Code Societies Days 2 & 3: Home & Networks

See Day 1 for an introduction!

Day 2, entitled Smart Homes, was run by Lauren McCarthy. She talked about the reasons for considering home and technology together: home is what we are all experts on, it is almost by definition the things with which we comfortable. With so much technology feeling unknown and uncomfortable — a representation of the many things we are not experts on — it might be useful to consider ways in which we can take technology into our home.

She showed us the work of others, a kind of gestalt of other people working on this idea of home and technology. Like Mary Mattingly’s work on documenting everything she owns (“What responsibility do I have to my objects?”) and Moreshin Allahyari’s 3D-printed versions of artifacts destroyed by ISIS, with a USB drive containing the code for the 3D object housed inside. (You can find everything she referenced here).

It might be worthwhile noting at this point that I don’t really know much about art; and Lauren’s presentation drove this home (ha!) for me. I love art, I love art museums. But I don’t really… know anything about it. (This is maybe why I’m here.) This was a whirlwind of work, contextualized in the theme of Code Societies and home and technology but, for me at least, little else and I just let it wash over me.

She also talked about surveillance, and the way technology in the home is not truly ours, but more like joint custody between us and the company that runs the servers. Our devices are constantly reporting back to the server. We do not truly own it. We own only the physical part.

Then Max Hawkins talked about his work on randomizing his life. He has randomized all kinds of things, from where he lives to what he eats, what events he attends to who he meets. In fact, the way he got here, presenting to us at SFPC, was from a random email sent to Lauren McCarthy. He also got a random a tattoo — a serious commitment to randomization. (He was scared of what the generator might select for him, but in the end his tattoo is sweet and poignant.) He said he was using randomness to highlight the constraints and boundaries on his life. Randomness breaks out of our social programming. What are the things you don’t do?

We ended with an activity in which we each thought of a ritual, pattern, behavior, event, or protocol we would like to implement at SFPC. It seemed to me that a lot of our rituals were bound up in feeling closer to the other people in your home; it was less about the space and more about what we shared in the space.

We each wrote or drew our ritual on an index card, described it to the group, and pinned them up together on a board. Our homework is to create a device to initiate or facilitate some kind of ritual, be it our own or someone else’s or something inspired by the exercise.

I found this homework tricky. As with day 1, I wasn’t sure how to guide my thoughts on it. What was I looking for in this device? How should I work through different ideas?

Day 3 with danah boyd: Hacking the Attention Economy. Danah took us clearly, though quickly, through a whirlwind of topics, socratic method style. Why do you get pictures of 6-month-old white babies when you search ‘baby’ in Google Images? Why does that happen even when you search ‘baby’ in other languages? Let’s break down why this happens, in order to understand how complicated big data on the internet really is.

And then let’s talk about “alternative facts” and that it’s not about facts at all; it’s about destabilizing how we get knowledge. Why do we distrust the media and who is there to provide information to those asking uncomfortable questions? There are tactics at work to spread conspiracy theories and everyone is at least a little complicit playing into them. You can take this out of the politic sphere: journalists know that writing about how a celebrity committed suicide increases suicide rates. They do it anyway. “People want to know.”

In the end, across and among many more things we talked about, the real question, the Code Societies question, is about individual people who are hurting or confused or just growing up. How do we connect with these people and help them and hear them, in the healthy way that the early internet did?

How do we start holding people?

Evangelicals normalized reaching out to people in pain; their work is mostly good. But that same model reaches out to people who don’t know what intersectionality is, and feeds them a toxic version of the world in which they become the victim. Network effects are powerful. Societies are knit by individual people coming together at church or book club or the army; they are not knit by accruing long lists of people who at one point expressed interest in your cause.

I’m jumping over a lot; we talked for over 3 hours. In the end, no one really knows what to do about all the problems with the internet. Danah’s talk was scary. Every half hour or so she would put up an impossibly hard question, how to fix some problem, and we would think for 6 or 7 minutes, minutes, and shoot about some ideas. But we have to start trying something new.

And this is how it all gets back to home, and rituals, and the codes we build for society. Let’s start recognizing the code that is affecting our society; let’s notice who is using the code and how. Then we can start designing our own that create the societies we want.