Under this title a participatory hack exploring the consequences of technology in our lives was held on 23rd March. Introduction was made by the organiser Richard Reynolds, Course Leader of MA Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries, followed by a talk from David White, Head of Technology Enhanced Learning at UAL.
Richard started with terms like: “global superculture” by Kenneth Boulding (1969) and “transhumanism” popularised back in 1957 influential essay by Julian Huxley, that gain new contemporary context today with multiple examples of diverse technologies expanding human capabilities to the point of speculation on when humans will become ‘posthumans’. Richard claims we need new mythologies for our society to frame the thinking about Internet.
We all experience living in constant expectation of rapid change that we either experience ourselves or are informed of by industries ‘producing facts’. This model for culture resonates with the rhizome, introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in “ A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”(1980) that resists the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of ‘things’ and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those ‘things. What they call “an image of thought” reminds an image of omnipresent internet connections.[1]
David White then called it the obligation of researchers and academics to establish new language relevant for debates on future of internet, AI and role of technology in our lives. Currently Technoself studies are an emerging, interdisciplinarity domain of scholarly research dealing with all aspects of human identity in a technological society focusing on the changing nature of relationships between the human and technology[2]. Homotechnicus is a term first used by Galvin (2003) referring to the effect of technological development on human evolution. While above mentioned terms seem highly sophisticated and philosophical the Data Self, was recently introduced in a friendly way to wider audience via marketing campaign. David compares Data Self to “front stage” and “back stage” behaviours distinction by Goffman.
It’s difficult to give a precise date when unlimited access to Internet became a necessary feature for individual to be considered part of the society in the, so called, Developed world. Members of global populations living differently have been called the victims of the “Digital Divide”. Yet the ever connected internet users suffer from siloing in their own echochambers with social media networks amplifying polarization of views. In this perspective the case of Cambridge Analytics becomes a new myth shaping our reality.
“A cyberlibertarian is an individual who subscribes to a kind of ideology about new technologies, such as the Internet. He or she advocates for the use of technology as a means of promoting individual or decentralized initiatives and less dependence on central governments. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an organization that is an advocate for cyberlibertarians and cyberlibertarianism”.[3]
As David Golumbia summed up cynically “Computerization will set you free.” He notices only a small number of people self-identify as cyberlibertarians, but many more subscribe to the belief in practice. While cyberlibertarianism appears to be and in many ways is a theory of technology Golumbia advocates it is an ideology that serves, also political, purposes other than it says explicitly.
“Among the corollaries that follow from this core belief include: a resistance to criticism of the incorporation of computer technology into any sphere of human life; a pursuit of solutions to perceived problems that takes technical methods to be prior to analytic determination of the problems themselves; a privileging of quantificational methods over and above, and sometimes to the exclusion of, qualitative ones; the use of special standards for evaluating computational practices that differ from those used in evaluating non computational ones; and an overarching focus on the power of the individual and individual freedom, even when that individual is understood to be embedded in a variety of networks.” [4]
- David Golumbia:2013
In his work Martin Moore notices the lack of discussion on terms of trade and ownership in using Social Media and eventually he highlights the disconnection of the modern use of internet from its antycapitalist and antyneoliberal foundations[5].
After the hack briefs were given and teams created the third, incredibly influencial talk, by Margaux Portron (from Paper Planes) took place. Portron explores truth and privacy through the ancient Greek lenses as “there hasn’t been much democracy in between”. She finds the whistleblower act of Edward Snowden an example of Parrhesia. Parrhesia was a fundamental component of the democracy of Classical Athens. In assemblies and the courts Athenians were free to say almost anything, and in the theatre, playwrights such as Aristophanes made full use of the right to ridicule whomever they chose. Elsewhere there were limits to what might be said; freedom to discuss politics, morals, religion, or to criticize people would depend on context: by whom it was made, and when, and how, and where.[6]
Another pre-Internet representation of Internet is late 18th century system of control Panopticon by Jeremy Betham. The scheme of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times.[7] This is the system revealing “beauty of discipline” in words of Michael Foucault.
Steamhack participants prepared a 5 minute long presentation of their group Manifesto on the Future of Internet. The critical issues that emerged in my team discussion were: mapping the areas of life in which the ethical consequences and the ownership of users data bothers us, naming the gatekeepers and noticing the borders of physical and non physical presence of Internet in our lives. Struggling with questions like: what is public and what is private? or what is freedom? Steamhackers dwelled upon if the internet is a user centered system and to what extend users practices are passive.
We ended with feedback from: Kasper De Graaf director of Images & Co and Nicole Kobylansky User Experience Researcher at Google and also MAIM graduate.
Experts were impressed with what the teams presented, including mothods: for users to reclaim their power and human values to be applied in digital world. Still the debate on privacy and truth in Internet is vivid and so are other dystopian visions of digital world.
Further research:
- “Technoethics and the Evolving Knowledge Society: Ethical Issues in Technological Design, Research, Development, and Innovation” (2010) by Rocci Luppicini.
- The role of NSA and Edward Snowden as Whistleblower explained by the Guardian here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded#section/1
- “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State”(2014) by Glenn Greenwald
- movie “Citizen Four” (2014) by Laura Poitras
[1] (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)
[2] source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technoself_studies
[3] source: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/29628/cyberlibertarian
[4] source: http://www.uncomputing.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/cyberlibertarianism-extremist-foundations-sep2013.pdf
[5] source: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/policy-institute/CMCP/Tech-Giants-and-Civic-Power.pdf
Alexandra is an MA Innovation Management student at Central Saint Martins currently exploring power relations across fashion supply chains.
Feel free to leave a comment or email at a.bakowska0620161@arts.ac.uk
