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It has been really thrilling to hear so much positive feedback about my essay about authoritarianism in engineering. In that essay, which you can read over at The Baffler, I argue that engineering education and authoritarian tendencies trend very closely and that we see this trend play out in their interpretations of dystopian science fiction. Instead of heeding very clear warnings about the avarice of good intentions gone awry, companies like Axon (né TASER) use movies and books like Minority Report as product roadmaps. I conclude by saying:

In times like these it is important to remember that border walls, nuclear missiles, and surveillance systems do not work, and would not even exist, without the cooperation of engineers. We must begin teaching young engineers that their field is defined by care and humble assistance, not blind obedience to authority.

I’ve got some pushback, both gentle and otherwise about two specific points in my essay which I’d like to discuss here. I’m going to paraphrase and synthesize several people’s arguments but if anyone wants to jump into the comments with something specific they’re more than welcome to do so.

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I dream of a Digital India where access to information knows no barriers – Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India

The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust. – From the suicide note of Rohith Vemula 1989 – 2016.

A speculative dystopia in which a person’s name, biometrics or social media profile determine their lot is not so speculative after all. China’s social credit scoring system assesses creditworthiness on the basis of social graphs. Cash disbursements to Syrian refugees are made through the verification of iris scans to eliminate identity fraud. A recent data audit of the World Food Program has revealed significant lapses in how personal data is being managed; this becomes concerning in Myanmar (one of the places where the WFP works) where religious identity is at the heart of the ongoing genocide.

In this essay I write about how two technology applications in India – ‘fintech’ and Aadhaar – are being implemented to verify and ‘fix’ identity against the backdrop of contestations of identity, and religious fascism and caste-based violence in the country. I don’t intend to compare the two technologies directly; however, they exist within closely connected technical infrastructure ecosystems. I’m interested in how both socio-technical systems operate with respect to identity.

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The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani asked a really good question earlier today: Why Don’t the 20 Cities on Amazon’s HQ2 Shortlist Collectively Bargain Instead of Collectively Beg? Amazon is looking for a place to put its second headquarters and cities have fallen over each other to provide some startlingly desperate concessions to lure the tech giant. Some of the concessions, like Chicago’s offer to essentially engage in wage theft by taking all the income tax collected from employees and hand it back to Amazon, make it unclear what these cities actually gain by hosting the company. The reason that city mayors will never collectively bargain on behalf of their citizens is two fold: 1) America lacks an inter-city governance mechanism that prevents cities from being blackballed by corporate capital and 2) most big city mayors are corrupt as hell and don’t care about you.

In 1987 urban sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch put forward the “Growth Machine” theory to explain why cities do not collectively bargain and instead compete with one-another in a race-to-the-bottom to see which city can concede the most taxes for the least gain. The theory is rather straightforward: cities may have one or two inherent competitive advantages that no other city has, but beyond that you can only offer tax breaks. Maybe you’ve got a deep water port that big container ships can use, or you’re situated at the only pass in a mountain range. Other than that, location is completely fungible. All that’s left is tax policy and land grants. more...

Let me begin with a prescriptive statement: major social media companies ought to consult with trained social researchers to design interfaces, implement policies, and understand the implications of their products. I embark unhesitatingly into prescription because major social media companies have extended beyond apps and platforms, taking on the status of infrastructures and institutions. Pervasive in personal and public life, social media are not just things people use, places they go to, or activities they do. Social media shape the flows of social life, structure civic engagement, and integrate with affect, identity and selfhood.

Public understanding of social media as infrastructural likely underpins mass concern about what social media are doing to society, and what individuals in society are doing with social media. Out of this concern has emerged a vibrant field of commentary on the relationship between social media use and psychological well-being. Spanning academic literature, op-ed pages and dinner table conversation the question has seemingly remained on the collective mind: does social media make people feel bad? Last week, Facebook addressed the issue directly. more...

Inverse has a short thing about the precipitous decline of reported close encounters with extra-terrestrials following the widespread adoption of smartphones. Author Ryan Britt asks, “How come there have been fewer reports of flying saucers and alien abductions in the age of the camera phone?” The answer is, essentially, UFOs and abduction stories don’t work at the high resolutions of our devices. Roswell and abductions are the products of eye witness accounts and fuzzy VHS video, not 4k videos captured on iPhones. The mundane enchantment of suburbia, as I’ve called it before, gets deleted as noise in an attempt to capture life in the photo-realistic. 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...

In turbulent times there is something emotionally powerful about reliability in and of itself. Facebook, for all its faults, is reliable. I can bet on Facebook being up and available more often than the Internet connection I rely on to access it. Hell, it works more reliably than my toilet. Changes to the site trigger cascades of stories and opinions about user experience which, really, goes to show how infrequently Facebook makes major alterations to core functions. You don’t have to like Facebook as a company or as a product to acknowledge that it is stable and works as intended more often that most other things. This transcendent reliability—a steadfast infrastructure of emotive communication and identity construction—has become Facebook’s core service. You may not like what you see in your timeline, but the timeline will be there.

Watching an organization embed itself into the lives of nearly a third of the global population is a strange thing. To be a common tread across all of those lives is to be as unthreatening or uncontroversial as possible. Conversely, it was only a matter of time before Facebook played host to something deeply disturbing like a murder, or even world-changing like a reactionary election. This tension between striving for unassuming background service and inevitable host to calamity goes a long way towards explaining why Mark Zuckerberg is traveling across the U.S and writing 6,000-word manifestos about community, despite the fact that most Facebook users aren’t Americans and Facebook is not a community. Shoring up good will in the most powerful nation on the planet is not only good business, it is tapping into a tradition of American progressivism that is so embedded in our daily lives we can’t recognize it when we see it enacted. It is the water we swim in and Mark Zuckerberg wants to tint it Facebook blue. more...

“We need to tell more diverse and realistic stories about AI,” Sara Watson writes, “if we want to understand how these technologies fit into our society today, and in the future.”

Watson’s point that popular narratives inform our understandings of and responses to AI feels timely and timeless. As the same handful of AI narratives circulate, repeating themselves like a befuddled Siri, their utopian and dystopian plots prejudice seemingly every discussion about AI. And like the Terminator itself, these paranoid, fatalistic stories now feel inevitable and unstoppable. As Watson warns, “If we continue to rely on these sci-fi extremes, we miss the realities of the current state of AI, and distract our attention from real and present concerns.” more...

Milo Yiannopoulos tried to speak at the UC–Berkeley campus a few weeks ago and the residents and students stopped him. The Berkeley News reported that, “no major injuries and about a half dozen minor injuries” occurred, a few fires were set, and fireworks were aimed at police. That’s less property damage and violence than a particularly popular World Series game. Still though, many people are not convinced that what happened was productive. In fact, many are questioning whether this is another kind of headfake that will ultimately come back to haunt us. Protest that does anything more than gather people together to chant and hold signs, could add fuel to the growing nazi fire. more...