{"id":18214,"date":"2014-03-13T05:00:12","date_gmt":"2014-03-13T09:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=18214"},"modified":"2014-03-12T12:12:27","modified_gmt":"2014-03-12T16:12:27","slug":"leaky-algorithms-the-quantification-of-affect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/03\/13\/leaky-algorithms-the-quantification-of-affect\/","title":{"rendered":"Riot Sounds and Leaky Algorithms"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ATR’s diagram for “riot sounds.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over at the CUNY Digital Labor Working Group Blog<\/a>, I\u2019ve been participating in a symposium on Angela Mitropoulos\u2019s book Contract and Contagion<\/em>. I think there are a lot of conversations and ideas that will be of interest to Cyborgology readers, so I want to highlight a few of these and encourage you to visit the DLWG blog and participate in the conversation yourself.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Anne Boyer<\/a> discusses the politics of how we arrange ourselves:<\/p>\n

\n

Indeed, \u201chow to arrange\u201d ourselves and our infrastructure is the question forced back at us at every turn by this minute of history: it is as much a question posed by the blockade or the riot as it is the occupation, it is as much a question posed by the struggle in the home or for a home as it is in the struggle in the workplace and the streets. \u00a0It is there when we are sick and there is no one to care for us or our people are sick and we are not there to care for them or when we have no people at all; it is there in the ports and shipping hubs; it is there in our digitized labors and the industrial and reproductive labors that support them; it is there in the leveler of an unstable climate that increasingly turns even what we might think of the polis into an urgent site of necessary care and renders the oikos as shelter for no one.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To be a bit reductive, Boyer is arguing that politics (either reactionary or revolutionary) isn\u2019t so much in what we do as it is in the institutions or arrangements in and through which we work. A \u201cleaky\u201d arrangement, to use Boyer\u2019s term, is one that allows resources (time, energy, attention, material support) to be siphoned or diverted from the channels that reproduce and maintain current arrangements. Perhaps leaky arrangements bend circuits (of capital, of care, of time, of money, of social reproduction) so they create what Atari Teenage Riot has called \u201criot sounds\u201d? I ask this last question both because my contribution to the forum is about sound, but also because I think ATR\u2019s concept of \u201criot\u201d is different than the traditional, political concept of riot and more like the \u201cleaky\u201d riot that Boyer discusses. You can read more about how I understand ATR\u2019s notion of \u201criot sounds\u201d here<\/a>. This sort of circuit bending echoes what Constantina Zavitsanos calls<\/a> \u201clooking at a thing side-eyed or periscopically\u201d: how do we bend the frequencies so they do different things, emphasize different angles, shift figure\/ground relationships? I need to think more about this relationship between leaky rearrangements and riot sounds.<\/p>\n

But, for Cyborgology<\/em> readers, Boyer\u2019s piece opens up questions such as: How are algorithms ways of arranging ourselves? Patricia Clough also opens up this question in her post<\/a>, where she argues \u201cthey are real objects, spatiotemporal data structures.\u201d How might we make algorithms \u201cleaky,\u201d especially because algorithms can adapt to compensate for leaks? Or, as Clough also suggests, algorithms are already \u201cleaky,\u201d but that leakiness is obscured in various ways.[1] \u00a0Basically (and I may be oversimplifying here), algorithms can appear to reduce everything neatly to quantifiable terms because the terrain in, on, and through which they operate is already smoothed out in very particular ways, so that some messy reductions seem neat and clean instead. For example, patriarchy and white supremacy might make an inadequate quantification seem adequate–standardized test scores can pass as adequate measurements of scholastic aptitude or teacher performance because white supremacy and classism covers over the racialized socioeconomic conditions that affect student performance. So the leaks are there. How do we bend the algorithms or the circuits of social reproduction so that the leaks, well, leak in ways that water our roots? How do we make riot sounds of our own<\/a>, sounds that are immoderate<\/a> in ways that make the lives of us \u201cwomen and slaves\u201d more survivable?<\/p>\n

Aren Aizura talks about <\/a><\/p>\n

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little data. For instance, parental surveillance: the time of the preteen fighting to have the \u201cindependence\u201d of an iPhone is long gone. These days parents totally want their kids wired up. Give your kid an iPhone and you can sync her messages to download into your phone: incoherent emojis, texts from boyfriend\/girlfriend and all. Want to know where your daughter is? Just bring up the app and you can see her GPS signal pulsing on the map, still or moving. This is not 1984, you understand. It\u2019s just parents keeping track.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Little data, then, takes the tools of big data and applies them not to populations (which is what big data does), but to individuals–your kid, for example, or even yourself (e.g., the Quantified Self movement, which Aizura discusses). Aizura uses little data to highlight the ways that contemporary contracts (as practices, as institutions) maintain the same old inequalities with fancier, newer, more efficient tools and methods. For example, little data updates a longstanding tradition of devaluing so-called women\u2019s work when it is performed by women in the home, but valuing it when it is appropriated by men and performed in a publicly visible forum (think about the different status of home cooks, who are generally women, and chefs, who are l<\/p>\n

\"photo\"<\/p>\n

argely men). Aizura\u2019s discussion of the role of the QS phenomenon in the ongoing devaluation of feminized care labor resonates with my earlier post <\/a>on feminization and hyperemployment. Aizura\u2019s post suggests that quantifiability does the work of gendered (de)valuation of care work: \u201cNurses in the global north are trained precisely to perform impersonal data collection; by contrast, South East Asian health tourism markets depend on South East Asian care workers being understood to \u201ccare more\u201d about patients, elderly people, children, and to expect less remuneration.\u201d Care that can be profitably quantified is \u201cmasculinized\u201d (i.e., incorporated into the wage-labor economy), whereas unprofitably quantifiable or just unquantifiable care is \u201cfeminized\u201d (i.e., excluded from the \u2018real\u2019 economy).<\/p>\n

I wonder if affect is how we perceive and pay attention to non-quantified care, which Aizura suggests is also \u201ca kind of attention.\u201d If affect is an easy way to access non-quantified care, it seems to me, at least, that it\u2019s also an easy way to render this non-quantified care quantifiable. For example, beats music, which I think is fabulous as a music streaming platform, will craft a radio station for you based on how you feel. Called \u201cThe Sentence,\u201d this feature asks you to fill in the variables in the following sentence: \u201cI\u2019m X feeling like Y with Z to ABC.\u201d This is just one easy example of how we\u2019re turning affect into data. And I don\u2019t think the answer is to find affects that aren\u2019t quantifiable, but to think about ways of making data and quantification itself \u201cleaky,\u201d to use Boyer\u2019s term. How would you use this beats interface to make \u201criot sounds\u201d in its algorithms?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1] Clough writes: \u201cQuantities rather are conditioned by their own indeterminacies since algorithmic architectures are inseparable from incomputable data or incompressible information\u2014that information or liveliness between zeros and ones.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the CUNY Digital Labor Working Group Blog, I\u2019ve been participating in a symposium on Angela Mitropoulos\u2019s book Contract and Contagion. I think there are a lot of conversations and ideas that will be of interest to Cyborgology readers, so I want to highlight a few of these and encourage you to visit the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18214"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18219,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18214\/revisions\/18219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}