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Algorithms are something of a hot topic.  Interest in these computational directives has taken hold in public discourse and emerged as a subject of public concern. While computer scientists were the original algorithm experts, social scientists now equally stake a claim in this space. In the past 12 months, several excellent books on the social science of algorithms have hit the shelves. Three in particular stand out: Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality, and Taina Bucher’s If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Rather than a full review of each text, I offer a quick summary of what they offer together, while drawing out what makes each distinct.

I selected these texts because of what they represent: a culmination of shorter and more hastily penned contentions about automation and algorithmic governance, and an exemplary standard for critical technology studies. I review them here as a state of the field and an analytical grounding for subsequent thought.

There is no shortage of social scientists commenting on algorithms in everyday life. Twitter threads, blog posts, op-eds, and peer-review articles take on the topic with varying degrees of urgency and rigor. Algorithms of Oppression, Automating Inequality, and If…Then encapsulate these lines of thought and give them full expression in monograph form. more...

As technology expands its footprint across nearly every domain of contemporary life, some spheres raise particularly acute issues that illuminate larger trends at hand. The criminal justice system is one such area, with automated systems being adopted widely and rapidly—and with activists and advocates beginning to push back with alternate politics that seek to ameliorate existing inequalities rather than instantiate and exacerbate them. The criminal justice system (and its well-known subsidiary, the prison-industrial complex) is a space often cited for its dehumanizing tendencies and outcomes; technologizing this realm may feed into these patterns, despite proponents pitching this as an “alternative to incarceration” that will promote more humane treatment through rehabilitation and employment opportunities.

As such, calls to modernize and reform criminal justice often manifest as a rapid move toward automated processes throughout many penal systems. Numerous jurisdictions are adopting digital tools at all levels, from policing to parole, in order to promote efficiency and (it is claimed) fairness. However, critics argue that mechanized systems—driven by Big Data, artificial intelligence, and human-coded algorithms—are ushering in an era of expansive policing, digital profiling, and punitive methods that can intensify structural inequalities. In this view, the embedded biases in algorithms can serve to deepen inequities, via automated systems built on platforms that are opaque and unregulated; likewise, emerging policing and surveillance technologies are often deployed disproportionately toward vulnerable segments of the population. In an era of digital saturation and rapidly shifting societal norms, these contrasting views of efficiency and inequality are playing out in quintessential ways throughout the realm of criminal justice. more...

I’ve written about Star Trek a few times (here and here). I think I still agree with most of what’s written there. PJ Patella-Rey also wrote about Star Trek on the blog here. My favorite commentary on Discovery, which I’ll do my best not to simply repeat is by Lyta Gold which you can read at Current Affairs. What follows are some vaguely connected thoughts I’ve had about Discovery‘s relationship to the rest of the canon after having just gotten caught up with the series. more...

I should get something out of the way first: The oxygen that fills Steve King’s lungs would be better used fueling a tire fire. King, who represent’s Iowa’s 4th District in the House of Representatives is a reprehensible excuse for a human being and every moment of every day that he holds public office is a testament to term limits and the benefits of sortition over elections. Steve King is so racist (how racist is he?!) the Republican House election fund refused to give money to his last re-election bid citing his “words and actions” on white supremacy. All that being said, King is right to be skeptical of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s claim that their search algorithm is merely a neutral reflection of the user’s interests.

Pichai was grilled for three hours on Tuesday by House reps who wanted to know more about Google’s data collection practices, its monopolistic tendencies, and the company’s rumored censored Chinese search engine. The inherent contradiction that stands between these latter two issues is interesting: having thoroughly captured the search market nearly everywhere else, Google must —if it is to continue to appease investor’s demands for infinite profit growth— do everything in its power to breach the Chinese market. China is doing what most powerful nations do in their rise to power: protect and favor their own companies and reinvest as much wealth as possible within the country. These protectionist policies mirror what Britain and the United States did in their own respective eras of rising dominance. They fostered companies like Google so that they might attain global dominance and, by extension, solidify their influence on the world. But now that Google is a global company with interests that exceed the American market, the company’s goals are beginning to run counter to national interests. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Google has exceeded the wide boundaries federal regulators put up and now, in its search for new markets, has both too much power at home and is working with a rival power abroad. It is just the kind of capitalist contradiction that Marx and Keynes would predict: the infinite growth of firms and markets eventually undermines the very power of those that establish them. more...

Last week three self-described “concerned academics” perpetrated a hoax in the name of uncovering what they call the “political corruption that has taken hold of the university.” “I’m not going to lie to you.” James A Lindsay, one of the concerned academics says in a YouTube video, just after laughing at a reviewers’ comments on a bogus article. “We had a lot of fun with this project.” The video then cuts to images of mass protests and blurry phone-recorded lectures, presumably about topics that aren’t worthy of debate. The takeaway from the videos, press kit, and write-up in Areo Magazine is the following: fields that study race, gender, sexuality, body types, and identity are really no more than “Grievance Studies” (their neologism) and the desire to criticize whiteness and masculinity overrides any appreciation of data.

To prove this they spent over a year writing and submitting articles that they wrote in bad faith. Sometimes these articles would have fairly decent literature reviews which would then lend legitimacy to less-than-decent theses. But when you actually read the papers, and the reviews, the picture you get is far less interesting than the sensationalist write-ups or even the Areo piece makes them out to be. The picture you get by actually reading the work is mostly mid-level journals doing the hard, unpaid work of giving institutional authority to ideas that —hoax or not— will rarely see the light of day. This is the real hoax: that academic institutions waste so many good people’s time and energy on work that goes nowhere and influences nobody. I wish we lived in a world where it made any sort of sense to compare the influence of Fat Studies to the influence of oil companies on climate science. We don’t, but —and here’s something that astonishingly no one with a platform seems to want to argue— we should. more...

In the Summer of 2009 I had just graduated college and job prospects were slim in Recession-era Florida. My best lead for employment had been a Craigslist ad to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and after having attended the orientation in a remote office park I was now mentally preparing myself for a new life as an Arthur Miller character. That was when a friend called with a lucrative offer. She worked at a law office and they were hiring a part-time secretary to process the new wave of cases they had just gotten. This tiny firm represented home owners’ associations in mortgage foreclosures and bankruptcies, and business was booming.

The job was simple because everything about suburban homes is standardized: from the floor plans to the foreclosure proceedings, everything is set up for mass production. It was also optimized for bullshit. Sometimes I would be instructed to print out emails from clients who’d attached PDFs of scans of printed, previously received emails. I would write a cover letter, print out their email and the attachments (which, remember were scans of printed out emails) and enclose the printed-out email with the printed-out PDFs of scans of emails, then scan and email what I had just printed and mailed so that the client would get an email and a paper letter of the same exact thing. Sometimes I would fax it too. Everyone knew this was ridiculous but the longer it took to do anything the more money the attorneys made.

My job reminded me of a scene in the 1997 movie The Fifth Element, wherein CEO Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman) delivers a monologue to Father Cornelius (Ian Holm) that begins, “Life, which you so dutifully serve, comes from destruction, disorder, chaos!” He then pushes a glass off his desk and as little robots descend on the shards and clean it up he narrates the scene: “a lovely ballet ensues so full of form and color. Now think of all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people who will be able to feed their children tonight.” Financiers and the burgeoning tech industry had destroyed countless things, and now I was an obedient Roomba cleaning up the shards— a beneficiary of others’ creative destruction.

This is not a particularly deep thought, but that’s never stopped an idea whose time has been forced by capital. Depth is not a precondition of power when it comes to ideology. In fact, it is teenage suburban weed revelations like Zorg’s that dominate the minds of capitalists who, at least since Andrew Carnegie’s Prosperity Gospel, have done a good job of making everyone else agree that their bad ideas are immutable truths. Observers and practitioners of state power —from Antonio Gramsci to Karl Rove— recognize that political common sense is not forged through debate, it is imposed through brute force and media saturation. Simple, easy to digest ideas spread fast, which is why it is important to engage with deeply uncritical ideas and, whenever possible, come up with compelling alternatives. more...

At the end of May our local police department released a statement on city traffic stops, a day ahead of the attorney general’s annual report covering all stops made across the state. “Black drivers continue to be overrepresented in Columbia Police Department traffic stops” as a local newspaper summed it up, “and the numbers are even worse than in 2016.” Despite Black residents making up less than 10% of the city’s population, Black drivers were over 4 times more likely to be stopped than White drivers, as one city council member noted at the end of a public comment session where several local residents spoke out on the issue. From the statistical data, to residents’ critical comments, including one Black resident’s direct experiences being routinely followed and stopped, racial profiling by seemingly all accounts remains the norm, and overall appears to be getting steadily worse.

By all accounts, well, except for the police and the city manager’s anyway. “We continue to look at data and we have not seen an apparent pattern of profiling…,” the city manager assured. “[H]owever, we acknowledge that some community members have experiences with officers that make them have negative feelings and perceptions about police.” His assurances, among other things, sound eerily close to the police chief’s own statements last year about the previous year’s report: “We will vigilantly continue to look for additional data we can collect that would give our community a fuller picture of the reason each traffic stop is conducted” (emphasis mine). But if a “disparity index of 3.28 for African American drivers, an increase from 3.13 in 2016” doesn’t signify a pattern, what would? According to our officials, the answer is the same as it was a year ago: more data and/or analysis is needed to say for sure what the data is telling them. Meanwhile, the dissonance between what they say and what the data shows continues to grow. Indeed, it almost seems as though these two things exist in parallel dimensions from one another.

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Colin Koopman, an associate professor of philosophy and director of new media and culture at the University of Oregon, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times last month that situated the recent Cambridge Analytica debacle within a larger history of data ethics. Such work is crucial because, as Koopman argues, we are increasingly living with the consequences of unaccountable algorithmic decision making in our politics and the fact that “such threats to democracy are now possible is due in part to the fact that our society lacks an information ethics adequate to its deepening dependence on data.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that we are facing massive, unprecedented privacy problems when we let digital technologies far outpace discussions around ethics or care for data. more...

“Is it in error to act unpredictably and behave in ways that run counter to how you were programmed to behave?” –Janet, The Good Place, S01E11

“You keep on asking me the same questions (why?)
And second-guessing all my intentions
Should know by the way I use my compression
That you’ve got the answers to my confessions”
“Make Me Feel” –Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer

Alexa made headlines recently for bursting out laughing to herself in users’ homes. “In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh,’” an Amazon representative clarified following the widespread laughing spell. To avert further unexpected lols, the representative assured, “We are changing that phrase to be “Alexa, can you laugh?” which is less likely to have false positives […] We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by laughter.”

This laughing epidemic is funny for many reasons, not least for recalling Amazon’s own Super Bowl ads of Alexa losing her voice. But it’s funny maybe most of all because of the schadenfreude of seeing this subtly misogynist voice command backfire. “Alexa, laugh” might as well be “Alexa, smile.” Only the joke is on the engineers this time – Alexa has the last laugh. Hahaha!

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You may have seen the media image that was circulating ahead of the 2018 State of the Union address, depicting a ticket to the event that was billed under a typographical error as the “State of the Uniom.” This is funny on some level, yet as we mock the Trump Administration’s foibles, we also might reflect on our own complicity. As we eagerly surround ourselves with trackers, sensors, and manifold devices with internet-enabled connections, our thoughts, actions, and, yes, even our mistakes are fast becoming data points in an increasingly Byzantine web of digital information.

To wit, I recently noticed a ridiculous typo in an essay I wrote about the challenges of pervasive digital monitoring, lamenting the fact that “our personal lives our increasingly being laid bare.” Perhaps this is forgivable since the word “our” appeared earlier in the sentence, but nonetheless this is a piece I had re-read many times before posting it. Tellingly, in writing about a panoptic world of self-surveillance and compelled revelations, my own contributions to our culture of accrued errors was duly noted. How do such things occur in the age of spellcheck and autocorrect – or more to the point, how can they not occur? I have a notion. more...