There’s always a lighthouse. There’s always a man. There’s always a city. – Bioshock Infinite
Let’s play.
My proportions are perfect. Perfect is a slippery term; rest assured that there have been teams and focus groups and more focus groups and round after round of men with impressive cars making comments and more teams and redrafts and here we are and here I am, exactly as we have determined you want me.
If I’m not perfect, you can mod me.
In our ongoing conversation about tracking “negatites” (what you might have but ended up not doing–this is a riff on Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the role of negation in human existence), I think we Cyborgologists may have hit on something. David’s post implied or begged the concept, I identified it, and Sunny explained how it relates to quantum physics. In a comment on Sunny’s post, David described this “Theory of Negatite Social Action (NSA, haha)” that we’re proposing as something “like the dark matter of social action.” I don’t know a lot about quantum physics, but I DO know a lot about political philosophy. So while I’m going to rely on y’all to fill in and/or correct me on the physics and big-data-tech side of things, I’m going to attempt to use some political theory to push these ideas forward and see where it takes us. Because this is genuinely an attempt (or an experiment, even), I’ve framed my post in the form of questions. Consider my answers provisional attempts at thinking through these questions.
1. Why do we care about negatites/dark social action? Why is it relevant now?
Here, I want to argue why I think explicit attention to negatites/dark social action is something that is likely to happen, if it isn’t already happening. There are two main motivations to monitor, track, and care about what people could but don’t do. more...
Ever since it and I first became acquainted, I have been the sort of person who goes by strange made-up names on the Internet. That “ever since” is a long one, too: It begins in the fall of 1995, when my classmates and I returned to school to find not only that the dark room full of DOS machines had been swapped out for a bright room full of Windows boxes with Internet access, but also that we now had email accounts—something most of us didn’t have at home.
To our mostly pre-digital teenaged selves, email was clearly the Best. Thing. Ever.
My friends and I spent all of our free periods in the computer lab emailing each other, even though we went to a small school and so all saw each other every single weekday. We passed silly forwards around (like “100 Things to Do in An Elevator”), and had group conversations, and had long one-on-one conversations as well—often conversations that, for a whole range of reasons, would never have happened through in-person interaction. I spent some of the most intense, exciting hours of that school year in the computer lab, engaged with those machines (and through them, my friends) as if they were lifelines. more...
Here is a list of skills that, as a grad student at one time or another, I’ve been expected to have with absolutely no offered training whatsoever: more...
Hello reader! This week Nathan continues his epic journey across the country, and I continue babysitting In Their Words.
“BuzzFeed, in all its listicle glory, reimagined and repurposed for a black audience”
“The hive has become a swarm. It’s diffuse, powerful, and all around you”
“Legally, this was self-defense. The law is a racist technology”
“Yeah! Shouldn’t you be FROM America!? Like, sorry, New York City just doesn’t cut it”
“The Internet, she explains, is for getting to the next level on Candy Crush Saga, not for getting information“ more...
Note: This article discusses virulent racism and white privilege. However, every effort has been made to not post or link to the images discussed below.
At first, I didn’t want to write about the privileged little shits who, sometime around May of last year, got it in their heads that it would be funny to lay facedown on the floor with some skittles and tea and call it #trayvonning. The Zimmerman verdict brought the disgusting meme back into timelines and news cycles, so I feel obliged to make short mention of it. I thought it would be disingenuous of me to write a post for just about every other (1, 2, 3) performative internet meme without mentioning this disgusting bit of racism. #Trayvonning shows up on the usual platforms –Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr—albeit I don’t see as much #Trayvonning as I did #standingman or even #eastwooding in its heyday. There are no dedicated web sites to #Trayvonning (although I haven’t checked Stormfront), nor have I ever seen the hashtag reach trending status. If there’s any silver lining to this story it’s the fact that I encountered many more people deriding the meme, than participating in it. more...
Given that I write science fiction and fantasy for fun and occasional profit, it stands to reason that I have an interest in quantum mechanics. Given that I almost failed high school physics, it stands to reason that that interest has led to only the most rudimentary understanding of same. Nevertheless, a recent comment by Robin James on one of David Banks’s recent posts led me to draw some connections to that exact thing.
(Expiation, n.: the act of making amends or reparation for guilt or wrongdoing; atonement: an act of public expiation.)
Dear reader, are you still thinking about the Zimmerman verdict?
Yeah, me too.
Over the last five days I’ve been thinking a lot about Trayvon Martin’s murder, and about George Zimmerman’s acquittal, and especially about the reactions to both that I’ve observed since the jury returned with a verdict Saturday night. I’ve been thinking (and somewhat obsessively reading) about these things not just because of my contractual obligation as a sociologist, but because as a person I’m saddened, troubled, and angered by what all of this says about U.S. society. Yet I’m not just a person; I’m also a white person, and as such I don’t know where to begin processing the fact that, regardless of my personal particularities, I am by this fact alone complicit in the systems of oppression that made Martin’s murder and Zimmerman’s acquittal possible.
Here’s the thing about white people, the Zimmerman verdict, and its aftermath: more...
Earlier this week, the New York Times ran yet another hilariously digital dualist piece on a new surveillance system that lets retailers follow customers’ every move. The systems, mainly through cameras tied into motion capture software, can detect how long you stared at a pair of jeans, or even the grossed-out face you made at this year’s crop of creepy, hyper-sexualized Halloween costumes. The New York Times describes this as an attempt by brick and mortar stores to compete with data-wealthy “e-commerce sites.” (Who says “e-commerce” anymore? Seriously, change your style guide.) Putting aside the fact that most major retailers are also major online retailers, making the implicit distinction in the article almost meaningless, the article completely misses the most important (and disturbing) part of the story: our built environment will be tuned to never-before-seen degrees of precision. We have absolutely no idea what such meticulously built spaces will do to our psyches. more...
The idea that technology and techno-scientific urbanization/development is making life more noisy is not new. Luigi Russolo wrote about this in his famous futurist manifesto The Art of Noise. “In antiquity,” he argues, “life was nothing but silence. Noise was not really born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility” (4). Russolo’s manifesto was written in 1913. “ON IT” like usual, The New York Times published a couple of stories about it last week.
While it’s certainly not news that cities are noisy, the Times article does suggest that the politics of urban noise have changed significantly since Russolo’s time. Urban noise works (or produces political effects) differently because it is understood differently–it’s not industrial and machinic, but post-industrial and affective. more...
