucking machines. Another curated discussion underlined by our own human insecurity about versions of us in silica. Fucking anthropomorphic fucking machines. Machines that fuck us. And let’s face it, machines are already fucking us, or so we seem to be told.
As the show advanced, we realized that there are a lot of people really really worried about the future, and they’re worried about big, big things. We’re talking things like inequality. We’re talking things like overconsumption of resources and environmental collapse. Social collapse. Community breakdown. General feelings of powerlessness against massive systems. And this seems to be universal.
So here’s what happened. If you tell people you’re going to have this super‐open, absolutely non‐commercial, money‐free thing, but it has to survive in this environment that’s based on money, where it has to make money, how does anybody square that circle? How does anybody do anything? And so companies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a corner. There was exactly one business plan available to them, which was advertising.
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Solar geoengineering rests on a simple idea that it is technically possible to make the Earth a little more reflective so that it absorbs a little less sunlight, which would partly counteract some of the risks that come from accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When I say technically possible, it appears that at least doing this in a crude way is actually easy, in the sense that it could be done with commercial off-the-shelf technologies now, and it could be done at a cost that is really trivial, sort of a part in a thousand or a part in ten thousand of global GDP. Read more →
I'm here today to talk to you about food and design. About what's cooking in design, and what's designing in food. But most of all I'm here to recommend to you never to let designers decide what you will eat. Read more →