politics

In late September the social news networking site ‘Reddit’ announced a revamp of their ‘quarantine’ function. A policy that has been in place for almost three years now, quarantines were designed to stop casual Redditors from accessing offensive and gruesome subreddits (topic based communities within the site), without banning these channels outright. In doing so the function impacted a small number of small subreddits and received little attention. The revamp of the quarantine function however has led to the policy applying to much larger subreddits, creating significant controversy. As an attempt to shape the affordances of the site, the revamped quarantine function highlights many of political and architectural issues that Reddit is facing in today’s current political climate.

As a platform, Reddit sits in a frequently uncomfortable position. Reddit was initially established as a haven for free speech, a place in which anything and everything could and should be discussed. When, for example, discussion about #gamergate, the controversy in 2014 over the ethics of the gaming industry that resulted in a number of high-profile women game designers and journalists being publicly harassed, was banned on the often more insidious 4chan, it was Reddit where discussion continued to flourish. However, in recent years, Reddit has come under increasing pressure due to this free for all policy. Reddit has been blamed for fueling misogyny, facilitating online abuse, and even leading to the misidentification of suspects in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombings.

Reddit announced the revamp of its quarantining policy via a long post on the subreddit r/announcements. In doing so, one of Reddit’s moderators u/landoflobsters highlighted the bind that Reddit faces. They said: more...

An analysis of how human beings engage with a given artefact likely draws from a fundamental premise: human creations demonstrate social-material consequences. This observation does not purport to indicate a probable condition, but rather an ineluctable one—and it holds relevance, always and everywhere, for all types of artefacts. This is true of artefacts demonstrating utilitarian salience—like a spear, scythe, wrench, pencil, microwave, motor vehicle, computer, etc.—and those ostensibly centring on more aesthetic functions—like a painting, sonnet, concert, novel, play or even a television programme.

For the following argument, I discuss how a particular television series, Doctor Who, demonstrates social-material consequences for a community of fans, the Whovians. Following the recent premier of Season Eleven, many excited Whovians took to Twitter in collective celebration of Jodie Whittaker, the first woman to play the show’s leading character, The Doctor.  After 55 years of men in the role, Whittaker’ casting had clear symbolic importance. But it had social-material significance, too. One Twitter comment comes to my mind as an exemplary indication of such significance.

A father tweets, “My daughter (6) told me they were playing  #DoctorWho… in the playground today and she was the Doctor – that’s why last night was brilliant.” Recognizing that the child’s pretending to be the Doctor is to envision herself as the hero, we may acknowledge that she not only enacted a role of social importance, but also felt it was appropriate and desirable to do so. In other words, we confront the affective (and thereby material) implications of her having a woman role model to serve as fodder for her imagined (and real life) ambitions. Pretending to be the Doctor, this child may envision herself as not only competent, but exceptional. While playing, she perhaps recited that now iconic line from The Woman Who Fell to Earth, “When people need help, I never refuse!”   more...

Humor is central to internet culture. Through imagery, text, snark and stickers, funny content holds strong cultural currency.  In a competitive attention economy, LOLs are a hot commodity. But just because internet culture values a laugh it doesn’t preclude serious forms of digitally mediated communication nor consideration of consequential subject matter. In contrast, the silly and serious can—and do—imbricate in a single utterance.

The merging of serious and silly becomes abundantly evident in recent big data analyses of political communication on social media. Studies show that parody accounts, memes, gifs and other funny content garner disproportionate attention during political news events. John Hartley refers to this phenomenon as ‘silly citizenship’ while Tim Highfield evokes an ‘irreverent internet’. This silliness and irreverence in digitally mediated politics means that contemporary political discourse employs humor as a participatory norm. What remains unclear, however, is what people are doing with their political humor.  Is humor a vehicle for meaningful political communication, or are politics just raw material for funny content?  My co-authors and I (Tony Love (@tonyplove) and Gemma Killen (@gemkillen)) addressed this question in a paper published last week in New Media & Society. more...

The High Court of Australia is currently hearing a case about whether or not Australia will move forward with a marriage equality plebiscite. The plebiscite is a non-binding survey in which Australians can indicate their position on same-sex marriage. The results of the plebiscite have no direct effect on the law, but will inform members of parliament who may or may not then proceed with legislation to extend marriage rights to non-heterosexual couples.

The marriage equality debates in Australia are mired in familiar political tensions—left-leaning liberals argue that marriage is a human right, critical progressives are wary about entrenching normative kinship structures, and conservatives oppose same-sex marriage because, what about the children?. The plebiscite is contentious in its own right, as a high price tag ($122million) and an open platform for “No” campaigners to espouse hate have been the subject of heated critique (and indeed, undergird the current court hearings). But the plebiscite is also marked by an additional controversy arising from a seemingly mundane component: the use of postal mail. more...

In this post, I’d like to make an argument about a way to understand how the Democratic party seems to be making messaging and policy decisions. An argument like this can’t be made in a vacuum—or in 1,500 words. Nor can any one or even ten reasons be decided upon for why the leaders of a party do what they do. But I recognize a pattern in how the DNC and leadership has acted over the past decade and I want to work that through here. So please forgive any indication that I am not a policy wonk or political analyst—I do not claim to be, nor do I wish to be either. more...

Science. Is. Political.

This concept will probably be easy to absorb for the regular readership at Cyborgology. It’s a topic that has been discussed here a time or two. Still, as truisms go, it is one of a very few that liberals and conservatives alike love to hate. The fantasy of apolitical science is a tempting one: an unbiased, socially distant capital-s Science that seeks nothing more than enlightenment, floating in a current events vacuum and unsullied by personal past experiences. It presupposes an objective reality, a universe of constants that can be catalogued, evaluated, and understood completely. But this view of science is a myth, one that has been thoroughly dissected in the social sciences. more...

The English translation of Martin Luther and Phillip Melancthon’s 1523 Deuttung der czwo grewlichen Figuren, Bapstesels czu Rom und Munchkalbs czu Freyerbeg ijnn Meysszen funden is a 19 page pamphlet describing two monsters: a pope-ass and a monk-calf. The former, a donkey-headed biped with one hand, two hooves, and a chicken’s foot, per Arnold Davidson, represents how “horrible that the Bishop of Rome should be the head of the Church.” The latter, a creature that brings to mind Admiral Akbar (think, “it’s a trap!”),  illustrates the “frivolous prattle” of Catholic Sacraments. Davidson explains, “Both of these monsters were interpreted within the context of a polemic against the Roman church. They were prodigies, signs of God’s wrath against the Church which prophesied its imminent ruin.” Fifty-six years after the pamphlet’s original publication in German, Of two wonderful popish monsters was distributed in English.

Nearly 600 years after that, in August of last year, five larger-than-life statues of a naked, blonde, bloated man were affixed to the pavement in highly trafficked areas of Cleveland, San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

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In the days before November 8^th I wrote the following vignette for what was supposed to be a special Cyborgology roundtable, a collection of differing viewpoints on the U.S. presidential election. For a number of reasons that roundtable was never published. Nevertheless, I am now posting what I wrote, unedited. My intent in doing this is twofold. First, it is a time-specific encapsulation of my sentiments before the event itself. It is not a reflection on what I would do given what I know now, but emblematic of the inexact and speculative nature of politics. And second, because I feel as if, regardless of the moment it emerged from, this short essay still carries a lot of weight in this post-election period. In fact, I would probably write very close to the same thing again.

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A couple of years ago I wrote about Friendsgiving, that very special holiday where cash-strapped millennials gather around a dietary-restriction-labeled potluck table and make social space for their politics and life experiences under late capitalism. All still very relevant, though I suspect this is the year where we should come up with a name for whatever happens after late capitalism. Some of you, of course, will be sharing a table with people not of your own choosing and so you might be forced into reckoning with people who make excuses for Nazis and disagree that trans people exist.

What follows are a couple of useful tactics that will help you hold your own and get through arguments that we shouldn’t have to keep having but here we are. These probably will not help you in a completely hostile room. These are better if you’re in a mixed crowd and you want to make sure that at the end of the political argument people don’t leave saying nothing more than “politics is so divisive!” People only criticize divisiveness when they aren’t sufficiently convinced by one side. more...

Pundits across the political spectrum have expressed outrage at Trump’s continued insistence that the presidential election is rigged, and seem quite scandalized at his stated unwillingness to agree, apriori, to accept the final results.  Trump’s critics argue that his distrust of the election process threatens to destabilize U.S. democracy by undermining the ideology of citizen-driven governance. It is horrifying they say, and more than that, his claims are dangerous.

While a smooth transition of power is indeed a hallmark of democracy, there is a distinct disingenuousness about the breathless moralizing against Trump’s claims. It’s hard to ignore the sharp dissonance that emerges when broadcast journalists report on the economics of campaign finance, the political collusion and corruption revealed through an email leak, and then, without even the interruption of a commercial break, turn to Camera 2 and condemn Donald Trump for questioning the integrity of the democratic process.   more...