Outrage over the Bob Marley Snapchat filter was swift following its brief appearance on the mobile application’s platform on April 20 (The 420 pot smoking holiday). The idea of mimicking Bob Marley in appreciation of a day dedicated to consuming marijuana by smoking it or consuming it in the form of a gummy bear or brownie, enabled users to don the hat, dreads, and…blackface!? News outlets that day covered the issue pretty quickly. CNN.money and The Verge noted the negative reactions voiced on social media in regard to the filter. Tech publisher Wired released a brief article condemning it, calling it racially tone-deaf.

The racial implications of the Bob Marley filter are multifaceted, yet I would like to focus on the larger cultural logic occurring both above and behind the scenes at an organization like Snapchat. The creation of a filter that tapped into blackface iconography demonstrates the complexity of our relationship to various forms of technology – as well as how we choose to represent ourselves through those technologies. French sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote in The Technological Society of ‘technique’ as an encompassing train of thought or practice based on rationality that achieves its desired end. Ellul spoke of technique in relation to advances in technology and human affairs in the aftermath of World War II, yet his emphasis was not on the technology itself, but rather the social processes that informed the technology. This means that in relation to a mobile application like Snapchat we bring our social baggage with us when we use it, and so do developers when they decide to design a new filter. Jessie Daniels addresses racial technique in her current projects regarding colorblind racism and the internet – in which the default for tech insiders is a desire to not see race. This theoretically rich work pulls us out of the notion that technology is neutral within a society that has embedded racial meanings flowing through various actors and institutions, and where those who develop the technology we use on a daily basis are unprepared to acknowledge the racial disparities which persist, and the racial prejudice that can—and does—permeate their designs. more...

While those of us in the states were mired in election drama, across the Atlantic Brits came together to celebrate a sacred and time-honored holiday: #EdBallsDay. more...

Is that? Oh my god. The Statue of Liberty, I said in my head, the words hanging in the whirring jet cabin on its descent to LaGuardia. The figure was so small, its features imperceptible and shrouded in shadow – a dark monolith amidst the gently churning Atlantic. The sudden apprehension of our altitude came with a pang of vertigo.

The plane yawed and a second shape swam into my oval window. Is that…  the Statue of Liberty? The original figure and its twin were, in fact, a pair of buoys in the bay. I leaned back in my seat and snickered to myself.

It goes without saying that in this instance my sense of scale, perspective and distance, let alone rudimentary geography, were fundamentally (if comically) off.

Finding one’s way in an unfamiliar city for the first time always involves an initial phase of bewilderment: the more familiar one is with their home terrain, the more alien the new place appears. Indeed, across my handful of excursions in and around Queens while attending #TtW16, this distortion pervaded my perception of space. more...

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A photo posted by d a banks (@d_a_banks) on May 6, 2013 at 8:20am PDT

Today at The Awl there’s a nice long read about the city I live in Troy, NY. I’ve written about Troy before and it certainly never runs out of interesting stories. Luke Stoddard Nathan, the author of the piece, and I spoke for a few hours about his essay a month or so ago and after reading the finished piece (you should too!) I remembered some of the ground we covered over beers. Luke’s essay follows the peculiar story of Washington Park –one of only three private parks in New York State— and the decades-long argument over who owns the park and who should be allowed to use it. When we spoke I mentioned that problems like Washington Park are ultimately the result of a lack of imagination when it comes to governance. We have two bad options: perpetually under-funded public systems and restrictive private ones. This is also a technological problem because not only are bureaucracies a kind of technology, but so are parks insomuch as they are built things that result from applied knowledge. How do you solve a problem like Washington Park?

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Theorizing the Web 2016. Photo Credit: Aaron Thompson

Live tweeting is an art. Anyone can do it, but doing it well requires a serious skillset. Keeping up with the ongoing conversation, making valuable contributions, engaging with other people, keeping all your hashtags and usernames organized, all while somehow paying attention to the meatspace event that prompted the live tweeting in the first place… it’s a lot. On the heels of two conferences (Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Theorizing the Web) and a long (oh so long) presidential debate season, I’ve been thinking a lot about live tweeting as a particular form of rhetorical address. Here, I offer a rhetorical model for understanding live tweeting as a social phenomenon. more...

“Basic,” “painful,” “embarrassing,” and comparable to necrophilia: a small sampling from the reviews of Fuller House over the last couple of months. The Netflix original, a remake of the classic 1980s/90s sitcom Full House, may become a lasting icon of terrible, terrible, really quite bad moments in television history. The kindest sentiment I came across was expressed by Maureen Ryan in Variety, who generously conceded that “[t]hose who enjoyed the original…and don’t mind its patented blend of cloying sentiment, cutesy mugging and predictable humor might find enjoyment in this unspectacular retread.”

Naturally, I binge watched. Of course, it was as awful as expected. Maybe worse. The remake is identical to the original in both form and feel. The characters are unidimensional, the story is episodic and shallow, the catch-phrases are somehow even less catchy, and oh the racism. Kimmy Gibbler’s ex-husband is a cringe-worthy Latino caricature whose lustful propensities can hardly be contained and the 11^th episode centers around an Indian themed party which acts as the foil for copious jokes, includes an almost entirely white cast dressed in saris and jamas, and culminates with the party attendees spontaneously breaking into a choreographed dance for which mysteriously, they each know all of the moves. That last part may or may not be racist, but as a storytelling decision, asks the audience to suspend an unfair amount of belief.

Fuller House could not have been worse if it tried. Which is why I reinterpreted the season as though it did try. And then, Fuller House was very good. more...

I only heard the term “blockchain technology” for the first time this past autumn, but in the last few months, I’ve became pretty absorbed in the blockchain world. Initially I was intimidated by its descriptions, which struck me as needlessly abstruse — though, in a perfect chicken-and-egg scenario, I couldn’t be sure, since the descriptions didn’t offer an easy understanding of how it worked. What compelled me to press on in my blockchain research was the terminology surround it. I’m a long-standing advocate for open source, and blockchain’s default descriptors are “distributed” (as in “distributed ledger”) “decentralized” (as in “decentralized platform,” a tagline for at least one major blockchain development platform [1: https://www.ethereum.org/])  and “peer-to-peer” ( the crux of all things Bitcoin and blockchain). These words all spoke to my f/oss-loving heart, leading me to click on article after jargon-heavy article in an effort to wrap my head around the ‘chain. As I learned more about it, I came to understand why it’s begun to garner huge amounts of attention. I don’t like to get too starry-eyed about a new technology, but I too became a blockchain believer. Crypto currencies like Bitcoin and the many others springing up are entirely digital and, as with any virtual system, are susceptible to hackers, malware and operational glitches. The bitcoin billionaire is an automatic cryptocurrency trading platform. Bitcoin Loophole platform is a powerful, efficient, reliable software that offers manual and automated cryptocurrency trading through a user-friendly interface. You can easily earn money as the award-winning bitcoin loophole app delivers unmatched results. It is legitimate, accredited, safe and secure. Join the exclusive group of members who recognized the potential in Bitcoin Trading and seized the opportunity to turn their lives around, by investing a minimum of time, effort and funds. The DC Forecasts – Cryptocurrency News Team can help you understand what challenges and opportunities are in the offing for the crypto world. The team consists of highly skilled writers and editors who are experts in the crypto sphere.

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Theorizing the Web is right around the corner! This post is a short overview of my paper, “Textual Community: Finding Belonging in the Manosphere.” It’s part of the “Politics of Platforms” panel, C5 on Saturday, April 16^th from 1:30-2:45 PM. more...

Hacking is the new social justice activism, and the Panama Papers are the result of an epic hack. Consisting of 11.5million files and 2.6TB of data, the body of content given to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous[1] source and then analyzed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), is uniquely behemoth. It puts Wikileaks 1.7GB to shame.

The documents were obtained from Mossack Fonseca. The company is among the largest offshore banking firms, and their emails and other electronic documents tell a compelling (if not entirely surprising) story about untraceable monetary exchanges and the ways that state leaders manage to grow their wealth while maintaining a façade of economic neutrality. By forming shell companies, people can move money without attaching that money to themselves. This is not a sufficient condition for illegal activities, but certainly fosters illicit ones. more...

The Victorians were into some weird stuff but one thing that could stand to make a comeback is a subgenre of speculative fiction called “utopian romance.” These books were somewhat light on plot and spent most of their pages describing utopian futures where everything you could ever want or need was directly at your finger tips. I suppose that is as good a way as any to work through the existential angst that persists in the face of incredible violence mixed with the lavishness of global empire. One person that was not too keen on these novels was a legal stenographer by the name of Ebenezer Howard. He was reading one such utopian romance called Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy which described something akin to Amazon: an enormous network of hyper-efficient delivery systems that could get you just about anything you want nearly as soon as you wanted it. more...