commentary

How does technology mediate belonging in an era of both rising connectivity and xenophobia? The rhetoric of globalization would have us believe we are entering a new era of integration facilitated by advances in transportation and information technology, while racist populism is finding currency unseen since the Second World War. These perspectives represent very different views of how the world should work, and reflect one’s position and ability to navigate multiple, entangled systems of belonging, and the technologies making such movement possible.

We order our world with technology, in ways so mundane they escape detection without effort to separate representation of the world from the world itself. This is difficult because language itself is a sort of representational technology. Think of language as the software used in “hardware” (like stop signs or birth certificates) designed to order society. more...

Television has been killing itself off for well over a decade. Rising costs, increased ad time, and the shift to cheap-to-produce content like reality TV are a just a few factors contributing to the slow death of broadcast and cable TV. Competition from online providers continues to get fiercer, and some networks are doing their best to adapt by providing limited, often ill-performing, online content. Major media events offer networks and providers an opportunity to save face, but even these low-hanging fruits are being ruined by one of the darkest forces in contemporary TV programming: commentators. more...

Pretty things are pretty to look at. They bring you comfort, inspire aspiration, or perhaps stimulate vicarious consumption. But have you ever stumbled upon something gross on the internet and yet could not look away?

Me too. (It’s no wonder Dr. Pimple Popper has over 700 million views on YouTube.)

“Picture perfect” Influencers have been thriving on social media ever since they burst into the scene in the early-to-mid 2000s. Having first begun on blogs such as LiveJournal, OpenDiary, and blogger, these self-made internet celebrities have since transited to monetising the presentation of their everyday lives on various social media including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and Snapchat. Perhaps most representative in the popular imagination are “Instagram Influencers” most known for their conscientious poses in pristine locations, luxury-esque conspicuous consumption and savvy internet relatability in tow.

But this economy of the perfect, pristine, and picturesque is growing saturated and fast becoming boring.

Enter “grotesque microcelebrities”. more...

Nextdoor is a local social network site that connects people who live in the same neighborhood. Neighbors use it to exchange information and keep up with the ongoings of a geographically bounded community. Nextdoor seems like a relatively innocuous site for block party advertisements and zoning debates, and it is. It is also a site on which racial profiling has emerged as a problem and in response, a site on which important debates are currently playing out.

In short, people on Nextdoor have been reporting crimes in which race is the primary descriptor of the subject, casting suspicion upon entire groups of people and instigating/exacerbating racial tensions among neighbors.

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia does not want his site to be a space for racial profiling, and recently instated a policy to ameliorate the problem. The policy is simple: Do not racially profile. What is contentious, however, is how this policy is enacted.

In contrast to Facebook (and more recently, Twitter), whose terms of service warn users that they can be censured or removed for discriminatory language, Tolia instructed his employees to build anti-profiling conduct into the site’s architecture. Specifically, the site provides a crime reporting form in which racial designations can only post if they are accompanied by two additional descriptors (e.g., clothing and hair style). In addition, reports that include race have to be of sufficient length. Otherwise they will be tagged by an algorithm and potentially removed.

Nextdoor’s tactic is exemplary of the politics inherent in codes and algorithms, and it is thus unsurprising that their anti-profiling codes and algorithms have been the subject of political debate. While the CEO makes a strong case for the move away from race-based criminalization, those opposed find the new requirement an impingement upon free speech, as well as a potential threat—if race is the only identifier a witness perceives, that witness is prevented from posting about potential dangers. As quoted on NRP, one person wrote the site administrators and complained: “Why would you engage in anything that limits people’s expression? And especially people who are trying to keep their neighborhoods safe?”

The debates—and potential outcomes—of Nextdoor’s anti-profiling code can be well explained using a gradated theory of affordance.
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I’m the first to admit that coming up with new material to write on a regular basis can be really tough. I also think that important arguments bear repeating. So I’m not mad when I see multiple versions of essentially the same story pop up in op-eds and essays. But I do feel the need to step in when stories that repeat themselves, repeatedly get something wrong. Such is the case with what I call the worry piece.

The worry piece is a particular brand of techno-skeptism. It addresses technology as an overwhelming force that on balance, changes people and relationships for the worse. It is concerned with the very nature of humanity and saturated with visceral anxiety. It is personal, and meant to shame you, but in a collective-we-should-all-be-ashamed kind of way. One can (and should) be skeptical and critical of technology for a host of reasons—mostly with regard to patterns of exploitation from its production, distribution, and use. The worry piece is less concerned with these structural issues and instead, occupied by the loss of dinnertime conversation and the influx of content to which readers can presumably pay only fleeting attention.   more...

During the week of July 12, 2004, a group of scholars gathered at Stanford University, as one participant reported, “to discuss current affairs in a leisurely way with [Stanford emeritus professor] René Girard.” The proceedings were later published as the book Politics and Apocalypse. At first glance, the symposium resembled many others held at American universities in the early 2000s: the talks proceeded from the premise that “the events of Sept. 11, 2001 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics.” The speakers enlisted various theoretical perspectives to facilitate that reexamination, with a focus on how the religious concept of apocalypse might illuminate the secular crisis of the post-9/11 world.

As one examines the list of participants, one name stands out: Peter Thiel, not, like the rest, a university professor, but (at the time) the President of Clarium Capital. In 2011, the New Yorker called Thiel “the world’s most successful technology investor”; he has also been described, admiringly, as a “philosopher-CEO.” More recently, Thiel has been at the center of a media firestorm for his role in bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, which outed Thiel as gay in 2007 and whose journalists he has described as “terrorists.” He has also garnered some headlines for standing as a delegate for Donald Trump, whose strongman populism seems an odd fit for Thiel’s highbrow libertarianism; he recently reinforced his support for Trump with a speech at the Republican National Convention. Both episodes reflect Thiel’s longstanding conviction that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs should use their wealth to exercise power and reshape society. But to what ends? Thiel’s participation in the 2004 Stanford symposium offers some clues.    more...

This is part two of an essay on René Girard’s influence on Peter Thiel. Part one ran last week and you can read it here. 

In my previous post, I examined social theorist René Girard’s influence on tech investor Peter Thiel. Previous observers have picked up on Thiel’s remark that Girard’s mimetic theory helped him identify the promise of social media, but they have left out a crucial dimension of Girard’s thought: mimetic violence, also a central preoccupation for Thiel. In what follows, I will make the case that Thiel invested in and promoted Facebook not simply because Girard’s theories led him to foresee the future profitability of the company, but because he saw social media as a mechanism for the containment and channeling of mimetic violence in the face of an ineffectual state. Facebook, then, was not simply a prescient and well-rewarded investment for Thiel, but a political act closely connected to other well-known actions, from founding the national security-oriented startup Palantir Technologies to suing Gawker and supporting Trump.

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Sherry Turkle has been very successful lately. She is still touring the country giving high-profile talks and her best-selling books are assigned in college classrooms all across the country. The quotes on her books’ dustjackets are from respected authors and thinkers. She is a senior faculty member at an elite east coast university. She is by all accounts someone with an ostensibly left-of-center perspective that is popular while still pushing audiences to consider the ramifications of their actions. Turkle, through her critical analysis of social media and portable digital devices, wants people to think twice about the unintended consequences of their actions; how individual choices often aggregate into undesirable interpersonal dynamics. This is important work worthy of public debate but, precisely because it is so important, it is worth asking who benefits from Turkle’s particular brand of mindfulness.

Critiques of Turkle are too few, but the ones that exist are spot on. Focusing on individuals’ technology use, according to Nathan Jurgenson, not only turns the subjects of Turkle’s analysis into broken subhumans, it also gives the reader the opportunity to feel superior simply by fretting over when and how a device comes out of their pocket. Her work also misses, according to Zeynep Tufeci and Alexandra Samuel all the ways social media is a way of reclaiming some form of sociality in a world dominated by televisions, the suburbs, long work hours, and life circumstances that geographically separate us. Taken together we might understand the shortcomings of Turkle’s work as primarily one of digital dualism, i.e. that she considers non-mediated, in-person interaction as inherently more real or authentic compared to anything done through digital networks. What has been left unsaid, and what I want to focus on here, is how Turkle contradicts herself and, in so doing, reveals a bias toward authority and socially conservative political institutions. Turkle selectively deploys her analysis in such a way that traditional sources of authority are left unchallenged. more...

My mom and I spent some part of the 1995 summer with my aunt and her house, complete with backyard. I was three, and having lived most of my life in a small New York studio apartment, my mom must’ve thought I would enjoy the few elements of nature often found in quiet Californian suburbs. She was wrong: each time they tried setting me in the grass, I would crawl desperately back to the beautiful, safe, concrete patio.

This is a childhood story that still speaks to my identity: camping is not my first choice of activities, and the narratives of people who lose themselves in the wilderness are  tedious to me. So it was quite a surprise when I willing accepted the hiking trail Pokémon Go had set for me with the promise of Clefairies: more...

Throughout their history, national conventions for American political parties have become more and more public events. Closed off affairs in smoky rooms and convention halls gave way to televised roll calls and speeches. In the Year of Our Big Brother, 1984, C-SPAN aired uninterrupted coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions. Conventions became more polished and choreographed, with 1996’s DNC being the zenith of this trend. Conventions moved to the internet in the aughts, using a variety of different platforms to distribute streams and commentary.

This election cycle incorporated something new into the dissemination of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the conventions: Twitch.tv. The platform designed for videogame streaming offered full coverage of the conventions. Additionally, it gave Twitch users the ability to host the coverage of both conventions on their own channels. In the case of the DNC, Twitch users were able to add commentary to the stream of the convention on their channel, giving their followers and other users an opportunity to hear their favorite gamers’ takes on the presentation of the Democratic National Committee. more...