commentary

I’d like to start off with an admittedly grandpa-sounding critique of a piece of technology in my house: My coffee maker’s status lights are too bright. My dad got it for my partner and I this past Christmas and we threw-out-the-box-immediately-wanna-keep it, but the thing has a lighthouse attached to it.  We live in a relatively small (and very old) place and our bedroom is a small room right off the kitchen. The first night we had the coffee maker I thought we had forgotten to turn off the TV.  We don’t really need alarm clocks anymore either, because when it finishes brewing it beeps like a smoke detector. Again, we love the coffee maker (Dad, seriously we love it.) but sometimes it feels like wearing a shoe that was designed for someone with six toes. more...

This is a cross-post from my research blog, Its Her Factory.

This week in my graduate seminar we talked about resilience discourse. I’ve written about resilience before, and the concept is a key theme in my forthcoming book with Zer0 Books. It’s also, as I understand, a trendy and common concept in programming and IT. For an introduction to the concept, you can refer to the blog post I cited a few sentences ago, or Mark Neocleous’s article in Radical Philosophy.

Here I want to focus on the question of critical alternatives to resilience. Resilience is and has long been a way that marginalized and oppressed people respond to, survive, and thrive in the midst of oppression. But now that resilience has been co-opted so that it’s a normalizing rather than a revolutionary/critical/counter-hegemonic practice, how does one respond to, survive, and thrive without being or practicing “resilience”?

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The debate over the ACA is carried out in ideological dogwhistle, waged with words barely capable of pointing to the concepts they are supposed to grip. While this well-oiled chatter is par for the course in American politics, it is doubly fruitless in the case of healthcare dot gov. The object of inquiry is a website, a kind of thing that is newer than our daily interactions would have us remember, and it has different ontological and anthropological qualities than our political commentators have learned to address. It is a kind of thing less suited to the language of communist bogeyman and other imaginary evils than the technics of networks and the processual language of software project management– topics where most of our politicians sound clueless and should follow Wittgenstein’s advice (“hey, shut up a minute”).

At the most basic syntax of domain naming, the phrase “healthcare dot gov”, repeated as much by its detractors as by its proponents, is a statement about the relationship of these two things: healthcare and government. more...

Three articles came out this week that help me develop my concept of droning as a general type of surveilance that differs in important ways from the more traditional concept of “the gaze” or, more academically, “panopticism.” There’s Molly Crabapple’s post on Rizome, the NYTimes article about consumer surveillance, and my colleague Gordon Hull’s post about the recent NSA legal rulings over on NewAPPS. Thinking with and through these three articles helps me clarify a few things about the difference between droning and gazing: (1) droning is more like visualization than like “the gaze”–that is, droning “watches” patterns and relationships among individual “gazes,” patterns that are emergent properties of algorithmic number-crunching; and (2) though the metaphor of “the gaze” works because the micro- and macro-levels are parallel/homologous, droning exists only at the macro-level; individual people can run droning processes, but only if they’re plugged into crowds (data streams or sets aggregating multiple micro- or individual perspectives).

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In Children of Men Clive Owen’s character Theo is trying to secure “transfer papers” from his cousin Nigel who seems to be one of the few rich people left in the no-one-can-make-babies-anymore-dystopia. The two older men are sitting at a dining table with a younger boy, presumably Nigel’s son, who seems to be inflicted in some way. He’s pale and stares vacantly at somewhere just past his left hand which is eerily still in between the twitches of fingers that are adorned by delicate wires. He doesn’t respond to others in the room and isn’t eating the food in front of him. After Nigel yells at him to take his pill we notice that they boy isn’t really sick or particularly disturbed, he’s playing a game attached to his hand. more...

The Quantified Self is defined—in the tagline of the movement’s website—as self -knowledge through numbers.  With the example of the Tikker “Happiness Watch” (also known as the Death Watch) I argue for the primacy of self-knowledge within the movement, and the subservient role of numbers. more...

On New Year’s Eve the biggest fireworks display ever was launched off of the biggest tower in the world. Dubai’s fireworks show was, in terms less vulgar than the display itself, an undulating orgasm of global capital. The 500,000 fireworks mounted to Burj Khalifa Tower and the surrounding skyscrapers, were reportedly viewed live by over a million people on the ground and livestreamed to millions more around the world. I can’t find a price tag for the display (too gauche?) but given that your typical municipal fireworks display for proles can easily top six figures, lets just assume that you could measure the cost of this display in national GDPs. It was profane in the way Donald Trump’s continued existence is profane. The fireworks display was so huge —such an utterly perfect metaphor for capitalism itself— that no single person standing on the ground could witness the entire thing. It was a spectacle meant for camera lenses. more...

As I said last week, I’m responding to Sarah’s recent series of posts on drone sexuality. In this post, I want to follow through/push one of Sarah’s concerns about the way her account relied on binaries–both gender binaries (masculine/feminine) and subject/object binaries. I don’t know if Sarah would want to follow my argument all the way, but, that’s one thing that’s great about thinking with someone–you can develop different but related versions of a theory, and more fully explore the intellectual territory around an issue, topic, or question.

What if droning isn’t something “masculine” phenomena do to “feminine” ones, but a process that everyone/everything undergoes, and, in sifting out the erstwhile winners from losers, distributes gender privilege? In other words, droning is a set of processes that dole out benefits to “normally” gendered/sexually oriented phenomena (masculine, cis-gendered, homo- and hetero-normative, white, bourgeois ones), and that subject “abnormally” gendered/sexually oriented phenomena (feminine, trans*, queer, non-white, working class) to increased vulnerability and death?

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This is a cross-post from Its Her Factory.

Recent shifts in the aesthetic value of audio loudness is a symptom of broader shifts in attitudes about social harmony and techniques for managing social “noise.” Put simply, this shift is from maximalism to responsive variability. (“Responsive variability” is the ability to express a spectrum of features or levels of intensity, whatever is called for by constantly changing conditions. You could call it something like dynamism, but, given the focus of this article on musical dynamics (loudness and softness), I thought that term would be too confusing.)  It tracks different phases in “creative destruction” or deregulation–that is, in neoliberal techniques for managing society. In the maximalist approach, generating noise is itself profitable–there has to be destruction for there to be creation, “shocks” for capitalism to transform into surplus value; the more shocks, the more opportunities to profit. However, what happens when you max out maximalism? What do you do next? That’s what responsive variability is, a way to get more surplus aesthetic, economic, and political value from maxed-out noise. (To Jeffrey Nealon’s expansion→ intensification model of capitalism, I’d add → responsive variability. He argues that expansion has been maxed out as a way to generate profits–that’s the result of, among other things, globalization. Intensification is how capitalism adapts–instead of conquering new, raw materials and markets, it invests more fully in what already exists. But once investment is maxed out, then, I think, comes responsive variability: responsiveness and adaptation are optimized.)

Maximal audio loudness was really fashionable in the late 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. Due to both advances in recording and transmission technology (CDs, mp3s), and an increasingly competitive audio landscape, especially on the broadcast radio dial, “loud” mixes were thought to accomplish things that more dynamic mixes couldn’t.

Loud mixes compress audio files so that the amplitude of all the frequencies is (more or less) uniform–i.e., uniformly maxed-out. Or, as Sreedhar puts it, compression “reduc[es] the dynamic range of a song so that the entire song could be amplified to a greater extent before it pushed the physical limits of the medium…Peak levels were brought down…[and] the entire waveform was amplified.” This way, a song, album, or playlist sounds like it has a consistent level of maximum sonic intensity throughout. This helps a song cut through an otherwise noisy environment; just as a loud mix on a store’s Muzak can pierce through the din of the crowd, a loud mix on the radio can help one station stand out from its competitors on the dial. For much of its history, the recording industry thought that loudness correlated to sales and popularity.

But many now consider loudness to be passe and even regressive. Framing it as a matter of “tearing down the wall of noise,” Sreedhar’s article treats loudness as the audio equivalent of the Berlin Wall–a remnant of an obsolete way of doing things, something that must be (creatively) destroyed so that something more healthy, dynamic, and resilient can rise from its dust. Similarly, the organizers of Dynamic Range Day argue that the loudness war is a “sonic arms race” that “makes no sense in the 21st century.” (What’s with the Cold War metaphors?) Maximal loudness, in their view, offers no advantages–according to the research they cite, it neither sells better, nor do average listeners think it sounds better. In fact, critics often claim overcompression damages both our hearing (maybe not our ears, but our discernment) and the music (making it less robust and expressive). Loudness is, in other words, unhealthy, both for us and for music.

As Sreedhar puts it,

many listeners have subconsciously felt the effects of overcompressed songs in the form of auditory fatigue, where it actually becomes tiring to continue listening to the music. ‘You want music that breathes. If the music has stopped breathing, and it’s a continuous wall of sound, that will be fatiguing’ says Katz. ‘If you listen to it loudly as well, it will potentially damage your ears before the older music did because the older music had room to breathe.’

At the end of 2014, we are well aware that breathing room is a completely politicized space: Eric Garner didn’t get it, cops do. “Room to breathe” is the benefit the most privileged members of society get by hoarding all the breathing room, that is, by violently restricting the movement, flexibility, dynamism, and health of oppressed groups. For example, in the era of hyperemoloyment, the ability to sit down and take a breather, or even to take the time to get a full night’s sleep, to exercise, to care for your body and not run it into the ground, that is what privilege looks like (privilege bought on the backs of people who will now have even less space to breathe–like, upper middle class white women who can Lean In because they rely on domestic/service labor, often performed by women of color)? “Room to breathe” is one way of expressing the dynamic range that neoliberalism’s ideally healthy, flexible subjects ought to have. So, it makes sense that this ideal gets applied to music aesthetics, too. Just as we ought to be flexible and have range (and restricting dynamism is one way to reproduce relations of domination), music ought to be flexible and have range.

By now it is well-known that women, especially women of color who express feminist and anti-racist views on social media, are commonly represented as lacking actual dynamic range, as having voices that are always too loud. As Goldie Taylor writes, unlike a white woman pictured shouting in a cop’s face as an act of protest, “even if I were inclined, I couldn’t shout at a police officer—not in his face, not from across the street,” because, as a black woman, her shouting would not be read as legitimate protest but as excessively violent and criminal behavior. White supremacy grants white people the ability to be understood as expressing a dynamic range; whites can legitimately shout because we hear them/ourselves as mainly normalized. At the same time, white supremacy paints black people as always-already too loud: as Taylor notes, Eric Gardner wasn’t doing anything illegal when he was killed–other than, well, existing as a black body in public space. White supremacy made his voice seem that because Gardner’s voice emanated from a black body, it was already shouting, already taking up too much “breathing room,” and thus needing to be muted to restore the proper “dynamic range” of a white supremacist public space.

Taylor continues, “merely mention the word privilege, specifically white privilege, anywhere in the public square—including on social media—and one is likely to be mocked.” These voices feel too loud because they are both supposedly, from the perspective of their critics (a) lacking in range–they stay fixated on one supposedly overblown issue (social justice), and (b) overrepresented among the overall mix of voices. Feminists on social media are charged with the same flaws attributed to overcompressed music (here by Sreedhar): “When the dynamic range of a song is heavily reduced for the sake of achieving loudness, the sound becomes analogous to someone constantly shouting everything he or she says. Not only is all impact lost, but the constant level of the sound is fatiguing to the ear.” Compression feels like someone “shouting” at you in all caps; this both diminishes the effectiveness of the speech, and, above all, is unhealthy and “fatiguing” for those subjected to it. Similarly, liberal critics of women of color activists often characterize them as hostile, uncivil, or overly aggressive in tone, which supposedly diminishes the impact of their work and both upsets the proper and healthy process of social change and fatigues the public. Just as overcompressed music is thought to “sacrifice…the natural ebb and flow of music” (Sreedhar,) feminist activists are thought to to “sacrifice…the natural ebb and flow” of social harmony. But that’s the point. They’re sacrificing what white supremacist patriarchy has naturalized as the “ebb and flow” of everyday life.

But this “ebb and flow” is totally artificial. It just feels “natural” because we’ve grown accustomed to it as a kind of second nature. This ebb and flow is also what algorithmic technical and cultural practices is designed to manage and reproduce. That is, they (re)produce whatever “ebb and flow” that optimizes a specific outcome–like user interaction, which optimizes data production, which ultimately optimizes surplus value extraction.

It’s not too hard to see how an unfiltered social media feed–like OG Twitter–might seem like overcompressed music. Linear-temporal, unfiltered Twitter TLs work like compression: each frequency/user’s stream of tweets is brought up to the same “level” of loudness or visibility–at its specific moment of expression, each rises all the way to the top. But just as overcompressed songs kill dynamic range and upset the balance between what “ought” to be quiet and what “ought” to be loud, unfiltered social media feeds supposedly upset the balance between what “ought” to be quiet and what “ought” to be loud, what “ought” to remain buried in the rest of the noise and what “ought” to cut through as clear signal. (Though what this norm “ought” to be is, of course, the underlying power issue here.) So in an era where all individuals can be egregiously loud, we need technologies and practices to moderate the inappropriately, fatiguingly loud voices, and amplify the ones whose voices contribute to the so-called health of that population.

Many digital music players and streaming services have algorithms that cut overly loud tracks down to size. There’s Replay Gain, which is pretty popular, and Apple’s Sound Check; neither makes any individual track more dynamic, but instead they tame overly loud tracks and bring the overall level of the mix/library/stream to an average consistency. In a way, these are sonic analogues to social media’s feed algorithms–they restore the “proper” balance of signal and noise by moderating overly loud voices, voices that generate user/listener responses that don’t contribute to the “health” of whatever institution or outcome they’re supposed to be contributing to. In a way, Replay Gain and Sound Check seem to work a lot like compression–instead of bringing everything in a single track to the same overall level of loudness, they bring everything in a playlist, stream, or library to the same overall level of loudness. Is the difference between dynamic compression for loudness and algorithmic loudness normalization simply the level at which loudness normalization is applied? The individual track versus the overall mix, the individual subject versus the population

Dynamic compression and range isn’t just about music, or hearing, or audio engineering. The aesthetic and technical issues in the compression-vs-range debate are local manifestations of broader values, ideals, and norms. The era of YOLO is over. Dynamic range, or the ability to responsively attune oneself to variable conditions and express a spectrum of intensity is generally thought to be more “healthy” than full-throttle maximalization–this is why there are things like “digital detox” practices and rhetoric about “work/life balance” and so on. At the same time, range is only granted to those with specific kinds of intersecting privilege. Though the discourse of precarity might encourage us to understand it as an experience of deficit, perhaps it is better understood, at least for now, as an experience of maximal loudness, of always being all the way on, of never getting a rest, never having the luxury of expressing or experiencing a range of intensities.

Hello, Cyborgology…it’s been a while. I’ve missed you, but I haven’t quite known what to say. Which is weird, right? Strangely enough, I’ve got half a dozen half-finished posts on my computer—twenty-thousand someodd words of awkward silence waiting to be wrapped up and brought into the world.

Writer’s block happens to the best of us, or so I’m told. What’s been strange for me is looking back and realizing that the last thing I posted was my piece from the beginning of #ir14, the 14th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. I say “strange” because I had an amazing experience at #ir14, and left it feeling so excited about my field and my work and what I imagine to be possible. And yet, in the two months since, something’s been off. I’ve managed to submit to a couple of important abstracts, and I continued sitting in on a really cool seminar, and I’ve plunged into the work of helping to organize this year’s Theorizing the Web (a conference about which I’m passionate, to say the least). But my words went somewhere, have been gone.

I realized recently, however, that it’s not about some kind of post-#ir14 crash. It’s actually about what happened after.

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