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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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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...

The year is 1959 and a very powerful modern art aficionado is sharing a limousine with Princess  Beatrix of the Netherlands. The man is supposed to be showing off the splendor of the capital of what was once —so optimistically— called New Amsterdam. His orchestrated car trip is not going quite as he had hoped and instead of zipping past “The Gut” and dwelling on the stately early 19th century mansions on Central and Clinton Avenues, Beatrix is devastated by the utter poverty that has come to define the very center of this capitol city now called Albany, New York. The art aficionado, unfortunately for him, cannot blame some far away disconnected bureaucrat or corrupt politician for what they are seeing because he is the governor of this powerful Empire State and he has done little to elevate the suffering of his subjects. He resolves, after that fateful car trip, to devote the same kind of passion he has for modern art to this seat of government. Governor Rockefeller will make this city into a piece of art worthy of his own collection. 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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Today is Cyborgology’s third birthday (see the first post)! Each year we do a little reflecting. more...

It’s almost a week now since I attended the 2013 Quantified Self Global Conference in San Francisco, and I’m still not sure where to begin with my summary of the event itself. Instead of jumping in with an overview, this time I’ll cover my own session—in which what started out as asking how researchers studying Quantified Self could better connect with each other became an (at times) intense debate about what Quantified Self is, what Quantified Self should be, and what role (if any) academic or institutional research and researchers should have within the Quantified Self community.

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On Cyborgology we’ve talked a lot about digital social media’s use for and implication in various forms of sexual assault; there’s David’s post the Steubenville rape case, Whitney’s post on sexts and online bullying, and PJ’s post on rape culture and photography at Burning Man. In a press release about a bill before New York state legislature, law professor Mary Anne Franks uses the term “virtual sexual assault” to describe the posting of a sexually explicit image of someone without the subject’s consent. Now, I know this may shock some of you, but I’m not going to problematize the “virtual” part of that phrase–I’m taking that problematization as a given (just go read the above-linked posts). Instead, I want to problematize the concept of consent. I think it might need an upgrade.

Following feminist political theorists’ and philosophers’ critiques of the language of “consent,” I want to raise the question: Is “consent” really the most accurate, most productive lens through which to understand and address “virtual sexual assault”? Using some feminist political theory, I want to suggest that “consent” is ultimately a counterproductive tool in combatting sexual assault perpetrated on/via digital media (I know that’s a clunkier phrase, but it’s more accurate than “virtual”). Because the concept of consent is tied to a specific notion of property–private property–it isn’t easily translatable to digital ‘property’ (I talked about this a little last week). So, consent might not be able to address the so-called “virtual” or digitally-mediated aspects of this type of sexual assault. But, it’s also not particularly helpful in addressing regular-old meatspace sexual assault. As Carole Pateman famously argues, “consent” was never designed for women to exercise. It may well be one of those “master’s tools” that will always, no matter who uses it and with what intention, prop up the master’s house.

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Last week Twitter introduced an alert system that they described as “ a new feature that brings us one step closer to helping users get important and accurate information during emergencies, natural disasters or when other communications services aren’t accessible.” The alerts show up on users phones as special push notifications and SMS notifications and are marked with an orange bell in your feed. At first blush it seems like a great idea but, given that I’m writing this during yet another government “shutdown”, are governments and NGOs really the only organizations that should get access to this useful service? What can activists do to push back? more...

“The fact that the Supreme Court itself has links to its own Web site that no longer function shows the depth of the link rot problem”

“In some circles, being inaccessible is a status symbol”

“the intention behind the looking matters the most”

“clothing that does not move, rigid materials that force a body into an idealized appearance”

“romance was alive and well in the Instagram iteration of their marriage”

““That’s boring,” thought BuzzFeed, deciding to place photographs of five nipples above that explanation”

“Guys who try to hit on you by asking if you want to try on their Google Glass”

“Jesse Pinkman’s Roomba Starting bid: $200“ more...