Here's something interesting:
On 06/03/2013 07:04 PM, Fenwick Mckelvey wrote:
> ... we must come to terms with our own online activities
> feeding the appetites of algorithmically-driven machines designed to
> facilitate the expansion of profit and power by quantifying and
> modulating our desires.
This is a great text, particularly for the literary references and
fundamentally because it recognizes how data-gathering feeds back into
what the artist Sze Tsung Leong once called "control space": an urban
environment outfitted with both sensors and screens, and designed in
order to wrap itself around the constantly shifting parameters of
publicly expressed affect and interest, until one of its seductive
interfaces succeeds in capturing *you*.
On Sunday, as I drove by the croporate offices of the sinister
data-aggregating and direct-marketing company Acxiom, in Aurora,
Illinois - which itself is a statistical artifact that Thoman Pynchon or
maybe William Gibson should have written about - I found myself thinking
back to the evanescent and yet terribly concrete world of control space,
which I had explored in 2007 in the text "Future Map: Or How the Cyborgs
Learned to Sop Worrying and Love Surveillance." At that time I had some
conclusions, which are close to, but still not quite the same as those
presented in the paper by Fenwick Mckelvey and friends:
"One thing we could do is to create more precise images and more
evocative metaphors of the neoliberal art of government, in order to
heighten awareness of the ways that intimate desire is predicted and
manipulated. Such images and metaphors are desperately lacking, along
with a Karl Marx of cybercapitalism. But another, more important thing
we can do is to dig into the existential present and transform the
everyday machines, by hacking them into unexpected shapes and
configurations that can provide collaborative answers to the spaces of
control. Critical communities of deviant subjectivity, forming at the
site of the eviscerated private/public divide, are not subcultural
frivolities but attempts to reinvent the very basis of the political.
What’s at stake is the elaboration of different functional rules for our
collective games, which in today’s society cannot be put into effect
without the language of technology."
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/future-map
In the conclusion to their paper, Mckelvey, Tiessen and Simcoe turn to a
discussion of exploits and pranks, which they conceive as momentary
subversive interruptions of the data-flow. The most suggestive example
is a faked AP tweet saying that president Obama had been attacked, which
caused a momentary 0.9% decline in the value of the S&P 500, amounting
(for a few minutes) to the disappearance of $130 billion of stock-market
value. While I have an irrespressible fondness for these kinds of hacks,
I think they are ultimately trivial. In fact, much high-frequency
trading (in the strict sense of the term) operates on a similar
principle, to the extent that the algorithms offer false purchase
orders, then retract them while simultaneously taking advantage of the
perturbation of the information environment already effected by the
false orders. At best, the prank cannot compete with the characteristic
internal errors of the system itself: nothing on the scale of the 2010
"flash crash" of the stock market has ever been carried out by a hacker.
What I meant by "critical communities of deviant subjectivity, forming
at the site of the eviscerated private/public divide" has since been
exemplified by the events of 2010-11, when the vast operation of
information piracy and social hacking carried out by Wikileaks
contributed to the unleashing of the Arab Spring, and when protesters
around the world massively appropriated Facebook and Twitter, not to
create perturbations within the control network, but to radically shift
the rules of the attention economy away from screenic fascination and
toward the embodied spaces of occupation. The result of this experience,
among many groups of politicized hackers and Internet aficionados, has
been the realization that there is a huge, simmering and at times
explosive social conflict over the uses of the all-pervasive net, which
can be twisted away from its dominant functions of
simulation/stimulation and used instead as a tool for the
direct-democratic and revolutionary investment of urban space with
living, feeling, speaking bodies-on-the-ground. In Spain these events
have been subjected to a vast and searching quantitative examination by
the group DataAnalysis 15-M (http://datanalysis15m.wordpress.com). This
study reveals that the participants of the Indignado movement were able
to collectively generate affects, subjects of critical attention and
emancipatory concepts in real time, within and against the flow of
events on the ground (notably police repression) and events in the media
sphere (disdain and disinformation from the established political
parties and the punditocracy).
The idea that a simple blip in the information flow is the pinnacle of
postmodern subversion dates back precisely to the days of Baudrillard
and the conceit of hyperreality. The world we live in is different.
Threatened by economic breakdown, civil war and climate change, it is a
world whose miserable, and yet to be sure, tremendously powerful
capacities of simulation are constantly cracking open to reveal their
inadequacies, lies and abject failures on the ground. Critical
intellectuals should not think inside the box of surveillance and
informational modeling. They should light up and also follow the
pathways that lead through it and outside it, to embodied conflicts over
the life-and-death issues of the present.
best, Brian
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