“In social media, alienation appears as its opposite”

“A LinkedIn Body is made of the ways in which you’ve made money”

“it’s no surprise to see an app tracking your ability to disconnect”

“It’s no accident that both Manning and Snowden are former soldiers who served in Iraq”

“Should the government know less than Google?”

“7. Realize, w/ horror, that your boyfriend, unbeknownst to you, has had unprecedented access to all of your emails”

““Oh, don’t be such a digital dualist, Raymond,” Isobel quipped”

“In his egregious professional misstep, he inadvertently handed Fat Activists a microphone and a spotlight”

“Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges”

“the digital beatdown he’d help deliver over Steubenville came back to haunt him”

“replacing cops and soldiers with PRISM and predator drones: Massively Open Online Police State (MOOPS)“ more...

I start with a nota bene by saying that I do not self-identify as a “surveillance scholar” but given our current sociotechnical and political climates, the topic is unavoidable. One might even be tempted to say that if you aren’t thinking about state and corporate surveillance, you’re missing a key part of your analysis regardless of your object of study. Last week, Whitney Erin Boesel put out a request for surveillance study scholars to reassess the usefulness of the panopticon as a master metaphor for state surveillance. Nathan Jurgenson commented on the post, noting that Siva Vaidhyanathan (@sivavaid) has used the term “nonopticon” to describe “a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it.” I would like to offer up a different term –taken straight from recent NSA revelations—that applies specifically to surveillance that relies on massive power differentials and enacted through the purposeful design of the physical and digital architecture of our augmented society. Nested within the nonopticon, I contend, are billions of “boundless informants.” more...

I’ve been writing a lot about game consoles lately, mostly because a lot has been going on with gaming. To date I’ve mostly been focusing on the Xbox One and the degree to which it contributes to the troubling industry trend – intensely apparent in the game industry but by no means confined to it – of eroding the power of owners and turning them increasingly into users/renters. With the release of the Xbox one, I – and many others – wondered if this marked the final push in the setting of massive industry standards. If, with the Xbox One’s hopelessly restrictive and confusing game lending/resale process and its daily “phone home” requirement, this was simply going to become the norm. Which would mean a serious blow to the power of technology consumers and an important and worrying redefinition of our relationship with the technology that augments our daily lived experience.

Then E3 happened.

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Earlier this month Geoffrey Miller (@matingmind), the now infamous professor of evolutionary psychology, punched out a really awful tweet. He said this:

His message is blaringly ironic, coming from a man who clearly lacked the willpower to think through the statement before making it public #truth. Although he later deleted the tweet, his followers had already created screen captures and sent the image into a spiraling journey of virality.

I don’t want to spend my post today harping on Miller’s particular indiscretion. Others have been busy doing just that, quite eloquently, for the past week and a half. Instead, I want to talk about Fatness as a moral stigma, and the ways in which Miller’s tweet first, exposed the moral nature of body size and in turn, offered Fat Activists an opportunity to publicly reject Fatness as a marker of immorality. This was facilitated, I argue, by the affordances of new technologies coupled with determined and conscientious social actors. more...

“Steve, what did we decide to codename her?”

Steve clicked through his notes. “Turnkey, sir.”

“Turnkey? Who the hell came up with that?” Raymond knew The Agency was running out of codenames, but this was ridiculous. As a top official, he had enough on his mind; how was he supposed to keep track of this shit?

“Well, I think it’s because—”

“So does that mean we’re moving ahead?” Isobel interjected.

“The data is there,” said Michael. “We’re positive she has one of the stronger connections to Wedge that we’ve been able to identify. The frequency of their SMS communication alone—plus the fact that they so often text late at night—indicates that this is clearly more than a working relationship.”

“Not to mention,” Patricia added, “that Occupy essay they wrote came out almost a year ago. If it was purely a working relationship, they’d have no reason to still be in contact.”

“So you think they’re lovers?”

“Well, we’re not certain yet,” Michael replied. “I’ve got Steve filing for a warrant to go through the SMS content, and her email content as well. We’re hoping she’ll turn out to be less opaque than Wedge—”  more...

If you take off your glasses and cross your eyes, my resemblance to Nathan is truly uncanny.

“the Internet itself is based on a system of binaries. Dualism, mutual exclusion, and absolutes are inherent in its structure”

“Each space becomes its own Generalized Other, with normative expectations about who a person is and how that person should be in the world”

“You might start thinking that the enemy is the internet itself. Or, by extension, that the enemy is us”

“There were so many people standing behind the cause that it felt like you had an army at your disposal and you could just stick up for what’s right”

“DIS Images invites artists to create alternative scenarios and new stereotypes”

“Games are therefore a fantastic example of ways in which digital technology is profoundlyembodied and usually designed with the able-bodied default in mind“

“A suffocating deluge of violent misogyny is how American comedy fans react to a woman suggesting that comedy might have a misogyny problem”

“the selfie has come full circle, from sign of subject’s marginality to sign of his or her social-media importance”

“Now there’s an app that allows you to share the things you Hate”  more...

A comment from a friend of mine on my recent post about the XBox One reveal got me thinking, about games and bodies and how exactly it is that we talk about both.

The thing about video/computer games – and in fact this is true of a huge amount of digital technology – is that we have this mythology built up around them that implies that they render bodies unimportant, that they divorce identity and movement and interaction from the physical embodied state in which most of us have historically experienced all of those things. This mythology is a classic example of Strong Digital Dualism, the digital and the physical profoundly disconnected and entree from one to the other amounting to an entry into a wholly different world where none of the rules are the same.

Which is clearly not the case. And games are a fantastic arena in which to see how un-true this is.

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In case you missed when The Guardian broke the story last night, here’s the TLDR: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) got a super-secret court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or Fisa) that says that, on a daily basis and from 25 April to 19 July of this year, telecom company Verizon must give information to the National Security Agency (NSA) about all the calls that take place through Verizon’s mobile and landline systems. The court order says that Verizon can’t talk about the court order (the first rule of Sketchy Fisa Court Order is: do not talk about Sketchy Fisa Court Order), but someone leaked the order itself—and now we all know that, every day, Verizon is giving the NSA “the numbers of both parties …location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls.”[i] Because these things are considered “telephony metadata” rather than “communication,” the FBI doesn’t need to get a warrant for each individual customer; instead, it can (and obviously has) demanded records pertaining to all Verizon customers, whether those people are or might be or ever might be suspected of anything at all.

The big questions now are: 1) whether this was the first three-month court order, or just the most recent three-month court order; and 2) whether Verizon is the only telecom that’s received such an order, or just the only telecom that’s received an order that’s been leaked. While I don’t know if I can call the first one[ii], the second seems to deserve a resounding “well DUH”; I can think of nothing to distinguish Verizon in such a way as would make it more worth data-mining than, say, AT&T. If Verizon got one, then AT&T probably got one; Sprint and TMobile each probably got one, and so too did probably every other mobile or landline carrier with a US address of operations. It seems increasingly clear that, whether we’re presumed innocent or presumed guilty, we ourselves had best presume that we’re under direct surveillance.  more...

Maps are always political. Most maps show us something that we already believe, so its difficult to see what is being reinforced and what is systematically ignored. Even the most mundane AAA maps of highways and state borders are doing political work by recognizing the sovereignty of individual states and the obduracy of highways and roads. The near-infinite number of things, qualities, measurements, and people that have spatial characteristics (seriously, just think of all of it: temperatures, ancestral lands, endemic species, isobars, places to buy smoothies, locations of hidden treasure, and so on, and so on…_) mean that map makers must always select what is relevant and what is not. This selection process—a human endeavor—is inherently social and deeply political. Google, a company that has taken upon itself to reject that selection process and “organize all the world’s information,” wants to provide a single map and, instead of deciding what is relevant in any given map, will personalize it based on information it has about you and your friends. Evgeny Morozov, writing in Slate,[1] is rightfully concerned that Google doesn’t quite know what they’re dealing with when they say they want to organize public spaces in their databases right next to email and photos of cats. He is concerned that–unlike books or weather forecasts—Google doesn’t “acknowledge the vital role that disorder, chaos, and novelty play in shaping the urban experience.” I completely agree that unpredictability is necessary for good urban space, but the biggest threat Google poses to public space isn’t that its maps are “profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character.” Rather, Google hasn’t done enough to personalize maps in such a way that they become part of everyday social (and Social) life. more...

Is there a point in speaking about original, fake or authentic when it comes to music these days? Before you roll your eyes and look for the exit button, you might want to read this post. It led me to realise that some debates which were hot when postmodernism came out of the oven are still relevant. A good take on this matter is Ted Cohen’s reflections on the notorious debate about art:

Although I have participated in discussions of what are is, I have always been in a negative position, arguing that someone’s attempt to say what art is fails, and until recently it did not seem to me that I had anything to say about what art is. And that was because, although I could think of reasons for denying what someone says art is, I could think of no way to begin thinking about what art seems (at least to me) to be. Now I have begun to find a way, and I am finding it by trying to understand why I (or anyone, for that matter) would ever seriously care to assert or deny that something is art. (Cohen, 1998: 154).

This blog post describes the art of music spammers who operate within the Echonest platform. more...