commentary

I’m working my way through a response to Sarah’s incisive and provocative posts on Drone Sexuality. But, I realized that I need to get some preliminary arguments on the table before I get into the thick of my response. In particular, I want to focus on what Sarah identifies as the ambivalence at the center of drone/cyborg eroticism; this ambivalence is, as I have argued in this article, deeply racialized. In what follows I’ll first explain my reading of Sarah’s point and then follow that up with the relevant excerpt from the article.

In her second post in the Drone Sexuality series, Sarah argues:

I think something particular is going on when cyborgs are sexualized. Transgression is erotic in itself, often powerfully so, and we tend to construct the blurring of the line between human and non-human as strongly taboo. Like all sexual taboos, we feel ambivalent toward it, experiencing fear and revulsion at the same time as we’re fascinated and deeply attracted by the idea…So cyborgian transgressiveness is exactly why we find it so sexy. A sexualized cyborg is at once submissive and potentially dominant, alluring and threatening, subservient and powerful. (emphasis mine)

Sarah’s claim that cyborgs are sexualized, and that this sexualization manifests as an ambivalence, as a tension between submission and dominance, allure and threat, is, I think, absolutely correct. I’ll give some evidence to support her claim, and my assessment of her claim, in the long passage that follows below. I want to push Sarah’s claim further, and consider how this ambivalence is racialized in terms of a black/white binary. I should clarify that I’m talking about race primarily as a system of social organization and less as a matter of personal identity. “White” and “black” express an individual’s, group’s, or phenomenon’s position in white supremacist society: those whom white supremacy benefits are “white,” those whom it oppresses are “black.” The tl;dr of this passage is that we whiten the beneficial, alluring, submissive and subservient aspects of cyborg sexuality, and we blacken the dominant, threatening, and powerful aspects of cyborg sexuality. In other words, we parse our ambivalence about cyborg sexuality along a racialized virgin-whore dichotomy.

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For those of us eagerly awaiting the Winter Olympics this February, we got an Olympics of a different kind to tide us over. Last weekend, the “Robot Olympics” took place at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in south Florida. Schaft Inc., a Google-owned Japanese company, took first place at The Games, officially called the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). The events in which competitors compete, and the criteria by which they are evaluated, are nicely illustrative of Earnst Schraube’s technology as materialized action approach, and present an opportunity to push the theory further. more...

Over on Vice Motherboard, Michael Byrne recently wrote about his desire for “an Instagram of sound.” He says

What I want is a place to hear things that people record in the spaces around them. This seems reasonable to me: An app with just one button to record and another to share. I’d have fewer “friends” than on Instagram, in the realm of sound, but there would surely be some. And some who use the app would be pushed to find better and more interesting sounds, and to appreciate those sounds in new and different ways.

There are already such apps–Audioboo is the one I use (there are plenty of others, as summarized here). Audioboo is a social network for sound-sharing; people follow me on Audioboo, but I’ve also linked my account to Twitter so I can also tweet sound clips and share with my twitter followers, just like I would with Instagram (if, that is, I used Instagram with any regularity). I wish it was as popular as Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine…but it’s not.

I don’t think this relative lack of popularity is primarily due to the fact that, as Byrne argues, we’re trained to use vision as our dominant sense. Certainly that’s part of it, but that’s not the only (and perhaps not even the primary) reason. I think sound recording is a different medium than both photography and even Vine’s short-attention-span videography, and that maybe this medium isn’t as well-suited as photography and videography are to the kinds of tasks we generally want to accomplish on social media. So, the controlling factor here is social media, not auditory or visual content–they’re just means to the end of social mediation.

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Part 1 of this series can be found here.

A quick recap: in these posts I’m attempting to establish some kind of loose theoretical framework for approaching the sexual aspects of “drones” as a concept rather than a specific technology, an enmeshing of surveillance, power, intimacy, and blurred boundaries. It’s that last that I want to close with, because when you combine technology and sex, something interesting always happens. And it’s no accident that the combination of technology and sexuality isn’t a rarity in contemporary society, or even in history.

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Over on Sounding Out, Primus Luta has finished the third installment (which I’ll refer to as LEP) in a superb series of posts on live electronic music performance. The aim of the series is to develop a “usable aesthetic language” to describe live electronic performance. In this post I want to summarize some of Luta’s argument–which is fascinating–and then push his project past his stated philosophical limitations. Even though Luta’s aesthetic language is still strongly indebted to modernist values and ideas (like “agency” and “virtuosity”), can we push his analysis beyond the frame of modernist aesthetics? Can live electronic music performance help us think about what an object-oriented aesthetics or a compositionist aesthetics might entail? From these perspectives, which aren’t very interested in subject-centered values like agency and virtuosity, what values and ideals would we use to evaluate electronic music?

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One of the things about writing with as little possible between your head and your fingers is that things come out that you don’t consciously intend and that you don’t understand until much later. I believe it’s one of the parts of the process that causes some writers to say those (in my opinion kind of ridiculous) things about how they don’t so much create their writing as discover it. But everything we write means something, and it does come from some part of us that puts it all together and spits it out.

An email exchange recently brought up a concept I used in one of my short stories about drones, the concept of being dronesexual.

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So, Elsevier pulled kind of a jerk move. And probably a move that’s not great for PR.

As it turns out, publishing giant Elsevier is taking down copyrighted papers from Academia.edu. Here’s a bit of background. For-profit publishing companies (like Elsevier, Sage, Taylor & Francis etc.) make authors sign a copyright agreement when they publish in the journals run by these companies. This gives distribution rights to the publisher, and takes them away from the author. However, many authors (like myself) sign said agreement, and then immediately post content on Academia.edu, ResearchGate, or other academic-based social networking sites.

Technically, posting our work on these sites is illegal. However, the publishers’ policies, which create false scarcity, exploit intellectual labor, and restrict knowledge sharing, are in a word, preposterous. Here’s why: more...

One of the most interesting things to watch in the usage trajectory of any form of technology are the ways in which it’s used that no one really anticipated, but that seem perfectly sensible and obvious after the fact. One of those that I actually found out about only this week – really, I should have known about it before – is Ingress, a game played on mobile phones that sorta kinda comes from Google, and whose players are intense enough about it that one of them flew to a remote location in Alaska in arguably dangerous conditions in order to complete a game task.

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A longer, more academic version of this post appears at Its Her Factory.

This post follows up on my earlier post about a culture of moderation. Here I want to consider one aspect of this contemporary focus on moderation: the idea of “balance.” We talk about work/life balance, the “balance” between individual freedom and national security, and, as Jenny notes, the “balance” between tech use and abstention.

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Quartz, a business and marketing website, recently released data on the Facebook dating app Are You Interested (AYI), which connects singles within the confines of their direct and indirect Facebook networks. Quartz’ data are based on a series of yes or no questions about who users are interested in, as well as response rates between users, once notified of a potential suitor. The data show that white men and Asian women receive the most interest, whereas black men and women receive the least amount of interest (see headline photo for the complex picture of racial preference by gender). The writers at Quartz summarize the findings as follows: more...