Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hola Tod@s and David, While the research and scholarship you present is extremely important to consider and to understand. It also assumes that artists and activist have no critical awareness of these issues of power above all things or below all things (of algorithms or robots), and I think this wrong. At least for me since my days (80's) with Critical Art Ensemble, ACT UP, and spending our days and nights reading Adorno to Virillio, from the Pentagon Papers to the SCUM. Manifesto, working with the Zapatistas and Electronic Disturbance Theater in the 1990's and now under the weight of Cloudy Empires etc., - we have never been utopian about technology or imagined the power and computing in the 20th century would be or become platforms of justice or concern. But we also did not want to fall into the no-way out zone of the apocalyptic-that seems to some degree at play in your scholarship. And I would add that this critical stance allowed us to continue to consider the importance of being in as artivist in support of social justice causes (of being advertisement or the platforms of concern) who would use whatever means to do it-including current expressions of the technological. Finally, a number of artivist and activist are investigating type exodus protocols to become what Max Headroom called blanks. Thanks for all your research links and pushing us to consider other types of powers-without-concern. Best, Ricardo --empyre- soft-skinned space-- On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com) wrote: power does not know social justice, however we construe that term. it is just power. On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com) wrote: it is everywhere in the scholarship on social media in particular: I'm going to look exclusively at the thing I consider good and how social media contributes to it, and put aside any consideration of the things I consider bad. That's not scholarship: it's advertising. Power does not know social justice and neither does algorithm or robot. Rather, now, the power of Big Software - more or less explicitly overdetermined by venal human desire - constructs systems of algorithmically driven robots in its service. The robots are reactive and generative in the sense that they react to symbolically structured cultural forms and then generate (more from less) cultural forms which are fed back to human subjects and also to other robots and systems. Big Software now builds these networked computational systems chiefly and massively to render commerce (not art or politics or culture or anything else except perhaps the flourishes of 'entertainment media') as frictionless as possible: by facilitating real tractions (between capital and its (co-)subjects) and by advertising hyper-effectively on behalf of capital. Big Software - McKenzie Wark's vectoralists - must make their income by charging capital for 'services.' But they have also discovered (and I will only briefly touch on this real, historical injustice) that they are easily able to steal Big Data from people everywhere merely as an unregulated function of the self-stated 'terms' of 'use' for these 'services'. Social Media is perhaps the most important manifestation of this pathology of sociopolitical economy. In so far as we may no longer be able to 'build our own' systems of social media, and in so far as the algorithms and robots of real existing social media are designed by and in the service of this pathology, I believe that there is an argument against Social Media as we know it. Social Media - in the form of robots and algorithms - will tend, inevitably, to generate more and more in the way of pathological cultural forms addressed to human subjects, regardless of those subjects intentions in terms of social justice or its opposite or anything else. And this is quite apart from the historical fact of Big Data theft and accumulation that is routinely and tacitly accepted as a function of the pathology - our contemporary pharmakon as Bernard Stiegler has it - with and within which we must try to live. The uses and values of all that 'data' (and it's not really data anyway, its only everything that our devices can so far collect) are all but entirely beyond democratic control, let alone beyond our control as individuals or progressive institutions/collectives. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- Ricardo Dominguez Associate Professor Visual Arts Department, UCSD http://visarts.ucsd.edu/ Principal Investigator, CALIT2 http://bang.transreal.org/ email: rrdoming...@ucsd.edu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] social media and scholarship
--empyre- soft-skinned space--David, along with John Cayley's, yours is the most ludic analysis of social media, and its selling itself, I have heard. Thank you. Murat On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 3:19 PM, David Golumbia dgolum...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Tim kindly asked me yesterday to reflect briefly on my own scholarship and the question of the relationship of social media and politics. I'm deliberately not engaging with the recent discussion on the list, although I've tried without success to dig into the discussion of ISIS Tim mentioned in last month's list. My interest, from the beginning, has been on the rhetoric that fuels this form of inquiry, and the political effects of that rhetoric. The ideas that the internet writ large, or social media writ somewhat smaller, is fueling or provoking political change; that that political change is welcome in some global sense; that if you want to liberate a government, give them Facebook--the odd and inexact phrasing of that sentence itself being worth reflection, as is the fact that it was uttered by a former Google executive who now is part of a Google social change venture capital subsidiary. All of this rhetoric, multiplied thousands of times in the mass and social media (a distinction I wouldn't want to grant, but let's leave it for now), provides a hard sell for a single proposition: give people more computing power, and welcome political change will result. Not only is that proposition based on, as I mentioned before, extremely contentious and implicit definitions of welcome and political, but it is probably false. not only is it probably false: there is good evidence to believe the opposite is true. This is the buried message behind the Snowden revelations, which I believe are wildly misinterpreted by Snowden himself, by encryption advocates, by the Left, and many others: the point is not that NSA is misusing networked computer power. The point is that that power itself is unwelcome and destructive. Networking and computerization the world was recognized long before our time as a way to create a fully-monitored, fully-surveilled, fully-controlled society. Now we find people not only dismissing the claim out of hand, and misinterpreting the claim as one about bad actors rather than inherent features of the system itself, but actually advocating its direct converse: that computerization equates with political liberation. As Daniel Trottier suggests in his great recent book *Social Media as Surveillance*, you can't disentangle these two functions: they are the same thing, viewed through different frames. The fact that we have moved from a kind of clear-sighted intellectual formation in the 1950s and 1960s and even 1970s that mass computerization would clearly lead to politically destructive outcomes, to a world in which even making those suggestions is dismissed out of hand by activists whose understanding of politics proceeds almost entirely from the computer itself, should make anyone with a long view very concerned. Further, the world that encryption advocates appear to want--in which all communication has been made entirely opaque to governments--is just as disastrous. This is one interesting place to focus in Snowden's speeches and those of his advocates, because they continually wave their hands about completely proper law enforcement--claiming it is possible and that it is FUD to claim otherwise, while at the same time claiming that their systems somehow block all IMPROPER law enforcement, while having no backdoors or other mechanisms to distinguish the two. It is logically and factually nonsensical. One need not dig long on the Tor website to see its fans actually crowing about the fact that corporate CEOs use Tor, while at the same time belittling anyone who suggests that this would somehow make prosecution of corporate malfeasance more difficult. So, back to my general comment about scholarship and advertising. The first glimmers we heard of Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions came from Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky, both highly-paid corporate consultants who by dint of the generosity of the university system also have faculty appointments. Neither of them is a scholar in the usual sense: they do not have advanced degrees and do not submit their work for peer review. When they celebrate Facebook revolutions *when no revolution has happened*--the starkest case being the original one, Iran, nobody calls them to account. People all over the academy take them seriously, despite the nonseriousness of their claims. In my own university, without getting too personal, there are several classes and programs devoted to teaching about social media and its usefulness for good. in those classes they read Shirky, and Jarvis, and others like them, while exclusively admiring the power of social media
Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space--John, I am glad to read what you have written. I was feeling more and more like a Luddite in my jaundiced view of social media, in my belief that the power of this media is much more towards evil than good. Ciao, Murat On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 8:12 AM, John Cayley john_cay...@brown.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com) wrote: power does not know social justice, however we construe that term. it is just power. On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com) wrote: it is everywhere in the scholarship on social media in particular: I'm going to look exclusively at the thing I consider good and how social media contributes to it, and put aside any consideration of the things I consider bad. That's not scholarship: it's advertising. Power does not know social justice and neither does algorithm or robot. Rather, now, the power of Big Software - more or less explicitly overdetermined by venal human desire - constructs systems of algorithmically driven robots in its service. The robots are reactive and generative in the sense that they react to symbolically structured cultural forms and then generate (more from less) cultural forms which are fed back to human subjects and also to other robots and systems. Big Software now builds these networked computational systems chiefly and massively to render commerce (not art or politics or culture or anything else except perhaps the flourishes of 'entertainment media') as frictionless as possible: by facilitating real tractions (between capital and its (co-)subjects) and by advertising hyper-effectively on behalf of capital. Big Software - McKenzie Wark's vectoralists - must make their income by charging capital for 'services.' But they have also discovered (and I will only briefly touch on this real, historical injustice) that they are easily able to steal Big Data from people everywhere merely as an unregulated function of the self-stated 'terms' of 'use' for these 'services'. Social Media is perhaps the most important manifestation of this pathology of sociopolitical economy. In so far as we may no longer be able to 'build our own' systems of social media, and in so far as the algorithms and robots of real existing social media are designed by and in the service of this pathology, I believe that there is an argument against Social Media as we know it. Social Media - in the form of robots and algorithms - will tend, inevitably, to generate more and more in the way of pathological cultural forms addressed to human subjects, regardless of those subjects intentions in terms of social justice or its opposite or anything else. And this is quite apart from the historical fact of Big Data theft and accumulation that is routinely and tacitly accepted as a function of the pathology - our contemporary pharmakon as Bernard Stiegler has it - with and within which we must try to live. The uses and values of all that 'data' (and it's not really data anyway, its only everything that our devices can so far collect) are all but entirely beyond democratic control, let alone beyond our control as individuals or progressive institutions/collectives. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you, Ricardo. as also evidenced by the posts of Richard and Rahul this week, it's the nuanced approach to social media of activist artists and organizers that we have hoped to hear about this week. What you have taught us over the years is how one miight shift platforms of art and protest in response to fluctuating expressions and manifestations of power, Thanks so much. timp Sent from my iPhone On Dec 12, 2014, at 9:15 AM, Ricardo Dominguez rrdoming...@ucsd.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hola Tod@s and David, While the research and scholarship you present is extremely important to consider and to understand. It also assumes that artists and activist have no critical awareness of these issues of power above all things or below all things (of algorithms or robots), and I think this wrong. At least for me since my days (80's) with Critical Art Ensemble, ACT UP, and spending our days and nights reading Adorno to Virillio, from the Pentagon Papers to the SCUM. Manifesto, working with the Zapatistas and Electronic Disturbance Theater in the 1990's and now under the weight of Cloudy Empires etc., - we have never been utopian about technology or imagined the power and computing in the 20th century would be or become platforms of justice or concern. But we also did not want to fall into the no-way out zone of the apocalyptic-that seems to some degree at play in your scholarship. And I would add that this critical stance allowed us to continue to consider the importance of being in as artivist in support of social justice causes (of being advertisement or the platforms of concern) who would use whatever means to do it-including current expressions of the technological. Finally, a number of artivist and activist are investigating type exodus protocols to become what Max Headroom called blanks. Thanks for all your research links and pushing us to consider other types of powers-without-concern. Best, Ricardo --empyre- soft-skinned space-- On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com) wrote: power does not know social justice, however we construe that term. it is just power. On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com) wrote: it is everywhere in the scholarship on social media in particular: I'm going to look exclusively at the thing I consider good and how social media contributes to it, and put aside any consideration of the things I consider bad. That's not scholarship: it's advertising. Power does not know social justice and neither does algorithm or robot. Rather, now, the power of Big Software - more or less explicitly overdetermined by venal human desire - constructs systems of algorithmically driven robots in its service. The robots are reactive and generative in the sense that they react to symbolically structured cultural forms and then generate (more from less) cultural forms which are fed back to human subjects and also to other robots and systems. Big Software now builds these networked computational systems chiefly and massively to render commerce (not art or politics or culture or anything else except perhaps the flourishes of 'entertainment media') as frictionless as possible: by facilitating real tractions (between capital and its (co-)subjects) and by advertising hyper-effectively on behalf of capital. Big Software - McKenzie Wark's vectoralists - must make their income by charging capital for 'services.' But they have also discovered (and I will only briefly touch on this real, historical injustice) that they are easily able to steal Big Data from people everywhere merely as an unregulated function of the self-stated 'terms' of 'use' for these 'services'. Social Media is perhaps the most important manifestation of this pathology of sociopolitical economy. In so far as we may no longer be able to 'build our own' systems of social media, and in so far as the algorithms and robots of real existing social media are designed by and in the service of this pathology, I believe that there is an argument against Social Media as we know it. Social Media - in the form of robots and algorithms - will tend, inevitably, to generate more and more in the way of pathological cultural forms addressed to human subjects, regardless of those subjects intentions in terms of social justice or its opposite or anything else. And this is quite apart from the historical fact of Big Data theft and accumulation that is routinely and tacitly accepted as a function of the pathology - our contemporary pharmakon as Bernard Stiegler has it - with and within which we must try to live. The uses and values of all that 'data' (and it's not really data anyway, its only everything that our devices can so far collect) are all but entirely
Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space--This is a great thread here. I think it is important, as David notes, we conflate the efficacy of specific instances of use (this campaign or that campaign) with the fact that it is really just a blank kind of power. What I see more readily is the real difference between a top down deployment of categorical notions under the old media to crowd sourced categories of thought. What Twitter is really good at is in refining the many divergent notions and boiling them down to a basic hashtag or concept… So, instead of Walter Cronkite dictating the basic terms of the debate for tomorrow's water cooler conversation, we supply vocabularies, often idiosyncratically, and then these are the things that we use. What used to take analysts and focus groups, we have streamlined. But in the end, we end up with rigorously policed concepts that are, perhaps, even more potent for the fact that we can no longer operate under the negotiated or oppositional postures that one forms in relation to top down media. Now, we interact directly with the normative communities that manage the encoding and decoding of a specific set of terms… So, as humans relate to humans, there is a difference. I am reluctant to declare this difference significantly better than what came before it… like any powerful institution at its peak, we tend to see its glory and will blind ourselves to its flaws as long as it is working for us. It is potent because it is reduces and channels social activity, while offering the feeling of an expansive and unfettered potential. In this way, social media is a refinement of neoliberal individuation and presentation of self (so much so for being a public space on private property). My own participation with Twitter-based netprov performances has me convinced that any group of people conversing actively enough over Twitter can forge concepts that attain a kind of substance through discourse. Over and over again, I have seen purely imaginary accidents converted into events that can be discussed at length. And I have seen behavior steered by through the cooperation of cunning players. The degree of affective involvement in something that is complete and utter moonshine is what makes netprov fun. And, after playing in this way, I have found that it has also robbed me of some of the pleasures of earnest social media use by unveiling its process. Sure, you can do good things with it. But more than the human process of hegemonic wrangling over meaning, there is the point that John Cayley brings up: the machine participant in this activity. Where we experience a kind of affective stimulation as we see divergent opinions and eccentric words filed away into a coherent trajectory… the machine watches with with a vision that is at once microscopic and macroscopic. And, it too, adjusts and nudges and massages our work of consensus until it becomes useful. In the most basic ways, this machine vision can give the old powers access to vocabularies that will tickle our ears in various ways. And, publics will join their voices to the old powers, effectively advertising the success of the platform. But this is the most rudimentary use. As John notes, the power of Big Software is happening. The only reason to sink so much capital into such a resource is the safe speculation that it will be able to contain and control our process of making meaning and make it into a commercial good for the people who have invested in it. Davin On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Tim Murray timm...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you, Ricardo. as also evidenced by the posts of Richard and Rahul this week, it's the nuanced approach to social media of activist artists and organizers that we have hoped to hear about this week. What you have taught us over the years is how one miight shift platforms of art and protest in response to fluctuating expressions and manifestations of power, Thanks so much. timp Sent from my iPhone On Dec 12, 2014, at 9:15 AM, Ricardo Dominguez rrdoming...@ucsd.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hola Tod@s and David, While the research and scholarship you present is extremely important to consider and to understand. It also assumes that artists and activist have no critical awareness of these issues of power above all things or below all things (of algorithms or robots), and I think this wrong. At least for me since my days (80's) with Critical Art Ensemble, ACT UP, and spending our days and nights reading Adorno to Virillio, from the Pentagon Papers to the SCUM. Manifesto, working with the Zapatistas and Electronic Disturbance Theater in the 1990's and now under the weight of Cloudy Empires etc., - we have never been utopian about technology or imagined the power and computing in the 20th century would be or become
Re: [-empyre-] Social Media Use across Campaigns for Social Justice
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear David, and John, Your critiques of Ricardo's post seem unfair to me. Your claim that all social media is problematic and that artists who work through these platforms in a critical way seems to provide little leeway. The point of an artist using any tool (and social media is a tool) as a means to make a critical engagement is what artists have been doing for years. Are you saying that social media is evil and that therefore we as artists need to find other tools? Is all digital bad so therefore artists need to go back to the analog methods of the canvas, paint, pencil, and paper? It is very difficult for me to imagine that this is what you intended. Where would you then position this very list serve -empyre? Renate Ferro Ricardo writes: While the research and scholarship you present is extremely important to consider and to understand. It also assumes that artists and activist have no critical awareness of these issues of power above all things or below all things (of algorithms or robots), and I think this wrong. - we have never been utopian about technology or imagined the power and computing in the 20th century would be or become platforms of justice or concern. But we also did not want to fall into the no-waynout zone of the apocalyptic-that seems to some degree at play in your scholarship. -- Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, (contracted since 2004) Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: rfe...@cornell.edu URL: http://www.renateferro.net http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net Lab: http://www.tinkerfactory.net Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
