The Facebook newsfeed is the subject of a lot of criticism, and rightly so. Not only does it impose an echo chamber on your digitally-mediated existence, the company constantly tries to convince users that it is user behavior –not their secret algorithm—that creates our personalized spin zones. But then there are moments when, for one reason or another, someone comes across your newsfeed that says something super racist or misogynistic and you have to decide to respond or not. If you do, and maybe get into a little back-and-forth, Facebook does a weird thing: that person starts showing up in your newsfeed a lot more.

This happened to me recently and it has me thinking about the role of the Facebook newsfeed in inter-personal instantiations of systematic oppression. Facebook’s newsfeed, specially formulated to increase engagement by presenting the user with content that they have engaged with in the past, is at once encouraging of white allyship against oppression and inflicting a kind of violence on women and people of color. The same algorithmic action can produce both consequences depending on the user. more...

The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI15) met last week in Buenos Aires. AI has long captured the public imagination, and researchers are making fast advances. Conferences like IJCAI15 have high stakes, as “smart” machines become increasingly integrated into personal and public life. Because of these high stakes, it is important that we remain precise in our discourse and thought surrounding these technologies. In an effort towards precision, I offer simple, corrective point: intelligence is never artificial.

Machine intelligence, like human intelligence, is quite real. That machine intelligence processes through hardware and code has no bearing on its authenticity. The machine does not pretend to learn, it really learns, it actually gets smarter, and it does so through interactions with the environment. Ya know, just like people. more...

Content Note: This posts discusses various forms of transmisogyny and TERFs

On Tuesday, Lisa Wade posted a piece to the Sociological Images blog, asking some important questions about drag- Is it misogynistic? Should it be allowed in LGBT safe spaces? How can pride organizers enforce drag-free pride events, if such an idea is useful? The good news is that many of these questions are already being asked in some circles. The bad news, is that outside of these circles –where specifics are unknown and the cis experience takes centre stage– such questions can lead to some harmful conclusions. more...

Buzzfeed asked Donald Trump if he knew what trolling is. Trump didn’t know the term, so Buzzfeed explained it,

“It’s basically saying or doing things just to provoke people,” I said, explaining that there were many who considered him a troll because “provocation is your ultimate goal.” Trump bristled at the characterization. “That’s not my ultimate goal,” he protested. “My ultimate goal is to make this country great again!” But then, he thought about it for a moment. “I do love provoking people,” he conceded. “There is truth to that.”

The news media –especially those who report on, rely on, presidential electoral politics– are quick to call Donald Trump a “troll.” In this exchange, look at the word “just” in the definition, “saying or doing things just to provoke people”, that Trump isn’t really a candidate running a real election, he’s not politics as normal, but just going for attention. In the current media feeding frenzy over Trump, from Time, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and so many others, there is an emerging and necessary narrative that he’s a “troll.”

Classifying Trump as a “troll” is centrally about saving the rest of the election coverage as real and authentic. The narrative that Trump is trolling assumes and reinforces the notion that the rest of the coverage is in good faith, something news organizations desperately need to sell. more...

With the latest round of thinkpieces about Rihanna’s BBHMM video, it seems like we’ve finally reached peak “Is it feminist?” I mean, it’s been a long road up to this peak, but this question feels like it’s growing stale and exhausting its ability to generate clicks.

“Is it feminist?” has always been a disciplining and normalizing question, one that centers particular kinds of women (privileged women) as the proper subject of feminism, and so on. This is what academic feminist theory learned in the 1900s, right? Anyway, “Is it feminist?” might be a productive question when feminism is itself a minority discourse, but in the era of Branded Post-Feminism(™), “Is it feminist?” it’s more normalizing than not. To be a lot theoretical about it: “Is it feminist?” used to serve as an instance of Rancierian disagreement. The question used to disrupt and at least give a little pause to hegemonic modes of thought and practice. But it’s not disruptive anymore; its disruption has itself been normalized. (Think, for example, of how “disruption” in general is fetishized as a term for innovation.)

But “Is it feminist?” is not the only way to start a feminist analysis or to think critically about gender politics. “What is it?” or “Is X a Y?” is like the oldest question in philosophy; “ti esti…?” (“what is…?”) is Socrates’ whole M.O. Philosophers have developed a lot more types of inquiry since then. We could, for example, ask “What is gendered and how?” or “What are the gendered components of this and how do they interact?” or, as Cynthia Enloe puts it, we can ask “Where are the women?” or “Where are the gender minorities?” or “Where are the nonbinary people?”

All the way back in 1949 Simone de Beauvoir identified the problems with “what is…?” or “is it….” style questions, and offered some alternative types of questions to ask instead. She begins the introduction to The Second Sex with a critique of these questions. Modeling the first part of the introduction after a Platonic dialogue, Beauvoir repeatedly asks “What is a woman?”: Biology? Nope. Metaphysical essence? Nope. Something made up, a false belief we should just get rid of? Nope. “Woman” is, Beauvoir argues, a situation in patriarchal power relations: “She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other” (26). The “What is/Is it…?” questions get the ontology wrong. (See the “scope of the verb ‘to be’” discussion on p.33 of TSS…from a Beauvoirian perspective “Is it…?” questions are all asking after “serious [that is, predetermined] values” and are thus all grounded in bad faith.) Woman/feminist isn’t a definite thing or feature or set of features; it’s a status in a particular type of gendered social and epistemological structure. So, as Beauvoir concludes:

But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness. Woman’s drama lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential. How, in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself? What paths are open to her? Which ones lead to dead ends? How can she find independence within dependence? What circumstances limit women’s freedom and can she overcome them? These are the fundamental questions we would like to elucidate. (37).

Following Beauvoir, we could say this: “feminist” is a situation or relational status. Something cannot “be” feminist. It can assist or impede our ongoing reproduction of patriarchy–it can do things. Notice the questions Beauvoir asks at the end of this quote: they’re all action-oriented: What can one do? What does the material situation allow? How might one effectively change the concrete reality of patriarchy so that nobody finds themselves in this contradictory concrete status of feminization? Beauvoir’s questions are also contextually dependent: whether or not something assists or impedes the ongoing reproduction of patriarchy depends on the concrete specifics of that particular situation, how patriarchy manifests itself there and then.

So, those are a few feminist questions you can ask instead of “Is it feminist?” Do y’all have some favorites to add to the list?

For a little over a decade, those researchers and visionaries originally involved in establishing the infrastructure for the World Wide Web have set their sights higher.  While hyperlinking Web pages has been pivotal to creating a Web of documents, the more recent goals to establish a Semantic Web involve hyperlinking data, or individual elements within a Web page.  In attaching unique identifiers (in the form of Uniform Resource Identifiers or URIs) and metadata to data points (rather than to just the documents where those data points appear) machines are able to interpret, not just what the browser should display, but also what the page is about.  The hope is that, in providing machines with the capacity to interpret what data is about, it will be possible to drastically improve Web search and to allow researchers to perform automated reasoning on the massive amounts of data contributed to the Web.  There are numerous examples where this infrastructure is already having impact (albeit largely behind-the-scenes).  For instance, the New York Times has already “semantified” all of its data and created a Semantic API where researchers can query its database.  Facebook’s Graph API, which employs Semantic Web infrastructure to structure user profile data, has been the foundation for several studies attempting to make sense of human behavior and interactions through the platform’s “big data.” more...

Reddit’s co-founder Steve Huffman, who is currently taking over CEO responsibilities in the wake of Ellen Pao’s resignation, has started doing these Fireside AMAs where he makes some sort of edict and all of the reddit users react and ask clarifying questions. Just today he made an interesting statement about the future of “free speech” in general and certain controversial subreddits in particular. The full statement is here but I want to focus on this specific line where he describes how people were banned in the beginning of reddit versus the later years when the site became popular:

Occasionally, someone would start spewing hate, and I would ban them. The community rarely questioned me. When they did, they accepted my reasoning: “because I don’t want that content on our site.”

As we grew, I became increasingly uncomfortable projecting my worldview on others. More practically, I didn’t have time to pass judgement on everything, so I decided to judge nothing. more...

In May of 1999 two people filed a lawsuit against AOL. They were volunteers in the company’s Community Leaders program which encompassed everything from chatroom moderation to teaching online classes. You had to apply to be a Community Leader and once you were selected you had a minimum amount of hours you needed to work every week, a time card to keep track of those hours, and reports that needed to be filed with administration. It had all the hallmarks of a real job which is precisely what those two people claimed in their lawsuit. Their argument was that their role constituted an “employee relationship” but I think it is more accurate to say they were creating value for a company that didn’t even feel the need to provide some kind of subsistence wage.

This story has been told countless times as a jumping off point for arguments that labor has left the factory or that even those companies like Amazon or Uber that have been leaders in the contractor / sharing / worse-than-capitalism economy are not paying enough. Some are even calling for “platform cooperativism” which sounds super cool. But there is another, very big, reason why social media companies (in particular) should be paying their moderators and other community leaders: it helps with diversity. more...

The concept of affordances, which broadly refers to those functions an object or environment make possible, maintains a sordid history in which overuse, misuse, and varied uses have led some to argue that researchers should abandon the term altogether. And yet, the concept persists as a central analytic tool within design, science and technology studies, media studies, and even popular parlance. This is for good reason. Affordances give us language to address the push and pull between technological objects and human users as simultaneously agentic and influential.

Previously on Cyborgology, I tried to save the term, and think about how to theorize it with greater precision. In recent weeks, I have immersed myself in the affordances literature in an attempt to develop the theoretical model in a tighter, expanded, and more formalized way. Today, I want to share a bit of this work: a timeline of affordances. This includes the influential works that theorize affordances as a concept and analytic tool, rather than the (immense) body of work that employs affordances as an analytic device.

The concept has an interesting history that expands across fields and continues to provoke debate and dialogue. Please feel free to fill in any gaps in the comments or on Twitter. more...

For as influential as Attali’s Noise has been, most scholars have sidestepped its central claim: “music is prophecy” (11). It feels really undersupported; Attali asserts that music anticipates or foreshadows social change, but he doesn’t seem to provide anything more solid than correlations as evidence. As Eric Drott says in his just-published article in Critical Inquiry, “the book never fully spells out the mechanisms by which music performs its prophetic function” (725). I think Attali does spell out this mechanism. Music is prophecy because its physical structure–sound waves–is isomorphic with the physical structure of economic forecasts (probability functions, which are graphed as sine curves). Attali thinks both music and statistical forecasts are made of the same stuff, so thus music is predictive in the sense that Amazon’s recommendation bot is predictive.

I’ve been revising this article on Noise, Foucault, & biopolitical neoliberalism for my next book project. My analysis focuses on the Attali’s claim that the logic of the market, as understood by 1970s macroeconomic theory, is isomorphic with the logic of sound waves. Macroeconomics and acoustics study, essentially, the same phenomena. As Attali puts it, ‘non-harmonic music’ (Noise 115) makes ‘the laws of acoustics. . . the mode of production of a new sound matter’, and in so doing, ‘displays all of the characteristics of the technocracy managing the great machines of the repetitive economy’ (113). The laws of acoustics are isomorphic with the  “rules” of biopolitical governmentality and financialized political economy–that is, with statistical forecasts. The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics” to understand and manage populations “include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures” (SMBD 246). Similarly, the methods economists use to understand the “repetitive” (Attali’s term for late capitalism) market include “macrostatistical and global, aleatory view, in terms of probabilities and statistical groups” (Attali, Social Text, 11). The logic of forecasting and financialization mimics the logic of auditory signals (at least as contemporary physics understands this latter logic)–for example, both probability functions and sound frequencies are visualized as sine waves. Just as harmonics emerge from dynamically interacting frequencies, predictable, reliable ‘signal’ emerges–as life, as human capital, as a data forecast, a data self–from dynamically interacting streams of data.

So, because he thinks sound and statistical forecasts are more or less identical in structure, Attali can then argue that music is predictive, that “our music fortells our future” (Noise 11). Writing in 1977, Attali lacks databases and fast, massive-scale distributed computer processing, so uses music, which, like big-data number crunching, “explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code” (Noise 11). Music, for Attali, is like an algorithm predicts where society will go next: it crunches all the variables and figures out which combination is most probable. Writing in 2014, Attali further explains that this ability to crunch variables and determine the most probable outcome is what makes music similar to finance: “We could also explore the reason why music could be seen as predictive: as an immaterial activity, it explores more rapidly than any other the realm of potentials. In that sense, it is not far from another quasi immaterial activity, finance, which is also very often an excellent predictive tool.” In 2014, Attali gave a lecture titled “Music As A Predictive Science” at Harvard. There, he talks about Noise, his intentions in writing it, and whether his claims about the future were accurate. He repeatedly refers to his project in Noise as “forecasting.” Forecasting is the same term Nate Silver uses to describe what big data analytics does. In a sense, Attali scooped Silver by more than 30 years; Noise uses music in the same way that The Signal And The Noise uses data.
This is widely (and rightly) taken to be the point where Noise jumps the shark into pseudo-rationality: music seems no better suited to predict the future than astrology is. But data forecasting is also pseudo-rational. Attali’s method seems obviously outlandish because it, unlike big data forecasting, can’t hide behind the mantle of scientific objectivity. Privileging noise, understanding music as a market that is predictable and whose future can be forecast, Attali’s analysis of the history of western art music employs some of the central principles of neoliberal economic theory.