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Data & Society Databite #102: Everybody Runs

I’ve been try­ing to get as many weird futures on the table as pos­si­ble because the truth is there are these sort of ubiq­ui­tous futures, right. Ideas about how the world should or will be that have become this sort of main­stream, dom­i­nat­ing ver­nac­u­lar that’s pri­mar­i­ly kind of about a very white Western mas­cu­line vision of the future, and it kind of col­o­nized the abil­i­ty to think about and imag­ine tech­nol­o­gy in the future.

Ingrid Burrington at Haunted Machines

I think there’s some­thing inter­est­ing about a dis­ci­pline that his­tor­i­cal­ly is tied to polit­i­cal intrigue, to secre­cy, being linked into this debate over what is good mag­ic or true divine mag­ic, and what is the work of demons. And I think there is some­thing inter­est­ing to be said about the moment we are in right now and how states them­selves kind of iden­ti­fy and invent exis­ten­tial threats to jus­ti­fy their own behavior.

Haunted Machines Morning Panel

Pretty much any­thing that Lucifer says in Paradise Lost, you could prob­a­bly imag­ine the CEO of Uber say­ing. They’re just dis­rupt­ing the Heavenly orders, you know. They real­ly need­ed it.

Jen Lowe at Deep Lab

Almost a year ago, I put my heart­beat online, and along with my heart­beat an account­ing of all the days I’ve lived, and the days I sta­tis­ti­cal­ly have yet to live, along with my aver­age heart­beat for each day. So I was play­ing with the idea of pri­va­cy. Here’s this very inti­mate mea­sure, in a way. But I’m not wor­ried about shar­ing it because there’s not much you can learn about me from my heart rate.

Ingrid Burrington at Deep Lab

So much of the work that is being done by the gov­ern­ment is actu­al­ly being done by third par­ties, and it’s a very lucra­tive busi­ness. So I went to this office park and kind of just walked around it, and it’s bor­ing. It’s real­ly kind of weird and bor­ing and it’s weird to think about the fact that these com­pa­nies that are enor­mous and involved in pret­ty unseem­ly shit appear like this, like this kind of crap­py build­ing with this kind of crap­py pub­lic art.