Stories of data breaches and privacy violations dot the news landscape on a near daily basis. This week, security vendor Carbon Black published their Australian Threat Report based on 250 interviews with tech executives across multiple business sectors. 89% Of those interviewed reported some form of data breach in their companies. That’s almost everyone. These breaches represent both a business problem and a social problem. Privacy violations threaten institutional and organizational trust and also, expose individuals to surveillance and potential harm.

But “breaches” are not the only way that data exposure and privacy violations take shape. Often, widespread surveillance and exposure are integral to technological design. In such cases, exposure isn’t leveled at powerful organizations, but enacted by them.  Legacy services like Facebook and Google trade in data. They provide information and social connection, and users provide copious information about themselves. These services are not common goods, but businesses that operate through a data extraction economy.

 I’ve been thinking a lot about the cost-benefit dynamics of data economies and in particular, how to grapple with the fact that for most individuals, including myself, the data exchange feels relatively inconsequential or even mildly beneficial. Yet at a societal level, the breadth and depth of normative surveillance is devastating. Resolving this tension isn’t just an intellectual exercise, but a way of answering the persistent and nagging question: “why should I care if Facebook knows where I ate brunch?” This is often wrapped in a broader “nothing to hide” narrative, in which data exposure is a problem only for deviant actors.

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Every year at our Passover seder, my father, the consummate emcee, tells us about his Uncle Neyech, a long lost Finnish relative. I have no idea why he would bring Uncle Neyech up, nor during what part of the seder he would do so. But every year, we would laugh at the idea that the Schaffzins of Ashkenazi descent had a relative in Scandinavia, not particularly known as the epicenter of European Jewery. I always figured this was a joke; his seder is filled with these sorts of bits—falsified anecdotes meant to keep us at attention during an otherwise rote evening. And then, one day earlier this year, he forwarded us—me, my three siblings, and my mother—an email he received from a woman in Baltimore claiming to be a distant relative from, wouldn’t you know, Finland.

I, for one, was in utter disbelief. Turns out my father was telling the truth all these years (it didn’t help that his default tone is “satire”). The story, as most in my family do, includes escaping from an oppressive regime (in this case, the Czar) and dispersing around the globe: Philadelphia, Palestine, and…Finland. For all intents and purposes, this story is, for me, nothing more than an anecdote with which I will annoy my seder guests one day. But what inspired my Finnish relative (turns out we’re second cousins once removed) to track down her father’s mother’s father’s brother’s grandfather’s grandson? And why should I care about her at all?

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Less than a week ago Byron Román made the above Facebook post challenging “bored teens” to pick up trash and post before and after photos on social media. Reddit user Baxxo24 (Baxxo24 looks to be Swedish while Byron lives in Arizona) took a screenshot and posted it to r/wholesomememes where it went viral. Now #trashtag (“hashtag trashtag?”) is the subject of a dozen or so feel-good human interest stories. It is unclear who the guy in the photo is (It looks like it came from a Guatemalan Travel Agency), but CNN, Washington Post, and CBS News have reported that “trashtag” is a long-dormant social media campaign for UCO Gear, a Seattle-based camping equipment company.

When I started seeing Byron Román’s #trashtag trending on my usual platforms I did what any well-adjusted person would do: I assumed it was as scam and Facebook stalked him until I was convinced otherwise. According to his Facebook profile, Román works in the non-profit home loan industry, mostly in marketing. His latest job helps veterans apply for and receive cheap mortgages. Nothing too dubious there, but it got me thinking about the long and dismal history of littering campaigns’ role in playing cover for corporate interests. more...

I want all of your mind
People turn the TV on, it looks just like a window…

Digital witnesses
What’s the point of even sleeping?

— St. Vincent, “Digital Witness” (2014)

Each day seemingly brings new revelations as to the extent of our Faustian bargain with the purveyors of the digital world in which we find ourselves. Our movements, moods, and monies are tracked with relentless precision, yielding the ability to not only predict future behaviors but to actively direct them. Permissions are sometimes given with pro forma consent, while other times they’re simply baked into the baseline of the shiniest and newest hardware and software alike. Back doors, data breaches, cookies and trackers, smart everything, always-on devices, and so much more — to compare Big Tech to Big Brother is trite by now, even as we might soon look back on the latter as a quaint form of social control.

While data breaches and privacy incursions are very serious and have tangible consequences, debates over user rights and platform regulation barely scratch the surface. Deeper questions about power, autonomy, and what it means to be human still loom, largely uncovered.  And when these concerns are even voiced at all they can often seem retrogressive, as if they represent mere longings for a bygone (pre-internet) time when children played outside, politics was honorable, and everyone was a great conversationalist. Despite ostensible consternation when something goes egregiously wrong (like influencing an election, let’s say), the public and political conversation around mass data collection and its commercialization never goes far enough: why do so many seemingly reasonable and critical people accept a surveillance-for-profit economy (with all of us as the primary commodity) as tolerable at all? more...

In January I started a new job (woo me!), but I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten over the one I left yet, nor the job application process it took to get here. Below are some reflections on that experience, which I share mainly to process them.

On my last day working at the university as an office support assistant (four years almost to the day), I published one more issue of the biweekly program newsletter one last time. In a short goodbye to readers, I found myself recalling another assistant who published her department’s newsletter—my mom. “She delighted in the visual design aspects, adding new flourishes and sections,” I wrote, remembering her face lighting up in the car on the drive home from high school when she’d find the perfect clipart or goofy pun to slip into the margins. Even after leaving the university herself, she likes crafting cards and mom memes in Publisher 2007, her visual design program of choice. more...

It seems like there is a flowering of interest in speculating about the future. Of course SF writers, the RAND Group, and Trekkies, have been doing this for much longer. (An interesting side note: SF writers are now enjoying new income streams by working with multinational corporations to imagine the future.)

It is possible that as consumer technologies began to appear as if from ‘the future’, as presented to us in dystopian movies such as Bladerunner and Minority Report,  speculating about the future increasingly became a topic of interest. As the phrase ‘surveillance capitalism’ has gained visibility thanks to devices just as the Echo. And maybe things started to appear ‘Orwellian’ after the Snowden revelations. I would like to think that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports generate concern about the future; but the continued rising temperature of the planet suggests that this is not the case. Possibly for people in the US, the election of Donald Trump, for Brazilians of Jair Bolsonaro, The Future has become a thing to be worried about (‘now more than ever’).

I spent last weekend at a workshop called Designing Tomorrow organised by the great folks behind the Utopia Film Festival in Tel Aviv, and re:publica in Berlin. The workshop was about testing various methodologies to actually speculate about the future; and they drew heavily from Peter Frase’s Four Futures. It got me thinking about the different narratives to thinking about the future. Here is a quick overview of some of these that I’ve encountered through recent arts and culture projects, and in the tech news (These do not necessarily line up as perfectly nested Russian dolls, however.)

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_{(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)}

This past weekend I attended Crafting the Long Tomorrow, a conference ostensibly about climate change, though approached through the varied perspectives of scholars working in both the sciences and the humanities. The setting was Biosphere 2, the site of two 1990s experiments to recreate the Earth’s biosphere in a completely sealed environment, under the assumption that humanity would need to evacuate our current planet some time in the future. Throughout the densely packed three days of panels and keynotes, we heard about efforts to measure, curb, combat, and educate on the anthropocentric nature of our impending planetary disaster.

From the outset, there was a relatively awkward divide in the room, though not the disciplinary sort that I would have predicted. Rather, there seemed to be two parallel conferences going on in the same room at the same time: one was being attended and contributed to by individuals who wanted to center identity politics and socio-economic considerations and another by those who did not (or, to be fair, perhaps did not even consider it a possibility). What I found the most striking, however, was that when the former would call out the latter, the critique would be met with an absurd defensiveness. When a respondent to a talk about the first Biosphere 2 experiment pointed out that there was a complete lack of diversity in the all-White participants (the “Biospherians”), another audience member took it upon himself to explain that the experiment was not about diversity among humans, but diversity among plants within the structure. The next morning, when two presenters spoke out about the dearth of people of color within the room, one of the organizers declared that she was made sad by the call-out and didn’t find it fair.

This is not to say that the conference was, in itself, not fruitful. Those talks that did engage with questions of diversity and marginalized communities did so eloquently and with an openness that resulted in compelling discourse. Still, even throughout those talks, not one speaker engaged with questions of physical access, disability studies, or disability rights.

That climate change will affect the most marginalized first and with the most force has been well argued. It is important to recognize the at-risk nature of those for whom the deterioration of our natural world and the systems of infrastructure within means life-or-death situations on an order of magnitude greater than for an abled body. In 2017, for PS Mag, David M. Perry described four different types of ways that disabled individuals might be at-risk during a climate crisis:

health maintenance (medicine, electricity, medical care), ability to move in and through physical areas, effective communication access, and what the experts call “program access.” Some of these needs are obvious: People who depend on dialysis or oxygen need power. Diabetics need insulin. Chemotherapy patients need hospitals that work, and so forth. A wheelchair user might well not be able to cross flooded areas, climb stairs to escape rising water, or access a shelter. Shelter space might also be inaccessible because messages about locations aren’t communicated in sign language or Braille. Such spaces might be too loud or chaotic for people with sensory integration needs

Perry’s piece provides an excellent overview of the problem and I suggest you read it.

But I also suggest/implore scholars, artists, researchers, and scientists to start centering disability studies within their work on climate change. You might approach it from an infrastructural perspective, extending work of scholars like Cassandra Hartblay, who has argued that “When accessible design elements are installed to meet minimum standards, they are “just for the check mark” and often do not “work.”” This might relate well to research on, for instance, ADA standards and how well they would hold up to the various climate disaster scenarios. Or you might take a more theoretical approach and build on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s work on fitting versus misfitting—something we’ve talk about a lot at Theorizing the Web. What happens when the environment shifts so drastically that the fits become the misfits—what do the misfits become?

There is a rich trove of research to be done here and it’s not being addressed on the necessary scale. Let’s do better.

Gabi Schaffzin is a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, with a concentration in Art Practice, at UC San Diego. The headline of this piece is a shout-out to Annie Elainey’s awesome t-shirt project.

In addition to contributing to Cyborgology, I write a sex column for the Pittsburgh City Paper. This week, I wrote a piece that’s relevant to conversations here, titled, “A new Kickstarter campaign has a terrible solution to your relationship problems.”

I look at LoveSync, a new technology aimed at helping couples with mismatched libidos, and argue it’s an example of how technological solutions to social or interpersonal problems can do more harm than good.

Jessie Sage on Twitter @sapiotextual.

I’ve written about Star Trek a few times (here and here). I think I still agree with most of what’s written there. PJ Patella-Rey also wrote about Star Trek on the blog here. My favorite commentary on Discovery, which I’ll do my best not to simply repeat is by Lyta Gold which you can read at Current Affairs. What follows are some vaguely connected thoughts I’ve had about Discovery‘s relationship to the rest of the canon after having just gotten caught up with the series. more...

Stories about AI gone bigoted are easy to find: Microsoft’s Neo-Nazi “Tay” bot, her still racist sister “Zo”, Google’s autocomplete function that assumed men occupy high status jobs, and Facebook’s job-related targeted advertising which assumed the same.

A key factor in AI bias is that the technology is trained on faulty databases. Databases are made up of existing content. Existing content comes from people interacting in society. Society has historic, entrenched, and persistent patterns of privilege and disadvantage across demographic markers. Databases reflect these structural societal patterns and thus, replicate discriminatory assumptions. For example, Rashida Richardson, Jason Schultz, and Kate Crawford put out a paper this week showing how policing jurisdictions with a history of racist and unprofessional practices generate “dirty data” and thus produce dubious databases from which policing algorithms are derived. The point is that database construction is a social and political task, not just a technical one. Without concerted effort and attention, databases will be biased by default.  more...