With the New York State Assembly’s recent budget, and after a long fight among labor organizers, lawyers, business owners, and legislators, ridesharing has come to town here in upstate New York. Ride-sharing advocates are celebrating the victory, claiming that it will spur economic development and reduce drunk driving. I spoke with local Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organizer Sean Collins about the new legislation and what effects it might have on the region, as well as the rhetoric regarding the benefits of services such as Uber and Lyft and the increasing replacement of public transportation improvement with private entities. more...
In this post, I’d like to make an argument about a way to understand how the Democratic party seems to be making messaging and policy decisions. An argument like this can’t be made in a vacuum—or in 1,500 words. Nor can any one or even ten reasons be decided upon for why the leaders of a party do what they do. But I recognize a pattern in how the DNC and leadership has acted over the past decade and I want to work that through here. So please forgive any indication that I am not a policy wonk or political analyst—I do not claim to be, nor do I wish to be either. more...
Exxxotica, a large adult-themed expo that started in 2006, was held in Chicago last weekend. While the event is broad and claims to be a “love and sex” catch-all event (including seminars and presentations related to BDSM, swing lifestyle, sexual health, toys, etc.), it is largely focused on the adult industry. Indeed, since its inception Exxxotica has hosted large name porn stars like Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy, and it promises to connect fans with their favorite stars.
In its 11th year, changes in the expo have reflected changes in the industry itself. Most notably, there has been a huge shift away from mainstream studio porn production to that of independent content creation. J. Handy, the director of Exxxotica, recalled that the first year that MyFreeCams was present was in 2012 with a 10×30’ booth and 8-10 cam girls.in contrast, the same site exhibited with a 50×60’ booth and over 200 cam models in Chicago last weekend. In addition to MyFreeCams, other cam sites such as Chaturbate, Cam4, and LiveJasmine were present. more...
Non-consensual pornography—frequently called “revenge porn”—describes nude or sexually suggestive photos shared in a manner or context that the subject did not consent to, often with the intent to humiliate, intimidate, or extort the victim. In many cases, these pics are distributed by someone who received (or was allowed to take) them on the assumption that they would remain private.
While non-consensual pornography is not unique to social media, these platforms have made it easier to distribute images anonymously/pseudonymously to a wide audience. Nude or sexual pics are non-consensually distributed through dedicated websites; subforms on Reddit, 4chan, and their many offshoots; “dump accounts” on Twitter or Tumblr; torrent sites (particularly for celeb photos); and the Dark Web (for underage or otherwise illegal content). more...
METATOPIA 4.0 – Algoricene (2017) by Jaime Del Val
The 23rd International Symposium on Electronic Art was held in collaboration with the 16th Festival Internacional De La Imagen in Manizales, Colombia in mid-June 2017. The opening ceremony for the conference kicked off with a performance by the artist Jaime Del Val, entitled METATOPIA 4.0 – Algoricene (2017), described by the artist as “a nomadic, interactive and performative environment for outdoors and indoors spaces.” The artist statement goes on (and on) to explain that the piece “merges dynamic physical and digital architectures” in an effort to “def[y] prediction and control in the Big Data Era.” In actuality, Del Val stripped down to his naked body, put himself in a clear mesh tent, projected abstract shapes onto the tent, and danced to what might best be called abstract electronica (think dubstep’s “wubwubwub” without the pop).
What piece of what Del Val presented qualifies as “electronic art”? Was it the music? The projector? The use of the term “Big Data Era”, capitalized (in lieu, perhaps, of scare-quotes) in his entirely glib artist statement? I was similarly confused by Alejandro Brianza’s artist talk, “Underground Soundscapes”, in which he showed a few photos of subway systems around the world, accompanied by sound recordings from each visit. About Brianza’s work and Del Val’s, I wondered: why is this electronic art? In fact, throughout the duration of my visit to the ISEA conference and festival, I found myself asking “why” quite often.
A mere 2 minutes and 19 seconds in length, the video Are Black British Youth Obsessed with Light Skin/Curly Hair. Or is it just Preference?” is a compilation of snippets from “person on the street” interviews, conducted in the environs of two shopping centers and a commuter railway station in east London (more on this later).
The interviewer is a roving Internet reporter going by the handle of VanBanter, whose YouTube channel boasts over 85,000 subscribers. VanBanter is a tall, svelte, black Briton of around 16, himself light skinned, whose voluminous hair in the clips is either styled in cornrows, or pulled back in a low Afro puff, the black version of the “man bun.”
The interviewees are black boys, ostensibly between the ages of 12 and 17, of a wide spectrum of skin colors and hair textures. The single question VanBanter asks all of them is, “What kind of girls are you into?” On occasion, he phrases it as, “What type of girls do you slide into?” Two token girls are asked the same question about boys. All interviewed say they like “light skins.” Some add “curly hair,” clearly meant as a qualifier in opposition to “kinky,” not straight, hair texture. Hence, palpably, one can infer that light-skins are more favoured than any other colors at the place. Most of the interviewees are filmed standing in pairs or small groups of friends who support their responses with interjections, gestures, or general glee.
The video was first uploaded on June 1st to the Facebook page of Black British Banter. Over that weekend, it received a million views, over 6k likes (2.6k neutral thumbs-up expressing interest, 1.2k crying emojis, 1.1k angry ones, 546 laughing ones, 467 wows, and 62 loves), 5k comments, and 8,000 shares.
I myself could not stop viewing it. The comments far outstretch the bounds of personal preference, to which we all have an undisputable right. Instead, they defend a centuries-old global regime of negating not only the beauty, but very humanity, of people with dark skin, especially women. “No black t’ings, like my shoes n’ shit!” says one very more...
Editor’s Note: We are re-posting this piece that originally ran in June 2016. With the newest season of OITNB launching this Friday, the post’s original author (Apryl Williams) reports that she has found no evidence of increased racial diversity in the OITNB writer’s room. In light of this, the message of her essay bears repeating.
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Orange is the New Black’s newest season demands to be binge watched with its notorious twists at every episode style. When it came out on June 17th, I began my annual binge session and had completed it by Saturday, June 18th.
If you haven’t heard, the series delivered “The mother of all finales” at the end of this season. As I mourned the death of a major black character, I found myself simultaneously mourning the real deaths of Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and the list unfortunately goes on. The stylized portrayal of a death in prison custody at the hands – or knee rather – of a white correctional officer was unmistakably close to Garner’s “I can’t breath.” Though those words were never uttered, anyone who has kept up with news in the last year would find haunting familiarity in the fictional inmate’s all-too-real gasps for air.
With her small frame and spine gradually being crushed by the full weight of the white correctional officer as she tried to breathe but failed, the imagery was almost too painful to watch. But I had come this far, I had to continue. At the end of the season, instead of falling into my usual “showhole” syndrome, I was angry and emotionally distraught. This had a visceral, personal effect and nobody warned me it was coming. As the other inmates grieved the death of their friend and urged those in charge to move her body, I wondered who was responsible for writing these scenes and this episode. Surely, a person of color would have cautioned against such tactics without ample viewer preparation. It appears as though the perspective of black viewers was not taken into consideration; a likely result of the limited representation we have in media production. Then I realized that to a white audience, a warning would not have the same meaning or importance. more...
Technological advancements have had a profound influence on social science research. The rise of the internet, mobile hardware and app economies generate a breadth, depth and type of data previously unimaginable, while computational capabilities allow granular analyses that reveal patterns across massive data sets. From these new types of data and forms of analysis, has emerged a crisis and renaissance of methodological thought.
Early excitement around big data celebrated a world that would be entirely changed and entirely knowable. Big data would “revolutionize” the way we “live, work, and think” claimed Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cuckier in their 2013 monograph, which so aptly captured the cultural zeitgeist energized around this new way of knowing. At the same time, social scientists and humanities scholars expressed concern that big data would displace their rich array of methodological traditions, undermining diverse scholarly practices and forms of knowledge production. However, with the hype around big data beginning to settle, polemic visions of omnipotence on the one hand, and bleak austerity on the other, seem unlikely to come into fruition.
While big data itself enables researchers to ask new kinds of questions, I argue that big data’s most significant effect has been to bring social thinkers back to the methodological (and philosophical) drawing board. For decades, more...
In April this year, thanks to Stephanie Dinkins and Francis Tseng, artists-in-residence at New Inc., I experimented with a workshop called ‘Imagining Ethics’. The workshop invites participants to imagine and work through everyday scenarios in a near future with autonomous vehicles and driving. These scenarios are usually related to moral conflicts, or interpersonal, social, and cultural challenges. This post is about situating this experiment within the methods and approaches of design fiction, a technique to speculate about near futures.
Julian Bleecker writes about design fiction as “totems” through which projections into the future may be assembled:
“Design fictions are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop, part functional software. …are component parts for different kinds of near future worlds. They are like artifacts brought back from those worlds in order to be examined, studied over. They are puzzles of a sort….They are complete specimens, but foreign in the sense that they represent a corner of some speculative world where things are different from how we might imagine the “future” to be, or how we imagine some other corner of the future to be. These worlds are “worlds” not because they contain everything, but because they contain enough to encourage our imaginations, which, as it turns out, are much better at pulling out the questions, activities, logics, culture, interactions and practices of the imaginary worlds in which such a designed object might exist.” more...
“It’s not about the money, it is about the principle”, I’ve heard this phrase so many times from friends, colleagues and internet influencers who refuse to pay an extra charge for a service or product not deemed worthwhile. In an episode titled ‘No Change’, a famous influencer was complaining about what he had felt was a growing phenomenon—that of waiters not giving back change when he pays the bill. He was expressing annoyance at ‘being duped’ by a waiter and went on to share that it should be his decision to leave a tip. In the wake of the ubiquity of imposed minimum charges at cafés in Egypt, people started resorting to storytelling on social media platforms to expose certain companies and ameliorate the standards of services. Instead of waiting on hold to make a complaint, a woman had provided a detailed account on Facebook of her conversation with a waiter at a café, where she was explaining to him that minimum charge is an illegal practice and he can’t really force her to pay it. She shared what she felt was a success story on a group titled ‘Don’t shop here-a list of untrustworthy shops in Egypt’, a public Facebook group where middle-class Egyptians would share stories about bad consumer experiences. The group now serves as an eclectic archive for a wide range of stories recounting bad experiences (from raw chicken at a famous restaurant to slow internet to undelivered customer service promises). more...