YouTube allows people to blur faces in videos before publishing them. An artist named Leo Selvaggio has gone so far as to create prosthetic masks of his own face, which he encourages others to order and wear, allowing them, he said, “to present an alternative identity when in public.”

Vortex is part of a growing crop of art projects, stunts, games, programs, and other tools that aim to wrest some control away from targeting systems. Crypstagram uses “glitchy photo filters” to disguise photos from prying eyes; only you and your intended recipient can decrypt the photo. Cryptagram accomplishes something similar by using a Chrome browser extension to password protect images. BlinkLink allows you to create a link that disappears after a set number of views. A South Korean graphic designer named Sang Mun created a typeface that fools the OCR technology used by computer systems around the world, including those of major intelligence agencies. During his time in the South Korean military, Mun had worked with the NSA, and he used his knowledge to take advantage of some of the flaws in OCR. After a year of work, the result was a typeface called ZXX (a Library of Congress classification meaning “No linguistic content; Not applicable”) which, despite the noise and scratches and blobs intentionally introduced, is still highly readable by humans but, crucially, not by machines.

Hell Is Other People is an app that takes Foursquare check-in data from friends and recommends destinations where you’re likely not to run into them; its creator called it “an experiment in anti-social media.”

Facebook Demetricator, a browser plug-in, removes all numbers from Facebook — number of notifications, friends, likes, shares, and other metadata. Ben Grosser, the artist who created the app, said that he was worried that he cared more about these metrics than the content of messages or the quality of his relationships. “The site’s relentless focus on quantity leads us to continually measure the value of our social connections within metric terms,” he explained, “and this metricated viewpoint may have consequences on how we act within the system.” With Demetricator activated, instead of seeing that “25 people like this” — and perhaps feeling compelled to respond to be part of the group bonhomie — you only see that “people like this.”

F.A.T., or Free Art and Technology are culture jammers par excellence. A collection of about twenty artists and pranksters, F.A.T. distributes all of their material free of copyright. Often, they produce 3-D models, instruction kits, masks, and other materials that they encourage people to disseminate and to make at home. F.A.T. has produced a fake Google self-driving car that they drove around New York City. They built a fake Google Street View car and took it around Berlin, where concern about Google’s privacy and surveillance practices runs high. (The car also appeared in New York.)

In a piece called “Clearing 4 Months of Internet Cache,” F.A.T. printed months’ worth of Internet browsing, compressed the paper into a large cube, and displayed it in a gallery — a physical instantiation of our insatiable informational appetite.

When Twitter introduced the ability for any user to send a direct message to another, the artists of F.A.T. equipped a Twitter account with a script that caused it to automatically tweet any direct messages it received. Riffing off of Twitter’s impending IPO, the piece was called “Going Public.”

FriendFlop, a browser extension, jumbled the names and avatars of people on your Twitter timeline and Facebook News Feed, “dissolving your biases and reminding you that everyone is saying the same shit anyway.”

Social Roulette was a F.A.T.-produced Facebook app that allowed you to generate a random number, and if it landed on 1, your Facebook account would be deleted. There were a couple of problems, though: Facebook makes it extremely hard to delete your account (apps certainly aren’t allowed this functionality), and the company blocked the app within hours. The app was also rigged to always land on 1, but the whole thing — what one F.A.T. member called “a performance disguised as a game” — existed to prove a valuable point: “Even suggesting that we own our digital data will get you shut down.” Facebook decides how you will manage your digital identity, and if you want to get rid of it, you’re going to have do it their way.

In an inspired piece, F.A.T. harnessed the iconography and philosophy of TED (“Ideas Worth Spreading”) to cleverly subvert that organization. Led by artist Evan Roth, the group created realistic but fake TED stages — the black curtain fronted by a large screen, the imposing red TED letters the size of a small child, a sturdy reminder of the brand bringing you these life-changing promises of technological solutionism. Their fake TED speakers wore Secret Service–style earpieces, and some adopted the look of the maverick techie: hoodie, dark jeans, I’m-about-to-blow-your-mind hand gestures. A few of the speakers appeared deliberately ridiculous; one gustily flicked off the camera, another grabbed his own crotch. So what’s the scam, what’s the joke? It’s that, once published, images of these scenes — much in line with TED’s motto — began to spread through the Internet. And now, performing a Google image search on TED talks, some of the fake images come up alongside the real. (I found one of the fakes on the Web site of a well-known magazine.) The message seems to be not that just a simulacrum can come to be mistaken for the real thing, but that something about TED’s sudden ubiquity, its ease of replication, franchised all over the world like some fast-food chain, calls the whole enterprise into question. These images only appear in Google image search results because people have started linking to and using them, and if no one cares enough to check their veracity, then perhaps that’s because TED itself is just an exercise in wishful thinking, preaching betterment through the viral sharing of uplifting ideas. Watch this YouTube video and you’ll become a smarter, more thoughtful person — it doesn’t matter if what’s being dispensed to you (and the audience that paid thousands for the event) is true or plausible. TED exists to make a privileged class feel better about its own cultural supremacy, and these images are a shorthand for that. We share them to show that we’re in tune with the latest techno-utopian trends. That some of these images are an art collective’s contrivances only reinforces the sense that it is, at bottom, a charade, a mock-up.

The late Aaron Swartz and the artist Taryn Simon created Image Atlas, a site that shows Google image results from seventeen different countries, illustrating how search results are contextually dependent. The effect is mutual, with search results also potentially shaping local attitudes. An Afghan searching for “Americans” will see photos of soldiers and George W. Bush. A Chinese search produces images of happy couples and a man standing in front of a flag. The Iranian search is nearly all U.S. soldiers, while a German search is photos of a type of cookie called an Amerikaner.

DURING CLASS:

1. Current events

Discussion leader: Robert

2. Lesson work

Assigned reading/video discussion leader: A
Online discussion leader: B
Links library discussion leader: C

3. Digerati: Michael Mandiberg

Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar and educator. His work traces the lines of political and symbolic power online, working on the Internet in order to comment on and or intercede in the real and poetic flows of information. He sold all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg,made perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com, created Firefox plugins that highlight the real environmental costs of a global economy on TheRealCosts.com, and transformed all of Wikipedia into books for Print Wikipedia. Michael is the editor of The Social Media Reader (2012).

Activity leader: D

In-class reading (click here for a copy) excerpted from:

In-class video:

4. Finale

Watch an Annotated Version of Colbert's Farewell Song and See Who All Those People Were
Thursday night's finale of The Colbert Report practically begged for it, so here it is: the definitive video annotation…www.slate.com