Edward Snowden is a very smart and courageous person. He has a brilliant mind for identifying important information and deciding who should know it and when–– what is typically called “operational security” or OpSec. It is the kind of rarified skill that quickly earned him a top spot in a private intelligence corporation before achieving the dubious honor of best known whistle blower. That being said, I have one simple request for media outlets: stop interviewing Snowden.
I’m not alone on this. None other than Snowden himself would like it if people stopped interviewing him. In his most recent interview with The Nation he said,
The only reason I do these interviews—I hate talking about myself, I hate doing this stuff—is because incredibly well-meaning people, whom I respect and trust, tell me that this will help bring about positive changes. It’s not going to cause a sea change, but it will benefit the public.
The following then, is for those “incredibly well-meaning people” who want Snowden to keep doing interviews. There are two big reasons why Snowden, as a political figure, should probably back away from the limelight and perhaps take on a more supporting role as a people’s OpSec analyst. First, Snowden might be a brilliant engineer, he might even be a brilliant engineer with a family history of government service (he is), but that doesn’t make him the best person to ask about foreign policy or even government surveillance. Second, what he is expert on ––the keeping of secrets and the technologies that make it possible–– shouldn’t take center stage in imagining a new and better digitally augmented society.
I teach at an engineering school. My students, generally speaking, are brilliant abstract problem solvers and are quick learners of discrete concepts but have little taste for complex and multifaceted social problems. And that’s okay! At least in the present form and boundaries of what it means to be an engineer institutions of education or production don’t select for or encourage that sort of thinking. That might not make for the best products or the most just allocation of scarce resources but that’s our present condition.
Obviously, given Snowden’s personal experiences and motivations he knows more about the present “deep state” than the average bear. But when it comes to asking what brings about effective social change or what that kind of change should look like, Snowden comes off as a novice. Sometimes, even echoes some of the cynical (not to mention empirically wrong) social Darwinism that comes across my desk every year. I don’t hold it against my students or Snowden because we live in a deeply competitive society and the best way to keep it that way is to make it appear as a natural phenomenon. That’s just how hegemony works. So when Snowden describes harassment on the Internet and partisan politics as being instantiations of “tribalism” I and other potential supports should balk.
I don’t really want to get into the missing analyses of power that not only make Snowden’s “tribalism” wrong, but also potentially deeply destructive so let me just leave it at this: When the powerless and the marginalized work together and form social and discursive barriers to outsiders on the basis of mutual solidarity, they are fighting power. When politicians or men’s rights activists form toxic nests of hate-mongering built from executive orders and subreddits, they are maintaining structures of power. Both might look the same structurally, but both cannot be described with the same hilariously outmoded term. I don’t think I’m putting words in Snowden’s mouth when I say that characterizing the present historical moment as fraught with “tribalism” is to make a lot of false equivalencies. Okay maybe I did get into the missing analysis of power. But trust me, I could go on.
False equivalencies brings me back to the second reason why we should stop interviewing Snowden. His prescriptive recommendations, most notably that reform that moves us away from massive state surveillance, should come in the form of new kinds of encryption for digital networks, paired with a parallel fight for “digital rights.” From the same The Nation interview (excuse the big block quote):
I spoke with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. We agree on the necessity for this generation to create what he calls the Magna Carta for the Internet. We want to say what “digital rights” should be. What values should we be protecting, and how do we assert them? What I can do—because I am a technologist, and because I actually understand how this stuff works under the hood—is to help create the new systems that reflect our values. Of course I want to see political reform in the United States.we could pass the best surveillance reforms, the best privacy protections in the history of the world, in the United States, and it would have zero impact internationally. Zero impact in China and in every other country, because of their national laws—they won’t recognize our reforms; they’ll continue doing their own thing. But if someone creates a reformed technical system today—technical standards must be identical around the world for them to function together.
The distinction between national laws and technical standards is dubious at best, and a red herring at its worst. The reality, and I’m not saying that allied figures like Tim Berners-Lee don’t get this, is that legal and technical standards mutually shape one another, often in unpredictable ways. This is why a focus on rights and encryption are, to my anarchist mind, the wrong way to go about fending off state and corporate surveillance.
Rights language has long been critiqued by anarchists and leftists as a reaffirmation of state authority, rather than a check. Rights, the argument goes, just enumerate and codify reforms of social power retroactively, they do not produce any kind of power. To focus on a “bill of rights” might be a good way to lay out your social movement’s platform, but too many times those kinds of documents get officially accepted by law-making bodies only to neglect the necessary guarantees to accessing (or freely avoiding) the goods and services necessary to enact those rights. Which brings us to what Snowden himself says he wants to do–– provide the underlying technical infrastructure for “digital rights.”
I’ve always been perplexed by the argument for encryption as the beginning and end of digital privacy. Sure encryption is really about making sure that only intended recipients receive certain communications, and just because you employ encryption doesn’t mean you necessarily have anything to hide sort-of-speak, but that sounds a lot like (at least in the American context) the second amendment “remedies” for ineffective government. That is, instead of trying to dismantle power, activists are focused on constructing better offenses and defenses. That seems like an abdication to power, not a long-term strategy for a better world.
We don’t need better encryption, we need better governance. Even new and better methods of data encryption and transmission were invented, do we think that governments and corporations won’t stop trying to crack it? Are we advocating a doomed arms race? Even if you think private citizens will win, what kind of power dynamics does that promote? Who holds the power when the only thing standing between you and unchecked state authority is an engineer who doesn’t think racism exists?
A movement that seeks to secure rights by way of encryption is not an anti-authoritarian movement, so much as it is a call for competing authorities. On the one side will be the well-funded old guard trying to tap our phones and read our emails, and on the other side will be self-appointed guardians with a kind of technical expertise that shows no sign of being democratized to the extent necessary for truly democratic governance. Snowden is a smart man, but he’s also a product of his time. And what a time it is.
In the 60s there was this flourishing of _________Studies Departments across Western academe. Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Urban Studies, African American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies set up shop in large Universities and small colleges and slowly but surely created robust intellectual communities of their own. These interdisciplinary fields of study sought to break apart centuries-old notions about the noun that came before “studies.” It was a radical idea for the social and behavioral sciences that now seems somewhat banal; focusing an entire department on a subject, rather than a method or tradition, allowed researchers to focus on pressing issues at the expense of traditional methodological barriers. One could easily argue that this approach produced some of the most influential academic and popular writing of the 20th century. The 21st century has seen an unfortunate decline in these institutions and the complex problems they sought to investigate and mitigate have come roaring back in uncanny ways.
Academic departments weren’t single-handedly stemming the tide of white supremacy and patriarchy, but they did give a few dedicated people the time and resources to investigate complex social phenomena and report back to burgeoning activist collectives. Interdisciplinary studies departments are best understood as both the product and engine of social movements. The crumbling of these departments should be seen as a reflection of both a change in tactics on the left as well as a resurgent counter-offensive made by conservative, plutocratic, and even fascist organizations. (Look no further than Patrick Henry College for an example of all three.)
My own academic training is thoroughly within the _________Studies tradition, specifically Urban Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS sought to reveal the obscured social and cultural dimensions of scientific practice and technological innovation. By studying scientists and engineers instead of remote tribes or marginalized people, STS sought to dethrone positivism: the notion that experts are impartial reporters of natural discoveries. Its understandable then, that Nathan Jurgenson’s newest essay in The New Inquiry, reporting on the resurgence of positivism in the guise of Big Data,feels like a defeat for my field.
Jurgeson writes:
Positivism’s intensity has waxed and waned over time, but it never entirely dies out, because its rewards are too seductive. The fantasy of a simple truth that can transcend the divisions that otherwise fragment a society riven by power and competing agendas is too powerful, and too profitable. To be able to assert convincingly that you have modeled the social world accurately is to know how to sell anything from a political position, a product, to one’s own authority. Big Data sells itself as a knowledge that equals power. But in fact, it relies on pre-existing power to equate data with knowledge.
The most unsettling part about this return to positivism is that it isn’t exterior to the study of positivism itself. Indeed, my and every other STS department know that the ever-shrinking pools of research money are much easier to reach if our proposals speak the algorithmic dialect of Big Data. Positivism is a wicked problem because it is immune to its own immense rhetorical power. By claiming that positivism is a social construction, and not “how things truly are” you risk swinging the pendulum to the opposite side of epistemological and ontological relativism. It is a realm where intelligent design and climate change denial seem to have equal footing. To attack positivism is to strike at one of the most fundamental and influential methods of storytelling ever conceived.
Jurgenson cites in his essay some of the best writers on this topic who are, not coincidently, also founding members of Women’s Studies: Sandra Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller. Both of these thinkers recognize the collectively curated subjective experiences of individuals is the closest we may get to what is typically called objectivity. They even go so far as to prescribe that subjectivity (Harding’s Strong Objectivity, to a lesser degree Keller’s “Feeling for the Organism”) as the replacement for objectivity. It is a compelling and, to my mind, brilliant analysis. It is a travesty then, that these ideas seem to have bounced off and out of Silicon Valley.
I am not sure if the resurgence of positivism in the guise of Big Data should be considered a failing of STS or the success of powerful and willfully ignorant technocratic elites. Probably equal portions of both, but I’m going to put the pressure on my fellow STS scholars to see this as a professional, collective failing. While we still are far from a world without misogyny, white supremacy, or empire, we as academics should take note of our own house: the internal fights at the level of institutions that we’ve let slip by us. Do we apply to Big Data grants and then use the funds for research that undermines the concept altogether? Do we participate in social media-funded conferences and research centers so that we may, from within, raise concerns early and often? Or do we confront positivism head-on as the force for command and control that we know that it is, in all of its forms, and insist on not legitimating Big Data by attaching our names to it? To all three I’d say “yes.”
Paul Budnitz describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” having created other companies that make artisanal toys and luxury bicycles. This is not the typical road bike most people have. He’s also the creator/founder/president/charismatic leader of Ello. And when a social network launches with a manifesto that proudly proclaims “You are not a product”, there’s more on the line than embedded video support. Despite the radical overtures of the initial launch, we shouldn’t expect any more from Ello than we would from a luxury bicycle.
By this I mean that it’ll be well-designed, fraught with race, class, and gender bias, and ultimately formed by the inevitable demands of capitalism. Just as more bikes in the world is better than more cars when it comes to concerns over the climate, Ello is probably better for the world than Facebook when it comes to issues of user control and (perhaps) privacy. Sure we should be concerned with how bikes and social media networks are made, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stick our noses up at an intermediate step. Unlike more pure attempts like Diaspora or Crabgrass, Ello is a pleasure to use and very simple to set up.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the critiques of Ello rely on comparisons to existing and defunct networks. As Natasha Lennard said, “To describe a site like Ello without referring to already existing social media platforms would be like trying to describe a new color — you couldn’t do it without talking about other colors.” If Ello were a color it would be white. Not only does Ello signal the zenith of the “more white space” design, its designers are white, and even their venture capital comes from the whitest state. That’s why I find it strange that lots of people are incensed that Ello is some kind of capitalist wolf in radical sheep’s (second hand, black wool hoodie) clothing.
Aral Balkan, a designer in the early stages of building a smartphone that “empower[s] users to own their data”, contends that by “taking venture capital you [Paul Budnitz] have made a crucial mistake that is incompatible with the goals you set out in your manifesto.” I really, really love Aral’s work (especially Experience-driven open), but if we’re gonna shit on Ello for taking VC money, we should also shit on his phone project because it says absolutely nothing about how, or where, or by whom it will be made. Just as Balkan doesn’t think Budnitz can make a progressive social network with VC funding, I don’t think Balkan can say his phone will “protect our fundamental freedoms and democracy” without giving lots of thought about sweatshop labor.
Then there’s the argument that Ello isn’t even worth considering because it is a “walled garden” and not a free software paradise where everyone can federate their servers and talk in encrypted emails all day. While I agree, in theory, that something like free software / open source software is the path to making truly democratic social networks, the big players in the free software community aren’t currently up to the task. They certainly aren’t bastions of acceptance or even tolerance, and their products are invariably harder to use. Who would want to spend their spare time reading a tutorialon how to use the thing that is supposed to distract them from work? Free software alternatives seem like a lot of work for not a lot of gain. I’d rather have responsive experts working on users’ concerns about accessibility and harassment prevention in the here and now than participating in an endless discussion of server ownership in service of an abstracted notion of freedom.
Thus, Ello isn’t a radical alternative to existing social networks. It won’t get to the root of our present problems with social media, but it might represent our latest and best hope for a social network that isn’t content with gaslighting their user base, relying on uninspired and exploitative revenue models, and enforcing rules that endanger marginalized people.
To put it simply, Ello is a luxury bicycle boutique, not an anarchist bike shop. Both offer an alternative to fossil-fuel based transportation, only the latter offers an alternative to capitalist modes of exchange as well. Diaspora is the closest thing we have to anarchist bike shop social media, and like the shop, is also a little more intimidating.
It’s pretty easy to dismiss a luxury bicycle boutique as nothing more than an extractive enterprise that relies on greenwashing to sell over-priced bikes to well-off Brooklyn hipsters. It’s all style and no substance. Those assholes are just buying (or getting invites codes for) their politics, they aren’t making the sorts of sacrifices necessary to live their politics. When an anarchist uses a bike as their primary means of transportation they are engaging in what Laura Portwood-Stacer in her book Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism calls conspicuous anti-consumption. Whether its going vegan or refusing to own or regularly use a car, radicals often display their politics in the negative. By selectively but conspicuously not consuming they become living examples that a life without oil corporations and animal exploitation is not only possible, but doable.
An artistic collaboration between the author and Adam Rothstein with creative suggestions by Nathan Jurgenson
Portwood-Stacer is also quick to point out that, “when an individual attempts to put anarchist principles into action in one’s everyday life, one acts on the assumption that one has the capacity to determine the shape of one’s personal experience.” Which is to say it is really hard to live your politics all the time, especially when it requires expertise or control over aspects of your life that most people delegate to companies or professionals. Building and maintaining your own bike is hard enough. Being deeply involved in the active maintenance of digital networks, where rarified expertise and expensive equipment is needed to keep things working smoothly, can be close to impossible. This a big reason why free and open software social media networks like Diaspora always have problems with keeping an active user base. Most people expect to use social media as a reliable means to talk to their friends, not as an ongoing development project.
As Quinn Norton rightly pointed out, with regard to Ello’s success “social networks are like languages — they are only worthwhile when they are broadly adopted.” That means a decentralized network like Diaspora, which asks you to choose among several installations with different features and performance rates, is a huge roadblock.
Beyond the melodrama of the Diaspora name –do we really need to equate leaving Facebook with the inter-generational violence wrought by colonialism, anti-semitism, and global capital?– it is also unclear as to whether Diaspora headaches offer the same benefits as the anarchist bike shop: do people actually feel more in control over the digital aspects of their lives? I suspect many would report “yes” but that seems like a selection bias more than an effect of the network. There’s a clear tension between democratic control, and democratic participation in social media. All of the things that make a social network easy to participate in – e.g predictable experience, user-friendly interfaces– generally come at the expense of user control.
What is largely missing from both the debate and the products that come from the radical software world is the importance of usability and pleasure. For instance, I wrote last week about my attempt to get rid of Dropbox because Edward Snowden told us it had a big open back door to the NSA. The presence of Condoleezza Rice on their board isn’t particularly wonderful either. It was hard to leave Dropbox, not just because the service is really useful, but because the alternatives are poorly designed. Secure services like SpiderOak focus their limited resources on their politics (security) but pay little attention to things like user interface design or documentation.
More times than not, doing something for your politics is a pain in the ass. Maybe you enjoy a good march or you genuinely love to code your own encrypted chat applications, but most of the time living your politics means giving something up or buying a more expensive version of a common good. There are precious few opportunities, especially for leftists, when living your politics means getting something better than everyone else. SpiderOak, Diaspora, and countless other projects seem just usable enough, but rely on your dedication to some other cause to make up for their obvious design problems.
Ello has the opposite problem. It is a social network built by designers for “people like them.” You could read this as “social media by foppish white dudes, for foppish white dudes” and you wouldn’t be wrong, but I think you’d also be missing something really important: Even if you’re not selling your users’ eyeballs the way Facebook or Twitter does, you’re still building a brand that’s mutually shaped by the users and your own marketing. Nothing about social media is “just marketing” because who you attract to use your service is part of the feature set. By making a social network with a manifesto, you get a social network filled with people that are at least attracted to the idea of a manifesto. Here’s where I think Ello can make an end-run around the control/participation tension. Attract people who are, in varying degrees, interested in control, but make a space that is fun and easy to participate in.
Further, and as Portwood-Stacer points out, participating in a lifestyle does not just follow from ideas, sometimes political orientations can be the result of participating in a specific community. Sometimes people engage in a political activity first, and develop a political orientation afterward. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it is probably better than shouting the common free software epithet RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual) at newcomers.
It’s a sort of politics of praxis. Ello as praxis encourages opportunities for behaving online in speculative, prefigurative ways. We can play with the form and affordances of the beta software by making long text posts about long text posts and filling our profiles to the brim with art that problematizes the ban on pornography [Early successes! NSFW content tags are in the works.]. By taking advantage of a network that has yet to become obdurate and institutionalized, and has some fairly receptive and talented people at the helm, I think there’s a very real opportunity for figuring out what we all want from our social media. Maybe then we’d all be a little more prepared to do the real heavy lifting of building a social network that doesn’t just conform to our politics, but actually generates and returns value in a socially just manner.
Ello, like a luxury bike, isn’t antithetical to capitalism and all of its problems. But it’s a step in the right direction, not just by being politically better than Facebook, but also being more useful and pleasurable than Diaspora. Ello’s core design team desperately needs some diversifying, and hopefully that and many other concerns of its users will alleviated sooner rather than later. This new network certainly isn’t the answer to every problem we have with private social networks, but it responds to some of the worst problems we face today. Ello might be a walled garden, but it’s fertile ground for growing something even better.
Micah Singleton (@micahsingleton) over at the Daily Dot has a really great essay about one of the biggest problems with the Apple Watch. You should read the whole thing but the big takeaway is that really great watches and mainstream tech have a fundamental incompatibility: nice watches usually become heirlooms that get handed down from generation to generation, but consumer technology is meant to be bought in product cycles of a only a couple of years. A really nice watch should be “timeless” in a way our devices never have been. Compared to the usual 2-year contract phone purchase, the technological evolution of high-quality watches moves about as fast as actual biological evolution. Is it possible to deliberately build timelessness into electronics?
Of course planned obsolescence is bad for the environment and it helps promote a less-thoughtful form of consumerism, but those seem almost like symptoms of a larger design problem. More than an issue of durability or material quality, the demands of interoperability and networking require that individual devices be part of a larger whole as well. It doesn’t matter how much you love your Palm Pre or hate 802.11ac wi-fi specification, there are large (usually capitalist) forces that are bigger than dictate the ecosystem that your individual device will have to live in. And let’s not forget that laws and regulations are also at play here: cars that require leaded gas for example, either need to be altered or rely on a lead additive. An older car is “incompatible” with the existing fuel supply.
Unlike classic cars, which can be modified to run on unleaded gas, you generally cannot modify your original iPhone to run on a 3G (let alone 4G) network. Some of those aforementioned large capitalist forces rely on a product being too cheap to fix because it 1) means the device is really cheap and 2) you have an opportunity to get the customer to pay a little more to upgrade rather than fix the old device. This is also important because labor used to build a device is far easier to exploit than the technical expertise necessary to diagnose and fix a broken device. With manufacturing you can split up the work and deskill the labor, but your average Genius Bar employee needs training, expertise, and cannot be easily centralized in one factory.
Even if we really slowed down the frequency with which we roll out new wi-fi specification and mobile phone architecture (this is actually kind of happening- the “LTE” that shows up on your phone stands for “Long-Term Evolution”) there is still a complexity and interoperability issue to contend with: it only takes one actor in the system to encourage a move towards obsolescence. Even gradual and small upgrades by a handset maker, carrier, prominent social media company, or software developer can lead to an eventual shift in technical requirements and prompting the purchasing of new devices in far shorter time spans than your grandpa’s watch or your aunt’s turntable. It is the interconnectedness of the network that makes obsolescence almost impossible to fight.
A cultural shift (or culture fix [PDF]) in all of these very different but interconnected industries could bring about longer timescales for devices. By encouraging a different ethic or motivating set of goals ––timelessness and adaptability, rather than speed and seamlessness–– we might start to see new kinds of devices. Some might say free / open source communities are doing this to some degree: demanding devices that are user-serviceable and thus being more upgradeable than disposable. That might get us part of the way but the romantic notion that we’re returning to a time where everyone knew how to repair everything in their house is -like all romantic notions of the past- illusory.
So how do we begin to foster this new culture? One way might be to to display what a similar value system has accomplished in similar arenas. One example close to my own research is the success of a particular water pump design implemented in rural Zimbabwe. What makes a durable water pump and a cherished watch are surprisingly similar: You have to design for a wide range of eventualities like buildings going up next to a well that might shift the water table, or a midlife crisis that causes a watch owner to take up base jumping. The thing that you are designing needs to simultaneously seem just for you while also being universal enough that it works in a predictable (even intuitive) manner and can be fixed by a wide range of people in different settings. You have to design something that could outlive the environment that produced it.
Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol studied the very successful roll-out of this state-sponsored well-pump project and concluded that projects like this work when technologies have a “fluid” character. They identified four major characteristics that contributed to a technology’s fluidity: 1) it should be “tailored to local circumstances, to local patterns of use and abuse.” 2) It should “seduce people into taking care of it.” 3) Each part should be forgiving in what kind of replacement parts it needs and how precisely moving parts must be calibrated or positioned. 4) Finally, the artifact should be in the public domain or somehow be understood as a communally owned technology.
Returning then to the Apple Watch and networked devices more generally: How could such a remarkably different technology exhibit similar “fluid” characteristics? Put another way, how can American technologists start to work more like Zimbabwe’s engineers?
The easy answer is to support and create more projects like “Phonebloks” (now Google’s Project Ara) which separate the phone into interchangeable chunks. I’m not as convinced however, that this is the answer. In fact, I suspect such a project would increase consumption by letting you buy it a piece at a time. You haven’t made a longer-lasting product, you’ve just made it easier to keep some parts. It also discourages the kind of “seduction” that leads to care. If I know its relatively simple to swap out a broken part, I’m actually less likely to take care of the thing than buy a $30 case to protect it.
The trick to getting this right will involve the perfect mix of relying on other people while also maintaining a sense of individuality. Apple products go a little too far in the direction of relying on others, while open source communities seem to over-correct. No one should have to be expert in all aspects of their phone, but they should feel relatively comfortable negotiating a repair bill with someone who is. The device should seduce you into taking care of it by embedding those caring practices into a desirable or familiar social relationship. That means retooling not just the device but the business models themselves. The turnover rate of retail stores are too high to develop the kinds of social bonds that make caring for a device more than a simple monetary transaction.
An heirloom smartwatch or smartphone needs to be user serviceable, but not too user-serviceable such that it encourages disposable thinking. It should be open and configurable enough such that independent businesses that develop local followings and loyalty can set up shop and reliably repair or resell the devices. Most of all, it is crucial that we don’t set ourselves up for failure by romanticizing inter-generational artifacts. For as long as there is a profit motive, there will probably be a manufactured desire for the “new and improved” version of one thing or another. What’s important is that we are striving to derive the most pleasure while extracting the fewest resources and harming the least number of people.
For more on the Zimbabwe Bush pump and fluid technologies see: Laet, Marianne de, and Annemarie Mol. 2000. “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump Mechanics of a Fluid Technology.” Social Studies of Science 30 (2): 225–63. doi:10.1177/030631200030002002
What are all those people celebrating with their standing ovation? Even the guy on stage is applauding. Sure the new product is exciting, but applause? Unlike a play or a musical performance (even a U2 performance), nothing is actually happening on stage when a product is announced. All that work that goes into making a product was done months ago, and the audience isn’t even being asked (at the moment) to thank the people that made the product. Instead of rapt silence or an excited buzz, lots of people are moved to show their unbridled enthusiasm in a very specific way. It is the same kind of collective reaction that comes after a political speech and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. When we applaud the Apple Watch we’re applauding an imagined future.
As I’ve argued before, Apple events don’t just show us what’s for sale, instead they are “a demonstration that the product on display is part of a life always aspired to but never totally lived.” This is why I don’t think we should dismiss Apple events as mere salesmanship. This particular brand of bombastic salesmanship works for reasons that are important for understanding why a wearable computer is treated like the president during a State of the Union address.
First, it’s worth paying close attention to what is actually said by the presenters. Along with very loaded words like “relevant”, “individuality”, and “intimate” there are a few phrases that get repeated several times:
“The most personal device we’ve ever created.”
“Apple builds great products that enrich people’s lives.”“
“Apple Watch helps you live a better day.”
Then there are sentences that describe relatively mundane features in monumental ways:
“It will fly you to the moon.”
“You can advance time.”
“This is the actual position of the planets for this time.”
Finally, there are the kinds of declarative sentences that seem to reinforce the inevitability of the kind of sociotechnical world that past Apple products have brought about:
“Precious photos number in the hundreds instead of a couple.”
“You can’t determine a boundary between the physical device and the software. “
The Apple Watch takes on so much more than itself. It has to bend the world through itself and back out to the audience. You have to see and understand what the world will be like with the Apple Watch in it; mediating conversations, bodies, and environments. And while the technology inside the device is certainly impressive, it really isn’t doing anything spectacular. It isn’t ending world hunger, curing cancer, or reversing climate change. It’s just playing music and receiving notifications like four other devices you already own except now it is on your wrist and looks pretty. So why the applause? What kind of future is this really heralding?
The Italian critic and media activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes the 20th century as “the century that trusted the future.” It was a time where it was apparent to reasonable people that the entire population would be fed and housed within a lifetime. And while the more developed nations have certainly been guilty of conflating technological development for social progress it was actually the nations still struggling to build a manufacturing base by the early 20th century, like Italy and Russia, that produced the most radical (and fascist) futurist movements. Futurists saw technology not only as a solution to existing social problems, but as having its own aesthetic and moral values that superseded anything that had ever been seen or done. Italian futurists latched onto the racing car as their totem: it represented the promise of speed as a world-conquering ability, and yet the car itself was good for nothing but going fast. Speeding things up wasn’t in service of anything, it was its own self-evident good. Futurists didn’t actually love race cars so much as they loved the idea of imbuing the world around them with the qualities of speed and acceleration.
If 20th century Futurists loved the race car, Bifo argues, then 21st century technocrats are in love with technologies that augment the body with information: “The bio-info machine is no longer separable from the body or mind, because it’s no longer an external tool, but an internal transformer of body and mind, a linguistic and cognitive enhancer.” Sound familiar?
Put side-by-side like this, Apple events don’t look much different than NASCAR races. Apple Events, like NASCAR races, require a lot of skill, and finite resources to pull off. It is communitarian conspicuous consumption. It isn’t just a celebration of the resources and skill on display. It is also the form in which they are presented that, I surmise, gets people really excited. Unlike NASCAR however, the Apple Event also announces a near future, a benchmark that reassures us that we are moving ever closer to a realized science fiction.
Any major product announcement isn’t much different than a State of the Union address. In fact, considering how quickly new products are adopted and how slow much needed legislation is passed, one could even argue that product announcements (whether or not you actually buy the product) are more likely to impact your day-to-day life than the declarations of a sitting president. When audiences applaud a device, they’re applauding the sort of life it outlines: one where we start to get more exercise, have intimate conversations with loved ones, and express ourselves with the preciseness necessary to stand out among 7 billion fellow humans.
Just like the Italians and Russians of the 20th century we might feel “behind” when compared to the educated social democracies of the Nordic countries or the manufacturing capabilities of China, but we can celebrate ourselves by reacting positively to a particular configuration of qualities that we see reflected in the watch face. If we didn’t value our health and each other, why would we make such a fine product that helps us appreciate both of these things? Of course part of the salesmanship is making you feel as though you are not completely actualizing these qualities and it is the product that will help you “live a better day.”
The phrases I listed above reinforce the idea that the Apple Watch is meant to make us feel like we are collectively embodying and achieving great societal feats. We may not be able to literally fly to the moon, stop time, and transcend the distinction between bits and atoms, but we value that kind of power. More important than the Apple Watch itself is the story it elicits about the society it serves. When Jony Ive or Tim Cook say they have “seamlessly blended performance and beauty to deliver a device that frees you to live a better life” they aren’t speaking in over-wrought generalities so much as they are describing the qualities (performance, beauty, and freedom) that neoliberal actors want to see in themselves. All the more insulting then, that such a flattering portrait was shattered by U2’s “dystopian junk mail.”
The murder of Mike Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson has catalyzed an already fast-growing national conversation about outfitting police officers with cameras like the one shown above. These cameras, the logic goes, will keep officers on their best behavior because any abuses of power would be recorded and stored for later review. Officer’s behavior, much like an increasing amount of civilian behavior, will be subject to digital analysis and review by careful administrators and impartial juries. This kind of transparency is extremely enticing but we should always be critical of things that purport to show us unvarnished truths. As any any film director will tell you: the same set of events recorded on camera can look very different when viewed from different angles and in different contexts.
As of this writing the whitehouse.gov petition to pass a “Mike Brown Law” that would require police departments to put cameras on all of their officers has amassed about 150,000 signatures. Should the federal government decide to act on this proposed law, it would make thousands of law enforcement agencies join the handful already testing these systems. Denver Colorado and Rialto, California already have pilot programs in place and the quotes from officers point toward a single conclusion: Cop-mounted cameras are meant to compete with, and ultimately discredit, citizens’ filming of cops.
One need only read the source article for that image to get a sense of why police departments are even considering filming themselves: Video is compelling evidence and its always good to have your own video that provides your own interpretation of events. One officer praises the cameras for capturing what a nearby cell phone video did not: “Now you can see the [suspect] punching the officer twice in the face before he hits him with his baton.” These sorts of quotes are almost always paired with an assurance that these systems do not get officers in trouble. From the same article: “I heard guys complaining it would get them into trouble, but I’ve had no problems so I’m OK with it[.]”
Surely some cameras will capture more video than others and a camera that is automatically triggered by the unholstering of a weapon can probably start recording faster than a nearby civilian fumbling for a phone in a pocket or purse. Having an extra few seconds of footage can catch that quick punch to the face, but really it is the opportunity to offer a believable description or interpretation of video that is really powerful.
Ben Brucato, a friend and department colleague studies cop watch groups is quick to point out that, “the very proliferation of media documenting extreme police violence, resulting in severe injuries and even death to civilians, speaks to the limitations of visibility as a protective power.” Brucato’s work has shown that while video of gruesome police violence surfaces every month, police use-of-force incidents have remained stable or slightly increased in spite of decreasing violent crime and increased officer safety. His interviews with organizations that train people to film police have shown that while video is important, it became clear that what was really needed was training in how to “write and add voice-overs, to provide the subjective accounting for video contents that can never be self-evident.”
Recall that during the Cecily McMillian case, the police were able to turn grainy, almost useless video into incontrovertible evidence of assault on an officer. It is this power to say what a video depicts that is the true source of power. The ability to say what one is seeing, to declare what is the “official depiction of events”, cannot be wrestled from the hands of authority with cameras alone. Mainstream media, when looking for video of an incident, will undoubtedly play the official police footage and then (maybe) show more video from a citizen’s perspective.
If Ben’s work teaches us anything it is that cameras are not synonymous with oversight or power. Ever since the video of the LAPD beating up Rodney King surfaced in 1991, police departments have recognized that videotape can be a formidable opponent to falsified reports or fellow officer’s court testimony. Video can draw a lot of attention to incidents that previously happened in the shadows, obscured by dark alleys and abuses of power. Now that more people than ever have a high definition camera in their pocket and the means to share it with millions, police departments must confront video with video.
The editors of Jezebel did a really brave thing yesterday and called out their parent company, Gawker Media for not dealing with a very serious and persistent abuse and harassment problem. For months now, waves of violent pornography gifs have been posted to Jezebel stories using anonymous accounts untied to IP addresses or any other identifiable information. That means it’s effectively impossible to stop abusive people from posting to the site. Instead, Jezebel writers and editors have to delete the posts themselves, hopefully before too many of their readers see them. People higher up on the Gawker masthead have known about this issue and have, through inaction, forced their co-workers to look at this horrific and potentially triggering content instead of dealing with the problem. This is precisely how spaces and tools meant for everyone, turn into alienating environments that foster homogenous audiences and viewpoints. Gawker needs to help their editors defend against harassment –and fast– but they should also be thinking more comprehensively about the culture of comments.
Obviously, first and foremost, this kind of harassment needs to be recognized as the persistent problem that it truly is- not just at Gawker but in digital publishing writ large. Lindy West, a Jezebel staff writer, described this-all-too-common situation in the comments of the original post:
At pretty much every blogging job I’ve ever had, I’ve been told (by male managers) that it’d be a death sentence to moderate comments and block IP addresses, because it “shuts down discourse” and guts traffic. But no one’s ever shown me any actual numbers that support that claim. Does anyone have any? Not that I think traffic should trump employee safety anyway, but I’d love for someone to prove to me that it’s more than just a cop-out.
The false dichotomy West is describing also obscures the fact that harassment also hurts readership and most certainly “shuts down discourse.” The only difference is whom gets shut down.
When it comes to figuring out how to resolves these issues, I’m a big fan of following the lead of the person experiencing and speaking out about their oppression. They are generally the best people to fully understand the complexities of the problem at hand and we should at the very least should begin by doing what Jezebel’s staff suggests: adding a ban IP functionality to all comments on the Kinja publishing platform that Gawker utilizes. Gawker’s editorial director Joel Johnson tweeted today that they had suspended image posting all together until they figured out a more permanent solution.
In the world of Science and Technology Studies, we would call IP banning and suspending images a “tech fix.” A tech fix doesn’t get at the root of the problem (e.g. misogyny, rape culture) but it generally mitigates a severe symptom, while also bringing into stark relief the kinds of problems our society is equipped to deal with. The availability of, and ease with which a tech fix is implemented can reveal a lot about what we collectively value and ignore. So while suspending image posting is a good temporary fix and the IP ban is certainly a longer-term option, we should also give due consideration to why there aren’t lots of readily available tech fixes to this problem. Tech fixes that might, at least in this case, let Jezebel continue to benefit from anonymous commenters that are crucial for whistle-blowing and story development.
Kinja’s inability to help Jezebel staff deal with harassment is even more unforgivable when compared to all the amazing technologies we’ve developed to solve very similar (but less gendered) problems. Take, for example, spam. Junk messages don’t only show up in your embarassingnamefrom10thgrade@gmail.com account, they are constantly barraging anything with a “post” or “send” button. Administrators of wikis and other interactive publishing platforms have to fight spam all the time. To an admin, spam behaves more like digital weather than an annoying business model. Offers for Oakley Sunglasses and Louis Vuitton handbags are always raining on your site and so most admins install Akismet or a captcha to discriminate between humans and a bots. There are at least a handful of really effective spam blockers for just about every platform you use on a daily basis. Why is spam so easy to block while harassment goes virtually unchecked?
Lindy West’s comment gives us one side of the troll coin: people in management positions just don’t prioritize the problem, or see it as enough of a problem to devote serious thought to dealing with. The other side of the coin, also expertly described by West, is that trolls aren’t like the weather, “internet trolling is not random—it is a sentient, directed, strong-armed goon of the status quo. And the more we can hammer that truth through the public consciousness, the sooner we can affect the widespread cultural change we need to begin tamping down online hate speech.”
West’s suggested cultural change (or Cultural Fix [PDF]) is to engage trolls with the intension of humanizing everyone in the conversation. Talking about people as if they’re monsters, and then assuming those monsters will show up in comments with the inevitability of swallows returning to Capistrano, reinforces a sexism-without-sexist people worldview. Linda Layne (in the PDF linked above) notes that in the face of seemingly inevitable problems what is needed are rituals and social mores that acknowledge the problem but help everyone recover. Gawker has shown an interest in radically rethinking how commenting technology works, but has done comparatively little to reintroduce the culture surrounding comments. Is such a campaign possible?
Gawker has a lot of money. They can experiment with a lot of options and build a campaign of campaigns. Hire someone to do nothing but filter out harassment and make judgments about threats to authors. Pay researchers to figure out how and why this kind of harassment happens in the first place and build a public media campaign to stop it. Just don’t stop at the tech fix.
When Adrien Chen tweeted a link to the Jezebel article adding “I see Gawker Media’s ‘become more like Reddit’ strategy is coming along nicely” he was being much more than glib. As I have written before, the technological affordances of a site and the culture of its user base are mutually shaping systems. A site that affords anonymity in the service of attention will always maintain hegemonic discourse. This is why, while Kinja definitely needs a better set of moderation tools we also need to pay attention to the kind of culture engendered by the rest of the site. Who feels more at home in a competition for attention? Who feels more comfortable opening up within the safe bounds of digital anonymity? We’ll have better conversations if we think about and act on these kinds of questions.
Imagine you live at the end of a cul-de-sac in a subdevelopment that is only accessible by a single gate that leads out to a large, high-speed arterial road. Your friends, your job, your kids’ school are all outside of this development which means life is lived through and on the road that connects your subdevelopment to the rest of the world. Now imagine that, without warning or any kind of democratic process, the company that maintains that road (private companies are subcontracted to do regular maintenance on public roads all the time) decides to add trees on either side of the road to reduce car speed. It’s a relatively benign design intervention and it works. In fact the trees work so well that the company’s engineers publish in a few journals which directly benefits the company financially, through prominence within the truly boring world of road maintenance. When the residents get wind of this experiment, and demand to know why they weren’t even notified, the owner of the road maintenance company says, “if you don’t like it use a different road.” That mind-bending response actually makes more sense than what has been coming out of OKCupid and Facebook these last few weeks.
If we were to make the above analogy adhere closer to the Facebook or OKCupid studies we’d first need to have the road maintenance CEO preface his remarks with something like “I don’t really know anything about how people drive.” Then, instead of adding trees to slow traffic, the study was about placement of billboards for maximum viewership during rush hour. Also, the study would have to be ambiguously conclusive, not generalizable to any other road, and yet still be the last in several thousand invisible studies that strove to change motorists’ driving patterns in very small ways. Finally, these thousands of inconclusive traffic studies should be heralded as the biggest thing since internal combustion engines.
In fact, this is only barely an analogy. Millions of people live in the suburban environment I just described and for those that do not have regular access to a car (because they aren’t of driving age or cannot afford one or are somehow differently abled such that cars aren’t compatible with their bodies) social media can bring an out-of-reach world to their fingertips. It can be a portal to your friends and even your source of income. The American car-centric built environment is very unforgiving to the young, old, poor, and differently abled which has made the Internet a truly life-changing invention for the car-less. (That being said, it is worth noting here that social media still has a lot of room to improve when it comes to differently-abled users.) When you consider all the people that rely on digital networks for their social life or their income you can’t help but realize: Facebook and OKCupid are experimenting on captive subjects.
I'm tired of people saying "just quit Facebook." I'd be cut off from MENA politics; college students from college life. Not that optional.
There is still one last way that my road/social network analogy is more than an analogy. The early history of the American suburb had a very similar business model to that of social media. The business strategy went something like this: you buy a lot of cheap land just outside of a major metropolis and either purchase or partner with one of the electric trolley companies that are operating within the city (Philadelphia had sixty-six operating by 1895). You then put up billboards advertising new suburbs that will have (wouldn’t ya know it?!) fast and efficient streetcar service that will take passengers from their homes right to the centers of industry. Once the suburbs are completed you’re free to jack up the fares, sell the advertising space to make new revenues and (eventually) sell the streetcar line to Ford Motors, Goodyear Tire, or an asphalt company so that they can be pave it and open up a dealership.
Both the Internet and the streetcar have been called century-defining technologies. They drastically altered landscapes and the daily lives of millions of people.To the extent that the history of technology repeats itself, it could be said that we are at the Internet equivalent of peak streetcar. That is, the suburbs are built and sold (many social media companies fear that they’ve hit market saturation) so advertising to those that are already bought into the system becomes more important than ever. Social media companies, if they are to continually increase profits as their shareholders demand, they must find their Ford Motor Company or become more brazen and aggressive in their advertising research. As I’ve written before, Opting out becomes more difficult as you go down the socioeconomic ladder. If you really didn’t like the streetcar company (or our fictional road maintenance company) you could pack up and move. Of course moving, even for the always-growing urban precariat, costs a lot of time and money. A similar thing happens when you give up a social media service. There are friends and family that are difficult if not impossible to reach any other way. It takes time to figure out how to deactivate and delete data while also salvaging the photos and status updates that you’ve amassed on your profile. It isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Of course, history does give us prescriptions as well as warnings. Charles Tyson Yerkes was one of the biggest streetcar robber barons in the United States. His company owned most of the streetcar lines in the Midwest, including Chicago’s transit system. Through some backdoor deals with city aldermen he was able to extend his monopoly contract with the city and was given permission to implement a substantial fare increase. When news of this deal got out, no one said, “Why are you so surprised?” or “Just learn to get around on a bike or maybe save up to buy a car.” Instead, hundreds of Chicagoans descended on city hall with guns and rope demanding Yerkes come out and face his unhappy customers. Yerkes, having no way to make the profits he wanted and live to enjoy them, fled the country and never came back. Chicago’s rail system was municipalized and remains so to this day.
Recommended reading on streetcars (in Chicago-style formatting, obviously):
Fishman, Robert. 1982. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Hall, Peter. 1998. “Changing Geographies: Technology and Income.” In High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology, edited by Donald A Schön, Bishwapriya Sanyal, and William J Mitchell, 43–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2002. Cities of Tomorrow : An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Jackson, Kenneth T. 1987. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.
Having just uploaded the final document of an NSF grant proposal (for this project) I feel like going “back to basics” and revisiting the big picture of my field. Unlike most of my fellow Cyborgology contributors, I don’t hold a degree in sociology and I’ve never been to the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. My department is an interdisciplinary social science called Science and Technology Studies. Similar departments call themselves Science, Technology, and Society (helpfully, both can be called simply “STS” and that’s what I’m going to use for the rest of this post) but other departments have slightly altered listicle names: MIT’s History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society probably wins for longest department name. (True Story: went to a grad conference there once and they handed out pint glasses that said “We put the HA in STS. Funny kids over there.) What follows is, in some really broad strokes, the contours of this little-known but growing intellectual tradition. I’m going to cover a rough history, and the field’s major projects and subfields that emerged from that history. As the title suggests, I’m going to make a lot of generalizations in service of brevity so… just be prepared for that. My hope is that this is somewhat helpful around this time of year for people who might just be getting into STS departments (congrats!) and for recent undergraduate degree holders who are considering going back to school. One final caveat: like all histories, this one is confined by its author. My friends at the Cornell STS program would write a different history, and the folks that study STS policy at Georgia Tech would write something different as well.
In the Beginning There was Revolution
Lots of intro STS books (there’s really only three of them 1, 2 and 3) say that STS began with Thomas Kuhn although the new editions of these books (if and when they ever come out) will probably revisit the work of Ludwik Fleck. Prior to Kuhn was what Sergio Sismondo describes as the “prehistory of STS” and is largely composed of philosophers and social scientists concerned with the nature of knowledge and the societal implications of handing off authority and power to machines. Names commonly associated with this history include Robert Merton, Michael Polanyi, Lewis Mumford, and more well known thinkers who had a lot to say about science and/or technology like Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Pytor Kropotkin.
Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolution, published in 1962 argued that scientific progress wasn’t only driven by the discovery of facts: science is a social process that fluctuates between periods of “normal science” and revolution. During periods of ‘normal science” every scientist subscribes to a particular paradigm and all work seeks to refine and elaborate the basic premises of the paradigm. Revolution occurs when a sizeable contingent of scientist challenge the paradigm itself. The revolution, according to Kuhn, isn’t resolved and normal science reinstated until the adherents to the old paradigm die off or become so marginalized that they are incapable of marshaling resources to continue their research. Even more controversial was the idea that these revolutions didn’t necessarily produce better accounts of the natural world, just different ones. Sometimes the newer paradigms were able to explain more, or they afforded new applications, but most importantly they structured who could do science and lay claim to “how the world works.”
Ludwik Fleck took a slightly different approach, describing something closer to Foucault’s episteme. Fleck taught that various “thought collectives” existed at any one time and vied for adherents through persuasive demonstrations and publications of experiments and remained coherent through a common vocabulary and method. Unlike Kuhn, which still has an essence of linearity to it (normal science -> revolution -> new normal science – new revolution), Fleck showed that scientific discovery was always working in multiple “directions” with each having relatively equal chances of achieving dominance.
Several turns to Technology, Social Construction, Representation, and the Nonmodern
Fleck was writing in the 20s and 30s up until his eventual incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp (where he was forced to work on and eventually invented a typhus vaccine in a German army hospital through experimentation on prisoners). He survived but his work on epistemology in this later period is not as widely cited. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was originally published in 1962 and, while the discipline has moved and improved beyond the theory of Kuhnian revolutions, it is still a foundational text in STS.
The STS work of the 70s and 80s laid the groundwork for the established field it is today. Much of what was written in this time was the result of a symbiotic relationship between counterculture and critical thought applied to science and technology. Langdon Winner’s Autonomous Technology (1977), Evelyn Fox Keller’s Reflections on Gender and Science (1985) and Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1979) are indicative of this period of writing. These texts, along with dozens of articles, essays, and books by (in no particular order) Donald MacKenzie, Sal Restivo, David Noble, Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, Andrew Pickering, Michel Callon, Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch began to develop a coherent rebuttal to the dominant idea that technologies are apolitical tools and science merely observes and records objective facts.
Winner’s two books in this period aforementioned Autonomous Technologies and his 1986 book The Whale and the Reactor built off of previous work by Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford and showed that technological artifacts have their own politics. (I summarize that argument here.) Keller’s work began one of STS’s longest-standing projects: revealing how the history of science and technology buries the contributions of women and even defines contributions to science as activities typically performed by men. Latour and Woolgar’s ethnography of the Jonas Salk laboratory was the first study to use the tools of anthropology on a thoroughly modern field site. This launched a long-standing tradition of seeing scientific objects and theoretical models as cultural artifacts as well.
By the end of the 80s and into the first half of the 90s several major projects had solidified into recognizable schools of thought and theories: The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and Social Construction of Technology (SCoT) continued where Fleck left off and produced dense and elaborate accounts of technological invention and scientific discovery. Everything from the design of 13th century Portuguese ships of war (Law, 1987) to Bakelite plastic and fluorescent lighting (Bijker 1997) was gone over with a fine tooth comb. These authors were after two very big ideas. The first was that all science and technology was socially constructed, meaning that everything “could have been otherwise” but wasn’t due to historical, social, and cultural factors. Second, these authors wanted to know what made a technology “stabilize” into the general form we come to recognize. This usually involved investigating the working definitions of technoscientific concepts like accuracy and precision. How accurate is accurate enough? Does accuracy work the same way in nuclear missile design and furniture construction? The answers were always extremely qualified and usually involved the phrase, “it’s more complicated than that.”
Latour and Woolgar’s ethnography of a laboratory began a tradition of studying the scientific process and how it came to develop representations of our world. Scientific instruments, Latour and Woolgar argued, inscribed invisible forces onto tangible and exchangeable documents and it was this process of inscription that was the over-looked but crucial process (along with high social standing) that made it possible to form arguments about the world. A sizeable portion of STS literature is devoted to articulating just how technoscientific objects mediate and represent the world around us. Obviously there’s a lot of overlap here with the work founded by Winner, who reminds us that this representation can have political consequences and/or motivations.
Bruno Latour, probably one of the most cited STS scholars, produced several foundational texts about representation, social constructivism, and the politics of technology but his most popular work sought to dismantle the nature/society dualism all-together. His book We Have Never Been Modern (1993) argued that modernity, more than anything else, relied on a conceptual separation between knowledge pertaining to nature and society. That is, the way we construct causality and ontology was unnecessarily bifurcated by a deeply and widely held belief that the laws governing society and nature were completely different. The titular argument of the book was a massive critique of the post-modern project as well, since the collapsing of boundaries was predicated on those boundaries beginning in the first place.
Only recently [PDF] has Latour tried to articulate what we have been this whole time, if not modern. In the mean time, he described the nonmodern as an infinitely complex network of human and nonhuman actors (or actants) that could be studied through his well-known Actor-Network theory developed with fellow ANT adherents Michel Callon and John Law. There are lots of good critiques of ANT, most of which point out that even if the fundamental ontology between society and nature is arbitrary, the way ANT repositions actors’ relationships to one-another erases or obscures inequalities of power among humans.
Cyborgs, The Public, and Making Things
Of course, another major project of 90s STS was Donna Haraway’s work and what is probably her best-known Cyborg Manifesto which was actually first written almost 10 years before the version everyone cites in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1990). The manifesto cites the later 20th century’s breakdown of barriers between humans, animals, machines, physical and nonphysical phenomena as a reason to de-center identity in favor of affinity. It was specifically a call for socialist feminists to reassess their identity-centered politics and recognize the power of affinities. The thesis is, and this is where this history definitely becomes my telling, does essentially the same work that Latour does. It is, at least for me, what We Have Never Been Modern should have been, at least in terms of its applicability to race, class and gender politics. (More on Latour’s approach to power here.)
Another boundary STS interrogates is that of lay and expert knowledge. Going as far back as the 70s, in some Scandinavian work (See Bødker’s work cited below) STS scholars have sought to understand what “counts” as legitimate science and what is considered either quackery or too amateur to be reproducible or generalizable. Much of this work relies on case studies of scientific controversy surrounding environmental disasters and faulty technologies. Popular topics in this area include: publics’ understanding of scientific facts and processes, legitimacy to make scientific claims or show scientific proof, the diagnostic process (e.g. why something works or doesn’t work and how “working” is defined in the first place), and the boundary formation of disciplines.
Its also worth point out here that there’s a smaller but parallel track of STS (that I really like) that dates back to SCoT and SSK that focuses more on the microsociology of performing science instead of focusing on the representational aspects of science. In other words, authors like Andrew Pickering look at what decisions scientists and engineers make in the moment so as to better understand how science works as a practice, not a profession or a collection of facts.
This sort of work is getting particularly useful now that STS scholars have also taken it upon themselves to collaborate with scientist and engineers themselves and engage in the making process. The last decade or so has seen a massive increase in methods and frameworks that help engineers and scientists develop a kind of “sociological imagination” while at the same time give social scientists a much richer picture of how humans think with and through material objects.
The future of STS, if current publications are any indication of future progress, will be in making as well as writing. Critical Making (Matt Ratto), Reflective Design (Phoebe Sengers), Adversarial Design (Carl DiSalvo), Feminist Technologies (Linda Layne), Critical Technical Practice (Phil Agre), Appropriate Design (Dean Nieusma), and the work of Public Lab (Sarah Wylie) are interventions meant to democratize science and engineering or in some other way imbue these practices with the kinds of concerns and problems that have been the subject of the social sciences for over a century.
Agre, Philip. 1997. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Bauchspies, Wenda K, Jennifer Croissant, and Sal Restivo. 2005. Science, Technology, and Society: A Sociological Approach. 1st ed. Wiley-Blackwell.
Bijker, Wiebe E., Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. 1989. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Bijker, Wiebe. 1997. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs : Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. 1st MIT Pr. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.
Bødker, S, P Ehn, J Kammersgaard, M Kyng, and Y Sundblad. 1987. “An Utopian Experience.” In In Computers and Democracy – a Scandinavian Challange, edited by Gro Bjerknes, Pelle Ehn, and Morten Kyng. Avebury Gower Publishing Company Ltd, Aldershot.
Haraway, Donna J. 1990. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1st ed. Routledge.
Hess, David J. 1997. Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction. NYU Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1991. “Technology Is Society Made Durable.” In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination, edited by John Law. London; New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2010. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto.’” New Literary History 41 (3): 471–90. doi:10.1353/nlh.2010.0022.
Layne, Linda, Sharra Vostral, and Kate Boyer, eds. 2010. Feminist Technology. 1st Edition. University of Illinois Press.
Sengers, Phoebe, Kirsten Boehner, Shay David, and Joseph “Jofish” Kaye. 2005. “Reflective Design.” In Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: Between Sense and Sensibility, 49–58. CC ’05. New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1094562.1094569.
Sismondo, Sergio. 2010. An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell.
Wynne, Bryan. 1996. “Misunderstood Misunderstandings: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science.” In Misunderstanding Science The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology, edited by Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, 1:19–46. 3. Cambridge University Press.
Late Monday night it was discovered that one of the EPA’s Twitter accounts was a C-list celebrity on the popular iPhone game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. The Tweet was one of those automatically generated ones meant to announce progress in a game or the unlocking of an achievement. Its easy to imagine the scenario: an over-worked or deeply bored social media manager didn’t realize they were signed into their work account instead of their personal one and let the tweet go. Or maybe a family member borrowed their work phone. Who knows? What we do know is that the tweet immediately garnered thousands of retweets and countless more screenshots were shared on other platforms. Why is this even remotely funny? What sorts of publicly held believes does it reveal?
On the face of it, the tweet is funny in a late night show monologue sort of way: a recent event upon which dozens of jokes can be made about ineffectual government agencies, social media habits, and celebrities. Republicans have defanged the Environmental Protection Agency so much even Kim Kardashian doesn’t think they’re worth hanging around. Maybe if Climate Change came out with an iPhone app we’d pay more attention to it. [prompted laughter] Something terrible and lazy like that. But these sorts of jokes only work if there are some widely held value judgements about their ingredients. And, as we all know, there’s no shortage of value judgements on any of these things.
Powerful women like Kim Kardashian are often maligned as stupid or shallow despite their tremendous talents as savvy business owners and public figures (I don’t like the accumulation of wealth but I’d never say the people that manage to do it are necessarily stupid); social media is often disregarded as mere self-centered posturing; and environmental protection always walks the line between obnoxious tree hugging liberalism and nefarious economic sabotage. The reactions to the EPA’s tweet showed how sexism, economics, and everyday identity performance are deeply interwoven. I should note that I was one of the people who retweeted. I even posted a screenshot to Facebook, so when I say that the reactions to the EPA tweet are deeply conservative, I’m calling myself out and recognizing the sorts of default behaviors that I’ve been taught to uphold as a straight white guy.
The tweet was eventually taken down the next day after accumulating several thousand retweets.
No specific tweet stands out as the ultimate example of conservativism and that is precisely why and how these conservative ideas are able to evade critique and rebuttal. But with each “looks like that intern got fired” it gets a little bit easier to apply unrealistic expectations to public relations teams . Its also worth mentioning that these jobs are actually not something that just gets tossed to interns, managing a social media brand is real work. And, as Jennifer Pan wrote last month, public relations is one of those professions that are both dominated by women and disparaged as not real work: “Communication and multitasking, of course, are precisely the ‘soft skills’ of emotional labor that define the post-Fordist work environment, especially within majority-women professions.”
The EPA (perhaps unfortunately?) does not have the kind of sophisticated and irreverent communications strategy that keeps us “engaged” with Taco Bell or Hot Pockets. The EPA Water twitter account is usually pretty busy convincing the public that they’re not looking to “regulate puddles.” So when evidence arises that someone at the EPA is playing a game on their phone (like so many office workers do) it looks like a slip of the mask. It comes off as an accident that reveals something true about a government agency that is regarded as superfluous if not a harmful waste to a too-large percentage of the country. We can reverse Pan’s observation that “In PR, a certain overlap of professional and personal relationships is not only likely, but ideal” and say that many people assume the ideal and project the personal (iPhone games) onto the professional (environmental protection).
Discovering evidence of someone playing an iPhone game immediately opens up the opportunity to impose our own game-playing habits on someone we’ve never met. We play games on our phones when we’re bored. A lot of that boredom is experienced at work, either because the work is tedious or because your entire job description is bullshit. Maybe both. Of course it is a uniquely American sentiment that working for the government is subject to very different expectations. Government workers should be super-efficient as their paychecks come from our involuntarily paid tax dollars rather than our voluntarily paid (tell that to the uninsured hospital patient) private market exchanges. While it might be okay for me to play Dots at my desk, the EPA worker should always be perfectly efficient. If you think the entire mission of the EPA is detrimental to your own desires, then you’re doubly angry. You don’t want to pay them to work, let alone play!
The pièce de résistance is, of course, the name of the iPhone game. Chastising a PR person for playing a game that reifies celebrity culture is just too tempting for those seeking a way to feel “above it all”. The person/brand/idea that is Kim Kardashian is the epitome of the right’s idea of unearned riches. To (literally!) play her game is to enact the seemingly vacuous life of fame for fame’s sake. It’s a deeply ironic stance to take: Turning your nose up at both the profession and the game playing person requires an appeal to the genuine and to the authentic- things that are deeply informed by celebrities and public relations professionals.
I don’t think, by itself, laughing at the EPA Kardashian tweet is a bad thing. There is something benignly funny about the juxtaposition of these two brands meeting in a single tweet. At the same time, it does seem like something that a Fox News mouth breather would find hilarious. What is disturbing and deeply insidious however, is the latent conservativism that props up many of the seemingly banal reactions to the accident. It demeans affective labor while simultaneously reminding everyone that Kim Kardashian got rich the wrong way.
We live in a cyborg society. Technology has infiltrated the most fundamental aspects of our lives: social organization, the body, even our self-concepts. This blog chronicles our new, augmented reality.
