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When talking about China, local digital media hypes are often temporalized on a yearly basis, resulting in a peculiar Chinese zodiac of tech-related buzzwords. 2005 was the Year of the Blog, 2008 The Year of Shanzhai, 2009 the Year of Weibo, 2012 the Year of WeChat, 2014 the Year of… well, it’s been the Year of WeChat for a few years now. Anyway, given the disproportionate attention being given to the phenomenon, 2016 is poised to be remembered as the Year of Livestreaming, or, as it is called in Mandarin Chinese, zhibo (literally ‘direct-casting’). The translation is revealing, because while livestreaming is commonly linked to videogaming and event broadcasting on platforms like Twitch (or, more recently, YouTube and Facebook) in Mainland China livestreaming is being adopted as a prominent content format by a wide variety of social media platforms, and has been enthusiastically embraced by users keen to share sights from their everyday lives, often through apps and websites that offer social networking capabilities, live commenting functions and microtransaction-based gifting.

I got in touch with my former colleague Dino Zhang to hear about his ongoing doctoral work at DERC (Digital Ethnography Research Center), and we exchanged a few thoughts around zhibo and content formats on Chinese digital media platforms. In 2014, Dino was kind enough to host me for the brief period in which our fieldworks overlapped in his home city of Wuhan, and we ended up writing some observations about Momo (perhaps 2014 was the Year of Dating Apps, who knows), a social contact app that was much touted as symptomatic of a Chinese “sexual revolution”, but that we instead found to be largely used for combating wuliao (boredom) through group chats and location-based social networking. Quite tellingly, two years later, Momo’s growing profits are fueled by its incorporation of a zhibo function which projects the platform further away from its narrow depiction as a “dating app” and typifies the shapeshifting nature of many local digital media platforms, forced by a competition for hundreds of millions of users to embrace and incorporate the latest functions and content formats.

Gabriele de Seta: Your previous research project was about internet cafés in a second-tier Chinese city and the changes they went through during large-scale urban restructuring. You’ve also written about social contact apps and explored the concept of boredom in its relation with urban spaces. How did zhibo enter this picture? more...

Last week The New Inquiry published an essay I wrote about science journalism podcasts syndicated on NPR. Shows like Radiolab, The TED Radio Hour, Hidden Brain, Invisibilia, Note to Self, and Freakonomics Radio, I argued, were more about wrapping pre-conceived notions in a veneer of data than changing minds or delivering new insights into long-standing problems. Worse yet, social and political issues that might be met with collective action are turned into wishy-washy “well isn’t that interesting” anecdotes:

Topics that might have once been subject to political debate or rhetorical argument–work demands, exposure to toxins, surveillance, the limits of love, even Marxian alienation–become apolitical subjects for scientific testing. But the results only lead to greater and greater complexity, prompting introspective thought rather than action.

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23andMe Co-Founder Anne Wojcicki
by Thomas Hawk on Flickr

Anne Wojcicki’s thinks it’s “incredibly meaningful” to honor scientists who are “purists” who “love what they do” and have “never looked for any kind of celebrity.” So she and a slew of other Silicon Valley technocrats gathered to recognize these altruistic innovators at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View last week by giving them a spotlight on primetime network television and also $3 million each. At the event, called the Breakthrough Prize ceremony, the 23andMe CEO sat down with a reporter from Bloomberg to discuss the award, which, per her interviewer, should “empower scientists just like technologists are empowered in silicon valley.”

It is most likely wishful thinking to presume that the curriculum for a Yale bachelors of science in molecular biology—of which Wojcicki is a recipient—would include the likes of Ludwick Fleck or Bruno Latour. more...

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

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In a widely-shared article on The Intercept, Sam Biddle made the point that, “Trump’s anti-civil liberty agenda, half-baked and vague as it is, would largely be an engineering project, one that would almost certainly rely on some help from the private sector.” The center of his article, that of the six major tech companies he requested comments from only Twitter gave him an unequivocal statement that they would not help build a Muslim database, was chilling even though most of the companies just never responded. The role of engineers and designers in carrying out political ends often relegated to business’s policies. That is, engineers themselves are seen as completely beholden to whatever their bosses decide their job should be. I want to look at this from a different angle: why are engineers so willing to defer responsibility for their actions and why are they so often in positions to do so? more...

There is a trend—one that was present prior to the election but has increased dramatically since—in our inability to communicate with people who hold radically different political convictions. It is a complete systems failure. On the smaller end of the scale, it takes form in the specialized vocabularies that we do not share, the differences in language use that muddy conversations and leave us confused. Higher up the scale are the different sources we rely on for news, the different windows to the world that deliver information to us and form our basic conceptions of reality. And at the top of this systems failure is something more difficult to discuss, let alone solve. It is a crisis of epistemology—the ways we come to know the world—that is bound up in the collapse of trust in fundamental institutions, and an apocalyptic paranoia that everyone you disagree with is knowingly working toward the destruction of your way of life.

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“The motor has killed the great city. The motor must save the great city.”

-Le Corbusier, 1924.

In the fast and shallow anxiety around driverless cars, there isn’t a lot of attention being paid to what driving in cities itself will become, and not just for drivers (of any kind of car) but also for pedestrians, governments, regulators and the law. This post is about the ‘relative geographies’ being produced by driverless cars, drones and big data technologies. Another way to think about this may be: what is the city when it is made for autonomous vehicles with artificial intelligence? more...

Fake news among the alt-right has been central in post-election public discourse, most recently instantiated through Donald Trump’s dubiously sourced tweet about the “millions of illegal voters” supposedly driving Clinton’s substantial lead in the popular vote. Less attention, however, has been paid to the way “real” news is, to use Jurgenson’s term, “fact-i”. Based in data and empirical accounts, mainstream news gets cast as respectable and objective vis-à-vis the fabrications and embellishments that go viral in right wing echo-chambers. This is especially true when journalists, stack of papers and obligatory pen studiously in hand, point to statistics that back up their reports.

Such reliance on, and valorization of, “data” masks the human underpinnings of journalistic practice and the ways that things become numbers and those numbers become stories. So here I present a cautionary tale of a small missing data point, with big narrative consequences.

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

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

On Friday night, VP-elect Mike Pence went to see Hamilton. He was loudly booed. The cast delivered a respectful message asking him to “work on behalf of all of us”. President-elect and noted internet troll Donald Trump accused the cast of harassment, because the truth is whatever he says it is. By Saturday morning, it was – going by my feed – most of what Twitter was talking about.

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