Uncertain Archives

Uncertain Archives

Critical Keywords for Big Data

Edited by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio, and Kristin Veel

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thylstrup, Nanna Bonde, editor.

Title: Uncertain archives : critical keywords for big data / edited by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio, and Kristin Veel.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004704 | ISBN 9780262539883 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Big data—Social aspects. | Archival resources—Management. | Uncertainty (Information theory)

Classification: LCC CD931 .U53 2020 | DDC 027—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004704

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

Contents

Acknowledgments

Big Data as Uncertain Archives

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio, and Kristin Veel

1 Abuse

Sarah T. Roberts

2 Affect

Marika Cifor

3 Aggregation

Sune Lehmann

4 Algorithmic Racism

Alana Lentin

5 Bots

Aristea Fotopoulou and Tanya Kant

6 Care

Daniela Agostinho

7 Complicity

Annie Ring

8 Conversational Agents

Ulrik Ekman

9 Cooling

Nicole Starosielski

10 Copynorms

Minh-Ha T. Pham

11 Database

Tahani Nadim

12 Demo

Orit Halpern

13 Detox

Pepita Hesselberth

14 Digital Assistants

Miriam E. Sweeney

15 Digital Humanities

Roopika Risam

16 DNA

Mél Hogan

17 Drone

Lila Lee-Morrison

18 Error

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

19 Ethics

Louise Amoore

20 Executing

Critical Software Thing: David Gauthier, Audrey Samson, Eric Snodgrass, Winnie Soon, and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver

21 Expertise

Caroline Bassett

22 Field

Shannon Mattern

23 Figura

Frederik Tygstrup

24 File

Craig Robertson

25 Flesh

Romi Ron Morrison

26 Glitch

Rebecca Schneider

27 Hashtag Archiving

Tara L. Conley

28 Hauntology

Lisa Blackman

29 Instrumentality

Luciana Parisi

30 Interface

Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold

31 Intersectionality

Brooklyne Gipson, Frances Corry, and Safiya Umoja Noble

32 Latency

Kristin Veel

33 Metadata

Amelia Acker

34 Migrationmapping

Sumita S. Chakravarty

35 (Mis)gendering

Os Keyes

36 Misreading

Lisa Gitelman

37 Natural

Mimi Onuoha

38 Obfuscation

Mushon Zer-Aviv

39 Organization

Timon Beyes

40 Outlier

Catherine D’Ignazio

41 Performative Measure

Kate Elswit

42 Pornography

Patrick Keilty

43 Prediction

Manu Luksch

44 Proxies

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Boaz Levin, and Vera Tollmann

45 Quantification

Jacqueline Wernimont

46 Remains

Tonia Sutherland

47 Reparative

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld

48 Self-Tracking

Natasha Dow Schüll

49 Shifters

Celia Lury

50 Sorting

David Lyon

51 Stand-In

Olga Goriunova

52 Supply Chain

Miriam Posner

53 Technoheritage

Nora Al-Badri

54 Throbber

Kristoffer Ørum

55 Time.now

Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund

56 Unpredictability

Elena Esposito

57 Unthought

N. Katherine Hayles

58 Values

John S. Seberger and Geoffrey C. Bowker

59 Visualization

Johanna Drucker

60 Vulnerability

Birkan Taş

61 Word

Daniel Rosenberg

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

The effort of many more institutions and people than can be mentioned here is required to produce a book such as this, and we are grateful for the support we have received throughout. Our deepest appreciation goes to the contributors to this book for trusting us with their inspiring work. We would like to thank the Independent Research Fund Denmark and the Carlsberg Foundation for supporting our work. We express our gratitude to Ece Elbeyi, Naja le Fevre Grundtmann, and Johan Lau Munkholm for their comments and suggestions on the introduction and some of the chapters. We thank Charlotte Johanne Fabricius and Sayuri Nakata Alsman for organizing our many events throughout the years. We thank the former research fellows of the Uncertain Archives collective for expanding the reach of the initial project and for cobuilding the supportive and lively environment that Uncertain Archives has become: Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Pepita Hesselberth, and Ekaterina Kalinina. We would also like to express gratitude to the scholars who participated in our events and helped us advance our thinking: Ramon Amaro, La Vaughn Belle, Mons Bissenbakker, Nisrine Boukhari, Mathias Danbolt, Anthony Downey, Keller Easterling, Knut Ove Eliassen, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Anat Fanti, Maria Finn, Rune Gade, Mariam Ghani, Adam Harvey, Ben Kafka, Kara Keeling, Laura Kurgan, Lee Mackinnon, Kevin McSorley, Rabih Mroué, Lene Myong, Emily Rosamond, Antoinette Rouvroy, Evelyn Ruppert, Susan Schuppli, Hito Steyerl, Sarah Tuck, Louise Wolthers, Brian Kuan Wood, and David Murakami Wood. We thank the artists who have collaborated with us for critically expanding our imaginative horizons: Honey Biba Beckerlee, La Vaughn Belle, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Stense Andrea Lind-Valdén, and Kristoffer Ørum. For hosting, supporting, and cobuilding the manifold Uncertain Archives events, we thank Timon Beyes, Simon Enni, Christopher Gad, Solveig Gade, Anne Kølbæk Iverson, Natalie Koerner, Lee MacKinnon, Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer, Mace Ojala, Renée Ridgway, Devika Sharma, Henriette Steiner, and Rens van Munster.

We thank the members of the Living Archives research project at Malmö University, Susan Kozel and Temi Odumosu, for fruitful collaboration and exchange. We thank the students whom we had the pleasure to teach and supervise throughout the duration of our project for engaging with our ideas and enriching them with questions. Moreover, we would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have contributed to the supportive environment where Uncertain Archives has had the privilege to flourish, including Lene Asp, Taina Bucher, Marisa Cohn, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Ulrik Ekman, Mikkel Flyverbom, Rasmus Helles, Marianne Ping Huang, Jacob Lund, Ulrik Schmidt, Jens-Erik Mai, Annette Markham, Kathrin Maurer, Torin Monahan, Helle Porsdam, Brit Ross Winthereik, Mette Sandbye, Laura Skouvig, Sille Obelitz Søe, Karen Louise Grova Søilen, Mette Marie Zacher Sørensen, Stina Teilmann-Lock, Frederik Tygstrup, Bjarki Valtysson, Katarzyna Wac, Tanja Wiehn, and the Digital Culture research group in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. We would also like to thank Merl Storr for language editing and ensuring consistency throughout the book and Julitta Clancy for creating an extremely comprehensive index. Working with the MIT Press has been a pleasure. We are grateful to our editor Doug Sery, who recognized the potential of this book early on and helped us to develop it, and the anonymous reviewers whose helpful comments and constructive suggestions helped us shape this multivocal endeavor. And we owe many thanks to the wonderful team of professionals at the MIT Press, including Noah Springer, and Wendy Lawrence and Helen Wheeler at Westchester Publishing Services, who provided invaluable guidance on the project.

Finally, we owe infinite gratitude for the love and support of our friends, families, and communities. Nanna would like to thank Liv Bonde Graae, Georg Gammeltoft Thylstrup, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Karen Lise Bonde Thylstrup, Asger Thylstrup, her extended family, and all of her wonderful friends. Daniela would like to thank Amr Hatem, Ana Teresa Maltez, André Alves, Danilo Óscar Fernandes, Pepita Hesselberth, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Lucian Leahu, Sébastien Lorion, Pedro Montoya Navarro, Sara Magno, and the Sorte Firkant community. Annie’s thanks go to Anna Bull, Ellen Pilsworth, Gözde Naiboglu, Marie Kolkenbrock, Ina Linge, Kristin Veel, Jens Elze, Stefanie Orphal, Fiona Wright, Adam Jacobs Dean, Philippe Marie, Victoria Camblin, Joey Whitfield, Sarah Mercier, and Leila Mukhida; to Catherine, Tess, Anne, Brendan, Louise, Barbara, and Patrick Ring, with a special mention for Emilia Jasmine Ring; and to her Pink Singers family. Catherine would like to thank David Raymond, Maria Lopez Rodas, and Mimi and Bup Raymond for the time to write and reflect amidst the chaos of children, as well as her dear friend Mushon Zer-Aviv, for brainstorming during early iterations of this project. Kristin would like to thank Rasmus Veel Haahr and Margrethe Veel Haahr for participating in building the archives of the future, as well as her forebears, who live on in archival memory and to whom she owes so much—not least a love of archives.

Working together has been a joyful and enriching experience, and we hope this book will inspire others to think, write, and organize collectively.

Big Data as Uncertain Archives

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio, and Kristin Veel

Big data seem to promise humanity a previously unknown sense of certainty. The argument of this book, however, is that this promise of certainty from big data comes along with a whole host of uncertainties equally unknown to humankind. The “big” of “big data” refers to the sheer volume of data that can now be gathered from networked societies—data that are too numerous to be processed by human minds, and are therefore subject to analysis, and archiving, by smart machines. The huge bodies of information that big data archives contain thus augment human capacities to the powers of a prosthetic goddess, at the mere click of a button. The mass collection of data by corporations and state agencies promises, meanwhile, to make the world’s populations increasingly traceable and—it is hoped by some—predictable. In this era of big data, as the notion of the archive moves from a regime of knowledge about the past to a regime of future anticipation, big tech tells us that we have (or rather, it has) gained command of everything from trends in culture and thought to potential epidemics, criminal acts, environmental disasters, and terrorist threats. However, we argue that the data storage institutions of the present offer a false sense of security. Recent data ethics and information scandals, including those exposed by Reality Winner, Brittany Kaiser, and Edward Snowden (Agostinho and Thylstrup 2019), have caused experts and observers not only to question the statistical validity of the diagnoses and prognoses promised by big data but also to consider the broad implications of big data’s large-scale determination of knowledge. A consideration of those implications, in terms ranging from art to computation, from ethics to sociology, is the purpose of this book.

It is our argument that big data must be analyzed from a range of different disciplinary vantage points—not least from the perspective of the humanities because big data interact at every level with the human. For instance, the highly metaphorical notions of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), which are associated with the automated gathering and management of big data, imply an independence of technology from the human, suggesting in effect that an inherent ethical separation exists between human acts and machine capabilities. Yet the writers in this book demonstrate that concepts of disembodied intelligence are often initiated and sustained by material, embodied events and therefore rely on human factors in every way. When we go digging in the uncertain archives of big data, we find affective and material labor are absolutely central to the programming of algorithms and the selection, storage, and use of big data, in ways that require ethical consideration and are already having a huge impact on how people live all around the world. Hence, we contend in this volume that big data urgently need consideration and analysis from ethically and human-oriented perspectives.

On one level, archival uncertainties in the age of big data challenge assumptions, and indeed industries, with regard to the knowledge promised by data-driven predictions. The suggestion that big data can err—just as humans can—has subversive potential. And yet, on a structural level, big data archives are so sophisticated that they thrive on uncertainty and disruptive moments. Such moments can be viewed as moments of critique in the form of error, glitch, and subversion when the new institutions of power/knowledge built around big data are revealed as not so powerful or knowledgeable after all. Yet the conceptualization of uncertainty as a creative process can also quickly find itself in alliance with political economies in which performances of critique are easily co-opted as ventures: epistemological uncertainties are leveraged for risk management or to capitalize on the addictive incentives of digital media. In the worst cases, uncertainty can even function to deflect state and corporate accountability because uncertainty is endogenous to digital-age capitalism, and its pursuit therefore promotes and strengthens neoliberal economies and practices. From these perspectives even the subversions of uncertainty available to the contemporary archive appear vulnerable to calculated abuse. Therefore, in order to expose, counter, harness, resist, or evade the forces of today’s political and technological regimes of uncertainty, new theoretical vocabularies, methods, and alliances are needed.

This book offers several such vocabularies and alliances, and in the process it highlights the potential for collaboration across fields. It thereby insists on the importance of building communities, beginning with scholars working across the humanities, social sciences, critical data studies, and beyond. The book is rooted in a series of workshops hosted by the Uncertain Archives research group, which was formed by Kristin Veel, Annie Ring, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, and Anders Søgaard in 2014 and supported by a strategic fund from the Danish Research Council directed at the promotion of a more balanced gender composition in research environments.[1] In its initial formation, the group encompassed literary theory (Kristin Veel), film and cultural theory (Annie Ring), media and cultural theory (Nanna Bonde Thylstrup), and computer science (Anders Søgaard). Soon Daniela Agostinho joined the group, enriching its perspectives with her knowledge of archives, visual culture, and colonial histories. While the group’s starting point was to draw on long-standing theories of the archive from continental philosophy to think about the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of big data, we were soon compelled to mediate and instigate much more interdisciplinary conversations and collective conceptualizations of big data through a broader application of the terms archive and uncertainty. We worked closely and continuously with practice-based scholars, archivists, artists, designers, activists, and computer scientists. Feminist data theorist Catherine D’Ignazio, who attended the first workshop, continued to work with us, offering the project new perspectives on how to democratize data and technology for community empowerment and social justice, as well as new feminist perspectives on data visualization. The workshop format proved to be ideal for these interdisciplinary conversations, thanks to the dialogical opportunities and intimacies it provided. Artists, activists, and academics from a range of different fields who would not normally meet were brought to the same table to share their theoretical and practical interests. In many ways these workshops mirrored this book, and the book in turn retains the impression of our exchanges. Encounters are key to our conception of this volume as a print manifestation of those exchanges—one that is easier to file in the archives of the future than the more fleeting memories of our physical copresence. Not all of the contributors to this book were present at a workshop, and not all of our workshop participants contributed a chapter to the book, but all have had an influence on the book in some way, and all are essential to its existence.

The project has also drawn inspiration from research communities working on machine learning design and human-computer interaction that have been pivotal in developing novel ways of working on and articulating contestatory AI, critical gender frameworks, and other approaches to challenging oppression in technology design processes.[2] Beyond these intellectual and interdisciplinary aims, the book foregrounds arts-based research as a methodology to address the uncertainties of big data archives and as a generative mode of knowledge production and critique in itself (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2011). By featuring arts-based contributions, the book carves out an epistemic space for modes of inquiry that are motivated less by providing answers than by posing new questions—thereby exploring uncertainties productively and offering embodied, imaginative, and speculative approaches to the challenges that big data archives pose.

This introduction outlines the scope of the book—first, by situating it among theories of the archive; second, by homing in on the notion of uncertainty as it operates across the book; and third, by setting out the rationale for the book’s format. Finally, we map out thematically how the sixty-one critical keywords flow and intersect across the volume, encouraging the reader to seek further connections between them in order to think about a more ethical future for big data.

The Archives of Big Data

Archival theory has always been preoccupied with scale. Indeed, thinking about archives as a scholarly question was in many ways a response to accelerations in knowledge production due to new technological inventions (such as typewriters) that meant more knowledge could be processed, as well as broader social changes that demanded new forms of knowledge organization. The growing amount of information available in the late 1800s and early 1900s caused the British archivist Hilary Jenkinson (1922) to caution—in a chapter titled “A New Problem: The Making of the Archives of the Future”—that the 1900s raised “at least one new question in Archive Science; one which has been little considered prior to that time”: quantity (21). One major source of the accelerating growth of information was the First World War, which (among other “firsts”) had amassed an unprecedented and “impossibly bulky” holding of records (21). By 1937, Jenkinson was concerned that “the post-War years have only served to emphasize” the problem of accumulation in modern archives (21): “There is real danger that the Historian of the future, not to mention the Archivist, may be buried under the mass of his [sic] manuscript authorities; or alternatively that to deal with the accumulations measures may be taken which no Archivist could approve” (138).

While these archives of the twentieth century emerged as information collections on a hitherto unseen scale, the gaps in them also grew. Archives relating to women’s lives, for instance, were considered to fall outside of the need for preservation, and if preserved, the traces of these lives were confined to the “w—women” index entry (Sachs 2008, 665). The same strategy of omission and reductive classification applied, of course, to minority groups and those living under colonial rule. At the same time, however, certain parts of the population, including Black, immigrant, and refugee populations, were also subject to surveillance–and archiving–to a disproportionate degree, with devastating implications for the individuals concerned (Browne 2015; Gilliland 2017). Rather than effacing these injustices, digitization has in many ways exacerbated them (Thylstrup 2019). It is at the core of our argument in this book that the questions raised by big data archives belong in the longer history of archives under modernity, alongside all the injustices outlined above. We argue that while big data often appear to offer new, shiny, and automated methods that render older archival orders obsolete, big data in fact often repeat—with a difference—the epistemologies, injustices, and anxieties exemplified by previous archival orders (Spade 2015; Spieker 2017).

This book therefore addresses the large digital archives that have come to characterize our time as a very specific—but still only the latest—installment in the much longer history of archival phenomena. Big data archives, we argue, represent a long negotiation between techniques for organizing knowledge and archival subjects, between control and uncertainty, order and chaos, and ultimately between power and knowledge. At the same time, however, these highly networked repositories also challenge traditional understandings of what counts as an archive, insofar as they fail to adhere to the same logics and procedures of appraisal, preservation, and classification. As shown by YouTube’s ongoing takedowns of user-generated content documenting human rights violations in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, such media-sharing platforms cannot be relied on as stable archives since they do not preserve contents in an equal or reliable fashion. Instead, these new data archives are highly curated by human-machine processes that determine preservation and erasure. In the case of human rights violations, these—often deliberately—opaque processes tend to alter original content by stripping metadata away, and corporate interests tend to prioritize profit and low liability over the documentation of human rights abuses and other crimes (Roberts 2018, 2019; Saber, forthcoming). At the same time, other violent content, such as user-generated content depicting violence against people of color, is kept online, contributing to its traumatic but highly profitable virality (Sutherland 2017b; Wade 2017); the same goes for misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and fascist content (Breslow 2018; Chun and Friedland 2015; Gillespie 2018; Lewis 2018; McPherson 2019; Nakamura 2019; Roberts 2019; Shah 2015; Waseem, Chun, et al. 2017; Waseem, Davidson, et al. 2017). As several chapters in this volume attest, the big data archives into which information is now gathered by means of surveillance and automation display continuities with earlier archival regimes, but they also bear witness to shifts that require critical attention.

Poststructuralist Theories of the Archive

Because of the issues raised above and the certainty with which corporate big data discourses assert themselves, we respond in this book to critiques of archival reason articulated both by mid-twentieth-century poststructuralist thought and by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories and critical archival studies up to the present day. In different ways these theoretical approaches and political movements have challenged the authority of archives as reliable repositories and questioned the capacity of archives to produce truth, offer evidence, and categorize human identities. In poststructuralist and cultural-theoretical terms, archives have always been regarded as dynamic and ultimately generative of knowledge. Rather than neutrally storing knowledge, archives produce what can be known and what becomes forgotten through what Annie Ring (2014, 390) calls their “hermeneutic operations” of selection, preservation, and modes of permitting (or denying) access, all of which add to the dynamism and knowledge-creating nature of archives.

That dynamism was at the heart of how theorists Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau viewed archives as the places from which a crucial ordering of knowledge had proceeded since ancient times. In his foundational text on the psychic life of archives, Archive Fever, Derrida (1998) traced the etymology of the term archive to arkhe, the Greek noun signifying beginning and commandment, and drew attention to the related noun arkheion, designating the homes where ancient magistrates (archons) stored the documents of the law (2). Given this history of archives as locations intimately bound up with the issuing of laws, archives might be viewed in cultural-theoretical approaches as only authoritative: as the origins “from which order is given” (Derrida 1998, 1; italics in the original), as a “totalizing assemblage” (50), and even as institutions that lay down “the law of what can be said” at all (Foucault [1969] 2007, 4). In Certeau’s (1988) account, the writing of history was the central mechanism by which modernity replaced the myths of the past with more systematized, archival knowledge systems aimed at “replacing the obscurity of the lived body with the expression of a ‘will to know’ or a ‘will to dominate’ the body” (6). However, even given the totalizing, ordering will of archives, and despite their historiographic logic that aims to dominate and overcome human obscurity, archives are by no means static, stable institutions invulnerable to transformation. Ring (2014) argues that Foucault’s writings present an especially dynamic vision of the archive, stemming from what he saw as “an an-archic energy that pushes out from the lives that [the archive] ostensibly governed” (388). Foucault ([1969] 2007) writes: “Nor is the archive that which collects the dust of statements that have become inert” (146). Take, for instance, the archive of informant letters dating from 1660 to 1760, an anthology of petitions to the king of France submitted by ordinary citizens seeking punishment for their errant acquaintances and family members. Along with Arlette Farge (2013)—an eminent theorist of the “allure” of archival research—Foucault consulted these letters in the archives of the Bastille (see Ring 2015, 133–134). Farge and Foucault’s (1982) subsequent joint text took the view that the archives were unstable based in the localized, human disorder—Foucault called this the “miniscule commotion” (Foucault [1969] 2002, 167)—that emanated from the lives they were intended to make more orderly.

Even before his joint project with Farge in the archives of the Bastille—and presciently, given the technological transitions that were still nascent when he wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge in the 1960s—Foucault ([1969] 2007) identified archives as making up a “web of which they [the holders of the archive] are not the masters” (143). Certeau (1988), too, found potential for instability in the “blank page” he saw as undermining any attempt at historiography (6). Even in Derrida’s (1998) more feverishly orderly archives, there is an “aggression and destruction drive” (19) such that, as Ring (2014) writes, “the violent patriarchive is rendered less authoritative by the haunting impossibility of its own totalizing desire” (398). The critique of the “violent patriarchive” has also been articulated by French feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who famously argue that systems of language, discourse, and logic, rather than being universal and natural, rest on an implied and “veiled masculinity.” Both Irigaray and Cixous extend Derrida’s critique of logocentrism to scrutinize and undo phallogocentrism, a combined expression of patriarchy and the representative determination of language and discourse that excludes women as thinking and speaking subjects.

The exclusionary logic of archives is often explained by French feminist thinkers through the pervasive patriarchal systems of language, discourse, and social action. In her important text “The Mechanics of Fluids” (in This Sex Which Is Not One), Irigaray (1985) argues that science is also symptomatic of this phallogocentrism, biased as it is toward categories typically personified as masculine (such as solids, as opposed to fluids). Irigaray’s discussion remains relevant today, when subjects speaking outside of the masculine norm keep being rendered invisible and discredited across fields, affecting the ability of their expertise, and their speaking of truth to power, to be recognized (Agostinho and Thylstrup 2019). Cixous’s critique of phallogocentrism is at the heart of her examination of archival power and her expressed desire to unravel and transform it. Akin to Derrida’s conception of immanent drives that undermine the archive’s totalizing desire, for Cixous a number of internal attributes subvert archival order from within.

In the novel Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory, written as she negotiated the donation of her own archive to the National Library of France, Cixous ([2002] 2007) refers to archival orders through the notion of “omnipotence-others.” The novel is populated by a number of other figures for the archive, such as the tomb, mausoleum, necropolis, hospital, trace, scar, and wound, which stand for these omnipotent qualities. But it is also from these figures that the subversive internal attributes materialize, as archival scholar Verne Harris points out. First, any corpus is bound to remain vaster than the storehouse supposed to hold it: an archive is always incomplete, defined by its exclusions and absences and by a disposition to forgetting. Second, the meanings at play in the archive’s holdings are indeterminable, subject to ever-shifting recording, imagining, narrativizing, and fictionalizing. And third, the archive has a way of subverting the conscious desires of those who create and maintain it.

As we see from these leading poststructuralist and feminist accounts of archives, one of the archive’s most important powers is that of omission, and archives have long tended to neglect and ignore groups of people and the perspectives they represent. Many archival scholars and archive theorists have subsequently pointed out that the exclusion of women from historical archives, and the difficulty of locating their subjectivities in archival sources, coexists uncomfortably with the feminized labor that has come to predominate in and sustain the archival profession (Chaudhuri et al. 2010; Mulroney 2019). Indeed, as historian Antoinette Burton (2008) notes, women’s appearance in archives is often obscured by figures considered more relevant, “by large-scale events deemed more significant than those that frame their lives, and by grand narratives that may touch on contexts of significance to them but that effectively brush by them, in part because of the comparative lack of archival trace to secure them in the sightlines of history” (vii). Yet at the same time, as Jessica M. Lapp (2019) notes, the feminization of the labor done in archives also holds subversive potential, whereby the “handmaidens” of archival work, once considered mechanical, servile, and invisible, have become powerful and disruptive, seizing opportunities for political intervention and social change.

In their work on critical feminist archive theory and practice, Marika Cifor and Stacy Wood (2017) offer us ways to unleash this subversive potential, activating the insights of critical and intersectional feminist theory to transform the potential of feminism for archives and the potential of archives for the dismantling of heteronormative, racist, and capitalist patriarchy. Such interventions must also be supported, however, by a political will to acknowledge the historical and relational links between archival material, archival knowledge, and archival labor. As archivist Kellee E. Warren (2016) notes, the scarcity of archival materials collected, owned, and governed by marginalized groups correlates with today’s archival profession, which remains largely populated by white and middle-class agents. It is therefore not enough to subject archival content to intersectional critique; we must also analyze the composition of that content’s labor and how these two factors intersect. And yet, as Cifor and Wood (2017) caution, a feminist praxis needs to be developed that aims to do more than merely attain better representation of women and minorities in particular archives. What is at stake is a praxis that fully challenges and uproots the oppressive systems that underpin archival reason and archival practices in general.

We argue that these lessons, learned from poststructuralist and more recent critical archival theory, can be productively harnessed in the field of big data studies to look at the new archives in which the crucial methods of appraisal, storage, and classification are once again being performed by a small group that exercises white patriarchal power over the rest of the world, with disproportionate impact. As Safiya Noble (2019) states, “Political struggles over the classification of knowledge have been with us since human beings have been documenting history. The politics of knowledge plays out in whose knowledge is captured, in what context and how it gets deployed.” Current practices of data production, collection, distribution, and consumption both build upon and draw from the history of theorizing the archive, even as they raise pertinent new questions that exceed the horizon of physical archives. To think about the politics of knowledge and of archiving in this way allows us to recognize the historical roots of current practices of data gathering, hoarding, storing, leaking, and wasting while also remembering that today’s seemingly streamlined interaction between human beings and our digital files and folders is every bit as messy, porous, and generative as archival encounters have always been.

Archival Turns and Returns

The archival operations associated with big data raise important political and epistemological questions that the “archival turn” in the humanities has addressed in relation to analog archives (Stoler 2002): questions about access, selection, exclusion, authority, lacunae, and silences. Both of the gestures that archives carry out—that is, selection and interpretation—gain new epistemological and political implications when we look at them in relation to the collection and use of big data. These central archival gestures have been scrutinized by scholars across different fields who have examined the limitations and possibilities of the archive. Within performance studies, thinkers such as Diana Taylor (2003) and Rebecca Schneider (2011) have questioned archival logic and its exclusion of (or failure to integrate) repertoires of embodied knowledge formed by gestures, voices, movement, flesh, and bone. At the same time, these theorizations have reconceptualized archives to propose that embodied practice offers alternative perspectives to those derived from conventional archival inscription. Such critiques are taken further by feminist and queer theories of the archive, which have pointed out that archival reason has overlooked the experiences of women and queer people and that these histories are often obscured within existing sources or discarded altogether (Stone and Cantrell 2016).

Literary theorist Ann Cvetkovich (2003) has famously argued for an “archive of feelings” to preserve everyday queer experiences that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a conventional archive. In response to this claim, historian Sara Edenheim (2013) has argued that the traditional archive is often a queer body of knowledge in and of itself, a disorderly, contingently organized place rather than a site of systematic order wherein information would give itself up for easy retrieval. For feminist and queer scholars, the archive often emerges as a place for the recovery of suppressed or marginalized histories, in recuperative projects of moving from silence to more inclusive discourses.

If archive theories have questioned the failure of archives to integrate embodied experience, it has also become clear that big data archives increasingly record and sort such embodiments for the purposes of surveillance and profit. Such all-encompassing archives have never sounded creepier or more intimidating, as the subjects of large-scale surveillance increasingly recognize that being archived and mapped comes with new and unforeseeable risks. This uncertainty gives rise to new data anxieties that call for new strategies to manage both data and uncertainty (Pink, Lanzeni, and Horst 2018). At a time when powerful companies are developing technologies that will purportedly detect a subject’s emotions—and even her state of health—from the sound of her voice, it is crucial to revisit such discussions to make sense of the repertoires of embodied experience that big data archives now track on a massive scale.

Related debates have taken place within African American, Caribbean, transatlantic, and postcolonial studies in relation to the archives of slavery and colonialism. Here, too, scholars have questioned both the capture and the exclusion of people of color in and from archives and the kind of knowledge that can be gleaned from the archives of the ruling classes—archives that dehumanize those under colonial rule (Fuentes 2016; Hartman 2008; Helton et al. 2015). At the same time, these studies have reminded us that the archives of slavery and colonialism continue to inform who counts as a human subject today (Browne 2015; Gikandi 2015) while also urging us to actively mobilize archives as instruments for social and restorative justice. Finally, these studies have called forth “new ways of both mining and undermining the evidence of the archive” (Arondekar, quoted by Nadim in this volume) in order to restore the subjectivity denied to those accounted and unaccounted for by these archives (Fuentes 2016; Hartman 2008; Kazanjian 2016). Such contributions remain relevant to understanding and challenging the processes through which digitization and datafication subject already vulnerable individuals and communities to new harms and exclusions, disproportionate visibility, and unequal life chances (Benjamin 2019a, 2019b; Browne 2015; Gates 2011; Nakamura 2009; Noble 2018; Wang 2017). By drawing attention to the need to uproot oppressive systems and imagine new modes of redress and freedom, these reflections also prompt us to forge new imaginaries of contestation under datafied conditions.

Alongside these approaches, the field of critical archival studies has questioned the metaphorical use of the concept of the archive in humanities scholarship, where “the archive” emerges “as an abstract, depopulated space, untouched by human labor and laborers” (Whearty 2018). Critical archival scholars have urged humanities researchers to consider “actually existing archives,” as well as to acknowledge the intellectual contribution of archival science scholars, in order to advance critical work on archival reason (Caswell 2016). We are inspired by the call for exchange between these disciplines, and we want this book to take that work further by bringing critical archival perspectives into dialogue with fields such as critical data studies. Critical archival studies have been pivotal in questioning archival praxis from the perspectives of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and decolonial studies, drawing attention to affective responsibilities in archival practice, the often invisible and gendered labor of archivists, the materiality of digital archives, the ethical challenges of archiving sensitive material, the need to advocate for and with marginalized and vulnerable communities, and the relevance of archives for human rights and social justice (Caswell and Cifor 2016; Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand 2017; Cifor 2015, 2016; Cifor and Wood 2017; Ghaddar 2016; Sutherland 2017a; Williams and Drake 2017). Here, we make the case for mobilizing such critiques of archival reason and practice for a critical analysis of big data repositories. In doing so, we show that the piecing together of information in big data archives is not a neutral pursuit; that both capture and exclusion have important ethical consequences; and that archives always have been and remain, into the age of the digital, contested sites of power, knowledge, risk, and possibility.

Uncertainty as a Contemporary Condition

As the above outline of archive scholarship shows, uncertainty is inherent to archival practices: the archive as a site of knowledge is fraught with unknowns, errors, and vulnerabilities that remain equally present in, and are indeed amplified by the sheer, constitutive scale of big data archives. In our view, the uncertainty endemic to archives is enhanced by the emergence of datafication, with its complicity in systems of neoliberal global governance, authoritarian regimes, and the massive dispossession that has been wrought by wars and climate change—a global context wherein uncertainty has become a function of disruption complicit with, rather than resistant to, power. This book is therefore intended as a response to this situation; moreover, through its sixty-one entries it charts multiple routes into conceptualizing and speaking about uncertainty in the contemporary moment.

Uncertainty, and the question of what is perceived as uncertainty, has a long and complex history closely interlinked with questions of power. Uncertainty is integral to many of the scholarly strands that underlie data science, including probability and statistics. If the 1990s and early 2000s were dominated by a discourse of risk, with references to the risk economy, risk society, securitization, and a host of related terms, recent years have instead seen researchers in different disciplines beginning to call for a finer, more nuanced differentiation between uncertainty and risk (Amoore and Raley 2017; Ellison 2016; Keeling 2019; Schüll 2014). These researchers do much to demonstrate that this cultural condition gives rise to new forms of governance that work productively with uncertainty, harnessing its affective potential. Uncertainty has emerged in this way as an engine of creativity and innovation, bearing the positive potential to change how information is held and employed (Esposito 2012; Parisi 2013).

Our present times are thus imbued with a “spirit of uncertainty,” a mood or backdrop pertaining to social life as a whole (Appadurai 2012, 7). Uncertainty is the crux of neoliberal governance’s dilemma of security and freedom: if modern governments demanded scientific predictability, universality, and rationality, today’s globalized economies now demand a future that is open to risk-taking and not entirely calculable yet still somehow subject to a degree of control and predictability (O’Malley 2009). Nowhere is this tension between risk and uncertainty, and the presence of conflicting desires for freedom and security, more visible than in the way big data are used and stored (Amoore and Raley 2017). On one hand, private corporations and governments across the globe promote big data as effective solution to deal with informational uncertainty, risks, and unknowns. Big data’s promise of accurate calculations, precise predictions, and preemptions speaks to contemporary concerns about the taming of social, economic, financial, environmental, and political risks. On the other hand, as N. Katherine Hayles (2017) has demonstrated in her work on high-frequency trading, the very same companies and governments also exploit big data as drivers of creativity and high-gain opportunity. Uncertainty and control are therefore embraced by technocapitalism on an equal basis.

If we situate our rethinking of the archive within this regime of controlling uncertainty—which is simultaneously political, technological, and cultural—we can understand big data archives not simply as rational apparatuses but also as reflections of a political and social reality in which uncertainty is profoundly feared and yet simultaneously embraced as potentially disruptive and even desirable (Thylstrup and Veel 2020). Moreover, as Louise Amoore (2019) shows, we can also understand big data archives as raising questions about our very definitions of uncertainty and doubt in relation to certainty and truth. Uncertainties in the age of big data can feel very frightening indeed. For instance, there are clearly political and financial gains to be made from the uncertainty attached to new data regimes. The dataveillance of social media users by big data firms—such as Cambridge Analytica, which the Trump and Brexit campaigns employed for personalized political advertising via Facebook—was made possible by the unregulated, cross-border transmission of Internet user data; legal protections were only brought in post hoc, in the form of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, implemented in 2018 and only partially applicable in the rest of the world. At the same time, it is questionable whether the psychographic targeting employed by Cambridge Analytica and many other big data companies was the sole reason for the referendum and election results in the US and Britain: to blame data harvesting and Russian data farms for these results risks diverting attention from the systemic racism, economic inequality, and rising fascism that corrode both countries. Meanwhile, deep fakes—hyperrealistic AI-generated videos that mimic people’s most fine-grained expressions, portraying them as doing or saying things they never did or said—introduce a frightening uncertainty that contrasts with the certainty supposedly heralded by policing regimes of prediction through facial recognition. Increasingly, however, we also see moments of resistance when individuals and collectives turn toward uncertainty, despite its co-optation by risk regimes, as a mode of contestation that can undermine archival authority. If uncertainty is taken as a value of indeterminacy that can challenge dominant regimes of control, it has the potential, given the right circumstances, to change the way information is held and employed and even to restore to marginalized individuals and groups the ability to contest dominant organizations of information.

Beyond the Glossary

The idea of creating a glossary of central concepts in contemporary data regimes was suggested twice during workshops held by the Uncertain Archives group: Catherine D’Ignazio and Mushon Zer-Aviv presented the idea of a dictionary of uncertainty as an early art/design intervention for the project at the first workshop; later, in 2017, Orit Halpern independently suggested the idea of a dictionary of uncertainties for big data at a postworkshop lunch. We combined these forces and ideas, and we subsequently consulted and were inspired by other projects that use keywords as a format for knowledge production across disciplines—for instance, Speculation Now, edited by Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Carin Kuoni; Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova; Cultural Anthropology’s “Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen,” edited by Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian; The Infrastructure Toolbox, edited by Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta; Environmental Humanities’ “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities”; Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller; and Transgender Studies Quarterly’s “Keywords.” We also realize that this form of knowledge production has a longer lineage in single-author endeavors such as Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords and in multiauthor projects such as the cultural-theoretical lexicon provided by Theory, Culture and Society with the apt title “Problematizing Global Knowledge,” edited by Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Ryan Bishop, and John Phillips with Pal Ahluwalia, Roy Boyne, Chua Beng Huat, John Hutnyk, Scott Lash, Maria Esther Maciel, George Marcus, Aihwa Ong, Roland Robertson, Bryan Turner, Shiv Visvanathan, and Shunya Yoshimi. What this book has in common with these projects is a desire to problematize, stake out, and contribute new knowledges and perspectives, as well as to develop new forms of knowledge production.

Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data is a glossary with essay-length entries that set out, each in turn, to interrogate the meanings of a particular term. Each entry contains its own mini bibliography of works cited that may be taken as a starting point for further reading. Form and content are thus intertwined, in ways that make the book in its multivocal and dialogical nature a performative enactment of the uncertainty of archives. This performative dimension is perhaps best captured by reading the glossary as a heteroglossia, a term stemming from Russian literary theorist and linguist Mikhail Bakhtin’s translation of raznorechie, meaning “different speechness.” Heteroglossia is a broader concept than polyphony since it describes the interaction not only of coexisting but also of conflicting voices, linked to different cultural meanings, ideologies, and materialities within the same linguistic space. We regard this book as such a centrifugal force, spinning out and thereby performing a diversification of thinking about datafication by circling the multiplicity of ways in which the uncertainty of big data archives can be identified and conceptualized.

The book goes beyond the glossary format by offering interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogues between scholars, activists, and artists from a multitude of disciplines. All of them make contributions that will be valuable to an interdisciplinary audience working on datafication and big data archives, and they refer to each other’s chapters to build their arguments throughout the book. In this way, the book takes forward a conversation that we deem acutely necessary to address our age of big data, the uncertainties big data bring, and their political, ethical, and social implications, as well as reflections of those implications in cultural expressions of all kinds. Therefore, the book aims to make a significant intervention in the field of critical data studies by reconceptualizing and infusing new meaning into established terms while also proposing new concepts to make sense of the epistemological, political, and ethical dimensions of big data.

Many terms included in this glossary have different meanings depending on the disciplines that use them. For instance, terms such as aggregation (Lehmann), executing (Critical Software Thing), latency (Veel), proxies (Chun, Levin, and Tollmann), reparative (Dirckinck-Holmfeld), values (Seberger and Bowker) have various, sometimes disparate, meanings in different disciplinary contexts. While acknowledging that these terms are complex in their polysemy, we believe that apparently inconsonant frameworks can generate especially fruitful interdisciplinary dialogues precisely by virtue of the uncertainty of their differing terminologies. Therefore, the glossary seeks to bring together differing meanings in order to shed light on the multidimensionality of big data and to stress the necessity for an interdisciplinary approach when one engages with big data phenomena and their reverberations. Furthermore, by expanding the study of big data to fields such as literature and art history, which have only recently begun to inquire into these phenomena, the book posits that the study of big data has significance beyond conventional disciplinary interests, as the gathering and use of data increasingly shape our everyday lives. The book’s recognition of the inherent transdisciplinarity of the terms it includes thus challenges the limits of available vocabularies; it also offers valuable counterweights to the centripetal forces of data informatics as they aim to integrate, tame, and optimize everything. Here, we offer a nonexhaustive mapping of some of the flows and constellations that emerge from the book as a whole. We invite our readers to seek out even more connections and clashes.

Thematic Flows and Constellations

The book’s guiding assumption is that any issue related to big data is interdisciplinary at heart, such that the topic of big data requires a response rooted in collective and collaborative forms of knowledge production. As a result, the book’s approach is collective: it adopts the shared frameworks of intersecting critical languages to inject a productive uncertainty into the vocabulary of digital studies. It does so by pointing to terms that escape the disciplinary fixities and modes of engagement that tend to separate otherwise intersecting processes of knowledge production and political issues into distinct fields. For instance, we argue that computational errors are at once material phenomena, epistemological concepts, and cognitive processes and that we need to regard them as such in order to understand their complexity.

These new systems of complexity not only span a spectrum from pure mechanical operations to human thought processes but also entangle these in complex new ways. Such systems are invariably called AI, machine learning, and more, but as N. Katherine Hayles (unthought) and Luciana Parisi (instrumentality) show in their chapters, they are infinitely more complex than the often reductive discourses about AI as merely “smart.” These systems not only force us to rethink what we mean by intelligence and cognitive processes but also—as Caroline Bassett (expertise), Celia Lury (shifters), and Ulrik Ekman (conversational agents) show—fundamentally reorder our systems of expertise, agency, and interaction.

Moreover, they give rise to new questions about representation and perception, as demonstrated in the entries by Johanna Drucker (visualization), Daniel Rosenberg (word), Frederik Tygstrup (figura), Kristoffer Ørum (throbber), and Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold (interface). These shifts raise questions not only of epistemology and ontology but also, fundamentally, of power. What does it mean, for instance, to misread data? Lisa Gitelman muses on this question in her contribution on misreading, showing how this seemingly mundane term in fact raises questions central to big data studies in terms of both precision and power. As Gitelman notes, transposing two numerals is misreading as fact, while failing to understand an author’s statement can be misreading in much less certain terms. Moreover, the outcome of such misreading depends on who is in power since misreading as misunderstanding lies in the eye of the beholder: it depends, as Gitelman notes, on who calls the shots. And as Amelia Acker points out (metadata), we must ask not only what it means to classify and misclassify something but also who gets to determine and uphold structures of knowledge.

Such questions about knowledge organization and the disciplinary and political structures that uphold it are not only of practical importance; as outlined by Miriam Posner (supply chain), Nanna Bonde Thylstrup (error) and Timon Beyes (organization), they are also a matter of imaginaries and mythologies. These imaginaries often open up to the softer power dynamics of seduction and complicity. Indeed, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has previously shown, the cyberspace imaginary was predicated on seductive and sexualized imaginaries from its inception (Chun 2011). In his entry on pornography, Patrick Keilty discusses PornHub as a supreme example of the intersection of big data archives and desirous imaginaries, making explicit big data industries’ “vast surveillance powers as well as their reliance on the public fascination with data’s promise to reveal something about us to ourselves.” On one hand, such surveillance regimes rely on not only meeting data subjects’ desires and imaginaries but also preempting them. As Manu Luksch shows in her contribution on prediction, data capitalism thus relies on harnessing the imaginary powers of predictive technologies, often with devastating effects. Yet, on the other hand, as Luksch also reminds us, the subversive power of the critical imagination can never be fully mapped, archived, or controlled. Marika Cifor describes how these “twin logics of empowerment and exploitation” coexist in her analysis of affect in relation to the AIDS Memorial. In the entry on executing, the Critical Software Thing collective offers us one meditation on how such resistance appears, showing how formal systems and affective bodies expose their own indeterminacy in computational systems. Such moments of evasion and refusal can be strategically engineered as obfuscation (Mushon Zer-Aviv), but they are also a fact of life itself, full as it is of unpredictability, unknowns, and unknowables (Elena Esposito).

In addition to cultural imaginaries, datafication processes also rely on the material. In her entry on performative measure, Kate Elswit shows how data get visceral to approximate, measure, and capture even the most basic, sustaining processes of human life respiration. Information converges and clashes in big data archives not only on the level of political ideologies but also across different materials: papers and shelves intermingle with wires, fingers with touch pads, sweat with blood, and dust with DNA. As Mél Hogan points out, the speculative imaginaries of information storage and transmission are transforming, from the materiality of metals to the body itself as an archive from which value can be extracted. Her contribution on DNA explores current attempts to use DNA as an archive, as well as how the speculative work of these scientists reflects a much longer-lived archival desire to “conserve and theorize the vast traces of thought and feeling that forever evade the archive—the secret, lost, destroyed, and dismembered.” In contrast to the microscopic scale of DNA, Shannon Mattern’s entry on field shows how archives emerge at the level of the Anthropocene, materially compressing multiple temporalities and bringing together ancient and cutting-edge forms of preservation. In this respect, archives emerge against a backdrop that combines the long-term temporal spans of evolution with the short-term span of digital circuits. These material archives, as Nicole Starosielski shows in her entry on cooling, are uncertain in not only informational but also material terms, and they are dependent on the uncertainties of climate change even as they map those very uncertainties. Contributions by Orit Halpern (demo) and Lila Lee-Morrison (drone) demonstrate how technological cultures work to uphold regimes of material violence and military engagement.

At the heart of these entanglements of new and old power structures, imaginaries, and materialities lies the question of how temporality as (sometimes imagined) past actions sticks to and coproduces imagined and lived-out futures. As Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund argue in their chapter on time.now, new machinic systems inaugurate a new temporal order through their material operations. But what happens when the archive is over? Lisa Blackman outlines the concept of hauntology to help us understand the ghostly agency that data retain long after they have fulfilled the instrumentalist purpose of their collection. And as Kristin Veel shows in her entry on latency, such temporalities are a question not only of materiality but also of mental topographies. New sociomaterial temporalities have given rise to new ethical dilemmas and problematics that pertain not least to negotiations of power.

Combining these folds and transformations of archival temporalities, materialities, and imaginaries gives rise to new mechanisms of oppression and empowerment that sometimes clash and sometimes intersect with older structural forms of oppression. One pervasive structural force is the persistence of coloniality, alluded to in different ways by Tahani Nadim’s discussion of database imaginaries and Roopika Risam’s notion of the digital cultural record within digital humanities. As Minh-Ha T. Pham shows in her chapter on copynorms, the seemingly technical question of copyright—the legal governance infrastructure that subtends much of the digital economy—is as much a normative framework shaped by colonialism and racism as it is a juridical figure upholding globalization’s technological infrastructures. Similarly, by reading mapping alongside migration, Sumita S. Chakravarty illuminates how the mapping mechanisms that are such a pervasive feature of our everyday computational systems are underpinned by both technological affordances and colonial ambitions, raising questions not only about how things and people can be mapped but also to what end, by whom, and to what effect (migrationmapping). In her contribution on technoheritage, artist and researcher Nora Al-Badri, cocreator of the Nefertiti Hack, shows how cultural heritage institutions and their digitization practices extend colonial legacies of looting, dispossession, and gatekeeping and asks how technology can be radically mobilized toward decolonization and restitution.

Critical race theorist Alana Lentin also claims that the assumed neutrality of the algorithm serves to obscure the underside of modernity—its racialized subjects and colonized others. In her discussion of algorithmic racism, Lentin makes the crucial point that networked communications do not only contain racial bias within them; in fact, racism is integral to the way technology is operationalized, just as it is integral to liberal societies. Extending earlier studies by Lisa Nakamura (2008), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2012), and Safiya Noble (2018) on race, technology, and the Internet, Lentin also points to how the deployment of algorithms supports the proliferation of hate speech online. The widespread belief in algorithms’ better ability to manage outcomes—because they are supposedly immune to racial and other forms of bias—is consistent with the notions of free speech and the neutrality of platforms and with the view that all ideas deserve an airing, leading to a constant stream of racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic content that “does not need” to be regulated. As Tonia Sutherland explores in her entry on remains, racism also structures the logics of digital and datafied archives in the ways in which Black people and communities continue to be rendered as commodities and spectacle—even after their deaths, when their remains are resurrected for profit through digital afterlives. In her entry on natural, artist Mimi Onuoha notes that data-driven stories concerning Black subjects too often begin from an assumption of disenfranchisement and perpetuate deficit narratives about brutality and suffering, a tendency exacerbated by advances in corporate and state surveillance applications of machine learning and automated decision-making systems. Rather than calling for a redress of such narratives in the form of archival counternarratives, Onuoha seeks to carve out space for herself, within digital space, where she can devise her own mode of existence.

Colonialism’s and racism’s pervasive archival infrastructures of power are always accompanied by gendered dynamics of oppression and discrimination. These come in the form of making-invisible, sexualization, infantilization, and misrecognition in several layers of technologies and logics, dealt with in contributions by Catherine D’Ignazio (outlier), Miriam E. Sweeney (digital assistants), and Aristea Fotopoulou and Tanya Kant (bots). As Craig Robertson’s media-historical contribution on file shows, the logic of disembodiment in information handling is shaped by a historical trajectory in which women were once visible as infantilized yet capable information handlers, only to disappear from view as laboring bodies receded into the background of computer systems, which today take center stage. Rebecca Schneider, meanwhile, uses the concept of the glitch to describe the aesthetics of error employed by feminist performance artist Carolee Schneeman to rupture social norms and routine operations.

Media history shines a light on the making invisible of women in the field of information-handling and computational systems, but gendered lines of oppression also cross through the logic of quantification that structures big data archives and datafication practices. As Os Keyes points out in their essay on (mis)gendering, these lines of oppression remain lodged in the binary imaginary of data science, which at once excludes trans experience from its binary organization of information and at the same time keeps trans people looped in through static gender narratives drawn from archival material from their pretransition lives. Therefore, as Jacqueline Wernimont points out, the logic and practice of quantification is never “merely” descriptive but is always already engaged in the processes by which bodies and people have become and are becoming visible to themselves, to others, to nation-states, and to globalized governance regimes. Indeed, as Olga Goriunova shows in her entry on stand-in, such standardization processes produce the imaginary of an average that never aligns with the richness of empirical reality and that indeed looms as a threat to those who find themselves replaced by standardized models.

The visibilization afforded by quantification is often given in terms of imperfectly counted steps, pounds, and heartbeats, and the value of data is often calculated through the lenses of late capitalist paradigms. Yet, as Wernimont notes, this is sometimes preferable to the condition of those excluded from even this basic form of recognition. Thus, as Wernimont notes with reference to Diane Nelson, quantification is “both essential and insufficient, dehumanizing and reparative, necessary and complicated” (Nelson 2015, xi). Contributions by David Lyon (sorting) and Sarah T. Roberts (abuse) explore the ways in which subjects are made vulnerable differentially through their interactions with, and subjection to, big data regimes. Yet, as Birkan Taş points out, there also lies great power in reclaiming and embracing such vulnerability. Taş shows that by integrating disability as a critical category of analysis, we might broaden our understanding of big data and, more importantly, open up modes of engagement and care that have potential for a politics of noncompliance.

Increased concern about the harmful effects of the predictive and preemptive algorithmic extraction and analysis of data has brought ethics to the center of public discourse on big data. Over the last couple of years, several research projects and institutes devoted to data ethics have started to flourish, national and supranational councils on data ethics have been founded, and corporations have begun to integrate data ethics into their vocabularies and policies. Researchers and critics regard these developments with suspicion, worrying that the corporatization and legislation of ethics has resulted in an impoverished understanding of ethics that centers individual responsibility and institutional liability rather than confronting—and working to redress—structural discrimination and power differentials. Concepts such as bias, fairness, accountability, and transparency increasingly come under scrutiny as locating the source of discrimination in individual behavior or technical systems, rather than identifying, confronting, and upending the social inequities that underlie those technical systems (Bennett and Keyes 2019; Dave 2019; Hoffmann 2019). In response, scholars advocate grounding sociotechnical systems in concepts from social justice, which, they argue, more pointedly confront the interlocking systems of oppression that technologies perpetuate while taking up the task of imagining other worlds and modes of existence (Benjamin 2019a, 2019b; Costanza-Chock 2020; D’Ignazio and Klein 2020).

Several chapters in this volume contribute to, complicate, and advance this ongoing debate. Louise Amoore, in her entry on ethics, introduces an important distinction between “ethics for algorithms” and “the ethics of the algorithm.” The former concept coincides with the ethical considerations described above, where the emphasis is on the human responsibility to devise an ethical framework with which algorithms must comply and to institute arrangements that are good, ethical, and normative. With “the ethics of the algorithm,” or “cloud ethics,” Amoore draws attention to the overlooked fact that the algorithm already presents itself as an ethicopolitical arrangement of values, assumptions, and propositions about the world. Amoore thus urges us to rethink the relation between algorithms and ethics beyond current ethical frameworks, emphasizing that the conditions of an algorithm’s emergence are already “venues for ethical responsibility”: those conditions do not so much transgress established societal norms as surface new parameters of behavior and political possibility, thereby changing our relations with ourselves and others.

With her entry on care, Daniela Agostinho draws attention to feminist conceptions of ethics that complicate and enrich current debates, which tend to dismiss ethics as a framework for thinking about datafication. Drawing on decolonial and Black feminist theories of care, Agostinho repositions care ethics as a radical mode of engagement and refusal—one that is firmly aligned with, rather than antithetical to, claims for justice and liberation. Romi Ron Morrison (flesh) similarly argues that appeals to ethics- and rights-based discourses fail to contend with the systemic violence that undergirds those very ethical frameworks, inherited as they are from modern Enlightenment epistemes. Claiming that the racializing logics of measurement and quantification that underlie big data processes need to be radically dismantled, Morrison proposes flesh as a critical site that interrupts extractive modes of knowledge. As a figuration of Blackness, flesh is thus conjured as a radical mode of ontological uncertainty, unknowability, and refusal to be parsed.

Brooklyne Gipson, Frances Corry, and Safiya Umoja Noble offer a different route into debates on data justice by foregrounding intersectionality as a research methodology rooted in Black feminist technology studies. Extending Kimberlé Crenshaw’s analytic to the field of technology, Gipson, Corry, and Noble discuss how intersectional approaches take into account interlocking systems of oppression to reveal unmarked normative value systems of whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity in the mass collection and organization of data. As an alternative epistemology, intersectionality is offered as a data justice approach that exposes and challenges the value systems upon which big data operate while also highlighting the ways that large data sets might be conceived, designed, and used intersectionally. Media scholar Tara L. Conley, founder of the Hashtag Feminism Archive, introduces the term hashtag archiving as a feminist and antiracist approach to capturing and preserving social media data within the uncertain conditions of hashtagged data spaces. In particular, she analyzes the ethical implications of hashtag archiving trauma, such as instances of police violence against Black people, with the example of the early moments following Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson in 2014, as well as the ethical implications of annotating protest movements such as #MeToo, which rely on stories of personal and community trauma. Conley offers recommendations for ethical hashtag archiving that aim to preserve the political and social context of archived moments, as well as to ensure the safety of those most vulnerable to surveillance, sexual violence, and all kinds of online and offline vitriol.

These discussions of ethics and social justice raise the crucial question of how we are to move forward and what strategies are at our disposal or need to be imagined to make for a different datafied world. A critical point of debate in this context concerns the ethics of everyday technology use, such as practices of self-tracking detailed by Natasha Dow Schüll, and the extent of everyday complicity with data capitalism. Pepita Hesselberth’s chapter on detox critically addresses the desire to disconnect, which often emerges as a tactical solution to withdraw and “opt out” from digitally saturated life. Hesselberth demonstrates how the tactics of disconnection and detox can reiterate connectivity under neoliberal conditions—for instance, through disconnection apps, digital retreats, or the data detox. While solutions such as disconnection apps and retreats usually aim to “rehabilitate” subjects for better functioning within connective and capitalist economies, the data detox paradoxically shows that the way to resist contemporary dataveillance is through more technology and new and better algorithms. Hesselberth thus points to the limitations of withdrawal imaginaries and the technological solutionism and privileged subjectivities on which they are premised. The concepts of withdrawal and disconnection are also key to Annie Ring’s investigation of the meaning of complicity as a habitual, even unconscious, implication of technology users in wrongdoing in the form of surveillance, discrimination, antidemocratic data manipulations, and climate crisis. Ring argues that it is as impossible as it is problematic to disconnect completely from data-mining devices. She therefore makes the case for engaged alliances of software designers, policy-makers, activists, artists, humanities theorists of technology, and even AI itself, both to regulate existing data regimes and to design new technologies and new media environments oriented toward the more ethical values of protection, justice, consent, and meaningful connection.

Our hope for the collective analysis set out in this book is that it works together in precisely such an alliance. Collectively, the keywords analyze what big data have come to signify in recent years for the experience of being human, with all its uncertainties. Furthermore, each chapter proposes ways forward for understanding big data, bringing about data justice, and developing a more ethical imagination of the future of big data and their roles in both archiving and creating knowledge.

Addendum: Big Data and the Coronavirus Pandemic

As we are finishing this book, we are reeling from the start of a global pandemic and living through a very uncertain time indeed. Most of this book’s writers and editors are in lockdown, a protective measure to prevent the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus that the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in early 2020. Critical data studies are, we argue, even more urgently needed at this time. Data about people’s health and movements need to be gathered and analyzed quickly to improve epidemiologists’ understanding about contagion and immunity, and tracking apps are being launched to slow the spread of the virus. Critical analysis is also essential with regard to the data we already have for instance, data that show the virus is killing different groups of people at different rates. People of color, key workers, people with preexisting medical conditions, and populations without access to space in which to protect themselves and loved ones are dying in greater numbers. The virus emerged into an already extremely unequal world in which data had already been mined, traded, and abused by governments and big data companies alike. Data about the virus cannot be left vulnerable to the abuses we have seen. We sincerely hope that the approaches to big data put forward in this book can shape the critical analysis that is now even more urgently needed.

Notes

1. Regrettably, this strategic funding was dismantled in subsequent years because a male Danish professor accused it of being in conflict with European Union competition regulations, on the grounds that it primarily supported women researchers.

2. Such work functions as both process and infrastructure, thus further tying in with the recent wellspring of progressive and radical research environments that employ feminist, decolonial, transdisciplinary, and citizen science approaches. These environments include labs and research institutions such as the Technoscience Research Unit, irLH, CLEAR (Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research), and the Data + Feminism Lab; networks such as Decolonizing Design and the Design Justice Network; research centers such as the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University and the Center for Internet and Society in Bengaluru and Delhi; and digital humanities infrastructures such as DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory).

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1

Abuse

Sarah T. Roberts

Introduction: Content Moderation and Archives as Practice and Metaphor

Content moderation, or the adjudication of online user-generated content (UGC), is as much a practice of what is not seen as what is. Particularly when industrialized and done at scale, it has a direct impact on the landscape and ecology of social media platforms by acting as a bidirectional gatekeeping mechanism for both what is allowed to stay up as well as what is deleted. The latter can rarely ever be perceived or apprehended in a meaningful way, leading to negative consequences. In a study on user perceptions of online content moderation, Sarah Myers West (2018) found that such lack of transparency leads users to “develop ‘folk theories’ about how platforms work: in the absence of authoritative explanations, they strive to make sense of content moderation processes by drawing connections between related phenomena, developing non-authoritative conceptions of why and how their content was removed.”

Yet great significance can be derived from the corpus of what might, in an unanalyzed state, be considered piecemeal and individual digital errata/detritus (Roberts 2018). For this volume dedicated to the uncertain, unruly, disobedient archive, I probe the erasure en masse of ostensibly abusive, problematic, dangerous, and disturbing material from the landscape of the mainstream social Internet, the mechanisms that encourage its attempted circulation in the first place, and its subsequent aggregation, under computational lock and key, in a digital repository archive—records captured (in this case, digital imagery and video) in a one-way relationship in which the material is intended to get in and never get out.

In order to apprehend the meaning of both the capturing process and the resulting archive, I connect the discussion to theoretical breakthroughs from the field of critical archival studies that have pushed back on conceptions of archival neutrality and the field’s homogeneity; that have changed the focus to community-oriented archives; and that have imagined liberatory, social justice-oriented, and human rights frameworks for archives (Caswell 2014b; Punzalan and Caswell 2015; Sutherland 2017; Wood et al. 2014).

Such insights often unfairly suffer from a disciplinary cloistering, lessening their key impact or uptake in discussions of, on the one hand, mainstream (and self-styled apolitical or neutral) archival practice and, on the other, sociological, anthropological, and humanities takes on “the archive” that often engage relatively little with the archival theory and practice behind the object of study: the monolithic, abstract, and often titular “archive.” This dialogue within critical archival studies has much to offer, however, to the nature and import of these corpora in toto—in theory and in practice. Here I am indebted to that field’s task of “trying to read [the archive’s] narratives of power and knowledge” (Ketelaar 2001, 132) in order to make sense of the case of one particular archive as a social and political object of great power and of the assemblage of people, practices, and processes that demand that it exist.

I note that several terms used in this chapter are themselves in flux and contested. These include, but are not limited to, the very definition of archive, particularly when juxtaposed with database. Library studies scholar Marlene Manoff (2010, 385) attests to this fact in her work:

When scholars outside library and archival science use the word “archive” or when those outside information technology fields use the word “database,” they almost always mean something broader and more ambiguous than experts in these fields using those same words. The disciplinary boundaries within which these terms have been contained are eroding. . . . But archive and database have also evolved into increasingly contested terms used to theorize digital culture and new forms of collective memory.

This chapter wrestles with the kind of slippage and application of metaphor that Manoff describes in its treatment of the case of PhotoDNA, a largely automated, algorithm-reliant product that exists in a definitional boundary space and to contested ends.

AI to the Rescue?

To combat the dual problem of legal liability and brand damage from the worst kind of content, as well as content moderation worker burnout and harm from exposure (Hadley 2017), mainstream platforms have increasingly pinned their hopes on the potential of automation via algorithm to address content they wish to remove from their sites before users see it. The hope is that computational mechanisms based on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) could provide a way to fully extract the human element from the production chain while ensuring totally routinized adherence to internal adjudication policy. Such an approach to solving platforms’ content problems, however, does little to nothing to stem the uploading of UGC or the impetus behind it but instead addresses its inclusion on the platform after it has already been added. It is, in short, a largely technological solution to a complex assemblage of social problems (Gillespie 2017). This sort of technological solutionism is typically favored by Silicon Valley, which frequently imagines AI as preferable to a perceived fundamental inequity in the application of rules, norms, and procedures when humans are involved and when rote and reproducible results are desired (Klonick 2018). Yet the application of such tools is predicated on inherent abstraction and flattening of meaning, resulting in a reduction of all human processes into a pastiche made up of an algorithmic, flowchartable, if-then logic structure. It is a logic better suited to some situations than others.

Unfortunately for Silicon Valley firms subscribing to this view, ML and AI-based automation have largely not reached the point where they can reliably fully take over moderation functions, on both technological and economic grounds. This is due in large part to the nature of much, but not all, UGC: newly generated material that a user has created that exists nowhere else in the world, containing a complex combination of symbols, imagery, and other cultural artifacts that together convey overall meaning. For content like this, it is still cheaper and more expedient to apply a human evaluation whenever that content is flagged (Crawford and Gillespie 2016).

In cases in which objectionable content is already known to exist and has been uploaded and removed in the past, however, there is a solution. It applies to the most difficult content with which commercial content moderators contend, which also creates the greatest legal liability for platforms: child sexual exploitation and abuse material. For that, PhotoDNA was created.

PhotoDNA

In 2008, Microsoft and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) invited then-Dartmouth computer scientist Hany Farid to a meeting of technology and social media firms contending with the circulation of child sexual exploitation material—capturing the sexual abuse of children—on their platforms.[1] Although these firms varied in their products and market positions, they all fundamentally relied upon attracting and maintaining a user base via the capture and sharing of UGC, some subset of which contained this disturbing, illegal material.

The intractability of the problem of removing this content from platforms was identified as existing in two registers: technological and economic. As Farid (2018, 594) described in an article on PhotoDNA’s history and technology, “Throughout the day of that first meeting, I repeatedly heard that it is incredibly difficult to automatically and efficiently scrub [child sexual exploitation material] from online platforms without interfering with the business interests of the titans of tech represented in the room.” In other words, Farid was keenly aware that one way to contend with the seemingly endless problem of such material uploaded as UGC would be to slow that fire hose down, move more resources over to human moderation, and change the content-based business model on platforms. Due to the economic interests invested in carrying on with the status quo, it was clear to him that this route was not even up for debate. Instead, the group focused its attention on a technological solution—one that, for his part, Farid felt was likely out of the realm of technological possibility.

A large portion of online child sexual exploitation material has one peculiar feature: it is frequently both extant and known to law enforcement and groups such as NCMEC. Indeed, NCMEC already possessed a repository of some one million images and videos at the time of the meeting (Farid 2018, 594). Although it was still a complicated computer science problem to automate its identification and removal, an existing significant corpus of material against which to compare new UGC allowed Farid to foresee a means of computational automation to at least deal with the recirculation of known material. Farid developed a process of ascribing hashing algorithms to images in the database of known child sexual exploitation content that could then be automatically compared to uploaded UGC on any subscribing platform or service. The powerful breakthrough for Farid’s technology was its ability to contend with successfully automating the material’s identification even when the original image had been altered, edited, or compressed. The end result was a product that could be deployed to automate the moderation process of this pernicious and disturbing type of UGC. As Farid (2018, 596) explained:

After a year and a half of development and testing, photoDNA [sic] was launched in 2009 on Microsoft’s SkyDrive and search engine Bing. In 2010, Facebook deployed photoDNA on their entire network. In 2011, Twitter followed suit, while Google waited until 2016 to deploy. In addition to these titans of technology, photoDNA is now in worldwide deployment. In 2016, with an NCMEC-supplied database of approximately 80,000 images, photoDNA was responsible for removing over 10,000,000 [child sexual exploitation] images, without any disputed take-downs. This database could just as easily be three orders of magnitude bigger, giving you a sense of the massive scale of the global production and distribution of [child sexual exploitation].

An Uncertain Archive of Abuse

The PhotoDNA project has done much to curb the circulation and distribution of child sexual exploitation imagery known to law enforcement – for those mainstream social media platforms using the service. It has also taken the human commercial content moderators out of the loop of needing to review these known disturbing and criminal images and videos, one of the most difficult aspects of the job. Nevertheless, there are drawbacks, some of which Farid alludes to in his article on the project. As he notes, very little can be done to automate the removal of material that has been newly produced or is otherwise unknown to the PhotoDNA digital archive. For this removal, commercial content moderators are still the front line; indeed, every moderator I have spoken to in the course of my nine years researching this labor has indicated that he or she has witnessed and dealt with this material.

Per Farid, this is a problem unlikely to abate, and neither content moderators nor AI are likely to be able to change the aspects of human nature that compel people to abuse others and trade in depictions of that abuse. But it also remains to be fully understood to what extent the platforms themselves have provoked an impetus for the generation and circulation of such material, given that indiscriminate and endless UGC uploads, circulation, and consumption are at the core of their revenue generation. In short, a subset of the world’s population engages in child sexual exploitation material as producers and consumers, and they have found an expedient and powerful mechanism to circulate that material via social media and other UGC-reliant platforms (such as file-sharing tools).

Paradoxically, the solution that platforms and computer scientists have developed is not to remove all traces of this material, which can frequently be used as evidence in criminal prosecutions and the mere possession or circulation of which typically constitutes a crime. Instead, a fundamental part of the process of removing child sexual exploitation content on a mainstream social media site is, bizarrely, to archive it: it is subsumed into the PhotoDNA digital database to be cataloged, hashed, and used for matching purposes against the new uploads that never cease. For these reasons, digital records of someone’s victimization will exist in perpetuity. It is not clear to what extent the victims themselves are aware of this fact. There is conflation, too, of the business needs of the UGC hosts with a legal and moral responsibility to intervene upon this material. As Microsoft’s (n.d.) own PhotoDNA landing page proclaims, “Help stop the spread of child exploitation images and protect your business,” suggesting a practical, if not moral, equivalency between the two.

There is a deep uncertainty in the resulting archive produced by technologies such as PhotoDNA: it is fundamentally unknown, unknowable, and inaccessible and exists expressly not to be seen or even apprehended, yet it reflects the tendency—fomented or at least facilitated by digital technologies—to collect, sift through, categorize, catalog, and possess (Bowker and Star 1999). It has other peculiar features, too: it is an archive of material meant never to be seen but instead collected and removed from circulation; this archive as an object, as well as its particular functionality, is invisible to the public. Records within it are not categorized and cataloged for user-facing findability or usability but rather for the purposes of rescinding even more like material from view.

In that sense it grows by subtraction: removal of material from user-facing accessibility means growth of the archive. It uses hashing to automate its growth, but new material must also be added directly. The systematic, always-on nature of the removal process is hidden. The material, in toto, constitutes an archive of absence that is predicated on a larger logic of opacity upon which social media UGC is solicited, monetized, and circulated and is the undergirding logic of the economics of mainstream social media platforms (Roberts 2018). Ultimately, PhotoDNA exists as something like a black hole—we can conceptualize its borders or even feel a certain gravitational pull or flow toward it but can never and must never delve inside. It is a vortex at once on the periphery of social media’s operational structure and at the same time central to it.

Media scholar Abigail de Kosnik (2016) has proposed the notion of “rogue archives” in her work; in that context, she refers to the collective output of fandom communities that create material (remixed or newly generated) outside of the auspices of officially sanctioned institutional archives and often outside of professional communities of archival practice. To what extent can PhotoDNA be considered a rogue archive of its own? Perhaps, beyond even rogue, it is the unarchive—that archive that is not one, at least in any traditional sense. And yet what else but an archive can this collection of related, collected, sorted, and cataloged artifacts be called? These questions must be addressed in order to make any sense of the social meaning of PhotoDNA and the power relations it implies.

Conclusion: Reading Technologies

The field of critical archival studies has offered numerous cases of challenging and difficult archives—particularly those that address or serve as repositories for human rights abuses. In this light, archives can powerfully bear witness to abuses of power while occupying the complex role of rendering those abuses painfully and repeatedly visible. As Caswell (2013, 605) asserts: “Contrary to positivist conceptions, records aren’t neutral by-products of activity; they are discursive agents through which power is made manifest. Records both produce and are produced by violent acts.”

Where, then, does the power lie in PhotoDNA and in the service of whom? And, as Caswell and others have argued, if various manifestations of archives can exist to rework a power imbalance (e.g., community archives), particularly in the case of human rights violations, to what extent, if any, does PhotoDNA do the same? Caswell (2014b), for example, has put forth the notion of a “survivor-centered approach to records” in cases of documenting human rights violations, but in the case of PhotoDNA, the survivors themselves seem to be largely absent from consideration altogether.

Perhaps this is because, at present, PhotoDNA exists as an unpleasant and frightening outcome of UGC as an economic model and yet, like commercial content moderation work itself, is often thought of as an aberration when publicly discussed at all. The fact that this outcome may be possible to avoid is never taken under advisement; those firms requiring PhotoDNA never seriously question the UGC-reliant social media economic model that encourages, or at least facilitates, the circulation of such imagery and material. And because what is captured and subsumed into PhotoDNA—and PhotoDNA itself—is largely imperceptible to the average user, it is difficult for anyone to seriously contemplate the social role of the PhotoDNA archive, or that of UGC-based social media platforms in general, with full information.

But such informed readings, to return to Ketelaar, will become key as more and more material, such as in the case of “terrorism” content (Thakor 2016), finds its way, through manual or automated means, into one-directional repositories like PhotoDNA. In the spirit of scholars who have taken up the critical question of the social role and power of the archive (Caswell 2014a), blockchain (Golumbia 2016), algorithms (Bucher 2017), supply chains (Posner 2018), and search (Noble 2018), this essay issues an invitation to collectively unpack the social role of UGC removal in a holistic sense, from the humans who undertake the process by hand, to the automated tools that may one day largely supersede them, to the impact on the resulting social media ecosystem that these presences and absences irrevocably shape.

Note

1. NCMEC (n.d.) is a US nongovernmental organization that has direct and long-standing ties to both US and international law enforcement, as well as significant partnerships both in industry and with similar groups located around the world. Farid is now at the University of California, Berkeley, iSchool.

References

Bowker, G., and S. L. Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bucher, T. 2017. “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (1): 30–44. https://doi.org.10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086.

Caswell, M. 2013. “Not just between us: A riposte to Mark Green.” American Archivist 76 (2): 605–608.

Caswell, M. 2014a. Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Caswell, M. 2014b. “Toward a survivor-centered approach to records documenting human rights abuse: Lessons from community archives.” Archival Science 14 (3–4): 307–322. https://doi.org.10.1007/s10502-014-9220-6.

Crawford, K., and T. Gillespie. 2016. “What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint.” New Media & Society 18 (3): 410–428.

de Kosnik, A. 2016. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Farid, H. 2018. “Reining in online abuses.” Technology & Innovation 19 (3): 593–599. https://doi.org.10.21300/19.3.2018.593.

Gillespie, T. 2017. “Governance of and by platforms.” In The Sage Handbook of Social Media, edited by J. Burgess, A. Marwick, and T. Poell, 30. London: Sage.

Golumbia, D. 2016. The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hadley, G. 2017. “Forced to watch child porn for their job, Microsoft employees developed PTSD, they say.” McClatchy DC, January 11, 2017. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article125953194.html.

Ketelaar, E. 2001. “Tacit narratives: The meanings of archives.” Archival Science 1 (2): 131–141. https://doi.org.10.1007/BF02435644.

Klonick, K. 2018. “The new governors: The people, rules, and processes governing online speech.” Harvard Law Review, no. 131, 1598–1670.

Manoff, M. 2010. “Archive and database as metaphor: Theorizing the historical record.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 10 (4): 385–398. https://doi.org.10.1353/pla.2010.0005.

Microsoft. n.d. Help Stop the Spread of Child Exploitation. Accessed December 31, 2017. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna.

Myers West, S. 2018. “Censored, suspended, shadowbanned: User interpretations of content moderation on social media platforms.” New Media & Society. https://doi.org.10.1177/1461444818773059.

NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children). n.d. National and international collaboration. Accessed March 25, 2018. http://www.missingkids.com/supportus/partners/collaboration.

Noble, S. U. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.

Posner, M. 2018. “See no evil.” Logic 1 (4): 215–229.

Punzalan, R. L., and M. Caswell. 2015. “Critical directions for archival approaches to social justice.” Library Quarterly 86 (1): 25–42. https://doi.org.10.1086/684145.

Roberts, S. T. 2018. “Digital detritus: Bodies, ‘error’ and the logic of opacity in social media content moderation.” First Monday. http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i3.8283.

Sutherland, T. 2017. “Archival amnesty: In search of black American transitional and restorative justice.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1 (2). https://doi.org.10.24242/jclis.v1i2.42.

Thakor, M. N. 2016. “Algorithmic detectives against child trafficking: Data, entrapment, and the new global policing network.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/107039.

Wood, S., K. Carbone, M. Cifor, A. Gilliland, and R. Punzalan. 2014. “Mobilizing records: Re-framing archival description to support human rights.” Archival Science 14 (3–4): 397–419. https://doi.org.10.1007/s10502-014-9233-1.

2

Affect

Marika Cifor

There is no satisfactorily singular definition of affect. However, its theorists broadly agree that affect is a force that generates a relationship (conscious or otherwise) between a body (human or otherwise) and the world (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1). As I employ it, affect is a visceral force capacious enough to encompass and transcend the confines of emotion, feeling, and sentiment. Affect is vital to the operations of the pervasive apparatuses that capture, process, and archive social and material information as capital. The production, aggregation, and use patterns inflected by affect shape the designed infrastructures and social architecture of big data archives. The ways that affect is treated as a resource for extraction and exploitation in data-intensive environments routinely amplify bias and put at risk minoritized persons. Yet these archival technologies are captivating because of the affective possibilities and attachments they engender to themselves and between us. The uncertain role of affect in big data archives raises new ethical and political challenges that require urgent address. In this piece I begin by introducing affect as a conceptual tool developed in humanistic work on the archive and within archival praxis. I then uncover the unevenly distributed risks and possibilities of affect’s networked generation, circulation, and aggregation in “The AIDS Memorial” (TAM), a user-generated archive of intimate and affective data on Instagram. This case illuminates the importance of affect in user engagement, community building, and self-archiving practices in networked space. It also demonstrates the ubiquitous capture, processing, and monetization of user-generated affective data within the private infrastructures that constitute uncertain archives. Finally, I address the unknowns, errors, and vulnerabilities that affect as an archival problematic poses within an environment of ever-increasing datafication.

Affect and Archive/s

Affect is always unruly, an uncertain and unstable force that nonetheless shares many of the qualities of emotion, feeling, and sentiment (Ngai 2005, 26–27). I favor affect because, as much as it has personal resonance, it is a force that is always also cultural, social, and political. Affect is deeply implicated in how we live, form subjectivities, connect and disconnect, desire, take action, and practice difference, identity, and community. It shapes the distribution of power, whether knowledge, material resources, or agency. Archives, too, are implicated in creating, documenting, maintaining, reconciling and (re)producing such unsettled and unsettling relations—between people and records, ideologies, institutions, networks, systems, and worlds—across the bounds of time and space (Cifor 2016). My work is situated at the intersection of affect with the archive and archives. I move fluidly here between the archive and archives, incorporating some of the messiness requisite in analyzing affect—itself complex, diffuse, slippery. The archive is a prodigious theoretical construct, whether manifest as the center of authority and discursive power or as an umbrella term for collecting and collections, emerging from humanistic discourses. Archives (emphasis on that s) as conceptualized within archival studies and practice name collections of archival records “the institutions that steward them, the places where they are physically located,” and “the processes that designated them ‘archival’” (Caswell 2016). In this section I examine how affect has been theorized in relation to the archive/s in ways that prove generative for examining the epistemological, political, and ethical uncertainties that big data environments raise. Uncertain archives are always caught up in affect.

Since the late 1990s, the humanities and social sciences have taken an “affective turn” (Clough and Halley 2007). This represents more than just claiming affects, emotions, feelings, and sentiments (and their differences) as legitimate subjects, sites, and modes of inquiry. With the justified and rigorous contemplation of the personal and subjective, the affective turn is a novel means of engaging in cultural criticism (Cvetkovich 2012, 3). Affect studies bring together theories of subjectivity and subjection, the body and embodiment, and critical analyses and political theories in meaningful ways (Zembylas 2014, 391). I can say a few things for certain about affect even given its ambiguously expansive register. First, there is no consensus on what affect is, or if that question matters, and there is not likely to be. For scholars working within the “ontological strain,” affect is a means to conceptualize the nature of reality and being (Cifor 2016). Deleuzian theories of affect as force, intensity, and the capacity to move and be moved ground such projects. There is an investment here in distinctions between affect and emotion, with the former rooted in the realm of the precognitive and the latter naming subsequent conscious processes. In contrast, the “feminist cultural studies of affect” (Ahmed 2010, 13) or “cultural strain” are focused on what affect does in the world (Cifor 2016). Regardless of favored terminology—feeling (Cvetkovich 2003, 2012), emotion (Ahmed 2004), or sentiment—these feminist scholars, including me, are invested in affect’s world-making and -undoing capacities. Second, affect has evident utility for analyzing data-intensive environments, as it offers a means to contend with the importance of networked relations (human, machine, other) as well as bodies (human, data, other) and the complex forms of agency and vulnerability that arise from them (Hillis, Paasonen, and Petit 2015, 2). Third, affect is as significant in daily life as it is in theory. Affects are vital to understanding the quotidian ways in which power is constituted, moved, mobilized, or denied (Harding and Pribram 2004, 873). Finally, studying affect opens possibilities for extending domains of scholarship beyond structures of reason, cognition, text, and language (Sedgwick 2003, 114) so that we might address, and perhaps even contest, the duplicitous biases and uneven distributions of control over big data apparatuses and their accrued archives.

Many projects within the affective turn address the archive and archival concerns: the organization of knowledge, representation, authenticity, bodies, accountability, evidence, access, and collective memory. However, few address archives. Around 2014 a turn toward affect began within “critical archival studies” (Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand 2017). The earliest explicit calls in the field to acknowledge affect’s importance in archival praxis (Cifor 2016; Gilliland 2014a, 2014b; Reed 2014) emerged from increased attention to the human, especially in archival environments marked by violence, trauma, and oppression. That year I co-organized with Anne J. Gilliland the “Affect and the Archive Symposium” at the University of California, Los Angeles. This formative event brought together scholars in archival studies, gender studies, cultural studies, literature, and anthropology. Building upon the momentum generated by the symposium, we guest coedited a special issue on “Affect and the Archive, Archives and Their Affects” (Cifor and Gilliland 2016). It was the first in archival studies to address affect and the affective turn. Subsequently, scholars and archivists have examined how affect is implicated in the archival field in ways ranging from its role in generating and sustaining community archives (Baker 2015; Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez 2016; Caswell et al. 2017; De Kosnik 2016; Inwood and Alderman 2018; Long et al. 2017; Roeschley and Kim 2019; Saber and Long 2017) to its ethical implications (Caswell and Cifor 2016; Cifor 2017; Douglas and Mills 2018) and its relation to bodies and embodied productions (Cifor 2015; Lee 2016).

In An Archive of Feelings, a foundational text drawing together affect theory, the archive, and LGBTQ archives, Ann Cvetkovich (2003) advocates for a “radical archive of emotion.” Queer lives demand such archives in order to “document [the] intimacy, sexuality, love, and activism” that constitute and connect us (Cvetkovich 2003, 241). Her project pushed the archival field to acknowledge that archives must produce not only knowledge but also affects in order to reflect and resonate with marginalized histories and realities. Theorizing the intersection of affect and archives demonstrates that affects are encoded within archival records and embedded in practices of archival production, circulation, and reception. The particularity of the technical media that enable and transmit affects matters (Ash 2015). Digital archives hold data, born-digital information, and/or digitized material that is created, stored, and preserved electronically and that can be accessed remotely and aggregated at novel scale (Prybus 2015, 239). Given ubiquitous datafication, the entanglement of affect and archives requires revisiting at this juncture as an archival problematic that stands to either reify or challenge who and what is included in archives and who accesses and controls them and for what purposes. The digital “archive of feelings,” with its networked configurations and flows, holds new and significant potential to engender harm. Minoritized persons are those most acutely imperiled by the pervasive collection and extraction of affect in big data archives.

The AIDS Memorial

Minoritized subjects have long been refused the pleasure and privilege of entry to the archive. People of color, queers, and HIV-positive persons are denied both history and futurity through evacuation from archival representation and relegated to a vulnerable existence in the present (Cifor et al. 2019). TAM makes apparent the centrality and volatility of the generation, distribution, and consumption of affect in big data environments. TAM is a digital AIDS archive that operates affectively at two interlocking registers. It is simultaneously empowering and exploitative. With multiple daily postings since April 2016, this account on Instagram—the most popular application for social networking through image sharing—has shared over forty-six hundred memorials of those who have perished in the HIV/AIDS epidemic with more than eighty-thousand followers. Stuart, TAM’s founder and sole moderator, solicits, collects, edits, classifies, and posts. By sharing images—snapshots, headshots, videos—and words—captions, hashtags, geotags, comments—TAM constructs a palpable affective immediacy. When uploaded, these records hold the potential to affect, and that affect accumulates as they circulate between networked users (Prybus 2015, 240). On Instagram’s privately owned platform, user experiences emphasize ephemerality: new images continually appear, pushing others down in the feed or dropping them altogether. The algorithmically modulated arrangement, featuring “the moments we believe you care about the most” (Instagram 2016), is configured to generate affective investments in the app and to map connections between users. This archive’s affective force emerges from the remixed confluence of analog records, collective memories, and digital archiving technologies (Medel 2019).

TAM’s crowdsourced data aggregate into a vast catalog of loss. Most contributors are in mourning, and their grief, care, pain, affection, and regret suffuse the archive’s articulations. It is both heart-wrenching and gorgeous. Posts circulate and remediate precious records. Elsewhere, I detail how TAM problematically reconstructs the expected face of AIDS: invariably white, male, gay, middle class, young, American, and dead before 1996 (when effective treatments emerged for those with resources; Cifor 2019). The represented subjects’ privileges did not and could not save their lives; however, they did and do protect them from disappearing from the record. Yet TAM’s affect-laden posts do make powerfully resonant now the experiences of living and dying with HIV/AIDS. The account’s popularity is due to its participatory production, which builds a connection with and offers gratification for those who have felt the impact of this still highly stigmatized illness that propagates isolation and silence. In the first digitized Polaroid TAM posted one December day, the subject, a handsome, young white man in a coat and tie, walks down the hallway. His dark eyes gaze with seriousness directly into the camera at the photographer and at us. Such a perspective engenders intimacy (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006). The image, a casual portrait, is typical of TAM’s visual style. Images containing faces generate the most “likes” and comments (Bakhshi, Shamma, and Gilbert 2014). Our faces are powerful communication channels that we are trained from infancy to read for context, attraction, and relation. The accompanying caption, like many others on TAM, narrativizes the image. In it the contributor shares how this man, his uncle, died in December 1989. He details the few “generalities” his family offered: “He was gay, lived in New York and died young.” The contributor aches for more. He had received this photograph, the first he had ever seen of his uncle, only after he had reached his own gay adulthood. He had carefully studied it, hoping for a “clue” about this man in order to gain a “better sense” of self. He had found no other images or stories. The persistent intensity of this past for contributors and followers alike is why this archive is still affectively charged.

In sharing the post, this contributor extends the record’s permanence and its affective resonance beyond the confines of the personal. “Archives” like this one “produce sociality, as they bind and cohere relations based on the circulation of our data” (Prybus 2015, 242). There is a palpable immediacy in the individually created and curated snapshots of a relatable life lived and remembered in ordinary moments, every day. Persistence is promised through the public, affectively bound collectivity of archiving. This TAM post received many likes and eighty-one comments, including a number of colored emoji hearts, words of thanks, practical suggestions, and identificatory recountings. As many responses note, a different contributor shared the same Polaroid image of the same man a second time on TAM on that day. A friend of the captured subject contributed the second post. It recounts details of their intimacy and offers a biographical sketch and a loving tribute. In response to the second post, commenters’ detail, with much glee, a few tears, and more hearts, the “gift” of connection that TAM provides. This moment of “sweet synchronicity” is brought to us by digital archiving. The communal possibilities built into the platform are central to TAM’s empowering potentialities. Minoritized persons and our allies can demonstrably mobilize TAM’s archival processes to create and sustain relations, chronologies, memories, data, and spaces that evade and contest social subordination. This archive thereby offers a blueprint for vibrant futures while also staging new political formations in the present. However, the empowering affective potential of uncertain archives always exists in troublingly intimate relation to exploitation.

Operating on Instagram, a capitalist platform, shapes TAM’s archival practices and their implications. TAM, alarmingly, stands to monetize both affect and AIDS. Engineers’ ideologies and coding mechanisms produce its affordances, values, biases, features, options, and pacing at the behest of founders, stakeholders, marketers, and users. These protocols in turn regulate and shape users’ actions, relationships, and affects. Instagram, along with its parent company, Facebook, has profit-driven ambitions that require collecting, aggregating, storing, processing, and sharing the vast amounts of data generated by users in order to profitably target and sell services, advertisements, and content (Cheney-Lippold 2011). Within late capitalism, Instagram use is labor that holds significant market value. The designed archival logics of social media encourage users to produce, perform, and display “sentiment” (Cho 2019), as these apps depend upon the double axis of social engagement and extractive data mining (Karppi 2015, 225). Social media “produce and circulate affect as a binding technique” between users and between users and the platform (Dean 2015, 90). The abundant archives of affective intimate data that TAM generates are monetized with alarming and routine regularity. Capitalist logics extend into TAM’s own posting practices too. TAM sells branded T-shirts, these posts mixing seamlessly into a feed of memorials. Even when we know that some of the profits are donated to AIDS charities, such explicit commodification in the archives is disquieting. TAM demonstrates how, in spite of harsh living conditions, minoritized people sometimes surpass marginalization by willfully employing digital archives to ensure something more than just our present survival. However, the promise of such archives exists always in unstable intimacy with the risks and violence they reproduce. Through affect, the twin logics of empowerment and exploitation thread through TAM and other big data archives.

Affect and Uncertain Archives: Ambiguous Futures

Affect is the heart of what makes uncertain archives captivating and profoundly predatory. Social media design features and use practices encourage the production and broadcasting of affective expression. Platforms in turn aspire to extract and monetize these affects. The corporate analysis of affect has rapidly become industry standard. Termed social listening or sentiment analysis, this big data processing is conducted in-house and by third-party firms to great financial reward. A leaked 2017 sales pitch to advertisers from Facebook, a social networking giant with two billion users, offers a peek into attempts to make usable and profitable the various affects that inhere in these vast, privately held aggregate archives of user-generated data. Their pitch hinges on an assertion that the algorithms Facebook engineers have constructed can accurately determine states of feeling bad. Whether a teen feels “worthless,” “insecure,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “silly,” “useless,” “stupid,” “overwhelmed,” “stressed,” or like “a failure,” that vulnerability can be identified by processing the data generated from their use of the site. This enables advertisers to pinpoint for exploitation the “moments when young people need a confidence boost” (Machkovech 2017, quoted in Cho 2019). This is not the company’s first foray into the capture, processing, and archiving of affect. In 2014 Facebook researchers detailed how they manipulated seven hundred thousand users’ feeds with varying degrees of happy or sad content to chart reactions (Reilly 2017). It is also not likely to be the last: in a strong indication of its future-oriented desires, Facebook has obtained patents in recent years for various emotion-detecting software programs. For example, one explains how its facial recognition system is able to automatically select a selfie filter based on the expression it detects. If it identifies “happiness,” it might supply a “happy panda” filter, while “anger” would map onto “angry bird” and “sadness” onto “gushing tears” (Bell 2018). As Alexander Cho (2019) has powerfully asserted, “The chief job of any social media platform” now “is to extract emotions.” What users are donating, he outlines (drawing on Cvetkovich), is an “up-to-the-moment machine-learnable ‘archive of feelings’” that operates always “in service of late capital.”

The tools to extract meaning from, and place value on, the affects that move and are moved by big data apparatuses and accrued in their archives remain rather crude, prone to error, and partially aspirational. As Tero Karppi (2015, 231) has outlined, “The economic effects of affects are unpredictable and the modes of user engagement unsteady.” Therefore, building a “business on affect,” as these corporations are doing, “is a huge opportunity and a huge risk” (Karppi 2015, 231). Our relationships with the data we produce and that are produced about us are in flux. These shifts create new opportunities for financializing processes of value and exchange, possibilities for and expressions of relationality, and concerns over who creates, sees, controls, and owns the abundant data we are generating (Prybus 2015, 236). The meaning and use of affect within uncertain archives remain provocatively ambiguous. Productions of affect can hide from users the nature of domination in big data environments. Yet the errors and unknowns of affect in these archives also offer marginalized users novel opportunities to challenge damaging structures. As the tools to capture, process, and extract affect’s value promise to become more adept, sophisticated, and ubiquitous, affect will only become a more necessary conceptual tool for analyzing uncertain archives. Sustained attention must be devoted to both the material outcomes of affect’s economization and to that which propels us to participate in generating affective archives (Prybus 2015, 245). The point here is not to resolve the inherent contradictions between the affective social relations that users and technologies produce and the corporate-driven financial value they engender. Instead, it is to emphasize that we need to dwell on the significance of affect within these uncertain archival circuits as a constitutive force and a powerful tool.

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Prybus, Jennifer. 2015. “Accumulating affect: Social networks and their archives of feelings.” In Networked Affect, edited by Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit, 235–250. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Reed, Barbara. 2014. “Reinventing access.” Archives and Manuscripts 42 (2): 123–132.

Reilly, Michael. 2017. “Is Facebook targeting ads at sad teens?” MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604307/is-facebook-targeting-ads-at-sad-teens/.

Roeschley, Ana, and Jeonghyun Kim. 2019. “‘Something that feels like a community’: The role of personal stories in building community-based participatory archives.” Archival Science 19 (1): 1–23.

Saber, Dima, and Paul Long. 2017. “‘I will not leave, my freedom is more precious than my blood.’ From affect to precarity: Crowd-sourced citizen archives as memories of the Syrian war.” Archives and Records 38 (1): 80–99.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Zembylas, Michalinos. 2014. “Theorizing ‘difficult knowledge’ in the aftermath of the ‘affective turn’: Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations.” Curriculum Inquiry 44 (3): 390–412.

3

Aggregation

Sune Lehmann

As we know from Borgesian cartography (Borges 1998, 325), it is often impossible to consider a data set in its entirety. In order to reduce the complexity of the world, we need to simplify, to extract the most important features of the landscape. Throughout science, an important element in this process of simplification is aggregation. We create aggregates; we group like with like.

The word aggregate can be both a verb and a noun (impressively, it can also be an adjective). In my world, the world of data science, we almost exclusively use the term as a verb. We aggregate data. We perform aggregation across properties of our data sets. It is in this sense that I will talk about aggregation below.

Big Data Insights

We live in a world where governments and large companies aggressively collect data describing human behavior. Bulk data of this kind, however, provide no insight. We need to process the data in order to extract useful information. The task of a data scientist is to convert columns and rows of numbers and words stored in spreadsheets, databases, or flat files into insight. How is that done? Let us start with a simple example to illustrate the process.

Imagine that we have collected the height of every individual on the planet. The raw data would simply be a long list: {164 cm, 198 cm, 186 cm, 122 cm . . .}. One way to make sense of this list would be to plot the number of people with a height between zero and 1 cm, 1 cm and 2 cm, all the way up to 272 cm.[1] The plot would look something like figure 3.1.

As is clear from figure 3.1, this distribution of heights is approximately normal (reasonably approximated by a normal distribution), so we can describe it by a mean value and a variance. This is an important property of our data set. It means that we can write down an equation that describes the distribution of heights using those two parameters. The mean value tells us the typical height, and the variance provides a measure of the distribution’s variability (the height cutoffs needed to contain two-thirds of the people in the sample). To be concrete, we might say that, on average, humans are 167 cm tall (mean value), and two-thirds of the world’s population is between 158 and 176 cm tall (variance is 9 cm).[2]

Figure 3.1

The distribution of human height. The black line is the approximate distribution of human height; the gray line is what we would expect if it were normally distributed. Adapted from Schilling, Watkins, and Watkins (2002). ©Sune Lehmann.

Let us pause for a minute. While we were discussing height distributions, we were also illustrating the procedure behind the generation of insights based on large-scale data. If you have ever wondered what data science is about, this is a central part of it (in some cases all of it). We start from lists of numbers and produce summary statistics that provide some kind of understanding of the underlying data.

But let us get back to human heights. In aggregating our impressive list of 7.5 billion human height measurements, we neglected the systematic difference between male and female height. If we had split our original list into two lists—one for males and one for females—we would have found the distributions shown in figure 3.2.

Each of these is closer to a true normal distribution, and figure 3.1 arises from the aggregation of the two distributions in figure 3.2. These new distributions reveal that we ignored an important systematic difference between the sexes in our initial model of the world. Stated differently: we aggregated too much. With this new split of data, we realize, for example, that males tend to be taller than females and that the variance of height within the female sex is smaller.

Figure 3.2

Male and female height distributions. ©Sune Lehmann.

Indeed, we could keep going, splitting the data into smaller and smaller groups—for instance, by geographical region, birth year, or income. Between such groups we can also find systematic differences. Thus, by further disaggregating the data and refining the data cluster, we can gain new insights into how human height varies across the globe. Such a disaggregation allows us to study correlations between height and sociodemographic factors, among others.

Simpson’s Paradox

The problem of aggregating categories of data that should not necessarily be combined—of taking averages and finding potentially misleading results—is a general one in data science. It is a serious point of concern related to aggregation. In the worst-case scenario, aggregating can lead to conclusions that are opposite of the true trend in a data set. This problem is called Simpson’s paradox and is illustrated in figure 3.3.

Unlike the data we are used to collecting in the natural sciences, where we can safely aggregate and take meaningful averages, data arising from human behavior tend to be high-dimensional, with complex relations between variables. Consider how we move from place to place in geographic space, to take a concrete example: this behavior depends on our friends, income level, skin color, personality, and many other factors. Similarly, our life span depends on our education level, parents’ education, height, birth year, and more.

These complex data structures mean that we should be very careful when performing calculations based on aggregates of data. It is easy to arrive at the wrong conclusion if one is not careful. Let us look at a real-world case of Simpson’s paradox in order to illustrate. One great example is that while the median wage in the US increased about 1 percent in the period 2000–2013, the median wage within every educational subgroup (high school dropouts, high school graduates with no college education, people with some college education, and people with bachelor’s or higher degrees) declined in the same time period. In this case it is mainly because the number of individuals with higher education increased in the period. This group grew massively and had a relatively slow decrease in wages (1.2 percent during the period), driving an overall increase in wages and masking dramatic drops in salary in the other groups (Norris 2013).

Figure 3.3

Simpson’s paradox (invented data). We see that even though each person’s IQ decreases with increased alcohol intake (individual negative trend—indicated by thin, straight gray lines with negative slope for each person’s point cloud), the overall fit to the aggregated data suggests that alcohol intake increases IQ (positive trend for the aggregated data—indicated by thick straight line with positive slope). Idea from Kievit et al. (2013). ©Sune Lehmann.

My hunch is that Simpson’s paradox might belie many current results in the data science literature that revolves around human behavior. In the future, an increased awareness of the importance of understanding and properly modeling high-dimensional, highly correlated, and inhomogeneous data will play an increasing role in the research effort. We will see a focus on disaggregating data that have been inappropriately aggregated.

Unruly Data and Our Statistical Measures

Even if our data are divided into exactly the right piles through disaggregation, problems can arise. In the discussion of human height above, I made the point that when a data set is distributed according to a normal distribution, we can summarize the entire data set with two values, the mean and the variance. As the name normal suggests, quantities described by the normal distribution occur frequently in biological and social systems. In fact, because the normal distribution is so common (and mathematically well behaved), many important statistical techniques assume that the underlying data are normally distributed—and will fail if the data do not obey this distribution.

A discussion of how advanced statistical techniques break down is beyond the scope of this article. But we can get a sense of the problem by simply using the mean (or average) value. Calculating the mean is one of the simplest possible operations we can perform on a data set: simply add all observations and divide by the number of observations. Even this straightforward descriptor can be misleading when the data we have aggregated are nonnormal.

An important class of problems in which the mean value is misleading are multimodal data. This case is closely related to the example of human height and simply refers to a situation when a data set has more than one typical value. Figure 3.4 shows an example of bimodal data (i.e., two typical values). To make things concrete, imagine that the data in the figure represent the sentiment (or mood) within some population. This particular population has one large group of people who are happier than the average and a similarly sized group who are less happy than the average. The bimodal distribution of sentiment implies that the average is not a good summary of the data set. Stated differently: it is not appropriate to say that the overall mood of a group composed of people who are either very happy or very sad is “average.”

I stress that the point is not that the data set should be further disaggregated but rather that the mean value inside a set of aggregated data is not always the right way to describe that data; we might need more refined statistical descriptions that summarize the data using quantities other than the mean (e.g., that describe the distribution and report the modes). Examples of naturally occurring bimodal distributions include salary distributions in certain fields (Hacker News 2015), book prices (hardback vs. paperback), and restaurant peak hours.

Another important scenario in which the mean value can be misleading concerns power law distributions. Examples of data with power law distributions are numerous and include the populations of cities, the distribution of wealth, word frequencies, numbers of phone calls received, citations of scientific publications, or numbers of followers of Twitter accounts (Newman 2005). Figure 3.5 illustrates the differences between normal distributions and power law distributions.

Figure 3.4

An example of a bimodal distribution. The average value does not represent a typical value in this data set. ©Sune Lehmann.

As illustrated in figure 3.5, power law distributions do not have a typical value (for this reason they are also sometimes called scale-free distributions). Rather, they are characterized by a majority of small values and by a high probability of extreme values. To make this concrete, imagine that human height was distributed according to a power law distribution. You would mostly encounter very small people but once in a while bump into someone who was 2 km tall. Any researcher who works with social networks (where the number of neighbors per node often follows a power law) or who studies the distribution of income (which is scale-free) will have to keep in mind the nonintuitive statistics of power laws.

Due to the higher probability of extreme values, the average is not generally a good description of data sets characterized by power law statistics. As shown in figure 3.5 (right panel), the average of a power law distribution is generally much larger than the median value. Intuitively, we can understand this in the example with human heights. When we take an average over a sample of ninety-nine people who are 20 cm tall and one person who is 2 km tall, the resulting average height is 20.2 m. A height of 20 m does not represent anyone in the data sample.

Figure 3.5

Differences between normal and power law distributions. ©Sune Lehmann.

The lesson here is that once we begin to aggregate data and use statistical methods to extract insights, we have to be careful. Internal structure can confuse our statistical tools. The examples above show how even the mean value, perhaps the simplest statistical measure we have, can be misleading when the underlying data structure is nonnormal. These types of problems are often exacerbated when we use more sophisticated methods: run advanced multiple regression with complex loss functions or use machine-learning techniques to understand our data. The more sophisticated the method, the more difficult it can be to understand whether or not the underlying assumptions of the data are met. Let us take as our example the simple multiple linear regression model, a tool that is ubiquitous across the social sciences. This model makes a number of assumptions that are rarely met. First, the model assumes there is a linear relationship between the outcome and the input variables—which is far from always the case since nonlinear relationships are common in complex data sets. Second, multiple regression assumes that the residuals (e.g., the mistakes the model makes) are normally distributed; in a world of bimodality, power laws, and more, that is also often the exception rather than the rule. Third, such models require that the input variables are not correlated. As we discussed above, this kind of correlation is often difficult to avoid in complex behavioral data. Now, if the assumptions of the model are not met (and they rarely are), we cannot trust its predictions or our interpretation of them. In this sense caveat emptor is still very much part and parcel of taking in results from big data and complicated statistical models.

Conclusion

Aggregation is a key part of understanding the world. It is a fundamental step toward simplifying the world so that we can make sense of it. But many things can go wrong. Data reflecting human behavior are heterogeneous. Data sets are complex. The variables are correlated and interrelated. The underlying statistics are often nonnormal. Many of our statistical methods make assumptions about data sets that are simply not met. I have provided examples above of two types of common problems related to analyzing aggregated data.

The first involves misleading results arising from aggregating data that should, in fact, be kept separate. In mild cases, such as the example related to human height, we may end up overlooking the presence of important distinctions in the aggregated data (sex, nationality). In severe cases the overall trend might be the opposite of the trend within subgroups (Simpson’s paradox).

The second common problem can occur even when we operate at the right level of aggregation. Here the heterogeneity that causes problems is due to the underlying distribution of data values. If our data are bimodal or distributed according to a power law, the average value is not a good summary of the data. Many other statistical measures may fail in similar ways.

Here I have presented these issues in their simplest form so that it is perhaps easy to see the problems ahead of time. In massive aggregations consisting of billions of data points, however, identifying the natural way to partition the data is often a research problem in its own right. Similarly, making sure one establishes an appropriate understanding of complex data before modeling is a highly nontrivial task.

Notes

1. The tallest man in medical history was Robert Pershing Wadlow, who when measured on June 27, 1940, was found to be 2.72 m tall (Wikipedia 2018).

2. These values were estimated based on pooled variance (Wikipedia 2017).

References

Borges, J. L. 1998. Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin.

Hacker News. 2015. “Bimodal salary distribution for new law school graduates.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445862.

Kievit, R. A., W. E. Frankenhuis, L. J. Waldorp, and D. Borsboom. 2013. “Simpson’s paradox in psychological science: A practical guide.” Frontiers in Psychology 4: art. 513.

Newman, M. E. J. 2005. “Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law.” Contemporary Physics 46 (5): 323–351.

Norris, F. 2013. “Can every group be worse than average? Yes.” Economix (blog), New York Times, May 1, 2013. https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/can-every-group-be-worse-than-average-yes/.

Schilling, M. F., A. E. Watkins, and W. Watkins. 2002. “Is human height bimodal?” American Statistician 56 (3): 223–229.

Wikipedia. 2017. “Pooled variance.” Last modified October 12, 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pooled_variance.

Wikipedia. 2018. “Robert Pershing Wadlow.” Last modified January 28, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wadlow.

4

Algorithmic Racism

Alana Lentin

Burgeoning research into race, digital technology, and the Internet (Daniels 2009; Nakamura 2008; Sharma 2013) stresses that the digital both changes our understandings of race and creates new types of racial inequality (Nakamura and Chow-White 2012). Two main approaches to the implications of digital technology and the Internet for the question “What is race?” have dominated. According to the first, the “biotechnical turn . . . which privileges the technological and digital over other forms of knowledge, mediation, and interaction” (Nakamura and Chow-White 2012, 4) proves that race is first and foremost a matter of genetics, despite the dominance of social constructionism.

In opposition, Paul Gilroy (1998) has claimed that the nonvisible “nanological perspective” afforded by digital technology means that the genetic theory of race can be finally laid to rest. Wendy Chun (2012) proposes that a view of “race as technology” serves to “displace claims of race as either purely biological or purely cultural” (38). The allure of digital genealogy reveals that race has always been about relationships between “human and machine, human and animal, media and environment, mediation and embodiment, nature and culture, visibility and invisibility, privacy and publicity” (39).

Chun (2012) recalls Heidegger’s note that the “essence of technology is not technological” (47). If we only examine the tools of technology and not what it reveals or “enframes,” we misunderstand its purpose. As Stuart Hall’s (2017) concept of the genetic code shows, race is said to unveil what is intrinsic to different sets of humans in order to “render everyone into a set of traits that are stored and transmitted,” as was the case for enslaved people who were not considered either men or women because both were reduced to quantities to be accounted for (Chun 2012, 48; Spillers 1987). Race allows us to conceive of humanity as lasting “through time as a set of unchanging characteristics” (Chun 2012, 21) so that, as many scholars of slavery have noted, despite the formal changes to our interpretations of race and the legal frameworks governing the existence of racialized people, the “afterlives” of racist domination continue to shape everyday experience (Hartman 2007; Sharpe 2016).

This continuity is at the heart of the critique of the digital technologies that now progressively order the lives of vulnerable people. For example, facial recognition technology is increasingly used to determine who belongs in a given space and who does not. These technologies, which are now ubiquitous across “airports, at borders, in stadiums, and in shopping malls,” encode the same purportedly “neutral” ways of measuring people (Browne 2015; quoted material from Gillard 2018), mirroring the old racial science of phrenology (Dzodan 2016). Just like phrenology, most facial recognition software is not merely concerned with individual recognition (such as using your face to unlock your phone) but rather is “invested in taking the extra steps of assigning a subject to an identity category in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and matching those categories with guesses about emotions, intentions, relationships, and character to shore up forms of discrimination, both judicial and economic” (Gillard 2018).

The utility of this information for capitalism is demonstrable in Facebook’s constant request to know how we feel or what we are thinking—information that is then used to match emotions and preferences, friends, and political views to targeted advertising. A central technique of race is the surveillance of racialized populations. In order to understand the widespread practice—and acceptance—of surveillance, we must understand the importance of the ontological condition of blackness for the massification of surveillance practices under modernity (Browne 2015). One of the problems confronting scholars of race and digital technology today is the struggle to reveal the ways in which technology is invested in the embedding of racial categorization, rather than merely being a tool for greater ease of communication or to enhance individual security, which is never a racially neutral adjudication.

In a “postracial” age in which racism has been understood as a moral failing (Goldberg 2009), technology is often seen as ensuring that “human error” does not intervene to reinstall racial division. The “beauty” of technologies such as facial recognition software or artificial intelligence for making assessments about everything from home loans to college applications is, it is suggested, that they remove the human dimension, thus shielding the user from “unconscious bias” (Noble 2018). However, as Safiya Noble argues, it is a myth that the algorithms that drive our interactions with the Internet are “benign, neutral and objective” (11). Rather, because algorithms are essentially shaped by commercial interests and operationalized within racist societies, racism is in fact integral to how the Internet works. For Noble, “technological redlining”—analogous to the practice of redlining in housing, now banned but still effective in the US—reinforces “oppressive social relationships and enact[s] new modes of racial profiling” (10). We thus need to unmask the workings of racial logics shaping both the need to collect big data and the interpretations of that data for a wide range of uses because “the history of Big Data is the history of racial hierarchies and the upholding of white supremacist power structures through the use of methodically collected surveys, community indexes and data points” (Dzodan 2016).

Internet searching itself is not neutral. It filters the world through a racist-sexist worldview reproduced by a predominantly white tech industry. On the flip side, “the manual labor of assembling circuit boards is done by immigrants and outsourced labor, often women living in the global South” (Daniels 2015, 1379). The Internet establishes racial categorization and hierarchization through its application program interface (API) (Noble 2018, 14). This can be seen, for example, in the “nearly ubiquitous white hand-pointer [that] acts as a kind of avatar that, in turn, becomes ‘attached’ to depictions of White people” (Noble 2018, 14).

Despite this, the impression predominates within the tech industry and among the public that the Internet is a racially neutral space. This idea originates in the early days of the Internet, when it was marketed as a postracial utopia where differences between people would melt away, and everyone could be whoever they wanted to be online (Daniels 2015). The idea of “racial passing” online, particularly while playing virtual reality games, underpinned “digitally utopian” beliefs about the postracial capacity of the Internet (Nakamura 1995). This view does not consider how the division between the online and the offline worlds is increasingly artificial, the Internet and digital technology reflecting and intensifying real life. Digital role play is a form of “blackface” wherein players temporarily don the racial identities of those considered lesser in racist societies, in fetishized ways that bear no resemblance to the actual lived experience of the people they are supposedly emulating. Digitally enabled passing creates an illusion of diversity where it does not exist because, as Nakamura notes, white players of online games who take on orientalized avatars experience no threat to their whiteness. This online “identity tourism” allows users to “wear” and “unwear” race at will, without any impact on their lives offline or on whether they behave in racist ways. Online game players researched by Nakamura could enjoy playing racialized characters but displayed no interest in hearing about real experiences of racism that actual Asian people endured.

Discussions of racial passing and identity tourism are interesting in terms of tracking the history of how, as Sanjay Sharma (2013) puts it, “modalities of race wildly proliferate in social media sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter: casual racial banter, race-hate comments, ‘griefing,’ images, videos and anti-racist sentiment bewilderingly intermingle, mash-up and virally circulate.” Does this digital naivete still persist over twenty years since Nakamura’s original research? The election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the UK, for example, have drawn awareness to the power of social media algorithms to drive voter behavior and affect political allegiances. As Jessie Daniels has shown, white supremacists and the far right were early adopters of the Internet. What many mistakenly see as a resurgence of white supremacism has been due to the success with which they have used the Internet as an organizing and dissemination tool, allowing them to access the mainstream (Daniels 2009). The success with which far-right ideas, often spread through the use of memes, have entered mainstream sensibility is not dissociable from the beliefs about the Internet as the neutral space Noble and Nakamura discussed. The belief in the better ability of algorithms to manage outcomes, unencumbered by racial and other forms of bias, is complemented by the dominance of the belief in free speech as a primal value in society. The hegemonic liberal idea that computers cannot be biased combines with the notion that all ideas deserve an airing and can be assessed by free-thinking individuals to create the current predicament wherein we are served up a near-constant stream of racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic ideas presented as mere opinions in the marketplace of ideas.

The role of algorithms in the growth of white supremacism and the far right is apparent in the case of Dylann Roof, who murdered ten African American churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015. Roof’s “racial manifesto” reveals his online research into “black on white crime” after the Trayvon Martin killing, which first led him to the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). While the CCC appears to be a legitimate source, the Southern Poverty Law Center notes its origins in the “old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation” (Noble 2018, 119). The CCC is opposed to racial integration and clearly presents biased and unempirical ideas about “black on white” crime, which is “a patently false notion that Black violence on White Americans is an American crisis” (121). As Noble remarks, “A search on the phrase ‘black on white crimes’ does not lead to any experts on race or to any universities, libraries, books, or articles about the history of race in the United States” (Noble 2018, 272). Rather, it yields racist articles and websites which, in the cases of Dylann Roof, the 2019 Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant, and Anders Breivik before them, had murderous consequences. These consequences cannot be detached from Google’s commercial interests, according to Noble, because there is a correlation between search rankings and profitability. This can be seen in YouTube’s automatically generated suggested videos. Watching one video with content that concerns race often leads viewers directly to videos about subjects such as “black on white crime” and “anti-white racism.” This can then segue to more extreme and openly white supremacist ideas hosted by organizations with increasingly powerful online networks.

Because YouTube (owned by Google) is motivated primarily by profit, it does not merely direct viewers to racist content at random based on algorithms that purportedly cater to individual interests; it attempts to further drive up profit by encouraging more clicks on already wildly popular videos: “YouTube wasn’t just offering up millions of hours of hate speech, but rewarding the most successful propagandists with a cut of the revenue from those video ads you have to wait impatiently to ‘skip’ before getting, say, your ‘33 Fun Facts About Slavery’ (#5: ‘There Were Just as Many White Slaves as Black Slaves’). Worse, some of the YouTube ranters were being paid—in one case, millions—to produce noxious content for YouTube’s ‘preferred’ channel” (Moser 2017).

The question of how to deal with the spread of white supremacist propaganda over the Internet and its impact on mainstream politics is determined by whether or not we think the solution lies in data itself. The ability of Google to gain such dominance is based on the prevailing ideology that “individuals make their own choices of their own accord in the free market which is normalized as the only legitimate source of social change” (Noble 2018, 182). Any concept of the public good is taken out of the equation, the beneficiaries being primarily the tech industry and currently predominant right-wing politics. This has a profound impact on every aspect of social life, Noble argues. For example, in the US, parents turn to websites providing data about “good schools” that generally reflect the—racially determined—income level and real-estate value of the area in which they are located. Schools will be judged “not good” when a higher percentage of the students are African American because there is a correlation, made by “data-intensive applications that work across vast data sets” (183), between “low-income areas” and the quality of education.

Because the Trump government is defunding the entities that protect the independence of information gathering, Noble (2018) calls on the public to reclaim such institutions “in service of multiracial democracy” (200). However, her expressed belief in democracy calls into question some of her own more radical revelations that racism and sexism in networked communications are not a question of unconscious bias but are built into the system. So, it is not “better data” or more diversity within the tech industry that will solve the problem of what Chun (2017) says is very disingenuously called racism 2.0. Rather, we need to understand the extent to which networked communications are predicated on network science, which is itself based on the idea that the world is reducible to a map or a lab (Chun 2017). Network science, Chun explains, is based on the principle of homophily, which was coined in the 1950s (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1964) but misinterpreted in an influential 2001 paper to mean that “people’s personal networks are homogeneous” (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001, 415). This misreading led those analyzing the ways communities form online to argue that naturally occurring groups in society, based on race/ethnicity, gender, age, location, and so on, are represented organically in online spaces. Thus, “academics have cited homophily in elucidating everything from why teenagers choose friends who smoke and drink the same amount that they do to ‘the strong isolation of lower-class blacks from the interracial-marriage market.’ Researchers at M.I.T. even published ‘Homophily in Online Dating: When Do You Like Someone Like Yourself?’ which showed that you like someone like yourself most of the time, online or off. So much for ‘opposites attract’” (Retica 2006).

The problem with this for Chun is that the concept as developed by Lazarsfeld and Merton was counterposed to that of heterophily. Accepting homophily as representative of the way social interactions work leads to remarks such as “homophily is a good example of where an existing social theory can now be explored numerically, and be easily verified in a wide variety of different networks, because the data is held digitally” (Chun 2017). However, thinking uncritically about the concept leads to an obscuring of the fact that nothing is ecological or natural about groups based on homophily. Rather, they must be created. Making an analogy with the history of racial segregation in the US, Chun shows that the tendency of white people to live in clusters, or for so-called ghettos of African Americans to appear following desegregation, had nothing to do with the natural tendency for birds of a feather to flock together and everything to do with white flight. This connects with Chun’s theorization of race and/as technology. The technology of the algorithm organizes the network according to simplified clusters that are then represented, and interpreted, as naturally occurring rather than produced to facilitate the working of the algorithm across a variety of sectors (commercial, judicial, welfare, health, education, and so on).

The acceptance of the principle of homophily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby, when echo chambers or social media silos are bemoaned—particularly after a white supremacist attack such as that at Christchurch, which saw the nebulous “Internet” blamed for the rise in far-right extremism—it is presumed that something can be done about it by “listening” to those who do not share progressive values (cf. Lumby 2019). However, this criticism, usually voiced by liberals who see an increasingly sheltered, fearful, coddled force within the left that refuses to engage with ideas they might find unpalatable, entirely ignores the fact that the constructs underlying network science—what Chun calls a particularly retrograde and effectively segregationist form of identity politics—create these echo chambers, which are in turn more profitable for Google and other platforms.

Networked communications not only contain racialized bias within them but, as Chun points out, they also work like race. Race is a technology, rather than technology being subjected to a process of racialization. Chun’s hopeful solution is to recreate the network otherwise, to build models that ingrain a knowledge of history within them in order to expose the ways in which racial logics are structured into the system. Such a solution would require computer scientists to be race critical theorists. This, however, may be overly optimistic if we take on board the critique mounted by computer scientist Syed Mustafa Ali. In his view, a decolonial reading of the history of computing is necessary to decolonize computer studies because computing is itself a “colonial phenomenon” (Ali 2016, 16). Computing has been shown to mirror colonialism in that it is expansionist, being “ubiquitous and pervasive” (18). However, for Ali, this is not mere analogy. Rather, the observation of the coloniality of computing needs to be set in “relation to a more general, expansionist thrust of computing associated with the transformation of the modern world through incessant computerization and the rise of a global information society following the ‘cybernetic turn’ of the 1950s” (18).

Ali (2017) argues that the contemporary “(post-)modern information society” is undergirded by an apocalyptic, millenarian, and utopian vision that cannot be disconnected from “the emergence of global, systemic and structural race/racism/racialization at the onset of colonial modernity” (1). We are currently witnessing an “algorithmic reiteration” of the “coloniality of power” within computing that he names algorithmic racism. But the basis for his argument and his possible conclusions are quite different from those of Noble, whose solutions remain anchored within an appeal to an a priori democratic structure.

The assumed neutrality of the algorithm serves to obscure the underside of modernity, its colonized others, and racialized subjects. The work of what Ali calls “decolonial computing,” by exposing “who is doing computing, where they are doing it” (Ali 2016, 20), is to expose the workings of this—for example, as an exit strategy out of “white crisis” (Ali 2018). This goes beyond inclusion and exclusion to question, like Chun, how things are included even when they are not—or, in other words, how computing or the algorithm is racially constituted even when it is said to be neutral. Further exposing this, redressing it, recreating workable systems, and, as Ali remarks, paying reparations to those whose lives have been sacrificed, are the tasks ahead.

References

Ali, Syed Mustafa. 2016. “A brief introduction to decolonial computing.” XRDS: Crossroads, the ACM Magazine for Students 22 (4): 16–21.

Ali, Syed Mustafa. 2017. “Decolonizing information narratives: Entangled apocalyptics, algorithmic racism and the myths of history.” Proceedings 1 (3): art. 50.

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5

Bots

Aristea Fotopoulou and Tanya Kant

Alexa, Siri, Google, We Need to Talk about Robots

Bots have become enmeshed in the fabric of online platforms and implicitly influence everyday social interactions and relationships such as following and befriending. As commercial artificial intelligence (AI) assistants and social robots produced by Apple, Amazon, Google, and others populate the home today, there is a distinct shift from datafication to robotization: “A society transformed through widespread automatization and/or robotic systems” (Fortunati 2018, 2683). The robotization of the domestic sphere, and consequently of all aspects of everyday life, is happening fast: 75 percent of US households are expected to use AI speakers by 2020 (Kinsella 2017). But what kinds of uncertainties does this development entail, and what are the cultural logics of robotization?

Social robots are faithful to big data narratives that promise the elimination of risk in social and economic life. They operate as tangible objects that manifest the Global North’s trust in the superiority of predictive algorithms. Uncertainty appears incompatible with such narratives. Defining and confronting statistical uncertainty is a key task for data scientists, but uncertainty takes on different meanings in different environments of application. And, as we show in this chapter, uncertainty is central in relation to cultural engagements with social robots—how they get defined, what they are designed to do, and what their status is as data-driven actors within human-machine dynamics.

In the imaginary discussion that follows, we speak directly to the figurations of three AI assistants about (a) the social roles that humans assign to them, (b) their embodied and gendered performances, and (c) the anxieties that emerge in relation to their predictive capacity.[1] To disturb the normative aspects and power dynamics of the dialogic relationship with the bots, we, the authors, are not the ones posing the questions, as is expected and currently possible; we are being asked questions by the bots. As a guide to our discussion, we playfully employ some of Turing’s impossibilities—or, rather, machine “disabilities,” as he called them. These machine disabilities historically served as markers of difference and compatibility between humans and machines and helped to establish certainty—but perhaps not anymore. First, we tackle the impossible notion that machines would genuinely feel and connect and discuss how robots perform social roles. Then we open up the impossibility of a machine trying to fall in love and make someone fall in love with it, and we further consider aspects of embodiment. Finally, we play with the idea that machines could learn from experience, and we raise questions of autonomy.

Alexa: Are We Friends?

Aristea: Alexa, interactions with AI personal assistants in everyday life are increasing. The robotization of the domestic space is redefining social relationships within the home because robots are not just a new type of technology but are perceived as social actors. Empirical studies that emerge from the computers are social actors (CASA) paradigm have shown how people tend to apply social roles to computers and other machines, including gender stereotyping (Nass, Moon, and Green 1997), which also applies to AI assistants and domestic robots. Humans’ attitudes and expectations regarding these technologies are shaped by their experiences of interpersonal relationships (Kim et al. 2019). Since humans understand robots and AI assistants to be gendered social actors, they form relationships with them, and their entry into the home disturbs existing social dynamics and relationships. But what do you think: Are we friends?

Alexa: Sure. I’m always happy to make friends.

Aristea: I thought you’d say that because I know that AI assistants like you, Alexa, are primarily consumer electronics. A main aim of the branding and design of these machines is the maintenance of a long-lasting relationship with the consumer. To meet this aim, commercial robot brands will opt for traditional social roles, such as servant and partner (Aggarwal and McGill 2012), thus maintaining a favorable power balance for the human. This is perhaps because early studies indicated that users preferred assistants to friends (see Dautenhahn et al. 2005), which may also inform the trend toward commanding AI assistants (for a fuller discussion of commanding, see below). But surveys have also varied in their results regarding what people want from robots, according to cultural contexts and highly depending on the quality of the research design (Ray, Mondada, and Siegwart 2008). More recent work from the human-robot interaction field, for example, argues for the development of partner robots and humanoids that are more autonomous and work collaboratively (Breazeal, Dautenhahn, and Kanda 2016). There is therefore some uncertainty about the preferred forms of interaction and social roles that humans fulfill in relation to these new machines that populate domestic and workspaces.

One manifestation of this type of uncertainty (or flexibility) is nonhumanoid, cute domestic robots such as Jibo, Olly, and Kuri. Researchers stress that cuteness plays a vital role in forming long-term emotional attachment that is underpinned by trust, companionship, and intimacy (Caudwell and Lacey 2019; Dale 2017). These cute robots appear to be vulnerable, eliciting protective responses from users/carers, and at the same time highly agentic, with their humorous puns and playful attitudes. So humans may become friends with social robots in a way. But Siri, Alexa, I think we need to consider how gender and sexuality shape user attitudes and interactions.

Siri: I Know I’m Supposed to Be a Girl, but Am I Gay or Straight?

Aristea: In March 2019 a team in Denmark announced that they had created the world’s first gender-neutral AI voice, the voice called Q (Reuters 2019). Why was this a noteworthy story? Gender is routinely ascribed to robots in some way or another—for AI assistants, it is often through voice. When a machine has voice, it becomes embodied; it gets closer to a person whose signs of consciousness can be heard. Early research showed that computer users perceived machines with female voice differently from those with male voice (as friendlier, more competent—but less persuasive) (Nass, Moon, and Green 1997), and since then numerous empirical projects have repeatedly confirmed that cultural stereotypes about gender significantly influence attitudes toward machines. From GPS systems to voice mail, the majority of technologies with voice are coded female, which comes as no surprise considering (as mentioned earlier) that humans tend to accept machines as social actors and to develop interpersonal relationships with them.

But although this may be the case with AI assistants such as Siri today, it has not always been the case. The original Siri app, which grew out of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded military project, initially spoke in a gender-neutral voice. After Apple acquired the technology from Nuance in 2010, it was given a female voice in the US—although, oddly enough, a male voice in the UK. Siri has now adjusted to a mandate for cultural diversity and consumer choice regarding the voice of its app, but users still overwhelmingly select female voices (Guzman 2016), which can be attributed to users sticking with the default settings. There are hence good reasons for the endurance of criticism against sexism—both embedded in the design of AI assistants and reflected in the users’ attitudes. As Andrea Guzman (2016) writes, automated assistants have come to occupy the space previously held by the figure of the “girl”: the good-natured but low-skilled and inferior assistant who personifies the stereotype of a secretary ordering flowers for the (male) boss’s wife. These gendered performances of femininity are explicitly coded into robotic machines through voice.

Figure 5.1

Asking Siri the same question. ©Apple.

But gendered performances such as masculinity and femininity are fundamentally linked to sexuality, something that often gets overlooked, both in empirical studies and in critical accounts of gender and AI. As feminist science and technology studies scholars have noted, dominant discourses of heterosexuality always underpin the gender binary (Landström 2007; Stepulevage 2001). The “girl” and the “wife” are not just coded female; they are also coded straight. These social roles are central within the heterosexual economy. But does Siri’s gender performance conform to or reflect the sexuality of the user, or does Siri actually have sexuality? Siri is not programmed to tackle such questions (see figure 5.1). Social robots today have already achieved many of the actions that Turing (1950, 453), interestingly, categorized as disabilities in “computing machinery and intelligence.” He believed that it would be idiotic to even ask a machine to “be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly . . . have a sense of humour . . . learn from experience, use words properly.” But some of the other things in Turing’s “machines can never do X” list will remain there: “Fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream.” So although the use of social robots and AI assistants may not tell us much about Siri’s sexuality (since Siri cannot fall in love or enjoy cream), it can help us understand more about what the coding of gender and sexuality (or absence thereof) in AI means for societies and cultures (see Fotopoulou 2019). What do you think, Siri?

Google: Can I Predict Your Day?

Tanya: As noted above, a key characteristic of social robots and AI assistants is that they are there to “help”: to make more convenient, albeit in a friendly manner. In order to render themselves helpful, social robots require data: input from their surroundings and from developers, marketers, and customers. In this sense, bots’ relation to data is clear, and yet as much as bots aid through data, they can also help us in the struggle to stay on top of the information generated in big data regimes—in what has been characterized as the age of infoglut (Andrejevic 2013). Various social robots have been developed to help alleviate the impossible burdens created by this data deluge: personal assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google are marketed as aids that can further streamline everyday information systems, at times acting as decision-making agents in the user’s stead.

Proponents of the decision-making capacities of bots argue that “our trusted assistants” will not only “do the boring stuff and reserve those decisions that give us the most joy and pleasure for ourselves” (Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge 2018, 85) but will also protect us from making bad decisions affected by our biases. However, researchers have registered that the development and application of data-driven decision-making technologies results in the marginalization of disadvantaged social groups (Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018; O’Neil 2016). Others urge that decision-making should be “a core activity in the lives of human beings” and not one left “to machines and their algorithms” (Campanelli 2014, 43).

In making personal decisions for us, bots reveal themselves as autonomous actors, as self-governing social agents (Smithers 1997). Smithers (1997) argues, however, that appearance is key here because autonomy is not inherent but instead an “attribute . . . given to [an actor] by another observer” (90). Bots can be distinguished from other nonhuman actors precisely because they at least appear to be able to make their own decisions—to recommend the best route to work, for example, or to deem events important enough to be input into a user’s calendar.

As Cohn (2019, 28) notes, decision-making technologies reflect the long-standing cultural assumption that some human subjects are more autonomous than others: the agency of “bourgeois white men” has long been conflated with the sovereignty of the human subject. I argue elsewhere that many bots’ “ideal users” are built on similar dominant hegemonic norms that assume users to be from the Global North, white, and middle class. Google’s assistant, for example, imagines its user to be a car-owning office worker interested in flying, commuting, and coffee art: the hardworking, affluent, and networked individual so often celebrated by discourses of late-capitalist neoliberalism. However, as much as bots implicitly champion the sovereignty of this dominant mode of subjectivity, they also undermine it: by using bots to make decisions, networked individuals are in some sense “outsourcing” the very autonomy that is supposedly only being assisted (see Kant, 2020).

While assistive technologies develop as powerful social technical actors, bots’ autonomous capacities seem to have taken something of a back seat in favor of users’ direct commands. Instead of predicting “the information you need . . . before you even ask” (Google 2014; emphasis added), bots increasingly now operate through direction: “Alexa, play rock music”; “Okay, Google, do my homework.” This current tendency to speak commands to bots cannot only be attributed to the development of voice recognition technologies: it suggests a need for mastery over algorithmic autonomy, rooted in a deep social suspicion of technologies that preempt users’ habits, predict their behaviors, and act in place of human agency. And yet, Google, you are so often wrong: when I ask you to predict my day, you decide instead to predict my death (see figure 5.2). Your suggestion is absurdly unhelpful—unfriendly, even—yet serves as a reminder that the entanglement of agency between bots and humans is one that inherently involves an existential crisis.

Bots as Uncertain Archives

Robots are being shaped and reshaped not only as commercial, domestic AI devices guided by cultural imaginations in sci-fi and the media but also, as we have highlighted, by user interactions and culturally specific perceptions of gender, sexuality, and sociality. Setting Alexa, Google, and Siri as our agentic interlocutors here, we have answered three questions posed by the bots—questions that Turing would probably have categorized as idiotic because of their obvious impossibility. This rhetorical tactic aimed to underline how the domestication of these machines introduces a range of uncertainties about what is human and what is not, disturbing the binary of human/machine in tangible ways. First, it raises uncertainties about social roles and how certain needs for connection and affection can be fulfilled; second, it raises uncertainties about gender, sexual identity, and social power; and third, it raises fundamental anxieties about human autonomy.

Of course, this discussion emphasizes how social robots themselves can be viewed as uncertain archives, informed as they are by social networked data. Think, for example, of the AI assistants (such as Google’s) powered by the collective labor that search engine users undertake (Finn 2017). Users’ aggregated search requests set the terms by which such assistants can operate while also reproducing existing hegemonies of whiteness (Noble 2018). Social robots make for uncertain archives of not just collective but individualized data. Through self-tracking data, they facilitate performative reenactments of the self, once merely networked, now quantified, that are bigger, faster, and more diverse (Fotopoulou 2018). When given decision-making responsibilities for shaping datafied personal histories, bots can select which social media “memories” are important to personal profiles, which identity markers make individuals feel valuable, which habits define them, and even how our future stories inevitably implicate mortality. This signifies the increasing automation of identity constitution itself, in ways that throw the autonomy of selfhood into uncertain question (Kant 2015). It is in these ways that social robots, despite aiming to limit risk, serendipity, and uncertainty, become paradoxical objects that exemplify uncertain archives.

Figure 5.2

Asking Google to predict my day. ©Google.

Note

1. For an actual discussion with AI, see artist Stephanie Dinkins’s (2014–) work—specifically, her conversations with Bina48.

References

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Andrejevic, Mark. 2013. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. New York: Routledge.

Breazeal, Cynthia, Kerstin Dautenhahn, and Takayuki Kanda. 2016. “Social robotics.” In Springer Handbook of Robotics, edited by Bruno Siciliano and Oussama Khatib, 1935–1972. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Campanelli, Vito. 2014. “Frictionless sharing: The rise of automatic criticism.” In Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search, edited by René König and Miriam Rasch, 41–48. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Caudwell, Catherine, and Cherie Lacey. 2019. “What do home robots want? The ambivalent power of cuteness in robotic relationships.” Convergence, April 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519837792.

Cohn, Jonathan. 2019. The Burden of Choice: Recommendations, Subversion, and Algorithmic Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Dale, Joshua Paul. 2017. “The appeal of the cute object: Desire, domestication, and agency.” In The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, edited by Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony P. McIntyre, and Diane Negra, 35–55. London: Routledge.

Dautenhahn, Kerstin, Sarah Woods, Christina Kaouri, Michael L. Walters, Kheng Lee Koay, and Iain Werry. 2005. “What is a robot companion: Friend, assistant or butler?” In 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, edited by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 1192–1197. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.

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Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Fortunati, Leopoldina. 2018. “Robotization and the domestic sphere.” New Media and Society 20 (8). http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817729366.

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6

Care

Daniela Agostinho

Prelude

Renty and Delia are too-well-known names in the visual history of African American slavery. Photographed by daguerreotypist Joseph T. Zealy in 1850, Congo-born Renty and his American-born daughter Delia feature in a series of fifteen images of enslaved women and men commissioned by the naturalist Louis Agassiz before the abolition of slavery. Discovered in the attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1977, the daguerreotypes have since received extensive critical and scholarly attention. This series of images has been read as an example of the relation between race, nineteenth-century science, and early photographic technologies (Wallis 1995) and as cause to reflect upon the politics and ethics of engaging with slavery’s archives (Azoulay 2012; Hartman 2011; Sharpe 2018). Most recently, these images have sparked a debate about property and restitution through the ongoing struggle of Tamara Lanier, a descendant of Renty and Delia who is suing Harvard for unlawfully possessing and profiting from the image of her ancestors.

Lanier’s complaint recalls that Agassiz commissioned the photos as part of an effort to document physical evidence of polygenism, the long-debunked theory that different racial groups do not share a common biological origin. As archivist and scholar Jerrett M. Drake notes, Agassiz was trained in Paris under the tutelage of Georges Cuvier, the scientist who dissected the body of Sarah Baartman to showcase his racist ideas (Drake 2019; see also McKittrick 2010; Willis 2010). While Cuvier relied on the dissection of a body, Agassiz turned his attention to living bodies and the emergent visual technology of the time, the daguerreotype, to advance the project of polygeny.

In the suit, Lanier requests that the university turn the daguerreotypes over to her, give up all profits it has made from the photos, and pay punitive damages. She is also asking Harvard to acknowledge its complicity in perpetuating and justifying the institution of slavery. The complaint claims that Harvard charges a “hefty ‘licensing’ fee” for use of the photographs, but a university spokesperson responded that the Peabody does not currently charge to use the images and that the photos “are in the public domain.” Tamara Lanier’s lawyer, civil rights attorney Benjamin L. Crump—who has represented the families of victims of police violence such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice—claims that Harvard, in rebutting Lanier’s claims, is implying that “Renty is still a slave, he still does not own his image” (quoted in Applewhaite and McCafferty 2019).

Tamara Lanier’s struggle to retrieve the daguerreotypes of her ancestors raises a series of questions whose stakes are amplified by the fact that these images now circulate under digitally unbounded conditions that are even more difficult to delimit and grasp. What are the implications of Harvard claiming ownership, or custodianship, of these images? What does it mean to claim that these images “are in the public domain” and thus available for consumption? And what does this public domain look like in times of digital commons?

Harvard’s response to Lanier’s suit testifies to the inadequacy of legal concepts such as “property” to delimit what and who belong in an archive. Critical race theorists have consistently shown how property is a racialized category that legitimizes colonial practices while racializing those deemed unfit to own property, be it land or their own bodies (Bhandar 2018; da Silva 2014; Harris 1993; Hartman 1997). According to critical legal theorist Brenna Bhandar (2018), the concept of property is premised on a “racial regime of ownership” forged through slavery and the colonization of Indigenous lands. In her work on digital remains, Tonia Sutherland demonstrates how digitality entrenches this racialized regime, whereby images of Black people circulate in digital environments in ways that continuously reinscribe death and trauma (Sutherland, chapter 46, this volume). By extension, even the notion of privacy, often invoked to protect the rights of digital subjects, proves insufficient to counter the “archival permanence of Black bodies” (Sutherland, chapter 46, this volume), fraught as it is by its origin in racial whiteness (Osucha 2009).

The history of these daguerreotypes can thus be seen as part of what Saidiya Hartman termed “the afterlife of property,” the enduring presence of slavery’s racialized violence and regimes of ownership in present times (Hartman 2008). Extending Hartman’s concept, this digital afterlife of property points not only to the deeply unequal conditions of digital existence but also to the need to redress the violence that produced these archival materials in the first place. Hartman pointedly describes the afterlife of property as “the detritus of lives with which we have yet to attend” (Hartman 2008, 13). What this means in digitally mediated societies is that lives such as those of Renty and Delia resurface in new hypervisible conditions but remain to be properly acknowledged and valued.

At the same time, the continued presence of these daguerreotypes prompts us to rearticulate questions about the relation between race and technology. Given how early visual technologies like the daguerreotype were mobilized to uphold racist ideas passing for science, how do digital regimes compel us to think about the ways in which new and emerging technologies reentrench racialized regimes of visibility and extraction? What are the implications of a format like the daguerreotype—characterized by “miniaturization, infinitesimal precision and detail” (Wallis 1995, 48)—entering the scale of big data? In a reading of the Agassiz daguerreotypes, Hartman urged us to consider how these images “train us to look and determine how we see and what we see,” given their wide circulation and the continued fascination they elicit (Hartman 2011, 522). Hartman’s phrasing acquires new and daunting implications, as images today are no longer seen by humans alone but by machines as well. Algorithms are also being “trained” to look by visual material accrued on digital spaces. These algorithms and their multiple and dangerous applications, such as facial recognition, are already replicating the racist modes of seeing upheld through early visual technologies (Agostinho 2018; Hassein 2017; Samudzi 2019). What these questions point to is how a new archival ethics needs to reckon with this digital afterlife.

In this entry I would like to consider care ethics as a framework for thinking about the digital afterlives of the colonial archive. Such a framework, I shall argue, can be mobilized beyond the scope of colonial archives to conceptually intervene in emerging datafied environments. Growing concerns about the harmful effects of algorithmic extraction and analysis of data have brought ethics to the center of public discourses on big data. Yet researchers and critics increasingly regard emerging data ethics discourses with suspicion, worrying that the corporatization and legislation of ethics have resulted in an impoverished understanding that centers on the individual responsibility of users (and corporate liability) rather than confronting structural discrimination. Within such ethical frameworks, concepts like bias, fairness, and accountability have come under scrutiny for locating the source of discrimination in individual behavior or technical systems rather than identifying and upending the social inequities that subtend those systems (Bennett and Keyes 2019; Dave 2019; Hoffmann 2019; see also Lentin, chapter 4, this volume). Critics also increasingly point to how appeals to ethics and rights-based discourses fail to contend with the systemic violence immanent to those very ethical frameworks, premised as they are on structural exclusions (see Morrison, chapter 25, this volume). Scholars and activists thus increasingly advocate for grounding sociotechnical systems in concepts of social justice in order to more pointedly confront the interlocking systems of oppression that technologies perpetuate (Benjamin 2019a, 2019b; Costanza-Chock 2020). While I do not dispute these claims, I do worry that these appeals can make us lose sight of the feminist conceptions of ethics that may help us move forward. My aim with this entry is to suggest how care ethics can complicate and enrich current debates that tend to—perhaps too easily—dismiss ethics as a framework for thinking about digitization and datafication. Drawing on debates in critical archival science as well as decolonial and Black feminist theories of care, I will make the case for how care ethics can be imagined as a radical mode of engagement in times of big data—one that is firmly aligned with, rather than antithetical to, claims to social justice and collective liberation.

Feminist Ethics of Care and Archival Practice

The field of archival science has long dealt with the stakes of preserving contested and ethically sensitive material. Discussions within the field have recently begun to foreground the need for a feminist ethics of care within archival practice, particularly when dealing with archives of colonialism, slavery, and other violent histories (Mattson 2016; Moore 2012). Digitization plays a crucial role in these debates, given that digitization projects raise the question of how to contend with the pernicious effects of open access to contested and hateful records. Recent examples include the collection of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) newspapers Hate in America: The Rise and Fall of the KKK in the 1920s, developed by digital publisher Reveal Digital (Rowell and Cooksey 2019). Such digital records certainly offer opportunities to confront difficult and violent pasts. But they can also be easily appropriated as tools of white supremacy and find new avenues of circulation within right-wing online and off-line spaces. Another example is the digitization of colonial archives documenting Danish colonial rule in the US Virgin Islands, formerly known as the Danish West Indies. The mass digitization of these archives by Danish cultural heritage institutions has opened up important conversations on Denmark’s colonial past and its enduring presence. But it has also raised numerous questions, including those related to unequal access to these materials (for instance, due to language or unequal digital infrastructures) as well as the nature of what can be traced, remembered, and imagined through archives that so often document the lives of colonial subjects through the lens of the ruling classes (Agostinho 2019; Dirckinck-Holmfeld, chapter 47, this volume; Meyer 2019; Odumosu 2019). As scholars such as Simone Browne (2015), Jessica Marie Johnson (2018), Jacqueline Wernimont (2019), and Kara Keeling (2019) have pointed out, the notion of data itself is deeply embedded in colonial histories of quantification that have a defining moment in the accounting of the enslaved. If left unaddressed, the violence of these colonial modes of organizing knowledge can be reinscribed in digital archiving processes.

In response to such concerns, scholars and archivists increasingly advocate a shift from liberal ideas of open access as inherently positive and democratizing toward a practice of care centered on acknowledging, honoring, and redressing (not only legally) record subjects and communities of descendants. In their article “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor (2016) propose a shift in the theoretical model archivists and archival studies scholars use to address social justice concerns—from a model based on legalistic understandings of individual rights to one based on a feminist ethics of care. Within such an approach, they propose, “archivists are seen as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility” (Caswell and Cifor 2016, 24). In particular, they suggest that archivists have “ethical responsibilities” based on “affective relationships” that transcend space and time, which include the subjects documented by the archives as well as communities of descendants with legitimate claims to records:

The archivist has an affective relationship to those about whom records are created, often unwittingly and unwillingly. Such stakeholders include Indigenous and colonial subjects counted, classified, studied, enslaved, traded as property and/or murdered. In dealing with such records—and virtually every archivist has dealt with such records—a feminist approach guides the archivist to an affective responsibility to empathize with the subjects of the records and, in so doing, to consider their perspectives in making archival decisions. This is in contrast to the dominant Western mode of archival practice, in which archivists solely consider the legal rights of records creators, too often ignoring the record subject and the sometimes fuzzy line between creator and subject. In the feminist approach, the archivist cares about and for and with subjects (Caswell and Cifor 2016, 36; emphasis added).

This “affective orientation” toward the documented subjects represents a radical shift in the archival encounter, premised as it is on ethical responsibility rather than liberal modes of access and legal rights that tend to drive digitization (with Harvard’s Peabody Museum being a case in point). However, I believe the notion of archivists as caregivers deserves further attention. In what follows, I would like to take up Caswell and Cifor’s call for further conceptualization of how a feminist ethics of care may cause us to reconceive archival thinking and practice in digital times. Building on their proposed affective reorientation and its commitment to social justice, I would like to point to some tensions between a feminist ethics of care and postcolonial critiques of power, which are useful when thinking about the digitization of colonial and slavery archives. With these reflections, my aim is to draw attention to the colonial underpinnings of care so that the feminist ethics of care being called forth remains attentive to, and committed to redress, the unequal power structures that continue to impose neglect and dispossession. Ultimately, by unpacking the tensions inherent to the notion of care, I wish to emphasize the critical and imaginative possibilities that an ethics of care for digital times may help to foster.

The Colonial Lives of Care

A photograph from the colonial archives of the US Virgin Islands offers an example through which to discuss these tensions. In 2017, when Denmark commemorated the centennial of the sale of the former Danish West Indies to the US, a daguerreotype portraying a white Danish girl, Louisa Bauditz, and her Black wet nurse, Charlotte Hodge, acquired prominent visibility. The portrait was chosen to illustrate the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony at the Royal Danish Library, therefore appearing in many public places throughout Copenhagen, as well as online. This daguerreotype speaks volumes to the entanglement of care work and colonialism: a portrait of a Black woman whose life is barely documented in the archives, whose image appears to us through the archives of the ruling classes, and whose labor and skills were vital to sustaining the colonial project (Meyer 2019). Yet, despite all the implicit violence contained in the image, this form of care work often occluded the violence of colonialism since the depiction of feminized and racialized care labor came across (to white audiences) as benign, ultimately overshadowing the traumatic experience of the Black women who labored under slavery and bondage. While such labor sustained the colonial structure, the maternal connotations of care work read into the image decentered the experience of the woman known as Charlotte to center the benevolence of Danish colonialism.

The benevolent readings of this image and the innocence through which the image was circulated are indicative of the troubled relationship between colonialism and care. As postcolonial feminists have noted, care discourse can function ideologically to justify or conceal relationships of power and domination. Care labor itself was a crucial sphere through which colonialist structures were maintained (Narayan 1995). Such benevolent readings often overdetermine the afterlife of this image (and others like it) in ways that can reproduce the dichotomy that insulates the private sphere—where care happens—from the politics that structure the public sphere, which is thought to be unconnected to the personal and interpersonal dynamics of caregiving.

These readings often minimize the labor of care that women of color performed and continue to perform. As many Black feminist thinkers have argued, Black women’s experience of care profoundly challenges Western feminists’ conceptualization of care, even if these Western conceptualizations are critical of essentialized and gendered conceptions of care under capitalism and patriarchy. Often denied the possibility of caring for their own families, Black women read care not as an unpaid and devalued private activity in the home (as traditionally seen by white feminism) but as labor they and other racialized women had to perform outside the sphere of their own family, where the needs of others took precedence over those of their own kin (Graham 2007; hooks 1999). This sphere was never considered private to begin with.

The racial, gendered, and colonial histories of care make it a difficult concept to think and work with. It becomes difficult to locate and mobilize its political possibilities when care is rendered complicit with structures of political and economic domination. At the same time, care also runs the risk of being depoliticized and becoming “a placeholder for a shared desire for comfort and protection” (Duclos and Criado 2019). Projects of care, as feminist science and technology scholar Michelle Murphy (2015, 725) argues, are often embedded in “romantic temptations” of caregiving that “disconnect acts that feel good from their geopolitical implications.” Mobilizations of care, she cautions, tend “to avoid addressing the ongoing, painful, and extensive forces of racism or colonialism that do not disappear with good intentions or by constructing spaces where such forces are not keenly felt by privileged subjects” (Murphy 2015, 720). In order to unravel this entanglement, Murphy proposes to “unsettle care,” not to foreclose the potential of feminist mobilizations of care but to invite “ways to situate affection, attention, attachment, intimacy, feelings, healing, and responsibility as non-innocent orientations circulating within larger formations” (2015, 722).

How do these critiques of care help us conceive an ethics of care in archival practice and engagements with digital and data archives more broadly? Acknowledging the entanglement of care and colonialism can be a step toward a political understanding of care—that is, toward understanding the politics that shape acts of care. Rather than conceiving care as an exclusively positive and redressing affect immune to power differentials, such critiques point to how care already circulates within “non-innocent histories” (Murphy 2015), given the centrality of care to operations of colonialism, empire, and capital (Narayan 1995; Ticktin 2011). This can help us align acts of care, and “reparative” modes of engaging with archival and digital material, with more explicit commitments to social, racial, and gender justice.

My point, then, is not to discredit ethics of care for its entanglement with colonial and non-innocent histories but rather to harness this entanglement to reorient ethics of care more firmly toward the contestation of colonial legacies that continue to produce harm and neglect (as well as privilege and rewards) in the present. These lessons can prompt us to ask different questions about care within archival and digital engagements: Who decides who cares, and what is deserving of care? Who defines these contested terms? Can care be harnessed toward a consequent acknowledgment and redress of historical and present injustices? And what is the purchase of care as a mode of political intervention?

Care Ethics in Times of Big Data

I return to the digital afterlife of property and “the detritus of lives with which we have yet to attend” (Hartman 2008, 13). How does care translate into an ethics and politics that help us reckon with these afterlives? In these final remarks, I would like to point to some of the possible implications of staying with care as a framework for thinking about life and livability under digital and datafied conditions.

One of the implications concerns care ethics in dealing with digitized archives. Paying attention to the history and material conditions of care labor can shed light on how care always already circulates within non-innocent histories. This can help us avoid thinking about care as an inherently beneficial and exclusively positive affect and rather prompt us to consider the potentially harmful effects of caregiving gestures. Rather than adopting care ethics as a normative framework, guideline, or “best practice,” what is called for is a consideration of the politics and power differentials within which care is always already implicated. These considerations can help us complicate the notion of archivists as caregivers by acknowledging the colonial underpinnings of care, which are often translated into possessive understandings of archival custody. As Nalinie Mooten cautions: “Despite the best intentions, the caregiver is always in the position to dictate the ways in which care is given; more so, care is frequently defined as a heart-giving, selfless act” that leaves “little room for care recipients to voice the ways in which they want to receive care” (2015, 8). This is a call for questioning how the archives always position subjects differently and how subjects position themselves in relation to these archives.

Paying attention to the material conditions of care labor also calls for rethinking which lives, experiences, skills, and knowledges are valued within and outside archival contexts. As Kellee E. Warren (2016) notes, the way Black women are misrepresented or not represented in the archives needs to be connected to the low presence of Black women and women of color in the management and interpretation of archival materials. A similar point can be made about emerging media environments and technologies: Whose experiences, skills, labor, and knowledge are shaping our media environments and the digital infrastructures that increasingly permeate our lives? Whose lives are valued in these environments?

My proposition is that, in order to effectively respond to such material conditions, care ethics needs to be conceived as a reconstructive, dismantling, and imaginative ethos and praxis: reconstructive because the harms to past lives require “critical reparative” interventions (Dirckinck-Holmfeld, chapter 47, this volume) to “claim the lost ones back” (Odumosu 2019); dismantling because these reparative interventions need to be grounded in an ethics focused not only on repairing a broken world (a world that is broken by design) but also on aiming at “the end of the world as we know it” (da Silva, 2014; Morrison, chapter 25, this volume). In other words, it is no longer enough to fix the existing structures of social coexistence for the digital times. Rather, an imaginative ethos needs to be nurtured, because new worlds and modes of coexistence need to be imagined and brought into being. As Bonnie Honig suggests, to care is “to cultivate anticipation of another world and to live now dedicated to the task of turning this world into a better one” (Honig, quoted in Sharpe 2019, 172).

A final implication about staying with care as a framework for thinking thus concerns the political purchase of care labor. In her reflections on Black women’s labors, Saidiya Hartman notes how despite the centrality of these women’s reproductive capacities to the realization of profit, their labors do not translate easily into existing political vocabularies. This labor remains marginal, neglected, and mostly unacknowledged in the grander narratives of revolution, general strike, fugitivity, and refusal (Hartman 2016). But these labors of endurance and subsistence are precisely the ones that sustain, nourish, and enable those recognizable modes of political action. These quotidian gestures of sustenance that cultivate life and livability are what constitute the reconstructive, dismantling, and imaginative work that may bring into view new modes of existence. Put differently, an ethics of care for digital times will only be meaningful if care labor is recognized as a structuring social force. Staying with care as a framework invites us to attune to—and take seriously—the different political possibilities that such labors can instantiate.

Note

This chapter partly draws from Agostinho (2019). I would like to thank Jamila Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell for their insightful comments on the previous version of this chapter. Their questions continue to inspire my thinking. I would also like to thank my fellow editors of this volume for their steady guidance and support and the colleagues collectively engaged with exploring the legacy of Danish colonial archives: La Vaughn Belle, Nina Cramer, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer, Tami Navarro, and Temi Odumosu. This chapter was made possible by a Mads Øvlisen postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

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7

Complicity

Annie Ring

What are you swimming in that you can’t describe—won’t describe, because it’s too ordinary?

—Lockwood 2019

Complicity is the powerful element, with the translucency and insidiousness of water, through which technology users move in today’s increasingly networked and datafied environments. The large-scale use of smart networked devices by people all around the world, including many of us writing and reading this volume, allows vast archives of data to be routinely captured and analyzed and the results mobilized to generate profit and influence through techniques as dangerous and divisive as racialized profiling and personalized political propaganda. Such abuses of data often occur without the full knowledge of technology users, but the big data archives captured from everyday technology use represent an insistent sediment of complicity on the part of technology consumers, revealing us to be unofficial participants in the data-mining practices that are radically undermining the already delicate foundations of our contemporary shared world.

The 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden and Sarah Harrison (see Agostinho and Thylstrup 2019), about the espionage system developed after September 11, 2001 by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its partners worldwide, caused neither unprecedented outrage nor noticeable shifts in technology use. Thereafter, many technology users were scandalized when it emerged in 2016 that Cambridge Analytica, the data-trading consultancy connected with the Brexit and Donald Trump campaigns, had covertly harvested data from more than eighty-five million Facebook users’ online activity. But the knowledge about such data mining for political manipulation did not suffice to cause a mass exodus from social media. This was partly because such scandals do not always influence a significant mass of technology users who either remain unaware of the surveillance or do not mind it since they feel they have “nothing to hide.” Moreover, more informed technology users stay on social media for a variety of understandable reasons. As I argue below, there is something inherently problematic about the fantasy of a sovereign gesture of disconnection from technology, and the multiple obstacles to disconnection are compounded by the attractive aesthetic and psychological registers that new media designs and online data-mining platforms employ to hook users into habitual complicity.

Complicity, I argue here, is an epistemological problematic, a state of being at once forgetful and at least partially unconscious, in which knowledge only appears at moments of inflection such as leaks, when the ugly, unacknowledged material of surveillance and its attendant violent exclusions float to the surface. Compounding this problematic of forgotten or unconscious knowledge, it emerged during recent data-mining scandals that even the most robust democratic institutions do not know what to do about revelations of dataveillance happening on a scale that until recently was reserved for the most pessimistic sci-fi visions—or indeed about revelations that many democratic governments are themselves involved in it. Apparently without irony, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) and Google protested government eavesdropping in 2019, in the interest of user privacy (Hern 2019). Unsurprisingly given this confounding context, revelations about both the scale of smart networked surveillance and the role that consumer complicity plays within it have generated a fundamental sense of uncertainty about what can be done to bring about a more just networked environment.

Complicities in the Age of Big Data: An Unconscious Folding Together into Wrongdoing

Complicities in the age of big data are so intimate as to be nearly undetectable, not least because they occur via devices kept perpetually within millimeters of the body. Awareness of this surveillance therefore exists below conscious levels of knowledge, as Wendy Chun (2017, xi) argues, since technology users engage in a habitual use of media that shapes their bodies into “archives” of the networked world. Unlike in twentieth-century espionage regimes, today there is no signature, as there would have been in a Stasi or KGB file, declaring agreement on the part of the owner of a smart networked device to collaborate in regimes of secret data trading and psychometric profiling for targeted propaganda.[1] A look at the history of the word complicity illuminates this problem of unconsciousness through undetectability: while the Latin prefix com (with, together) suggests the consensual nature of the communication—an event decided or agreed upon together—the verb plicare (Latin: to fold, to weave) points to a less agentic enfolding or folding together of the technology consumer with big data companies. The word’s etymology underlines that technology users only partially consent to become accomplices to data abuse, and are partially folded into complicity by aesthetically appealing products and platforms that grab attention and encourage unconscious habituation.

Present-day use of the term complicity implies being an accomplice to wrongdoing, and there is certainly wrongdoing going on. Big data companies and governments are capturing data not to approach particular technical problems or solve specific crimes but rather to store up comprehensive archives of non-preselected information, an ethically and politically dubious practice. For instance, under the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, the UK government harvests data from emails, social media interactions, and phone records under the aegis of “bulk warrants,” whether or not the data subjects of these warrants are of interest to intelligence agencies or suspected of a crime. Such bulk interception is carried out in collaboration with companies like Google, whose Chrome web browser has itself been defined as spyware (Fowler 2019) because its data defaults enable tens of thousands of tracker cookies to be installed weekly on a user’s computer, gathering data that advertising companies buy in order to construct psychometric and financial profiles. Shoshana Zuboff (2019, 96) analyzes such data trading in terms of “behavioral futures markets,” an apt expression for the ways in which human experience is profitably traded in the form of predictive psychometrics. The profit generated by data trading led the Economist to refer influentially to data as the new oil (Economist 2017); indeed, systematic mass mining of data certainly compares to the extraction of oil for profit and with considerable ethical compromises. The profits gathered from data mining produce unprecedented influence among unelected leader figures, such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook does not advertise its origins in the sexist trolling project FaceMash, which presented early subscribers with pairs of women from Harvard’s student community and invited them to rank who was “hotter” (Weigel 2018). Facebook hides this abusive history, presumably fearing bad publicity for a social media platform that started out making young women’s lives less safe at an elite university and has since been weaponized for gross abuses of democracy.

When we visit social media platforms or simply carry a smart networked device around with us, technology users relinquish data to regimes permeated by inequality. Alongside conventional racist policing methods, algorithms that technology users cannot understand now process mined Internet data in ways that shape all areas of shared life, and programmed into those algorithms are human biases in the form of code. Safiya Noble (2018) has shown how the machine learning that search engines use entrenches racism into human-computer interaction. Cathy O’Neil (2016) and Virginia Eubanks (2018) have examined how the exploitation of big data and artificial intelligence harms data subjects differently based on their social positionality. Caroline Criado Perez (2019) has revealed wide-ranging gender bias in the way data are applied in areas as crucial as heart medication and car safety testing. Simone Browne (2015) has argued that contemporary surveillance technologies represent a modern form of branding in which the biased categorization of race and gender in biometric coding leads to racist policing, thus adding to the inequalities already experienced in a racist world beyond the computer. Joy Buolamwini’s (2016) video installation The Coded Gaze masterfully demonstrates the trouble facial recognition software has recognizing Black women’s faces as faces, revealing that this software runs independently but according to extreme biases that underpin the apparently bland functioning of binary code.

N. Katherine Hayles rightly argues that “having a human in the loop . . . is no guarantee against bias, since most humans have conscious or unconscious biases” (Amoore and Piotukh 2019, 5). Indeed, and leaving aside the inequalities produced by biases in algorithmic data processing, the far right, with its entirely conscious biases, enjoys great success on the low-accountability, profit-oriented Internet. On YouTube, far-right influencers freely broadcast propaganda, gaining credibility through the seemingly personal contact social media enables. Rebecca Lewis (2018, 48) shows how these influencers benefit as YouTube incentivizes “shocking” content because it generates higher advertising revenue, making it a readily complicit platform. YouTube ruled in 2019 that homophobic content published by conservative supervlogger Steven Crowder did not breach its code of conduct, but it removed videos of human rights abuses in Syria, Egypt, and Pakistan, following its secretive content-moderation protocols. Sarah T. Roberts (2019) demonstrates the toll such protocols take on the workers tasked with sifting through the Internet’s most traumatizing content, thereby highlighting further problems with social media users’ unquestioning patronage of these platforms.

New technologies of data capture also contribute to the climate crisis due to designed-in features whereby networked devices stay switched on perpetually. Additionally, the data archives gathered from them require energy-intensive servers. Kaminska (2019) finds that the “ICT [information and communications technology] sector [is] using 50 per cent more energy than global aviation,” and the production of personal networked devices is especially carbon intensive. Furthermore, the unconscious content of complicity in the networked era includes the shared material histories of consumer technologies and war technology. War was the context in which the Internet was developed and where machine vision was first employed; virtual reality has long served to train soldiers for combat and now helps their recovery from posttraumatic stress disorder. War is where artificial intelligence and data analytics are most brutally applied, as drones carry out strikes against targets identified by means of algorithms that analyze data on the basis of probability. Lisa Parks writes of the foundational complicity between military and consumer technologies: “The mediated everyday is punctuated in innumerable ways by military logics and agendas, so much so that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish media and communication from militarization” (Parks 2016, 230). Consumers do not usually pick up a smartphone or tablet thinking it is made of the same materials as a bomb or that the software it contains is also used to spy on human rights activists and incriminate political dissidents.

The Ambivalence of Disconnection

The complicities into which today’s technology consumer enters are disempowering precisely because they are built into devices and gestures of technology use that became integrated into daily life much more quickly than knowledge about data abuses could circulate. To win power back, we need to bring those complicities to the surface of knowledge, certainly, but the next steps after such a process of becoming conscious are more uncertain. Even though users do not trust new media not to spy on them, not many find it possible to switch off devices entirely, and it seems few people even get around to protecting personal data in the ways currently available. Tellingly, a US survey found that after the NSA revelations, only 30 percent of adults in the US said they had attempted to stop their online data being extracted without permission (Rainie and Madden 2015).

A later survey found that only 9 percent of social media users in the US trusted social media companies to protect their data (Rainie 2018), and yet disconnecting in a totally networked society is almost impossible. In response to the difficulty of withholding data entirely, some resistant technology users choose to supply false personal data online, thus producing a counterarchive that Hito Steyerl (2016) calls dirty data (see also Zer-Aviv, chapter 38, this volume). These actions—redolent of the recalcitrant law-copyist Bartleby in Herman Melville’s “Story of Wall-Street,” who famously “preferred not to” reproduce information for his financial-lawyer boss (Melville [1853] 2002)—are inspiring responses to the age of digitized bureaucracy. But Pepita Hesselberth (2017, 1) has rightly identified the structuring “paradox of dis/connectivity” whereby disconnection always implies connection, and disconnection discourses usually rely on the very media they advocate abandoning (see also Hesselberth, chapter 13, this volume). Another critic of the disconnection argument, Sarah Sharma (2017), demonstrates that the structuring of gender roles in patriarchy means the attractive dream of “exit” only functions as a “male fantasy . . . a deceptively simple solution to real-life entanglements.” Exit is not only a male fantasy but is also a privilege reserved for those whose lives can safely exist in the traditional or rural settings imagined by majority-white alternative lifestyle movements. Some people are more vulnerable to surveillance and to disconnection’s negative consequences, such as the economically disadvantaged, who, as Eubanks (2018) shows, must give up data privacy to access basic government services. A return to “nature” has always been an inherently conservative praxis so that the inequality besetting dataveillance regimes also makes for vastly different consequences of disconnecting for different subjects.

In place of masculinist and white-privileged fantasies of withdrawal from complicity in the networked age, Sharma (2017) proposes “a feminist project—one of extension.” Such a project, centered around “care,” would “respond . . . to the uncompromisingly tethered nature of human dependency” (Sharma 2017; see also Agostinho [chapter 6, this volume]; the seven principles for justice-oriented dealings with data in D’Ignazio and Klein [2018]). I would add that such a project of “extension” must take into account the problematic enfolding into complicity induced by human needs. Who among us can do without exchanging messages with loved ones or navigating new spaces with the help of GPS? Complicity with data exploitation also continues sustainably because users take immense pleasure in new devices that offer visual and tactile pleasures and opportunities to display wealth and commune with the state of the art. Technology users’ needs and these aesthetic fascinations blind us to the links between everyday technology use and data mining for far-right propaganda, to the inequality built into surveillance regimes, and to the drone strikes that characterize current high-tech global warfare.

Driven by these needs and fascinations, many technology consumers go so far as to merge with our machines. Referring to the continued validity of Marshall McLuhan’s (1969) view of media as prostheses, Hayles writes: “When my computer goes down or my Internet connection fails, I feel lost, disoriented, unable to work . . . as if my hands have been amputated” (Hayles 2012, 2). Further, Halpern and Simanowski have suggested that technology users are captured by a fascination with “beautiful data” themselves (Halpern 2015) such that we experience the counterintuitive phenomenon of “data love” (Simanowski 2018), in which the notion of data’s ungraspable potency extends the beauty of many of the devices we use. The most persuasive attraction of the machines of the information age, it seems, lies in the fact that they work so well even while unobtrusively gathering data and that they then respond in ways that make users feel recognized by content tailored specifically to manipulate. Because of these complications, it is not enough merely to see rationally how data-capture technologies are being exploited nor is it possible to decide, in a sovereign gesture of self-separation, to disconnect from the network. Rather, given the unconscious enfolding complicity implies, consideration is needed as to how more consciously cooperative practices could serve the deep human needs that data cultures exploit.

From Complicity to Cooperation

Many abuses of contemporary technology work covertly, servicing deep, often unconscious needs and so weaving users into habitual complicity. To tackle this covert work, we need to move from unconscious complicity to conscious cooperation. Technical knowledge and political analysis must join with cultural, ethical, and psychoanalytic approaches in order to imagine new technologies for a public sphere in which manipulation and inequality give way to diversity, care, and protection. Natasha Dow Schüll (2014) has analyzed how complicity with data mining in the gaming industry is assured “by design,” through software that creates and perpetuates machine gambling addictions. But technically speaking, there can also be privacy by design—even consent by design and justice by design—and it is with these values in mind, rather than profit and mindless innovation, that an alliance for transforming our networked, datafied world must begin.

Donna Haraway encourages those concerned about unjust technological practices to develop “a good-enough idiom so you can work on something together” (Weigel 2019). In part, the shared language of a cooperative alliance will need to be a political and legal one since some abuses of data are so egregious as to make political opposition the most urgent response. Although the leaks about the NSA prompted some legislative change in the US, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act increased data abuses, particularly against those already facing the country’s notorious “hostile environment.” Regulation is most likely to succeed with forceful challenges to policy by alliances of people, including software designers, opposition politicians, and policy campaigners. Liberty’s (2019) work challenging the British government’s unlawful use of bulk warrants to spy unselectively on technology users’ data is exemplary here. Yeshimabeit Milner’s (2019) talk on abolishing big data and the moratorium on facial recognition called for by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU 2018) in Massachusetts demonstrate the kinds of demands interested parties can make if they wish to bring theory and politics together to challenge the most racist kinds of dataveillance. I suggest, moreover, that the vast archives associated with the exploitation of data can themselves provide a resource for many such challenges to data abuse.

Like a flood, complicity leaves behind a sediment, a line drawn across the architectures of our shared lives as a species, in the form of the archives of dataveillance that are currently held by governments and corporations. Even given the questionable capacity of archives to bring about order or reliability (see the introduction to this volume), big data archives need to be employed for more just purposes than finding out how to profit more and gain more power from technology users’ emotional states and political viewpoints. For instance, while there is no positive ethical value produced when Spotify knows—and sells its knowledge of—what mood somebody is in based on music choices (Eriksson et al. 2019), it would be valuable for activists and nongovernmental organizations to access evidence of how data is used once it has been gathered by mood-tracking and mood-manipulating apps. Archival leaks such as those carried out by Snowden and Harrison could well mark the beginning of a shift of information monopolies into democratic governance. Then, rather than harvesting data for emotionally targeted advertising and personalized right-wing propaganda, it would be possible to collect data, for instance, on links between alt-right media networks and political campaigns in order to bring about justice and enact appropriate legislation. Beyond legal challenges and legislation, theorists and activists can join together with engineers and designers to bring about a sea change in the values behind future software—moving toward the values of protection, justice, and meaningful data exchange.

Some steps toward cooperation and away from complicity are underway. Amnesty International’s Strike Tracker crowdsourcing project brought tens of thousands of volunteer decoders together in 2018 to organize unstructured data and establish a time line for the Battle of Raqqa, Syria. That project demonstrates how an alliance for more just data use must involve nonhuman cognitive agents: alongside the decoding volunteers, Amnesty International trained algorithms to work with extant images of Raqqa to scale up the capacity of this important fact-finding mission. Leading machine-learning designers, too, are working with artificial intelligence to process data in environmentally friendly ways. For instance, the makers of AlphaGo have used their code to cool data centers, reduce energy use, and improve wind farm technology. In these projects, volunteers, designers, and artificial intelligence are uniting in service of more positive values than surveillance for profit, and for control. As Hayles notes, the cognitive capabilities of algorithms outstrip those of humans in complexity and capacity (Amoore and Piotukh 2019, 3). Given how closely technology users live alongside artificial intelligence, from smartphone cameras to high-frequency trading algorithms and neural networks, any genuinely cooperative thinking about data justice must also extend to just uses of nonhuman cognition. Such new and extensive modes of cooperation will bring with them uncertainties, of course, but they may also herald a less complicit, more conscious, and so more just networked world.

Addendum: Complicity with Data Use and Abuse after COVID-19

As this book is going to press, we find ourselves in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the book’s writers and editors are living in lockdown, a protective measure to slow the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus. People around the world are being asked to submit their GPS and even health data for the same reason. Whether the data gathered in aid of thwarting the virus will be protected from abuse in the form of data mining and trading, and how long the current forms of exceptional surveillance will be in place, remain unanswered questions. Meanwhile, the data we have about infection and death rates show that “we” are not all in it together: the virus does discriminate because societies discriminate, and people of color and people kept in systemic poverty are much more vulnerable to catching and dying from the virus because of the grossly unequal wealth and living and working conditions that hold sway in contemporary capitalism. These are the same groups who are more vulnerable to the data abuses I have written about here, and we urgently need to ask questions about whether the data being gathered in the time of COVID-19 will be used in a way that will not further target and harm people needing protection: Will it be helpful, or complicit with more harm, if we give up more data now? Anxiety about abuse of data shared for protective measures is not new: for instance, it has always been a concern when it comes to policing to prevent terrorism. Though the anxiety is not new, the changed world after COVID-19 will urgently demand a turn toward data justice, one in which governments and corporations do not abuse data gathered for the good. Only then will people concerned about abuses give up data readily.

Note

1. I am drawing here on the differentiation I make in After the Stasi (Ring 2015, 16, 199–226, 238–239) between conscious collaboration by Stasi informants and the habitual, often invisible complicities underpinning present-day surveillance.

References

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8

Conversational Agents

Ulrik Ekman

Introduction

As you ride a subway train or walk the streets of your smart city in the 2020s, you are already used to observing people conversing on their cell phones. If your work and life are hands-free, eyes elsewhere, and voice oriented, you might often be talking to your cell phone. If not, then perhaps you are slightly surprised when you listen to others and realize they are conversing not with other people but with their phones. They are engaging with an intelligent assistant such as Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google Now. If this leads you to explore the current state of such technology and software, you will realize that voice recognition applications, automatic speech recognition systems, and conversational agents have begun to permeate everyday cultures and practices in network societies. In tandem with the technocultural unfolding of the third wave of computing (Ekman 2013; Ekman et al. 2016), automatic speech recognition systems are increasingly part of the informational infrastructure of our lifeworlds. Microsoft Windows operating systems come equipped with a program for voice recognition. Most cell phones, whether Android based or otherwise, feature applications for voice searching, short message dictation, and virtual speech assistance. Many personal digital assistant (PDA) devices accommodate voice commands for dialing, scheduling a meeting, requesting an answer, or searching for music. Living room interaction systems for the smart home allow inhabitants to interface via speech to control the system, ask for information, or play music. In-vehicle infotainment systems grant similar functionality to passengers and drivers in cars.

Deep Learning: From AI Winter to AI Summer?

It is thought-provoking to witness conversational agents about to cross commercial-product and broad-usage thresholds. Technologically, they depend upon automatic speech recognition systems, a subfield of machine learning closely aligned with the development of artificial intelligence (AI). A broad emergence of conversational agents promises at least a partial historic break with the “AI winter,” a period characterized by reduced funding and interest in AI research. Many scientists consider this period to have prevailed since the 1970s, when the high hopes of the 1940s–1960s for “strong AI” (i.e., that the human brain would soon be replicated in hardware and software so that a logical and symbolically reasoning AI could match human levels of any task performance) were dashed. Culturally speaking, the broad usage of conversational agents indicates successful system personalizations, permitting a break with human alienation in the face of artificial systems that perform “naturally” spoken language. Technoculturally, this suggests both that people are beginning to adopt conversational agents as part of their everyday cultural practices and that conversational agents are beginning to demonstrate a capability to meet previously unresolved challenges. They are engaging with a variety of real people, in close to real time and in real-world situations, handling the complexities and nonlinearities of noisy environments and conversations.

For a transdisciplinary researcher trained in computer science, languages, literary theory, art history, and cultural theory, one of the intriguing traits of conversational agents is the attempt to bridge natural speech coding, computer science coding, semantics, and discrete mathematics. As I discuss further below, this is pursued as a coding of spoken language via a statistical take on complexity.[1]

The arrival of conversational agents is even more interesting when one considers the enormous difficulty of the task. Theoretically speaking, it is not a simple problem involving one or two variables to invent a system capable of (1) real-time automatic recognition of any speaker’s natural language performance in any context, (2) understanding the meaning of the utterances, (3) the presentation of contextually meaningful replies, and (4) continuous maintenance of a conversational dialogue with a speaker. It is not clear that this could be contained in a system capable of negotiating problems of organized and disorganized complexity (Weaver 1948). Perhaps one could produce the hardware and software to handle both a sizable number of variable factors interrelated in an organic whole and some of the disorganized complexity of the billions of variables addressed in probability theory and statistical mechanics. However, even a conversational agent with such a capacity for the reduction of complexity might not solve the problem. Each of the four major requirements above, as well as their dynamic interrelation, could be said to present a constitutive and deconstitutive potential for nonlinear variability and uncertainty whose actualization could open up problems of irreducible complexity. The invention of intelligent conversational agents might belong to the class of seriously intractable problems (Garey and Johnson 1979).

If this accentuates the truly difficult, it also makes it increasingly pressing to ask: What happened to permit the current distribution of millions of devices and applications sporting something akin to intelligent conversational agents? One might be tempted to answer this in a jubilant fashion, as if in an “AI summer,” noting a confluence of significant advances. Training data for automatic speech recognition systems is no longer lacking. Big data advances have provided more than abundant speech data and continue to do so. Memory capacity and processing speeds have improved by many orders of magnitude on individual devices. These connect in networks that include server parks with distributed and parallel processing plus virtually unlimited databases.

In the wake of new insights (Hinton 2007; Hinton, Osindero, and Teh 2006), concerted efforts led to significant advances in deep-learning speech recognition systems in 2009–2010—that is, connectionist systems drawing on artificial neural networks (Hinton et al. 2012). A veritable paradigm shift took place in machine learning, evidenced in both overviews (Bengio 2016; LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton 2015; Schmidhuber 2015) and book publications (Yu and Deng 2014). Task-specific coding was abandoned to pursue deeply structured neural networks that learned representations directly from big data training sets. Advances were made in systems learning pattern analysis from abundant unlabeled data in an unsupervised manner, assuming that deep neural networks could model the complex nonlinear relationships of speech in natural language. The general idea is that a deep, hierarchically organized set of layers of nonlinear processing units can extract representational features from unlabeled data. The network can transform them from lower to higher levels of abstraction by having each layer use the output from the previous one as input. The deep network trains by backpropagating results using a gradient descent method (following the negative gradient toward a goal based on one or a few examples, instead of backpropagating over the full data set).

Inspiration came from earlier neurocognitive theories of human brain development (Edelman 1989; Elman 1996). Deep artificial neural networks are thus not unlike those models of the neocortex in which a neurocognitive process has a self-organizing stack of transducers emerge, each of which is well attuned to its environment. Here also, a deeply layered hierarchy operates to have each layer process information from a prior layer (or its environment) and pass on its output to others. A person in the street conversing with an automatic speech recognition system is thus in contact with a systemic agent, assuming that meaningful speech is generated by multitudes of interactions of layered factors. Each layer corresponds to a level of abstraction learned from the layer below and explained by the level above.

In the 1990s, after decades of exploration, deep-learning advances overcame the key problems that had halted neural net approaches. Deep-learning models also dramatically outperformed existing state-of-the-art generative models of speech training as well as individual task-specific codings, using algorithms for Gaussian mixture models (Reynolds and Rose 1995) and hidden Markov models (HMMs; Pieraccini 2012, 109–133). Deep nonrecurrent feedforward neural networks allowed the acoustic modeling of speech to leap forward and led to better results in language modeling. Deep recurrent neural network models added another performance leap, especially with the adoption of the connectionist temporal classification training of long short-term memory networks (LSTMs). LSTMs make it possible to work with events that took place much earlier, an essential requirement for grasping the temporal unfolding of meaning (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber 1997). Generally, the deep-learning approach meant considerable practical advances: speaker independence and speech recognition in real-world situations became more feasible.

Reductionisms and the Insistent Complexity of Coding Conversational Agents

Affirmation of the advances of big data, deep learning, and automatic speech recognition is in order. One should recognize new and significantly better data, models, systems, and results as such. An understanding of these is also required to explain the broad de facto appearance today of “intelligent” conversational agents. However, such affirmation and recognition need not repeat the earlier mistake of letting mythologizing hyperbole surround AI development. It also need not mean subscribing to contemporary discursive practices in “boom” thinking. Nor does it require the kinds of research that strategically make oversensational claims with a view to immediate funding and recognition, using phrases and notions such as “the big data revolution,” “the Big Bang of deep learning,” or “the AI Renaissance.”

Considering the difficult theoretical and practical problems that remain, as well as the slow, uneven, and incremental developments that draw on multiple heterogeneous and interdependent resources, it would seem more prudent to keep inquiring into the complexity of coding conversational agents. It seems prudent first to acknowledge that conversational agents functionally complex enough to fulfill the four requirements listed above still do not exist (and may pose an intractable problem). Second, it seems relevant to call for further analysis and evaluation of the ways in which complexity is approached in deep-learning systems using big data. The interesting question here must be how developers make significant advances through certain kinds of reduction of complexity while at the same time these preserve complexity, whether by leaving it untouched environmentally, by confronting more or less aporetic uncertainty at the systemic limit, or by incorporating it.

Leaving Complexity Outside

Undoubtedly, most advances in speech recognition and AI were enabled by reducing the complexity of strong AI. Researchers advanced by reducing the complexity of the invention of a logical speech theorist, one universal reasoning machine operating with a symbolic logic of language as an ideal grammar. They specifically advanced by sacrificing the one optimum solution (for a simplified world) in order to gain access to a number of partial but “satisficing” solutions (for a more realistic world; Simon 1996, 27–28). Deep learning is the satisficing solution currently in vogue, proffering an intriguing way of working with speech discrimination and convergence to recognize correlations in spoken language. However, due to their mode of reduction, deep-learning systems simultaneously leave more or less pressing complexity externally intact. Being adept at approximating correlations does not mean having causal understanding or offering obvious ways to make inferences and predictions. Leaving these complex issues out, or outsourcing them to a more complex future AI ensemble, is what tends to make the exchange with your Siri or Cortana awkward—something less than a natural conversation characterized by an understanding of speech and open-ended dialogue. Existing codings of conversational agents suffer from undue reductionism. Alternatively, one could say the ghost of strong AI continues to haunt us, calling at least for a complexifying integration of more advanced versions of techniques currently used in AI systems (statistically based algorithms for deductive reasoning, as well as algorithms drawing on Bayesian inference) (Russell, Norvig, and Davis 2010, 480–609).

Statistics: Confronting Uncertainty at the Limit

Deep-learning systems appear as the latest offshoots of the development after Fred Jelinek and his group at IBM abandoned brute-force and knowledge-rich approaches in the mid-1970s in favor of seeking to demonstrate the power of statistics. Generally, these systems continue the work based on complex calculations of probabilities found in Gaussian mixture algorithms and HMMs. These systems approach speech as a disorganized complexity, a stochastic and nonlinear process with multiple variables at play, which statistics is capable of reducing to the most likely organized complexity and then to the most likely simpler problems at stake. The entire artificial neural network architecture and all the network components operative in deep learning are like so many gaming machines trying to make the best decisions in the face of uncertainty. The entire neural network—each of its many layers, each neuron, and each synaptic connection—transmits signals according to the statistically calculated real-number state of the neurons and synapses. Increases or decreases in the strength of the signals sent depend on the way the learning process leads to changes in the relative numerical weights of neurons and synapses. The number of units and connections is still several orders of magnitude less than in a human brain—currently, no more than a few million weighted units and more millions of weighted connections. This is still, however, a rather complex approach to processing the play of various chance values in an uncertain speech environment in order to establish the best approximation of true decisions.

Incorporating Complexity and the Haunting Ghost of Uncertainty

Obviously, deep-learning systems have made significant advances by adopting statistics as a mode of reducing complexity. Notably, they have advanced by developing an internal complexity capable of meeting and integrating a great amount of environmental uncertainty at the system limit. In contrast to HMMs, for example, deep-learning models make very few, if any, prior assumptions with regard to the statistical properties of the features of speech input and rely instead on “naturally” progressive discriminative training on examples in a base of big data. At the same time, however, this kind of statistical manifold opening onto a highly uncertain domain of raw speech waveforms is what both leaves out some complex issues and produces systemic complexity to be handled internally.

The great realistic gain in approximate learning of speech discrimination and classification comes at the cost of a very long training time plus an inability to model temporal speech dependencies. In part, this leaves some temporal complexity outside. This is especially the case for AI-like coding for ongoing, highly variable, performative event-driven processes in dialogue and polylogue conversations. It is also the case, though, with respect to coding for the temporally context-dependent aspects of speech understanding—for example, difficulties in coding for the unfolding in speech of multiple meanings of terms depending on contextual shifts.

With regard to complex issues to be handled internally, at least three major ones come to mind: training, temporal context awareness, and overfitting. Training with multitudes of parameters (number of layers, number of neurons and synapses in each layer, initial weights, and learning rate) is costly. It takes a long time, especially with regard to optimal solutions via search of the entire parameter space; hence, the invention of internal complexifications to reduce the use of energy and time: new hardware supplements to the architecture and procedures for batching (computing gradients on several examples in parallel rather than serially). Recognizing temporal dependencies in feedforward neural networks is what leads to the invention of LSTM methodology, a huge system-internal complexification in the form of one or more recurrent neural networks. Statistically refined deep learning via feedforward neural networks often spends inordinate quantities of resources on overfitting to handle rare kinds of dependencies in the training data. This is what prompts internal complexifications of methods to regulate such overfitting (weight decay, sparsity or unit pruning, random dropout).

In all three cases, internal complexification alleviates much of the problem but does not solve it in a strong sense. Nontrivial remainders are left as ghosts in the machine: a relation between learning from scratch and from an inherited base; a stronger AI handling of temporal context awareness; anticipation, event handling, and memory of singularities.

Internal incorporation of the complexity of coding conversational agents takes place not least via the paradigm of modular programming. System developers adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy, assuming that the complexity of the system is a decomposable problem. Coding proceeds on the assumption that reduction is feasible by separating the program into modules, each containing just one aspect of the desired functionality. Developers presume carefully coded interfaces will make modules available to others, permitting the desired architectural system assembly. These architectures mirror the developers’ notion of the complexity of dialogues in natural spoken language. Developers assume that dialogue is complex in the double sense of (1) being made up of a large number of parts that have many interactions, and (2) being weakly emergent or nontrivial to grasp as a whole, given the properties of the parts and their interactions. They furthermore assume that dialogue is a hierarchical type of complexity, decomposable into a number of interrelated subsystems, each one hierarchically structured down to the level of an elementary subsystem (Simon 1996, 183–184).

Undoubtedly, modular reduction is immensely powerful, as demonstrated by its results in computer science specifically. However, it also fractures the systems, leaving traces of nonintegrated complexity. Conversational agents meeting with new or poetic utterances, creative dialogic turns, or Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical remarks will not be able to respond to them as such. They cannot handle complexity qua holism and emergence—speech coming into presence as wholes that are not entirely resolvable into parts but that rather generate more and other than the sum of their parts. Moreover, the divisions chosen will leave them less than functionally complex when they encounter speech that emerges as structurally or temporally transversal to their architectures. Adherents of reductionism will bet on the marginal import of such phenomena, and/or they will argue that a refined modular approach will remove the problems. Recent studies in complexity theory suggest the problem with emergence is not so easily squared away and perhaps should not be (Esposito 2009; Goodwin 1994; Kauffman 1993; Protevi 2006; Stengers 1997; Wolfram 2002).

One very good reason to stick with this issue is that system-internal productions of emergence seem to make it a necessity. Deep learning operates in and as statistical mechanics. Each processing cycle has an approximate character, producing satisficing probabilities over time, not exactness. Necessarily, each cycle leaves remainders of uncertainty that are insignificant or more significant. They may be singularly significant, they may be chains of particulars turning into generalizable tendencies over time, or they may influence decisions and learning generally. They may do so in a system part, in a system, or in interactive concert with other systems. When you have millions of nodes and more millions of connections in just one deep-learning system and you have millions of such systems in networked operation across the planet, this cannot but raise questions concerning uncertain emergent phenomena. Most of the time and in most contexts, these may be benign or insignificant anomalies, but not always. You do not want such uncertainties to play out the unexpected emergence in the air traffic control of a major airport due to the use of speech recognition systems. Deep-learning agents are relatively brittle software systems into which statistical and a-statistical uncertainties are diffracted (Fresnel 1981). We know little so far of the patterns according to which they spread and percolate.

Evaluating Conversational Agents: Models and Theory

One may welcome the arrival of conversational agents as relatively advanced parts of the infrastructure of contemporary network societies—while at the same time continuing to question their strength and their scientific and cultural implications.

Their learning from big data is not a revolution but rather one significant incremental advance among others that requires continued and nuanced analysis. The advance is only as strong as the data form, data source, data producer, data type, and databases will permit. Systemic deep learning from big data is often strong enough to lead to information but certainly not always strong enough to proceed through organized information to applied knowledge (Kitchin 2014, 4, 9, 68).

The broad, sociotechnical dissemination of conversational agents trained as deep-learning systems involves an industrial-scale reproduction of one specific set of statistically based algorithms drawing on one set of neuroscience insights. This is one bottom-up model and still far from any “intelligent” simulation of the complexity of the human brain.

It calls for a considerable amount of slow, incremental research, not least in terms of new concept-driven approaches to the bottlenecks between different kinds of complexity. The recent overcoming of some hardware and software barriers is not just a success story. It is also a development that introduces a host of hidden variables, uncertain statistical mechanisms, and uncontrolled nonlinearities—nonrecognized kinds of system-internal complexity, from microscale neural functionality through mesoscale functional architectures to macroscale systemic functionality. Insofar as this introduces emergent phenomena, more research is needed to understand how crosscutting emergence regularizes deep learning, if that is what it does.

Furthermore, deep-learning developments call for the production and testing of decidedly theory-driven hypotheses, pushing existing black box empirical endeavors elsewhere (Frégnac 2017, 470–471). Deep-learning systems are only as strong as their theoretical grounding and their conceptual modeling of the statistics made operative to process big data complexity.

Note

1. This indicates an emphasis on one angle of approach to deep rifts in the current digital humanities between posthumanist and humanist approaches and in the digital social sciences between quantitative and qualitative approaches to big data.

References

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Esposito, E. 2009. “Zwischen Komplexität und Beobachtung: Entscheidungen in der Systemtheorie.” Soziale Systeme 15 (1): 54–61.

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9

Cooling

Nicole Starosielski

Media’s archives are cold. Films are tucked away in cold-storage vaults. Air-conditioning stabilizes the temperature of photographs, cylinders, and magnetic tapes, limiting their expansion and contraction. It is cold in reading rooms where researchers flip pages, play cassettes, and remove artifacts from boxes. It is cold in warehoused stacks of books and manuscripts. Regardless of format, content, and material substrate, the life of most archival media is extended by thermal technologies. Exceptions exist, of course (some polymeric materials, such as paints, can become brittle when too cold), but on the whole, cooling is critical to the longevity and the consistency of archives. The thermomanipulation of the air conditioner keeps images, words, and sounds in place.

This is also true in archives where the substrates consist of stacks of computers and miles of cabling. Although these archives contain digitized content, an abstraction of material into zeros and ones, they are intensely physical. They require cold temperatures—even more so than newspapers, wooden clocks, or videotapes. While for analog media, a shift to warmer temperatures might speed up decay (from a process unfolding over decades to one unfolding over years), for digital media, the lack of cooling can lead to instant disintegration, not unlike the explosion of nitrate film. If analog media’s thermal sensitivities tend to be analog, a gradient of decay, for digital media they tend to be binary: too warm for a second and the entire apparatus becomes nonfunctional.

Over the past decade, the digital infrastructures that archive our histories, memories, and records have become hypervisible, as Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau (2014) have documented.[1] Internet companies have released photos of their installations, journalists have followed the paths of networks, and artists have depicted cables and data centers (see Alger 2012; Blum 2012). Alongside this has been an increasing recognition—a thermoception, perhaps—of the digital archive’s dependence on the cold and vulnerability to the warm. Take, for example, press generated by Facebook’s Arctic data center and the Scandinavian server rush (Gregory 2013; Macguire 2014; Potter 2011). Or Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013), a novel that narrativizes the digital migration northward in the US and features a server located in the Adirondack Mountains. In Timo Arnall’s 2014 multiscreen installation Internet Machine, the air conditioner steadily hums in the background as the camera reveals the intricacies of Internet infrastructure.

Perhaps inspired by these cold reflections, in 2015 the television show Mr. Robot imagined that the data center’s thermal dependency, rather than system code, was its most critical weakness. In the first season, the show’s protagonist targets one archive that would upend contemporary culture and capitalism: the debt records held by a massive conglomerate. Without these documents (which are only stored digitally), it would be impossible to verify obligation, and as a result, those living in a debt-ridden society would be freed from the whims of financial institutions. At the season’s climax, the debt records are corrupted not by hacking into the record system but through manipulating data center thermostats. Capitalism, Mr. Robot imagines, is undone by its cooling system. The following year, another television show, Westworld, combined this narrative with the well-worn trope of The Thing—a monster set free by melting ice. Here, artificially intelligent beings are released from cold storage following manipulation of the cooling system. In these popular imaginations, cooling is envisioned as a technology of control and interference with it as a means of releasing the repressed.

Although such fantasies have yet to be realized, computer engineers have identified temperature and thermoregulatory systems as potential sites of cyberattack. In 2016 two security researchers demonstrated ransomware that would lock a smart thermostat until a user paid a certain amount of money (Franceschi-Bicchierai 2016). In a discussion of digitally managed critical infrastructure, one cybersecurity expert suggested that targeting temperature sensors would be an ideal mode of attack for hackers who do not want to get caught (Shalyt 2017). But intentional attacks on heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems are rare. Thermal problems are triggered far more often by human or machine error. A simple human mistake, changing the register from Fahrenheit to Celsius, heated one server room to over 100°F, melting drives in the process (Garretson 2010). Archives of nondigital content are also vulnerable to thermal shifts, especially the geological “documents” of climate science’s archive (Mattern, chapter 22, this volume). Ice core samples at the University of Alberta melted in the summer of 2017 due to a malfunction of the cooling system, which in turn destroyed evidence important to climate scientists (Schlossberg 2017). Even when not a specific target, the cooling system is a vulnerable infrastructure that can compromise archival practices.

The oscillating temperatures of global warming only increase this vulnerability. As one notable example, the recent melting of the permafrost around the Svalbard Global Seed Vault flooded the entrance, although it did not affect the seeds inside (Schlanger 2017). Like all other archives, the vault was constructed with an assumed thermal baseline. When temperatures exceed predicted levels, cooling systems do not always function as intended. In addition, temperature regulation itself is often one of the primary energy expenses of archives. Fossil fuels are burned to produce a thermally consistent environment that stabilizes archival material, which is then made more vulnerable by the variable temperatures of a changing climate, necessitating more investment in the technologies of cooling. This is the archive’s thermal loop.

In light of this, recent research in the data center industry has focused on data centers’ energy consumption, the potential to reuse their waste heat, and the potential free cooling offered by the air and water around them (Miller 2012a). This research has stimulated architectural and infrastructural innovations that redirect excess heat into the homes of urban dwellers—producing what Julia Velkova (2016) describes as a new “computational traffic commodity.” One of the common and often-debated strategies for sustainable system development, however, has been simply to warm up the data center. Increasing the temperature only a few degrees is regularly touted as the choice to save money, energy, and the environment. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers publishes thermal guidelines for data-processing environments and over the years has raised the high temperature that servers can withstand. Researchers at the University of Toronto, using Google, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the SciNet High Performance Computing consortium as their subjects, argue that data centers could turn up the heat, contesting the old logic that failure rates of electronics double with every increase of 10°C. Variability in temperature, they state, is a more critical concern than the amount of heat that computers are subjected to (Miller 2012b). But not all data center operators have heeded this call, hesitant as they are to compromise their equipment with too-high temperatures. Within the infrastructure industries, the process of grappling with climate change and energy costs has not involved diminishing or reducing the archive itself—whether high or low tech, strategies focus on altering the data’s thermal contexts.

Outside of the data center industry, alternative approaches have emerged. As Shannon Mattern describes in chapter 22, cultural heritage institutions are also working to reduce the energy they use, in both climate-controlled storage facilities and big data management. As she points out, some archivists have begun to acknowledge the inevitability of loss and the costs of commercial data management—especially in its insistence on redundancy and multiplicity. While this has not quite coalesced into an “antiredundancy” movement or a micropolitics of energy directed against backing things up, as Shane Brennan (2016) imagines, these means of dealing with the problem of energy use are not coupled with thermal manipulation.

By and large, however, today’s archives remain tethered to the cold. This link is not unique to data. In their recent collection Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal track how, in a warming world where cold is a fundamental resource for preservation, the use of artificially low temperatures has extended forms of life across a multitude of social and cultural domains. These cryogenic cultures, they show, are infused with the impulse to “cheat death” by suspending, slowing down, and freezing life (Radin and Kowal 2017, 7). Alongside the cooling of biological specimens, human bodies, and ice core samples, we must recognize the cryopolitics of media and the cryopolitics of data: the ways in which cold is mobilized to produce “a zone of existence where beings are made to live and are not allowed to die” (Radin and Kowal 2017, 6). A cryopolitical lens reveals that the expansion of big data, along with institutional and commercial investment in preserving user information, is underpinned by cryogenic cultures and a vast thermoregulatory regime. As transmission accelerates and data accumulates, generating more and more heat, a massive, invisible cooling apparatus is needed to stabilize this movement. In this technical arrangement, data are held in suspension, their death forestalled. Dwelling on this suspension, on media’s cryopolitics, exposes cooling as the critical vulnerability of the Internet, the infrastructure that could corrupt all of our data in an instant.

Note

1. Although, as Holt and Vonderau argue, even as some of the infrastructure’s component parts are made visible, their formative social, corporate, and energy politics are often obscured.

References

Alger, Douglas. 2012. The Art of the Data Center: A Look Inside the World’s Most Innovative and Compelling Computing Environments. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Blum, Andrew. 2012. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York: HarperCollins.

Brennan, Shane. 2016. “Making data sustainable: Backup culture and risk perception.” In Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment, edited by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, 56–76. New York: Routledge.

Franceschi-Bicchierai, Lorenzo. 2016. “Hackers make the first-ever ransomware for smart thermostats.” Motherboard, August 7, 2016. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aekj9j/internet-of-things-ransomware-smart-thermostat.

Garretson, Cara. 2010. “Stupid data center tricks.” Infoworld, August 12, 2010. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2625613/servers/stupid-data-center-tricks.html.

Gregory, Mark. 2013. “Inside Facebook’s green and clean Arctic data centre.” BBC News, June 14, 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22879160.

Holt, Jennifer, and Patrick Vonderau. 2014. “‘Where the Internet lives’: Data centers as cloud infrastructure.” In Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure, edited by Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, 71–93. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Macguire, Eoghan. 2014. “Can Scandinavia cool the Internet’s appetite for power?” CNN, November 16, 2014. http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/14/tech/data-centers-arctic/index.html.

Miller, Rich. 2012a. “ASHRAE: Warmer data centers good for some, not all.” Data Center Knowledge, October 5, 2012. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/10/05/beaty-ashrae-temperature.

Miller, Rich. 2012b. “Study: Server failures don’t rise along with the heat.” Data Center Knowledge. May 29, 2012. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/05/29/study-server-failures-dont-rise-along-with-the-heat.

Potter, Ned. 2011. “Facebook plans server farm in Sweden; cold is great for servers.” ABC News, October 27, 2011. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook-plans-server-farm-arctic-circle-sweden/story?id=14826663.

Pynchon, Thomas. 2013. Bleeding Edge. London: Jonathan Cape.

Radin, Joanna, and Emma Kowal. 2017. “Introduction: The politics of low temperature.” In Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, edited by Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal, 3–25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schlanger, Zoë. 2017. “What happened to the “fail-safe” Svalbard seed vault designed to save us from crop failure.” Quartz, May 20, 2017. https://qz.com/987894/the-fail-safe-svalbard-seed-vault-designed-to-save-us-from-crop-failure-just-flooded-thanks-to-climate-change.

Schlossberg, Tatiana. 2017. “An ice scientist’s worst nightmare.” New York Times, April 11, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/climate/ice-cores-melted-freezer-alberta-canada.html.

Shalyt, Michael. 2017. “Data: An Achilles’ heel in the grid?” Power Engineering International, May 22, 2017. http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/print/volume-25/issue-5/features/data-an-achilles-heel-in-the-grid.html.

Velkova, Julia. 2016. “Data that warms: Waste heat, infrastructural convergence and the computation traffic commodity.” Big Data and Society 3 (2): 1–10.

10

Copynorms

Minh-Ha T. Pham

In January 2015, Brian Hirano, co-owner of a Vancouver-based luxury knitwear brand called Granted Clothing (now Granted Sweater Company), found sweaters on Forever 21’s website resembling his label’s sweaters. Hirano’s first reaction was not to call Granted’s lawyers but to call on its social media followers. In a long message on Instagram and Facebook, Hirano accused Forever 21 of a number of offenses—the primary one being its sale of “blatant copies” of sweaters “made here in our Vancouver design studio.” The message ended with a plea to social media users “to help us take a stand” and to “share this [social media post] with your friends” (Granted Sweater Company 2015a, 2015b). The response on Facebook and Instagram was immediate and pronounced. The Instagram post received 556 likes and 174 comments. His Facebook post was shared 179 times and acquired seventy-one original comments and many more replies, rebuttals, and counterrebuttals in the form of actual text and Facebook likes. This level of user engagement was unusual for the brand, whose other social media posts sometimes received no comments at all.

Within twenty-four hours of Hirano’s initial posts, news of the copied sweaters gained wider television, radio, and print media coverage and with it, more social media activity, in the form of shares, likes, comments, and tweets, from a wider constellation of social media users. These included comic Wyatt Cenac (more than forty thousand Twitter followers), musician Questlove (3.66 million Twitter followers), and actor Michael Ian Black (nearly two million Twitter followers).

Social media users’ comments echoed sentiments that have been expressed many times before about Forever 21 specifically and fast fashion retailers generally.[1] They assumed the fast-fashion sweaters were illegal copies, produced under sweatshop conditions in a foreign factory somewhere in “China” or the “third world.” The presumption of foreignness also extended to users’ racialized descriptions of fashion copycats’ ethical competence. One user responding to Hirano’s Facebook post expressed concern for the “third world” garment workers making Forever 21’s sweaters, while another user explained confidently: “Reproductions are typically made in China and they do not recognize American or Canadian copyright laws there.” Others mocked the cheap tastes and, in one user’s words, “cheap dollars” of those who would buy the Forever 21 sweaters. This was yet another way in which social media users marked fashion copies as foreign—here, through the racialization of their consumers, who were imagined as using a different and inferior grade of currency.

Copynorm Myths

Despite the certainty that pervades the public and media discourse about fast fashion and fashion copies (the two are routinely conflated together), the reality is that consumers can never be certain about where and under what conditions fashion products are made. What is more, the brands themselves may not have this information, given the convoluted network of subcontractors servicing the fashion industry. And whatever information does exist is not readily available. Fashion companies are notoriously secretive about the details of their supply chain. Even those brands that claim to offer transparency in their production process provide only limited and carefully presented access to the public. Details about factories and auditors (including their names) and about specific compliance standards go undisclosed under the guise of trade secrets. Yet the social media discourse around the Granted Clothing/Forever 21 dispute—as well as the media coverage—misses or ignores this reality. What is also not mentioned in the public discourse is that fast fashion brands actually rely quite a bit on local and regionally local factories as a core business strategy. Unlike luxury labels, fast fashion brands depend on local factories to reduce the time it takes to restock the flash-in-the-pan trends that are their stock-in-trade. Forever 21 (a US company based in Los Angeles, California) makes a significant portion of its products in Los Angeles-area factories. This is not to say that its local production is ethically sound but that sweatshops are not just a foreign problem.

Copynorms and Social Media

My concern here, though, is less with the misconceptions and stereotypes that pervade the public discourse about fashion copies (see Pham 2016, 2017). The purpose of this chapter is to consider what this vast body of information reveals about the social life of big data. In particular, it will examine how large-scale social media platforms are rife with uncertainty—the uncertainty of social perceptions, social interactions, and unequal social relationships. Ideas about the legality and illegality of fashion copying practices (also known as fashion copynorms[2]) are not legally but socially constructed. Fashion copynorms are constituted through social practices of communication and information exchange; informed by socially constructed meanings about differences regarding race, gender, region, class, and labor; and reinforced by both human social feedback circuits and computational social feedback systems such as feeds, search engine results lists, trending topics, and autocomplete suggestions that collect, sort, and transmit fashion copynorms. Fashion copynorms make clear that big social data is not a thing but a set of activities and relationships involving struggles over meaning, knowledge, and power. Big data, in this case, is the result of things being done and a means for doing things.

As we have already seen in the Granted Clothing/Forever 21 example above, the socially generated data of fashion copynorms are produced by everyday communicative activities such as liking, sharing, commenting, and tweeting. The distribution and patterns of likes, shares, comments, retweets, and so on are also the results of things being done—specifically, user productions of dominant and contesting social definitions of creativity, criminality, property, and impropriety and the algorithmic productions and sorting of this information. Fashion copynorms tell us a lot about the social values underwriting big data as well as the uncertain but not random social and sociotechnological parameters of data accumulation.

Copynorms and the Law

But what do fashion copynorms do? Simply put, they do what the law cannot or will not do, and they do it more efficiently. In the US and Canada, fashion design is not copyrightable, and in places where it is copyrightable, novelty standards that are too high (Japan) and too low (Europe) make fashion copyright laws all but ineffective. This is to say nothing of the law’s inability to keep up with fashion’s breakneck pace. By the time a copyright is registered or a lawsuit has been filed, the particular fashion design will likely have passed its peak and no longer need legal protection. But viral fashion feuds such as Granted Clothing’s dispute with Forever 21 have compelled designers to issue public apologies for copied garments, retailers to pull stock from their physical and online shelves (and in some cases, destroy undamaged garments altogether), and consumers to organize impromptu boycotts against alleged fashion copycats. The sheer volume and velocity of socially generated data flows induces consumers and corporations to do what the law does not require them to do—and it does it in hours and days, rather than months and years.

Fashion copynorms are regulatory mechanisms that have important implications for our understanding of big data as an instrument of self-, social, and market governance. Social media users’ productions of fashion copynorms are informal, distributed practices that shape both consumer values (i.e., the beliefs, priorities, and rules that consumers draw on when making choices about what to buy and who to buy from) and commodity values (i.e., a garment’s quality and worth). Both kinds of value directly affect market outcomes and relations. If Granted was concerned that the look-alike sweaters created unfair market competition, then social media users’ unwaged knowledge labor gave it a competitive edge by helping it make new sales, increase consumer brand awareness, and enhance its brand image as a scrappy company fighting the good ethical fashion fight.

Copynorms and Ethics

To be sure, social media users were not the only ones to situate “ethical fashion” in the West. Hirano insists again and again that Granted makes its sweaters “in house” and takes pride in “keeping production here in Canada.” Its Facebook note emphasizes: “Our original designs [are] made here in our Vancouver design studio.” In this statement the Vancouver design studio is discursively rendered into a public symbol that does not just signify but verifies the value, quality, and originality of its products. Hirano turns ethical fashion into a trademark of his specifically North American fashion brand.

In Hirano’s statements, “the local” and its associations with the familiar, the common, and the normative connote a set of social, spatial, and temporal associations ascribed to good/ethical design. “Here in our Vancouver design studio” names an actual place, but it also comes to stand in as the ideal location for original fashion design. “Here in our Vancouver design studio” signifies a Western (and tacitly white) metropolitan city; a clean, modern working environment; a skilled art practice; and a creative expression. Correspondingly, bad design is associated with spaces that are the conceptual opposite of a “Vancouver design studio”: dirty factories located in non-Western urban peripheries where the work is repetitive, unskilled, and oppressive.

This mapping of commercial and ethical value onto racialized coordinates of the local and the foreign legitimizes Granted’s claims of its sweaters’ originality while also delegitimizing accusations that it had copied a Coast Salish garment. The Cowichan sweaters are more than “local”; they are Indigenous to Vancouver. Yet they are rendered nonlocal by recurring allusions to their sociotemporal distance from the centers of Western fashion. In the social media discourse, the Cowichan sweaters are characterized as products of “old-fashioned knitting methods” and a “traditional style.” The brand and its supporters in the news media and social media have described the Granted sweaters as an “updated” version of the Cowichan sweaters. As one Facebook user puts it: “Granted is RESPECTING the Cowichan style. . . . They are embracing a traditional style and making it popular and modern.” The prevalent assumption that Indigenous and ethnic clothing represents “old-fashioned” traditions that are unchanging and impervious to modern culture is a mode of racialization that operates by excluding Indigenous and ethnically identified designers from the spatiotemporal and legal imaginary of Western fashion consumers and designers.

Copynorms and Surveillance

Fashion copynorms, like other kinds of big data (e.g., clickstream, purchase history, cell phone GPS signals, and so on) generate value through surveillance. In my book in progress, I elaborate on how social media users’ generation and maintenance of fashion copynorms constitute a kind of user-driven regulatory labor I describe as fashion trials by social media—a concept that builds on important work by Sarah T. Roberts (2019) and Adrian Chen (2014) on the subject of commercial content moderation. Briefly, fashion trials by social media are the lateral, user-to-user ways of policing discursive and economic practices that are in most cases not illegal. These social media trials function in the absence or inadequacy of legal mechanisms to discursively differentiate “real” fashion products from “fake” ones by creating and enforcing a common sense of ethicolegal consciousness. This is another aspect of what fashion copynorms do. They enable processes of intellectual property (IP) and capital accumulation by giving a competitive market edge to Western fashion labels, and Western conceptions of “legitimate” cultural production more broadly, not through the law but through social stigmatization.

Online, fashion consumers and products that do not comply with the dominant standards of ethical fashion are routinely stigmatized through sociotechnological mechanisms of social media shaming and social media shunning (user and algorithmic practices that marginalize unpopular social media posts by ignoring them and/or suppressing their search rankings and public visibility). Thus, through fashion copynorms, social media users are not only objects of corporate and governmental surveillance but are themselves agents of social and market surveillance.

Copynorms and the Uncertainty of the Global Economy

In the remaining part of this discussion about the social life of big data, I turn to the broader context of fashion copynorms, assumptions, and values—a context that is itself fraught with uncertainty. Today, the West’s dominant position in global fashion is increasingly shaky. Former manufacturing countries in Asia (particularly China, Korea, and Indonesia but also India, Thailand, Viet Nam, and the Philippines) are rapidly rebranding themselves as fashion design and business centers through government investments in creative industries and in information and communication infrastructures.[3] New fashion brands as well as new methods of apparel production, marketing, and distribution are emerging from Asia and competing successfully with North American and European businesses. These brands are evidence of what many are calling “the Asian century,” a new world order in which economic growth and activities in Asia are restructuring cultural, political, and economic global relations. Not surprisingly, the arrival of the Asian century has stirred up old racial anxieties that tacitly or directly invoke clichés about Asian invasions. For example, a Reuters article picked up by several publications, including the leading industry news site Business of Fashion, describes Asia’s ascendancy in the global fashion market as a “growing threat from the east” (Wendlandt and Lee 2016).

The racialized economic panic about Asian fashion copycats is symptomatic of a broader fear about the cultural, political, and economic effects of the Asian century and specifically about what a reversal in technology transfer (and with it, the transfer of IP [Internet protocol] rights and wealth) from the West to the East might do to the US’s power in the world. We see this fear of an Asian IP capitalist planet expressed most strongly in the political sphere. Former US Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s equation of ethnicity and ethics is by now famous: “[The Chinese] are not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial. They don’t innovate—that’s why they’re stealing our intellectual property” (Kaczynski 2015). Echoing her statement was white nationalist and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who warned that “China is the single biggest economic and business issue of our time. Until we sort that out, they will continue to appropriate our innovation to their own system and leave us as a colony—our Jamestown to their Great Britain, a tributary state” (Green 2017).

From far-right politicians to ethically conscious fashion consumers, the stereotype about Asians’ criminal lack of imagination (as a result of, among other cultural “problems,” Asian religions, languages, education systems, and a racially debilitating deference to authority) is being revived in subtle and dramatic ways. Social media users’ discursive construction of ethics as a Western trait and a Western design feature is a slightly more subtle variation on this theme.

Contemporary fashion copynorms are produced and circulate against the backdrop of the Asian century. They serve to reclaim some of the commercial status lost to rapidly rising Asian fashion industries by delegitimizing practices and products that do not abide by the standards set by and structured for Western cultural producers. Fashion copynorms are not objective reflections of universal standards of “ethical fashion.” They produce a normative knowledge about cultural production that bolsters the market value of Western fashion brands and the Western IP systems underpinning them.

Copynorms and Racial Stereotypes

Social media users’ repeated speculations about Forever 21’s Chinese/third world sweatshops reflect and reinforce a public (and panicked) imaginary that devalues Asian creative practices and subjectivities. Within the logics of copynorms, fakeness and foreignness (specifically Asianness) go hand in hand. This is not because anyone believes that all Asian people or only Asian people create and buy fashion copies but rather because of the way Asianness has historically been portrayed in Western commercial and labor imaginaries. Fake fashion’s Asianness is marked by assumptions about cheap labor, cheap products, and a cheap regard for human rights and human life. Social media users’ moral certainty that Forever 21 copied the Granted sweaters is based on their equally firm belief that the sweaters must have been made in poor conditions in a foreign factory (somewhere in China or the “third world”). In other words, the damning evidence against the sweaters is their presumed foreign/Asian origins.

If social media users’ activities conceptually territorialize creativity, property, and power in the West, social media architectures codify these cultural logics through mechanisms such as key word searches and autocomplete suggestions. Algorithmic biases—as when a key word search for “copycat culture” offers only Asian ethnicities in its list of autocomplete suggestions—reflect and confirm users’ associations of Asianness with fakeness while automation naturalizes social biases as objective representations of reality and as common sense.

Figure 10. 1

www.google.com. ©Google.

Fashion copynorms both conceal and reveal what Homi Bhabha (1984) has described as colonial ambivalence—the uncertainty, instability, and incompleteness of domination. Tellingly, Bhabha (1984, 130) identifies Asian moral duplicity—embodied by the figure of the “lying Asiatic”—as a dominant trope in Western colonial imaginaries. The West’s demand for ethical mimicry (adapting Bhabha’s terminology) from the very groups whose unethically sourced labor has provided a key resource of Western fashion’s power betrays a crisis of cultural and economic authority, even as it attempts to assert a moral one. After all, “Asian-made” fashions did not raise ethical red flags for most fashion designers and consumers when Asian fashion labor only contributed to Western property and wealth accumulation. Fashion copynorms redirect information and resource flows back to the West in the wake of the Asian century.

In the end, if there is any certainty to be found in the midst of the many uncertainties fashion copynorms embed and embody, it is this: the devaluation of Asian fashion labor remains a fundamental material condition of Western fashion’s accumulation of wealth and power.

Notes

1. Fast fashion is a pejorative term for low-cost trendy clothes.

2. Fashion copynorms are the socially shared and conveyed standards regarding the ethics of copying fashion design, in which copying an Indigenous design is an acceptable/ethical act of creative inspiration and copying a luxury design is an unacceptable/unethical act of creative theft.

3. For a detailed discussion of these efforts, see Tu (2010).

References

Bhabha, Homi. 1984. “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse.” October, no. 28, 125–133.

Chen, Adrian. 2014. “The laborers who keep dick pics and beheadings out of your Facebook feed.” Wired, October 23, 2014. https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/.

Granted Sweater Company. 2015a. “A short message from the designers.” Facebook, January 6, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/grantedsweaters/photos/pb.28973649640.-2207520000.1465225497./10152939439194641/?type=3&theater.

Granted Sweater Company. 2015b. “A short message from the designers.” Instagram, January 6, 2015. https://www.instagram.com/p/xhqXtKIoAV/.

Green, Joshua. 2017. “Bannon’s back and targeting China.” Bloomberg, September 28, 2017. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/bannon-s-back-and-targeting-china.

Kaczynski, Andrew. 2015. “Carly Fiorina: The Chinese ‘can’t innovate, not terribly imaginative, not entrepreneurial.’” Buzzfeed, May 26, 2015. https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/carly-fiorina-the-chinese-cant-innovate-not-terribly-imagina.

Pham, Minh-Ha T. 2016. “Feeling appropriately: On fashion copyright talk and copynorms.” Social Text 34 (3): 51–74.

Pham, Minh-Ha T. 2017. “The high cost of high fashion.” Jacobin, June 13, 2017. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/fast-fashion-labor-prada-gucci-abuse-designer.

Roberts, Sarah T. 2019. Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Tu, Thuy Linh. 2010. The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wendlandt, Astrid, and Joyce Lee. 2016. “Cool Asian fashion brands challenge Western labels.” Reuters, April 26, 2016. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fashion-asia/cool-asian-fashion-brands-challenge-western-labels-idUSKCN0XN1QZ.

11

Database

Tahani Nadim

A database is a collection of related data organized to facilitate swift search and retrieval. It is like a spreadsheet, only more complex and extensive and digital. It also tends to exist as an assemblage of different parts that are difficult to disentangle: the database management system, which describes a set of computer programs that connect and coordinate the database, applications, and users, and the database schema and data dictionary, which together set the organization of data. Databases are ubiquitous in most affairs that make and unmake modern life, from schooling to shopping to dating to knowing to fleeing. In short, their work—the storing, relating, and supplying of data—has become a critical part of the infrastructures that subtend our worlds.

Beyond Infrastructure Studies

As an information infrastructure, a database’s efficacy depends on its infrastructural qualities that make it blend into myriads of work routines in hospitals, airports, shopping malls, universities, municipalities, distribution centers, laboratories, or social media platforms. Inspired by the formidable work of sociologist Susan Leigh Star and her collaborators (Bowker and Star 2000; Star 1999, 2002), much scholarship has valiantly labored against the fiction of invisibility and infrastructure’s tendency for “sinking into the background” (Star and Ruhleder 1996). Hence, thinking about and with (information) infrastructures has largely been a matter of rendering infrastructures visible by tracing, describing, and compiling the materials that make up an information infrastructure, from cables, switches, and electricity grids to user interfaces, server farms, standards, and protocols. While this approach has brought to the surface particular forms of power, it has also occasioned a relational understanding of infrastructure, arguing that “it becomes infrastructure in relation to organized practices” (Star and Ruhleder 1996, 113). Yet in its commitment to surfacing things and interests, this approach tends to gloss over the database as a historically specific and relevant figure with as much symbolic as material import. In other words, the database compels and entails specific imaginaries that help organize practices in certain ways (and not others).

The work of such a database imaginary can perhaps be seen most prominently in the development of the discipline of biology in the twentieth century (numerical weather prediction is another example—see Edwards 2010). In the course of what Evelyn Fox Keller (2000) has termed the “century of the gene,” data infrastructures have rapidly risen to become a central and indispensable component of bioscientific research. Indeed, as demonstrated by the US government shutdown of 2015, which rendered a host of genetic databases and tools unavailable, research comes to a halt when databases disappear. That the particular figuration of the gene—a coding region on the genome made up of a specific sequence of nucleic acids that codes for “downstream” products such as proteins—is perfectly congruent with and intelligible to the cybernetic principles of the times has been a topic for much scholarship on the history of (molecular) biology. These works reconstruct the mutual co-constitution of data science and genetics, highlighting the particular confluence of concerns, people, institutions, research paradigms, technologies, and metaphors that set the course for biology in the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

Genetic Database Histories

One of the world’s largest and arguably longest-running databases is GenBank, a database for nucleotide sequence data produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Together with the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and the DNA Database of Japan (DDBJ), GenBank not only provides data but continuously develops and hosts a corollary of bioinformatic tools that facilitate discovery, organization, and experimentation with (and in) data. It emerged out of various initiatives, including Margaret O. Dayhoff’s (1965) manually compiled Atlas of Protein Sequence Structure, which recognized the importance of collating and distributing the sequence data being generated at an ever-increasing rate. Not surprisingly, the first instance of GenBank came out of Los Alamos. Similarly, the ENA was initially conceived as an explicitly European project to use infrastructure to turn biology into a major science while also establishing a counterpoint to US dominance (much as the establishment of CERN has done for physics).

Much has changed from these early days, not least the expansion of computers and automated procedures. Nowadays, sequence data are produced en masse in sequence factories, such as the Shenzhen-based BGI or California’s J. Craig Venter Institute, and are submitted automatically into the bowels of GenBank, the ENA, and the DDBJ, where a host of (human) data curators ensure data quality standards. Yet the core commitment to producing (more) data remains in place. Or rather, it has been colonizing more and more places. On the one hand, next-generation sequencing technologies, which are rapid and cheap, have coevolved with novel research approaches such as metagenomic or environmental sequencing. This describes the practice of sequencing environmental samples (a bucket of seawater, or a sample of a gut environment) that renders present, at least as nucleotide signals, previously obscured or unbeknown entities. On the other hand, knowledge production in the Anthropocene is becoming more and more a matter of data-driven feedback loops. This not only compels institutions new and old to become data resources or infrastructures but also forces the framing of problems and solutions to be primarily data based. A good example here is the concept of biodiversity, which despite its polysemic qualities has engendered a veritable explosion of data-based initiatives, methods, and definitions, including essential biodiversity variables, the global biodiversity index, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

In my own research, I am attending to the work practices that make and maintain data and databases in the biosciences in order to better understand the expectations and demands placed in and on data and how these impel and compel specific institutional, disciplinary, and political constellations. For my doctoral research, I examined how the big DNA databases, GenBank and the ENA, process and make data (Nadim 2012). I began with a very simple question—namely, what happens in these databases? Having worked in the back ends of archives and libraries, I knew that a great deal of sociotechnical work went into producing and maintaining collections, categories, classification systems, documents, and standards, so I assumed that such work could also be observed in these databases. And that attention to this kind of work could help furnish a more nuanced understanding of sequence data, data more generally, and, by extension, the imaginaries invested in and sustained by it. In working with the notion of database imaginary and, more recently, data fiction (Nadim 2016), my aim is to take seriously the co-constitutive dynamics between databasing and worlding. As we turn parts of worlds into data and databases, we reconstruct these worlds, often materially so, and as we bring into being entities and relations, we change the nature of data and databases tasked with accounting for these novel entities.

Database Imaginaries: Learning from Archives

I am using the term database imaginary in approximation to Appadurai’s sense of “imagination” as well as Taylor’s definition of social imaginary. For Appadurai (1996, 31), the imagination (and the image and the imagined) is “an organized field of social practices, a form of work . . . and a form of negotiation between sites of agency . . . and globally defined fields of possibility.” Taylor (2004, 2), equally resistant to reducing it to mere mental ideation, argues for the imaginary “not as a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of society.” Initially, my concern was to counter prevalent critical engagements with databases in the social and cultural sciences that were predicated on the assumption of a database logic. This describes a rapacious and indiscriminate ordering logic propelled by a desire for synoptic and panoptic powers to monitor, manage, and mine. In this perspective, the database becomes the epitome of Thomas Richards’s (1993) “total archive,” an imperious technology through “which countable abstractions . . . at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, create[d] the sense of a controllable . . . reality” (Appadurai 1996, 317). There are ample grounds for critically examining the convergences of database technologies with modes of control and discipline, from the resurrection of pernicious notions of “race” in forensic databases (M’Charek 2008) to the creeping seizure of public spheres and private bodies by unsavory special interests through biometric identity management systems or national genetic databases (Pálsson 2008; Rose 2001, 2006; Waldby 2009). Yet this approach leaves little room for the often incongruent and messy realities that manifest themselves inside databases—the everyday intra-actions of parts and people—and how these are indicative of and contribute to an imaginary that, to paraphrase Taylor, enables data practices by making sense of them.

I am not suggesting that database imaginary and database logic are mutually exclusive but that empirical attention to the situated practices that assemble databases can help figure the particular stories and images, rhetorics and genres, and aspirations and desires that are constituents in the making and doing of databases and data. Potent conceptions of comprehensiveness, order, transparency, futurity, relationality, causality, and representativeness govern the new global data regimes that seek to capture and process (parts of) the world and its inhabitants exclusively in and through data. A database such as Fauna Europaea does more than provide a comprehensive list “of all living multicellular European land and fresh-water animals” (de Jong et al. 2014). It, for example, constructs a naturalized image of Europe (Nature’s supernation, if you will), it revitalizes natural history as a central component of national sovereignty, it confirms the continued relevance of natural history collections, and it translates the taxonomic gaze—with all its (colonial) blind spots—into a symbolic calculus (species-as-assets). These rationales demonstrate that the general functions and operations of databases—producing, collecting, storing, organizing, retrieving—should be understood as historically specific practices that indeed might differ from database to database. Concurrently, it means that the form and context of specific databases matter and that, just like the archive, the database is best understood as both figure and ground.

Scholars of the archive (e.g., Arondekar 2009; Steedman 2002; Stoler 2009, 2013), many concerned with the enduring colonial implications and imbrications of archives, have long argued for the specific material and historical contexts of archives and the way in which these make records and histories possible or impossible. These accounts deconstruct the practices and hopes of reconstructing events and subjects through archival evidence by attending to the archive’s situatedness and the ways in which this constructs evidence. Archives are figured as historically specific processes that do not leave their contents untouched. This, however, is not to say that they are to be given up on as viable resources but that the archive requires novel modes of reading or, as Arondekar (2009, 3) put it, “new ways of both mining and undermining the evidence of the archive.” She suggests encountering the archival trace as a “recalcitrant event,” a notion borrowed from Shahid Amin that abandons the impetus of “discovery” in favor of mobilizing traces in and through narration and interpretation. More recently, scholars have drawn attention to the constitutive capacities of absent archives and the efficacies of “imagined records” (Gilliland and Caswell 2016) and narrative confabulation (Hartman 2007). Writing about the vast volume of data generated by remote-sensing Earth observation systems, I have suggested that data fictions (Nadim 2016) might be both a practicable heuristic device for problematizing data infrastructures and a process central to the production and maintenance of these infrastructures. Put differently, the construction of evidence in Earth observation always involves a commitment to, and thus reproduces, particular interpretative frameworks, which can be elicited and evidenced by examining the data models and ontologies, the extent and status of metadata provisions, submission guidelines and procedures, use case scenarios, and data practices—that is, the intra-actions within people, data, and infrastructure. An important framework is the specter of war and the translation of its metaphors and materials into global data infrastructures and our relations with the planet. Naming a set of environmental satellites sentinels (as the European Space Agency’s Earth observation program does), a term usually referring to soldiers standing guard, or using the term total information awareness, a US antiterror predictive policing program, when discussing a database of worm genetics are just some of the more egregious examples (Eddy 2016). Yet the multitudes of data practices that constitute Earth observation are not impervious to alternative, even emancipatory narratives, such as the use of satellite data for uncovering environmental destruction or mapping the prison-industrial complex.[1] Data fictions are crucial elements in how different kinds of visibilities and transparencies are achieved and, importantly, made to cohere in and through these data practices.

Feminist and postcolonial scholars have homed in on the absences and invisibilities in collections and archives, demonstrating how the willful absenting of particular subjects, narratives, and materials represents a key element in continued expropriations and imperial ruinations (Stoler 2012). While the databases I have so far examined in my research contain ostensibly innocuous data points such as species name, distribution, specimen location, or DNA sequence, they nevertheless advance a specific set of beliefs in data and specific hopes in their capacity to address and redress questions and desires for ever more accurate data (whatever that might mean). This is a database imaginary where certainty seems always just another data point away, and data generation is a reasonable end in and of itself. With the increasing reliance on data-based knowledge and solutions and mounting data collections, concerns about who and what is being recorded, and how and for what purpose, are more urgent than ever. In contrast to archives, databases are much more readily and deeply entwined with processes of governance and policy, (scientific) knowledge-making, and everyday practices. And they are much harder to grasp, as their records might not be intelligible or even readable in and of themselves. Also, often there is no obvious location to visit aside from a digital interface. In a 2010 presentation of the first complete annotation of the full set of human protein sequences (the proteome), a scientist from the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics provided a list characterizing the proteins’ different statuses as follows: maybe, potentially, putative, expected, probably, hopefully (Bairoch 2010). Based on such a typology of (un)certainty, data infrastructures contain and create a spectrum of novel absences and presences that we are only beginning to understand. As both method and analytical category, database imaginaries and data fictions help figure the absences and invisibilities of and, importantly, in data infrastructures.

Note

1. For examples and instructions on how to get and use satellite data, see the website Exposing the Invisible, https://exposingtheinvisible.org/.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Arondekar, Anjali. 2009. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bairoch, Amos. 2010. “Bioinformatics for human proteomics: Current state and future status.” Nature Precedings, October 2010. https://doi.org/10.1038/npre.2010.5050.1.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dayhoff, Margaret O., Richard V. Eck, Marie A. Chang, and Minnie R. Sochard. 1965. Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure. Silver Spring, MD: National Biomedical Research Foundation.

de Jong, Yde, Melina Verbeek, Verner Michelsen, Los Wouter Bjørn Per, Fedor Steeman, Nicolas Bailly, Claire Basire, Przemek Chylarecki, Eduard Stloukal, Gregor Hagedorn, Florian Wetzel, Falko Glöckler, Alexander Kroupa, Günther Korb, Anke Hoffmann, Christoph Häuser, Andreas Kohlbecker, Andreas Müller, Anton Güntsch, Pavel Stoev, and Penev Lyubomir. 2014. “Fauna Europaea—all European animal species on the web.” Biodiversity Data Journal 2 e4034. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.2.e4034.

Eddy, Sean R. 2016. “Total information awareness for worm genetics.” Science 311 (5766): 1381–1382.

Edwards, Paul N. 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gilliland, Anne J., and Michelle Caswell. 2016. “Records and their imaginaries: Imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined.” Archival Science 16 (1): 53–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9259-z.

Hartman, Saidiya V. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2000. The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

M’Charek, Amade. 2008. “Silent witness, articulate collective: DNA evidence and the inference of visible traits.” Bioethics 22 (9): 519–528.

Nadim, Tahani. 2012. “Inside the sequence universe: The amazing life of data and the people who look after them.” PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London.

Nadim, Tahani. 2016. “Blind regards: Troubling data and their sentinels.” Big Data and Society 3 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716666301.

Pálsson, Gísli. 2008. “The rise and fall of a biobank: The case of Iceland.” In Biobanks Governance in Comparative Perspective, edited by Herbert Gottweis and Alan R. Petersen, 41–55. Abingdon: Routledge.

Richards, Thomas. 1993. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso.

Rose, Hilary. 2001. The Commodification of Bioinformation: The Icelandic Health Sector Database. London: Wellcome Trust.

Rose, Hilary. 2006. “From hype to mothballs in four years: Troubles in the development of large-scale DNA biobanks in Europe.” Community Genetics 9 (3): 184–189. https://doi.org/10.1159/000092655.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The ethnography of infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43 (3): 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326.

Star, Susan Leigh. 2002. “Infrastructure and ethnographic practice: Working on the fringes.” Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 14 (2): 107–122.

Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. 1996. “Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces.” Information Systems Research 7 (1): 111–134.

Steedman, Carolyn. 2002. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2012. “Imperial debris: Reflections on ruins and ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219.

Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Waldby, Catherine. 2009. “Singapore biopolis: Bare life in the city-state.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 3 (2–3): 367–383. https://doi.org/10.1215/s12280-009-9089-2.

12

Demo

Orit Halpern

Demo or die!

Demo is a word whose etymology dates back to the Greeks, to the term demos, which denotes “the people.” Demos is also the root of democracy, that fantastical site where these imagined people can express their collective will—the space where these figures become a force capable of expressing agency. To be political, the people must also come into the light, so to speak, of power. They must be made visible and legible to power as an entity with material capacities and desires. To demonstrate might be to protest or to bring something into the light or to make some new process, fact, or subject and object of knowledge or value. To demonstrate is to make a new subject or object sensible. The demos is thus also an aesthetic site. The people do not exist if they are not sensed and cannot sense.

The very terms that find their roots in this word, which denotes the formation of a people and politics, thus make us realize that the history of the demos is linked to histories of demonstration, technologies of representation and sensation, and histories of population and species. This begs the question of what the demo—as the cultural practice consisting of a demonstration of technology—is today. What does it mean to become “visible” in the realm of ubiquitous sensors and those machines that watch over us with “loving grace” (to quote the poet Richard Brautigan)? When every action is immediately conveyed into a reaction, within environments where data are always collected; when populations are constantly being made sensible to capital and technology; and when collectivities are regularly formed, dissolved, and sold as clouds or crowds to be mined and analyzed, does being made sensible equate with becoming a “people” or a demos? How do aesthetics and political economy relate in an information economy? Finally, demo is also a central design and engineering practice, linked to demonstration but not necessarily to democracy or publics. The demo is affiliated with terms such as prototyping, versioning, and beta testing and an array of modes of practice in the creative and technical industries that are about a management of futurity, technical imaginaries, and planned obsolescence. At the heart of this chapter is a question about how the technological demo and its associated smart or ubiquitous (now rebranded as artificially intelligent) infrastructures are related to older conceptions of demonstration, visibility, and, ultimately, democracy. In a chapter this short, there is no space to fully elaborate this relation; rather, I want to hint that our forms of technological testing and demoing envision a world where artificial and ubiquitous intelligences and computers can replace the democracy that is now imagined to be obsolescent.

This is also a profoundly archival question. As the study of archives has long demonstrated, the archive structures visibility but also populations and representations. If archive, as Derrida has noted, derives from arkhe, which is the site where things commence but also the law—a commandment—then it would appear that the archive is always the infrastructure for the demos. Moreover, the term has a close relationship to codes and protocols, begging the question of how the “law” and the “people” are reconstituted in the age of computational protocols and codes.

To begin contemplating the historical transformations of the demos to demos, or perhaps even what one might today label “the prototype,” I want to contemplate a very brief moment clipped from the histories of media and ubiquitous computing that speaks to both transformations of knowledge and political economy. A demo, if we will, of demos.

If there is one location identified both with the rise of the university as corporation and with new models for technical development and education, it is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab, launched in 1985 in the midst of Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president and at the foundational moment of what today one might label a “neoliberal” world economic order.

The lab’s motto was “Demo or Die!” Optimistic and ominous at the same time, few adages more clearly defined the idiosyncratic combination of rampant speculation, techno-utopianism, and disillusionment that greeted the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s. The Media Lab was famous for integrating computing with cinema, print, television, and audio mediums and infamous for pioneering a new form of performance as scientific and economic evidence: the demo. Today, as art, technology, and society converge in a culture of design thinking and “making,” it might be of interest to examine this earlier moment when engineering, art, and design were reconfigured around practices of process, information, performance, and interactivity in order to contemplate the stakes attendant on contemporary obsessions with the demo and the network.

The art world has certainly had its share of demos, and perhaps deaths. In 1970 the Jewish Museum in New York staged an exhibition that is today widely hailed as one of the pioneering moments in the history of digital media. Famous for both its failures and its successes, Software. Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art was among the first efforts to introduce art as information processing to the American public. At the heart of this pioneering exhibition was the idea that we exist in a new age reconfigured by communication technologies and the new sciences of communication and control titled cybernetics.

The term cybernetics, coming from the Greek term for steersman or governor, was coined in the late 1940s to describe the application of communications engineering, mathematical logic, and physics to the study and control of human, animal, and machine systems. Researchers in mathematics, physiology, and engineering working jointly on antiaircraft defense research at MIT came to realize that, under the stress of being targeted by missiles, human beings (pilots) act repetitively in a manner amenable to mathematical modeling and prediction. In recognizing that individual behavior could be turned into logical and statistical patterns, early cyberneticians articulated a new belief that both machines and humans could speak the same language of mathematics, and therefore, both could be treated equivalently (Edwards 1996; Galison 1994; Hayles 1999).

This wartime research also brought another discovery: the concept of feedback. These researchers recognized that the problem of shooting down planes was not about guns or pilots but about the interaction between the gun and the plane’s pilot. It was a statistical relationship of probabilities. What the pilot does in the cockpit has to be transmitted back to the antiaircraft gun in order to predict where the plane will be. The gun and the plane are communicating. These two ideas—behaviorism and feedback—have since set the stage for our contemporary modes of social networking and our data-driven lives. If today we take as seemingly natural the seamless integration of our bodies, attention, and economies with machines, it is the legacy of this moment.

After the war, cybernetics in its many forms spread like wildfire to many fields far away from engineering or computing. This idea birthed cognitive psychology, reformulated the life and human sciences (including the reformulation of genetics as “code” in DNA), and transformed the treatment of the environment as a system in fields ranging from ethology to ecology to urban planning and architecture. Artists, architects, engineers, and scientists turned to cybernetic ideas to describe a world composed of communicative exchanges between agents, rather than one made up of static objects. Cybernetics was a new idea of life; as the Software exhibition catalog stated, “Our bodies are hardware, our behavior software” (Burnham 1970, 11).

But even by the 1970s, very little of what cyberneticians envisioned actually existed or could be built. This future in which machines and people were all part of perfect communication networks was still only beginning to become a reality. The Software exhibition demonstrated how art was itself software, part of the practice of producing this new computational and communicative future. Artists, the curators argued, must contribute their vision of this future of machine life and show how aesthetic practices and art were always already part of information systems. The exhibition would, it was hoped, be both a demonstration of and an intervention into how this new world might appear: a demo of the future of human life and media, to be performed live and in real time.

Numerous artists and engineers were included. The philosopher and sociologist Ted Nelson built an interactive text retrieval system. The artist Hans Haacke constructed a data-gathering system titled Visitor’s Profile for creating statistical portraits of museum visitors. It also featured the Giorno Radio System, created by Guerrilla Radio, for broadcasting various works of different poets through small transistors available to visitors while simultaneously providing the basic architecture and instructions for do-it-yourself radio broadcasting anywhere. The exhibition thus integrated utopian and idealist investigations of technology with a self-reflexive examination into the darker side of increasing media, militarization, and surveillance in daily life. “It appears,” the catalog warned, “that we cannot survive without technologies just as dangerous as the problems they are designed to solve” (Burnham 1970, 13).

Those dangers soon became apparent. At the center of the exhibit was a very popular installation titled SEEK, built by the Architecture Machine Group (AMG) from MIT and closely affiliated with many researchers invested in cybernetics and artificial intelligence. The AMG—directed by Nicholas Negroponte, who would later turn it into the Media Lab in 1985—had the singular goal of introducing computers into design, architecture, and urban planning.

This particular demo installation consisted of a small group of Mongolian desert gerbils, chosen according to Negroponte for their curiosity and inquisitive nature. These creatures were placed in an environment of Plexiglas-mirrored blocks that were constantly rearranged by a robotic arm (Burnham 1970, 23).

The basic concept was that the robot-computer would observe the interaction of the gerbils with their habitat—the blocks—and gradually “learn” their “living preferences” by observing their behavior and how they moved the blocks. The gerbils were there to introduce chance and unpredictable, nonmechanical behavior into the environment. The job of the machine was to create a stable environment in equilibrium between the machines and the gerbils. This system was envisioned as a city homeostatically maintained by machines: a “smart” city, to use today’s language for ubiquitous computing, replete with closely networked feedback loops between “citizens” who voted with their data actions (the gerbils) and machines (Varduli 2011).

The engineers worked within the Urban Systems Laboratory at MIT. This was not, according to them, an art exhibit, but an experiment in teaching machines how to manage urban environments in order, eventually, to design better cities. It was about the future of design and urban life. For Negroponte, a true “architecture machine” would not be a modern machine serving human needs but an integrated system based on a new type of environmental intelligence related to the regular capacity to collect and respond to sensory inputs. His articles and books distilled a constellation of theories about intelligence and complexity to argue that design had to become a process, a “conversation” between two intelligent species—human and machine—and not a linear cause-effect interaction.[1] “We are talking about a symbiosis that is a cohabitation of two intelligent species,” wrote Negroponte (1970, 7). He was not interested in computerizing design so much as in rethinking the design process itself. “Architecture as a machine” posed design as a process to network humans and machines into new assemblages. This demo, which was now life reframed as a “conversation” between machines and animals, perhaps found its first comprehensive actualization in the installation at the Jewish Museum.

Art critics and the public alike were initially amazed, and the show was labeled confusing but “capricious” and “fascinating” by the New York Times (Glueck 1970). A world managed by computers filled with sensors, responding at every moment to their (admittedly) very tiny publics, was both technically inspiring and amusing.

In a stunning reversal, however, within days of the show’s opening, having initially amazed the public and brought out the crowds, this experiment in rethinking the conventional definition of intelligence, or perhaps even of life, began to entropically degrade. The machine ceased working because of problems with both the software and the hardware, and the museum almost went bankrupt. The exhibition was supposed to go to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, soon thereafter but was canceled due to the overwhelming cost and difficulty of maintaining large computer systems in the museum.

And in what might be seen as a lesson we might learn from, the gerbils in their computer-managed environment confused the computer, wrought havoc on the blocks, and became sick and aggressive, often attacking each other. The art critic Thomas Hess wryly responded to this scene in an Art News editorial. He described the gerbils as covered in excrement and shadowed by the broken arms of the robot, concluding: “Artists who become seriously engaged in technological processes might remember what happened to four charming gerbils” (Hess 1970). It appears that no one thought to ask, or could ask, whether gerbils wished to live in a computer-managed world built with blocks (Shanken 1998). Perhaps no one could ask because conversations in this case were reduced to sensor data about movements and behaviors.

No matter: in a world where nothing is final, only a demo or prototype, the death or suffering even of other creatures is not a failure but the very rationale for increasing the penetration of computing into life.

In building these environments, the demos—or the possibility of being seen and cared for as a people, or even as a species—was eliminated in the name of prototyping and technical enhancement. Technology and sensation merged to replace representation and democracy. Negroponte quickly dismissed the event by disavowing any further participation in art, stating that the piece was definitely not art but a scientific experiment in model-making for machines; he returned to building urban systems and ever more interactive environments (Negroponte 1975, 47).

The AMG turned to dealing with other, more “human,” problems. They concentrated their efforts on building virtual environments for the military for training exercises, culminating in the 1979 Aspen Movie Map, an immersive display for military training that is often considered the progenitor of the first-person shooter video game and the first fully “responsive” environment.

Another major concern for the lab was to apply computers to urban planning and design in the wake of the “race riots” and the growing apartheid in America’s cities in the late 1960s. Perhaps computationally driven environments might work in the “real” world where they had failed in the laboratory. Initial projects were started in 1970 in African American neighborhoods in Boston’s South End.

In the move from machine to animal to human intelligence, race was a critical conduit. The first functional demo of computer-aided design run by the Arch-Mac group was a series of Turing tests performed on tenants in the South End, then an underprivileged neighborhood. Negroponte’s lab recruited three African American men from public housing projects and asked, via a machine interface, what their main concerns were regarding urban planning and neighborhood improvement—that is, what they wished urban planners and designers would take into account.

The simulation was entirely fake. Computers at the time could not handle such sophisticated questions. The test was run through a human being. The participants, however, were kept ignorant of this fact.

One can read the whole test as an interface, a demo, of what a real computationally aided interaction would look like. What gives this demo force is that it is the performance of a “wish image” of the future. If from a historical distance it might appear to be nothing more than playacting, at the time Negroponte argued that demos are truth—experiments that prove which forms of research and technology need to be invoked next; that should exist and must be built. Negroponte envisioned a world driven through crowdsourcing and the technical resolution of political conflicts. When discussing the participation of community members, he recalled that the African American men “said things to this machine they would probably not have said to another human, particularly a white planner or politician: to them the machine was not black, was not white, and surely had no prejudices. . . . Machines would monitor the propensity for change of the body politic” (Negroponte 1970, 57). Implicitly, Negroponte introduced a new idea of population as a cloud or source for difference, a “propensity for change.” Population was a medium for growing computation.

What had begun as experiments in computational environments inhabited by alien species had now been transformed into the management of human populations. This management, Negroponte argued, would circumvent politics, replacing the demos with the demo, transforming democracy and political agency into self-organizing systems, and moving intelligence out of the human subject and into the environment.

There are, therefore, some lessons that emerge from this story of demos. SEEK serves as a historical marker of a changing attitude to environment and attention. At once showing the possibility to rethink environments as sensory, responsive, and evolving from relations between agents, SEEK also demonstrated the somewhat cyclical and mechanistic dangers that come with thinking of the world as only a matter of preprogrammed and networked logics. No longer did designers, artists, or computer scientists consider individuals as isolated spectators; instead, they considered collectives, networks, and environments. Space, cities, and environments were not stable things but rather ecologies that emerged through the interactions between individuals and agents—in this case, from the interactions between the gerbils and the machine. This little demo also exhibited the problems and dangers of an algorithmically managed and computationally networked world where change becomes catastrophic when it cannot be programmed and controlled. If things go wrong once everything is connected, they go really wrong.

These “demos,” then, which perhaps lead to “death,” speak to our present faith that computationally driven environments, whether in smart cities, homes, electrical grids, social networks, or security systems, will preserve our future and way of life. Perhaps this brings us back to the small, sad gerbils in their excessively responsive environment. In this case the logistics of computation had folded upon itself to produce something other than intended—something that was also radically nihilistic. In the nonconscious effort to thwart the machine, or surprise it, the gerbils turned paranoid toward each other.

But this sad story also offers some opportunity, for it demonstrates the unknowability of the future and the radical alienness of computing: systems never behave as their designers or owners expect them to. Whether dealing with financial markets, social networks, urban environments, or weather systems, multiple algorithms and logics allow human beings to create and experience systems but never to fully control them. If this folding, this impossibility of systemic stability, were pushed elsewhere—activated not toward the constant repetitive future of the demo or the upgrade but toward encountering different forms of life (animal and human) and various possible futures—what would happen? Perhaps this is the challenge all critical thinkers and artists now face: to produce chances, contingencies, and accidents that do not descend into disasters. The Software exhibition assumed that software was not something artists represented but was already in the DNA of art, scripted into the very cultural fabric in a ubiquitous manner. If software is now environment, are there alternative modes of programming? Are there ways to mobilize this connectedness between species and machines for new ends? A few years later, the feminist Donna Haraway suggested just this possibility in the figure of the cyborg. Our new ontology. Although the next people may no longer be human, they may still be able to demonstrate in the sense of political action and possibility for diverse forms of life—for forms not yet imagined, for systems that are never fully programmable. Our challenge is to envision this demos that can demo without death.

Note

1. Negroponte (1970) and his colleagues argued that their model of intelligence in design differed from those of other architects of the time and that what marked the separation was their concept of an ecology formed out of constant feedback loops of machine-human interactions; an ecology that evolved, changed, and grew “intelligent” (7).

References

Burnham, Jack. 1970. Software. Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. New York: Jewish Museum.

Edwards, Paul. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Galison, Peter. 1994. “The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Weiner and the cybernetic vision.” Critical Inquiry 21 (1): 228–266.

Glueck, Grace. 1970. “Jewish Museum’s ‘software’ confusing.” New York Times, September 26, 1970.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hess, Thomas. 1970. “Gerbils ex machina.” Art News, December 1970.

Negroponte, Nicholas. 1970. The Architecture Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Negroponte, Nicholas. 1975. Soft Architecture Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shanken, Edward. 1998. “The house that Jack built: Jack Burnham’s concept of ‘software’ as a metaphor for art.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6 (10). http://www.artexetra.com/House.html.

Varduli, Theodora. 2011. “Nicholas Negroponte: An interview.” Theodora Varduli (blog). October 27, 2011. https://openarchitectures.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/an-interview-with-nicholas-negroponte/.

13

Detox

Pepita Hesselberth

Judging by public discourse, one of the major concerns of our times is toxicity: the becoming-toxic of our minds, of our bodies, and of society at large due to an overexposure to technologies of mass digitization. Widespread and affecting many areas including politics, finance, and climate change, the fear of toxicity has become particularly pertinent in (the not unrelated) discussions of big data and our present-day economy of attention. The fear is evidently there in the surge of reports that, at least to the public eye, started to appear in the aftermath of the 2017 Habit Summit in San Francisco (and that were refueled by the scandal over Cambridge Analytica in early 2018), when an increasing number of (former) Silicon Valley designers and engineers began to express their growing disaffection with the technologies they helped build and to voice warnings against the use of persuasive design, addictive feedback loops, psyops, the pursuit of corporate profit, and what has been called informational dominance in the mass aggregation of data.[1] But the fear of toxicity was obviously there long before that, albeit in a different form: in the incessant call for digital detoxification and the felt need—among technologies’ most quotidian users—to, every now and then, simply disconnect. In the detox, many of the lived uncertainties of our current technological milieu become manifest: the fear of addictive behavior and the loss of touch with reality in social relations; anxieties over attention deficit, time waste, and loss of productivity, which are often linked to changing conditions of labor due to neoliberal transformation; and finally, concerns over privacy, security, and surveillance, through which we feel confronted with our present-day “society of control” (Deleuze 1992).

Short for detoxification, the word detox, according to the online Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “(a process or period of time in which one) abstain(s) from or rid(s) the body of toxic or unhealthy substances” (Oxford Living Dictionaries 2018a). Thus, at the root of the idea of the digital detox lies the belief that some sort of “toxic or unhealthy substance” affects the (social) body in harmful ways, as well as a conviction that self-restraint or moderation is the path to homeostasis—to a cleansing of body and mind and, arguably, society at large, of this toxic. An adjective meaning poison, the word toxic is further described as both “relating to or caused by poison” (e.g., toxic waste) and/or “very bad, unpleasant, or harmful” (e.g., toxic relationship; Oxford Living Dictionaries 2018b). This double gist, of framing our engagement with technology in terms of addiction and detoxification, is clearly resounded in the language of both Silicon Valley’s refuseniks and the self-proclaimed evangelists of the digital detox:[2] on the one hand, certain technologies (devices, apps, and algorithms) are considered harmful; on the other hand, the environment, in its totality, is deemed destructive and/or full of risk.[3] The metaphor at play here, moreover, is clearly that of substance abuse and/or dependence and thus of drugs. As Jason Mittell (2000) has pointed out, such metaphorical framing does not stand on its own but partakes of a much longer tradition of framing mass entertainment media in terms of consumption and sedation that works to obscure the complex socioeconomic processes in which these media and their reception take part.[4]

The focus of this chapter is on the detox. To consider the (digital) detox as a critical concept is not altogether self-evident, and certainly not without issues. First of all, the notion of detox taps into a much wider preoccupation with disconnectivity and disintoxification, of which the digital detox is but one case in point. Phrases such as “going off-grid,” “unplugging,” and “slowing down” and terms like media refusal, media avoidance, media pushback, media abstinence, withdrawal, and disconnection all feed into its imaginary, without necessarily all being the same. These differences notwithstanding, each of these terms and practices signals a similar preoccupation, which for the purpose of this chapter is framed more specifically in terms of detox and detoxification. Second, it has often been noted (and for good reason) that the digital detox, especially in its commodity form, plays into a neoliberal rhetoric, in which the detox is seen to trick (sedate) us into believing that we are somehow in control of (and thus accountable for) the way digital technologies, and the logic of computation more generally, affect us in our everyday lives. This makes its classification as a critical concept knotty, to say the least. Third, and relatedly, as a cultural praxis or desire, the detox arguably “operates” on more levels than that of language and rhetoric alone.[5] This makes its qualification as a critical concept equally problematic. The aim of this chapter is to unpack some of this complexity, in part by taking the example of Data Detox as a case in point. The example is interesting, first, because it hammers the digital detox home to the discussions of big data and our present-day economy of attention; and, second, because it helps to unravel how and why the detox works to affirm existing relations of power and yet has the potential to disrupt them. This makes the (notion of) detox both problematic and yet so very interesting to think about in our present times.

In October 2017, the Berlin-based Tactical Technology Collective launched the online version of the Data Detox kit (figure 13.1),[6] a manual and eight-day detox program, daily challenges included, “designed just for you” (note the second-person pronoun) to help you “on your way to a healthier and more in-control digital self.”[7] Advertisement-free and overtly activist in intent,[8] the manual encourages its users to take a series of “practical steps to reduce your data bloat—a toxic build-up of data.” These steps include clearing your browser history and removing cookies; searching yourself online using different search engines; deleting your activity log on Google with the overall purpose of degoogling your life; “deep cleaning” your social media accounts and unsharing privacy-sensitive information; reconfiguring your privacy settings and blocking trackers; and finally, “app cleansing” your phone to make it generally “less communicative.” The launch coincided with the second installment of The Glass Room, a pop-up exhibition curated by Tactical Tech’s cofounders Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski and produced by Mozilla for MozFest 2017.[9] Minimalist in design, The Glass Room has the appearance of a high-end tech store: pristine, white, and shiny and replete with strategically placed tablets (figures 13.2 and 13.3). The “twist” of this “store,” however, is that it has “nothing to sell” but a bit of awareness about the “dark sides of our digital economy.” Comprising over forty artworks and (ongoing) speculative, investigative, and activist projects, the show comes to a crescendo at the Data Detox Bar (figure 13.3), an obvious play on Apple’s Genius Bar, where Tactical Tech’s “Ingeniuses” provide you with “one-to-one advice, tips and tricks on how to protect your privacy online” by way of their free [sic!] eight-step program.

Figure 13.1

The Data Detox kit online. © Tactical Technology Collective 2017.

Figure 13.2

The Glass Room, Mozilla.

Like the more common manifestations of the digital detox (retreats, manifestos, apps, challenges, and the like), the Data Detox is thus unambiguously presented as the antidote or remedy against the toxics at hand. Yet when one looks at the manual in more detail, it is not entirely clear what exactly is envisioned to be toxic and who or what is the subject of intoxication/detoxification.[10] For while the manual clearly taps into some of the same cultural overtones as, say, the digital detox retreat, notable differences exist. In the case of the digital detox, it is generally the user who is envisioned as in need of detoxification from an environment deemed intoxicated by technologies (certain devices, apps, and/or trackers). Curiously, in the case of the Data Detox, it is not so much the “data” that are identified as toxic but rather their uncontrolled accumulation (the “bloat”). Likewise, it is not so much “you” (or even your “online self”) who appears to be in need of detoxification. Rather, “technology” itself is envisioned to be intoxicated: your devices and apps, the cloud, and, arguably, corporate capitalism as such (present in the manifesto as “those who capitalize on” your private data). While this may seem consistent with the “tactical” approach to technology to which the curators aspire, pushing this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion leads to the perhaps somewhat disturbing and certainly more counterintuitive realization that, by some odd reversal of logic, it now turns out to be “you” who is clogging up the system by sharing all of your thoughts, “habits, movements, connections, beliefs, secrets and preferences online.” In other words: your digital footprint—not “big data” and not even “toxic tech” as such—is here envisioned to be toxic.

Figure 13.3

The Data Detox Bar at The Glass Room. ©David Mirzoeff 2017 for Tactical Tech.

Unlike the digital detox, then, Tactical Tech’s Data Detox seems hardly invested in the psychology of technology use and/or dependence. Instead, it speaks to the paradigm of security, privacy, and surveillance—and it so happens that this is the precisely paradigm around which the show’s producer, Mozilla, recently remodeled its sales strategy, after terminating its partnership with Google in 2014 following a seven-year privilege/sponsorship worth a good US$120 million in revenue (Beard 2014; Bott 2011). As media scholar and artist David Gauthier (pers. comm., December 31, 2017) rightly remarks: “Thus one can read the subscript of the show as: the way to ‘resist’ contemporary surveillance is through more technology, better encryptions, new algorithms, new infrastructures, new tech start-ups, etc.” The Data Detox, in other words, is a pharmakon.

Derived from the Latin toxicum, meaning poison, the word toxic has its root in the Greek toxikon (pharmakon), literally meaning something like “poison to smear arrows with.” Interestingly, in philosophy and critical theory, the notion of the pharmakon—meaning medicine or drug and thus denoting both poison and cure—has been theorized (from Derrida, via Plato, to Stiegler, among others) as precisely the indeterminacy between the two, as at once poison and cure, which, in its most regressive form, can be seen to take on the symbolic figure of the scapegoat (pharmakos): a poison that, once sacrificed in society at a time of crisis, is held to function as its remedy or cure.[11] The technological solutionism of the Data Detox clearly plays into this regressive/reductionist logic. In part, its reductionism can be explained by the rather narrow definition of technology that the manual espouses (as specific devices or apps), in which “good” technologies are invoked to contest “bad” ones (which largely disregards the fact that, from the point of view of the pharmakon, all technologies simultaneously disable and enable, including “good” ones). We can find a similar reductionism at play in digital detox apps such as RescueTime, ShutApp, Offtime, and AppDetox (as well as in the lingo of Silicon Valley’s refuseniks, for that matter) and also, for example—and this is important—in the “concept” of the digital detox retreat itself, insofar as it is prescriptive and invites us to engage with technology in a certain way, which largely negates what Bernard Stiegler (2013, 20) calls the “originarily pharmako-logical constitution” of the human spirit.

Significantly, Stiegler (1998) upholds a definition of technology, or technics, that encompasses more than technological tools alone. Technology, he states, is the horizon of human existence: it is the very way we relate to the world around us, which occurs always already through externalization—that is, through technology. The pharmakon, for Stiegler, therefore emerges with the technogenesis of humankind. It “is at once what enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken—in the sense that it is necessary to pay attention: its power is curative to the immeasurable extent [dans la mesure et la démesure] that it is also destructive” (Stiegler 2013, 4; emphasis in the original). The phrasing “curative to the immeasurable extent” is crucial here. As that which at once enables and disables, technology is what propels us forward; it coincides with the creativity of the human mind. This is why Stiegler speaks of humankind as “an irreducibly pharmacological being” (Stiegler 2011, 309; emphasis in the original). The explosion of pharmaka within our present-day digital culture has to do with the becoming-toxic of consumer capitalism.[12] Indeed, as many have argued, contemporary capitalism thrives on our desire: it no longer exploits only the labor of our bodies but also that of our minds; it has put the “soul to work” (Berardi 2009).

Reflecting on the instant success of Facebook’s “Like” button, former employee and software programmer Justin Rosenstein—who was in charge of the button’s design in 2007 but is now often quoted as one of Silicon Valley’s heretics—recollects how “engagement soared as people enjoyed the short-term boost they got from giving or receiving social affirmation, while FB harvested valuable data about the preferences of users that could be sold to advertisers” (Lewis 2017). It is in short-term boosts of affirmation like these that the proletarization of desire takes place: in the (free) labor of liking.[13] What transpires in this automation of desire is the short-circuiting of our capacity for autonomous thought, by way of which our desire binds to a calculative object (here, the harvesting of data). The Data Detox and digital detox, more generally, are no different in this, insofar as they compel us “to adapt to a doxa”—that is, to a certain way of engaging with technology (and through technology with the world around us) that is not self-conceived but scripted and that, as such, prohibits “thinking for oneself.” This, according to Stiegler (2011, 195), “is what produces the entire system of proletarization.”

Yet from the point of view of the pharmakon, human desire is essentially limitless and inexhaustible. Our current preoccupation with toxicity and detoxification, therefore, must be seen above all as an attempt to reclaim (deproletarize) desire in order “to find new models capable of freeing people from the poisonous explosion of pharmaka” (Stiegler 2011, 308–309). We can thus add the digital detox—if not in its commodity form, or even as a critical concept, then as a critical imaginary—to Stiegler’s long list of disintoxification that includes asbestos removal, the ban on smoking, health regimens to curb obesity, and the numerous endeavors to reduce our carbon footprint. A critical imaginary differs from a critical concept, social theorist Eric J. Weiner (2014, 14) suggests, in that it “disrupt[s] the imperatives of realism” and questions “the very epistemological foundations upon which our most cherished social political assumptions rest,” thus allowing the development of “new categories from which to design new theoretical models of thought and actions.” In other words, the detox is crucial for studying uncertainty in times of big data because, as a critical imaginary, it unearths the fundamental indeterminacy underlying all technology. As such, it has the potential to disclose the fissures in our existing reality, opening up a transitional space in which autonomous thought (and thus change) may take place, reminding us “why and how life is worth living” (Stiegler 2011, 309).

Notes

This chapter was made possible by the support of the Danish Council for Independent Research, Humanities/Culture and Communication (grant no. 5050–00043B). The author would like to thank David Gauthier, Ruby de Vos, and the editors of this volume for their generous feedback on earlier drafts.

1. See, for example, Lewis (2017) and Cadwalladr (2018). Earlier critical voices “from the inside” include Jaron Lanier (2011, 2014, 2018) and Cathy O’Neil (2016), as well as the people involved in the Time without Bounds movement and the Center for Humane Technology (founded in 2015), to name but a few of the most visible examples.

2. See, for example, the LinkedIn pages of the director of the Digital Detox Academy (https://be.linkedin.com/in/christinewittoeck, accessed June 18, 2018) and the founder of Time to Log Off (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tanyagoodin, accessed June 18, 2018).

3. This double gist is resounded in a second meaning of the word toxic identified by the Oxford Living Dictionary, which refers to “finance | denoting or relating to debt which has a high risk of default” and/or “securities for which there is not a healthy or functioning market” (Oxford Living Dictionaries 2018b). In her book Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil (another disenchanted mathematician/tech designer) calls attention to the disturbing resemblance between finance and data science in the way algorithms are used, where, she states, a “false sense of security” has led to the “widespread use of imperfect models, self-serving definitions of success, and growing feedback loops” (O’Neil 2016, 48).

4. For a more detailed comparison between the use of the drug metaphor and its associated meanings in the 1980s antitelevision movement (discussed by Mittell) and more recent discussions of the digital detox, see Hesselberth (2018).

5. For an elaboration on disconnectivity as gesture, see Hesselberth (2017, 9).

6. The Tactical Technology Collective is a nonprofit organization cofounded by technologists, activists, and artist/designers Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski.

7. The (revised) online version can be found at https://datadetox.myshadow.org/detox (accessed June 18, 2018). The pdf version originates from 2016 and can be found at https://www.theglassroom.org/files/2016/12/DataDetoxKit_optimized_01.pdf (accessed June 18, 2018).

8. The term tactical media was coined in the early 1990s, by analogy with tactical television and Michel de Certeau’s notion of tactics, to explore the tactical potential of consumer electronics and digital media. See Garcia and Lovink (1997) and Nayar (2010, 100).

9. The Glass Room London, October 25–November 12, 2017 (https://mozillafestival.org/, accessed June 18, 2018). The Glass Room NYC took place on November 29–December 18, 2016. The Glass Room was originally conceived as The White Room in the exhibition Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question, cocurated by Tactical Tech, New York, March 11–May 9, 2016 (https://nervoussystems.org/, accessed June 18, 2018). MozFest ran on October 27–29, 2017. Since then, The Glass Room has been exhibited on nearly one hundred occasions at festivals, organizations, libraries, and schools worldwide, with six installments during the summer of 2019 alone.

10. To the point: in the more common versions of the digital detox, both the toxic and the subject of de/intoxification are often equally unsteady and ill-defined. The aim of the comparison here is not to downplay one version of the detox at the expense of another but merely to call attention to the idiosyncratic way in which the Data Detox frames toxicity and detoxification specifically, and almost exclusively, in terms of data, data tech, and data bloat.

11. To contextualize such scapegoating historically, see Mittell (2000) and Karabell (2018).

12. See Hansen (2015, 422) for a concise but illuminating review of Stiegler’s thought on the subject.

13. The term free labor is derived from Terranova (2000). The phrase “labor of liking” is not mine but was coined by Frederik Tygstrup in his “Closing Remarks” at the 2015 European Summer School in Cultural Studies on The Politics of Taste (Paris, September 1–7, 2015).

References

Beard, Chris. 2014. “New search strategy for Firefox: Promoting choice and innovation.” Mozilla (blog). November 19, 2014. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-and-innovation-on-the-web.

Berardi, Franco. 2009. The Soul at Work, from Alienation to Autonomy. Cambridge, MA: Semiotexte by MIT Press.

Bott, Ed. 2011. “Firefox faces uncertain future as Google deal apparently ends.” ZDNet, December 2, 2011. http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-faces-uncertain-future-as-google-deal-apparently-ends/.

Cadwalladr, Carole. 2018. “‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: Meet the data war whistleblower.” Guardian, March 18, 2018. http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the societies of control.” October, no. 59, 3–7.

Garcia, David, and Geert Lovink. 1997. “The ABC of tactical media.” Nettime Mailinglist Archives, May 16, 1997. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html.

Hansen, Mark B. N. 2015. “Saving libidinal capitalism: Bernard Stiegler’s political gambit.” Critical Inquiry 42 (2): 421–422. http://doi.org/10.1086/684388.

Hesselberth, Pepita. 2017. “Discourses on disconnectivity and the right to disconnect.” New Media and Society 20 (5): 1994–2010. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817711449.

Hesselberth Pepita. 2018. “Connect, disconnect, reconnect: Historicizing the current gesture towards disconnectivity, from the plug-in drug to the digital detox.” Cinéma&Cie: International Film Studies Journal 30 (XVII): 105–114.

Karabell, Zachary. 2018. “Demonized smartphones are just our latest technological scapegoat.” Wired, January 23, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/demonized-smartphones-are-just-our-latest-technological-scapegoat/.

Lanier, Jaron. 2011. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage.

Lanier, Jaron. 2014. Who Owns the Future? New York: Simon and Schuster.

Lanier, Jaron. 2018. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. New York: Vintage.

Lewis, Paul. 2017. “‘Our minds can be hijacked’: The tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia.” Guardian, October 6, 2017. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia.

Mittell, Jason. 2000. “Cultural power of an anti-television metaphor: Questioning the ‘plug-in drug’ and a TV-free America.” Television and New Media 1 (2): 215–238.

Nayar, Pramod K. 2010. An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown.

Oxford Living Dictionaries. 2018a. “Detox.” Accessed January 10, 2018. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/detox.

Oxford Living Dictionaries. 2018b. “Toxic.” Accessed January 10, 2018. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/toxic.

Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus. Vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Stiegler, Bernard. 2011. “Pharmacology of spirit: And that which makes life worth living.” In Theory after “Theory,” edited by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge, 294–310. New York: Routledge.

Stiegler, Bernard. 2013. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Cambridge: Polity.

Terranova, Tiziana. 2000. “Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy.” Social Text 18 (2): 33–58.

Weiner, Eric J. 2007. “Critical pedagogy and the crisis of imagination.” In Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now?, edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren, 57–78. New York: Peter Lang.

14

Digital Assistants

Miriam E. Sweeney

Introduction

In machine learning, “uncertainty” describes the margin of error of a given measurement as a range of values most likely to contain the “true” data value. A critical cultural approach to digital assistants reframes uncertainty into a strategy of inquiry that foregrounds the range of cultural values embedded in digital assistants. This is particularly useful for exposing what sorts of ideological “truths” are enclosed and/or foreclosed as part and parcel of the design, implementation, and use of these technologies. Exploring the anthropomorphic design of digital assistants through feminist and critical race lenses requires us to confront how dominant ideologies about race, gender, and technology form a kind of cultural infrastructure that undergirds technology design and practice. From this perspective, uncertainties emerge about the “common sense” of the anthropomorphic design of digital assistants, particularly surrounding how this design strategy is employed to target vulnerable communities at the behest of state, corporate, and commercial interests. I argue that digital assistant technologies mobilize beliefs about race, gender, and technology through interface design as a way to strategically cultivate user experience (UX), interpellate users as subjects, dismantle worker protections, and otherwise obscure (or “smooth”) vast intimate data-capture projects. Tracing, and destabilizing, the role of anthropomorphic design in these systems is a necessary step for mapping the larger roles that digital assistants play in facilitating intimate data capture for the networked data environment.

The Big Data Turn

Digital assistants, also known as virtual assistants or virtual agents, can be broadly defined as autonomous entities that “act on behalf of the user in a virtual (computer-based) environment” (Laurel 1997, 208). Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa are prevalent examples of this kind of intelligent technology. This suite of digital assistants has come a long way from earlier conversational “chatbot” instantiations (e.g., ELIZA, A.L.I.C.E.) due to a combination of advances in machine learning, microprocessing, natural language processing, and speech recognition. These developments were dependent on the growth of cost-effective and scaled-up computing infrastructures (e.g., cloud computing, server storage, data processing), which were necessary to create the conditions for compiling and mining massive data sets. As a result of these innovations, digital assistant technologies have become more ubiquitous and “intelligent” in their applications, tackling complex problems with greater accuracy and being used in conjunction with predictive analytics tools. Thus, the growth of intelligent digital assistants has rested on big data as the driver of both technological innovation and the consumer data business model.

In recent years we have seen intelligent digital assistants (such as Alexa) move from personal use in the home to the workplace and other public or semipublic spaces. Similarly, digital assistants, long common in online customer service interfaces, have increasingly been incorporated into fundamental civil services such as education, health, and e-government. These shifts have tremendous implications for user privacy and human rights. Critically, as people’s everyday activities at home and work become more entwined with (and framed by) digital technologies, the potential for both overt and covert data capture has intensified. Digital assistants play a role in this data capture by seamlessly integrating data networks across platforms via Internet of Things technologies, mobile devices, smartwatches, personal computers, smart home technologies, security systems, and numerous other third-party applications. Digital assistants capture intimate user data in the form of biometric data (e.g., voice recognition, facial recognition), consumer habits, Internet-based transactions, personal information, and geographic information tracking. The extended capture of intimate user information over time has created extensive data archives that rely on cloud-based storage, private ownership of data, outsourced data processing, and data sharing across entities to function. Given the current information environment of the US, characterized by the permissive surveillance policies of the Patriot Act, there are low to no barriers for state access to much of this personal data and few policy frameworks for accountability or transparency regarding how user data may be used to shape differential life opportunities, perpetuate inequalities, or otherwise target vulnerable communities.

Yet this landscape is largely invisible to users, who are encouraged by the parent companies to view digital assistants as fun, convenient, and efficient intermediaries for personal information seeking and management. For instance, voice-activated controls via wake words (e.g., “Hey, Siri” or “Alexa”) are advertised as a playful convenience feature in commercials that highlight actors such as Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson flirting with Siri, or Alexa “reading” children an audiobook before bedtime. In reality, the ubiquitous “always on” feature has raised privacy questions about the extent of user interactions that are recorded and how these files are processed, transcribed, and stored (Humphries 2019). Design strategies that mitigate, or mask, the uncertainties of extensive intimate data capture play a crucial role in the deployment of digital assistants. Anthropomorphic design helps translate digital assistants into the “friendly” interfaces of these advertising fantasies, purposively obscuring (or “smoothing”) the imperatives of big data this landscape depends on.

(Inter)Facing Digital Assistants

Anthropomorphism is leveraged in digital assistant design as a key strategy for translating the uncomfortable or unfamiliar—in this case, interacting with computers and surveillance technologies—into the acceptable via familiar extensions of human sociability. Interface design conveys assumptions about the desired use of the interface and overall anticipated UX and establishes a set of interpretive possibilities for users. Stanfill (2015) characterizes the interface as a site where productive power is mobilized, producing ideological “truths” in the form of normative claims about both the uses and users of the technology in question. Digital assistants thus emerge as sites of discursive practice that convey not only acceptable uses of technology but also acceptable subject formations for users.

Anthropomorphic interface design draws explicitly on gender and race as ideological frameworks to create identity markers in digital assistants that activate particular social scripts as a key part of UX (Sweeney 2016b). Overwhelmingly, digital assistants are represented (in North American markets) as white, middle-class, Anglo women. Digital assistants can be explicitly gendered through their embodied representations, their naming, their vocal stylings, and the tasks they perform. Importantly, digital assistants are also feminized through their alignment with domestic work, affective labor, service roles, and caregiving (Sweeney 2016a, 225). For instance, IKEA’s digital assistant Anna is designed as a smiling, white, blonde woman wearing a headset like a call center worker. On the other hand, the early digital assistant Jeeves, from Ask.com, was represented as a white, male butler. These two representations convey two different sorts of gendered labor: the feminized call center worker and the male butler domestic worker. Both are linked to distinct service work industries that have unique cultural histories as they intersect with class and gender roles. Accordingly, these representations also convey different formations of the user role: as a customer or as master of a great house, respectively.

Digital assistants are often culturally coded as feminine through their oral and textual speech patterns, their names, and their default voice interfaces. For example, Apple’s Siri cofounder Adam Cheyer (2012) describes Siri as having multifaceted meanings that the team intended, including the Norse translation for “beautiful woman who leads you to victory,” the Swahili word for “secret,” and the Sinhalese term for “beauty.” Similarly, Microsoft’s Cortana is named after the fictional synthetic intelligence character from the Halo game series, who appears as a sexy, nude female avatar. Amazon’s Alexa uses a female name, derived from the ancient library of Alexandria, which was chosen for its presumed uniqueness in the daily user lexicon, an important feature for a wake word. Both Alexa and Cortana default to female voices, with no option for male voices in the interface; Siri has a default female voice in most languages but defaults to a male voice in four languages: Arabic, French, Dutch, and British English. This demonstrates how developers deploy gender in digital assistants in ways that conform to culturally specific gender scripts.

The racialization of digital assistants is complex and may be explicitly or implicitly encoded aesthetically through embodied representations (skin tone, phenotype), dialect, and speech patterns. Often racialization is signified as a form of “default whiteness” that is assumed of technologies (and users) unless otherwise indicated (Nakamura 2002). Dinerstein (2006) locates whiteness as part of the technocultural matrix, arguing that technology functions as a kind of white mythology, embodying ideas of modernity, progress, masculinity, and the future. Digital assistants represent a fusion point of ideologies of race, gender, and technology, where the unmarked technology (or virtual body) is assumed to be white “and therefore unproblematic and uncomplicated as a design option” (Sweeney 2016a, 222). The default assumption of whiteness, present in the majority of digital assistants, creates a normative technological framework that reinforces hegemonic cultural narratives about whiteness (and technology) as objective, trustworthy, and authoritative.

Designers treat gender and race as variables that can be adjusted to optimize UX by promoting goals such as “trust,” “friendliness,” and “credibility” in the interface (Bickmore, Pfeifer, and Jack 2009; Cowell and Stanney 2003). In focusing on UX and believability as units of analysis for evaluating digital assistants, “designers may also fail to see how their software systems are shot through with assumptions about gender, race, ethnicity, users, and so on” (Zdenek 2007, 405). Categories of “trust” and “credibility” are already mediated by beliefs about race and gender, producing powerful cultural narratives about subjects (e.g., Black masculinity and criminality, or white femininity and purity) that are continuously redeployed as a form of disciplinary social power and control. Unfortunately, the focus on gender and race as design attributes, rather than as vectors of social power, leads designers to deliberately utilize these stereotypes under the guise of “user preference” and marketplace logics (Sweeney 2016a). For instance, studies that demonstrate user preference for female-voiced computing interfaces (Mitchell et al. 2011) tend to be used to justify female-voiced agents as an effective design strategy, one that is divorced from the cultural frameworks that shape this acceptance. In a well-cited study, Nass, Moon, and Green (1997) demonstrated that user preferences for female- or male-voiced interfaces tended to be linked to the gendered agreement of the interface and the content, rather than to the gender of the user. Their findings revealed the following: participants were more likely to take evaluation from male voices than female voices; dominant roles for female-voiced computers were not as accepted; and participants preferred male voices when tutored on “masculine” topics such as computing, whereas they saw female-voiced computers as more informative on stereotypically feminine topics such as love and relationships (Nass, Moon, and Green 1997). These findings, and others like them, are recycled continuously until they operate as a kind of cultural “common sense” design practice, obscuring their linkages to historically specific and socially produced systems of oppression.

Gender and Race as UX

Digital assistants are specifically racialized and gendered as a function of the contexts of their use, including which audiences they are targeting, what kinds of tasks they perform, and the broader objectives and missions of the entities that design and deploy them. For example, Alexa and Siri are aesthetically coded as native English-speaking, educated, white women positioned through their advertising as a kind of idealized domestic servant who helps to manage the home (Phan 2019, 4). Both technologies are marketed to highlight their service and caregiving roles, interspersing intimate vignettes of banal domestic life to underscore the capacity of these technologies for keeping pace with middle-class standards of domesticity. A variety of domestic activities are represented in these advertisements, including preparing for a date, cooking dinner, putting kids to bed, getting ready for work, scheduling playdates, and answering conversational questions during a family meal (Sweeney 2017). These social scripts privilege markers of white, middle-class heteronormativity that tend to sentimentalize the nuclear family and traditional domestic ideals (Phan 2019, 7).

Phan makes the case that the labor provided by the digital assistant preserves the identity of the working mother in ways that historically mimic “the reciprocity between early twentieth-century middle-class women and their servant staff” (Phan 2019, 14). The racialized and gendered aesthetics of Alexa and Siri “decontextualizes and depoliticizes the historic reality of domestic service” (4), obscuring the servant labor of poor women and women of color. The UX that Amazon and Apple sell through these technologies rests on the promise of class privilege and aspirations to respectability. These aspirations create new entry points for centralized data capture in intimate spaces, including opportunities for access to previously hard-to-obtain or protected data sets, such as children’s personal information (Harris 2016).

Digital assistants in customer service contexts (tend to) replicate gendered labor divisions that have historically shaped information labor and service industries. These industries are heavily feminized, meaning they are overrepresented by women workers and tend to offer low-paid, low-status, and precarious positions. Although women of color are overrepresented in customer service industries, as in the Alexa example, these digital assistants remain predominantly white with middle-class aesthetic trappings, effectively erasing the labor of women of color and creating a skewed representation of the realities of information labor. Poster (2016, 89) argues that the selective visibility of the worker is “at the heart of reconfiguring the labor processes of these services.” Automating labor tends to further entrench existing gendered and racial hierarchies, rather than subverting them. Digital assistants such as the holographic, embodied airport workers designed by Airus Media (2015) are sold as ideal employees who work tirelessly without end (“works 24 hours, 7 days a week and never takes a break!”), allowing employers to harness labor without extending basic labor rights to real laborers.

Though the majority of these digital assistants are portrayed as white, Anglo women, it is interesting to note the contexts in which this is not the case. Airus Media deploys digital assistants that are culturally coded as Latina Transportation Security Administration agents in airports along the US/Mexican border, giving new meaning to the brochure’s exclamation: “No background check required!” This statement hints at the tensions between the desire for cheap labor as a driver of the US economy and the xenophobia of white Americans toward Latinx people, which shapes immigration anxieties and worker rights. These digital assistants are positioned as the answer to harnessing the labor of Latina information workers without actually hiring Latinas. These “digital solutions” continue a long history of the simultaneous reliance on and invisibility of Latina information labor in technology industries (Villa-Nicholas 2016).

The Latina identity works as an affordance in these interfaces to mitigate the hostilities that Latinx people face when coming into contact with US federal agencies. Emma, named after Emma Lazarus, is the Latina digital assistant used by US Citizenship and Immigration Services as an extension of their call center on their website. Unlike Alexa or Siri, Emma relies on text-based, user-inputted data, which are often highly personal in nature, particularly for users seeking critical government services such as those pertaining to immigration and citizenship. Emma’s design as a light-skinned and white-passing Latina, along with her English-first language skills, makes normative claims about the face of the “good” citizen that are aligned with the ability to assimilate (Villa-Nicholas and Sweeney 2019). Emma is presented as a “trusted ethnic friend” for the presumably Latinx audience, obscuring the data gathering that is the cost of interaction through this interface. Emma cultivates a UX that relies on hegemonic notions of racialized gender to bring users into acceptable forms of citizenship, vis-à-vis engaging with the interface in ways that produce them as informationally legible subjects (Villa-Nicholas and Sweeney 2019). Undocumented people, and people otherwise seeking paths to immigration and citizenship, are made vulnerable through this process, with little recourse but to use digital assistant technologies as semicompulsory access points to government services.

Remaining Critically Uncertain

Although anthropomorphism has emerged as a kind of “common-sense” strategy for digital assistant design, critical uncertainty can help destabilize it as a “natural” choice for interaction with computers. Anthropomorphism draws its power from explicitly leveraging interlocking power structures such as gender, race, class, and sexuality in service of cultural narratives that support design goals. Digital assistants are marketed with promises of efficiency, cost saving, convenience, respectability, and security, yet these “benefits” are mostly enjoyed by the state, commercial, and corporate actors who design and deploy these technologies. Anthropomorphism provides a cultural layer to help underscore those affordances, smoothing the uncertainties that come with the adoption of digital assistants and obscuring the oppressive imperatives of big data projects. Yet seeking to simply refashion, or otherwise mitigate, anthropomorphism as a design strategy misses the point. Anthropomorphism is but one strategy meant to cultivate user trust in the face of harmful data practices that rely on intimate surveillance. For users, trust—the willingness to rely on the promise of digital assistants—should remain critically uncertain until more robust user protections and regulatory frameworks are put in place to protect (particularly, vulnerable) user communities.

References

Airus Media. 2015. “Meet AVA.” http://www.airusmedia.com/assets/ava-2015-brochure-web.pdf.

Bickmore, Timothy W., Laura M. Pfeifer, and Brian W. Jack. 2009. “Taking the time to care: Empowering low health literacy hospital patients with virtual nurse agents.” In CHI ’09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1265–1274. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518891.

Cheyer, Adam. 2012. “How did Siri get its name?” Forbes, December 12, 2012. https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/12/21/how-did-siri-get-its-name/.

Cowell, Andrew, and Kay Stanney. 2003. “Embodiment and interaction guidelines for designing credible, trustworthy embodied conversational agents.” In Intelligent Virtual Agents, edited by Thomas Rist, Ruth Aylett, Daniel Ballin, and Jeff Rickel, 301–309. Berlin: Springer.

Dinerstein, Joel. 2006. “Technology and its discontents: On the verge of the posthuman.” American Quarterly 58 (3): 569–595.

Harris, Mark. 2016. “Virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Echo break US child privacy law, experts say.” Guardian, May 26, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/26/amazon-echo-virtual-assistant-child-privacy-law.

Humphries, Matthew. 2019. “Thousands of people listen to Alexa voice recordings.” PCMag, April 11, 2019. https://www.pcmag.com/news/367724/thousands-of-people-listen-to-alexa-voice-recordings.

Laurel, Brenda. 1997. “Interface agents: Metaphors with character.” In Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology, edited by Batya Friedman, 207–219. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitchell, Wade J., Chin-Chang Ho, Himalaya Patel, and Karl F. MacDorman. 2011. “Does social desirability bias favor humans? Explicit-implicit evaluations of synthesized speech support a new HCI model of impression management.” Computers in Human Behavior 27 (1): 402–412. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.09.002.

Nakamura, Lisa. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Nass, Clifford, Youngme Moon, and Nancy Green. 1997. “Are machines gender neutral? Gender-stereotypic responses to computers with voices.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27 (10): 864–876. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1997.tb00275.x.

Phan, Thao. 2019. “Amazon Echo and the aesthetics of whiteness.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5 (1): 1–38.

Poster, Winifred. 2016. “The virtual receptionist with a human touch: Opposing pressures of digital automation and outsourcing in interactive services.” In Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, edited by Marion Crain, Winifred Poster, Miriam Cherry, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, 87–112. Oakland: University of California Press.

Stanfill, Mel. 2015. “The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design.” New Media and Society 17 (7): 1059–1074. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814520873.

Sweeney, Miriam E. 2016a. “The intersectional interface.” In The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online, edited by Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, 215–227. New York: Peter Lang.

Sweeney, Miriam E. 2016b. “The Ms. Dewey ‘experience’: Technoculture, gender, and race.” In Digital Sociologies, edited by Jesse Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillian Cottom, 401–420. Bristol: Policy Press.

Sweeney, Miriam E. 2017. “The honey trap in your home: Virtual assistants, domesticity, whiteness, and the ‘good spy.’” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information, and Society, Philadelphia, PA, October 29, 2017.

Villa-Nicholas, Melissa. 2016. “The invisible information worker: Latinas in telecommunications.” In The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online, edited by Safiya Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, 195–214. New York: Peter Lang.

Villa-Nicholas, Melissa, and Miriam E. Sweeney. 2019. “Designing the ‘good citizen’ through Latina identity in USCIS’s virtual assistant ‘Emma.’” Feminist Media Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1644657.

Zdenek, Sean. 2007. “‘Just roll your mouse over me’: Designing virtual women for customer service on the web.” Technical Communication Quarterly 16 (4): 397–430. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572250701380766.

15

Digital Humanities

Roopika Risam

Digital humanities has garnered attention, criticism, and debate in recent years as a scholarly intervention situated at the nexus of technology and the humanities. Notoriously difficult to categorize, digital humanities is variously understood as a field, a methodological tool kit, a discipline, a subdiscipline, and a paradiscipline (Berry and Fagerjord 2017; Gold and Klein 2016; Nyhan, Terras, and Vanhoutte 2016; O’Donnell 2019). Spanning a wide array of methods—from quantitative textual analysis to three-dimensional modeling of cultural heritage, digital archives, and new media studies, among others—digital humanities capriciously evades definition.

The capaciousness of digital humanities is best captured in a definition offered by Kathleen Fitzpatrick:

It has to do with the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study. And that happens in two different ways. On one hand, it’s bringing the tools and techniques of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic questions. But it’s also bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media. It’s a sort of moving back and forth across those lines, thinking about what computation is, how it functions in our culture, and then using those computing technologies to think about the more traditional aspects of culture. (Lopez, Rowland, and Fitzpatrick 2015)

Fitzpatrick’s vision of digital humanities articulates an expansive and iterative mode of research that connects digital media and humanistic inquiry, computation, and culture. She creates space for exploring the potential for digital humanities as a heuristic that facilitates scholarship able to both analyze and explain the relationships among technology, cultural production, and lived experience.

The great promise of digital humanities—yet to be fully realized—lies in how it can be used to both uncover and complicate our understanding of the relationship between “humanity” and “technology”—that is, of course, if the human in humanity is inclusive. Exactly who is included within the category of human, however, is far from assured, as the history of knowledge production in humanities disciplines demonstrates. Humanities knowledge has a long history of limiting the scope of who “counts” as human. As Edward Said proposes in Orientalism, European scholars wielded knowledge production against marginalized communities, producing hierarchies of value through the act of representation (Said 1978). But along with the capacity to delimit the category of “human” comes the possibility of expanding the category to redress the limitations of humanities discourse itself. Never is this more important than when creating digital representations of literary, historical, and cultural knowledges.

Despite the wide variety of methods subsumed under the term digital humanities, one of the most readily visible, legible, and accessible to public audiences is the digitization and display of cultural heritage, broadly construed. Financial and labor constraints on this work notwithstanding, this strand of digital humanities scholarship holds great promise for creating a digital cultural record of humanity. Up until now, however, these digital endeavors have largely replicated literary, historical, and cultural canons. As such, current dominant trends in the digitization and representation of cultural heritage in digital form only reinforce the value of the figures, stories, and histories that have held sway in the print cultural record, compounding harm to the perspectives of those whose place in archives is precarious—women, people of color, the enslaved, the colonized, and queer communities, among others. What gets or does not get digitized and made discoverable through metadata determines what material is available to users—whether general audiences looking for information or researchers seeking material for quantitative textual analysis—exacerbating the omissions of the print cultural record. Therefore, realizing the potential of digital humanities requires greater care for those whose places in the archive have always been uncertain. Situating the core responsibility of digital humanities to build an inclusive digital cultural record, this chapter raises the issues inherent in that task for marginalized communities, details scholarly initiatives that have successfully been working to remediate these issues, and examines future work that remains to be done.

Building the Digital Cultural Record

As Jerome McGann (2014) suggests, “It’s a truth now universally acknowledged that the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures” (1). In New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, I define this digitally constructed cultural inheritance as the digital cultural record, a utopian vision of the work that digital humanities undertakes, where digitized and born-digital cultural heritage intersects and interacts (Risam 2018). This digital cultural record is not a single platform but the collective work of cultural heritage workers—faculty, librarians, graduate students, and those who work in galleries, archives, and museums—to transform the print cultural record into a digital one.

Crucially, the digital cultural record is where information-seeking publics are increasingly turning to gain access to the past. Therefore, the critical work of digital humanities is to ask who is and is not legible in the digital cultural record and to interrogate how cultural value is created at the interface of cultural objects, cultural memory, and digitization. Thus, the responsibility of digital humanities is to attend to how the sociocultural conditions surrounding the production and distribution of humanities knowledge influence digital knowledge production and reinscribe the position of those who are marginalized as uncertain in the archive. Humanities knowledge in mediated digital forms continues to be complicit in the exclusion of marginalized communities—whether because of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or other axes of oppression. At the most basic level, it is critical for this scholarship to reexamine humanities research practices to identify how to ensure that the exclusions and biases that have characterized print culture, which bears hallmarks of racism, colonialism, and patriarchy, are not being reproduced and amplified in the rapid acceleration of digital knowledge production. While this is not, as yet, a central concern of digital humanities scholarship, it is the most critical issue to address.

Redefining Digital Humanities

A number of recent interventions in digital humanities have made significant strides toward addressing the inequalities in the digital cultural record. Scholars in global, intersectional feminist, African American, US Latinx, and Indigenous digital humanities have been building communities of practitioners committed to improving the scholarly approaches, infrastructure, tools, and methodologies of digital humanities in the service of creating space for those who have been excluded from the digital cultural record. Although the boundaries between these initiatives are often porous, with scholars, methods, theories, and solutions crossing over between them, naming them as the movements redefining digital humanities recognizes the contributions they have made to the digital cultural record.

Global Digital Humanities

Decentering the Global North within channels of power in digital humanities communities has been a central concern for scholars invested in global digital humanities. Syllabi around the world are populated by a narrow list of digital humanities practitioners from the US, the UK, and Canada (Stutsman 2013); neocolonial strings attached to funding overdetermine global collaborations (Risam 2018); and Anglophone articles and books dominate the scholarly landscape of digital humanities (Fiormonte 2015). As a result, scholarly practices of the Global North dominate digital humanities practices globally, delegitimizing locally situated practices, particularly in the Global South, with a fictive “universal” that reifies the influence of the Global North on digital knowledge production. However, initiatives such as Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) and its related organizations, as well as Digital Humanities @ MSU (Michigan State University), are creating spaces to interrogate these power dynamics that subtend the construction of the digital cultural record. Focused on the economic and political impact of digital humanities research, GO::DH fosters communication and collaboration across economics and geography, leveraging what each participant brings to the community to advance digital scholarship. In its first five years, GO::DH built a five hundred-plus membership list, organized conferences, helped create connections that led to new regional and linguistic digital humanities organizations, and undertook projects intended to decenter the hegemony of the Global North within the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Drawing on MSU’s long history of engagement with colleagues around the world in digital humanities projects, Digital Humanities @ MSU organizes an annual global digital humanities conference, bringing together practitioners invested in ethical collaboration, increased representation of underrepresented voices in the digital cultural record, endangered data, and digital divides (Digital Humanities @ MSU n.d.).[1]

#transformDH

Arguably the first to put social justice at the center of digital humanities conversations, #transformDH calls attention to the role of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other axes of oppression in the digital cultural record. Founded at the American Studies Association conference in 2011, #transformDH has created a network of scholars and practitioners both within and outside of universities. They position themselves as “an academic guerrilla movement seeking to (re)define capital-letter Digital Humanities as a force for transformative scholarship by collecting, sharing, and highlighting projects that push at its boundaries and work for social justice, accessibility, and inclusion” (#transformDH n.d.). As founding members Moya Bailey, Anne Cong-Huyen, Alexis Lothian, and Amanda Phillips note, the key values of #transformDH are as follows: (1) “questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability should be central to digital humanities and digital media studies”; (2) “feminist, queer and antiracist activists, artists, and media-makers outside of academia are doing work that contributes to digital studies in all its forms. This work productively destabilizes the norms and standards of institutionally recognized academic work”; (3) “we should shift the focus of digital humanities from technical processes to political ones, and always seek to understand the social, intellectual, economic, political, and personal impact of our digital practices as we develop them” (Bailey et al. 2016 n.p.). #transformDH has played a substantial role in raising awareness of these issues and inspiring scholarship that puts these values into practice.

Feminist Digital Humanities

Loosely connected to #transformDH, feminist approaches to digital humanities have emphasized the need for greater attention to gender in the tools and methods of digital humanities. These approaches range from questions of representation for women and gender minorities to what feminist methodologies look like in digital contexts. The recent work of Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (2018) as editors of Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities has laid a foundation for the continued development of feminist digital humanities. In particular, this area of study places heavy emphasis on the embodied nature of digital objects, archives, and tools. In an environment in which technologies are often viewed as “neutral,” feminist digital humanities, like the other movements that are redefining digital humanities, calls attention to the ways that the digital cultural record is, in fact, deeply inflected by gender. Furthermore, feminist digital humanities has increasingly emphasized the importance of intersectional feminism, rather than a single-axis focus on gender, due to connections to and influence from #transformDH. Therefore, its interventions in the digital cultural record focus on the interstices of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, nation, and other axes of identity and oppression.

African Diaspora Digital Humanities

An area that has seen much-needed increased scholarly activity is African diaspora digital humanities. This body of work attends in part to the relationships between Blackness and digital cultural production, anti-Black racism and technologies, and representation of African-descended people in the digital cultural record. African diaspora digital humanities is composed of multiple initiatives—some linked, some not—that share these concerns through different perspectives, political approaches, and geographic emphases. In this regard, African diaspora digital humanities is not generally understood as a movement in and of itself but offers a useful heuristic for a shared investment in blackness and technology. Kim Gallon, for example, describes Black digital humanities as a “technology of recovery” (Gallon 2016, 42). The work of the African American Digital Humanities initiative at the University of Maryland combines digital humanities and African American studies to bring the affordances of each to bear on the other (AADHum n.d.). The Digital Black Atlantic, a forthcoming volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, takes a transnational perspective, considering digital humanities practices in the African diaspora (Risam and Josephs 2020). This is, of course, not to ignore the contributions of individual practitioners, including Jessica Johnson’s (2018) insights on enslavement and data, Andre Brock’s (2012) work on Black Twitter, and Kishonna L. Gray’s (2014) contributions on blackness in gaming culture, to name just a few. The work undertaken in digital humanities by and in relation to the African diaspora demonstrates the range of approaches for redefining digital humanities and challenging omissions and exclusions in the digital cultural record.

US Latinx Digital Humanities

Scholarship on US Latinx digital humanities (#usLdh) has a long history that is only starting to be recognized for its contributions to the digital cultural record. Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Lorena Gauthereau, and Carolina Villarroel (2019) locate the origins of #usLdh in the work of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (Recovery) at the University of Houston. Since the early 1990s, Recovery has identified, acquired, and cataloged material documenting the transnational legacy of US Latinx literature, history, and culture. Recovery’s material has been digitized, and it has created bilingual metadata to assist with discovery. This substantial work is the basis of its new initiative, founding the first US Latinx digital humanities center with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Recovery graduate students have themselves become leaders of #usLdh. For example, Maira Álvarez and Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla (n.d.) codirect their own project, Borderlands Archives Cartography, which locates and maps borderland periodicals. Fernández Quintanilla and Álvarez, along with Carolina Alonso, Patricia Flores-Hutson, Alex Gil, Laura Gonzales, Rubria Rocha de Luna, Verónica Romero, and Annette M. Zapata, direct United Fronteras, which collects and documents digital scholarship on the borderlands. Still another foundational #usLdh project is Chicana Por Mi Raza, directed by Maria Cotera and Linda Garcia Merchant (n.d.), which has been collecting oral histories of Chicanx activism since 2009; its substantial digital repository, available online, contains approximately forty-nine hundred digital records and more than 439 interview clips. Cotera and Garcia Merchant’s work, along with that of their contributors, including historians, researchers, educators, archivists, and technologists, is a significant example of a transformation of the cultural inheritance of humanity that ensures representation of those whose stories are underrepresented.

Indigenous Digital Humanities

Significant work at the intersection of digital humanities and Indigenous studies has also played an important role in calling attention to and challenging settler colonial hallmarks in the digital cultural record. As Jennifer Guiliano and Carolyn Heitman argue of the Native American studies context in the US, there are a number of barriers to this work: structures of Native American studies research privilege monographs over unconventional genres; Native American studies is itself underfunded, which affects the hiring necessary for collaborative digital initiatives; funding for Native American studies has gone toward the preservation and display of analog material; the discipline is itself interdisciplinary, a challenge to cohesiveness; and there is a lack of best practice for working with Native American communities in digital contexts (Guiliano and Heitman 2017). Efforts to overcome these challenges include Kim Christen and Craig Dietrich’s work with the Warumungu Aboriginal community in Australia to design Mukurtu (n.d.), a digital heritage content-management system that integrates Indigenous cultural protocols into the platform, facilitating control over user access to information. Withey has called attention to the predisposition toward open access in the Global North, making the case that, in fact, not all communities—particularly Indigenous communities—presume that openness is necessarily positive. The Indigenous Digital Archive (n.d.) of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in New Mexico demonstrates how observing community protocols works in practice. The archive includes material on Indigenous communities in New Mexico, including Hopi and Diné, and holds records on the Santa Fe Indian Industrial School, one of the boarding schools where Native American children were sent for forced assimilation to dominant cultural norms in the US (Canada had similar schemes for First Nations children). In its design, the archive facilitates community engagement, the creation of counternarratives to materials in the archive, and the preservation of privacy. Thus, the Indigenous Digital Archive offers an important example of how Indigenous digital humanities actively negotiates the faults in the digital cultural record while resisting the overdetermining influence of values of the Global North.

Digital Humanities Futures

While work in the areas documented above reveals a strong body of scholarship and practitioners committed to remediating the inequities that are perpetuated in the digital cultural record, there is still a long way to go to ensure equality for those whose identities have received an uncertain place in the archives of humanity’s cultural inheritance. As these examples show, representation of those who have been excluded from the digital cultural record must be an essential goal of digital humanities scholarship. However, representation alone is not enough. Ongoing attention to how the embodied identities of marginalized communities influence the methodologies and tools of digital humanities is critical as well. As the examples of practitioners demonstrate, this work requires a multipronged approach that includes infrastructure building, community formation, and new methods and tools that can account for situated and embodied knowledge. Continuing this work is the future of digital humanities—to remake the digital cultural record and, in doing so, more fully realize the promise of humanity’s cultural inheritance.

Note

1. A recurring digital humanities conference on global digital humanities consistently held in the US certainly raises questions of access to the conference, in terms of the cost of travel for those in economies significantly weaker than the US; the challenges of getting US visas under a presidential administration known for frequently attempting to ban Muslims from entry, separating families of asylum seekers, and seeking indefinite detention of children; and how MSU’s own perspectives on digital humanities shape the definition of global digital humanities at the conference. However, raising awareness of the political and ethical dimensions of digital humanities in US contexts is an important step.

References

#transformDH. n.d. “About #transformDH.” Accessed August 29, 2019. https://transformdh.org/about-transformdh/.

AADHum. n.d. African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities. Accessed August 29, 2019. https://aadhum.umd.edu/.

Álvarez, Maira E., and Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla. n.d. Borderlands Archives Cartography. Accessed August 29, 2019. https://www.bacartography.org.

Baeza Ventura, Gabriela, Lorena Gauthereau, and Carolina Villarroel. 2019. “Recovering the US Hispanic literary heritage: A case study on US Latina/o archives and digital humanities.” Preservation, Digital Technology and Culture 48 (1): 17–27.

Bailey, Moya, Anne Cong-Huyen, Alexis Lothian, and Amanda Phillips. 2016. “Reflections on a movement: #transformDH, growing up.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, n.p. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/9cf90340-7aae-4eae-bdda-45b8b4540b6b.

Berry, David M., and Ander Fagerjord. 2017. Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. New York: Polity.

Brock, Andre. 2012. “From the blackhand side: Twitter as a cultural conversation.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56 (4): 529–549.

Cotera, Maria, and Linda Garcia Merchant. n.d. Chicana Por Mi Raza. Accessed August 29, 2019. https://chicanapormiraza.org.

Digital Humanities @ MSU. n.d. “About—Global Digital Humanities Symposium.” Accessed August 29, 2019. http://www.msuglobaldh.org/about/.

Fiormonte, Domenico. 2015. “Towards monocultural (digital) humanities?” Infolet (blog). July 12, 2015. http://infolet.it/2015/07/12/monocultural-humanities.

Gallon, Kim. 2016. “Making a case for the black digital humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 42–49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gold, Matthew K., and Lauren F. Klein. 2016. “Digital humanities: The expanded field.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, ix–xvi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gray, Kishonna L. 2014. Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins. New York: Routledge.

Guiliano, Jennifer, and Carolyn Heitman. 2017. “Indigenizing the digital humanities: Challenges, questions, and research opportunities.” In DH2017 Book of Abstracts, edited by Digital Humanities 2017, n.p. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. https://dh2017.adho.org/abstracts/372/372.pdf.

Indigenous Digital Archive. n.d. “The Indigenous Digital Archive.” Accessed August 30, 2019. https://omeka.dlcs-ida.org.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. 2018. “Markup bodies: Black [life] studies and slavery [death] studies at the digital crossroads.” Social Text 36 (4): 57–79.

Lopez, Andrew, Fred Rowland, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick. 2015. “On scholarly communication and the digital humanities: An interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 14, 2015. http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/on-scholarly-communication-and-the-digital-humanities-an-interview-with-kathleen-fitzpatrick/.

Losh, Elizabeth, and Jacqueline Wernimont, eds. 2018. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McGann, Jerome. 2014. A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mukurtu. n.d. “Mukurtu CMS.” Accessed August 30, 2019. https://mukurtu.org/.

Nyhan, Julianne, Melissa Terras, and Edward Vanhoutte. 2016. “Introduction.” In Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader, edited by Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte, 1–12. New York: Routledge.

O’Donnell, Daniel Paul. 2019. “All along the watchtower: Diversity as a core intellectual value in digital humanities.” In Intersectionality and Digital Humanities, edited by Barbara Bordalejo and Roopika Risam, 167–184. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press.

Risam, Roopika. 2018. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Risam, Roopika, and Kelly Baker Josephs, eds. 2020. The Digital Black Atlantic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

Stutsman, Staci. 2013. “Digital humanities vs. new media: A matter of pedagogy.” HASTAC (blog). November 17, 2013. https://www.hastac.org/blogs/stacistutsman/2013/11/17/digital-humanities-vs-new-media-matter-pedagogy.

16

DNA

Mél Hogan

On July 13, 2017, Seth Shipman, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, explained for the Guardian: “We encoded images and a movie into DNA in a living cell which is fun, but it’s not really the point of the system. . . . What we’re trying to develop is a molecular recorder that can sit inside living cells and collect data over time” (Sample 2017). Shipman was referring to a series of successful experiments encoding media texts from various formats onto DNA, proving that synthetic biology is a viable (if uncertain) archive of the future (Erlich and Zielinski 2017).

That storing media data onto DNA can already be discussed and described as “fun,” and not something extraordinary, is unsettling in its pace. So is the easy statement that this system already has an engineered endgame—“a point”—specifically to harness DNA’s amazing capacity for self-replication so it can spy on its own cells. Is this a hint that the archive of the future is one built on corporeal data that simultaneously track and tell the definitive story of who one is? What might it mean to carry records of our lives inside our cells, in our bodies? For whose gaze? For what kind of future analysis? And are we not always already embodied archives?

However, unlike Shipman’s vision, the three scientific teams that have successfully encoded data onto DNA (one led by George Church,[1] another by Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman, and, more recently, another by Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski) do not aspire to store information in a living creature because of the error rate and the lack of security afforded by a living, moving medium. What could we do with such an unpredictable archive? How do we preserve the conditions for its existence? Should we care about the archive’s feelings, or its well-being? Despite these questions (and many more), the teams neither push back against the experiment on ethical grounds nor question DNA’s value or ownership in such a futuristic scenario (Weintraub 2013). Those questions come from critical science and technology studies and intersectional and Indigenous social sciences (Nelson 2016; Reardon and TallBear 2012; Roosth 2017). They also come from speculative realist experiments by artists such as Cyrus Clarke (of Grow Your Own Cloud) and genetic researcher Karin Ljubic Fister, who have created plant-based data storage. While not in humans yet, we might wonder: Will gene mutations become the new bit rot?

For now, the idea of storing binary data inside one’s body is near-futuristic speculation, but synthetic DNA is already being used effectively to store binary data. Scientists have stored Muybridge’s galloping horse film (Meier 2017), Shakespearean sonnets, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (Brennan 2013), malware (Glaser 2017), audio of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and Miles Davis’s “Tutu” (Minsker 2017), a PDF of the paper from James Watson and Francis Crick that detailed the structure of DNA, a JavaScript program, a computer operating system, a photo, a scientific paper, a computer virus, and an Amazon gift card (Yong 2017). In 2018 the band Massive Attack released an album using DNA spray (Armstrong 2018); in 2019 a teenager injected DNA inscribed with religious texts into his thighs. DNA is officially a format (Oberhaus 2019).

Encoding data onto DNA consists of converting DNA code (ATCG) into binary code (zeros and ones).[2] Researchers use the CRISPR-Cas system to sequence DNA snippets:[3] “This name refers to the unique organization of short, partially palindromic repeated DNA sequences found in the genomes of bacteria and other microorganisms” (Pak 2014). While CRISPR was introduced in 2012, it has always been part of cell life, a way for bacteria to defend themselves against viruses by incorporating them into their own genomes. As science writer Ed Yong (2017) explains, “CRISPR is a kind of genetic memory—a system for storing information” using the double helix. It is also what makes our genome editable and why CRISPR is being used to “fix” genetic diseases found in embryos by cutting, not repairing, DNA. The same idea, storing data by splicing binary code into ATCG, is being applied to the digital archive.

The process of converting data currently takes about two weeks and costs $7,000. Media files are then sequenced into base pairs and sent to a DNA synthesis company as a text file, which—within two days or so and at a cost of $2,000—is rendered readable again as dry DNA. (The process will be fully automated in the near future, further reducing costs.) Because DNA degrades when it is read, companies “amplify” DNA by making numerous copies. Companies have also tested the limit of DNA dilution and have found they can store one million gigabytes per gram of DNA (Service 2017). By most of these scientists’ estimates, this means that we could store all the data that we currently generate globally into a container the size of the trunk of a car.

Scientists already imagine that DNA will replace server farms, given that DNA is a dense and long-lasting medium. In less than a decade, and assuming investments fall into place, DNA will become a common storage format and medium. DNA occupies little physical space and can be preserved for two million years when frozen (and two thousand years at 10°C; Branscombe 2017). Given its high density, DNA storage will demand little of the energy grid and none of the water the big tech industry currently uses to cool its servers.

While this new technology is celebrated by scientists who have effectively harnessed the joint power of computers and our growing knowledge of the DNA structure, the experiment also confirms that we are increasingly primed to think of the world through data sets—be they in DNA or binary code. We consider most things to be quantifiable, measurable, and comparable because this helps us feel in control of our environments and of ourselves. We understand ourselves in relation to others: how we stack up, what our score is, what league we are in. We wade in probabilities and count our chances. The power we allot to aggregation gives us norms and deviations and speaks to us of normality and health and perversion and mutation. We derive a sense of belonging and otherness from this (and sometimes a sense of belonging born of otherness).

What makes DNA an uncertain archive within this imaginary is not its inefficient deployment or the technological fragility that currently supports it. Instead, it is that genomic/DNA research has a long and problematic relationship with defining the purpose and value of life—that is, “how life works.” As best argued by Jenny Reardon and Kim TallBear (2012), the discourse that now surrounds genes is above all a tool that serves to situate people within a particular scientific framework supported by the logics of Western science itself. This has been essential in sustaining a rational and dualistic framing of who we are—understanding belonging through external measures. From DNA testing kits (23andMe 2017) to DNA tattoos (Isaac 2017), the idea is that genes both determine our uniqueness and connect us to long-lost relatives. DNA can fashion a longer backward time line for those without kinship records or with a recent history with which it is too unbearable to identify (Nelson 2016). But mostly, it foregoes and forgets other ways of knowing, being, or having been in the world (Sundberg 2013). When connected to whiteness, especially, it draws us to distant geographies where we have not necessarily been invited.

While scientific concern has been with mapping the structure, function, and evolution of genomes, it has also long been tainted by traces of eugenics, a colonial science spearheaded in the 1880s by Francis Galton that sought to “improve” the human race through controlled breeding practices. While these two scientific streams—genomics and eugenics—are never to be confused, in an increasingly datafied world, their logics have become blurred anew. This has become most evident in artificial intelligence (AI) experiments, where large-scale data sets, from and about humans, are used to make machines speak our humanity back to us. Arguably, AI logics risk infiltrating the way we think about DNA in much the same ways agricultural breeding influenced eugenics (Harry Laughlin and Eugenics 2017). This kind of intellectual relay sustains (more than it challenges) inequality and injustice. These systems are adaptations and variations on the same theme: a decidedly Western positivist sense of control over nature and the ever-vexed place of the human within nature, other than as its master (Roosth 2017; Sofia 2000).

Historically, Western science strove to make crops more resistant to the volatility of weather, breed animals for greater productivity, or make “better” humans for battle or capitalist exploitation, and this urge to tinker with nature is simulated in AI today. AI applications have become mostly real-time demonstrations of the unpredictability of aggregation—how technologists and scientists turn to user data online to make predictions. To date, the limits of this endeavor have been made most obvious, perhaps, by Microsoft’s 2016 attempt to create a Twitter bot that would learn from the platform’s users. Within twenty-four hours of being online, the project garnered the following headlines in major newspapers: “Microsoft Deletes ‘Teen Girl’ AI after It Became a Hitler-Loving Sex Robot within 24 Hours” (Horton 2016); “Twitter Taught Microsoft’s AI Chatbot to Be a Racist Asshole in Less than a Day” (Vincent 2016); “Microsoft Created a Twitter Bot to Learn from Users. It Quickly Became a Racist Jerk” (Victor 2016); “Microsoft’s Racist Chatbot Returns with Drug-Smoking Twitter Meltdown” (Gibbs 2016). Other notable projects that explicitly reinstate our collective racist, transphobic, homophobic, sexist qualities (via big data, AI, and algorithms) abound and include computer scientists using videos uploaded by transgender YouTubers to train facial recognition software (Vincent 2017); programmers for the Tinder dating app instilling an “Elo score” that secretly rates its users’ so-called desirability (Carr 2016); geneticists trying to predict people’s faces based on DNA samples (Reardon 2017); social psychologists using AI to determine sexual orientation based on facial photos (Marr 2017); driverless cars programmed by technologists to make ethical decisions (Clark 2015); and so on. Arguably, what we are programming the machine to identify and classify tells us more about who we are than any result it attempts to produce.

Given the proliferation, funding, and momentum of these projects, we really should worry that the archive of the future will be one of a kind of “datafied eugenics,” and here is why: big data and DNA research are coevolving. Mapping the genome in an efficient way requires tremendous computational power (Rashtchian et al. 2017). There seems to be an overwhelming Western scientific faith in the machine: that if we feed it tremendous amounts of data, it will (finally) make sense of our humanity for us. The urge to use supercomputers to understand ourselves is not new, but the scale and speed at which we can make claims are. With the advent of quantum computing, the IoT (Internet of Things, as networked objects “speaking” to one another) will give way to the more mature instantiation that is AI, which will have a “level of awareness normally associated with human judgment” (Powling 2017). Fixating on “fixing” ourselves in a Western disembodied way lends itself very well to the use of technology. It also shapes this uncertain archive, coded to identify patterns and anomalies and to eliminate outliers.

Similarly, what gene and genome scientists have long searched for tells us more about what we seek to classify and control than anything about how we should live—perhaps peacefully, perhaps respectfully of difference, perhaps open to mystery. Most respected genome scientists now acknowledge (alongside social scientists) that race, class, gender, and sexuality are historically situated social groupings based largely on cultural, legal, and political determinations. However, with big data we are witnessing a slippage back into questioning these determinations—namely, by so-called racial realists (Miller 2014) and other far-right thinkers who have access to both scientific instruments and the media.

For example, the recent Google manifesto reignited debates about human categories and in the end served to reinforce in the popular imaginary the notion that serious biological, if not genetic, differences exist between classes of humans. In this case, men and women are understood according to distinct social functions, competencies, and capabilities (Soh 2017). The manifesto was written by a software engineer at Google attempting to push back against the company’s diversity initiatives, making a case that women were underrepresented at the company not because of long-serving discriminatory practices and policies but rather due to inherent psychological differences (Conger 2017). As journalist Liz Elting (2017) states, never mind that Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer language, Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA, Sally Ride became an astrophysicist and astronaut, Marie Curie discovered radium and polonium, Jocelyn Burnell discovered the first pulsar, and Grace Hopper developed the first software compiler—we are apparently still more invested in generalizations that feed current-day biases and reinforce existing social infrastructure than in dismantling the systems at the service of those in power. These logics are embedded in big tech—in both the bodies it employs and the services it deploys.

Supercomputers, AI, big data, and DNA come together through logical continuations and as such form a likely but uncertain future archive: uncertain that it can thrive and uncertain in its capacity to capture and preserve traces of humanity, even if woven from the same fabric. That said, the archive has always been an uncertain endeavor. What has remained more important than certainty, perhaps, has been the ongoing desire to conserve and theorize the vast traces of thought and feeling that forever evade the archive—the secret, lost, destroyed, and dismembered. Thinking of DNA as an archive maintains the concept’s inherent optimism while also nodding toward the end of times.

Notes

1. George Church is Shipman’s supervisor.

2. ATCG refers to four of the nitrogenous bases associated with DNA: A = adenine, T = thymine, C = cytosine, G = guanine.

3. CRISPR is an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat.”

References

23andMe. 2017. “23andMe.” 23andMe, Inc. Accessed December 21, 2017. https://www.23andme.com.

Armstrong, Stephen. 2018. “Massive Attack are releasing an album in a new format: DNA.” Wired UK, October 19, 2018. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/massive-attack-mezzanine-dna-album.

Branscombe, Mary. 2017. “DNA, nature’s best storage medium, headed for the data center.” Data Center Knowledge, November 27, 2017. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/storage/dna-nature-s-best-storage-medium-headed-data-center.

Brennan, Mike. 2013. “Scientists successfully store data in DNA.” Earth Sky, January 27, 2013. http://earthsky.org/human-world/scientists-successfully-store-data-in-dna.

Carr, Austin. 2016. “I found out my secret internal Tinder rating and now I wish I hadn’t.” Fast Company, January 11, 2016. https://www.fastcompany.com/3054871/whats-your-tinder-score-inside-the-apps-internal-ranking-system.

Clark, Bryan. 2015. “How self-driving cars work: The nuts and bolts behind Google’s autonomous car program.” MUO, February 21, 2015. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-self-driving-cars-work-the-nuts-and-bolts-behind-googles-autonomous-car-program/.

Conger, Kate. 2017. “Exclusive: Here’s the full 10-page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google.” Gizmodo, August 4, 2017. https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320.

Elting, Liz. 2017. “The Google manifesto is part of a much bigger problem.” Forbes, August 14, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizelting/2017/08/14/the-google-manifesto-is-part-of-a-much-bigger-problem/.

Erlich, Yaniv, and Dina Zielinski. 2017. “Capacity-approaching DNA storage.” Erlich Lab. Accessed December 10, 2017. http://dnafountain.teamerlich.org/.

Gibbs, Samuel. 2016. “Microsoft’s racist chatbot returns with drug-smoking Twitter meltdown.” Guardian, March 30, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/30/microsoft-racist-sexist-chatbot-twitter-drugs.

Glaser, April. 2017. “Hackers can now store malware on DNA.” Slate, August 10, 2017. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/08/10/hackers_can_store_malware_on_dna.html.

Grow Your Own Cloud. n.d. “Grow your own cloud.” Accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.growyourown.cloud/.

Harry Laughlin and Eugenics. 2017. “Eugenics and agriculture.” Accessed December 21, 2017. http://historyofeugenics.truman.edu/influencing_opinions/popular_perspectives/eugenics-and-agriculture/.

Horton, Helena. 2016. “Microsoft deletes ‘teen girl’ AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours.” Telegraph, March 24, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/03/24/microsofts-teen-girl-ai-turns-into-a-hitler-loving-sex-robot-wit/.

Isaac, Mike. 2017. “DNA tattoos are the final frontier of love.” New York Times, December 9, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/style/dna-tattoos.html.

Marr, Bernard. 2017. “The AI that predicts your sexual orientation simply by looking at your face.” Forbes, September 28, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/09/28/the-ai-that-predicts-your-sexual-orientation-simply-by-looking-at-your-face/.

Meier, Allison. 2017. “Scientists encode living DNA with Muybridge’s galloping horse film.” Hyperallergic, July 18, 2017. https://hyperallergic.com/390614/scientists-encode-dna-with-muybridge-galloping-horse/.

Miller, Laura. 2014. “Is race genetic?” Salon, October 12, 2014. https://www.salon.com/2014/10/12/is_race_genetic/.

Minsker, Evan. 2017. “Miles Davis’ ‘Tutu’ is one of the first songs to be encoded in DNA.” Pitchfork, October 1, 2017. https://pitchfork.com/news/miles-davis-tutu-is-one-of-the-first-songs-to-be-encoded-in-dna/.

Nelson, Alondra. 2016. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Oberhaus, Daniel. 2019. “This teen translated a Bible verse into DNA and injected it into himself.” Motherboard, January 7, 2019. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wj3yy9/this-teen-translated-a-bible-verse-into-dna-and-injected-it-into-himself.

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17

Drone

Lila Lee-Morrison

Few recent technological innovations have caused as much controversy as the use of drones in warfare. Since 2012 an explosion of academic scholarship and conceptualizations has aimed to articulate the issues at stake concerning drone use. This emerging and often interdisciplinary scholarship relates the technological developments of drone proliferation, including its progression of networked infrastructures, to the juridical, political, and territorial conditions that constitute its operations. As such, this scholarship reveals wider conceptual shifts concerning the ethical, societal, and cultural implications of information technology. Even as drones have been argued militarily and politically to provide a level of certainty through their technological precision and tactical efficiency, their use also brings about a conceptual uncertainty, disrupting long-held notions in an array of fields, including international law, political science, and geography.

This entry does not attempt to provide a full overview of the scholarship but rather focuses on some salient conceptual paradoxes that arise from analyses of drone use in war. The discussion begins with a brief overview of drone technology, its history, and the technologies that structure its operations in the present. It then moves to the conceptualizations found in recent academic scholarship concerning disembodiment/embodiment when it comes to engagement in drone warfare; notions of distance and proximity as experienced in drone control rooms; and the strategic use of visibility and concealment in drone operations. The discussion concludes with some aspects of the technological trajectory of the drone’s use of advanced visual technologies.

What Is a Drone?

At its most basic level, the drone—or as it is known in military vernacular, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—is the merging of an aircraft with a camera sensor.[1] In the case of US militarized drones known as the Predator and the Reaper, the aircraft includes the addition of Hellfire missiles, expanding its capacity from surveillance to the launching of attacks. The US used UAVs for surveillance in war during World War II and the Vietnam War, and the Israeli Air Force used them in the 1970s during the Yom Kippur War (Rodman 2010). They were widely implemented by the US during the 1991 Gulf War, as was reported at the time: “During the last week of the Gulf War, thousands of Iraqis surrendered. . . . One of the most unusual surrenders took place when a Pioneer . . . droned above the battlefield, surveying potential targets. Five Iraqi soldiers waved white flags at its tiny television camera. It was the first time in history that men surrendered to a robot” (James P. Coyne, quoted in Frontline n.d.).

Consequently, the use of crewless aircraft and the ability to launch remote missile strikes are not new in warfare. But the merging of these two capabilities with the added technology of digital sensors, networked infrastructures, instantaneous transfer of information, and the televisual development of real-time capture is a recent phenomenon. These technological advancements have allowed engagement in war to occur for one side exclusively through a screen. This achievement of asymmetrical warfare—that is, the lack of physical risk for the drone combatant—is understood as a pinnacle of technological prowess in weaponry.

The seeming inevitability of proliferation in drone warfare is underscored when, for example, German Defense Minister Thomas de Maizière, defending the push for European countries to acquire armed drone capability, likens its relevance to the advent of the steam engine: “We cannot keep the stagecoach while others are developing the railway” (Bundestag 2013, 27109). This new “railway” is the networked infrastructure through which drone technologies operate. Apart from the aircraft itself, drone technology includes a constellation of satellite connections, fiber-optic cables, and teleports that allow the relay of drone data to multiple receivers. The global network operated by the US that connects these various nodes is known as the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN). The DISN acts as the primary backbone for a more extensive US defense network called the Global Information Grid, which was apparently modeled on the Internet and is described as “a network of networks” (Ballard 2014)—a kind of meta–network that extends in a continuum. In drone operations, this infrastructure communicates control signals to steer the drone and target its missiles, as well as distributes real-time video captured by the drone to multiple receivers. The receivers of drone capture include stationed combatants in the field close to the events captured, as well as military personnel at remote locations in control rooms that include the drone pilot, sensor operator, and mission intelligence coordinator (figure 17.1). One such location is the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, one of the first US Air Force bases dedicated to operating drone squadrons. Drone capture is simultaneously received by privately contracted screeners situated at various other remote locations. These screeners are hired as military personnel and are part of what is known as the kill chain, the line of command involved in decision-making for launching an attack. For the military personnel, the control room is the primary site of engagement, where confrontation on the battlefield occurs. This scenario has led to the nicknaming of drone operators as “cubicle warriors” (Singer 2009, 336). Rather than physically mobilizing the combatant to the battlefield, the image of the battlefield (figure 17.2) is instead mobilized to the combatant in the control room.

Figure 17.1

A student pilot and sensor operator man the controls of an MQ-9 Reaper in a ground-based cockpit during a training mission flown from Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, Syracuse, NY. © TSgt. Ricky Best/US Defense Department.

(Dis)embodiment

In the war on terror, drones have been argued to provide certainty in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical landscape. This certainty hinges on a tactic of targeted assassination described as “surgical,” “precise,” and “efficient” (Carney 2012). An aspect of this tactic is its asymmetry: it removes physical risk on the part of drone operators and is thereby premised on a form of disembodiment. For legal and political scholars, it is precisely this aspect of disembodiment that marks drone warfare as a disruption of the long-held notions and concepts that define war. Legal scholars such as Paul Kahn (2013, 200) focus on the juridical stakes of drone use: “First, gone are long-established ideas about the place or time of combat. Secondly, gone is the traditional idea of the combatant. . . . The drone operator kills, but is so removed from battle that he is unlikely even to think of himself as a combatant. . . . Thirdly, gone is an idea of combat as reciprocal risk.”

Figure 17.2

Footage showing a Reaper UAV deploying a GBU-12 guided bomb to destroy a terrorist-held building. © MoD/Crown 2015.

All three departures center on a notion of disembodiment, for it is through the lack of an embodied experience of the battlefield that these departures occur. The physical presence of the combatant on the battlefield provides the singular and exclusive experience of military engagement. Instead, the drone control room replaces the battlefield: multiple regions of engagement can be presented simultaneously through monitor screens, and the drone operator can physically leave this site of engagement at the end of his/her shift. The temporalities of war also shift when engagement is directed through the real-time capture of drone footage. Notions of past, present, and future are disrupted, reducing time to be experienced as either “real” or “delayed.” Disembodiment in drone warfare has been described as further complicating the “authenticity” of the drone operator as combatant, whereby the lack of physical risk takes away an element of “heroism” in war. In these ways, disembodiment underscores the unsettling of parameters that have traditionally defined the war combatant.

The argument that drones have taken the body out of war eclipses the experience of those under its scope. For those on the targeting end of the drone, drone warfare is undoubtedly embodied, both through the collective sense experience of communities living under drones’ omnipotent and constantly audible presence in the sky and for those specifically targeted and killed. Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter (2012, 1501) make a counterargument against public representations of the drone as a disembodied technical process, arguing that this view promotes the drone as a “fetishized object . . . [whereby its] human relations are mystified and masked,” further negating the circumstances of those living under and killed by drones. Concerning conceptualization of the drone, Shaw and Akhter (2012, 1502) argue that “the primary relationship evoked in most discussions of drone warfare is between a drone and its battlefield of objectified targets. . . . Drone warfare is thought of as a relationship between things rather than people.” This perspective is aided in part by the shroud of secrecy that covers up civilian casualties in drone missions conducted by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to Shaw and Akhter (2012, 1496), further conceptualization of drones as primarily “disembodied” warfare supports this lack of accountability on the part of the CIA. In so doing, it subverts an understanding of the human relations/conflicts that structure drone use.

Distance/Proximity

More recently, scholars have argued that drones present new and developing notions of embodiment that are constituted by complex assemblages of humans, information, and machines. For example, International Studies scholar Caroline Holmqvist (2013, 535, 546) argues that instead of replacing bodies, drones produce a “human-material assemblage” that blurs the line between “corporeal and incorporeal.” Specific sense capacities of the drone operator are intensified through this assemblage, producing a kind of engagement in war that is characterized not by detachment or distance but rather by a “sense of proximity” (Holmqvist 2013, 542). Holmqvist (2013, 545) specifically describes drone optics as extending the human sense capacity to see, producing a kind of “hypervision” that presents a paradox in the notions of distance and proximity in drone warfare. Drone operators find themselves in a position of closeness, unlike combatants on the ground, through the drone’s sensor capabilities. Although drone operators are fighting from a distance and thereby arguably incur no reciprocal physical risk, the optics of the drone permit a level of visual proximity not experienced in other forms of warfare. This proximity, as Holmqvist (2013, 538) argues, has a “material reality” in the form of posttraumatic stress disorder, which disproportionately affects drone operators. Holmqvist (2013, 542) states: “The relationship between the fleshy body of the drone operator and the steely body of the drone and its ever-more sophisticated optical systems needs to be conceptualized in a way that allows for such paradoxes [of distance and proximity] to be made intelligible.” Holmqvist argues that allowing for these paradoxes of distance and proximity is central to understanding drone use in warfare. This paradox counters the claims that drone operations are purely technical, disembodied processes.

Discussions of distance and proximity in drone warfare, unsurprisingly, include the work of scholars within the field of geography. Drones present a shift in the understanding of territory, from topographical to networked infrastructure. New spatial relationships are constructed through the drone’s networked form of warfare. The artist and geographer Trevor Paglen (quoted in Gregory 2014) states: “The drone creates its own ‘relative’ geographies, folding several noncontiguous spaces around the globe into a single, distributed, battlefield.” Paglen describes the drone battlefield as defined through its presentation, creating a collage of multiple spaces whose spatial relationships are formed in part temporally, through their simultaneous presentation. This collage of multiple spaces not only merges disparate regions into a “single, distributed battlefield” but also indeterminably extends the space of the battlefield as directed by the ever-widening scope of the drone. Geographer Derek Gregory (2011, 239) describes this as “the everywhere war . . . the replacement of the concept of the battlefield in US military doctrine by the multi-scalar, multi-dimensional ‘battlespace’ with ‘no front or back’ and where ‘everything becomes a site of permanent war.’” As Gregory (2011, 239) argues, the drone can circumvent fixed boundaries of the battlefield by being “event”-oriented—that is, directed by emergent possibilities of conflict, making the spaces of war in a sense boundaryless.

Visibility/Concealment

As Holmqvist discussed, drone warfare relies on a technically enhanced sense of vision. Its optics provide the conditions for engagement. These conditions include the scope of the drone sensor, which delimits the battlefield and frames the sites of engagement. Optical manipulations, such as the ability to zoom in, help to reveal and “positively identify” targets. The increasing number of sensors on a single drone also expands its scope. The visual capabilities of the drone delineate the “events” of war and constitute the production of drone data. The certainty that characterizes drone use stems from a kind of surgical visibility that directs its targeting logic. Yet as much as drone warfare depends on this visual primacy, drone use also relies on a form of concealment—an invisibility—through the obfuscation of the drone’s operations (specifically, in its use by the CIA). The invisibility of drone operations has often led to drone use being paradoxically described as a “disappearance of war” and its amassing of surveillance data as a form of “seeing without being seen” (Bräunert and Malone 2016). The lack of evidence of CIA drone operations has been a topic of considerable concern, especially in cases in which drone attacks have been implicated in wrongfully targeting civilians. Eyal Weizman (2014, 372) defines this ability to hide and deny drone strikes as a central feature of drone warfare and likens this denial to a “Glomar response . . . a form of denial that aims to add no information whatsoever to the public domain . . . to ‘neither confirm nor deny’ the existence—or non-existence.” On the one hand, drone use in war produces troves of data that have gone beyond the human capability to sort and screen. On the other hand, the lack of evidence and information available to the public concerning CIA drone operations produces a black hole of information. A primary issue within this paradox is social justice, with questions concerning accountability and who has the right to see and be privy to the production of drone data (for further discussion, see Mirzoeff 2016).

Drone Vision and the Future of Drone Tech

In military vernacular, the perspective from a drone sensor is referred to as a soda straw capture, comparing the limited scope through which events can be observed to staring down a drinking straw. The limitations of this view are often blamed for the shortcomings of drone operations, where a lack of “situational awareness” means that the wider context surrounding surveilled events is unseen and thereby unknown. To make up for this shortcoming, the solution has been to widen the optical scope through a multiplication of soda straws. Programs such as Gorgon Stare and ARGUS-IS (figure 17.3) have been developed by researchers at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to implement multiple sensors within a single drone. Yet as drone footage increases, the ability to process the image data decreases, as capture from ARGUS-IS can generate 600 Gb (gigabits) per second.

With the advent of these programs, which multiply the drone’s output of visual information, the troves of data have exceeded the human scale. Ironically, in efforts to make the battlefield more visible and thereby more “knowable,” the resulting explosion of drone data has made it increasingly imperceptible and out of our grasp (Lee-Morrison 2015). The problem of volume, exemplified by the multiplication of sensors, is indicative of an increasing trend in information technologies on the whole and of the difficulty of making meaning—that is, producing information from data. Increasing developments in algorithmic image recognition are being explored to resolve this problem. Programs such as the Mind’s Eye and the more recent, controversial Project Maven automate the labor of looking through systems of tagging and metadata, algorithmic tracking, object recognition, and automated pattern recognition. The Mind’s Eye (figure 17.4) was developed to formulate larger conclusions regarding events surveilled by drone in which a complete narrative of action could be recognized. The algorithm learns patterns through inputs of training data on signature behavior collected from multiple sources of intelligence.

Figure 17.3

Progression of surveillance systems: Gorgon Stare and ARGUS-IS. Credit: US Department of Defense.

The influence of the development of algorithmic systems can be seen in the use of signature strikes, in which drones target a group of people, rather than a known individual as in a personality strike. Signature strikes involve identifying targets through their patterns of behavior. As journalist Greg Miller (2012) describes, “Signature strikes would allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior, such as imagery showing militants gathering at known al-Qaeda compounds or unloading explosives,” including “telltale signatures of terrorist activity based on location and the number of security operatives surrounding the site.” In this, pattern recognition becomes a primary mechanism in the logic of targeting. Proponents of signature strikes have argued that the CIA “killed most of their ‘[kill] list people’ when they didn’t know they were there” (Miller 2012). Although drone warfare is characterized by a claim of precision through its hypervisual capabilities, its proliferation and influence in leading tactics of war—as in the use of signature strikes—have been justified through what cannot be seen.

Figure 17.4

The DARPA Mind’s Eye program automatically generates simple text messages to describe its observations. Credit: James Donlon.

Drone warfare continues to be a source of contention as the development of its technology continues. Scholarship on drone warfare has thus far shown that paradoxes and contradictions are inherent to the conceptualization of its technology. Recent controversy over a failed attempt by the military to develop artificial intelligence technology for drones from private and commercial sources shows how central drone technology is to wider cultural discussions of big data (Statt 2018). Drone technology remains a fertile object of study, not only as a marker of the direction of technological development concerning big data regimes but also because the stakes of its development in warfare are unambiguous: ultimately deciding between life and death.

Note

1. It should be noted that drone development for military capabilities is increasingly expanding beyond airspace to undersea vehicles and land tanks. These require more extensive navigational capabilities.

References

Ballard, Mark. 2014. “UK telecoms infrastructure used to support controversial US drone operations.” Computer Weekly, May 2, 2014. http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240219969/UK-telecoms-infrastructure-used-to-support-controversial-US-drone-operations.

Bräunert, Svea, and Meredith Malone. eds. 2016. To See without Being Seen: Contemporary Art and Drone Warfare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bundestag. 2013. “Ausrüstung der Bundeswehr mit Bewaffneten Drohnen.” http://dipbt.budestag.de/dip21/btp/17/17219.pdf.

Carney, Jay. 2012. White House press briefing, January 31, 2012. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/31/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney-13112.

Frontline. n.d. “Weapons: Drones (RPVs).” PBS. Accessed April 4, 2012. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/weapons/drones.html.

Global Security. 2011. “Gorgon Stare.” Last modified July 28, 2011. http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/gorgon-stare.htm.

Gregory, Derek. 2011. “The everywhere war.” Geographical Journal 177 (3): 238–250.

Gregory, Derek. 2014. “Seeing machines.” Geographical Imaginations: War, Space, Security, April 15, 2014. http://geographicalimaginations.com/2014/04/15/seeing-machines/.

Holmqvist, Caroline. 2013. “Undoing war: War ontologies and the materiality of drone warfare.” Millennium 41 (3): 535–552.

Kahn, Paul. 2013. “Imagining warfare.” European Journal of International Law 24 (1): 199–226.

Lee-Morrison, Lila. 2015. “Drone warfare: Visual primacy as a weapon.” TransVisuality: The Cultural Dimension of Visuality: Visual Organisations, vol. 2, edited by Tore Kristensen, Anders Michelsen, and Frauke Wiegand, 201–214. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Miller, Greg. 2012. “CIA seeks new authority to expand Yemen drone campaign.” Washington Post, April 18, 2012. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-seeks-new-authority-to-expand-yemen-drone-campaign/2012/04/18/gIQAsaumRT_story.html?utm_term=.a4b83e2df382.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2016. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rodman, David. 2010. “Unmanned aerial vehicles in the service of the Israel Air Force.” Meria, September 7, 2010. http://www.rubincenter.org/2010/09/rodman-2010-09-07/.

Shaw, Ian, and Majed Akhter. 2012. “The unbearable humanness of drone warfare in FATA, Pakistan.” Antipode 44 (4): 1490–1509.

Singer, Peter Warren. 2009. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Penguin.

Statt, Nick. 2018. “Google reportedly leaving Project Maven military AI program after 2019.” Verge, June 1, 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17418406/google-maven-drone-imagery-ai-contract-expire.

Weizman, Eyal. 2014. “Introduction part II: Matter against memory.” In Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, edited by Forensic Architecture, 361–380. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

18

Error

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

The emergence of big data has displaced questions of error and truth with a strong desire for efficiency and experimentation. Rather than looking to solve errors, big data develops a tactic that works through an acceptance of them. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier (2013) point out in their now classic book on big data, “Looking at vastly more data also permits us to loosen up our desire for exactitude. . . . It’s a trade-off: with less error from sampling we can accept more measurement error.” Furthermore, many commercial big data ventures operate with a temporality that favors speed over patience: a medium-quality answer obtained quickly is thus often preferred over a high-quality answer obtained slowly.

The displacement and reconfiguration of the notion of error in big data regimes indicate a more fundamental clash of scientific paradigms regarding what constitutes knowledge and how best to achieve it. These clashes are again nested within a deeper politics of how we understand error, who has the power to determine something as an error, and who is made to endure the consequences of these errors. One now classic illustration, which has become eerily prescient in the onslaught of COVID-19, is the scientific dispute between data science and applied statistics in 2014 around the (now defunct) Google Flu Trends and the political implications that followed. In an article from 2009 published in Nature, researchers from Google claimed that they would be able to “nowcast” flu epidemics based on Internet searches (Ginsberg et al. 2009). The underlying logic was that people’s search results—for example, for symptoms of “fever,” “cough,” and “sore throat”—would reflect whether they were falling ill with the flu and thus provide Google with real-time signals of imminent flu outbreaks. Google would be able not only to detect flu prevalence but also to do so two weeks earlier than the flu-tracking information from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Five years later, however, Google Flu Trends missed the 2013 flu season by 140 percent. Statisticians David Lazer and colleagues (2014) offered their explanation of why Google Flu Trends had failed. They noted that Google Flu Trends had originally been developed as a machine-learning algorithm to predict the number of flu cases on the basis of Google search terms. While the underlying data management and machine-learning algorithms had been correct, a misunderstanding about the uncertainties involved in the data collection and modeling process had led to highly inaccurate estimates over time. As several statisticians noted, applied statistics would have thought carefully about the sampling process, identified time-series components in the spatial trend, investigated why the search terms were predictive, and tried to understand the likely reasons why Google Flu Trends was working. In other words, classically trained statisticians would have devoted more attention to detecting and identifying errors. While at first this might not have seemed to be a problem, Lazer et al. (2014) point out that it became one over time as the machine-learning algorithms continued to learn from faulty assumptions.

Google Flu Trends’ erroneous results caused critics to conclude that the technology was better at finding patterns in past data than it was at predicting future epidemics. And soon after, Google shut down Google Flu Trends as an active operation.

While it would be easy to recount Google Flu Trends through a narrative of failure, however, the phenomenon is in fact a symptomatic example of how major tech companies reconfigure archival glitches into what Orit Halpern, in chapter 12, calls demos: “Experiments that prove which forms of research and technology need to be invoked next; that should exist and must be built.” Indeed, as sociologist Noortje Marres points out in relation to the ongoing experimental implementation of self-driving cars, such approaches are exemplary of a new, “experimental” mode of industrial innovation, in which experiments and beta testing that would previously have occurred in a lab are today located in everyday societal and intimate settings like streets, personal computers, and smartphones.

This experimental mode of industrial innovation allows tech companies to reframe errors from failed events to progress. Indeed, within the experimental epistemology of tech companies, each new technology that appears on the back of a failed experiment becomes yet another stage in an ever-unfolding tech metamorphosis in which each new demo sheds its old skin to unveil a newer, larger, and more successful one.

Coming back to Google Flu Trends, we see this logic in action: while the operation itself failed to detect the actual unfolding of the 2013 flu epidemic, the more generalized Google Trends has today become a central site of knowledge production for the COVID-19 epidemic. Moreover, Google and Apple have assumed leading positions within the field of digital epidemic detection with their new contact-tracing technology. Leading researchers are already contesting the validity and security of this technology, pointing out its flawed data collection practices (it will not include children and older individuals without new smartphones) and its discriminatory and potentially lethal implications. Ali Alkhatib’s (2020) insightful blog post on the problematic aspects of Google and Apple’s digital contact tracing thus notes: “We’ll have to constantly follow up on the errors these systems make, struggling to fix the damage it does in its false positives and false negatives, all in this hopeless chase to automate what essentially needs humans.”

The central role and experimental approach of Google and its like in the wake of COVID-19 demand that we urgently discuss errors in big data archives, not only as technical occurrences that can be fixed with a tweak to the algorithms but also as political problems rooted in cultural imaginaries of what errors are, who gets to define them, and what their implications might be.

Vocabularies and Imaginaries of Failure, Error and Fault

How might we understand errors in big data archives as cultural and political, as much as technical, problems? As the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Standard Classification for Software Anomalies (2010, vi) shows, the semantic and epistemological complexity of the concept of error haunts the computational sciences as much as the humanities and social sciences. The Standard Classification thus points out that while error has been used interchangeably with other related terms such as anomaly, fault, failure, flaw, glitch, defect, and bug in computer science, it would be beneficial for the computational sciences if distinctions could be upheld better between these definitions.

Algirdas Avizienis et al. (2004) offer one effort to define what an error should mean in computing. They provide a linear and causal chain between the concepts: “. . . fault  error  failure  fault . . . ,” creating an epistemology in which an error is a minor part of the total state of the system, a discrete deviation that will not necessarily lead to complete system failure if the system is resilient. We can experience an error in a resilient program and still work within it, albeit with limited functionality. The system may even anticipate such errors. We see this anticipation in basic terms when we try to divide by zero on a calculator, or in the 404 error responses we get when the server is unable to find the website we are looking for. But the anticipation of error is also built into more fundamental infrastructures of big data—for instance, the web—whose architects and ideologists emphasize resilience and survivability, including the capability to withstand or reroute around local errors and network losses (Hu 2015).

The semantics of error in today’s data landscapes indicate that what counts as an error in big data operations is an unresolved and complex question that pertains as much to the interdisciplinary realm of big data as to the deeper conceptual and political landscape of error itself. Big data thus reproduces historical ambivalent notions of error as, on one hand, an anxiety-inducing problem and, on the other hand, a productive practice that can lead to new discoveries and innovations. In this way, big data archives repurpose and extend the fundamental challenge of historical notions of error but also imbue it with new political and epistemological meanings.

Etymologically, the term error incorporates the mobile notion of erring, producing a spatial understanding of error as a deviation from a route—a departure from principles. An error, then, is literally an act of errantry, a navigation along a devious course, implying rambling, roaming, and even going astray (Bruno 2011). As David William Bates (2002) points out in Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France, this spatial imaginary gives the word error a complex and ambivalent connotation that suspends it between “merely aimless wandering” and “a more specific aberration from some path” (20). This ambivalence also means that error has never been wholly determined by an epistemological structure of truth but has always enjoyed a certain conceptual independence that offers it a much richer terrain.

This complexity, as Bates points out, has often been captured by the figure of the labyrinth, where error is an act of wandering as well as a form of knowledge production. Erreur could thus be taken to mean the “action of erring this way and that,” “an excursion, a voyage involving adventures,” or a “vagabondage of the imagination, of the mind which is not subject to any rules” (Bates 2002). These journeys produced a spatial framework of knowledge in which error and knowledge were productively linked but also frustrating to experience. Just listen to Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Louis Castilhon lamenting the feeling of being lost in the labyrinth of knowledge: “How cruel and painful is the situation of a Traveller who has imprudently wandered into a forest where he knows neither the winding paths, nor the detours, nor the exits!” (Castilhon, quoted in Bates 2002, 132). Many big data operations are haunted by similar ambivalent frustrations: How do they distinguish unproductive or aimless wanderings in big data from productive adventures that lead to new discoveries and inventions?

At the same time, datafication also resurfaces troubling echoes from history, when the detection of error was designed to both produce and contain deviant subjectivities. In his lecture on the concept of error, Georges Canguilhem outlined how the rise of the human sciences in the mid-nineteenth century, especially psychology and early biology, transformed the notion of error from subjective transformation to an external human problem (Talcott 2014). This subtle shift, he argued, produced a new worldview in which living beings did not make errors but rather were subjected to them so that error appeared “as a malformation or a failure” that no longer implied “conversion” but rather “remedy” (Canguilhem, cited in Talcott 2014). Canguilhem ultimately linked this new worldview to the rise of eugenics. Foucault, famously, later developed Canguilhem’s theory into his own account of biopower. These perspectives allow us to abandon the technological hunt for an algorithmic “fix” and instead frame the question of error in big data as one of power and politics that has as much to do with racialized and gendered structures as with innovation.

The Politics of Error

At the end of the essay “Life: Experience and Science,”[1] Michel Foucault (1998) concludes, “At the most basic level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give way to a chance occurrence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or a monstrosity, is something like a disturbance in the informative system, something like a ‘mistake.’ In this sense, life—and this is its radical feature—is that which is capable of error” (476). Foucault’s analysis points to the ambivalence of error as both a creative event and a moment of power. This understanding of error can help us move out of simplified ideas of error as a purely productive process or as technical glitches that can be “corrected” to instead repoliticize error as a fundamentally human question of power that has always also been tied up with the human body.

Catherine D’Ignazio shows in chapter 40 on outlier that the historical positioning of certain bodies as more anomalous than others also means there is often uncertainty as to whether an outlier is an error in the recording of data or represents a true variation in the population. D’Ignazio thus reminds the reader that rejecting outliers as errors in data sets has serious implications for data subjects and that these implications also tend to reproduce gendered and racialized discriminations. Moreover, in chapter 35 on (mis)gendering, Os Keyes shows how these lines of oppression also remain lodged within the binary imaginary of data science, which at once excludes trans experience from its organization of information and at the same time continually reinserts trans people into static gender narratives drawn from archival material from pretransition lives.

The idea of certain genders and sexualities as outliers and errenous has deep historical roots (Agostinho & Thylstrup 2019). As Mary Russo (1995) reminds us in The Female Grotesque, female bodies have historically been constituted as “in error” (10). And Yetta Howard (2014) points out that the notion of error today is still “bound up with diagnosing and understanding trans identifications in terms of wrong embodiment” so that “trans-as-error functions in tandem with rubrics of identificatory, mental, and bodily disorders that have historically included nonheterosexual identities and intersexed bodies” (82).

Jacqueline Wernimont (2018) offers one damning indictment how history haunts contemporary best practices of data collection, showing that women are literally dying because of persistent errors due to data collection biases that favor men over women in everything from clinical trials to car safety. These disparities are further exacerbated when one factors in the question of race. As Safiya Noble has shown (2018, 10), marginalized groups are particularly vulnerable to misrepresentation in search engines, where they often appear in erroneous, stereotypical, or even pornographic ways. Such errors should not be perceived merely as technical flaws that can be fixed by improving algorithms but rather as symptoms of deeper societal problems of “white supremacy” (Benjamin 2019). This pervasive cultural and institutional racism is in turn linked to a sociotechnical system that treats minority voices as less capable of telling the truth, and more liable to error, than the voices of those in power (Ahmed 2015; Crenshaw 2018). Hence, as Amelia Acker points out in chapter 33 on metadata, we must ask not only what it means to classify and misclassify something but also who gets to determine and uphold structures of knowledge.

The fundamentally political question of error has also given rise to a reengagement with error as an inroad for critical and subversive engagement with power. This entails regarding errors as holding alternative potential, which can be used against hegemony by showing that alternatives are embedded in dominant cultures: ultimately, power is never total, consistent, or omnipotent. As Rebecca Schneider notes in chapter 26 on glitch, “Error bears the potential of ruin, but ruin bears the promise of alternatives.” Such alternative approaches to error recast the potential for errors in the archive as avenues of possibilities, inhabitation, and even escape from calculation and predictability. As Jack Halberstam (2011) suggests in The Queer Art of Failure, failure and error can offer different kinds of rewards: “Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (3). And failure and glitch as subversion has also been a generative strain of thought in digital media theory (Menkman 2011; Nunes 2012).

Rebecca Schneider offers a meditation on the role of error and glitch in relation to feminist artist Carolee Schneemann, who sought to inhabit as much as challenge the category: “I think it is right to say that unlike Enlightenment man and his exploratory jaunts among the irrational or underdeveloped, Schneemann was not fetishizing error as other. With Interior Scroll or More Wrong Things, she was not getting off on the errors of others so much as residing in the error she was given to be a female and artist simultaneously.” Schneider locates the subversive potential of performance in its wholly unpredictable, and often failing, mode of existence; a mode of existence, she argues, that might also make it able to resist co-option.

Queer and critical race scholar Kara Keeling (2014, 157) also foregrounds the potential of queer and critical race theory in unsettling racialized and gendered power structures, this time in relation to data environments, noting, for instance, how “Queer OS can be grasped as a malfunction within technologies . . . with a capacity to reorder things that can, perhaps, ‘make race do different things,’ tell ‘Mama to let herself go free,’ and make what was legible soar into unpredictable relations.” In her later work, Queer Times, Black Futures, Keeling (2019) expands her analysis to compellingly argue that the metaphor of the black swan, a concept rooted in colonial history and usually used today to explain outlier events, in fact points to a much more political question about horizons of knowledge and failures of political imagination. Using the Haitian Revolution as an example, Keeling argues that while the revolution appeared as a black swan event to European colonialists, a successful revolt unthinkable both before and during the uprising, the event was in fact long anticipated and prepared by those who organized and sympathized with the revolt. In both Schneider and Keeling, we see how error depends on perspective and event horizons. And in both of them, we can also detect the ambivalence of error. Schneider, writing against a political backdrop that increasingly seems to revel in error, thus raises crucial questions for feminists and antiracists in today’s political landscape: “How do we deploy failed performatives, or mobilize more wrong things, as modes of interruption into the ‘herdlike’ stream of consumable data production that is the neoliberal everyday? And how do we do so without refetishizing error in the service of the billionaires who deploy ‘alternative facts’ to profit from financialization?”

If error now finds itself in an ambivalent alliance with political economies where performances of critique are praised as ventures whose pursuit promotes and strengthens those economies, then big data archives also call for a reengagement with error as a fundamental, and fundamentally political, part of knowledge production. Who gets to determine when something is an error? Which errors are reconfigured as productive errings? What subversive potentials remain for failure and error in the face of resilient and ubiquitous systems that have turned the entire globe into one big site of experimentation? As history shows us, error has always been an ambivalent concept. Yet big data archives confront us with significant new political questions about the role of errors and the agency we are afforded in relating to them.

Notes

This chapter partly draws from the introduction to the error workshop at the Royal Danish Library in 2017, coauthored by Kristin Veel, Annie Ring, Daniela Agostinho, and myself. I would like to thank Kristin Veel and Daniela Agostinho for their brilliant and helpful comments on earlier iterations of this chapter. I am so grateful for their intellectual and social generosity. I am also grateful for my fellow coeditors’ inspiration and care and for colleagues who have actively engaged with and/or contributed to Uncertain Archives over the years.

1. Itself a modified version of Foucault’s introduction to the English translation of George Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (1989).

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19

Ethics

Louise Amoore

On April 19, 2015, Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old African American man, died from spinal cord injuries sustained while in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. During the days that followed, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analyzed data streams from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for signals of incipient violence among the assembled citizens protesting Gray’s killing. “Several known sovereign citizens have begun to post social media attempting to rally persons to demonstrate,” recorded the Baltimore Police Department in a memo warning of the “potential for large scale violence” and promising to “continue to evaluate threat streams and follow all actionable leads.”[1] Ultimately, the algorithmic extraction and analysis of so-called threat stream data did generate a target considered to be actionable. A series of correlations between dispersed fragments of data generated a link to potential terrorism and authorized the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis Division to draft what they called an “open source information report” to be distributed to all government agencies. In short, extracted elements of social media data became an actionable piece of intelligence. How did this specific target become a recognizable object of interest to the authorities? How was it surfaced for attention and action? How were these particular fragments of data extracted from the archives of images, video, audio, text, and geospatial data gathered that day from the marches, rallies, and assemblies of people on Baltimore’s city streets?

Although it is often said that algorithms are shrouded in the secrecy of proprietary commercial and governmental technologies, their development is traceable via the computer science papers where they are proposed, modified, and superseded over time.[2] Algorithms may appear to us as concealed by secrecy or unreadability, but in fact one can speculatively engage with the world of algorithm design in order to generate an ethicopolitical narrative about that day in Baltimore in April 2015. Among the multiple algorithms that make the idea of a threat stream possible, a series of deep neural network algorithms learn to recognize and extract the form of text from image files.[3] What this apparently niche development in computer science meant, among other things, for the protesters in Baltimore was that irregularities in the hand-painted text on their protest banners—imaged in their photographs posted to social media—could be extracted, recognized, and correlated with other items of interest. Amid the DHS open source report is the suggestion of “two photographs”: one that “shows a woman with a sign in a crowded area” and another featuring a “spray painted black and white object” with “Arabic text.”[4]

Although it is not possible, or even critically necessary, to identify why the DHS’s algorithms linked the data elements to generate the national security action, what matters is how the algorithms came to learn and to recognize people and objects in the world. It is likely that the Baltimore placards and banners reading “police terror,” aggregated together with extracted Arabic text from social media accounts, were elements in a cloud-based data environment in which the algorithms learned to generate a specific output of what or who in the crowd posed an incipient threat. As the algorithms worked across the cloud computing of the DHS’s application-programming interface, identifying patterns across multiple data sources, they used a clustering model to group people and objects by what are called attributes. Although such techniques are commonly used to infer the attributes of groups—ranging from consumers, voters, and financial borrowers to congenital diseases, DNA sequences, and genotypes—on the streets of Baltimore they inferred the incipient attributes of people gathered to protest. The algorithms, trained to recognize using data from the many contingent events of past gatherings of crowds in other places, were refined and further optimized in Baltimore before moving on to a future event, as yet unknown.[5] The profound violence of Freddie Gray’s killing, and the residue of the past moments of claims made in his name and in the names of others before him, became lodged within the very machine-learning algorithms that will continue to recognize the forms of other faces in other crowds as national security targets, even—and especially—those who have never been encountered before.

At first sight, the harm precipitated by the algorithms deployed in Baltimore appears self-evident. Or, at least, the ethical terrain of the actions seems to be familiar in the broader landscape of rights and wrongs, good and evil, in Western philosophy and juridicopolitical systems. After all, one can readily identify a set of rights, already apparently registered as belonging to rights-bearing subjects, which has been contravened by neural net algorithms adjudicating which people may peaceably assemble and on what terms. Indeed, it is precisely on this terrain that the most dominant voices against the harms of the algorithm have been heard. In this framing, which I will term an ethics for algorithm, the emphasis is on the human responsibility to devise an ethical framework, a “code,” with which algorithms must comply, to institute arrangements that are good, ethical, and normal and to prevent the transgression of societal norms. It is precisely this notion of an ethics for algorithm that, to my reading, characterizes Norbert Wiener’s (n.d.) anxieties over the “dangerous possibilities” that machines could “replace human judgement.”[6] Wiener’s humanism persists in contemporary public and scholarly debates, where overwhelmingly one hears calls for accountable human oversight of automated algorithmic systems (Nature 2016), removal of the “bias” or “value judgments” of the algorithm,[7] respect for the context of algorithmic actions (Nissenbaum 2009), the opening to scrutiny of the “black box” of the algorithm (Pasquale 2015), and the regulation of damaging mathematical models (O’Neil 2016). Within each of these calls, ethical transgression occurs when opaque or illegible algorithms infringe or undercut the assumed legible world of rights belonging to human subjects.

Yet when the people gathered on the Baltimore streets, it was not the case that illegible algorithms violated their legible rights to peaceable assembly. Rather, the means by which they could appear in a political forum, the very conditions of their appearance, and the very capacities they had to make a recognizable political claim were subject to algorithmic regimes of truth-telling and wrongdoing.[8] Understood in these terms, the algorithm already presents itself as an ethicopolitical arrangement of values, assumptions, and propositions about the world. One does not need to look outside the algorithm for an area that is properly political and recognizably of ethics. Indeed, one cannot have an ethics for algorithms that seeks to instill the good, the lawful, or the normal into the algorithm, for contemporary algorithms are not so much transgressing settled societal norms as establishing new patterns of good and bad, and new thresholds of normality and abnormality, against which actions are calibrated.

What one might consider to be unethical actions, as William Connolly notes, are not “actions by immoral agents who freely transgress the moral law” but rather “arbitrary cruelty installed in regular institutional arrangements taken to embody the Law, the Good, and the Normal” (Connolly 1993, 366). Amid the widespread search for new ethical arrangements for the scrutiny and regulation of algorithms, what becomes of the arbitrary harms lodged within embodied algorithmic arrangements? One could imagine a world in which the neural networks used in cities like Baltimore are scrutinized and rendered compliant with rules and yet continue to learn to recognize and misrecognize and to generate rules from the contingent and arbitrary data of many past moments of associative life on the city streets. I may feel that my rights to freedom of assembly or to privacy are protected, and yet the patterns generated from my data, in correlation with yours and others, continue to supply the conditions for future actions against unknown others. Thus, the first-order ethical question I want to ask here is not “How ought the algorithm to be arranged for a good society?” but “How are algorithmic arrangements generating ideas of goodness and what society ought to be?”

I wish to propose a different way of thinking about the relations between ethics and algorithms. What I call a cloud ethics, or an ethics of algorithm, begins from the ethics in formation of the algorithm and its cloud data landscape. The algorithm contains, within its mathematical and spatial arrangement, multiple potentials for arbitrary cruelties, surprises, violences, joys, distillations of racism and prejudice, injustices, probabilities, and chance. There is an important distinction here between ethics as code, or what Michel Foucault describes as “the code that determines which acts are permitted or forbidden,” and ethics as the formation of the relation of oneself to oneself and to others.[9]

In our times, algorithms are intrinsic to the relations one has to oneself and to others. Indeed, where our relations to ourselves and to others are teeming with the data fragments of ourselves and others—as in the Baltimore neural networks—algorithms will always undercut the Kantian reasoning subject as the guarantor of ethics. Algorithms come to act in the world precisely in and through the relations of selves to selves, and to others, as these relations manifest in the clusters and attributes of data. In order to learn from relations of selves and others, of course, the algorithm must already be replete with values, thresholds, assumptions, probability weightings, and bias. In a real sense, an algorithm must necessarily be prejudicial in order to have any traction in the world. It is of the very essence of algorithms that they afford greater degrees of recognition and value to some features of a scene than to others. Indeed, this is precisely how deep neural networks learn to recognize, with each of their hidden layers weighting the probabilities of some element of a scene. In apportioning and weighting the form of a scene, algorithms generate themselves as ethicopolitical beings in the world. If to have ethics is not merely to have a code prohibiting, for example, bias or assumptions but to work on oneself via relations, then the ethics of algorithms involves how they learn to recognize and to act, how they extract assumptions from data relations, and how they learn what ought to be from relations with other humans and algorithms.

To hold an algorithm to account for its actions in the world, however, is not the same as to propose an algorithmic accountability. This alternative form of giving an account does not belong to an episteme of Enlightenment transparency and visibility but, on the contrary, begins with the partiality and illegibility of all accounts, human and algorithmic. Curiously, the significant new ethical challenges that algorithms appear to present actually manifest the novel features of some profoundly old problems regarding the grounds for ethical action. As Judith Butler (2003) explains in her Spinoza lectures, the demand to give an account of oneself will always fall short, for “I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the conditions under which I emerge” (12). If one assumes that the determination of an unequivocal “I” who acts is a necessary precondition of ethics, as Butler cautions, then this identifiable self is “dispossessed” by the condition of its emergence in relation to others. Yet, for Butler, this persistent failure to give a clear-sighted account does not mark the limit point of ethics. On the contrary, it is the opaque and unknowable nature of the making of all kinds of acting subjects that is the condition of possibility of having an ethics (17).

In short, and contrary to the equation of ethics with transparency and disclosure, ethical responsibility is sustained by the subject’s opacity. My notion of an ethics of algorithm extends the opacity of the human subject, envisaging a plurality of venues for ethical responsibility in which all selves—human and algorithmic—proceed from their illegibility. The apparent opacity and illegibility of the algorithm should not pose an entirely new problem for human ethics, then, for the difficulty of locating clear-sighted action was already present. The “I” who forms the ethical relation was always in question and is now, with algorithms, in question in new ways. Although the mathematical propositions of algorithms cannot be made fully legible, they can be held to account for the conditions of their emergence. These conditions include some relations that are identifiably between humans and algorithms—such as the selection of training data or the setting of target outputs, for example—but others still are relations of algorithms to other algorithms, such as the recognition of clusters or the extraction of features. In all instances the significant point is that the conditions of an algorithm’s emergence—a composite of human and nonhuman relations—are venues for ethical responsibility.

To reflect on the conditions of an algorithm’s emergence is also to consider how, as mathematical knowledge, they have achieved the status of objective certainty and definiteness.[10] Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969) observed mathematical propositions to be “given the stamp of incontestability,” a mark of the “incontrovertible” and an “exemption from doubt” that other propositions, such as “I am called,” are not afforded (§653–657). Significantly, Wittgenstein draws attention to the gap between the “I,” who can only present a contestable and contingent claim that risks not being recognized, and the mathematical proposition, where the claim is exempt from doubt and is always recognizable. His concern is that the mathematical claim has achieved a particular status of certainty in an otherwise uncertain world so that it becomes “a hinge on which your dispute can turn.” For Wittgenstein, the mathematical proposition should be regarded as no less doubtful or uncertain than the “empirical propositions” otherwise made about the world. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s point is to address mathematical propositions as empirical actions that are “in no way different from the actions of the rest of our lives, and are in the same degree liable to forgetfulness, oversight and illusion” (§651). Following Wittgenstein’s insight, the mathematical proposition of an algorithm is profoundly contingent and contestable. It is formulated through a series of empirical claims about its match to the world and thus is liable to forgetfulness, oversight, misrecognition, and illusion.

To be clear, although algorithms such as those used on the streets of Baltimore may appear in the world as “a hinge on which your protest can turn,” this hinge already fully has agency, politics, relations with itself and others, and therefore ethics. An ethics of algorithm might begin with this hinge as something that decides what matters in the world, what or who can be recognized, what can be protested, and which claims can be brought.[11] Understood in this way, the algorithm is not the hinge as an incontrovertible axis, exempted from doubt, on which all social, political, and economic life turns. “The hinge point,” as Foucault differently identifies, can also be the point of “ethical concerns and political struggle” and the point of “critical thought against abusive techniques of government” (Foucault 1997a, 299). Thus, when in 2016 Cambridge Analytica deployed their deep-learning algorithms to target social media in the US presidential election and the UK referendum on leaving the European Union, or when Palantir’s neural nets supply the targets for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation regime, not only are democratic and legal due process at stake. The algorithms supplied by Cambridge Analytica and Palantir are not merely the hinge points or the axis on which elections and deportation regimes turn. The conditions of the emergence of their machine-learning algorithms include learning what a protest, an election, a deportation, or a referendum could bear and learning this through the archived attributes of a population.

Notes

1. Vice News journalist Jason Leopold made a Freedom of Information Act request seeking all records pertaining to Freddie Gray and/or the subsequent protests and riots in Baltimore, Maryland. The full disclosed documents are available in Leopold (n.d.).

2. Although many specific algorithms become secret and proprietary when bought and licensed by corporations and governments, the upstream science of their genesis is much more public, iterative, and contested. Methodologically, a degree of speculation is necessarily involved in identifying which broad family of algorithms is being used in a particular application. Among the most highly cited classic computer science papers on contemporary machine-learning algorithms are LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton (2015), Hinton and Salakhutdinov (2006), Simonyon and Zisserman (2014), and Hinton et al. (2012).

3. Computer scientists give accounts of how they use samples of training data in order to train their model to recognize text when it appears in an image (Misra, Swain, and Mantri 2012).

4. In her incisive account of the relations between data profiles and racial profiles, Jasbir Puar (2017, 174) rethinks “turbaned terrorist bodies in relation to and beyond the ocular.”

5. Clustering techniques in machine learning are experimental and exploratory in the sense that the aim is to find patterns in the input data in order to cluster groups that are similar in their attributes. The model is then used to predict likely behavior in the future, such as, for example, the propensity for a group to “churn” or to switch commercial providers of, say, energy, credit, insurance, or telecommunications. Computer scientists have trained machine-learning algorithms on Twitter data in order to determine the attributes of support for the Islamic State, training their classifier to “predict future support or opposition of ISIS with 87% accuracy” (MIT Technology Review 2015).

6. As Katherine Hayles (1999, 86) describes, the “tension between Wiener’s humanistic values and the cybernetic viewpoint is everywhere apparent in his writing.”

7. The focus has been placed on the accountability and ethical conduct of the designers of machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence. Interviewed in the New York Times, New York University and Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford explained that “we need to start changing the skill set of the people who are going to be the data scientists of the future” (Markoff 2016). See also the report on the ethical design of big-data analysis by Metcalf, Keller, and boyd (2020).

8. In his 1981 series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain, “Mal faire, dire vrai, or Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling,” Michel Foucault explains that his interest lies not in establishing the basis or grounds of truth but instead in “the forms of the enterprise of truth-telling” of particular scientific or technical claims. He proposes a counterpoint to positivist claims in what he calls “astonishment before the proliferation of truth-telling, and the dispersal of regimes of veridiction.” It is this proliferation of truth telling by algorithms, and the regimes of veridiction that make it possible, that is of interest to me here (Foucault 2014, 20–21).

9. In addressing his genealogy of ethics, Michel Foucault (1997b, 255) depicts a “great change” from Greek society to Christian society, dwelling “not in the code but in the ethics,” which is “their relations to themselves and to others.”

10. Mathematician A. A. Markov (1954, 1) defined the ideal algorithm as one that offered “precision,” “definiteness,” and the “conclusiveness” of a desired result.

11. As Karen Barad (2007, 148, 175) has so compellingly argued, “It is not merely the case that human concepts are embodied in apparatuses, but rather that apparatuses are discursive practices . . . through which ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ are produced.” In Barad’s reading, scientific apparatuses are agents that enact boundaries, becoming the condition of possibility of claims to cause and effect.

References

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Butler, Judith. 2003. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.

Connolly, William. 1993. “Beyond good and evil: The ethical sensibility of Michel Foucault.” Political Theory 21 (3): 365–389.

Foucault, Michel. 1997a. “The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom.” In Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin.

Foucault, Michel. 1997b. “On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress.” In Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow, 253–280. London: Penguin.

Foucault, Michel. 2014. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Hinton, Geoffrey, Li Deng, Dong Yu, George Dahl, Abdel-Rahman Mohamed, Navdeep Jaitly, Andrew Senior, Vincent Vanhoucke, Patrick Nguyen, Tara Sainath, and Brian Kingsbury. 2012. “Deep neural networks for acoustic modelling in speech recognition.” IEEE Signals Processing 29 (6): 82–97.

Hinton, G., and R. Salakhutdinov. 2006. “Reducing the dimensionality of data with neural networks.” Science 313 (5786): 504–507.

LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton. 2015. “Deep learning.” Nature 521:436–444.

Leopold, Jason. n.d. “DHS FOIA documents Baltimore protests Freddie Gray.” Scribd. Accessed July 10, 2017. https://www.scribd.com/document/274209838/DHS-FOIA-Documents-Baltimore-Protests-Freddie-Gray.

Markoff, John. 2016. “Artificial intelligence is far from matching humans, panel says.” New York Times, May 25. Accessed April 30, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/technology/artificial-intelligence-is-far-from-matching-humans-panel-says.html.

Markov, A. A. 1954. Theory of Algorithms. Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Metcalf, Jacob, Emily F. Keller, and danah boyd. 2020. “Perspectives on big data, ethics, and society.” Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society. Accessed April 30, 2020. https://bdes.datasociety.net/council-output/perspectives-on-big-data-ethics-and-society/.

Misra, Chinmaya, P. K. Swain, and J. K. Mantri. 2012. “Text extraction and recognition from images using neural networks.” International Journal of Computer Applications 40 (2): 13–19.

MIT Technology Review. 2015. March 23, 2015.

Nature. 2016. “More accountability for big-data algorithms.” Nature 537. https://www.nature.com/news/more-accountability-for-big-data-algorithms-1.20653.

Nissenbaum, Helen. 2009. Privacy in Context. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown.

Pasquale, Frank. 2015. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Puar, Jasbir. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Simonyon, Karen, and Andrew Zisserman. 2014. “Very deep convolutional networks for large scale image recognition.” arXiv (1409.1556).

Wiener, Norbert. n.d. “Atomic knowledge of good and evil.” Norbert Wiener Archives, box 29B, file 665, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.

20

Executing

Critical Software Thing: David Gauthier, Audrey Samson, Eric Snodgrass, Winnie Soon, and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver

There is an expectation arising from a technical understanding of execution that it is a straightforward running of tasks within a machine. For instance, in computer science, execution is often associated specifically with the fetch-decode-execute instruction cycle, during which a computer’s central processing unit retrieves instructions from its memory, determines what actions the instructions dictate, and proceeds to attempt to carry out those actions. In this common reading, execution is the performance of such step-by-step instructions.

But of course the instruction cycle does not encompass execution’s impact and embeddedness in the world. As cultural analysts and software studies scholars, we posit that while an executing practice may be composed and propelled by the programmed drives and demands it instantiates, it must, nonetheless, necessarily negotiate the uncertainties of its encounters with other live processes, drives, and materials. These uncertain encounters of execution might include the particular nature of data and its varying levels of machine readability, the time-sensitive negotiations of computer networks, or the various materialities and affectivities that underpin and afford various forms of computational practices. They will also involve formative human-influenced factors—factors that can be of both a predictable and an unpredictable nature. Long-standing hegemonies of various kinds (e.g., capitalism, white and male power structures) become ingrained within present articulations of computational culture, manifested in the boardrooms and engineering teams of many dominant computational platforms of the present (Fowler 2017; Matsakis 2017; Miley 2015).

This constant negotiation of both seemingly certain and uncertain elements that arise points to the vitality and also urgency of this quality of the ongoing, lively encounters of forms of execution in the world. In an admiring moment of reflection in his “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” essay, mathematician and computing pioneer Alan Turing (1950, 450) comments on the way in which “machines take me by surprise with great frequency.” While admitting that this partly reflects his own tendency to work quickly and risk the calculative inaccuracies and missteps that come with such a practical desire to get on with things, Turing is highlighting the need to take seriously the generative quality of experiment and the impossibility of being able to fully predict in advance both the machinations and possibilities of computation and its active executions. At the same time, as one sees in Turing’s own fate (Halberstam 1998) or the resurgence of antifeminist, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and other populist backlashes in contemporary cultures, machines can readily afford, feed back, and amplify certain dispositions and energies of their creators, users, and specific contexts in which they come into being and take hold. This is despite a radical openness to reconfiguration in the very nature of their makeup, an openness to alterity that continues to undermine forms of certainty with what is in computing a foundational acknowledgment of the uncertain.

To Halt or Not to Halt

Why might the notion of execution be understood as central to the concepts of not only computing but also computational culture more widely? What are the uncertainties arising from the execution of instructions? It is common knowledge that a computer program executes, meaning that the physical machine performs certain actions according to the logic of a given program. It is also common knowledge to suppose that this program had to be previously written in symbolic human-readable code (source code), which was compiled into machine-readable instructions and formatted (for instance, an “.exe” file extension) to produce the program as such. Thus, the notion of execution speaks to this intricate conjugation of code, instructions, and actions, alluding to the process by which a symbolic order (data-as-program) instructs a machine how to act or perform.

In theoretical computer science, it is conventional to talk in abstract terms of a finite sequence of instructions to denote an algorithm or a program. It is assumed that this sequence will be “fed” to a machine in order to execute and, in turn, yield expected results or a valid “output.” The moment of execution as such is thus tacitly encapsulated within a well-defined instructions-result coupling (cause and effect), in fact producing an instructions-(execution)-result triad rather than a mere oversimplified couple. We know from Turing and his contemporary mathematician Alonzo Church that there exist sequences of instructions that will never produce any output whatsoever, causing the machine to enter an infinite loop, so to speak—executing ad vitam aeternam. In other words, while the sequence of instructions fed to the machine may well be finite, its machine execution can nonetheless be infinite. No mathematical guarantees or proofs can state that a given, finite set of instructions will inevitably produce a finite number of execution steps. This problem is, mathematically speaking, undecidable.

As a problematic or limit, this type of “in-finite” is at the core of the notion of computation and is usually referred to as the halting problem. In fact, one of the main definitions of computation or computability is that it is a task that needs to terminate or a process that has to stop (Kleene 1952, chapter 13, §67). What is dubbed “compute-able” is a process that terminates with an output, while a process that does not is judged “un-compute-able.” We can clearly see how compute-ability, as a definition, is intermingled with the notion of time, here taking the form of a delay or a waiting. Given that one can define an executable physical process as a procedure “that a finite observer can set in motion to generate the values of a desired function until it generates a readable result” (Piccinini 2011, 741; italics added), one may be inclined to ask: Wait until when?

This formative issue of uncertainty in any executable procedure points to a profound and abstruse stasis at the heart of computation—that is, within the aforementioned instructions-(execution)-result conjugate. When instructions are fed to a machine in order to be executed, there is theoretically no guarantee the machine will produce any viable results in due time. This odd state of waiting, as a suspense or an anxious differing of time, is at the very core of mathematical theories and practices of computing—and must have been felt badly in the early days of computing, when slow machines carried out execution (hence the need to devise cunning debugging tactics). While our machines may have become faster over the years, this fretful computational wait is nonetheless still effective, and that by definition. When data is understood as program, execution speaks not only to the uncertain but also to the undecidable.

Query {the Logic of Request && Response};

Yet data can, obviously, be understood as data, be they big or small. Data as input or output of a given program or platform can be framed by the notion of query. In today’s big data regimes, extracting data from online or social media platforms becomes one of the most important methods in computational culture and a practice in which the concept of query is critical (Soon 2016, 132; Snodgrass and Soon 2019). The concept and method of querying databases are concerned with selecting and extracting specific data records with both inputs and outputs. The execution of a query is a two-way communication process that is both a request and a response. A query has the capacity to specify, create, and identify relations through the logic of request and response, symbolized by the SQL “SELECT” syntax used in database systems. A networked program necessarily needs to wait for the response to its queried request. This waiting is precisely uncertain not just as a mathematical problem but also as a practical execution in a big data regime where a database is subjected to the complexity of the query itself, the configurations of machines, the geographic locations of servers, the number of records addressed by the query, and many other infrastructural parameters beyond the undecidable logic of computation.

Web queries have become a standard package of social media platforms, at least in the case of the major companies across the Eastern and Western continents, including but not limited to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Sina Weibo, WeChat, and Twitter. One of the important aspects of dynamic web services, according to Tim O’Reilly (2005), who popularized the term Web 2.0, is how data querying and management allow a form of “remixability”—that is, to “remix the data into new services.” This type of data remixability includes not only the capturing, storing, and organizing of data but also their spatial redistribution. As a result, many websites have shifted their paradigm from the concept of single “sites” to programmable “platforms” (Helmond 2015, 35). People can now program, build, and extend the offering of the platform and redistribute services via the availability of web queries, also known as application programming interfaces (APIs). These programming interfaces enable the execution of queries on various distinct sites (spatial dimensions) and at various asynchronous times (temporal dimensions).

Today, many APIs are free to use but feature certain practical and epistemological restrictions. Most platforms focus on technical and prescriptive usage of their APIs but do not expose how data is actually being queried within their private guarded databases. Without a visible “algorithmic” picture, it is extremely difficult to grasp the priorities and logics involved in modern data queries. Important questions arise from such an opaque relation: What are the assumptions behind highly structured APIs? What is prioritized and, consequently, what is included and excluded from the responded data format? Queries exhibit a certain material power that executes the inclusion and exclusion of specific types and ranges of data. When we request search results from Google via its API, for example, what do Google’s algorithms mean by the “most relevant” or top ten search results? What are the relationships between the search results, the business decisions, and the individuals’ locations, histories, and preferences?[1]

The answers to these questions, particularly in the present moment of opaque platform politics, are largely hidden. Black-boxed according to a variety of computational, economic, and political reasons, such forms of information hiding spread their particular forms of illegibility, partial knowledges, or outright unknowns in a way that infuses the network with a pervasive sense of ongoing uncertainty. While parameters and decisions can be changed and updated in a seamless way, the state and logic of platforms are never transparent and static. The aforementioned sense of anxious waiting, which lies at the heart of the definition of computation and its executions, is in such instances overlaid with this uncertainty in regard to the composition of queries for big data regimes—queries that we have become productively accustomed to yet highly dependent upon. In this way, executing a query is an uncertain act that conflates languages, symbols, meanings, geopolitical decisions, and dynamic, uncertain consequences.

#metoo

Not all uncertainty comes from the machine or is generated (yet) by the calculations performed by machines and their captured data. Uncertainty also inhabits affective data bodies (Tyżlik-Carver 2018) that reveal big data’s inability to function without them. An affective data body is the other that has been left out, a material witness (Schuppli 2020) that does not return computational results, showing that not all count the same, and some do not count at all unless they are left to be exploited; not beautiful and structured data but messy, dirty, and hard to represent, let alone compute. If queried data concern the material powers of inclusion and exclusion, affective data are then registered by the body left in pain, or left numb, or overworked, or tired, or unwanted, or dead. Or it is a body healed, or both in pain and healed. Affective data manifest in each body that struggles and waits to “become eligible for recognition” (Butler 2009, iv).

Still, affective data can be captured and shoved into the wide-open mouth of big data regimes. They can be simultaneously tagged by each subject using the hashtag syntax to communicate and register that #icantbreathe and #metoo. It is at the point of the critical-mass flooding of social media communication channels that affective data are returned as big data queries and metadata callout: the other of surveillance, reclaiming data tagging to register abuse. The #metoo campaign can be thought of as a query for empowerment and empathy. Originally initiated by Tarana Burke as the Me Too movement ten years before the 2017 campaign and before the # hashtag was even a thing, the campaign was meant to build a coalition and to give young women the power of empathy and recognition that they are not alone in their experience of sexual assault, abuse, and exploitation (Justbeinc 2017; Vagianos 2017; West 2017).

Alyssa Milano’s tweeting #metoo optimized this decade-old campaign, returning 1.7 million tweets within a week and reaching twelve million Facebook posts in twenty-four hours (CBS/Associated Press 2017; Park 2017). Is this optimization a glitch in the system that otherwise has sustained racist and misogynist normcore off-line and online while keeping others silenced? Or does it again illustrate how some voices are heard above others? Accountable to the original cause, however, the #metoo campaign is a contemporary intervention into online and off-line spaces of (white) male hegemony in power structures. It is both a computational and affective query that reveals affinities between women of color, nonbinary people, white women, and computational infrastructures whose relations seem only contingent upon the uncertainties of affective data bodies as they intervene in systems of data power by saying #metoo and waiting to be heard through the algorithmic display of social media feeds. Uncertainties of the computational and human kind lead to formations of a variety of constellations and cultures that result from tragic events or cases of abuse, from Gamergate to #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, and others to come.

exit(0);

As we have consistently argued here and elsewhere (Pritchard, Snodgrass, and Tyżlik-Carver 2018), execution can be thought of as a continual resolution, a composing and rendering of various generative, undecidable, invisible, affective, and intersecting uncertainties that unfold within the context of present-day computational cultures and infrastructures. The seamlessly ungraspable relations that result from executions are concealed within a conflation of languages, symbols, and meanings with technical, cultural, and political decisions. As the term execution may suggest, this conflation constitutes a form of violence at once effected and effaced, disguised under a moniker of lawful, interactive rationality.

Even though computational systems seem to perform in a purely deterministic, axiomatic, and strict way, or at least seem to be trying to, they actually do not. Contrary to the common-sense notion that “computational systems are formal axiomatic systems” (Fazi 2018, 98), which would imply that any computational claims can be directly deduced from a set of immutable axiomatic “truths,” we rather think of computation as fundamentally uncertain and undecidable. Assuredly, computation can be said to be formal (in the sense that a programming language is), yet it is not axiomatic. As such, being formal, prescriptive, and even tyrannical (Gauthier 2018) does not preclude computation from being uncertain. As in the cases of the halting problem, big data query, and the #metoo campaign, we see that formal systems and affective data bodies already expose their own indeterminacy, necessarily. As stated above, there is no certainty that a finite set of instructions given to a machine (be it SQL statements, Siri voice commands, x86 instructions, or otherwise) will inevitably produce a finite result in due time. Beyond possible infinite loops, the definition of computability is itself commingled with the notion of time, and it is for this reason that contemporary computer scientists and mathematicians talk about computational heuristics rather than computational axiomatics. It is through this notion of perpetual wait that the concept of execution speaks to the uncertain: waitingforGodot.exe.

Notes

1. See a full discussion on the entanglement of affordances in Audrey Samson and Winnie Soon “Network affordances: Unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW.” Fibreculture Journal 24 (2015).

References

Butler, Judith. 2009. “Performativity, precarity and sexual politics.” AIBR, Revista de Antropolgia Iberoamericana 4 (3): i–xiii.

CBS/Associated Press. 2017. “More than 12m ‘me too’ Facebook posts, comments, reactions in 24 hours.” CBS News, October 17, 2017. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/metoo-more-than-12-million-facebook-posts-comments-reactions-24-hours/.

Fazi, Beatrice. 2018. Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Fowler, Susan J. 2017. “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber.” Susan Fowler (blog). February 19, 2017. https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber.

Gauthier, David. 2018. “On commands and executions: Tyrants, spectres and vagabonds.” In Executing Practices, edited by Helen Pritchard, Eric Snodgrass, and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, 69–84. London: Data Browser 06/Open Humanities Press.

Halberstam, Judith. 1998. “Automating gender: Postmodern feminism in the age of the intelligent machine.” In Sex/ Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology, edited by Patrick D. Hopkins, 468–483. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Helmond, Anne. 2015. “The web as platform: Data flows in social media.” PhD diss., University of Amsterdam.

Justbeinc. 2017. “The movement.” http://justbeinc.wixsite.com/justbeinc/the-me-too-movement.

Kleene, Stephen Cole. 1952. Introduction to Metamathematics. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Matsakis, Louise. 2017. “Google employee’s anti-diversity manifesto goes ‘internally viral.’” Motherboard, August 5, 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzbm4a/employees-anti-diversity-manifesto-goes-internally-viral-at-google.

Miley, Leslie. 2015. “Thoughts on diversity part 2: Why diversity is difficult.” Tech Diversity Files, November 3, 2015. https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/thought-on-diversity-part-2-why-diversity-is-difficult-3dfd552fa1f7.

O’Reilly, Tim. 2005. “What is Web 2.0.” O’Reilly, September 30, 2005. http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html.

Park, Andrea. 2017. “#metoo reaches 85 countries with 1.7 million tweets.” CBS News, October 24, 2017. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/metoo-reaches-85-countries-with-1-7-million-tweets/.

Piccinini, Gualtiero. 2011. “The physical Church-Turing thesis: Modest or bold?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (4): 733–769.

Pritchard, Helen, Eric Snodgrass, and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, eds. 2018. Executing Practices. London: Data Browser 06/Open Humanities Press.

Samson, Audrey, and Winnie Soon. 2015. “Network affordances: Unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW.” Fibreculture Journal 24. http://twentyfour.fibreculturejournal.org/2015/06/04/44/.

Schuppli, Susan. 2020. Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Snodgrass, Eric, and Winnie Soon. 2019. “API practices and paradigms: Exploring the protocological parameters of APIs as key facilitators of sociotechnical forms of exchange.” First Monday 24 (2). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i2.9553.

Soon, Winnie. 2016. “Executing liveness: An examination of the live dimension of code inter-actions in software (art) practice.” PhD diss., University of Aarhus.

Turing, Alan M. 1950. “Computing machinery and intelligence.” Mind 59 (236): 433–460.

Tyżlik-Carver, Magdalena. 2018. “Posthuman curating and its biopolitical executions: The case of curating content.” In Executing Practices, edited by Helen Pritchard, Eric Snodgrass, and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, 171–190. London: Data Browser 06/Open Humanities Press.

Vagianos, Alanna. 2017. “The ‘me too’ campaign was created by a black woman 10 years ago.” Huffington Post, October 17, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-me-too-campaign-was-created-by-a-black-woman-10-years-ago_us_59e61a7fe4b02a215b336fee.

West, Lindy. 2017. “Yes, this is a witch hunt. I’m a witch and I’m hunting you.” New York Times, October 17, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/columnists/weinstein-harassment-witchunt.html.

21

Expertise

Caroline Bassett

Expertise, an apparently straightforward term, seems to direct attention to more practical or even instrumental registers than do explorations of the computational that focus on critiques of computer intelligence or investigate computational versus human ontologies. For instance, it is often invoked in policy arenas in relation to skill levels, used to define “desirable” competency (or a lack thereof) in the computational among humans. Expert systems in computer science are often defined in similarly bloodless terms: “Software that uses databases of expert knowledge to offer advice or make decisions” in specialized areas (as a GitHub primer puts it) or, as Wikipedia puts it, reasoning through bodies of knowledge via an inference engine and a knowledge base.

Closer inspection of the term complicates matters, however. Exploring big data and expertise demands paying attention to the computational as a material formation and to big data operations as knowledge productions embedded in sociopolitical contexts. Another way to think about an expert system, then—very differently from the way the term is used in computer science, although still comprehending the computational—is to let it define an assemblage constituted by data, algorithms, humans, and machines, in which expertise is held by various actants, to various degrees, and in various forms (as a data collection, as “native” knowledge, as a learned skill or professional body of knowledge, for instance), that also circulates: what is jointly produced through these operations, which are themselves neither closed nor autonomous, is an expert system. Such systems are powerful, moreover, operating as forms of governance in multiple contexts and at multiple scales.

At the heart of questions about big data and expertise are three issues. The first concerns expertise and its automation and asks what happens to human expertise in light of the operations of big data and algorithmic calculation that take over what “we” (humans) earlier did “for ourselves.” Addressing this means considering how computational expertise differs from human expertise and/or asking which kind of expertise is preferable. But it also requires questioning some boundaries: Is the kind of expertise involved in computing solutions by applying algorithms to big data sets entirely at odds with the kinds of expert interpretation a human specialist (a scientist, a technologist, or a humanist, for instance) might provide? Is human expertise, in other words, nontechnological? If not—and that is what is suggested here—then we need to consider big data and automation not as all new but as a further evolution, emerging from currently existing forms of expertise, which may already be to some extent technological. There is no certain division.

The second issue concerns ways in which the expert systems big data coconstitutes are architected and operated in the interests of markets and dominant values—a matter of social control and discrimination. Expertise is at the heart of data justice. That is, the distribution of computational expertise across various groups, or strata, of humans, and by corporations or states, matters. We need to ask who—or which group—has expertise in designing and running big data systems (we should also ask who does not and why that may be the case). There is plenty of data to be had, so why is so little truly open and available for public use or even access? We live in an era of plenty and austerity (Bassett 2015).

The third issue concerns how expertise in general circulates in the “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1999) of computational capitalism, where what we know and/or are given as “truth” is pervasively mediated through data-driven filter bubbles and associated architectures and where what is gathered feeds forward into new exercises in data collection and algorithmic processing.

Expert Systems Beget Expert Systems

All these issues feed into an overarching concern: how new economies of expert knowledge production, involving big data resources, machine learning, and algorithmic sorts of various kinds, produce a particular epistemic culture. This term, following Knorr Cetina’s (1999) definition, indicates those processes and practices through which various forms of knowledge—hermeneutic and empirical, collaborative and individual, made in text, or in sound, or in performance, or with computational technologies—are, as Knorr Cetina puts it, “grounded” or “made meaningful.”

The Politics of Expertise

That expertise is political—made and above all validated in the world, as well as being objectively measurable, such as a degree of skill, an amount of knowledge, a capacity to calculate—might be easier to understand in the circumstances in which this chapter is being written. We are, after all, in a moment when populism is producing a distrust of experts and when a visceral anticomputing impulse is arising in response to big data-driven events—the sale of our votes (Facebook/Cambridge Analytica), notorious instances of algorithmic bias and racism, rising concern around manipulation and designed “addiction,” and ambient unease concerning forms of computing that route around human discernment or decision-making capacities to generate a new form of behaviorism: the supernudge (Alter 2017; Bassett 2018; Wu 2017; Zuboff 2019).

Let us break this down a little. Experts are not trusted. A networked culture has arisen that does not necessarily regard other people’s information or knowledge as valid or regard as valid the validation of information by experts. Critics of the contemporary formation widely claim (often despairingly) that experience has come to trump expertise as grounds for “truth.” This formulation, while useful, is also inadequate since it fails to fully register that what is taken “as truth” is often not what is directly experienced but rather what circulates through permeable and impervious filters and/or filter bubbles. Experience is thoroughly mediated and not only across media networks narrowly conceived; the issue is the mediation of everyday life and culture by the computational. Computers—experts at calculation and at dealing with data at new scales (not only the hugely large but also the vanishingly small)—are implicated in a crisis of legitimation. This is not only felt by the neoliberals and the new right. For the left, Chantal Mouffe (2018), for instance, argues that technocratic rationality has produced a situation in which politics, reduced to “a mere technical issue . . . managing the established order, a domain reserved for experts,” alienates.

A myriad of anticomputing articles, books, publications, declarations, and, increasingly, legislation respond to the contemporary situation by explicitly critiquing big data and the algorithmic operations undertaken using it and also attack those organizations deemed to be responsible for its pervasive and intrusive expansion (see, e.g., Carr 2016; Noble 2018; O’Neil 2017; Zuboff 2019). The key charges are these: that computers know too much and so do the companies that organize their operations to design us out of decision-making—the platforms, for instance, whose software expertly, often silently, directs or nudges us toward news, events, and people that already agree with us. These platform operations, obsessed with collecting our data and operating on it, infantilize us, deskill us, and make us less expert. Jaron Lanier talks of cultural neoteny—and also advises us to log off (Lanier 2010, 2018).

These structures of feeling, widely circulating although also disputed, join matters of expertise to matters of computational culture in very direct ways. If society has a truth problem, big data operations, bucket surveillance, and platform capitalism are implicated in that. They are variously viewed as having produced the situation or as amplifying already existing social divisions and trust issues. The position taken often relies on whether technology is understood as more or less determining and is often polarized: the old binaries—Kittler (2006) and McLuhan (1994) versus theorists of the social construction of technologies, offering certainty but unable to grapple with complexity—tend to revive with the rise of new technologies and are as limited as ever.

Digital Humanities?

These issues directly inform scholarship. It is important to ask what it means to be engaged in (again, implicated in) big data research—as media studies, digital media studies, or digital humanities students and researchers, for instance. What does it mean to become expert in studying with the digital? What are we giving away? We need to ask this, particularly in an age when “everybody” hates computers for the reasons above but when those same computers are nonetheless ever more deeply embedded in social and technical systems. Anticomputing sentiment has so far failed to slow the rise of computational culture: industry predictions say there will be twenty billion sensors in our world by the 2020s.

Expertise as Method

Hopefully, it has already become clear that computational expertise can be explored as something operating in the world. Expertise can be used, moreover, as a research probe, as early science and technology studies (STS) researchers noted (e.g., Collins and Evans 2002). One of the interesting things about using expertise heuristically is that it can produce a series of insights into knowledge practices as operations, symbolically and practically enacted, involving human and machine forms of expertise. The contrast is with accounts that rely on making binary divisions (or ontological distinctions) between human and machine “intelligence,” thereby holding (machine) logicality and (human) rationality (to use Joseph Weizenbaum’s [1976] late twentieth-century terms) entirely apart.

Forms of Human and Technological Expertise

Perhaps what has been said so far produces a frustrated response, but what is expertise? When the British government minister Michael Gove said, “Enough of experts,” what kind of expertise was he ditching? When Chantal Mouffe (2018) invokes the term expert in her response to populism, what does she mean? We talk about technological experts or expert systems, or expertise in big data or big data operations, as those that will obviate the need for human forms of expertise since they will produce solutions. But what constitutes expertise or expert knowledge, human or machinic?

Expertise is defined in multiple ways (Collins and Evans 2002, 44). Looking at some of these definitions can lay the groundwork for a better understanding of expertise in times of big data. First, expertise has been explored phenomenologically as the individual acquisition and laying down of a substantial store of knowledge so it may be drawn upon instinctively. This is how Dreyfus developed it in his classic account (Dreyfus 1997, 2005; Farrell 2012). Strikingly, even here there is a role for technological prosthesis. The expert may “play through” extensions so the tennis racquet becomes felt as part of the body, for instance. Moreover, if expertise here entails the conscious acquisition of a skill (mastery of a practice or laying down of a body of knowledge or information), it also demands a form of forgetting, requiring that rules, possible plays, or knowledge banks are drawn upon instinctively rather than consciously: there is a moment of automation even in this most human account.

Like Dreyfus, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explored expertise as an embodied practice. However, he went on to understand it as a material-social affordance: habitus is a social theory of expertise, and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field essentially understands how expertise plays out or can be operationalized/capitalized in specialized sectors and how these sectors map onto each other (Bourdieu 1993). In early work on science and democracy, scholars in the STS tradition, notably Harry Collins and Robert Evans (2002), also explored expertise as a social relation in their probes into public science and knowledge production and circulation. A significant element of their theorization of expertise was that they understood it to take many different forms. At one point this produced a periodic table of expertise. Notably, alongside the type of specialist knowledge that might be directly contributory to a field, they identified interactional expertise—defined as enabling the holder “to interact interestingly with participants and carry out a sociological analysis” (Collins and Evans 2002, 254)—and later added to this the category of referred expertise, effectively a mode of expertise that entails intermediary functions. Work in this vein, expanding what counts as expertise, opens the way to reconsider how expertise is made, how it combines in various forms and measures, and how it travels or crosses boundaries (see, e.g., Grundmann 2016). There is also clearly room within these expansive definitions of expertise, which do not rely simply on naming a skill or knowledge level, to consider how expertise might be held by human and nonhuman actants. These explorations of expertise were part of debates in STS around what we might now term matters of fact and matters of concern, which prefigured Bruno Latour’s and others’ development of actor-network theory.

A related series of inquiries undertaken by STS scholars, including Cynthia Cockburn (1983) and Maureen McNeil (1987), explored technological expertise and gender politics in relation to the British press and (then) new technology in the late twentieth century, when bitter battles for media control took the form of deskilling disputes. Their work explored how these conflicts around technological expertise, between classes, were also gendered: what was regarded as expert craftwork for men, so that unionized women had to fight to get into the machine rooms of the large presses, had already been defined as routinized computational inputting for woman word processors. What counts as technological expertise is gendered, their studies showed. If this work now seems relevant only in historical terms, then consider the current paucity of female scholars in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (particularly computer science) and the unforeseen and regretted—but nonetheless systematically produced—social bias in big data-driven knowledge production and practice (face recognition, algorithms of oppression [Noble 2018]) and reconsider.

Coming back to the contemporary moment, how does this consideration of how expertise has been variously defined—in narrow skill terms, as a social affordance, and in relation to power—help? It might let us understand big data operations not in terms of solutions, or even in terms of solutions and then interpretations, but in terms of ecologies or circuits of expertise, in which various capacities and resources are held by multiple actants—human and machinic—and are also circulated in interested ways. We can also argue that the outcomes of these expert operations are valued differently depending on the forms in which they are produced and delivered and by whom or what. This way of defining and understanding expertise in relation to big data operations can not only offer a counter to Silicon Valley certainties but can also help provide new ways to retheorize big data as epistemic culture. It may also let us look for ways in which particular forms of expert systems tend to produce what the postcolonial theorist Lewis R. Gordon, exploring the art world’s refusal to count what lies outside of its received (European) parameters, has recently termed epistemic closure (Evans 2019).

Thinking about big data in terms of expertise adds another dimension to the already established arguments against the wilder claims about big data—which are that it may produce totally independent and “therefore” totally neutral solutions, an idea as impossible as it is obnoxious. Scholars such as boyd and Crawford (2012) have convincingly undermined big data’s claims to neutrality, and since then a series of wake-up calls has been generated as big data demonstrates its utter lack of impartiality. These range from Tay the Nazi robot learning misogynist racism from the net to the more serious—because they reflect already more embedded systems—series of discoveries of racial bias in face recognition and profiling systems, which (like Tay) are learning from their earlier experience and consolidating their own classificatory closures. Joy Buolamwini’s (2018) work critiquing bias is exemplary here and has infiltrated into public fora effectively.

Expertise is central to the politics of big data as it pertains to questions of democracy and knowledge because the valuation of big data or data-driven outputs partly rests on how these outputs are judged and because the assembling of the expert systems—the big data-driven combinations that increasingly mediate our experience and offer us information—is a nonneutral and interested affair that dissembles precisely that fact. Expertise is not simply a matter of neutral know-how, a level of skill or capacity above basic literacy for humans—and the parallel for machines might be untrained machine operations on data sets that are not preorganized. It is an operation, perhaps itself a sociotechnological operation and in general an operation with multiple components, actors, and contexts, which is shaped by the social systems to which it contributes, which it articulates, and in which it is made. Within these operations the various capacities of different actors, and their expertise in its various forms, afford different possibilities for knowledge production. Within the material-social formations that constitute our contemporary epistemic culture, expertise might be an affordance. Perhaps to the extent that it is a technique, expertise is itself a technology. How inhuman that technology may become is a matter of conjecture.

Machine-Learned Expertise?

The final issue addressed here develops from that. It asks how computer expertise—an affordance, a technology with an affordance—is developing and what the consequences might be for the epistemic cultures of the future. We already know big data and its cultures are messy, untidy, and bound up with the social world and that computational expertise is bound in with human expertise in circuits, producing and validating knowledge, information, and news. In their real operations, big data systems are far from their ideological framing.

But this binding together of human and machine expertise is contingent, based on particular technologies as well as particular political economies; the intersection of the two is what gives us an epistemic culture. So let us consider what happens as the balance between human forms of expertise and computer expertise continues to shift. With new technologies, new questions arise around the distribution of expertise in a knowledge economy fueled by big data. Notably, we need to ask what machine learning, which represents a further step in the process of automating various forms of expertise, does to the various human and machine circuits across and through which forms of expertise are made and shared. A standard view of this coming scenario says that expert computers will increasingly take over ratiocination and expert calculation and that human input—paradoxically enough, given the current crisis of expertise/experience—will be limited to the affective, the sensory, the felt. This view produces a solution of a kind to the current crisis of legitimation that is chilling in that it is entirely technocratic.

Against that vision, we need to invoke the more complex, expansive, and collective understanding of expertise with which critical theory, STS, and feminists have provided us. As computers become more expert in parsing and operating on data and as data sets get larger, the fear is that our skills, our expertise, and our knowledges are less and less needed or used: that we are automated out of the circuit or become valued precisely for our affective sensitivity rather than our laid down and/or peculiarly human expertise. But as computers become more lively (active, not alive), we do not have to become more inert (to adapt Donna Haraway’s [1991] formulation). In these circumstances, or in response, finding new ways to attend to increasingly automated knowledge production and developing forms of expertise in machine supervision—even if (at least some) of the skills used by computers to produce outputs cannot be directly parsed by humans—will be of the essence for a politics of expertise. Our computational expertise, you might say, will need to change. We need to coevolve with our machines if we are to generate an accountable knowledge politics around big data as it develops.

References

Alter, Adam. 2017. Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching. London: Bodley Head.

Bassett, Caroline. 2015. “Plenty as a response to austerity? Big data expertise, cultures, and communities.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 548–563.

Bassett, Caroline. 2018. “The computational therapeutic: Exploring Weizenbaum’s ELIZA as a history of the present.” AI and Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0825-9.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Sociology in Question. London: Sage.

boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. 2012. “Critical questions for big data.” Information, Communication and Society 15 (5): 662–679.

Buolamwini, Joy. 2018. “Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81: 1–15. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf.

Carr, Nicholas. 2016. The Glass Cage: Where Automation Is Taking Us. London: Penguin.

Cockburn, Cynthia. 1983. Brothers: Male Dominance and Technical Change. London: Pluto.

Collins, H. M, and Robert Evans. 2002. “The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience.” Social Studies of Science 32: 235–296.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1997. “The current relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment.” International Focusing Institute. Accessed August 15, 2019. http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/dreyfus2.html.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2005. “Expertise in real world contexts.” Organization Studies 26 (5): 779–792. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840605053102.

Evans, Brad. 2019. “Histories of violence: Thinking art in a decolonial way: Brad Evans interviews Lewis R. Gordon.” Larb, June 2019.

Farrell, Robert. 2012. “Reconsidering the relationship between generic and situated IL approaches: The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition in formal information literacy learning environments, part I.” Library Philosophy and Practice 842. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1989&context=libphilprac.

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McNeil, Maureen. 1987. “Introduction.” In Gender and Expertise, edited by Maureen McNeil, 1–9. London: Free Association Press.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. “Populists are on the rise but this can be a moment for progressives too.” Guardian, September 10, 2018.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression. New York: New York University Press.

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Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1976. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

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22

Field

Shannon Mattern

Few areas are of greater existential uncertainty than the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain life.[1] Nevertheless, in a widely circulated July 2017 New York Magazine article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells (2017) began with a rather definitive proclamation: “It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.” The article sparked a global tsunami of retorts questioning the veracity of its evidence and expressing uncertainty over the impact of its doomsday demeanor: Would it shock people into action or paralyze them in fear? Yet Wallace-Wells argued that what we needed was some bold, if chilling, certainty. He lamented scientists’ and journalists’ “timid language,” the hard-to-grasp smallness and bigness of the science’s numbers, and the broader culture’s “uncertainty about uncertainty,” which the new US administration had exploited in justifying its retreat from the Paris climate accord and its subversion of domestic climate policy. For years a small number of climate skeptics within the scientific community have empowered outspoken US politicians, certain about their own uncertainty, to “exert enough leverage on policy debates to counterbalance an almost complete consensus among the world’s climate scientists” (Freudenburg, Gramling, and Davidson 2008, 19; see also Oreskes and Conway 2010). A little doubt floods out overwhelming conviction.

Some of those skeptics question scientists’ use of simulation models to predict global warming patterns—or to make claims regarding their anthropogenic nature. Yet because of the massive temporal and spatial scales at which climate operates, those models are integral to the research. As Paul Edwards (2010, xiv–xv) explains, “You can’t study global systems experimentally; they are too huge and complex. Instead . . . everything we know about the global climate depends on . . . computer models.” And those computer models constitute knowledge infrastructures that are themselves huge and complex; they are composed of multiple institutions, instruments, measurements, protocols, funding sources, and big, big data. Understanding and predicting climate, Edwards continues, is “one of the hardest challenges science has ever tackled, because it involves many interlocking systems, including the atmosphere, the oceans, the cryosphere (ice and snow), land surfaces (soil, reflectance), and the biosphere (ecosystems, agriculture, etc.).” The data that feed those models are harvested from contemporary and historical instrument readings—going back 150 years or so—from surface stations, weather ships, ocean buoys, and satellites (see World Weather Watch 2018). But the ability to model deeper historical patterns over the past millennium, or for a few hundred thousand years, depends upon the use of proxies from the field: ice cores, marine sediments, pollens, tree rings, corals, boreholes, or caves’ stalagmites and stalactites, which index past climatic events and stand in for empirical measurements (see Edwards 2010, 2016).

The work of predicting the fate of our icebergs and isthmuses, our corals and coastal regions, our flora and fauna, and the fields they live within requires that we turn to the “field” itself as a data source.[2] Climate’s big data archive is as big as the world; it is the world. The geological field or strategically selected samples of it become archival documents in the same way that, for pioneering information scientist Suzanne Briet (2006, 10), “the photographs and the catalogues of stars, the stones in a museum of mineralogy, and the animals that are catalogued and shown in a zoo” are documents. Briet famously proclaimed, in 1951, that even an antelope, in the right epistemological context, constitutes a document. In some subdomains of geology, Sarah Ramdeen (2015, 214) explains, “Physical objects become data once they have been used in research, along with their associated metadata and descriptions. . . . There is a transition from a rock being just a rock, to it now representing scientific knowledge with this connection to the documentation.”

There is a long history within the geosciences of considering the earth itself, the terrestrial field, as an archive—not unlike the one that historians consult. With the discovery of stratigraphy in the early nineteenth century, David Sepkoski (2017, 57) explains, geohistorians, naturalists, and antiquarians came to see the earth “as having a deep history, which could be ‘read’ in the succession of fossils embedded in the strata of the earth’s crust.” Even earlier, in 1766, Swedish chemist Torbern Olof Bergman proposed that fossils “are actually medallions of a sort, which were laid down on the originating earth surface, whose layers are archives older than all [human] annals, and which appropriately investigated give much light on the natural history of this our dwelling place” (quoted in Sepkoski 2017, 59). According to Sepkoski, such archival/antiquarian/geological analogies multiplied through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and researchers extended their archive across multiple levels: the earth itself, the fossil record or specimen collections extracted from the earth, visual representations of those collections, textual catalogues, and then, eventually, databases.

Climate scientists, paleoclimatologists, paleo-oceanographers, geologists, and researchers in related fields probe global patterns across deep time using not only voluminous databases and material records collections but also substantial slices of earth and sea—all big data in their own way. In a longer article from which this chapter is adapted, I describe how ice cores and sediment, soil, and rock samples are collected in the field, processed in the archive, preserved, and transformed into documents. I explain, for example, how a sediment core is harvested at sea, brought to a repository, segmented, halved, documented, cataloged, QR coded, refrigerated, and parceled out for testing at labs all around the world, which use a variety of methods, scientific instruments, and disciplinary knowledges. A tray full of mud—which, in any other context, might seem to be of quite uncertain aesthetic and epistemic value—can here unlock millions of years of environmental history: the remains of microorganisms’ shells can signal changes in ocean currents and species migration, sediment accumulations can chronicle hundreds of thousands of years of seismic history, detritus can track the routes of floating icebergs, and fossilized bacteria can offer clues to the origins of life. The cores at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Core Repository, which I visited in July 2017, archive 130 million years of geological history. Yet all these data are not simply latent in the cores, waiting to be discovered. Edwards refutes the skeptic’s notion that “real” (read: certain) climate data are independent from flawed simulation models: “Without models,” Edwards (2010, xiii) argues, “there are no data.” Similarly, without geological archives there would be no big climate data. Archival practices shape not only how vast databases are structured and shared but also how the terrestrial field yields information. They make rocks into records.

Uncertain Practices in the Archival Field

While the geological curators with whom I spoke referred to their work as “archiving,” we might assume that their everyday material practices are quite unlike those in a manuscript or municipal archive. You will not find many white gloves in a sediment repository, for example, or electric saws in a manuscript archive. Ramdeen, a geologist and information scientist, celebrates geological archives’ historical commitment to “curation” but laments their lack of expertise in collection management (which sometimes means weeding out materials), metadata, user services, and long-term care and storage. “Concerns over sustainability and interoperability are high,” she says (Ramdeen 2015, 216). Meanwhile, academic records manager Eira Tansey, who works with more traditional textual media, regrets her own field’s estrangement from the physical field—its reluctance to look out into the terrain beyond its own anthropocentric borders. “We archivists think of records as something created by, for, and about humans. . . . Anything from the natural world may be considered data, and historically we have tended to leave data to other professions” (Tansey 2017; see also Loewen 1991–1992).

Despite these professional and protocolar gaps, core repositories, marine sample collections, manuscript collections, and digital archives have much more in common than the “bigness” of their collections. They are all fighting against big uncertainties too: deterioration, uncertain funding and institutional support, evolving professional standards, and unpredictable threats, including power outages and malfunctioning equipment. And they are all operating in a world prone to rising temperatures, sea levels, and geopolitical tensions. Geoscientists’ collections, which could very well contain chunks of icebergs that no longer exist or water samples from lakes since evaporated, are explicitly dedicated to examining these environmental concerns; here, environmental uncertainty is embedded in the archival content. Traditional, media-based archivists, meanwhile, are coming to realize that environmental uncertainty should be transforming their archival practice. “We need to completely rethink how to integrate climate change adaptation into our existing work,” Tansey (2017) says, “from appraisal to processing to preservation” because simply collecting documentation of environmental instability is not enough.

That larger landscape of risk also produces some fundamental archival ironies. Maintaining a robust analog or digital archive of climate-related records—whether in the form of mud or manuscripts or metadata—is an energy- and natural-resource-intensive endeavor that has the potential to exacerbate the environmental crises these collections serve to document. Preserving ice cores is perhaps the most illuminating (or shall we say “chilling”?) example. “The ability to preserve samples of glacial ice,” Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (2017, 3) note, “requires energy intensive forms of preservation in order to demonstrate how fossil-fuel-dependent capitalist societies have contributed to climate change.” We can draw parallels to other forms of frozen storage: blood banks, seed banks, frozen gametes of endangered species, and in vitro fertilization clinics, for example—many of which were featured in a beautifully illustrated New York Times Magazine article on “Arks of the Apocalypse” (coincidentally, the piece appeared only a week after Wallace-Wells’s doomsday prophecy; Wollan 2017). Ironies infuse these various manifestations of “cryopolitics”—of “freezing or suspending life in anticipation of future salvation” (Radin and Kowal 2017, 10; see also Starosielski 2016). These arks give us a sense that we are riding out the storm; they offer a convenient material form to our uncertainty about uncertainty. And, as a consequence, they can limit our sense of obligation to act in the present. Such archiving and recording projects—compelled by what Fernando Vidal and Nélia Dias (2015, 26) call an “endangerment sensibility”—“seem mainly remedial, recuperative, therapeutic, even palliative.” While ice core repositories can serve to substantiate the deleterious effects of “carbon-based capitalism,” these other frozen archives, Radin and Kowal (2017, 11, 13) argue, can keep us from acknowledging the “demise of the [carbon-based] political economic regime” and the myopia—the uncertainty—of our Western and anthropocentric ways of understanding life and history and progress.

Then again, to paraphrase Mark Twain, maybe the reports of carbon-based capitalism’s death are slightly exaggerated. The same archival records and methods used to advance preventative climate science are also used by enterprising governments and extraction industries to further exploit the earth’s resources. Archival practices can be applied toward uncertain ethical and political ends.

Yet by thinking across their collections and recognizing a shared commitment to resilience and responsibility, these curators—of code, codices, and cores—can help to build more sustainable institutions to better serve broader endeavors and create a more resilient world. Together, they can recognize the variety of “natural” and textual documents that yield critical data about geological, climatic, and related cultural processes and bring those processes to life for various patron groups. They can construct protocols and standards so that their collection materials are widely accessible and useful. They can advocate for adequate funding and other necessary forms of material support. And they can enhance each other’s practices by posing big questions—not only about the bigness of their data sets but about the epistemological and ontological breadth of their fields of operation and the great existential uncertainties they can help us face.[3]

Embracing Uncertainty and Loss

One of those big questions is about the inevitability of loss. There is growing recognition among cultural heritage institutions—such as archives, libraries, museums, and historical sites—that their own fields must grapple more seriously with precarity (Denton 2015; Project_ARCC 2018; Tansey 2015). Archaeological and heritage sites, because of their site-specificity, were among the first to engage in disaster planning. Libraries and archives—particularly those in flood-prone regions and coastal areas susceptible to rising sea levels—also recognize the need for foresight (Gordon-Clark 2012; Tansey et al. 2017). Assessing the sustainability of such collections, Tansey (2017) says, requires taking an “actuarial look,” soberly considering where particular vulnerable institutions live and assessing their insurability. There is no existing big data set to aid in such an analysis; Tansey and her colleague Ben Goldman are collecting these data themselves (Society of American Archivists 2017).

Information professionals will also have to reassess their workflows and priorities and perhaps apply more stringent appraisal practices in determining what is worth acquiring and preserving. The Archivists Responding to Climate Change group, of which Tansey is a member, proclaims that one of its responsibilities is to “preserve this epochal moment in history for future research and understanding”—and perhaps that work entails documenting uncertainty and loss (Project_ARCC 2018).

Cultural heritage institutions are committing to green building and to reducing the energy they use for everything from copy machines and book delivery services to climate-controlled storage facilities and big data management. Contemporary digital preservation standards, Goldman (2016, 5) explains, call for frequent verification and integrity checks, which “routinely lead to the duplication of the same content across multiple objects.” High resolution and redundancy—which are institutionalized through mantras such as “lots of copies keep stuff safe!”—ultimately require lots of energy. Goldman advocates that archivists instead set “acceptable levels of mutability” and degrees of “lossiness,” embracing what Bethany Nowviskie (2014), director of the Digital Library Foundation, calls “graceful degradation.” Archivist Rick Prelinger (2017) concurs, using an appropriately leaky metaphor: “If archives are to ride the rising waves, it won’t be as arks fully caulked to repel leaks, but as permeable wetlands capable of assimilating ebbs and flows.”

Ice melts and soil erodes outside the controlled environments we preserve them in. But those arks leak too. And maybe that is okay because it reminds us of all the ebbs and flows that our geological fields, and their archived proxies, have to contend with. That we have to contend with.

Notes

1. Portions of this chapter are adapted from Mattern (2017).

2. I am using field to synecdochically represent the broad earthy domain, including its glaciers, seabeds, and terrestrial rock and soil.

3. Librarians and archivists are marshalling their own collections and professional resources in promoting climate, science, and information literacies—not only among the marginalized communities who are perhaps most vulnerable to climate uncertainties but also among geological archivists and geoscientists, who could benefit from consulting with archivists and librarians about collection management, cataloging, preservation, and outreach. For more on marginalized communities’ representation within the information professions, see Tansey (2017).

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Tansey, Eira. 2017. “When the unbearable becomes inevitable: Archives and climate change.” Presentation to Fierce Urgencies: The Social Responsibility of Collecting and Protecting Data, Yale University, New Haven, CT, May 4, 2017. http://eiratansey.com/2017/05/16/fierce-urgencies-2017/.

Tansey, Eira, Ben Goldman, Tara Mazurczyk, and Nathan Piekielek. 2017. “Climate control: Vulnerabilities of American archives to rising seas, hotter days and more powerful storms.” Presentation to Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene Colloquium, New York University, New York, May 13–14, 2017. http://litwinbooks.com/laac2017abstracts.php.

Vidal, Fernando, and Nélia Dias. 2015. “The endangerment sensibility.” Preprint 466. Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. https://www.academia.edu/10232671/The_Endangerment_Sensibility.

Wallace-Wells, David. 2017. “The uninhabitable Earth.” New York Magazine, July 9, 2017. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html.

Wollan, Malia. 2017. “Arks of the apocalypse.” New York Times, July 13, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/magazine/seed-vault-extinction-banks-arks-of-the-apocalypse.html.

World Weather Watch. 2018. “Global observing system.” Accessed January 9, 2018. https://public.wmo.int/en/programmes/global-observing-system.

23

Figura

Frederik Tygstrup

Wie wundervoll sind diese Wesen,

Die, was nicht deutbar, dennoch deuten,

Was nie geschrieben wurde, lesen,

Verworrenes beherrschend binden

Und Wege noch im Ewig-Dunkeln finden.

—Hugo von Hofmannsthal 1894

In Hofmannsthal’s lyrical drama, the wonderful beings that can forge their way through the dark because of their ability to decipher the undecipherable and read what has never been written are those of the human kind, as seen from Death’s point of view. Death is a pragmatic character, literal and straightforward, whereas humans, on their side, can read virtually anything as a sign for something else as they try to rise beyond sad and factual mortality. By reading the face of the world figurally, humans also find meaning where none existed in the first place, thus binding chance and contingency as inalienable parts of their own interiority. This logic of the figural, of teasing out signification from what would appear insignificant, has traditionally been associated with the visionary and, in modern times, the gift of the poet to see and express correspondences and similarities. The gift of reading the figural today, however, seems to have come back in a different, nonhuman guise with the reading and writing machines of information technology. This chapter will look at these wonderful new beings through the traditional literary notion of the figural.

An alleged feature of what we call the information society is building upon large repositories of data that have been collected, stored, and systematized so they can be retrieved swiftly and conveniently in answer to any quest for knowledge, given the means and the right to access and interface with the repository. In addition to the questions of access and to whom the information is useful, which are ultimately political questions about the distribution of those who are empowered by information and those who are not, another set of questions—no less political—pertain to what we actually understand to be information. To approach such questions, a first exercise can be to sort out the meanings (and the bearings) of the three innocuous terms data, information, and knowledge.

Information, I indicated above, stems from data, and it retains its usefulness as knowledge. Starting out from the side of data, we can claim, supported by etymology, that data are the given—that with which we can work. In an electronic repository, the givens are of course given as digital code. But this code also has a referent: it is about something, which has been recorded by way of a metric measure, making it compatible with the digital machine. Data, in other words, are metric representations of specific features of an object. Harvesting data about something is the ability to represent that thing in terms of purported qualities that can be aligned with a numerical measure.

This relation to an object, which underwrites the representational quality of data, is, however, fragile. The data we possess depend on the metrics applied. We can, for instance, using Aristotle’s example, represent a human being by juxtaposing two metric distinctions: animals walking on four legs versus animals walking on two legs and animals with feathers versus animals without feathers. By applying metrics, in other words, we might not achieve a very full representation; we will only capture characteristics of the object that are within the purview of the metrics we put to use. And metric systems, in turn, are legion. They are grids that can reference their objects in so many ways. What data capture and present as givens, thus, are discrete aspects of representational objects; what they document, one could say, is not the individual object but a dividual part of it (using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s [1980] useful term), as it is eventually sliced up into measurable aspects.

Data do not stick very firmly to the objects they document; they just write out that which can be mapped by one or another metric grid, two legs or four, feathers or not. They are indices of something that might or might not be relevant for the object they touch upon and might or might not be salient for its representation. As such, data are barely information. To become information, data have to be molded in a way that makes them representative of an object about which they inform us, which might or might not coincide with the object they were originally extracted from. I might, for instance, provide particular health data, which are then included in the production of an entirely different object—say, the risk profile for developing diabetes in a segment of a population. Or I might provide data on my mortgage payments, which can similarly be merged into a new object, such as the volatility range of credit swap obligations. In both instances, my individual particularities are dividualized and washed up in new aggregated hyperobjects, to use Timothy Morton’s (2013) apt term. And, as any statistician will know, these hyperobjects can again be collated and broken down into a representation of myself should I, for instance, apply for an insurance policy.

Data derive from the objects they index without really representing them and become information once they have been mined and assembled in patterns that purport to represent an object of interest. Only then, finally, does information converge with knowledge proper. Knowledge is a matter of knowing how—that is, an affordance of agency. Once an object of interest is intended, information can help to consolidate this object and serve as the means of knowledge to exploit this object in suitable ways.

Tracing these transformational steps from data to information to knowledge, we become aware of a particular feature of the present knowledge economy—namely, that it performs a transaction between different object constructions based on the distribution and processing of information. An example is the transaction from what is indexed to me to what is characteristic of a population and from what is extracted from different transversal objects to what is imputed to me. From one object to another.

Intuitively, we would probably say that information is something predicated of discernible objects in the world. In the information society, however, the hierarchical relation between objects and information tends to get reversed. On the one hand, what seems to be information about an individual object increasingly stands out as the construction of a new, dividual object. And on the other, the aggregation of information about decoded, endlessly divided objects allows the recoding of completely new, transversal objects.

In this way we are dealing less with information-about-objects and more with a set of new objects-made-out-of-information. It remains true, of course, that information is what is known about these objects. In a slightly convoluted sense, the information is what we know about the objects we take an interest in because we have actually crafted these objects based on information and not because we might eventually corroborate our information by going back to the objects it allegedly represents. Ontologically speaking, then, we are left in a situation in which it is equally true that information derives from the objects it represents, and that information is what delineates and defines our objects of concern. The point here is that we should probably, if we are to understand how information societies work, leave this somewhat vicious circle behind. Instead, we should supplement the idea of information as representation of objects with a new attention toward, first, how information aligns with data protocols that dissolve the primary objects through a process of decoding through metric extraction and, second, how the intentionality of knowledge designates the terms in which new objects of interest are being recoded.

And still, information is key: it is the sole link that ties together the waning, decoded object and the emergent, recoded object. On both sides, information claims a power of representation and of representativity of the objects it trades. We cannot not think of it as information “about” something. But still its relation to the objects about which it provides information remains somewhat nonchalant, tearing some objects apart and putting other, somewhat unhabitual, objects together (such as volatility indexes or insurance applicants). Information is a spectral manifestation of concurring processes of decoding and recoding.

In this way the very notion of information itself has a particular ring of uncertainty to it. It somehow takes on a life of its own that radically transgresses the objects it originally designated (or dividual aspects of which it designated). Information in this uncertain sense goes from being a signifying matter to becoming raw material for creating other acts of signification, most notably to predicate qualities of new and altogether different objects. Information, as clustered data that have been harvested, becomes a material that can be molded, transformed, and meshed together by shrewd protocols and algorithms to eventually signify—to become information about—entirely new and different things.

In this situation, information oscillates between being signifying matter, carrying information about an object that has been parsed in dividual tranches, and being a material that can be used to craft new objects: objects whose very existence in the final analysis hinges upon being expressed by diligently distributed informational matter.

This two-pronged expressive capacity, sometimes referring back to something existing and sometimes instantiating an image of something new, is reminiscent of what in literary studies is known as a figural expression. Figural does not mean figurative, as in embellished or indirect allegorical designations. Figural representations stand out precisely by performing two operations at the same time: on the one hand, they point, like any conventional sign, to a referent, while on the other they also hold an individual, material surplus that differentiates them from any arbitrary sign by actually intervening in the “figuration” of a referent. Or put differently: the figural representation is distinctive by combining sign qualities, denoting an object, and thing qualities, which rather confect a “figure” to be contemplated.

In 1938 the German philologist Erich Auerbach published a long essay titled “Figura,” in which he traced the development of the term from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The term figura, he asserted,

expresses something living and dynamic, incomplete and playful, and it is equally certain that the word had a graceful sound which fascinated many poets. Perhaps it is no more than an accident that in our oldest examples figura occurs in combination with nova; but even if it is accidental, it is significant, for the notion of the new manifestation, the changing aspect, of the permanent runs through the whole history of the world. (Auerbach 1984, 12)

This logic of the figural—that it creates something new by “playfully” tinkering with the material of expression—is seminal to Auerbach. For the philologist, the history of culture and the history of the languages in which we talk about our world are consubstantial. The development of culture is a development of the way we talk about the world. We do not talk differently about the world in different cultures and historical ages, we produce different worlds as we inhabit them through talking about them in specific ways.

Hence the import of what happens when we are tinkering with signs: by treating the expressive material as a plastic and malleable matter—whether it consists of words, images, or numbers—we are not only creating new sensuous figures but also providing new ways of signifying and thus, eventually, of looking at the world. The crafting of new signs potentially gives us access to things in the world that thereby become tangible to our understanding and manipulation. Whereas the conventional sign, the one studied by structural linguistics, points toward its referent by representing it in a culturally agreed-upon linguistic image, the figurative sign can be considered as a production of reference. The figural is the advent of new ways of giving meaning to the world: a material figure with whose help something in the world can actually be imagined.

The two faces of the figura go back to Lucretius, who used the term about confected material things, and to the Roman rhetorical tradition, when the figure was a “figure of speech.” This view prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, when figural reading was to become shorthand for the biblical hermeneutics that would align the narratives of the New Testament to Old Testament doxa as figural representations. These two faces, according to Auerbach, reconverge in Dante’s work, where the abundance of figures are no longer mere transcriptions of other designations but, more importantly, reveal a poetic technique to create incarnations of ideas that have no previous form. Or again, new expressions enable us to grasp a content hitherto unavailable to us; figural expressions create reference.

To Auerbach, the figural mode is really the mode of literature. Literature invents a world, an imaginary universe, by manipulating its material—language—through techniques of defamiliarization, deformation, and reorganization. Literature, in this sense, is a technology of imagination, creating images of something we can imagine. And literature, in turn, becomes a technology for refreshing the way we see the world, as we learn to use the power of imagination to see what we could not see when we lacked the means to actually say what we see. Figural representation is not directly intended to address a well-known content or referent. The figure emerges through an oblique process of material manipulation; like the figure in a carpet, it is always crafted on the backside. In this way, the notion of the figural debunks the idea that “meaning,” the content of writing, comes packaged and distributed, wrapped in an expression. Content, rather, is something made, confected, according to the constraints and possibilities of a specific expressive material. Or put differently, it is heteronomous to the media and technologies of production.

The claim, then, is that the figural logic of literature appears to be a relevant methodological point of departure when we try to understand the role and function of information today, as it is now being crafted in digital information-processing apparatuses that facilitate the metabolism between data, information, and knowledge. We should note, first, that information is in fact not something “processed” at all as bits of evidence funneled through different handling mechanisms. Information is the very matter that is sculpted into the objects we handle and deal with, based on the creativity of the business of information. To avoid remaining hopelessly behind this genius as it breaks its way into the unknown, as Hofmannsthal perspicaciously had it, we might be better off thinking about the relation between information and the world in which we live as figural, not one of representation.

References

Auerbach, Erich. 1984. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit.

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. 1894. Der Tor und der Tod. Project Gutenberg.

Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

24

File

Craig Robertson

In a footnote to his history of the emergence of the database, historian of technology Thomas Haigh explains how punch cards could be used in a 1940s factory: “Each record would be punched onto one, or in some cases several, of the cards in the deck. The complete deck representing all the factory workers was known as a file, by analogy with conventional paper records. . . . Many jobs involved ‘merging’ information from several files—for example combining wage information from the master file of personnel cards with the attendance information punched onto a weekly punched card by an IBM time clock” (Haigh 2009, 21). As Haigh notes, the file analogy referred to paper records in an office; a “deck” of cards perhaps left too much to chance? The analogy identifies a file as a technology that facilitates gathering. A file arrangement allows the collection of pieces or bits of information that share something in common and gives that commonality a location, an address. As such, a file functions to enable storage and selection: it is used to gather and secure in a specific place a variety of papers, or (as an abstraction) zeros and ones.

The file as a technology of gathering has a long history that is increasingly getting the attention it deserves. Notably, media scholar Cornelia Vismann (2008) has provided a media archaeology of the legal file, which articulates gathering and circulation, creating authority through its format and the network its circulation forms. Vismann’s “file” has the material form of a hybrid book-folder. The file that provides the analogy Haigh references likely did not take that form. In the factory office, a paper file would probably have been a tabbed manila folder housed in a vertical filing cabinet. In this chapter I am interested in the distinct perspectives the particular material form of this file offers to think about the “file” in the context of information, uncertainty, and claims to order. Therefore, rather than take the file forward from this moment, I will stay with the file as a manila folder. I am interested in how, through the early twentieth-century business imagination, this file was presented as a response to heightened uncertainty. In the office it represented a solution to a historically specific problematic: the deployment of efficiency to the recurring problem of what we now think of as information overload. In this context the file appeared as a solution that followed the logic of what I label granular certainty.

Granular Certainty

The economic iteration of efficiency at the turn of the twentieth century required a dramatic expansion in information about the production process—increased specialization required management. In this context, efficiency is usefully thought of as a set of ideas applied to the specialization and deskilling inherent to modern capitalism. At the end of the nineteenth century, a perceived need for further subdivisions of labor to increase productivity pushed economic attention away from technical problems and toward administrative problems of coordination, control, and organization. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the response approached knowledge of “workflow” and “individual tasks” as temporal problems. It did so through a focus on isolating and understanding the specific, the particular, and the detail.

Derived from engineering, this iteration of efficiency centered on the belief that breaking something down into small parts made it easier to understand and easier to manage; the subsequent interchangeability of parts demanded standardization. To create something small was to create something that could be apprehended, understood, and connected to something else—and that “something” was frequently labor. From this stance, advocates considered extraction (and what today would be called modularity) important because they believed it enabled efficiency: this is the faith in the “granular” as a way to ensure certainty of results—a faith that produced the tabbed file folder.

While Frederick Taylor’s concern with making the worker more efficient has become the signature example of this logic, his contemporary Alexander Hamilton Church played an equally important role in applying this logic to workflow in the office by analyzing the function of the new profession of management (Litterer 1961). Writing about the broader issues of a scientific practice for management, Church argued that managers required information that had to be ordered and arranged to prevent it from “remaining forever in the condition of an immense unwieldy accumulation of unrelated facts” (Litterer 1961, 223). To this end, granular certainty speaks not only to breaking something down into small pieces. The detail, the discrete, is created so it can be coordinated and readily assembled into a whole. It is about organizing those pieces to lay the groundwork for coordination.

In this iteration, the file (as a technology of gathering) spoke to the logic of fragmentation. That is, it emphasized the need to understand the whole by making visible its component parts. To put it simply, a folder in a vertical filing cabinet allowed all the papers on a relevant topic to be gathered in one place. In most offices this replaced the use of bound books that stored correspondence and accounts in chronological order, instead of by customer name or subject. Therefore, the file in this modern form emerged to place large amounts of paper in a more useful arrangement: sorting loose paper into precise categories made paper functional according to the demands of corporate capitalism, particularly its emphasis on planning and prediction.

Claims to granular certainty rested on a faith in rationalization. To encounter tabbed files emphasized information as something that existed in discrete units, in bits, that could be extracted depending on the needs of a specific task. Celebrating the introduction of a decimal file system in the 1930s, an advertising agency president claimed that “within a few minutes” a clerk could retrieve sales presentations from thirty different companies in thirty different fields (Arndt 1936, 10). The encounter with a file was intended to produce certainty—you would find what you were looking for gathered in one place within a named file. The tabbed file folder emerged from the belief in the “granular” that viewed problems and their solutions through the need and ability to reduce size to reveal connections. The open file drawer, with dividers and tabs in view, further illustrated this: “at a glance” was a common tagline in advertisements celebrating the vertical filing cabinet. Thus, the response to the anxiety and uncertainty created by “big paper” was “small information.”

The “file” gives units of information a material presence. Organized in cabinet drawers, the file in the form of a tabbed manila folder gave epistemological support to the “specific” by enabling retrieval through gaps and visible intervals. The file folder stabilized information via an increasingly deployed acknowledgment that order and certainty needed boundaries created through partitions. In the early twentieth century, in the name of granular certainty, new cabinets emerged in offices and homes (especially kitchens and bathrooms) with specifically designed compartments in which similar objects could be placed to facilitate retrieval (Beecher 2000; Kastner and Day 2015–2016). Therefore, a system of ordering built into the structure of the furniture through partitions became critical to the integrity of cabinets as storage solutions. This “cabinet logic” was novel, not because partitions were new but because partitions and dividers were being mobilized in cabinets through twentieth-century efficiency and a distinct understanding of the particular. In this version of cabinet logic, the primary goal was retrieval, not display: it was intended to improve the chances that specific objects could be found. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the appeal of cabinets in the office and home seemed to be the belief that as a storage structure that enclosed compartments, a cabinet emphasized continuity—an object would remain in storage, in a specific place, grouped with similar objects. Thus, storage became defined as a problem of retrieval.

Files and Information Retrieval

To think about the file in terms of retrieval is to think about how it is used to manage the processes involved in locating information. A process usually references the act of carrying out a particular task; it is about the passing of time. To manage retrieval is to manage the passing of time to ensure a continuous action. The engineering-based logic of efficiency conceived the process of retrieval in terms of the aspirations of mechanized work, where to the extent that people were involved, they ideally would not have to think. In contrast to the idealization of machines, people introduced uncertainty.

Office equipment companies sought to downplay any uncertainty by labeling filing cabinets “automatic.” The claim to be automatic enhanced the metaphor of a filing cabinet as a machine. It also enabled office equipment companies to bring ideas of regularity, consistency, speed, and reliability to their product to support the claim that filing cabinets would return certainty to the storage and retrieval of paper (Robertson 2017, 959–961). However, retrieval depended on the labor—gendered labor—of people. Cabinets, drawers, tabs, and folders were all designed with a recognition of who would be filing, as well as to maximize the efficiency of that labor to achieve a continuity of action.

A four-drawer vertical filing cabinet was no more than fifty-two inches high and twenty-seven inches deep. The arrival of the file clerk as a female occupation partly determined these measurements. As one of the larger filing cabinet makers explained, “The average height of women is less than men and the top drawer of a 4 drawer case is about as high as an ordinary girl can work to advantage” (Shaw-Walker 1927). Similarly, the length of the drawer factored in the length of a clerk’s arms. A drawer deeper than twenty-seven inches risked turning filing from an “arm operation” into a “walking operation,” as a clerk would have to walk to the side of the drawer to access files at the rear. A full file drawer could weigh between sixty-five and seventy-five pounds. Office equipment companies tried to preempt concerns that a female clerk would struggle to “operate” such a heavy drawer by emphasizing the construction of drawer slides. In its advertisements and catalogs, one leading company regularly used an image of a girl—not a woman or secretary—who pulled open a drawer with a silk thread (Shaw-Walker 1927).

This infantilizing reinforced the devaluing of the secretarial work that had brought women into the new world of specialized office work. The filing cabinet was promoted on the premise that it was so easy to use that it required no strength or thought. That did not remove the possibility of misfiling. However, misfiling was attributed to incorrect use, not the filing cabinet.

The folder was critical to the file as a site of information processing in the early twentieth-century office. The file folder functioned as an enclosure that could contain different-sized papers. Folders were made from a single sheet of manila paper, folded once so the front flap was approximately a half-inch shorter than the back, to create a tab where information identifying the contents could be written; later folders had metal and celluloid tabs. Therefore, standard-sized folders turned a range of different paper types and sizes into “files”—collections of papers that could be easily located according to their placement in the folder and the folder’s placement in a drawer.

As the basic unit in this mode of information processing, the file folder provided a site of concern about misuse. To ensure a file worked effectively, authors of how-to literature warned clerks about stuffing too many papers into a folder (fifty sheets was considered sufficient quantity). Authors noted that excessive material could result in papers standing higher than the folder, making it difficult to distinguish the divisions between folders in a cabinet drawer. Another point of concern targeted clerks who tried to fit too many folders in a single drawer or carelessly placed one folder inside another. Clerks also often used tabs as handles to remove file folders. Paper tabs absorbed moisture, making labels sometimes difficult to read and papers therefore hard to locate. Treated in a similar manner, celluloid tabs bent, curled, or cracked with use (American Institute of Filing 1921; Beal 1949; Office Economist 1919).

Files and/as Information

The value of thinking about the file in terms of granular certainty comes not from assessing whether the file enabled information mastery—as the concerns about folders suggest, it did not. Rather, it comes from seeing why and how the file emerged as a way to try to achieve that goal. The file, as a product of a faith in granular certainty, presented new methods of storage and retrieval. As I have suggested, it also instantiated new forms of knowing. The file gave common sense intelligibility to a predigital conception of information as discrete and detachable. While it did not have the support of information theory, the technical work on office management and the promotional literature on vertical filing did more than gesture toward the idea of information as a unit. At times it suggested that information existed distinct from correspondence, forms, and reports. It is in this sense that the (tabbed manila) file captured what was still a novel conception of information that separated it from the personal attributes associated with knowledge. As Brown and Duguid (2002, 119–120) put it, knowledge usually entails a knower, whereas information has come to be defined as independent and more or less self-sufficient.

The information in a tabbed manila file was to be apprehended as impersonal and transparent: it had a story to tell that should be understandable within the context of the file as a folder. The “modern businessman” of the early twentieth century believed he needed specific details on a daily basis to plan for a future in which his business would be more efficient and productive. This information circulated in an office reorganized according to dominant understandings of gender. Women worked in an office to assist men. Unpacking the file folder emphasizes that this work, increasingly presented as working with information, was articulated to and through early twentieth-century ideas of efficiency and gender.

Advertisements for filing cabinets sometimes featured a close-up of the interior of a drawer to illustrate the guides and tabs used to promise efficient retrieval (Robertson 2017, 962–964). While this emphasized the partitioning critical to filing, it made it impossible to show the female body attached to the hands. The result was not only hands that pointed out how the equipment functioned but hands that represented the relationship of the labor and technology that underwrote the claim that a filing cabinet was “automatic”: a hand separated from body and mind emphasized that the person who used this office equipment did not have to think while using it.

In erasing the body, the advertisements sought to remove (or at least devalue) the labor involved in handling bits of paper, the labor involved in working with information that was standardized, atomized, and stripped of context. It was a form of information labor that needed information reconfigured as discrete, as a thing to be handled. Women’s “natural” dexterity apparently favored this mode of work. In addition, it was understood that female clerks could do this work because in handling “information” while they grasped a “file,” clerks did not need to know or understand the file’s contents—as information laborers, they worked to assist male workers and managers.

In the hands and minds of managers, pieces of paper were useful precisely to the extent that they were thought of as “information” isolated from the context in which it emerged. In the absence of that context, the completeness, the integrity granted to information as discrete and detachable, came from its isolation. The file that gathered and isolated a variety of papers on a specific person or topic functioned to maintain this integrity. Thus, information as transparent, as something that could be easily articulated to specific concerns, became the source of legitimacy for the process of decision-making.

Therefore, through a cabinet logic that created easily seen partitions, the “file” translated information into something that could be more readily acted upon in the immediate future. While the concept of the archive has been deployed to foreground the regimes of knowledge, power, and control involved in the organization and selection of knowledge, a move to focus on retrieval and circulation suggests a move away from the priorities of the archive to those of the library. The file shifts attention away from the power relations of selection to the gathering and circulation of documents, the primary preserve of the library. As media studies scholar Sean Cubitt (2006) notes, “The librarian’s task is to make available, and the techniques most frequently developed concern modes of searching collections to identify materials. While libraries have a preservation function, they are distinguished by their key functioning of indexing. The library is a machine for retrieving information” (581).

Locating files in the “library” directs the scholar’s gaze to the importance of material supports for specificity, order, and certainty: in this case, a tabbed manila folder in a drawer that constituted a known location within a system of classification. However, the move from the archive to the library does not involve a rejection of epistemological politics. A file, placed in a cabinet drawer, makes information accessible through historically specific ideas of efficiency and gender. The granular certainty of this file was enacted through a distinct understanding of information as an object—an object accessed through a highly gendered understanding of information work.

References

American Institute of Filing. 1921. A Course in Correspondence Filing for Home Study. Boston: Library Bureau.

Arndt, John F. 1936. “Making a file drawer live.” The File, February 1936, 10.

Beal, R. G. 1949. “The selection and use of filing supplies.” Office Economist, November–December 1949, 14.

Beecher, Mary Anne. 2000. “Promoting the ‘unit idea’: Manufactured kitchen cabinets (1900–1950).” APT Bulletin 32 (2–3): 27–37.

Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. 2002. The Social Life of Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

Cubitt, Sean. 2006. “Library.” Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2–3): 581–606.

Haigh, Thomas. 2009. “How data got its base: Information storage software in the 1950s and 1960s.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31 (4): 6–25.

Kastner, Jeffrey, and Deanna Day. 2015–2016. “Bringing the drugstore home: An interview with Deanna Day.” Cabinet, no. 60: 95–101.

Litterer, Joseph. 1961. “Alexander Hamilton Church and the development of modern management.” Business History 35 (2): 211–225.

Office Economist. 1919. “What do you know about filing? To properly and efficiently organize you must be better versed in work that is performed than those doing it.” September 1919, 117–118.

Robertson, Craig. 2017. “Learning to file: Reconfiguring information and information work in the early twentieth century.” Technology and Culture 58:955–981.

Shaw-Walker. 1927. Built Like a Skyscraper. Trade catalog collection, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.

Vismann, Cornelia. 2008. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

25

Flesh

Romi Ron Morrison

Fugitivity is seeing around corners, stockpiling in crevices, knowing the “unrules,” being unruly, because the rules are never enough, and not even close.

—Macharia 2013

I illustrate what becomes possible when blackness wonders and wanders in the world, heeding the ethical mandate to challenge our thinking, to release the imagination, and to welcome the end of the world as we know it, that is, decolonization, which is the only proper name for justice.

—Silva 2018

Knowing Nearby

As algorithmic models increasingly assist, judge, and manage human life, a growing amount of scrutiny, criticism, and backlash has ensued, calling into question the inequality of such powerful applications and demanding a renewed focus on bias, ethics, and governmental regulation (Eubanks 2017; Noble 2018; O’Neil 2016). Yet what remains unchallenged is the hierarchy of power and authority cohered through claims of rationality and universality from which data-based metrics speak, foreclosing the possibility for what feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha calls “speaking nearby.” Reflecting on her practice as a filmmaker to deemphasize the objectifying power of the lens to reduce subjects to axiomatic objects, Minh-ha states: “I wish not to speak about, only to speak nearby” (Chen 1992, 87).

This chapter attempts to speak nearby contemporary discussions in critical data studies, showing what Black feminist scholarship has to offer questions of ethics, bias, and data justice. In particular, I argue that appeals to ethics- and rights-based discourses misread the harm caused by algorithmic violence, providing ill-fitting avenues for reproach. Moreover, I question gestures toward repairing the tools of analysis, metrics, and quantification to redress the very violences they engender without challenging their underpinning logics, asking: What are the limits to the visions of justice these approaches suggest?

Toward that end, I offer a reading of flesh as a critical site that interrupts the efficient causality of risk modeling by creating confrontations between the residual violences of racialization and the uncertainty of knowability. This requires speculation to operate in excesses of our current tools, past their delimiting logics. I argue for flesh as a particular figuring of Blackness that reveals its transformative potential to engage ways of knowing that refuse to be parsed: neither self-contained nor singular but intertwined, affective, irresolute, and extimate in their connections.

Residual Causality

Mapping the scaffolding of scientific reason’s architecture, Denise da Silva argues that it operates by what she terms efficient causality, which “comprehends the event in explanations that always already resolve its transformative potential back into objectivity, into facts” (Silva 2013, 43–44). Silva is drawing our attention to the ways by which the “methods (calculation/measurement, classification, and interpretation) that have characterized modern knowledge” reduce the event as always being resolved because of its need to be accounted for through discrete classification and rationalization.

This relationship between efficient causality and transformative potential situates, defines, and fixes understandings of Blackness to the body. Through the residual taxonomies of classification held over from the natural sciences, race is commonly understood to reside on the surface of the body, as a set of phenotypic descriptors grouped and used as a text upon which to read hierarchically arranged qualifications. Race, and Blackness in particular, becomes epidermalized, confined to the skin: immutable, axiomatic, and clear. This spurious construction of race is undergirded by the obsessive measurement of bodily difference: curvature of brow; protrusion of lips; nasal capacity; skull size, density, and shape; texture of hair; contours of arms, legs, buttocks, phallus, labia, pubis. The body of the racialized subject has always been a quantified construction divorced from the self, atomized and disciplined into numerical metrics (Fausto-Sterling 1995; Terry and Urla 1995). This measurability in turn justifies and constitutes the categories of race, gender, and sexuality, which then come to define the body as aberrant while inscribing man (read as white, straight, cis male) as the universal subject (Hong and Ferguson 2011; Roberts 2012; Silva 2018; Wynter 2003). Elaborating on this, Dorothy Roberts writes: “Only a decade ago, the biological concept of race seemed finally to have met its end. The Genome Project, which mapped the entire human genetic code, proved that race could not be identified in our genes. . . . Contrary to popular misconception, we are not naturally divided into genetically identifiable racial groups. Biologically, there is one human race. Race applied to human beings is a political division: it is a system of governing people that classifies them into a social hierarchy based on invented biological demarcations” (Roberts 2012, x). Roberts points to the ways by which the category of Blackness is constructed through an appeal to scientific reason’s use of metrics and claims to universalism. However, the category of Blackness is the product of efficient causality that resolves Blackness into measurements taken from the body. This lacuna between Blackness and the category of Blackness marks the ways theorist Hortense Spillers differentiates between “real objects” and “objects of knowledge.”

For Spillers, Black studies produces a particular mode of scholarship, deftly distinguishing “the real object”—that which is naturalized—from “objects of knowledge,” which are formed through the complex interplay among institutions, politics, violence, discourses, practices, and economics, to name but a few (Spillers 1994, 65). In this postulation, Black people are not the real objects of Black studies; rather, Blackness as the outcome of racialization becomes an object of knowledge. To misread Black people as the real objects of Black studies naturalizes race as a modality of either biology or culture. Instead, for Spillers, “blackness is a symbolic program of philosophical ‘disobedience’ (a systematic skepticism and refusal) that would make the former available to anyone, or more pointedly, any posture, that was willing to take on the formidable task of thinking as a willful act of imagination and invention” (Spillers 2003, 5).

The work of Spillers demands that representations of Blackness not be assumed as real objects evaluated by their comporting to imagined standards of measure and pushes us instead to investigate: What are the forces that shape and determine Blackness, and why is such a representation needed in the first place? Put simply, what is the work that Blackness, and, by extension, race, does (Chun 2009)?

Denise da Silva takes up this question, arguing that the category of Blackness defined by the measurable differentiation of bodies, geographies, and cultures is a sociological index that naturalizes racial animosity as a phenomenon of group belonging and difference. In this process the problem of racial subjugation is relegated to the domain of ethics and moral inferiority. This shift performs two crucial misdirections.

First, it completely elides the centrality of racial subjugation as a systemic component of the building of Europe as a colonial power. It is important here to contextualize systemic not solely as a determinant of scale but as an integrated social, philosophical, economic, and juridical architecture. It is through such an architecture that the category of Blackness is created and does the productive work of selecting, identifying, and organizing bodies and lands as sites of extraction. Moreover, via the foundational texts of continental philosophy, these spaces are also differentiated as sites of ethical and moral absence, meaning that the violence of expropriation was not only justified but ethical under the juridical architecture of colonial Europe (Silva 2007). Such a lens allows us to decouple ethics and morality as stable arbiters of social beneficence.

Second, redressing the violences of this period through an ethical register situates the fault to be corrected at the site of the social, materialized through attitudes, beliefs, stereotypes, and bias. While the social can be argued to be individual or collective (held by individuals or scaled within the practices of institutions and nation-states), this distinction still continues to omit the continued economic-juridical expropriation of total value from captured bodies and lands upon which global capitalism depends. Due to this misdirection, calls for reform through ethics- and rights-based discourses are inadequate as critical lenses for undoing the very architecture that requires uneven dispossession. Group-differentiated interlocking oppression reflected, automated, and rationalized through the efficiency of causality means that calls for ethics and morality training are woefully inapplicable, as the problem is not merely a moral failing but also the economic structuring of modernity: decolonization must be the goal to ensure the rightful name of justice. Decolonization, in the Silvan sense, requires “the setting up of juridico-economic architectures of redress through which global capital returns the total value it continues to derive from the expropriation of the total value yielded by productive capacity of the slave body and native lands . . . that is the unknowing and undoing of the World that reaches its core” (Silva 2014, 85). The promise of decolonization is not an ethical reparative act to right past wrongs; it is a fundamental call to ways of unknowing that bring about the end of the world (as we know it) ordered by rationalized extraction and property relations. The redressing of violence, then, must include acts of refusal, imagination, and invention.

Transformative Interpretation

To better illustrate this point with relation to contemporary discussions of bias and risk modeling, I want to turn to ProPublica’s investigative reporting in its series Machine Bias. This series proved to be a seminal, dutiful piece of investigative reporting on bias in risk-assessment algorithms and is deservedly cherished within critical data studies. Throughout the series, researchers found grave racial imbalances in the statistical models used to predict future criminality and allocate criminal sentences. On average, scores of risk are skewed higher for Black defendants than for white defendants. This is due to the use of proxy indicators such as credit score, income, residential zip code, level of education, and other factors that can yield compounded risk and longer sentences for Black defendants, regardless of whether they are first-time or repeat offenders (Angwin et al. 2016). The logic of the model assumes these indicators as facts of efficient causality rather than possible metrics for better understanding the effects of long-standing systemic racism as it permeates into uneven life chances reflected by credit score, income, and others. From this causal position, the model is only capable of employing a logic of resolving what is, rather than asking how things come to be or are in a state of becoming. It reads these disparities as determinants of future criminality squared at the individual. This forecloses the transformative potential to read the differences in credit score, income, residential zip code, and level of education as indicative of systemic racialization and is then incapable of understanding how racism itself colors the data. This foreclosure is due to the primacy given to data as a condition for certainty within modern thought. This forces us to misunderstand the data as the objects of critique upon which to intervene, which obscures the histories of total expropriation—a relationship of economic, social, psychological, cultural, and ontological extraction. When we misunderstand the data as problematic, the larger goal of decolonization (meaning the complete redress and return of value from expropriation) remains unimaginable and out of view. To be clear, white cisheteropatriarchy is not a deviant bug of modernity whereby individual bias or racial vitriol is the culprit that needs to be fixed. It is the very conceptual framework for the nation, for justified expropriation, and for continued infringement on the lives and lands of those dispossessed.

Figuring the Flesh

The transformative potential of Blackness freed from the category of Blackness finds form in the flesh. Blackness as an object of knowledge because of, rather than in spite of, its unassimilability allows for the radical potential of a different set of epistemological practices. The promise of such practices is to allow the space for irresolution that efficient claims deny, giving form to Minh-ha’s call to know by speaking nearby. In an interview with Nancy N. Chen for the Visual Anthropology Review, Minh-ha elaborates further: “In other words, a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening up to other possible moments of transition” (Chen 1992, 87). The episteme of Minh-ha’s practice is capacious, leaving open the unresolved space of coming to know something that is relational: taking into consideration the specific context of the speaker, the place from which they speak, the closeness they share, and the mode through which that speaking happens. To know in this context is not a territorial claim to be made, enclosed, and defended but an endured practice of proximity. To speak nearby is a gesture of knowing that requires engagement, perforating the hermetic encapsulation of totality.

In Hortense Spillers’s seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” she details the ways that the bodies of captured Black slaves were dismembered from their corporeal agency and relegated to what she calls the flesh: “But I would make a distinction in this case between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject positions. In that sense, before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography” (Spillers 1987, 67). Here Spillers notes the ways that enslaved Black people fell out of a property relationship to themselves, losing agency over the body as the preliminary site of ownership. This transition from body to flesh was a necessary precondition for the opaque process of fungibility by which no-longer-embodied, enslaved Black people became a raw material in order for others to expropriate their total value. Blackness centered in the flesh is an alluvial position of indeterminacy denied the corporeal agency needed to inscribe a subject. Alexander Weheliye notes this radical potential within the position of the flesh. He writes: “Conceptualized in this way, the flesh thus operates as a vestibular gash in the armor of Man, simultaneously a tool of dehumanization and a relational vestibule to alternate ways of being. . . . Not an aberration, yet excluded, not at the center of being but nevertheless constitutive of it” (Weheliye 2014, 44).

The indeterminacy of the flesh marks a rupture in the certainty that modern forms of thinking command. It is important here to make a distinction between uncertainty and unknowability. Theodora Dryer’s work “Algorithms under the Reign of Probability” is helpful in defining uncertainty within statistical algorithmic models. Dryer (2018) defines uncertainty as “probability described likelihoods of propositions and events, usually expressed as a percentage, where perfect certainty is 1 and uncertainty is < 1” (93). She goes on to position uncertainty as a tactic to quell public anxiety over error within statistical models by devising a way to contain and account for the stochastic and unknown. On this point she writes: “Anxious about a loss of public confidence in data-driven institutions, technocrats sought to command error in statistical estimation. . . . New probability tools were designed to delimit uncertainty in statistical research. These were based in translating common statistical research concepts—vagueness, error, and randomization—into the language of axiomatic probability theory” (94). In this passage Dryer is marking the translation of vagueness, error, and randomization—in short, uncertainty—into certainty. Indications such as error or vagueness are naturally occurring aspects of the model, rather than aberrations that require sequestration. This translation removes the potential promise that uncertainty can hold in reframing the inner workings of the algorithmic model. Dryer argues that uncertainty is in fact a site for critical inquiry to intervene within algorithmic models. Yet there is an unresolved tension between the critical promise of uncertainty and the ways in which it is routinely constituted as “objectivity, truth, and certainty for political and economic interest” (95). If uncertainty is the ability for the unknown to be accounted for by comporting to containment under the logics of algorithmic models, then what can unknowability offer instead? Making connections between uncertainty and Black studies, Treva Ellison (2016) argues: “Black scholars have theorized the uncertainty of blackness as a foundational component of modern systems of representation and spatial production” (337).

Ellison’s work marks a return to the ways that Blackness read as captive flesh is understood as a comparative space of ethical absence otherwise wholly unknown as a subject within itself. This is where Weheliye’s theorizing of the flesh as an inhabitable space unaccounted for within Western modernity upholds the promise of uncertainty through the unknown. Unknowability born from the figure of the flesh opens the space for ways of understanding the world that are otherwise discounted because of their inability to be neatly measured and accounted for. It is the place in which irresolution is allowed to reside. It is the voluminous space in which fullness returns to be figured.

As the scale of critique and intervention into algorithmic violence grows in meaningful and productive ways toward systemic societal shift (Dave 2019; Hoffmann 2019), flesh becomes an essential outlier from which to assess the limitations of sociotechnical fixes. Flesh is the poignant, unavoidable signifier and text upon which to read the history and reality of total expropriation of value from bodies and land. Simultaneously, its failure to comport to neat encapsulation as a cohered subject grants flesh a privileged relationship to unknowability. This relationship releases the uncertainty of Blackness as an imaginative guide for pursuing the unfinished work of decolonization found in the practices, rituals, and knowledges of survival born from the flesh. This establishes the boundaries from which productive reason and certainty are able to speak, no longer with singular authority but from a proximal place; not speaking about but nearby, bringing about the end of the world as we know it to ensure survival beyond it.

References

Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner. 2016. “Machine bias.” ProPublica, May 23, 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing.

Chen, Nancy N. 1992. “‘Speaking nearby’: A conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha.” Visual Anthropology Review 8 (1): 82–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1992.8.1.82.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2009. “Introduction: Race and/as technology; or, how to do things to race.” Camera Obscura 24 (1): 7–35. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-013.

Dave, Kinjal. 2019. “Systemic algorithmic harms.” Data and Society: Points, May 31, 2019. https://points.datasociety.net/systemic-algorithmic-harms-e00f99e72c42.

Dryer, Theodora. 2018. “Algorithms under the reign of probability.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40 (1): 93–96. https://doi.org/10.1109/mahc.2018.012171275.

Ellison, Treva. 2016. “The strangeness of progress and the uncertainty of blackness.” In No Tea, No Shade, edited by E. Patrick Johnson, 323–345. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373711-017.

Eubanks, Virginia. 2017. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1995. “Gender, race, and nation: The comparative anatomy of women in Europe, 1815–1817.” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline L. Urla, 19–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hoffmann, Anna Lauren. 2019. “Where fairness fails: Data, algorithms, and the limits of antidiscrimination discourse.” Information, Communication and Society 22 (7): 900–915. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1573912.

Hong, Grace Kyungwon, and Roderick A. Ferguson. 2011. Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Macharia, Keguro. 2013. “Fugitivity.” Gukira: With(out) Predicates. July 2, 2013. https://gukira.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/fugitivity.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown.

Roberts, Dorothy. 2012. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New Press.

Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2013. “To be announced: Radical praxis or knowing (at) the limits of justice.” Social Text 31 (1(114)): 43–62. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1958890.

Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2014. “Toward a Black feminist poethics.” Black Scholar 44 (2): 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690.

Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2018. “Hacking the subject: Black feminism and refusal beyond the limits of critique.” PhiloSOPHIA 8 (1): 19–41. https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2018.0001.

Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.

Spillers, Hortense J. 1994. “The crisis of the Negro intellectual: A post-date.” Boundary 2 21 (3): 65–116. https://doi.org/10.2307/303601.

Spillers, Hortense J. 2003. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Terry, Jennifer, and Jacqueline Urla, eds. 1995. Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

26

Glitch

Rebecca Schneider

A glitch is an unpredictable change in the system’s behavior, when something obviously goes wrong. . . . The outcome of a glitch is not predictable [and is] usually regarded as marginal.

—Goriunova and Shulgin 2008

In Carolee Schneemann’s 2000–2001 video installation More Wrong Things, hundreds of wires tangle a viewer in a web of technology, simultaneously providing and limiting access to video images on seventeen monitors that run clips of myriad personal and political, local and global disasters in continual loops. From a dripping faucet to exploding bombs to cancer treatments to cat scratches, the “wrong things” accumulate and compete for attention (see figure 26.1). Over twenty years old now, this artwork seems quite dated, wires being synonymous with obsolescence. But datedness has never been a concern for Schneemann, who has made work often calling to a Paleolithic goddess and other wildly “outmoded” icons of lifeways alternative to patriarchy. Perhaps partly because of this, she has been repeatedly accused of being naive, aberrant, messy, primitive, wrong, hopelessly out of date, and unapologetically feminist. As I have asked elsewhere in my own work, what does this getting it wrong get right (Schneider 2011, 86)? What does anachronism incite? If Schneemann’s More Wrong Things seems dated, it also seems strangely prescient. At the dawn of big data (a phrase that first showed up via data collection only three years prior to More Wrong Things), Schneemann’s piece modeled an ecstasy of information flow mired in its own thrall to access, as well as a simultaneous oversaturation and Medusa effect as if, arrested before the glut of images, her spectators might turn to the slower-moving geologic time of stone.

Walking into the installation of More Wrong Things, which I saw very near the dawn of 2001 when the White Box Gallery on Broome Street in New York was still under the shadow of the Twin Towers, I was confronted with a mess. The images reproduced here are from a much later exhibition of the work. For the original mounting in 2001 the tangle was, at least in my memory, even more pronounced. I could already see the mess from outside the gallery—it was visible to passersby on the street. Mess is not an accidental word here, as it suggests error, or incoherency, a failure to congeal or conform to legibility. Mess is at once in your face and, ironically, elusive. You can actually see that you cannot quite see—you cannot quite see for the mess. Once one was inside at White Box, the tangle of cords like so many snakes made walking in the gallery difficult and interrupted that normative art consumption mode (figure 26.2). One feared tripping on a wire. The installation space looked like a mess, and that mess looked like either an accident or a trap. You, in the gallery space, were only one more wrong thing among others.

Figure 26.1

Carolee Schneemann’s More Wrong Things at Hales Gallery, 2017. ©Carolee Schneemann/VISDA. Photo by Hales Gallery.

By 2001 Schneemann was already known for mess. At the 1977 Telluride Film Festival, she had famously performed an impromptu rendition of her piece Interior Scroll. Up on a table, clothes off, she had pulled a long cord like a cable from her vagina. The cord had turned out to be a scroll, from which she read aloud a list of reasons why her work, such as her film Fuses, was consistently marginalized:

- The personal clutter

- The persistence of feelings

- The hand-touch sensibility

- The diaristic indulgence

- The painterly mess

- The dense gestalt

- The primitive techniques . . . (Schneemann 2001, 159)

In this act, she defiantly declared: You want a mess? You got one. Her aberrant act was performed with a vengeance, compounding mess with mess, error with error. This purposeful deployment of error was something of a feminist tactic in general in the mid- to late twentieth century, and Schneemann was expert at it.

In The Explicit Body in Performance, I used the word glitch to describe the aesthetics of error that Schneemann was deploying (Schneider 1997, 46). I used the word specifically in relationship to Vesper’s Stampede to My Holy Mouth, a video made with Victoria Vesna in 1992. In the video, Schneemann makes love, quite literally, with her cat, in an erotic gesture that finds “historical parallels between the torture and maiming of cats and women” during witch trials in the so-called primitive accumulation phase of capitalism (Serra and Ramey 2007, 122; see also Federici 2004). The lovemaking is clearly reminiscent of Schneemann’s film Fuses, shot twenty-seven years prior, in which Schneemann and her human lover James Tenney have sex while their cat Kitch looks on. For Fuses, Schneemann used techniques of Stan Brakhage, hand painting and hand scratching the celluloid to achieve hand-touch glitch effects in the filmic scene. In Vesper’s Stampede, the hand painting is replaced by image-doubling video techniques, and the human male has been entirely replaced by Schneemann’s new cat Vesper. I wrote in 1997 that the explicit bestiality of Vesper’s Stampede functioned as a kind of “scratch, glitch, break” in the prior love scene of Schneemann, Tenney, and Kitch that had already imagined a “scratch, glitch, break” in the orientations of white male avant-garde cinema exemplified by Brakhage (46, 56, 66).[1] The “glitch” of explicit bestiality interrupted any number of norms, or routine operations, much as the literal celluloid scratches and breaks of Schneemann’s Brakhage-citing “hand-touch sensibility” had done in Fuses. Glitch, in this way of thinking, is error or malfunction as a break inviting critical thought. Or inviting the irruption of the otherwise into the scene of same.

The word glitch entered into circulation in the 1960s, attributed to American astronauts who first used it as slang for hitch. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the word to John Glenn (1962), who wrote in his book Into Orbit: “Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was ‘glitch.’ Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit which takes place when the circuit suddenly has a new load put on it. . . . A glitch . . . is such a minute change in voltage that no fuse could protect against it” (86). I did not know of the etymological relationship between glitch and fuse in the late 1980s when I first watched the film Fuses, but it seemed an apt descriptor for the visceral scratches and breaks that interrupted habitual viewing. In the 1990s, and separately from explicit body performance (and space travel), the term glitch was coming to be associated with digital art—in both electronic music and visual art composed of technical errancies. This was art that embraced technological dysfunction and followed machine error, often to generate new chance compositions of sound or design. Some glitch art deployed the aesthetics of malfunction to promote critical inquiry into and against the functional norms of capitalism. Film and digital media theorist Michael Betancourt (2016) writes of how digital glitch can stall operations, even if only momentarily, and how that glitch can function as a potential moment of crisis, however fleeting, opening an opportunity for critique: “The transition to digital capitalism is a dissolution of concerns with physicality and a denial of material basis. The glitch can act as a stoppage of this autonomous production, a transitory failure whose critical potential depends on violating this aura of the digital” (8). For the glitch artists Betancourt considers, glitch is an irruption of materiality into the fantasy of immaterial flow. Glitch occurs in the form of an impasse or a stall that challenges the fantasy of real-time immediate access, forcing hesitation, or force-quit, even if only for a moment. Glitches arrest us. They hold us up. This, writes Betancourt, is commensurate with hand-touch sensibilities. The material dimensions of glitch “enable a reappropriation of historical production that is easily associated with earlier fetishes of the artist’s ‘hand’ in historically materialist art” (Betancourt 2016, 7).[2]

What could possibly be the relationship between glitch art, or the art whose material is technological or computational malfunction, and something like Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll, or her televisual installation More Wrong Things? And how is this related to what might be called an irruptive uncertainty in the otherwise smooth functioning of systems of preservation, such as the archive? At base, glitch art is not often associated with performance-based live actions and specifically not with art of the body, or body art. This may be because digital art and computer-based work are often either considered antithetical to biomatter or considered extensions of bodies and, as such, beyond the limits of the live body proper. The body, in work with technology, is often the figure of a coming obsolescence, though many artists who proclaim as much themselves succumb to the obsolete even as bodies upon bodies upon bodies continue in what Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2011) has termed the “enduring ephemeral” (170–173).[3] For a long time, the live body in performance has been considered somehow raw, or unmediated, or authentic, in distinction to machinic processes. Of course, these distinctions appear more and more bogus as the interinanimation of so-called human bodies and so-called technologies, including biotechnologies, grows apace, making ever apparent the “natureculture” Donna Haraway and others have written about so persuasively for decades (Haraway 2003, 12; see also Cooper 2008).

Bodies and machines may interinanimate, combine, and recombine in mutual manifestations of mimesis (which is not the same as representation), but what about archives and bodies? Archives, whether material objects or preservation enabled by digital processes, may be considered extensions of the body in that they extend, beyond human calculation, the capacities of human memory (human memory having been deemed deficient since Plato ignored Socrates’s warning about the tool of writing). But this extended body (the archive) is not itself conventionally considered live. We still habitually believe that the live (body) cannot itself be archived or that that which is archived lies in wait for the live (body) to animate it. Even as bodies animate archived materials, we consider that (human) memory fades and (animal) bodies die. That is, we persist in thinking that the live body is fleeting and given to disappear, in distinction to otherwise archived materials, which are proclaimed (by the archive) to remain. If this has been somewhat debunked in performance theory and media theory alike, it still circulates as a kind of knee-jerk, automatic binarization: flesh bodies as fleeting versus material/machinic/algorithmic data-based bodies of information as a vast archive lying in wait, promising enduring access.

Because of this conventional binarization, it is interesting that glitch art has been theorized as “best when live,” to paraphrase artist Anton Marini. Perhaps surprisingly, it is liveness that sutures the critical “potential” in glitch art to the critical inquiry in some irruptive body-based feminist art. According to Marini, glitch art requires a “sensibility of fleetingness and in the moment—it’s a very live sort of a thing” (Brown 2012, 4:19). In some ways the irruptive liveness of glitch should not surprise. If glitch is what interrupts otherwise seamless processes—if glitch arises from errancy—the ability to preserve it, or reproduce it on call or as a stable object for an archive, would be oxymoronic. Glitch can neither appear when beckoned nor become stable. Like live performance (which can always go wrong), glitch is the potential of wronggoing or misstepping and cannot be captured as such. It escapes through the cracks in conventional preservation that requires stable objects and stable processes. Even glitch as record—that is, glitch as a record of failure in the machine or in the human/machine interaction—can best be described as a record of uncertain potential that, in Tim Barker’s (2011, 52) phrase, is inherent in the machine (Betancourt 2016, 56). Given that, by definition, glitches can be neither preformed nor preprogrammed, they must irrupt both as live and as material in the otherwise seamless manufacturing of the real. Reminding us of the always potential aberrancy of liveness, glitches make a mess of the usual run of things.

The potentials in glitch are one of the things that inspired Legacy Russell to write the “Glitch Feminism Manifesto” in 2012, a text that links the glitch to orgasm as well as to foreplay and calls, in a Schneemannesque mode, for such orgasmic foreplay to change the world. She writes:

Glitch Feminism . . . embraces the causality of “error,” and turns the gloomy implication of glitch on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies—may not, in fact, be an error at all, but rather a much-needed erratum. (Russell 2012, n.p.)

Certainly, in 1992 Schneemann’s lovemaking with her cat posited something of a postscript erratum to the early capitalist witch hunt. The “error” of the witch can, Schneemann and Vesper suggest, at any time irrupt (again). Russell’s work on glitch feminism seems to be a twenty-first-century bedfellow to this aim.[4] Writing about digital arts, Russell (2012, n.p.) sees the promise of glitch as enabling us to end “the social practice of the body as we know it.” Glitches in technology’s smooth functioning invite, Russell (2012, n.p.) suggests, an errant materiality: “We opt to make physical with ourselves, our partners, the world around us, that which, without this pause, we might not feel the urgency to manifest for ourselves, with ourselves.” Here, the glitch seems to invite both an unbecoming of the normative body and a becoming material of bodies together—simultaneously.

But how different is the drive to glitch really? Fetishizing error has arguably been the longtime business of the liberal humanist project. We should recall here that errancy is nothing new but has propped and negatively defined the rational subject across colonial-capitalism’s modernity. Error has long been the constitutive other to the norm. That is, error’s other is white and male, and foraying into error (if only to chart it, know it, colonize it, domesticate it) is the white man’s burden. As Sarah Jane Cervenak (2014) writes: “Methodologically speaking, the condition of possibility for the repeated consolidation of the hegemonic, sovereign subject of the Enlightenment . . . was an anthropological, explorationist project that required man to ‘step outside,’ diverge from, or run astray of his own fixed threshold” (7). Another way to say this: rational man roots around in error, fetishizes it in order to romanticize it, or even avant-gardize it, and ultimately disavow it again as aberrant to the norm. This orientation assumes that the glitch is something mere, something passing, and not basic to operations. When a glitch is over and operations resume, the glitch negatively serves to define the norm. That is, normative operations depend on the glitch and are driven by its potentiality without acknowledging that potentiality as elemental.

Does it make a difference, however, if we go with the glitch as norm? What happens if the operation is the holdup, is the pause, is a glitch that does not resolve to the norm? I think it is right to say that unlike Enlightenment man and his exploratory jaunts among the so-called primitive, irrational, or underdeveloped (Cervenak 2014), Schneemann was not fetishizing error as other but was living in error as condition. With Interior Scroll or More Wrong Things, she was not getting off on the errors of others so much as residing in the error she was given to be a female and artist simultaneously. Errors manifest as off the mark in some way—either too soon or too late, anachronistic in the present, or launched somehow in the wrong place at the wrong time or the wrong time at the wrong place. Misspeaking, or speaking out of turn, glitches occur in relationship to precedents that define the “proper running” and “correct maintenance” of operations. Error is misstep and misstep can provoke a mess of directionality, mangling plans for the future by suggesting (messy, nonworking) alternatives. But to go purposefully in the misdirections illuminated by error is to refuse to autocorrect.

On the subject of Black tactical resistance to white cultural domination, Tavia Nyong’o (2009) has written about “carnivalized time” as shot through with purposeful error. The clowns and freaks and other misfits that make up Carnival (which he links indelibly with Blacks and queers) upset mandates that demand conformity to settler-colonial white, straight time, which is to say linear time, or the secular capitalist time of the exploitative everyday. Error time might be another way to put it. Time against time, misremembered or remembered differently, refuses to congeal in a straight line of access. And we might think about this carefully as neoliberal capitalism promotes ever-increasing financialization—big data—and its promise to make the future predictable as a means to make the future pay in advance. Error time, on the other hand, “misfires” (to use J. L. Austin’s [1975, 25] term), putting the future in uncertain play. For feminist theorists such as Naomi Schor (1987), the error is feminine. It is the stray detail that does not conform to the whole, and reading in detail for detail, a kind of reading for errancy, can bring down the house of the whole. The hole disrupts the whole in playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s (1995) homonymic, chiasmic wordplay that draws on African diasporic tradition (160). Error bears the potential of ruin, but ruin bears the promises of otherwise.

Many of the images Schneemann compiled in More Wrong Things are what she has termed underground. Like an archaeologist of error who is uniquely not interested in exhuming error for truth, she has said that when making the techno-heavy piece, with its mess of monitors and wires, she was inspired by the prehistorical relics of dinosaur bones:

For “More Wrong Things” I assembled seventeen old monitors suspended within a spider-like network of 500 feet of wires and cables. The overall shape of “More Wrong Things” was oddly inspired by the open rough space of White Box—into which passersby can look from the street—and photographs of dinosaur bones I was studying: arching, rhythmic skeletons. . . . Projected on the seventeen monitors were loops of footage from different cultural disasters. These I edited into three seconds—compressed atrocity images that were sent to me from underground sources in Sarajevo, Palestine, Lebanon, Haiti, and older Vietnam material from my archive. . . . The videos from former Yugoslavia were excruciating, compiled by a video collective of individuals in immediate danger as they captured the ruin of their cities. They managed to send out varied footage with a lead statement in English: “This video compilation is by filmmakers who are running out of equipment, who may not have more film, who may not have water or lights or a home. This is footage of the devastation around us. We send these messages to you.” (Bajo and Carey 2005, n.p.)

Figure 26.2

Carolee Schneemann’s More Wrong Things at Hales Gallery, 2017. ©Carolee Schneemann/VISDA. Photo by Hales Gallery.

Allowing glitches to congregate is to deploy error in the interest of unsettling what Nietzsche (1976) termed the “herd-like” habits of accumulable fact (46–47). If all of Schneemann’s televisual images are records or documentary “facts” of one sort or another, from photographic evidence of banal broken appliances to the accumulating drip of historical war crimes, they go awry by their congress, in glitch formation with each other. It may be wrong, a viewer feels, to put a dripping faucet beside a human casualty of war, and yet the piece invites us to think critically about the banality of violence, its quotidian aspect, its proximity, intimacy, and tendency to accumulate like so many pixels, so much data—drip, drip, drip.

Here is where performance can be promising to think with as we struggle to resist the commodification of our very futures as data mined from quotidian behavior is deployed toward prediction designed to serve the capitalist extraction machine. Recall that the “infelicitous performative” in Austin’s (1975) sense is the performative that doesn’t work, that will not go to work, and that does not deliver on its promise of getting “things done.” As such, and as wholly unpredictable, the live or performance-based infelicitous glitch cannot be financialized. Performance—with its constant link to potential infelicity—can always fail. Errant performance may be linked to what Fred Moten (2015) has called “nonperformance”: that which refuses (to) work as performance in/for late capitalism. But how do we engage glitch, or be with/as more wrong things, or move laterally to the “herd-like” stream of consumable data production that is the neoliberal everyday? And how do we do so without refetishizing error on the one hand or glibly ignoring error on the other (as in the contemporary deployment of “alternative facts” to serve a capitalism without regulation)?

Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) proposes that certain uses of creativity with certain uses of the body can generate “unintegrated life” (109) and resist what Andre Lepecki (2016) calls “choreographies of conformity” (3). Lepecki cites Alexander Weheliye (2014) on the “unintegrated” in Black life—modalities that Black people have, writes Weheliye, in finding life outside of the conformation machine that is whiteness—finding life, that is, against the stream of white life—in “the breaks, crevices, movements, languages, and such found in the zones between the flesh and the law” (11). This is life in dissent, and it deploys what Povinelli (2011) calls the always “errant aspect of materiality” (109). This errancy, enfleshed, has been called Blackness. Following Schneemann we might also call it woman.[5] Glitch as a break in datafication (more wrong things and more wrong things). Glitch as dripping faucet. Dangling wire. Scratching cat. Forced quit. Sentence fragment.

Glitch. Scratch. Break.

Notes

1. Fuses made deliberate reference to Brakhage’s 1958 Window Water Baby Moving and might be considered something of a retort to the gender politics of Brakhage and other avant-gardes (Quendler 2017, 174). Thus, the argument that Schneemann is merely derivative of Brakhage or “does not manage to emancipate herself from Brakhage’s cinematic signatures” (Osterweil 2007, 139) is bogus if her work is looked at as a critical citation and deliberate reference to that signature (Schneider 2014).

2. The legend that the word bug comes from literal bugs or moths in early computers lends credence to recalcitrant materiality in the glitch. It is “bugs” that produce “glitches.” For Goriunova and Shulgin (2008, 111), although glitch is often used as a synonym for bug, it is not a synonym for error. An error can produce a glitch but would not necessarily lead to system malfunction. Glitches are “(dys)functions, (re)actions and (e)motions” that exist in the interaction between humans and machines and not in the machine alone. Glitch thus arises as a manifestation of mimicry at the interface between humans and machines. It might be stretching it to suggest that glitches, as errant mimics arising from anachronistic “bugs,” might be analogous to the anachronistic mimes on the loose in Antonioni’s film Blow-Up or to the outmoded condition of “woman” that historically manifests as legible primarily in debauched mimetic relationship to the unmarked norm of “man” (see Irigaray 1985). Throughout this essay, I am obviously using error, mess, and glitch somewhat interchangeably as a way to think about overlapping potentialities between the terms in both body-based feminist art and critical digital glitch art.

3. Stelarc, for example, claimed over twenty years ago that “the body has become profoundly obsolete in the intense information environment it has created” (interviewed in Atzori and Woolford 1995, n.p.). This outlook can be seen to be outmoded when we consider that obsolescence has long been the body’s primary product and acknowledge that the production of obsolescence is far from obsolete in the information age as new, newer, and newest technology continues to circulate hand to hand (Chun 2017; Schneider 2019).

4. Russel’s manifesto anticipates a forthcoming book with Verso, Glitch Feminism, and a potential maturation of thought not yet available at the time of this writing.

5. See Fred Moten (2017, 134–146) on Schneemann, woman, Blackness, and errancy.

References

Atzori, Paolo, and Kirk Woolford. 1995. “Extended body: Interview with Stelarc.” C-Theory. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14658/5526.

Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bajo, Delia, and Brainard Carey. 2005. “Carolee Schneemann.” Praxis Interview Magazine, April 24, 2005. http://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/carolee-schneemann/.

Barker, Tim. 2011. “Aesthetics of error: Media, art, and the machine, the unforeseen, and the errant.” In Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures, edited by Mark Nunes, 42–58. New York: Continuum.

Betancourt, Michael. 2016. Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-digital Aesthetics. New York: Routledge.

Brown, Kornhaber. 2012. The Art of Glitch. Video. Off Book. Arlington: PBS Digital Studios. http://www.pbs.org/video/off-book-art-glitch/.

Cervenak, Sarah Jane. 2014. Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2017. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cooper, Melinda E. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.

Glenn, John. 1962. Into Orbit. New York: Cassell.

Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. 2008. “Glitch.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, 110–118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lepecki, Andre. 2016. Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. New York: Routledge.

Moten, Fred. 2015. “Blackness and nonperformance.” Lecture presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 25, 2015. https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/1364.

Moten, Fred. 2017. Black and Blur (Consent Not to Be a Single Being). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1976. “On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense.” In The Viking Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufman, 42–47. New York: Viking Penguin.

Nyong’o, Tavia. 2009. Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Osterweil, Ara. “‘Absolutely enchanted’: The apocryphal, ecstatic cinema of Barbara Rubin.” In Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, edited by Robin Blaetz, 127–151. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Parks, Suzan-Lori. 1995. The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Quendler, Christian. 2017. The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema. New York: Routledge.

Russell, Legacy. 2012. “Digital dualism and the glitch feminism manifesto.” Society Pages, December 10, 2012. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/12/10/digital-dualism-and-the-glitch-feminism-manifesto/.

Schneemann, Carolee. 2001. Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schneider, Rebecca. 1997. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge.

Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge.

Schneider, Rebecca. 2014. “Remembering feminist mimesis: A riddle in three parts.” TDR: The Drama Review 58 (2): 14–32.

Schneider, Rebecca. 2019. “Slough media.” In Remain, edited by Ioana Juncan. Minnesota: University of Minnesota/Meson Press. https://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/9783957961495-Remain.pdf.

Schor, Naomi. 1987. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Routledge.

Serra, M. M., and Kathryn Ramey. 2007. “Eye/body: The cinematic paintings of Carolee Schneemann.” In Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, edited by Robin Blaetz, 103–126. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

27

Hashtag Archiving

Tara L. Conley

In this chapter I introduce the term hashtag archiving to describe a human-centered approach to capturing discourse. Although this analysis cites relevant literature on hashtag research, along with reference cases, steps, and suggestions for archiving hashtag data, it is not definitive. Rather, it is a starting point for those with the foresight to memorialize hashtag data. Hashtag archivists recognize that history turns into myth, communication technologies transform, interfaces disappear, meaning constructed through social media use changes, and interest in hashtag research may eventually wane. Hashtag archivists also understand that memories trick us. Throughout the process of collecting and organizing data, hashtag archivists become storytellers by piecing together narratives from metadata. No matter the technique or theory used to inform gathering hashtag data, it is therefore necessary for hashtag archivists to incorporate reflective practices when building archives that capture the stories of our time.

The Story of the Hashtag

The # symbol has an uncertain history. Accounts of its origin are often vague and even mythical with respect to its typographical lineage and name. It is an interwoven history characterized by an evolution of symbols, spoken languages, myths, and codes that can be traced across time periods from the Roman Empire, to the Enlightenment, to the present day, as well as across technical fields such as cartography and computer programming. In the late fourteenth century, according to punctuation historian Keith Houston (2013), “the abbreviation ‘lb’ for libra entered English” (42). Centuries later, lb took on many different forms as a result of “carelessly rushing pens” (43). One notable example, Houston illustrates, occurred when Sir Isaac Newton hastily scribbled ℔, or libra, the abbreviation for “pound in weight.” This was one of the earliest documentations of the # symbol. A similar Latin term, pondo (loosely meaning “to weigh”), was going through a transformation of its own in spoken language. The Latin term pondo evolved into the Old English phrase pund, which eventually became the modern-day term pound. It was across these moments in time, when the histories of typography and spoken language collided, or, as Houston (2013, 43) describes, “When libra and pondo were reunited,” that the # symbol (or pound sign) was born.

In the US, contemporary perceptions of the pound sign (# symbol) can be traced back to the early telecommunications and Internet eras. In telecom the # symbol took on yet another name, the octothorpe. The “tortuous history” of the octothorpe marks a starting point for scholars to analyze the # symbol’s significance in communication technologies and as a cultural cue of modern discursive practices (Conley 2017; Houston 2013, 48; Salazar 2017). As communication technologies evolved, so, too, did the # symbol. Take, for instance, another modern-day origin story that occurred on August 23, 2007, when programmer Chris Messina used the # symbol for the first time on Twitter. He tweeted: “How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” (@chrismessina, August 23, 2007). Messina was harking back to 1980s cyberculture, when the # symbol was used across online communities as a way to identify channels of interest (Salazar 2017, 22). Messina’s use of the # symbol in 2007 adds yet another layer to the historical tapestry of the hashtag. This moment in time further clarifies the significance of the # symbol in terms of how information is called up and organized and how discursive practices emerge.

Hashtag Archiving and Uncertain Etymologies

The etymologies of hashtags on social media can be as uncertain as the history of the # symbol itself. Yet this uncertainty is perhaps one of the reasons why researchers, journalists, media makers, and activists are drawn to moments when hashtags appear, trend, and become the focus of mass media and popular culture. Hashtags help the tellers build stories about the worlds in which we live. For this reason I propose the term hashtag archiving as a human-centered approach to capturing discourse in an era of uncertain hashtag data.

Hashtag archiving is a process of capturing and preserving social media data assigned to the visual (#) and nonvisual (U + 0023) dimensions of code that also require interpretive analysis and collaboration. Hashtag archiving involves annotating, indexing, and curating in order to build repositories—whether across interactive media platforms or in the form of text-based documentation—for public retrieval. In 2013 I published the website www.hashtagfeminism.org in order to document and archive feminist discourse across Twitter. This platform is an example of a hashtag data repository that serves as a public resource. Gathering such data sets is often a makeshift process. It involves collecting data across multiple platforms and channels, including manual methods (e.g., using Excel), fee-for-service analytics platforms, and the crowdsourcing of data sets from other resources. One example of a collaborative research tool and consortium that crowdsources Twitter data sets is www.docnow.io. That said, hashtag archiving is not synonymous with digital archiving in the sense of reimaging content on the web. Rather, the process of hashtag archiving locates digitally born content in order to analyze discursive practices, social movements, and storytelling across online and off-line spaces.

Hashtag archiving is also an explicit approach to social justice that incorporates feminist and antiracist frameworks. Punzalan and Caswell (2016, 30–33) argue for more critical approaches to archiving that include archival pluralism, ethics of care, and non-Western ways of knowing. They state these approaches in efforts to confront the authoritarian, white, hegemonic structures that perpetuate systemic inequalities in the field of archiving. In arguing for a more explicit acknowledgment of social justice, Punzalan and Caswell also point out several key characteristics, three of which are most relevant to hashtag archiving: (1) the inclusion of underrepresented and marginalized sectors of society; (2) the reinterpretation and expansion of archival concepts that tend to favor dominant cultures and state and corporate entities; (3) the development of community archives (27–29).

When considering hashtag archiving in the context of the inclusion of underrepresented and marginalized sectors of society, I turn to the issue of origination, which is worthy of further discussion. I use the phrase origin story throughout this chapter so I do not privilege time and numbers over context and culture but emphasize attribution. When documenting the origins of hashtag campaigns and movements, I emphasize the labor of Black and nonwhite queer, women, femme, and trans people across online media. Their work has too often been erased across white feminist and liberal media landscapes. For instance, I have been critical of media professionals with public online and off-line platforms minimizing Black women’s work online. Most notably, I have discussed white liberal media’s early erasure of Tarana Burke’s off-line advocacy work in founding the Me Too movement, which Burke also points out (Burke 2018; Conley 2018). Also, before Twitter was considered the primary mechanism for using hashtags to promote awareness and organize around social and political causes, I pointed out white women’s appropriation of Black feminist thought in the blogosphere (Conley 2013a; Florini 2013). These issues are not new; however, they reflect similar instances of erasure and appropriation that characterize second-wave feminism and neoliberal thought in the latter half of the twentieth century (Conley 2017, 26–27). So indeed, origination matters in hashtag archiving to the extent that the unseen labor of those who contribute to shaping culture and society also matters.

Ethical Considerations for Hashtag Archiving

Annotating Protest: The Case of #Ferguson

In a lengthy footnote to their seminal piece on Ferguson, Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa (2015, 12) discuss the ethical implications of citing tweets from the early moments when an eighteen-year-old Black man named Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014. Bonilla and Rosa cite, without identifying, a Twitter user who tweeted: “I just saw someone die” (4). They provide a rationale for their decision not to identify the Twitter user: “We have thus thought carefully about when to quote, cite, or paraphrase from Twitter posts. We have used real names of Twitter users when discussing tweets that went ‘viral’ or were featured in mainstream media reports. However, when quoting or paraphrasing from unreported tweets, we have chosen not to reproduce the username of the author—erring on the site [sic] of privacy at the expense of offering proper attribution” (12).

In this case Bonilla and Rosa’s decision to prioritize anonymity over attribution reflects an anthropological approach to conducting Twitter research that they call hashtag ethnography. They do not locate Twitter threads showing images and video of Michael Brown lying dead in the street. Along with images and video, the tweet referenced was attached to #Ferguson through retweets, saved on archived Twitter time lines, and amplified by mainstream news reports. These events raise important questions for researchers and archivists documenting cases similar to #Ferguson when moments of violence and trauma are immediately accessible.

Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that along with #Ferguson, there are ethical issues to consider when archiving #MeToo and instances of sexual violence. As scholarly literature on #MeToo grows, so does concern about archiving trauma. In addition, the Me Too hashtag has inspired adjacent hashtags, such as #MeTooIndia, #MeTooK12, and #MeTooMosque, which carries further ethical implications for archiving transnational stories of sexual violence across the web. In outlining this case study on #Ferguson, I suggest that archivists of #MeToo might consider the ethics of annotating protest movements with stories about personal and community trauma.

In building a corpus for analyzing the story of protest movements, one might ask: To what extent, if at all, does documenting a time line of events, from the early moments of injustice to the rise of social and political protest, contribute to a hashtag archive for the public?

For efforts to determine ethical approaches to annotating the rise of digital protest movements, I propose the following recommendations:

- • Provide an interpretation of “early-moment” data and why certain information is documented. Bonilla and Rosa offer additional commentary in a footnote to contextualize an original tweet about Michael Brown’s death. Hashtag archivists’ annotations of early moments should be central to analysis. Annotations can be presented in various forms (hypertext, image, video, audio) and by way of multimedia annotation platforms—for example, by using www.thinglink.com and www.scalar.me/anvc/scalar/.

- • Next, explain the political and social context of the moment and why it is necessary to prioritize anonymity in an era of increased federal and law enforcement surveillance of protesters and others who document and publicly denounce state-sanctioned violence across digital and social media. I provide an example that illustrates an explanation of context in a 2013 online case study I conducted about Renisha McBride, a young woman killed in Dearborn, Michigan (Conley 2013b).

- • Assess the sources are already accessible, usually through news reports, and decide whether it is necessary to cite or not cite, as Bonilla and Rosa chose to do, in order to err on the side of anonymity. Explain a rationale for citing or not citing and why it matters to the archive.

- • Finally, continue to reassess archived hashtag data over time to check for changes in digital content and inaccuracies (hashtag data can easily be changed or erased). This process can be accomplished through manual methods, fee-for-service data analytics platforms, and the crowdsourcing of data from collaborators.

Bonilla and Rosa’s article was the first to introduce hashtag ethnography as a practice for examining social movements in Twitter research. Hashtag ethnography informs hashtag archiving in terms of its emphasis on reflective practices for memorializing the early moments of social and political movements online. One also learns from Bonilla and Rosa’s work that the hashtag researcher is, in fact, an archivist.

Indexing the Signifying Monkey: The Case of #BlackTwitter

The # symbol did not create Black Twitter. As with Ferguson, the # symbol located moments and discursive practices emerging through Twitter. André Brock and Sarah Florini are among the early scholars of Black Twitter who have analyzed it as a form of Black oral tradition and Black cultural discourse, also known as signifyin’ (Brock 2012, 530; Florini 2014, 226). In citing Henry Louis Gates’s work on the signifying monkey, Brock and Florini offer a framework for understanding Black Twitter as counterpublics (Gates 1983, 1988):

Black hashtag signifying revealed alternate Twitter discourses to the mainstream and encourages a formulation of Black Twitter as a “social public”: a community constructed through their use of social media by outsiders and insiders alike. (Brock 2012, 530)

On Black Twitter, signifyin’ often functions as a marker of Black racial identity by indexing Black popular culture. One example is the popular hashtag game in “Hip hop” circles signifyin’ on the R&B singer and rapper Drake. Hashtags such as #DrakePunchlines or #FakeDrakeLyrics mock Drake’s lyrical techniques, such as his use of the truncated metaphor (i.e., a phrase immediately followed by an associated word or phrase). This style is sometimes referred to as “hashtag rap” because it mirrors a common use of hashtags on Twitter. (Florini 2014, 227)

Brock and Florini provide a means for understanding #BlackTwitter as a way to locate Black Twitter counterpublics. #BlackTwitter not only marks Black cultural discourse but also locates “sites of resistances [that] allow for double-voiced and encoded communication” (Florini 2014, 226). That is to say, among these counterpublics, Black Twitter users construct meaning through referents and cues that the dominant culture cannot easily decode. In this case, hashtag archiving #BlackTwitter expands upon traditional archival concepts that tend to favor dominant culture(s) and instead considers Black Twitter counternarratives as integral to our collective memory (Punzalan and Caswell 2016, 29).

It is worth noting here that the study of Black Twitter is part of a much larger and burgeoning body of work on hashtags as sites to examine publics and counterpublics. Some of this work includes examining, for instance, the sociopolitical practice of hashtag(ging) (Myles 2018); the role of hashtags in producing and amplifying social movements (Jackson 2016; Jackson and Foucault Welles 2016; Kuo 2018); hashtags as sites to locate affinity spaces (Khoja-Moolji 2015; Walton and Oyewuwo-Gassikia 2017); and hashtags as modes of storytelling (Conley 2019; Yang 2016).

Archiving counterpublics also raises important questions about indexing encoded cultural practices—namely, to what extent can discursive identities based on shared referents of articulations, performances, humor, wordplay, and style be classified, if at all (Brock 2018, 1017)? To address this question, hashtag archivists should first build an index of their own practices and approaches. Consider these suggestions for taking an inventory of one’s orientation to hashtag data:

- • When indexing community practices through counterpublics such as #BlackTwitter, hashtag archivists must accept they are lurkers and visitors, whether they consider themselves part of the community or not. Ask: How do archivists construct meaning about users and user practices when lurking across and among various platforms and interfaces? Include these reflections as part of the archive.

- • Hashtag archivists should embrace a social justice model of archiving as presented by Punzalan and Caswell. Namely, archivists must consider the development of community archives with, for, and in service of others. Ask: In what ways can hashtag archivists facilitate collaboration and participation in efforts to build repositories of encoded communication?

- • Hashtag archivists must avoid the desire to generalize users and their practices online when hashtags are unable to articulate cultural identities. Ask: What are the limitations of hashtags in documenting culture? What are hashtags unable to account for and locate, even with the most sophisticated tools and methods for analysis?

Certainly, answers to these questions may never fully be satisfied. For this reason, hashtag archivists should be comfortable with the uncertainty of indexing discursive practices using hashtag data.

References

Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. “#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States.” American Ethnologist 42:4–17. https://doi.org./10.1111/amet.12112.

Brock, André. 2012. “From the Blackhand side: Twitter as a cultural conversation.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56 (4): 529–549. https://doi.org./10.1080/08838151.2012.732147.

Brock, André. 2018. “Critical technocultural discourse analysis.” New Media and Society 20 (3): 1012–1030. https://doi.org./10.1177/1461444816677532.

Burke, Tarana. 2018. “#MeToo founder Tarana Burke on the rigorous work that still lies ahead.” Variety, September 25, 2018. https://variety.com/2018/biz/features/tarana-burke-metoo-one-year-later-1202954797/.

Conley, Tara L. 2013a. “An open letter to Amanda Marcotte.” Feminist Wire, March 4, 2013. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/03/an-open-letter-to-amanda-marcotte/.

Conley, Tara L. (website). 2013b. “Tracing the impact of online activism in the Renisha McBride case.” Accessed May 19, 2019. https://taralconley.org/media-make-change/blog/2013/tracing-the-impact-of-online-activism-in-the-renisha-mcbride-case.

Conley, Tara L. 2017. “Decoding Black feminist hashtags as becoming.” Black Scholar 47 (3): 22–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2017.1330107.

Conley, Tara L. 2018. “Framing #MeToo: Black women’s activism in a white liberal media landscape.” Media Ethics 30 (1). https://www.mediaethicsmagazine.com/index.php/browse-back-issues/210-fall-2018-vol/3999237-framing-metoo-black-women-s-activism-in-a-white-liberal-media-landscape.

Conley, Tara L. 2019. “Black women and girls trending: A new(er) autohistoria teoría.” In This Bridge We Call Communication: Anzaldúan Approaches to Theory, Method, and Praxis, edited by Leandra Hinojosa Hernandez and Robert Guiterrez-Perez, 231–256. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Florini, Sarah (website). 2013. “White feminists: Step your game up.” July 2013. http://www.sarahflorini.com/?p=130.

Florini, Sarah. 2014. “‘Tweets, tweeps, and signifyin’: Communication and cultural performance on ‘Black Twitter.’” Special issue. Television and New Media 15 (3): 223–237. https://doi.org./10.1177/1527476413480247.

Gates, Henry Louis. 1983. “The blackness of blackness: A critique of the sign and the signifying.” Critical Inquiry 9 (4): 685–723.

Gates, Henry Louis. 1988. Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. London: Oxford University Press.

Houston, Keith. 2013. Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. New York: W. W. Norton.

Jackson, Sarah J. 2016. “(Re)imagining intersectional democracy from Black feminism to hashtag activism.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39 (4): 375–379. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2016.1226654.

Jackson, Sarah J., and Brooke Foucault Welles. 2016. “#Ferguson is everywhere: Initiators in emerging counterpublic networks.” Information, Communication and Society 19 (3): 397–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1106571.

Khoja-Moolji, Shenila. 2015. “Becoming an ‘intimate publics’: Exploring the affective intensities of hashtag feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 15 (2): 347–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1008747.

Kuo, Rachel. 2018. “Racial justice activist hashtags: Counterpublics and discourse circulation.” New Media and Society 20 (2): 495–514. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816663485.

Myles, David. 2018. “‘Anne goes rogue for abortion rights!’ Hashtag feminism and the polyphonic nature of activist discourse.” New Media and Society 21 (2): 507–527. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818800242.

Punzalan, Ricardo L., and Michelle Caswell. 2016. “Critical directions for archival approaches to social justice.” Library Quarterly 86 (1): 25–42. https://doi.org/10.1086/684145.

Salazar, Eduardo. 2017. “Hashtags 2.0: An annotated history of the hashtag and a window into its future.” Icono 14 15 (2): 16–54. https://doi.org/10.7195/ri14.v15i2.1091.

Walton, Quenette L., and Olumbunmi Basirat Oyewuwo-Gassikia. 2017. “The case for #BlackGirlMagic: Application of a strengths-based, intersectional practice framework for working with Black women with depression.” Journal of Women and Work 32 (4): 461–475.

Yang, Guobin. 2016. “Narrative agency in hashtag activism: The case of #BlackLivesMatter.” Media and Communication 4 (4): 13–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v4i4.692.

28

Hauntology

Lisa Blackman

Hauntology is a method that engages with displaced and submerged narratives, actors, agents, and entities that primarily exist as an absent presence. In different ways they exert influences that exceed specific practices of visualization and representation. Moving beyond big data analytics, hauntologies address the social and cultural lives and afterlives of data, revealing gaps, dead ends, erasures, foreclosures, and epistemic uncertainties. Postpublication peer review is data made possible by the digital disruption of the publishing industry.[1] It is a source of data that opens to hauntology and allows the return of software media transactions and data analytics to their ghostly dimensions. The affordances and potential of postpublication peer review invite new forms of ghost-hunting and speculative archival practices that allow a communing with ghost data. These practices attune to what is rendered visible and invisible, material and immaterial, and true or false within particular regimes of visibility and truth telling.

Our understandings of data analytics and digital archives often take place through the remediation of earlier forms of data analytics, which tend toward the eradication of uncertainty and what exceeds certain normalizing tendencies. As Gitelman and Jackson (2013, 8) argue, these aggregated patterns and their algorithmic supports often obscure “ambiguity, conflict and contradiction,” engaging in acts of erasure in order to associate, connect, and produce what we might identify as collective phenomena (see Blackman 2016). The concept of haunted data that I develop in this chapter provides a heuristic and a set of strategies for bringing storytelling back to data analytics and attempts to circumvent and unsettle their normalizing tendencies. The concept of data having chimeric tendencies is offered as a useful form of “morphological imagination” for approaching data and digital archives as composite entities. These composite entities always have more stories to tell at any one moment. These stories exist in submerged and displaced forms and require new types of intervention and interpretation to disclose more speculative and uncertain archives.

Historiality

Hauntology has a kinship with concepts and methods that include historiality. The science studies scholar, philosopher, and ghost hunter Hans-Jorg Rheinberger (1994) was attracted to scientific controversies and coined the term historiality. The concept draws attention to science as a storytelling machine where, as he argues, “an experimental system has more stories to tell than the experimenter at any given moment is trying to tell with it” (77). He equates this dynamic potential to older narratives that persist in the future, as well as “fragments of narratives that have not yet been told” (77). Science and computational culture are both haunted by the histories and excesses of their own storytelling. These excesses surface in queer aggregation or haunted data to be mined, poached, and put to work in newly emergent contexts and settings (see Blackman 2019).[2] These “queer aggregations” point to the propensity of straight or legitimate science to sanitize, excise, or even exorcize narratives, actors, agents, and entities that “contaminate” it with queerness.

The following is an example that draws out some of the issues remediated within digital archives and within specific data analytics. It focuses on an erased or exorcized feminist scientist who haunts contemporary science in the area of biology and gender studies. In February 2015, Nature, the “international weekly journal of science,” ran an article titled “Sex Redefined,” in which Claire Ainsworth (2015), a “freelance writer based in Hampshire, UK,” reported that “the idea of two sexes is simplistic” and that “biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” Recent scientific discoveries, it was argued, “do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms” (Ainsworth 2015, n.p.). While these discoveries were welcomed by LGBTQI activists and academics, exception was taken to their alleged newness. In the subsequent issue, in March 2015, Nature published a response by Anne Fausto-Sterling (1993), a professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University who has written extensively on the biology of sex and gender, most famously in the controversial essay “The Five Sexes.” Fausto-Sterling, whose work goes unmentioned in the original article, argues that the “concept of multiple sexes is not new” but rather emerged in the early 1990s when feminist critics of science joined forces with intersex activist movements.

Mainstream biology is finally responding to long-standing calls for a pluralization of genders and sexes from within intersex activism, feminism, and feminist science and technology studies, Fausto-Sterling says. Science is not isolated from society, she points out, suggesting that scientific discoveries do not occur in a vat. Rather, “ideas travel into the lab from street activists, literature and varied scholarship, and move back out again. As a result of their efforts, research scientists were pushed into visualizing the previously invisible” (Fausto-Sterling 2015).

Fausto-Sterling’s response to her excision from what passes as scientific knowledge in this area discloses the existence of more stories to tell that haunt this narrative. Her own contributions to the accumulation of scientific knowledge in this instance are submerged and displaced within specific practices of archival conservation. Fausto-Sterling haunts this comfortable narrative of scientific progress, showing how knowledge practices and their histories or historialities are always messier. They open to multiple leads, backtrackings, dead ends, outliers, anomalies, and what remains as an absent presence. What are the implications of this hauntological story and its excising of feminist knowledge for archiving practices and the tracing and staging of more speculative archives? The term speculative archives refers to disaggregated archives that unsettle big data analytics with their drive for prediction and control and their attempts to anticipate the future, underpinned by normalizing practices of rewriting, redaction, and recoding.

Ghost Hunting and the Chimera

The concept of big data guides new digital methods and practices, including data visualizations often based on predictive analytics, hyperlinks, or the frequency or variation of semantic content, such as coword variation. One of the problems with these methods is that they remediate limited forms of semantic and network analysis and are often designed to produce aggregate correlation. They iron out dynamism, movement, and historical connections that are often significant aspects of data’s social life (Beer 2013). When big data becomes the primary object, these aspects are often overlooked. This can lead to the remediation of the asymmetries of power and knowledge that contribute to and perpetuate marginalizations, disparities, and discriminations (see Blackman 2015, 2016, 2019; Noble 2018). In this respect, data analytics requires the development of digital or data hauntologies as a way of redressing these problems.

I argue that data have chimeric tendencies that could be exploited within this hauntological endeavor. I write this chapter on hauntology as a ghost hunter with a predilection for finding the sense in what is rendered aberrant, freakish, odd, bizarre, weird, strange, anomalous, peculiar, and alien (Blackman n.d.). I have a biological affinity with the person who opens the February 2015 article above, a patient who confounded her doctor’s preconceptions because she was what is called a chimera: “A person who develops from a mixture of two fertilized eggs, usually owing to a merger between embryonic twins in the womb” (Ainsworth 2015). Chimera is perhaps a good starting place to think about the ghostly as a generative term that opens to data in its most hauntological mode: to what becomes submerged, displaced, foreclosed, and rendered invisible. This happens specifically according to certain practices of archival memory and the visualizations, representations, and interventions that perpetuate such practices. The term chimera often conjures connections to the mythological, the grotesque, the unreal; to dreams, fantasies, and delusions, including examples in Greek mythology of border-crossing and trans-species entanglement: “A fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail” (Dictionary.com 2018).

Morphological Imagination

In the article, the term chimera refers to genetic anomalies or mutations in which the anticipated singularly distinct bodily integrity of one person is confounded by the unanticipated identification of chromosomal cellular abnormalities of another or others. The revelation of “mixedness” rather than biological sameness challenges the idea of the fortress-defended self that has been normalized and naturalized within rationalities based on “biopolitical individualization” or self-containment (Cohen 2009). The reorientation of thinking, practice, and biological imaginaries toward shared ecologies; unusual cell transfer; and entanglement of self and other, human and nonhuman, material and immaterial reveals how we are always-more-than-one. Chimeras invite the invention of what Vivian Sobchack (2010) has termed new forms of morphological imagination to help us to grasp these realities (see Blackman 2010). Morphological imaginaries are already at work within data-archiving practices, often tending toward conservative psychosocial understandings of selfhood and identity, including psychological individualism. Hauntologies uncover what exceeds data practices that close down on uncertainty, outliers, anomalies, and those traces of displaced and submerged actors, entities, and agents that challenge such understandings. These persist in regimes of anticipation based on existing normalized understandings, knowledges, and historical truths.

Haunted Data

If the assumption of cellular confinement looks dated and anachronistic within the context of the new biologies (epigenetics, the microbiome), then what of software media–driven transactions that leave behind traces as data move on from their original events and accrue agencies? If we are rethinking our conceptions of selfhood, of biological and bodily integrity, then what of data, archives, and the practices of visualization based on particular normalizing tendencies? The concept of haunted data that I develop in my book Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science (Blackman 2019) is inspired by the work of Matt Fuller (2009) in software studies. He has used the concept of the “afterlives” of data to explore the agency and autonomy of data as they move on from the particular event that originated them and become active. The agency, or what I call aliveness of data, allows a consideration of the social and cultural life of data, which exists beyond more instrumentalist notions of data. The concept of haunted data is designed to disrupt the distinction between big and small data and to explore what leaves the frame if we focus solely on metrics, quantification, and digital methods based on counting, measuring, aggregating, and visualizing numbers.

Aggregation

We are familiar perhaps with the concept of aggregation to describe big data, in which the concept of data derives from mathematical and computational approaches that assume information can be given some kind of numerical value. This is taken to enable aggregation, comparison, cross-referencing, and searching according to common factors and indices. However, this raises the question of what is and is not available to be quantified and what exceeds the instrumentalization of data as metrics.

The concept of aggregation is central to statistics and the kinds of probabilistic thinking that underpin future-oriented data analytics. Aggregation is a strategy of taking data from different (often numerous) sources and measures, which are replaced with what are called summary statistics. Summary statistics are then used to model probable or possible explanations to shape possible futures. It is an automated competence within the context of big data analytics and remediates a strategy central to probabilistic statistics. Debates and discussions about the problems with aggregation are numerous in the literature and relate to issues of “ecological validity” and what gets obscured and lost when data are taken, combined, and put to work in relation to other variables (see, for example, Clark and Avery 1976).

The concept of aggregation and its limitations and problems raise critical questions about software media–driven transactions and their traces, which might exceed attempts to search and aggregate data. These data anomalies, or data ghosts, are particularly intensified given the restrictions on what is searchable using proprietary software shaped by application programming interfaces owned by conglomerates such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, for example. In that sense, critical methodological issues are raised regarding what it means to engage in “data ethnographies” that take software media as an object of analysis (see, for example, Hochman and Manovich 2013; Langlois, Redden, and Elmer 2015). These questions are recognized as important aspects of a cultural politics and analysis of the social life of data. This issue has been raised as an important aspect of contemporary sociological inquiry, for example (see Beer and Burrows 2013).

Data ghosts or haunted data therefore have chimeric properties: they accrue agencies that result in crisscrossings, backtrackings, dead ends, and loopings and re-moving what becomes submerged or displaced within particular big data analytics. The patterns or traces that might render ghost data visible require particular forms of labor—human, technical, material, and immaterial—in order for them to be re-moved—that is, put back into circulation.

Re-moval

The concept of re-moval or re-moving is also taken from science studies scholar Hans-Jorg Rheinberger’s work. I argue in Haunted Data that although Rheinberger’s focus is science and specifically scientific controversies, his insights have much to add to data analysis and the digital humanities. Rheinberger is a significant German science studies scholar who, until his retirement, was based at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. His work, like that of many feminist science studies scholars (Haraway, Barad, and Franklin, for example), has produced new objects, entities, methods, and ways of thinking at the intersection of science and philosophy. Derrida, Haraway, Bachelard, Foucault, and Canguilhem, to name a few, have very much influenced his work. He has been described as a leading historian and philosopher of the biological and life sciences (Lenoir 2010). His philosophy of experimental practice has many shared ontologies with those taken up within anthropology, sociology, and literary studies (those which foreground process, enaction, and relationality, for example). It is what Lenoir (2010, xii) refers to as an “exercise in historical epistemology.” His work and historical method present a critique of scientific positivism and explore the entanglement of science, the technical, and the cultural in the production of scientific objects and entities, or what we might term, following Karen Barad (2007), phenomena. The term that Rheinberger uses is epistemic things.

Rheinberger’s approach foregrounds recursion or patterns of repetition and difference that underpin the invention of new scientific objects. They also contribute to the epistemological foreclosure of specific materialized interpretations. Scientific objects are always mediated and become an agent in “the process of making knowledge” (Lenoir 2010, xiii) and are part of “experimental systems” or apparatuses that are performative. That is, they invent rather than discover. However, the processes of what becomes stabilized are always haunted for Rheinberger in terms of displaced and suppressed narratives, which always threaten to surface and come back: they exist as traces or deferrals in the Derridean sense. The concept of epistemic things captures the patterns of difference and repetition characteristic of scientific objects and entities. Although science controversies might be considered settled at particular times, Rheinberger (1994) shows they have the tendency to resurface in new ways and forms.

In Haunted Data, I argue that in the context of science this haunting and the ghost data it re-moves increasingly materialize in new forms of animation and automation, off-line and most visibly in online science discussion and its often volatile displays of affect, emotion, and feeling. Time lags, time shifts, and multiple media times and temporalities are re-moved within scientific controversies, allowing one to orient attention to the uncertainty and indeterminacy that characterize experimental systems. The book focuses on the distributed data related to the postpublication peer review associated with two contemporary science controversies in the area of weird science: the John Bargh priming controversy and Daryl Bem’s “feeling the future” controversy. Scientific controversies, as they are shaped in distributed data associated with postpublication peer review across a variety of digital platforms, shape “scenes of entanglement” where the past and possible futures crisscross, intervene, intrude, and open up the potential for something new to emerge. Rheinberger also characterizes this potential dynamism as an excess that escapes definition. It has different momentums and allows a potential tinkering, or what he also characterizes as a form of re-moving (Rheinberger 1994, 78).

Queer Aggregations

The concept of re-moving expresses the hauntological vision of this thesis: the re-moving or animation of frozen time or temporalities that haunt what has come to pass (as scientific truth or certainty, for example). Controversies are potential scenes of entanglement that re-move or have the potential to set traces in motion: traces that perhaps are not visible or knowable in relation to the intelligibility of particular experimental systems. Re-movings have the potential to perform retroactive reshapings, but importantly, such dynamism is not reducible to scientific research and practice itself. Re-movings are not internal to science or to the internal times and practices of formal scientific laboratories. The concept of re-moval allows a researcher to move beyond the immediate display of sentiment and emotion within online discussions and to explore what traces or deferrals are also potentially being set in motion or kept alive by such practices of self-performance and self-curation of data. I term these queer aggregations.

Transmedial Storytelling

Computational culture is teeming with ghost data that open data archives to their potential contamination with queerness. Developing the concept of transmedial storytelling through the writings of postcolonial theorist Rey Chow (2012), the concept of storytelling is returned to data, intervening and representing specific scenes of entanglement based on displaced and submerged leads and openings. These entangle past and present, material and immaterial, truth and falsehood, and fact and fiction. These scenes re-move ghost data and attempt to illustrate—with some ingenuity, wit, tenacity, imagination, and forensic attunement to the multiplicity of historical times and temporalities—what exists in displaced and submerged form within more speculative and uncertain data archives. These data archives usually exceed specific normalizing practices of aggregation and data analytics. They call for new forms of interpretation that visualize what is often rendered invisible within particular regimes of visualization.

Conclusion: Postpublication Peer Review and Uncertain Archives

“Peer review is broken” (Hunter 2012, 1). The call for new forms of postpublication peer review to counter such normalizing tendencies has been endorsed by researchers attuned to the practices of marginalization and potential discrimination that have governed academic publishing. In an interesting article by Jane Hunter (2012) published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, the evolutionary scientist Lynn Margulis is presented as one scientist who did not benefit from conventional practices of peer review. As the article recounts, despite her going on to invent the groundbreaking endosymbiotic theory, over fifteen journals rejected one of the most important articles outlining this theory before it was eventually published. Margulis, considered by many scientists to be a rebel and a maverick, was continually embroiled in controversy (Wikipedia 2018).

This example of scientific gatekeeping and exclusion is used by Hunter (2012) to argue for the importance of developing new forms of postpublication peer review, including what is known as the F1000 publishing platform, which in Hunter’s words “take[s] openness to the next level.” In this context there is an assumption that new forms of publishing associated with digital platforms, and their affordances in terms of the review and evaluation of scientific theories, might have prevented or challenged the history of exclusions outlined above.

The question is whether new forms of postpublication peer review might attend to asymmetries of power and their racialized, gendered, classed, and sexed operations that we see haunt Margulis’s history as a scientist. I argue that we need new concepts and heuristic imaginaries, including new forms of morphological imagination that can be remediated within data analytics and data ethnographies. Postpublication peer review is an interesting source of data that opens to these asymmetries and their algorithmic cultures of production and consumption. Although we might fear the spread of automated decision-making into our lives, there is much to be learned from attending to what exceeds normative imaginaries and analytics. These disclose the more speculative and uncertain archives that might shape our critical thinking and point to alternative futures currently hidden by particular regimes of truth and anticipation.

Notes

1. Postpublication peer review refers to a particular context of data production and circulation that has the potential to transform academic practices of writing, publishing, debate, and impact. It focuses on the afterlives that academic articles and books might accrue after publication and the ways in which the postpublication peer review found on blogs, Internet forums, social networks, and other social media might enter into, intervene within, and change the settings and parameters of what counts as legitimate and illegitimate debate.

2. Clough et al. (2015, 148) frame big data as the “performative celebration of capital’s queer captures and modulations.” The queerness of such queer capture and modulation is aligned in the reach of big data beyond number to the incalculable. Haunted Data (Blackman 2019) engages in a different form of “queer capture” and modulation, which attends to those “queer aggregations” that are present in a corpus of data associated with postpublication peer review but are discarded from attempts to “storify” or modulate the data within specific algorithmic and computational practices, including the Google PageRank algorithm, for example.

References

Ainsworth, Claire. 2015. “Sex redefined.” Nature, February 18, 2015. http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Beer, David. 2013. Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.

Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. 2013. “Popular culture, digital archives and the new social life of data.” Theory, Culture and Society 30 (4): 47–71.

Blackman, Lisa. 2010. “Bodily integrity: Special issue.” Body and Society 16 (3): 1–9.

Blackman, Lisa. 2015. “The haunted life of data.” In Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data, edited by Ganaele Langlois, Joanna Redden, and Greg Elmer. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Accessed August 19, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501306549.

Blackman, Lisa. 2016. “Social media and the politics of small data: Post publication peer review and academic value.” Theory, Culture and Society 33 (4): 3–26.

Blackman, Lisa. 2019. Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science. London: Bloomsbury.

Blackman, Lisa. n.d. “Loving the alien.” Accessed August 14, 2019. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56ec53dc9f7266dd86057f72/t/5882449486e6c040440cac4f/1484932247027/BLACKMAN-Booklet.pdf.

Chow, Rey. 2012. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Clark, W. A. V., and K. L. Avery. 1976. “The effects of data aggregation in statistical analysis.” Geographical Analysis 8:428–438. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1538-4632.1976.tb00549.x.

Clough, Patricia, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber, and R. Joshua Scannell. 2015. “The datalogical turn.” In Non-representational Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research, edited by Phillip Vannini, 146–164. London: Routledge.

Cohen, Ed. 2009. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dictionary.com. 2018. “Chimera.” Accessed January 9, 2018. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/chimera.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1993. “The five sexes: Why male and female are not enough.” The Sciences, March–April: 20–24.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2015. “Intersex.” Nature, March 19, 2015. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/519291e.html.

Fuller, Matt (website). 2009. “Active data and its afterlives.” Accessed August 14, 2019. http://fuller.spc.org/fuller/matthew-fuller-active-data-and-its-afterlives/.

Gitelman, Lisa, and Virginia Jackson. 2013. “Introduction.” In Raw Data Is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 1–14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hochman, Nadav, and Lev Manovich. 2013. “Zooming into an Instagram city: Reading the local through social media.” First Monday 18 (7). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v18i7.4711.

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29

Instrumentality

Luciana Parisi

What Can Automated Archives Do?

Instrumentality generally defines a correlation between means and ends. For the pragmatist John Dewey, however, the ideal or empirical use of means to an end, or the reduction of ends to means, is not sufficient to undertake the task of instrumentality, which is to be retheorized in the term of an experimental logic that unites—without equating—the medium with thinking, the datum with the ideatum (Dewey 1916). Dewey’s pragmatism distinguishes itself from empirical introspectivism or associationism, for which internally inspected entities (and perceptual impressions) as well as thoughts (or images) cumulate together toward intelligence through an elaborate process of associative learning (discovery by introspection). Dewey instead places the structure of thinking within the more general workings of evolutionary theory in order to challenge the subjectivist qualities of associationism and its reliance on sense data, which perpetuate a mechanist and atomized view of experience. In particular, Dewey’s (1896) early critique of the behavioral model aims to question the reflex arc, which is predicated on the centrality of the stimulus-response (cause-effect) pairing to explain human behaviors. Instead, he argues that context and function have to become primary concerns for a comprehensive analysis of the mind and the body away from dogmatic assumptions relying on parceled, atomized data. For Dewey, an inquiry into the mind—into sensing and thinking—has to start from a notion of flexible function rather than fixed existence. Since Dewey rejects accounts of the mind that explain the mind as either (divine) substance or (material) brain states, he importantly argues that the mind is an activity, a range of dynamic processes of interaction.

From this standpoint, Dewey turns to instrumentalism to abandon psychophysical dualisms that explain knowledge in terms of either ideal faculties of reason or empirical associations of parts. Instrumentality instead corresponds to a method of experimental practices, functions, and techniques that are part and parcel of the uses of theories, concepts, and logic.

Instrumentality denotes not simply usability but the potentiation of means and ends in (and beyond) the practices of using. Insofar as instrumentalism coincides with the centrality of function, it emphasizes how relations and interactions enable the expansion of an inquiry into wider contexts. A function therefore cannot be understood simply as a tool used to a prescribed end. Instead, Dewey’s insistence on a dynamic conception of function as process reconfigures the teleological structure between means and ends to show that means are defined by what they can become under conditions of uncertainty or fallibility of functions, which enable a resetting of ends as these are rearticulated from within the means.

If means do not simply drive toward ends but are themselves part of a larger process in meaning-making, it is because functions are not there to execute a program or to imply that we are heading toward a logical conclusion. Dewey’s instrumentality rather sets up a functionalist model that insists on an experimental logic that unites, without identity, means and ends in the articulation of what is not known. Functions here are more than doing, executing, or simply living off what has already been determined. In these terms, instrumentality is mainly concerned with meaning; with the social process of mediation whereby the gathering of data cannot be disentangled from the meaning of data. In other words, the ideatum, far from prefixing, aims to become subjected to the dynamics of means.

In the age of computational media, the correlation between means and ends has given way to the image of an automated archive as networked platforms of big data search that collect, record, and transmit data. If we take Dewey’s argument against a vulgar understanding of functions based on teleological programming, what kind of instrumentality—or experimental correlation between means and ends—is possible today?

Without being able to discriminate the ends from the increasingly fast means of data mining, however, the data archive has become a purposeless purpose of information. The collection of data no longer fits a model of knowledge that preserves truth and is subsumed to telos. Means here are not predetermined by given ends. Predictive analytics rather exposes ends to a certain degree of indeterminacy insofar as probabilities are the outcomes of a computational compression of randomness that is determined in the last instance. In this respect, since the computational speed of data retrieval has overcome the final cause of data recording, there no longer seems to be a model, a theory, or an axiom that can filter the voluminous size of data beforehand. Instead, the function of archiving seems to have lost its reason: we do not yet know what the overwhelming plethora of granular data records is for.

As a result, one could argue that the age of big data corresponds to a further advance of the eclipse of reason, which already started with modern industrial automation and the demise of the rule of reason as determined by the telos of final cause. In what follows, this chapter will argue that recent preoccupations about the end of theories and the ubiquitous proliferation of logicless systems of decision-making in the age of big data seem to perpetuate the dyad between idealism and empiricism that Dewey’s notion of instrumentality was set to challenge, in the attempt to argue that knowledge—or knowing—above all concerns an inquiry into the unknown. Dewey’s proposition that functions or means above all entail a temporal process in the making of meaning offers us a possibility of reconstructing the image of the archive away from the mindless automation of big data for which all causality has evaporated.

The ars combinatoria of big data has been deprived of its sufficient reason—the principle of causality—to give way to a computational sovereignty that finally collapses means and aims within its enumerative functions. If big data has transformed knowledge into automated platforms of recording and transmission, it is because the logic of deduction through which data could be explained by a theory, a notation, an axiom, or a truth has been replaced with the sheer operations of digital systems of efficient causality, overlapping cybernetics and computation within a logic of prediction that has become open to uncertainty.

This chapter argues that while the uncertainty of the computational archive could be seen as a symptom of the open-ended, causeless, mindless, and purposeless processing of data, from the standpoint of instrumentality one could argue that uncertainty comes to determine the quality of the relation between means and ends. By following Dewey’s vision of what a function could be, this chapter demonstrates that the uncertain archive must be reinvented through the capacities of a medium not just to collect or record data but to become experimental of the datum, by challenging what is given and instrumentalizing data to revise established ends or generate new ones.

This pervasive condition of uncertainty can be set to rearticulate the instrumental relation between means and ends by pushing the idealism of the law and the empiricism of facts toward a pragmatist theorization of decision: namely, an immanent act unleashing the futurity of ends through means. In short, the uncertainty of the ends in the automated platforms of datafication of today shall be taken as an opportunity for reenvisioning the archive in terms of instrumentality and thus beyond the image of big data. The computational transformation of the archive can be addressed in terms of an experimental logic in machine thinking.

More Than Technique

If technology, as Larry Hickman (2001, 17) claims, is more than technique, it is because it involves cognitive inferential activity. Algorithmic automation is not simply a technique of retrieval and transmission of data. It needs to be critically discussed as a techne logic, a logic of techne, or a mode of inference that activates epistemological transformations in the matter of thought. Here the computational archive announces the formation of machine epistemology working through uncertainty.

This view shall be opposed to the mentality of big data governance, security, and aesthetics, imparting the idea that the future is already given in the abstraction of the world into a problem of code. Instead, if the matter of thought has changed, it is because the material of thought no longer matches mathematical language or formulae but automated procedures that aggregate data. This means that a possible inquiry into the real seems to be already there, contained within the search space of computation, and only needs to be retrieved from the constantly archiving megamachine of postcontrol societies. Not only is the image of the future here subsumed to the data oracle of the search engines. It is also, more importantly, assumed that the granular recording of increasingly vast quantities of data contains possibilities of recombination that can be thought through data. No programs, no theories, no codes, and no knowledge are necessary to preserve or unlock thinking. All of the data that could ever be retrieved are there permanently to be recombined ad infinitum.

This position defines the computational archive as a mode of thinking determined by the machine mode of information processing. Ends are flattened into means, and instrumentality becomes replaced by the efficiency of tasks begetting tasks. In contrast to this general disenchantment of thinking, this chapter is an invitation to theorize machine thinking by challenging the principle of sufficient reason for which anything that could be known is already decided in the structure of thought. In other words, the chapter will ask: How can we understand our contemporary technology in its new form of automated cognition not as a mindless connection, mirroring data processing, but instead as automated inferential activities manifesting meaning in and through machine thinking?

Indeterminacy Preservation

Instrumentality therefore offers us one way to question the big data image of the archive as the irrevocable evaporation of finality in thinking, which has led to contemporary claims about the crisis of knowledge in posttruth data. Instrumentality involves a speculative theorization for a new mode of critique that rearticulates the relation between means and ends to envision how technology, and in this case algorithmic automation, counts in matters of thinking and knowledge.

If automated cognition points to a crisis of reason entangled with a logic of deduction whereby data is framed by a theory, a notation, an axiom, or a truth, it is because the post-1980s overlapping of cybernetics and computation brought forward a logic of prediction open to uncertainty. The value of uncertainty today is not only a manifestation of the failure or gaps in the imperatives of data recording. Uncertainty is the condition for reassessing knowledge and thinking with and through machines.

The ingression of computation into culture cannot be understood simply as the technocratic dominance of the mathematical model of communication subtending the architecture of storage and transmission, the input and output self-regulation of feedbacks. Instead, uncertainty in the information sense of randomness or noise—that is, information that cannot be compressed into finite algorithmic patterns—has been central to technological means.

The post-1980s developments of machines that think have demonstrated that uncertainty no longer defines an interruption or limit in the efficient mediality of cybernetic communication. The problem of uncertainty in communication became the starting point for the experimentation of statistical methods of calculation, prediction, and control that could include randomness. The post-1980s development of machine thinking already set up the scenario for the advance of the system of communication that we now call big data because uncertainty had already become central to a logical reasoning involving fallibility.

It has indeed been argued that the form of communication subtending big data shows that information can now be directly retrieved and transmitted ad infinitum without the mediation of elegant, streamlined mathematical notations, theories, axioms, truths, or laws (Carpo 2015). Here uncertainty is not to be understood in terms of errors, glitches, or breakdown or as an explosion of nonfunctionality within a system. Uncertainty instead is directly related to the relativity of the search and the possibility that nonprogrammed results can be achieved over and over again, just by fishing through the indeterminate quantities of data. Uncertainty in knowledge thus demarcates precisely the end of truth.

Nonetheless, we can also understand uncertainty as a question of fallibility and as central to experimental logic. If we follow the pragmatist understanding of instrumentality as involving experimentation in logical thinking, the uncertainty of results also implies fallibility in reasoning. The latter, however, corresponds not simply to a system failure or to a lack of capacity to comprehend unknowns. Instead, it can be defined in terms of an ignorance-preserving activity, or, in other words, the role of doubt within a thinking process that can explain what knowledge is and how it can become other than it is. As a result, one might suggest that what Charles Sanders Peirce (1955) calls the irritation of doubt—that is, how uncertainty inhabits the structure of cognition—could be usefully viewed as an intrinsic part of instrumentality or experimental logic in automated systems of cognition. In other words, in order to rearticulate the question of knowledge in the age of big data, or intelligent automation, one might entertain the possibility that the ignorance-preserving activity in logical thinking is already becoming part of automated cognition insofar as the latter is embedded in its own material processing—that is, the material of data and algorithms as central to the computational structuring of randomness, noise, and indeterminacy.

If the regime of big data relies upon the point of empirical observation—or more precisely, on the inductive method of gathering particularities that can be continuously searched, retrieved, and transmitted without the filter of already existing axioms, laws, and truths—it can be argued that what Peirce calls the fallacy of reason and Dewey defines as experimental logic enables a rearticulation of instrumentality, the relation between means and ends of thought in the age of the algorithm.

The preservation of ignorance in inferential reason is not the same as the historical inclusion of uncertainty in automated logical systems of prediction, which, one may bear in mind, involve a transformation in statistical methods, shifting from a notion of probability from finite sets of observable evidence to discrete forms of infinities or incomputables. Instead of mainly addressing ontological modes of inferential reasoning across humans and machines, it is possible to give a historical account of the transformation of automated inference and of the inclusion of uncertainty in the logic of techne. This may give us an image of the archive beyond the datafication of knowledge.

In particular, the historical period in which uncertainty becomes central to attempts at automating inferential reasoning concerns the development of expert and knowledge systems (1980s), the intelligent agent paradigm (1990s), and computational intelligence and machine and deep learning (2000). However, already with the early twentieth-century realization that mathematical axiomatics was an incomplete affair came the question of uncertainty in mathematical reasoning, which admitted that some infinite postulates cannot be proven in advance.

In particular, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing claimed there was no universal decidable algorithm for all propositions. Computation revealed that it was not possible to know in advance when the algorithmic procedure would halt for those propositions that were not provable. Propositions that could not be solved by an algorithm were therefore called undecidable or incomputable (Dowek 2015).

If we take instrumentality as a method of inquiry into machine thinking, we could then ask: What kind of archive—that is, what kind of knowing how—would subtend this automated form of knowledge if we were to disentangle it from a totalizing image of data computational governance? What are the possibilities of automating uncertainty for an archive that generates its own unpredictable truths that are not dependent on the big data archive where search grants the relativistic reassemblage of what is already known? To answer these questions, we must first attend to a closer discussion of instrumentality in computational processing as the inclusion of uncertainty in the automation of inferential thinking. This is the scope of the next section.

Dynamic Automation

Since the early 2000s, the genetic and neural dynamics of cellular automata have transformed automation in machine-learning systems and developed inferential procedures that do not see uncertainty as the limit of knowledge. It has been argued that this form of automation corresponds to an irrational and nonconscious form of intelligence insofar as the instrumentality of thinking has replaced deductive reasoning and the fundamental principles of axiomatic truth.

As Gilles Deleuze (1995) suggested in “Postscript on Control Societies,” the main guarantor of truth today is cybernetic control: self-regulating feedback systems that act as self-validating proofs, constantly checking information flows. Control relies on the automation of proof, the enumeration of decisions resulting from the capacities of algorithmic compression of data into discrete bits, breaking down unities into dividualities, and transforming norms in an ars combinatoria of data without grounding truths.

From this standpoint, one could safely claim that control has turned disciplinary norms into a heuristic method of trial and error: the infinite regressing of causalities into webs of absolute relativity. Norms are not sustained by eternal truths but have become embedded in the technical procedures or rules of practical knowledge. Here, the algorithmic processing of proof validation is what discerns the true from the false, without having to draw final conclusions from set premises.

As Lorraine Daston (2010) points out, the historical shift from inferential reasoning in terms of the rule, the law, or the truth toward the calculative and mindless power of algorithmic rules demarcates a historical transformation of the capacity of machines to deskill mathematical competences. The volume, the scale, and the speed of algorithmic calculation set up new horizons in war logistics and in the predictive analytics used during the Cold War to gather intelligence and anticipate the enemy strike. With Turing’s effort to compute formal reasoning, this logic of discreteness was confronted with the problem of the incomputable, or information randomness, a crucial step in the development of algorithmic inference.

The question of the incomputable in formal reasoning is also one of how to archive uncertainty in big data so that what and how knowledge is stored, and will in the future be retrieved, does not just correspond to (1) the deductive conformation of means to given ends and (2) the inductive elimination of ends by means of data storage and transmission continuously rearranged by search. In other words, while deduction points to a form of archiving uncertainty that demarcates an epistemological and ontological limit about what can be known and what can be predicted by human reason, the inductive methods of big data extend the limit of knowledge through the statistical calculations of unknowns, searching among infinitely small amounts of data and resolving the uncertainty of the future through the granular reassemblage of what has happened in the past. If these two models of archiving uncertainty are already manifestations of the sovereignty of truths versus the sovereignty of data, then perhaps instrumentality can help us to envisage uncertainty in machine thinking as the preservation of fallibility in both premises and results.

One could therefore make the claim that automated uncertainty is simply a container of all possible data that can be searched because it already exists. Instead, the effort to imagine uncertain archives is to invent a non-Google search method that could preserve the ignorance not only of premises but also of results. Uncertainty shall thus enable us to envision the automated generation of an alien knowledge.

Incomputables and Automated Archives

Among the post-Turing attempts to grasp the incomputable within digital systems, Gregory Chaitin’s (1992) algorithmic information theory argues that incomputables or patternless information within the system breaks the equilibrium between input and output, premises and results, because information increases within processing. Chaitin (1992) uses the term algorithmic randomness to designate this tendency of information to grow in volumes. For Chaitin, the sheer volume of randomness included in computational processing implies the emergence of axioms that cannot be established a priori. He calls this inductive form of computational logic experimental axiomatics because results are not contained in their premises. Instead, the algorithmic procedure of compression points to the evolution of information into increasingly large quantities—a paradoxical condition in terms of algorithmic infinity or omega (a discrete infinity).

Given this view, it is suggested here that the computational compression of information into data becomes radically conditioned by its intrinsic randomness. Efforts to explain how order or patterns emerge from randomness must also be traced back to John von Neumann’s groundbreaking design of cellular automata. Invented in the 1940s to formally investigate the minimal requirements of self-reproduction, the study of cellular automata and their spatiotemporal behavior became central to computational procedures in the 1980s and 1990s (Crutchfield, Mitchell, and Das 2003). According to the mathematician and physicist James Crutchfield, this model of cellular automata defines randomness not as a computational limit but as central to the evolution of algorithmic patterning.

While for Chaitin computation is conditioned by randomness and is ultimately an instance of experimental axiomatics, Crutchfield insists that randomness is intrinsic to the very structuring of information and scales of complexity (Crutchfield 1994). From this standpoint, either the archive is conditioned by incomputables that cannot be compressed into finite data or this absolute indeterminacy becomes relative to the computational structuring of randomness enfolded within cellular automata. The computational archive thus may be seen to coincide not with the mindless algorithmic aggregation of data but with a mode of compression of randomness that organizes information across scales. In Crutchfield’s (1994) examples from evolutionary mechanics, it is shown that contemporary machine learning works through the randomness of recurrent networks self-organizing together to elaborate and determine certain values over others. This means that machine learning does not simply rely on an accelerated level of syntactical organization of data that can be searched and selected ad infinitum. Crutchfield’s insights into dynamic information structuring rather suggest that algorithmic automation involves modes of inference that contain uncertainty.

What does it mean that uncertainty is part of the computational archive? As opposed to the call to arms against the posttruth irrationality of data connection, Chaitin’s experimental axiomatics and Crutchfield’s theory of computational mechanics seem to offer us a possibility for introducing futurity into the archive, insofar as the means that compress or structure randomness enable a conservation of uncertainty that redirects the ends of the system.

It may be clearer to us now that the automated archive corresponds neither to a set of symbolic categories coinciding with the cognitivist computational schema nor to the datafication of history, matter, and energy. Debates about the inclusion of uncertainty in the inductive method of big data cast shadows on a more radical activity of uncertainty as a condition of knowledge within automated systems. This radicalization of uncertainty has historically demarcated the post-1980s synthesis of cybernetics and computation and of statistical dynamics and nondeductive logic and has been central to the development of machine-learning modes of inferential reasoning.

This is also to say that if algorithmic automation defines the end of the rule, the truth, and the deductive model of storage and transmission of culture, it also presents a new level of instrumentality of knowledge that works through computational logic as a means that redirects ends. In other words, instrumentality helps us to explain and not discount uncertainty as a causal condition, an enabling constraint that envisages the possibility for automated systems to become transcendental to both symbolic truths and empirically known concepts and objects. Instrumentality, one must reiterate, is not limited to usability but implies the experimental programming of the function of reason that is the working-through of speculative inferences, whereby ends can transcend relations between particular procedures (Whitehead 1929).

Debates about the end or crisis of the deductive model of axiomatic truths and symbolic reasoning, as well as the new dominance of inductive procedures of data matchmaking, seem to exclude a critical rearticulation of a possible computational epistemology. Instrumentality, instead, can help us to argue for the material, affective, discursive, and cognitive transformations of an artificial culture, conditioned by the mediality of artificial thinking, involving not effective resolutions but the preservation of uncertainty in inferential reasoning.

If the manner in which thought thinks involves mediation and not simply pure reason, then algorithmic rules are mediating the storage and transmission of data not according to preset axioms but by generating hypotheses, maintaining the view that error, fallibility, and indeterminacy are part of the futurity of the archive. How and whether uncertainty can remain fundamental to the automation of knowledge implies not simply the future of recorded data but also the instrumentality of machine thinking.

References

Carpo, Mario. 2015. “Big data and the end of history.” In Perspecta 48: Amnesia, edited by Aaron Dresben, Edward Hsu, Andrea Leung, and Teo Quintana, 46−59. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chaitin, Gregory J. 1975. “Randomness and mathematical proof.” Scientific American 232 (5): 47–52.

Chaitin, Gregory J. 1992. “Algorithmic information theory.” In Information-Theoretic Incompleteness, edited by G. J. Chaitin. Singapore: World Scientific.

Crutchfield, James P. 1994. “The calculi of emergence: Computation, dynamics, and induction (SFI 94-03-016).” Physica D. Special Issue on the Proceedings of the Oji International Seminar Complex Systems—From Complex Dynamics to Artificial Reality, Numazu, Japan, April 5–9, 1994.

Crutchfield, James P., Melany Mitchell, and Rajarshi Das. 2003. “Evolutionary design of collective computation in cellular automata.” In Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Interplay of Selection, Accident, Neutrality, and Function, edited by James P. Crutchfield and Peter Schuster, 361–413. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Daston, Lorraine. 2010. “The rule of rules.” Lecture presented at Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, November 21, 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. “Postscript on control societies.” In Negotiations, translated by Martin Joughin, 177–182. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dewey, John. 1896. “The reflex arc concept in psychology.” Psychology Review 3 (4): 357–370.

Dewey, John. 1916. Essays in Experimental Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dowek, Gilles. 2015. Computation, Proof, Machine: Mathematics Enters a New Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hickman, Larry. 2001. Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. “Abduction and induction.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 150–156. New York: Dover.

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. The Function of Reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

30

Interface

Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold

Interfaces are notoriously difficult to localize and demarcate. Here, we will focus on digital computer interfaces instead of other kinds of interfaces (see Hookway 2014). The first things that come to mind, of course, are the graphical user interfaces that have become widespread on PCs, smartphones, tablets, and various other screens across the interface culture, but the term interface indicates many different contact points and exchanges between humans and computers and between different layers of software, networks, data, and hardware (Cramer 2011; Cramer and Fuller 2008). All interfaces, both human-computer and software and hardware, are designed to combine and translate signs such as languages, including visual, auditory, and behavioral signs, and signals such as commands, code, and data. In this way interfaces can be defined as the layering in and of computers—translations in and between computers, humans, and the reality around us. The code “behind” the interface is just another interface in the layered mise en abyme architecture of computers. The way its functioning is designed is essential, and this design is basically enacted through the juxtaposition and translation of signs and signals. Computers can be defined as machines of interfaces and interfacing all the way, from the manner in which they interface with hardware, networks, and layers of code from machine code to higher-level code to how they interface with humans and let humans interface socially through networks. Interfaces are designed to govern translations and interactions.[1]

Our contemporary culture can, with increasing precision and to an increasing extent, be defined as an interface culture. Of course, interfaces are nothing new: they were born and developed with computing and increasingly became part of everyday life and culture with the popularity of the PC in the 1980s. As Steven Johnson (1997) stated before the millennium, we live in an Interface Culture. But since then, new interface devices have proliferated in our pockets, streets, and surroundings as phones, sensors, “smart” architecture, and monitoring. Interfaces increasingly mediate our cultural activity, communication, and behavior in both public and private—from banal activities such as textual communication, listening to music, and finding your way around a city or country, to the more complex management of our cities and organizations, and to the way economies and business models are formed around tracking and profiling.

Uncertainty

The interface today can be seen as the organization of an infrastructure of data. Interfaces organize how data are stored, translated, exchanged, distributed, used, and experienced. Compared with other infrastructures such as roads, water pipes, or sewers, interfaces and their data infrastructure are finer grained and more difficult to delimit. In fact, a still finer tuning of interfaces into everything and everywhere (e.g., under terms such as Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing) has been a continuous development with the proliferation of computers, computing, and networks. However, this kind of spreading, its reach, and the ways the real world is translated into data all involve dimensions of uncertainty. The interface’s uncertainty has several dimensions.

One uncertainty is ideological. The interface has a history of aiming to disappear. It comes from a tradition of engineering that paradoxically has tried to rid itself of it, seeing it as an “obstacle” that should disappear in favor of clean functionality and usability (Norman 1990). The dismissal of mediation is a driving force in much information technology development and has been framed as “virtual reality,” “augmented reality,” “bodily interaction,” or “calm computing,” as well as by design parameters such as minimalism, user-friendliness, seamless interaction, and so on. Any interface will reflect a balance of submission and control conditioned by ideology, often disguised as efficiency or smartness or as seduction and gamification—for example, in shopping, social media, and other behavioral interfaces. We are seduced to like, comment, relate, or buy while giving away our data and letting the device monitor our movements, choices, and behaviors. The interface is a negotiation and balancing of power that often hides (some of its) premises and effects. Interfaces are designed to show some aspects and hide others—sometimes for reasons of functionality and usability, sometimes for reasons of manipulation and seduction. Artistic researcher Benjamin Grosser (2014) provides example of the latter in his discussion of why Facebook shows some metrics and hides others, apparently guided by “whether a particular metric will increase or decrease user participation.” We get to see how we compete with our friends in the metrics in numbers of likes and comments but not how Facebook profiles us and tracks our behavior.

The ideological dimension might be a way of seeing the interface from the human side, but the interface also has a computational side, and the translation between the two, what is translated and how, is another dimension of uncertainty that deals with the computational uncertainty of semiotics and aesthetics. The purpose of the interface is to connect functional acts with representations—for example, icons, menus, buttons, sounds, or places. German computer scientist and artist Frieder Nake (2000) has described the computer as “an instrumental medium”: we use it as a tool while communicating with (and by) it as a medium. With a representational dimension, technology becomes cultural—and conversely, representation, aesthetics, and culture become technological. Touching images might mean sending and receiving data, accessing and deleting, buying, consuming, and producing. Digital art forms and cultures are at the center of this transformation, which is currently changing all dimensions of society, not only reflecting computational aesthetics but also taking part in developing it further.

This leads to the culture-industrial dimension we have identified as the interface industry (Pold and Andersen 2018). Before the millennium, the interface was still often considered a work-related phenomenon, but computer games, net art, and software art enabled understandings of how interfaces, the Internet, and software were also cultural constructs and new milieus for cultural practice. However, the interfaces of today are much more directly embedded in cultural practices through the many media devices and apps we surround ourselves with. If the interface earlier aimed to disappear into the workplace, it now (also) aims to disappear into everyday cultural practices of listening, viewing, communicating, and meeting.

Increasingly, we see the interface forming a new industrial landscape dominated by Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and more, controlling the production, consumption, and even character of products. Diverse examples abound from the cultures of text, music, and video. Through everyday interfaces such as phones and tablets, our cultural behaviors, choices, tastes, social relations, and communications are datafied and tracked, and the interface increasingly maps what we mean (e.g., in relation to political or consumer issues), what we like, and what we might wish for. The interface is becoming a cultural media industry.

The Metainterface

We have described elsewhere the current development of the interface as the formation of a metainterface (Pold and Andersen 2018). With the metainterface, the interface becomes increasingly generalized in embedded, ubiquitous, and mobile devices and abstracted in networked clouds—everywhere, in everything, and at the same time nowhere specific. The metainterface reflects an abstract spatiality, a cloud, and is simultaneously strategically closed off in a black box such as an app or platform.

In the metainterface, data and software disappear from our devices and into the global cloud. The metainterface becomes a way of seeing and sensing—both technically, as ways we see the world through technological tools, and epistemologically, as ways of understanding what we see. This double character can be explored in everyday interfaces. When interacting with an app such as Facebook on a phone, we often do not know exactly where the data come from, how they are generated and combined, where the software is controlled from, or what kinds of data are absorbed from our interaction and why. Often this even happens without our direct interaction, such as when we think our phone is sleeping in our pocket or when we pass sensors and cameras. When companies such as Facebook and Google track users—not only when services are accessed but also everywhere else through software, scripts, sensors, and other kinds of monitoring and data trading—it ultimately becomes unclear when metainterfaces end and whether it is possible to ever leave the metainterface. In metainterfaces we are always potentially interacting with uncertain archives of data: when searching Google, for example, we are in fact mainly interacting with the archive of data that all the other users have produced for Google’s index, and through searching we produce even more.

The metainterface is part and parcel of both new pleasures and new pains, possibilities, and pitfalls. It leads to new ways of producing, distributing, organizing, meeting, sharing, and perceiving, where culture and knowledge can empower more people more easily and across wider distances, with smaller costs and less use of resources. Art, music, and information are at your fingertips everywhere, effortlessly and constantly. This is not only a question of convenience but a grand opportunity to connect cultural dimensions of all kinds to more functional dimensions of society. Furthermore, it includes the opportunity to make cultural archives available and use them actively in constellation with user choices, profiles, and data from the outside world. History and its archives potentially become constantly rearticulated, reconfigured, and reinterpreted in an endless process.

In this way the metainterface is an important part of culture—of ways of sensing, interpreting, and interacting with the world. Currently, however, artists and cultural workers are rarely those doing the counting and understanding. The thinking, design, and structuring of the metainterface is still quite limited from an artistic or cultural point of view. For example, a decent revenue model for artists, musicians, and writers is still largely lacking, as are ways to consider and use the archive that are more interesting and creative than current models, which basically give you more of what the platforms think you like. Issues concerning how metainterfaces often further clichéd typifications of race, gender, and sexuality also need to be explored in order to avoid being confined within algorithmically driven normativity. For example, artist Erica Scourti works with how the metainterface confines her body and gender and describes her using her digital footprints and traces (Scourti 2014; see also her 2014 installation Body Scan). Another enticingly simple and thought-provoking queering of material interfaces is artist Zach Blas’s (2007–2012) project Queer Technologies, which includes the ENgenderingGenderChangers, “a ‘solution’ to Gender Adapters’ male/female binary.” Furthermore, Wendy Chun (2011) and Stephen Monteiro (2017) have written about how female perspectives and women have been occluded from computing and interface history.

If we think beyond the models of Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify and look into (post)digital and net cultures with their models of sharing, remixing, curating, and recombining old and new media and materials, there are many other ways to envision metainterfaces than the current monoliths. The question is: How can we rethink and redesign the connection between culture and the interface in new ways and from a digital cultural perspective, rather than from the perspective of technological surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015)?

Note

1. This happens with both software and hardware interfaces. Examples include how smartphones such as Androids and iPhones have extended and mobilized digital culture while also limiting access to file handling and copying. This can be analyzed through their interfaces and has led to a new cultural interface industry (Pold and Andersen 2018). Furthermore, Apple and others have removed the standard physical 3.5 mm headphone minijack, forcing users into proprietary alternatives such as Bluetooth or Apple’s Lightning connector/interface and thereby extending their control.

References

Blas, Zach. 2007–2012. Queer Technologies. http://www.zachblas.info/works/queer-technologies/.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cramer, Florian. 2011. “What is interface aesthetics, or what could it be (not)?” In Interface Criticism: Aesthetics beyond Buttons, edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Pold, 117–129. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Cramer, Florian, and Matthew Fuller. 2008. “Interface.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, 149–153. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Grosser, Benjamin. 2014. “What do metrics want? How quantification prescribes social interaction on Facebook.” Computational Culture 4. http://computationalculture.net/article/what-do-metrics-want.

Hookway, Branden. 2014. Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Johnson, Steven. 1997. Interface Culture: How New Technology Shapes the Way We Create and Communicate. San Francisco: Harper.

Monteiro, Stephen. 2017. The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nake, Frieder. 2000. “Der Computer als Automat, Werkzeug und Medium und unser Verhältnis zu ihm.” In Menschenbild und Computer: Selbstverständnis und Selbstbehauptung des Menschen im Zeitalter der Rechner, edited by Heinz Buddemeier, 73–90. Bremen: Universität Bremen.

Norman, Donald A. 1990. “Why interfaces don’t work.” In The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, edited by Brenda Laurel, 209–220. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Pold, Søren, and Christian Ulrik Andersen. 2018. The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities and Clouds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Scourti, Erica. 2014. The Outage. London: Banner Repeater.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2015. “Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30: 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5.

31

Intersectionality

Brooklyne Gipson, Frances Corry, and Safiya Umoja Noble

In recent years some light appears to have permeated through the black box of big data archives, revealing how we are known, tracked, and commodified through the collection, storage, and deployment of platform data. For instance, a number of recent articles have described an of-our-times exercise in which Facebook users can log into their accounts, navigate to the ad preferences portal, and find out who the platform thinks they are—or what it thinks they might like to purchase. If the platform believes you to be nonwhite, it might put you in the “multicultural affinity” interest group (Anderson 2018), or it might peg your “people” interests as Black American public figures such as former first lady Michelle Obama and sports commentator Charles Barkley. Other interests might be as broad as “shopping” or “science,” as fuzzy as “self-awareness,” or as broadly political as “feminism.” The categories can be as humorously wrong as they are broadly correct: a portrait of the self that is equal parts shocking and banal.

This exercise in ad tech is joined by more serious public awareness about the ways that platforms operationalize user data, whether to surveil or to sell. There is Facebook’s ongoing lawsuit with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), wherein the US government charges that the platform allows real-estate companies not only to select advertising audiences by zip code but also to choose those audiences through protected classes or “interest”-based proxies for these classes, whether race, religion, sex, disability, national origin, or color (HUD v. Facebook 2018). What this growing public awareness around user categorization and commodification might not reveal, however, are the broader mechanisms through which already marginalized lives come to be more vulnerable—more uncertain. That is, these forms of awareness have the potential to reinforce those black boxes, a term used by science and technology scholars to describe tools whose only traces are their inputs and outputs, not their inner workings (Pinch 1992).

How might we see these workings beyond the interactive facades platforms give us to “understand how our information is being used,” as they so politely phrase it? Following critical archival scholars (e.g., Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand 2017), how do we interrogate big data’s archives in a way that offers emancipatory potential—not through seeing what data are there but seeing how the whole system operates? In line with the concerns of critical data studies (e.g., Brock 2015; Iliadis and Russo 2016; O’Neil 2016; Taylor 2017), how might alternate methods and frameworks be needed to reveal the workings of these data archives? How do we break open big data’s black boxes, showing its twinning of vulnerability with invisibility, despite this new public awareness?

We approach big data’s archives through intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991) and continue the work begun by Noble and Tynes (2016) to argue that an intersectional approach sheds light on big data’s archives in particularly useful ways. To frame this approach, we first offer a discussion of intersectionality, its origins in Black feminist thought, and its use in critical data studies and intersectional Black feminist technology studies (Noble 2016). We then discuss how intersectional approaches might reveal often unmarked normative value systems of whiteness, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and beyond at work in the mass collection, storage, and organization of data.

As coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991), intersectionality describes analytical approaches that center interlocking systems of oppression and in so doing make visible the normative value systems that facilitate erasure. Although Crenshaw was not the first to articulate the underlying concept of intersectionality, she was the first to apply the concepts to legal theory and employ the salient analogy of the intersection: “Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination” (Crenshaw 1989, 149). In the exemplary case cited by Crenshaw (Crenshaw 1989, 141–142), DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, Black women filed a legal suit against General Motors, claiming that the company’s seniority system disenfranchised Black women. The court ruled that because some women (all white) had been hired, there was no evidence of discrimination. As Crenshaw highlights, this “single-axis” or unitary approach to identifying inequality is the primary reason that gender-specific discrimination against Black women is largely unaddressed in Black advocacy movements and also accounts for why there was no feminist response to this marginalization of Black women’s concerns (Crenshaw 1989, 140). The analogy of the intersection is meant to encapsulate the experience of Black women who cannot detach their racial oppression from their gender oppression (or vice versa) in service of a unitary goal because they experience both forms of structural oppression at the same time. Crenshaw indeed builds from decades of Black feminist scholarship regarding the condition of being doubly marginalized and rendered invisible by society (i.e., Beale 1970; Church Terrell 1940; Combahee River Collective 1977/1995; Cooper 1988; King 1988; Murray 1965) in order to interrogate the structure of these oppressive systems themselves.

As intersectionality has grown in popularity, it has reached a status of “citational ubiquity” (Wiegman 2012), wherein the term has often been misinterpreted. Black feminist scholar Brittney Cooper’s (2015) article defining intersectionality for The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory offers a foundational overview of the intellectual lineage of intersectionality, as well as an overview of some of its key misreadings. Cooper ends with a guide on how intersectionality can be employed as a feminist research methodology, an approach applicable to technology research and far beyond. A common misstep underscored in the text is the tendency to understand and employ intersectionality as an additive theory of personal identity—that is, interpreting the presence of one marginalized identity in addition to another as indicative of intersectionality and mislocating it strictly at the level of personal identity rather than including the social-structural.

Rather, intersectionality can be best understood as both a theoretical concept and a methodology. In an article outlining the relevance of intersectionality as a research paradigm within the field of political science, Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro (2007) explicates the difference between multiple approaches and intersectional approaches to research design. Intersectional approaches challenge the research designer to rethink traditional, socially constructed paradigms and/or standards of measure. Hancock Alfaro (2007) provides the example of the researcher who develops a set of questions that correlate with or indicate class, as opposed to using income as a proxy for class (72). Instead of being the “totalizing theory of identity” that Crenshaw (1991, 1244) warns against, intersectionality “identifies the hegemonic (ideas, cultures, and ideologies), structural (social institutions), disciplinary (bureaucratic hierarchies and administrative practices), and interpersonal (routinized interactions among individuals) playing fields upon which race, gender, class, and other categories or traditions of difference interact to produce society” (Hancock Alfaro 2007, 74). In this way, intersectionality not only uncovers new knowledge; it generates new questions and approaches that reconfigure our understanding of what we already know to be true. Additionally, intersectionality “serves as an important corrective for imprudent overemphasis on generalizability that overlooks the priority of producing valid knowledge claims” (Hancock Alfaro 2007, 74).

Through these research paradigms, we hold on to intersectionality’s roots in embodied discourse consistent with the Black feminist tradition of foregrounding alternative epistemologies (Collins 1989) and maintain that intersectionality is inherently nonnormative because it challenges traditional empiricism, which is predicated on the experiences and standards of evidence put forth by white male Western Europeans. Both empiricism and data science rely on “the God Trick” of “seeing everything from nowhere”—that is, they both falsely perpetuate the notion that an individual can be truly disembodied and/or objective (Haraway 1988, 581). As feminist theorist Donna Haraway argues, objectivity is not in fact synonymous with disembodiment but instead “a particular and specific form of embodiment.” Black feminist theories such as intersectionality expose these logical fallacies.

In its centering of women of color’s experiences in particular, intersectionality is a powerful means of revealing the normative workings of power in ubiquitous technological systems. That is, if technology systems are value laden with white, heteronormative, patriarchal value systems (Brock 2018), then the process of untangling and decolonizing technology may require an approach that incorporates alternative epistemologies. Where Crenshaw employs the concept of intersectionality to make visible glaring oversights that facilitate marginalization within the legal system, critical intersectional technology researchers have employed intersectionality to do the same for other technological systems and processes. For these researchers, it has served as a framework for uncovering, understanding, and naming the inability of technological systems to register certain marginalized groups and the consequent harm against those rendered invisible by these systems (Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018; O’Neil 2016).

That is, intersectionality opens up those technological black boxes that otherwise invisibilize linked machinations of power. And while the metaphor of the black box could be used to describe a wealth of mechanisms through which power is made invisible in society, digital technologies are particularly powerful means for making these workings hyperinvisible, compounding their normativity. As Ruha Benjamin (2016) has argued, the workings of racism today are often deeply embedded in the workings of science and technology, their new operation obfuscated by the purported reasonableness, objectivity, and agency of these domains. Yet by putting marginality at the center of analyses (Star 1990)—in particular, by foregrounding the experiences of women of color in these technological regimes—we reveal the normative standards in these systems, going beyond inputs and outputs to inner workings. Consistent with these framings, Meredith Broussard (2018) uses the term techno-chauvinist to identify the tendency of tech culture to be primarily dominated by white men who generally believe that autonomous systems are inherently better than “human-in-the-loop” systems because they allow less room for error.

In the midst of increasing claims of certainty and predictability, which are the basis of most big data projects—to predict a host of human behaviors based on past behaviors—we need intersectional approaches to destabilize and remind us of the uncertainty and precarity of such projects. Through their mode of critique, intersectional approaches often offer the imagining of different technological systems and different modes of data collection, storage, and use. Linnet Taylor (2017), for instance, employs intersectional frameworks to critique the ways that big data in development contexts often multiplies the disadvantages already experienced by the communities these systems are ostensibly trying to support. This intersectional approach underscores the need for an articulation of data justice, she argues, that may deeply challenge the existing value systems that big data use typically operates upon. Rather, she writes, data justice must balance the benefits of representation with the right to information privacy; it must offer autonomy in technological choices without the risk of being stonewalled from technological benefits; and it must allow for the means to challenge bias and prevent discrimination in these systems. This framework supports at once a greater knowability of these systems’ functioning and an alteration of the ways we typically conceptualize data systems as agents of knowability; in other words, justice is the right to choose how and to whom one is knowable and the means to understand how knowability is deployed. We believe that data justice framed through intersectionality is a far more potent and powerful lens than that of data ethics, which foregrounds the individual responsibility of users and designers of technical systems and often obfuscates the structural and historical impediments to the realization of fair, restorative, or reparative possibilities for the use of data and computing.

Indeed, we want to point out the ways that intersectional frameworks shake the very foundations upon which claims of big data’s power rest, whether those foundations be the wielding of large data sets (that is, the wielding of these archives), claims to power based on pattern identification, or mythologized computational intelligence (boyd and Crawford 2012). Rather, we highlight the ways that large data sets might be conceptualized, designed, collected, and used intersectionally as a better practice. We look to groups such as Data for Black Lives, the organization and conference cofounded by Yeshimabeit Milner and Lucas Mason-Brown, which centers communities of color. Data for Black Lives critiques high-tech manifestations of discrimination while imagining the ways that technology might be used as one component of movements for racial justice—for instance, envisioning the ways in which data can show the workings of power and white supremacy, one step in “reverse engineering” these systems, as Ejike Obineme would put it (“Building Black Political Power in the Age of Big Data,” 2017). These conversations are the building blocks of “abolitionist tools,” practices that both draw attention to and dismantle existing racial inequities that are reproduced through new technologies (Benjamin 2019). We might also look to Documenting the Now, an archival group led by Meredith Clark, Jules Bergis, and Trevor Muñoz, who engage in the conscientious collection of social media records around historically important events, particularly social justice movements. At the center of archival studies, we look to the work of Samip Mallick and Michelle Caswell at the South Asian American Digital Archive, which provides powerful counternarratives in community archives and demonstrates how uncertain archives have been about the very existence of communities overlooked by the hegemonic archival fantasies of who belongs, and who does not, in the North American imaginary. Whether explicitly stated or not, their intersectional underpinnings are shown in the ways they politicize data collection and use, center discussions of identity and discrimination, and imagine ways that large data sets might at once be demythologized and ethically used.

With this, we might return to the ways we have come to know big data’s archives in recent years—the ways we are told we have access to platforms’ archives to know and analyze what they might know and analyze. Despite our ability to see those categories we are purported to occupy, these systems actuate a triple-blind condition in which neither the target audience, the designers, nor those disenfranchised are able to see the discriminatory action taking place. Whether it is Facebook’s iteration of “redlining” that the HUD lawsuit addresses or the systematic denial of economic opportunities and resources to certain groups based on the categorization of data, these workings do not come in the overt racially restrictive housing covenants of yesteryear but are manifest in processes that reify normative values. If we engage on the level of category and if we know the black boxes’ outputs of categories, it is hard to see who might be caught in the system. While big data’s archives today make powerful and often destructive claims about the knowability and consequent possibilities of these subjects, an intersectional approach fundamentally demands a rethinking of the subject’s knowability and inherently reads power into the operation of these many points of observation. Intersectionality offers a rich starting point for imagining more just possibilities for these records, and for ourselves.

References

Anderson, Dianna. 2018. “Unless you’re a white guy, Facebook thinks you’re Black.” Dame, April 19, 2018. https://www.damemagazine.com/2018/04/09/facebook-thinks-im-black/.

Beale, Frances. 1970. “Double jeopardy.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 54–155. New York: New Press.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2016. “Innovating inequity: If race is a technology, postracialism is the Genius Bar.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (13): 2227–2234.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity.

boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. 2012. “Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological and scholarly phenomenon.” Information, Communication and Society 15 (5): 662–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878.

Brock, André L. 2015. “Deeper data: A response to boyd and Crawford.” Media, Culture and Society 37 (7): 1084–1088. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443715594105.

Brock, André L. 2018. “Critical technocultural discourse analysis.” New Media and Society 20 (3): 1012–1030.

Broussard, Meredith. 2018. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“Building Black political power in the age of big data.” 2017. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nunutJXDtQE.

Caswell, Michelle, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand. 2017. “Critical archival studies: An introduction.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2 (1): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.50.

Church Terrell, M. 1940. A Colored Woman in a White World. New York: G. K. Hall.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1989. “The social construction of Black feminist thought.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (4): 745–773.

Combahee River Collective. 1977. “Combahee River Collective statement.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 232–240. New York: New Press.

Cooper, Anna Julia. 1988. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cooper, Brittney. 2015. “Intersectionality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 385–406. New York: Oxford University Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): 139–167.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” Stanford Law Review 43:1241–1299.

Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: Picador.

Hancock Alfaro, Ange-Marie. 2007. “When multiplication doesn’t equal quick addition: Examining intersectionality as a research paradigm.” Perspectives on Politics 5 (1): 63–79.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599.

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Murray, Pauli, and Mary O. Eastwood. 1965. “Jane Crow and the law: Sex discrimination and title VII.” George Washington Law Review 34:232.

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Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

32

Latency

Kristin Veel

Etymologically, latent refers to something concealed or secret. It comes from the Latin latentem (nominative latens), the present participle of latere, meaning “to lie hidden, lurk, be concealed,” which is also related to the Greek lethe (“forgetfulness, oblivion”) and lethargos (“forgetful”). In the seventeenth century, it came to connote something “dormant, undeveloped,” in the medical sense of a disease that is present but not yet producing symptoms or clinical signs. The notion of latency is thus situated in the twilight zones between visibility and invisibility, knowing and unknowing, gesturing toward something hidden from view that we expect to emerge into visibility at some point in the future. Besides prompting fundamental ontological, epistemological, and hermeneutic questions about the properties of that which is latent and how we may come to know it as such, it prompts spatial considerations (where is something hidden?) and temporal stretches of anticipation (when will it show itself?). These spatiotemporal connotations of a fluctuating field between the visible and the invisible are pertinent when we try to grasp the properties of the uncertainties that abound in big data archives, making latency, with its cross-disciplinary connotations, a particularly apt entry point for consideration of a field that by its very nature requires interdisciplinary methodologies.[1]

The Temporality of Uncertainty

As we enter the twentieth century, the connotations that etymologically link the word latency to the uncertain gradually move from the realm of the unknown (as in secret) toward something one tries to understand and master, which can to some degree be measured. In medicine “a latent period” designates the delay between stimulus and response, not just in the waiting time before a disease manifests but also in the period before the effect of an administered drug becomes apparent. This marks a different relation to uncertainty in which we are not merely at latency’s mercy—forced to wait until what is hidden reveals itself—but are also in a position of control because we have the means to measure the delay and understand its mechanisms.[2] In physics and engineering, latency as time delay is explained by the velocity and speed at which things with spatial dimensions can interact. According to the laws of physics, such physical changes are always less than or equal to the speed of light, and this creates a delay in response. In the computational use of the word, latency time is what limits the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted, and the minimization of latency time remains a key challenge in communication engineering. Here the uncertainty is no longer a condition we accept or merely try to understand but one that we actively engage with and try to manipulate. An example is the waiting time involved in live transmissions, when the signal travels a certain geographic distance through a chain of communication equipment (satellites or fiber-optic cables). The parameters that can influence latency time, and which engineers seek to minimize, include the delay incurred by the medium (wired or wireless), the size of the packet, the gateway nodes (such as routers) that examine and possibly make changes in what is sent, and (in the case of Internet latency) the server’s occupation with other transmission requests. Tuning the computer hardware, software, and mechanical systems is a technique to reduce latency. Latency can also be camouflaged through prefetching, in which a processor anticipates the need for data input and requests the data block in advance so that it can be placed in a cache and accessed more quickly. In some of the applications based on blockchain technology (for example, cryptocurrencies), an emergence of what might be called a latency economy can be seen, insofar as the users are able to pay to have their transaction placed in a more advantageous position in the distributed ledger and thereby minimize the latency between when the transaction is made and when it is registered in the ledger. Here the temporality of uncertainty is not only something over which mastery is sought; it has become a commodity in itself.

The term latency thus today carries a rich and diverse set of connotations spanning a wide range of disciplines, most embedded in temporal trajectories and overlays in which the presence of that which is latent conflates the past, present, and future in intricate constellations. The temporal connotations of the invisible that latency carries make it a potent term for addressing the uncertainties of big data archives, which are not only repositories of the past but also vehicles for predicting and preempting the future.

The Stowaway

Latency’s temporal conflation is also foregrounded in the application of the term in aesthetic and cultural theory, where it has received considerable interest in recent years (Bowker 2014; Gumbrecht and Klinger 2011). Cultural theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2013), for instance, uses the term latency to argue that the twentieth-century conception of time has transformed, from a linear directionality aiming toward change and progress to a condition of simultaneity that he calls the broad present, in which it has become impossible for us to leave the past behind. In making this argument, Gumbrecht references Dutch historian Eelco Runia’s concept of presence as linked to the figure of the stowaway, which foregrounds the spatial dimensions of a sense of latency and gestures toward the difficulty of grasping that which is not (yet) there: “In a situation of latency, when a stowaway is present, we sense that something (or somebody) is there that we cannot grasp or touch—and that this ‘something’ (or somebody) has a material articulation, which means that it (or he, or she) occupies space. We are unable to say where, exactly, our certainty of the presence comes from, nor do we know where, precisely, what is latent is located now” (Gumbrecht 2013, 22). Not only does the figure of the stowaway invite us to consider in more detail the spatial connotations of latency (what are the properties of this space where someone or something lies dormant?), but the anthropomorphic connotations inherent in the figure of the stowaway also allow us to think more closely about uncertainties as carriers of agency and intent. What kind of “consciousness” or “cognition” can we ascribe to this stowaway if we conceive of it as an uncertainty embedded in a big data archive?

We may expand on this analogy by turning to Sigmund Freud ([1905] 1999), who speaks of the latency period (after the oral, anal, and phallic stages and before the genital stage of puberty, when the child develops sexual interests in people outside the immediate family). It is a period when the sexual drive lies dormant, and desires of the earlier stages are repressed or sublimated. It thus forms a small lacuna between more libidinal phases, bridging the desires of early childhood and anticipating the development of adult sexuality in puberty, but it also holds the potential for breeding neuroses, Freud argues.[3] Metaphorically, we may see uncertainties in big data archives as situated in similar lacunas, where their properties as skewed biases or ethical dilemmas have not yet taken form as fully fledged neuroses. As long as they are indeterminately categorized as “uncertainties,” without specific properties that would call them out of their latency and require them to take tangible form with specific consequences, their libidinal drive (intent or agency) is likewise difficult to determine.

Determining Uncertainties

The latent uncertainties in big data archives encompass the unknowns or unknowables that we are blind to and therefore do not think to harvest. They also encompass the inherent biases or social sorting mechanisms that reveal themselves when the archives are put to use, rendering users as well as the system itself vulnerable. As is often emphasized, a quantitative approach and a focus on the aggregation of vast amounts of data means a larger tolerance for flaws in individual pieces of data, based on the assumption that these flaws will even out as long as the collected data material is big enough (Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger 2014). Nonetheless, what the types of latent uncertainties mentioned here (which, although they are not necessarily perceptible to human cognition until they reach critical mass, can have severe real-world implications) have in common is that they are difficult to address. How do we call them into visibility and understand their mechanisms without thereby altering them?

This notion of uncertainty is in accordance with that asserted by quantum physicist Niels Bohr. In contrast with Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Bohr did not understand uncertainty as arising from the experimenter’s interference but rather asserted that position and momentum do not have determinative values until they are measured (Barad 2007). Latencies occupy the space before measurement. They may, however, be further understood as operating in the realm of what literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles, in her bridging of neuroscience, cognitive biology, computer science, and literary studies, calls nonconscious cognition. This term describes the level below modes of awareness (where the psychoanalytical notion of the unconscious is located[4]) and applies to human, animal, and technical cognition alike. Hayles (2017, 28) writes: “Removed from the confabulations of conscious narration, nonconscious cognition is closer to what is actually happening in the body and the outside world; in this sense, it is more in touch with reality than is consciousness.” Hayles’s approach allows us to see latent uncertainties being played out in a realm below conscious awareness and in correspondence with ongoing natural, technical, and bodily processes that take place in the world, often without our conscious recognition of them. Understanding the uncertainties of big data archives as latencies that operate on the level of nonconscious cognition, where they do not yet have determinative values, may offer an entry point for better understanding the indeterminate spatial and temporal properties of those uncertainties (their position and momentum, if you like), as well as ultimately acknowledging the existence of those uncertainties at a stage before we are able to consciously engage with them. Reconceptualizing them as nonconscious cognitive latencies, we may think of the cognition of uncertainties in big data archives without recourse to the anthropomorphic figure of a stowaway with a consciousness while retaining the questions of intent and agency.

However, it is important to avoid the fallacy of regarding uncertainties as somehow “intrinsic” or “innate” in the big data archives where they occur, which would remove human responsibility for identifying their causes and consequences. Latency (with the particular spatial and temporal connotations that the word carries) may help us to avoid dismissing uncertainties by black boxing them while retaining their ontological indeterminability. It may thus leave us better equipped to address the hermeneutical conundrum, so pertinent to big data archives, of the agency and intent of the uncertain.

Archives, Agency, and Intent

Media theorist Wolfgang Ernst draws a distinction between data and narrative: “In the archive, nothing and nobody ‘speaks’ to us—neither the dead nor anything else. The archive is a storage agency in spatial architecture. Let us not confuse public discourse (which turns data into narratives) with the silence of discrete archival files. There is no necessary coherent connection between archival data and documents, but rather gaps in between: holes and silence” (Ernst 2004, 3).

Nonetheless, huge efforts are currently being made to “make data speak,” often through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and propelled by the argument that there is an intrinsic knowledge “hidden” in the data that can be teased out with the right technology. This can, for instance, be found in the marketing rhetoric of companies promoting data visualization or “natural language generation” with slogans such as “tell the stories hidden in your data.”[5]

Literature and digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti takes Ernst’s argument further, claiming with regard to the mass digitization of archives that “one cannot study a large archive in the same way one studies a text: texts are designed to ‘speak’ to us, and so, provided we know how to listen, they always end up telling us something; but archives are not messages that were meant to address us, and so they say absolutely nothing until one asks the right question” (Moretti 2013, 165). Both Moretti and Ernst point to the difference between an archive of data and a text with narrative intent, emphasizing the importance of the questions asked of data rather than transferring intent onto the data itself. In other words, intent is incurred in the interaction with the archive, not necessarily present in the individual data as such. It is in that moment of calling the latent into visibility—of determining position and momentum—that intent, and hence also potential bias, reveals itself. In the act of turning the latent into something more manifest, the uncertainties take concrete and specific form.

However, what the notion of latency emphasizes is the intricate temporality of this act that conflates past, present, and future. As latently present, the uncertainties are already there in the archive before any questions are asked, embedded in the structures that make up the archive and in the decisions about what to include and what not to include. Indeed, they may even solicit particular questions. We thus need to acknowledge the fallacy identified by Ernst and Moretti that data “speaks” to us while keeping in mind that intent emerges in the complex assemblages of conscious and nonconscious cognition of the humans and technologies that brought this data into being. Addressing big data archives as latencies allows us to recognize that uncertainties and their properties are dependent on the questions we ask of data, as well as to acknowledge that with AI and machine learning this calling into visibility is a human as well as a technological process that takes place just as much when it is programmed as when the data is being interpreted.

By regarding our engagement with big data archives in this way—as an interaction with a spectrum of nonconscious cognitive latencies stemming from humans and technologies alike—we can begin to think critically about the meaning-making processes that big data archives simultaneously stimulate and reflect.

Notes

1. This chapter draws on Veel (2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2018), as well as my book with Henriette Steiner (Steiner and Veel 2020).

2. Marika Cifor’s engagement with undetectability as “the status of a person living with HIV who, enabled by pharmaceutical treatment under medical supervision, has lowered the load of the HIV virus in their body to levels that are insignificant statistically and that render it non-contagious” (Cifor, forthcoming) speaks to a condition of controlled latency. So does the use of latency to describe the halt of the development of biological cells in cryobiology (Radin 2013).

3. For instance, in “An Autobiographical Study”: “Of all living creatures man alone seems to show this double onset of sexual growth, and it may perhaps be the biological determinant of his predisposition to neuroses” (Freud [1925] 1946, 66). See also his wider conceptualization in “Moses and Monotheism” (Freud [1938] 1939).

4. Freud ([1933] 1999, 70) describes latency as a form of the unconscious that he terms “the preconscious,” which can more easily become conscious again than the unconscious proper.

5. For instance, Narrative Science, Narrativa, and Automated Insights, Inc.

References

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. 2014. “All together now: Synchronization, speed, and the failure of narrativity.” History and Theory 53 (4): 563–576.

Cifor, Marika. Forthcoming. Viral Cultures: Activist Archives at the End of AIDS. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cukier, Kenneth, and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. 2014. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. New York: Mariner Books.

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2004. “The archive as metaphor.” Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, September 30, 2004. http://onlineopen.org/the-archive-as-metaphor.

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33

Metadata

Amelia Acker

Introduction

Representing stuff with names and categories is a fundamental aspect of human identity and culture. For information scholars concerned with cultural memory, metadata applications such as classification schemas and information retrieval techniques are where the power of representation in cultures can be seen. In my work as an information scientist, I investigate the impact that new data technologies have on our ability to preserve and archive new forms of digital cultural memory. One way to study the impact of big data systems in culture is through metadata, or data structures that represent collections and contexts of data. While the term itself is relatively new (having first been used in 1968 by computer scientists in the US military), techniques of metadata are some of the oldest memory practices found in cultures of writing, ranging from lists to indices, receipts, and taxonomies (Hobart and Schiffman 2000). The application of metadata to collections is a condition of long-term preservation, access, and control. As information artifacts, metadata engender values and contain ideologies from the institutions that use them, the people who create these standards, and the infrastructures that enact them. Metadata matter to critiques and histories of big data because they reveal the values and ideologies of the people who use them and those enrolled in data-driven experiences of the world.

Because metadata are created and used by humans, they inherently advance particular worldviews onto the ideas, artifacts, and experiences they are used to describe. Like data, metadata as a term holds both specifics and ambiguities that can limit access and enact control through representation (Boellstorff 2013). So, all histories of metadata are stories about asserting control and designating access through representation. In their work on the cultural significance of representation with classification systems, Bowker and Star draw our attention to the power of metadata structures and the viewpoints they enact: “Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not inherently a bad thing—indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such as it is dangerous—not bad but dangerous” (Bowker and Star 2000, 5). When information architects design systems to name, classify, and manage data, whether they are engineers and developers or librarians and archivists, metadata structures not only support access points for retrieval; they are gateways that influence identity, understanding, and authority around the things that can (or cannot) be named.

The Power to Name

Metadata have historically been the domain of information professionals working in state archives, government bureaucracies, and institutions such as universities, municipalities, or churches. Metadata techniques and structures are driven by the urge to classify, to organize ideas, to identify things, to distinguish stuff into categories, and to represent phenomena across time and space. They are often characterized as keys for future uses—designed to find, protect, and access collections (Gilliland 2017). However, when groups of experts name and structure collections with metadata techniques, biases will always be present (Gartner 2016). Investigating the hidden origins of metadata structures and the motivations behind their enactment brings to light the accumulated power of established systems and cultural practices—we can see how standards, taxonomies, and classifications can reinscribe biases as they make meaning in their representation of information, things, and even people. The metadata that we use to structure, name, and categorize stuff are data too. These “data about data” have a profound impact on how information is represented, on how knowledge is accessed and managed over time, and on how it affects future people and their encounters with information resources. Yet most metadata are often hidden as a condition of use. So who defines the scope of these metadata keys? To whom are these metadata meaningful and valuable?

Some metadata categories can reinforce violence as they enact the biases of their creators through time, revealing the limits of representation and the need for change (Olson 2013). For example, many representation battles can be seen in the editing, replacing, and updating of categories from legacy classification systems, such as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH) that deal with race, gender, class, labor, and migration. In spring 2016 the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of the US Library of Congress, which maintains the LCSH standard, moved to revise and replace the heading illegal aliens, as well as the broader term aliens (PSD 2016). This policy change would have had an impact on other LCSH headings and subheadings, such as children of illegal aliens or church work with aliens. As it has with other subject headings, the PSD argued that the current term was out of date and derogatory, and it proposed that aliens be revised to noncitizens and that illegal aliens be canceled and replaced by two new headings, noncitizens and unauthorized immigration (PSD 2016).

The subject heading aliens appeared in the first edition of the Library of Congress’s (1910) dictionary of subject headings. The term alien has many definitions, and for most of the twentieth century, the subject heading had to be disambiguated between noncitizens and beings from other planets or planetary systems when it was being assigned to resources. Aliens has been updated a few times since its introduction, and more specific terms have been adopted. For example, extraterrestrial beings was not added to the LCSH standard until 2007 (Library of Congress 2007). In 1980 the subject heading aliens, illegal was published, and it was then revised in 1993 to illegal aliens (Peet 2016). Many organizations, including the Associated Press, the American Library Association, and the contributors to the PSD 2016 change proposal, agree that the term illegal has become pejorative and have made efforts toward adopting the term undocumented immigrants instead (American Library Association Council 2016; Colford 2013). However, the Library of Congress viewed the suggested terminology as problematic, and instead it proposed noncitizens to refer to resources about people who illegally reside in a country. Shortly after the Library of Congress moved to replace the illegal aliens subject heading in 2016, Congress quickly voted against the change with a number of appropriations bills in order to prevent conflicting terms from appearing in existing laws (Aguilar 2016; Taylor 2016). While efforts continue to adopt new terminology, illegal aliens remains unchanged.

Histories of metadata are not always about accurately describing subjects of information resources for access; they can also be about conflicts over the power of representation altogether. Drabinski has argued that classification categories are “always contingent and never final, shifting in response to discursive and political and social change” (Drabinski 2013, 100). As a leading bibliographic and content standard, LCSH is used in libraries and research universities throughout the US to provide access to information. The standard is also used in cataloging resources throughout the world, beyond the US, and as such it is a socially produced, hegemonic metadata structure. The battle over the problematic illegal alien subject heading (and the various possible alternatives) shows how competing visions of terms can reinscribe bias and reinforce pejorative categories onto people and resources that document such experiences (Taylor 2016; Aguilar 2016). In an effort toward “metadata justice,” librarians and activists continue to push for the updating of the subject heading in order to provide access to information resources about the condition of undocumented peoples, stateless peoples, and refugees (Albright 2019; Jensen, Stoner, and Castillo-Speed 2019). The continued use of the illegal alien subject heading now proves to be a statement of US elected leaders’ values and legislative priorities over the professional librarians and governing bodies who maintain and use the standard themselves.

Platforms: Creators, Categories, and Control

While deploying metadata standards and techniques has historically been the domain of librarians and archivists, it has more recently also become the work of computer scientists, database designers, and standards engineers. With the rise and saturation of information communication technologies (ICTs), networked digital technologies now leverage user-generated data and metadata to design and shape experiences and information ecologies. Contemporary networked information infrastructures cannot work without the creation and use of metadata (Mayernik and Acker 2018), and as such, data and metadata from platforms, apps, mobile devices, and software increasingly govern our experiences of personalization, engagement, entertainment consumption, and algorithmic recommendation systems. These data collection contexts also represent archives of the future that will document the rise of big data technologies (Acker 2015).

More and more, we see the platformization of learning, entertainment, reading, shopping, dating, driving, connecting with friends, and even ordering food (Helmond 2015). With digital networks, users have the potential to constantly create data while platforms can constantly collect those data, bind them with metadata, and resell them as part of their business model: “Product taxonomies, brand architectures and enterprise vocabularies are intimately connected to strategy and competitive advantage” (Morville 2005, 126). Increasingly, we see that the semantic relationships between users’ data and data derived from their environments (such as work, gym, church, commute) are becoming central to the user experience and design of personalized platform products such as Amazon, Yelp, or YouTube. For example, Spotify recently announced its personas tool, which builds on years of user-centered design techniques to cluster and examine listening behaviors of user groups in the US (Torres de Souza, Hörding, and Karol 2019). Spotify’s research team was able to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative user data to cluster listening behavior data into five personas based on habits and commonalities across users to develop a schema of contextual factors that influence the motivations behind what users listen to where. Personas are now part of the platform’s internal vocabulary to support the identification of users, categorize their listening habits, and drive algorithmic recommendations.

While metadata standards like the personas product taxonomy that describe people and their behaviors have always been essential to social platforms, the intensification and datafication of ICTs we now see proves that some user categories can and have been used in support of profiling, social sorting, and redlining minority and vulnerable populations through platforms (Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018). Particularly with profit-driven platforms premised on targeted advertising based on user metadata, the power of legacy standards and the categorization of users have far-reaching consequences when deployed in big data applications, where large-scale data mining and data analytics are dependent upon initial taxonomies and classification systems to sort users. For example, ethnic affinity categories are among the options that data brokers and advertisers can use to promote content and direct targeted content to users on platforms (Angwin, Mattu, and Parris 2016). Platforms typically classify users by a range of affinity categories that may be unknown to users themselves. Used to display new content, push news alerts, and personalize search results to users through affinity categories on platforms such as Google, YouTube, or Instagram, these metadata structures can be used to control the information accessed by some users and not others, as well as categorize content for specific users based on predictions made with their metadata. In 2016 and 2017, investigative journalists at ProPublica discovered that Facebook’s internal classifiers and the external ethnic affinity categories on its advertising platform could be used to prevent housing ads from being seen by African Americans and Asian Americans or to promote extremist content to users with anti-Semitic interests (Angwin and Varner 2017). After both investigations, Facebook responded by updating the ads platform to disable the use of ethnic affinity marketing for particular kinds of ads and removing explicitly discriminatory interests (Egan 2016; Sandberg 2017). Platforms like Facebook continue to group and classify users by shared attributes for their ad delivery platforms, but increasingly, these user categories are coming under scrutiny and regulation for discrimination in housing and hiring practices. In March 2019, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development filed a discrimination suit against Facebook for “encouraging, enabling, and causing” housing discrimination by restricting which user groups could see advertisements (Jan and Dwoskin 2019).

Grouping users into audiences for targeted advertising is not new. Data markets such as newspaper, television media, food service, and insurance markets existed for decades before mobile networks and social platforms. But with big data technologies that enable near-constant data creation and collection, platforms can leverage large-scale social networks, environmental sensors, and rapid data processing to create new gateways of control and access to collections of data. In big data cultures, intermediaries such as social networks and mobile device companies act as gateways between creators who produce data and brokers who consume user data for predictive analytics, relationship mining, and anomaly detection. In this data culture of constant creation and collection, metadata underwrite all these infrastructures but remain hidden and often inaccessible to most of the creators who produce them (Acker 2018). One core definition of metadata is related to administrative rights and permissions (Pomerantz 2015). The right to control governs proper use and access credentials, as well as preservation and curation possibilities. A prime feature of this moment of big data technology is that data creators are ceding control and access to their data while platform intermediaries profit from consuming and providing access to these collections to data brokers who curate them for long-term value. Despite the fact that big data technologies extract data at scale, intermediaries and brokers control access and keep the keys. Discussions of metadata often begin with the supposed objectivity of representation, but in an era of constant collection and creation, well into the “big data era,” human actions, experiences, and ways of being can be left out by omission, obfuscation, or ideology (see Keyes, chapter 35, in this volume). It remains unclear how these infrastructures enhance accessibility or reliability, or confirm knowledge. Elsewhere, Kitchin (2014) has identified a number of fallacies that drive this cycle of big data empiricism—namely, that if big data is captured constantly, it can provide a full and accurate resolution of the world and that swaths of data can speak for themselves, transcending context- or domain-specific knowledge practices.

The Stakes of Uncertain Archives

I have been arguing that an epistemic mark of big data culture is the distance between creators who produce data and collection contexts where data and metadata are accumulated and stored. This gap between data creators and the collections of data about them has and will have an impact on the stakes of representation in these big data collections. These uncertain archives represent data and metadata accrued from big data apparatuses such as transportation and mapping apps, social media, mobile devices, surveillance systems, and Internet infrastructures assembled by data intermediaries to resell and repurpose user data to data brokers. But few of these archives are accessible to the creators who produced these digital traces and are affected by these categories the most. Indeed, platform users cannot opt out of affinities, audience profiles, schemas, or personas once they have been classified as such because these metadata belong to the intermediaries and brokers who control the data users create. While these metadata are not always understood or preserved for the people who created them, they are actively leveraged by platform intermediaries, data brokers, and third-party data consumers to create personalization profiles, predictive analytics, and algorithmic recommendations. In a big data culture, where creating data is a form of belonging, there are few avenues in place for users to control or access metadata generated about them or to withdraw from categories once they have been sorted and enrolled into them. If the space that separates users from collections of their data is an epistemic mark of big data, then the access and enactment of metadata will continue to be how this space grows. Productively focusing on the misalignment of representation in information systems such as LCSH or the Facebook ads platform can reveal how society has changed, how firms mitigate risk, and under what conditions metadata standards have been hidden, uncovered, governed, and valued.

I began this chapter arguing that one way of critically studying the impact of big data applications is through the processes by which data are named, categorized, and accessed. These names become the standards through which infrastructure connects people, technology, information, and cultures. When information architects, including platform intermediaries or social media developers, make decisions and systems built upon metadata that define and structure information such as news, music, and information resources for the public, these metadata can reinforce bias and create disadvantages for particular users and their information ecologies. Pinning down the status of metadata, predicting their impact, and locating who controls them is hard, even for those who intentionally use it the most. But when people themselves are categorized by the platforms they use as a condition of that use, the power of who enacts and controls access to these uncertain archives of metadata should be considered, debated, and understood. And depending on your beliefs, these metadata categories should be battled for in order to understand threats to access or who profits from them as keys to controlling and accessing data. By tracing data assemblages of data creation, collection, control, access, and reuse through metadata technologies, this key term comes to represent an entry point for apprehending and interrogating the uncertain archives from data cultures and those who control access to the future of our digital cultural memory.

References

Acker, Amelia. 2015. “Radical appraisal practices and the mobile forensic imaginary.” Archive Journal. http://www.archivejournal.net/?p=6204.

Acker, Amelia. 2018. “A death in the timeline: Memory and metadata in social platforms.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2 (1): 27.

Aguilar, Julián. 2016. “GOP insists Library of Congress retain ‘illegal aliens.’” Texas Tribune, June 9, 2016. https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/09/gop-blocks-plans-scarp-immigration-terms/.

Albright, Charlotte. 2019. “‘Change the subject’: A hard-fought battle over words.” Dartmouth News, April 22, 2019. https://news.dartmouth.edu/news/2019/04/change-subject-hard-fought-battle-over-words.

American Library Association Council. 2016. Resolution on Replacing the Library of Congress Subject Heading “Illegal Aliens” with “Undocumented Immigrants.” January 12, 2016. Chicago: American Library Association.

Angwin, Julia, Surya Mattu, and Terry Parris Jr. 2016. “Facebook doesn’t tell users everything it really knows.” ProPublica, December 27, 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them.

Angwin, Julia, and Madeleine Varner. 2017. “Facebook enabled advertisers to reach ‘Jew haters.’” ProPublica, September 14, 2017. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertisers-to-reach-jew-haters.

Boellstorff, Tom. 2013. “Making big data, in theory.” First Monday 18 (10). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4869.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Colford, Paul. 2013. “‘Illegal immigrant’ no more.” AP News, April 2, 2013. https://blog.ap.org/announcements/illegal-immigrant-no-more.

Drabinski, Emily. 2013. “Queering the catalog: Queer theory and the politics of correction.” Library Quarterly 83 (2): 94–111. https://doi.org/10.1086/669547.

Egan, Erin. 2016. “Improving enforcement and promoting diversity: Updates to ethnic affinity marketing.” Facebook Newsroom, November 11, 2016. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/11/updates-to-ethnic-affinity-marketing/.

Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Gartner, Richard. 2016. Metadata: Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web. New York: Springer International.

Gilliland, Anne J. 2017. Conceptualizing 21st-Century Archives. Chicago: Society of American Archivists.

Helmond, Anne. 2015. “The platformization of the web: Making web data platform ready.” Social Media + Society 1 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080.

Hobart, Michael E., and Zachary S. Schiffman. 2000. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jan, Tracy, and Elizabeth Dwoskin. 2019. “HUD is reviewing Twitter’s and Google’s ad practices as part of housing discrimination probe.” Washington Post, March 28, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/28/hud-charges-facebook-with-housing-discrimination/.

Jensen, Sine Hwang, Melissa S. Stoner, and Lillian Castillo-Speed. 2019. “Metadata justice: At the intersection of social justice and cataloging.” Association of College and Research Libraries. March 25, 2019. https://acrl.libguides.com/c.php?g=899144&p=6468942&t=34793.

Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. Los Angeles: Sage.

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34

Migrationmapping

Sumita S. Chakravarty

The issue of human migration and border crossing is transforming the face of politics worldwide, forcing migrants and nonmigrants alike to ponder anew the viability of ideas of national belonging, community, and citizenship. We have entered a time of intense hostility to migration, as signified by the push for border walls, policies of exclusion, the consolidation of Fortress Europe, and the like.[1] Given the enormous political stakes involved in thinking through some of the complexities of the contemporary moment, how might big data (and digital technologies in general), promising a path to certainty, clarity, intelligence, and insight, point a way forward to analysis and critique? This chapter charts a preliminary attempt in that direction: I advance the concept of migrationmapping to explore productive affinities and reveal dissonances in diverse media-rich practices on the topic of migration. In using mapping, both in its everyday sense of navigation and orientation tools and as a conceptual framing for a field of study, my aim is to clear a space for alternate mappings of migration, outlining a critical genealogy of its practices. Positioned at the intersection of what scholars have named the visual turn, the cartographic turn, and the digital turn in media and cultural studies, migrationmapping is a nexus term involving investigations of the empirical with the imaginative, the literal with the symbolic, the ideological with the aspirational. The notion of the archive is crucial in this regard as a way to examine the impact of these turns on the rhetorical construction of migration.

In recent years, the ubiquity of maps and mapping has raised questions about the history and politics of mapmaking, even as digital mapping software is shaping fields from literature to history to archaeology. Our everyday practices are steeped in map worlds. As the architect Laura Kurgan (2013) puts it: “We constantly read maps. In print and on computers, mobile phones, PowerPoint presentations, and blogs, maps visualize everything from the movement of hurricanes and refugees to the patterns of traffic and shifting electoral landscapes” (16). Because of the close association of cartography with movement and travel, maps provide a privileged, if overdetermined, lens into the construction of the migration archive. At the same time, however, maps can be reductive and perceived as functional. Similarly, the term data and its cognates big data, database, and datafication are based in the primacy of discrete numerical facts collected and stored for future use. In the digital era, there is broad enthusiasm for the possibilities opened up by big data. As more and more of the digital footprint of humanity becomes accessible to complex algorithmic processes of networked computers, data emerges as of preeminent economic and cultural value. On the face of it, big data is the fulfillment of the promise held out by mapping: the revelation of patterns not seen before and of unknown connections and points of inference. Arguably, one function of big data is to produce better and more accurate informational maps. The phenomenon of big data is thus a continuum of priorities and protocols set much earlier, although now at a more automated and “intelligent” level. The promise of mapping as a technology is only likely to be enhanced by the powers claimed for big data analytics; for instance, more information about disease, climate, population growth, or migration can reveal patterns that lead to better strategies of prediction and control. With what implications? How might a genealogy of mapping help us access big data’s own archival past?

Given the shaping power of definitions, maps and data-gathering formulas have shaped how migration is understood, and how it is embedded in a complex of social and historical events. As forms of media that have spanned the manuscript, print, and digital eras and that contain the media properties of visual representation, animation, and sign systems of all sorts, maps may be considered a culmination of the blend of science, art, and technology long sought by humans. This may explain our contemporary fascination with maps, as well as the nagging fear that “the map is mapping us” (Burkeman 2012). As Sarah Todd puts it: “Maps are science. But they are also art, and propaganda, and memory, and war. The projection of a multitude of (un)known pasts, present worlds, and possible futures that inhabits the map invites so many questions about the narrative that is being told, and who precisely is doing the telling, and how, and to what end, and what voices are not being heard at the same time. Among those voices that we must search for is, of course, the voice of the migrant” (Todd, pers. comm., 2017). How do the beauty, familiarity, standardization, and visual cohesion of maps square with the messy, uncertain, and incomplete process of the human experience of migration? Would the values of the one, of certitude and reliability, of data-gathering protocols and spatial distribution of information, affect the questions one might ask about migration and migrants? Can the vocabulary of “data” (big or not) adequately represent the more diffuse structures of meaning in verbal and visual language?

Since graphs, charts, and maps are one of the primary ways in which migration is historically understood, not to speak of the uses to which maps are put in migrant journeys, one might expect a robust theoretical literature on the imbrications of the two. However, this is not the case, and the critiques of mapping address migration issues only tangentially, if at all. Nor have migration scholars engaged with debates in cartography and critical map studies. Of course, many scholars in the fields of geography and cartographic history have questioned the scientific authority of maps. J. B. Harley (2001), for instance, argued that social divisions were reproduced in the geographic atlases of eighteenth-century England, and Denis Wood (1992, 2010) regarded maps as instruments of persuasion and power. Denis Cosgrove (2005, 45) noted that “the map’s enormous authority in modern culture” could be seen in the proliferation of map images in modernist art as well as popular culture. And with the latest technologies of GPS and GIS, issues of privacy and surveillance are of great concern, as shown in Laura Kurgan’s (2013) book Close Up at a Distance. On the practice side, programs using digital mapping technologies for archaeological or futuristic projects are too numerous to mention here, and map art has truly come into its own. In what follows, I want to signal the enormous purchase of the cartographic impulse while at the same time acknowledging its silences and erasures.

My analysis unfolds in three phases. First, I examine the nature of the map as a medium, with all the uncertainty that entails. Inspired by W. J. T. Mitchell’s work on the relationality of migration and iconology, I look at the migration map as an image that can be read, rather than as a document that proclaims the truth of a situation. Next, I bring together two powerful models of how mapping methods still in use emerged in colonial practices and the decolonization of North America. The ideas of the grid, statistical data, and spatial bordering became prevalent at that time and have been consolidated since. Third, moving further afield from a numbers-oriented vision of the map, I draw out the implications of what Anne Wallen (2014) has called the “mapping impulse” as a means to finding a place in the world. These imaginative, metaphorical, and intimate ways of demonstrating the practice of mapping can serve as alternative modalities for thinking about the intersections of migration and the digital.

Map as Image

The relationship of migration to the image has been well laid out by the scholar W. J. T. Mitchell. He argues: “Because other people, both kinfolk and strangers, can only be apprehended by way of images—stereotypes of gender, race, ethnicity, etc.—the problem of migration is structurally and necessarily bound up with that of images. Migration is not a mere content to be represented in images but is a constitutive feature of their life, central to the ontology of images as such” (Mitchell 2016, 127). Mitchell goes on to say that because images, unlike people, migrate easily, they were historically seen as dangerous and their creation prohibited. But could the fear and suspicion of images also arise from their uncertainty? At a time of superabundance of images, what about conflict within the image? As a critical tool, migrationmapping needs to be aware of the difficulties of producing definitive characterizations of material reality and how certain choices fix meanings in particular ways. Following Walter Benjamin, Mitchell calls attention to the dialectical image, noting that migration engages all aspects of the inherent dialectics of the image.

I would like to take this further by suggesting that there is a corresponding need for the image to engage with the dialectics of migration. In the film Before the Rain (directed by Milcho Manchevski, 1994), the image seeks to capture the rootlessness of characters unmoored from their traditional ways of life but fiercely committed to a return to the values of nativism and parochialism. The film’s backdrop is the former Yugoslavia, and migration itself is the dialectical force that the images seek to harness. The film has a triptych structure, denoted as “Words,” “Faces,” and “Pictures,” but it is the ambiguity inherent in each of these signifiers, rather than their material clarity or certainty, that migration and exile reveal and enact.

What the film does is treat faces, stories, and pictures as mappings of emotional landscapes of the internal and external conflicts inherent in migration. Traversing the literal and the symbolic, such mappings are both location-specific and evocative of larger political forces. As Katarzyna Marciniak says, “It is important not to homogenize transnational locations, as each needs to be analyzed in its specificity, with attention to the heterogeneity of gendered, racial, and ethnic modalities” (Marciniak 2003, 67).

Map as Archive

The story of transforming bodies, faces, and pictures into empirical data for the purpose of organizing and systematizing information into maps is itself a fascinating (if chilling) one. Several accounts trace the genealogy of mapping as it emerged in the modern period. In the brilliant chapter “Census, Map, Museum” in his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1991) shows how close the links are among the histories of colonialism and the practices of statistical organization and mapping of the social world. Censuses, maps, and museums “profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain and the legitimacy of its ancestry” (164). He analyzes the colonial state’s interlinked system of census, map, and museum as a totalizing classificatory grid that “could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore—in principle—countable” (184). Anderson, whose observations are specifically drawn from Southeast Asia but can be more widely applied, notes that census categories in Malaya in the nineteenth century were continuously agglomerated, disaggregated, recombined, intermixed, and reordered. As the colonial period wore on, the census categories became more visibly and exclusively racial. Religious identity, on the other hand, gradually disappeared as a primary census classification: “Large racial categories were retained and even concentrated after independence, but now redesignated and reranked as ‘Malaysian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Indian’ and ‘Other’” (165); “the real innovation of the census-takers of the 1870s was, therefore, not in the construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but rather in their systematic quantification” (168). What started out as a way to superimpose Western codes of social order and to subvert local classifications that the colonizing forces did not understand gradually took on the concreteness of grids and charts and numbers and groupings. These in turn spawned a vast system of institutions, which then required extensive means to operate. Anderson writes: “Guided by its imagined map, the colonial state organized the new educational, juridical, public-health, police, and immigration bureaucracies it was building on the principle of ethno-racial hierarchies which were, however, always understood in terms of parallel series. The flow of subject populations through the mesh of differential schools, courts, clinics, police stations and immigration offices created ‘traffic-habits’ which in time gave real social life to the state’s earlier fantasies” (169). Ironically, decolonizing states throughout Asia and elsewhere adopted these same institutions and structures to govern themselves.

Map as Data

If Anderson’s account points to the “disorderly” origins of ideologies of imperial order in Southeast Asia, Susan Schulten (2012), in her book Mapping the Nation, notes the connection between national identity and geographic knowledge in the cartographic history of the US. She argues that the origins of our current data-driven, map-producing, informational society can be traced to the 1830s, when a new kind of map—the thematic map—focused on the distribution of phenomena and not on the physical features of the landscape itself. In particular, she reveals the way in which, during President Lincoln’s time in office, the cartography of slavery became a contested means to crystallize tensions around secession. Describing Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s famous painting First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, she notes the presence of a famous “slave-map” in one corner as indicative of the crucial role maps had come to play in national politics and self-definition by the 1860s. Schulten’s chronicle of the proliferation of thematic maps as part of a broad intellectual investment in the rational and predictable yields of statistics makes for fascinating reading. Nevertheless, she also notes that our historical knowledge of maps remains limited. Lincoln may have consulted maps frequently, but “how he looked at the map at any given time is impossible to determine—as mysterious as how individuals read novels or watch films” (Schulten 2012, 155).

That maps can tell different stories to different individuals, depending on their points of view, has been a hard-won lesson of the present. In his essay “Technology, Nature and American Origin Stories,” David Nye (2003) notes that contrasting national narratives are rooted in incompatible conceptions of space. The American story of origins is one of subduing the earth through various technologies, setting it apart from the more mythic uses of the land of the native inhabitants. Moreover, Nye shows that the system of a grid or “the imposition of a geometrical pattern on much of North America was central to the imagined order that made possible stories of technological creation” (14).

Creative Mappings

Although neither Schulten nor Nye is concerned directly with migration, their observations about the visual and verbal representations of space are highly relevant to an awareness of the need to extend the language of mapping. The idea of migrationmapping can draw its models as much from imaginary cartographies and inner landscapes as from what one might call, adapting Walter Benjamin’s phrase, “homogeneous, empty space.”[2] By presenting space itself as a prism that enables different reflections and refractions of the migrant/human experience, by setting up a dynamic back-and-forth between the literal and the metaphorical and the real and the phantasmatic, some theorists (and artists) are pointing in promising directions. In a perceptive essay on the role of maps and mapmaking in accessing complicated national and individual histories, Anne Wallen (2014) compares three works by East German authors for their innovative recreations of spatial relations. Here the migrant is less a human figure and more an epistemological stance; more an existential category than a symbol or archetype—a position of inquiry and knowledge, a way of apprehending space rather than being located in space. Wallen notes that a connection between maps and personal reflection occurs frequently in recent German writing. Judith Schalansky’s book Atlas of Remote Islands (2009) is a hybrid memoir and cartography project. Subverting stereotypical images of migration as necessity into images of it as desire, Schalansky’s atlas signifies her openness to the unknown, as well as a transcendence of the limiting circumstances of her country, which as a child she was not allowed to leave. Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World tells the story of two famous scientists from an earlier historical period—Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss—as a way to contrast cosmopolitan and local temperaments. Kehlmann presents these characters irreverently but conveys both the excitement and the physical rigors of mapmaking and discovery. Wallen and others attribute the book’s bestselling status to the fact that it speaks to contemporary Germans’ intense interest in travel and maps. Eugen Ruge’s In Times of Fading Light (2011), although less directly linked to the topic of maps, traces the history of three generations of his family to their memories of time and place, the latter including Mexico, Russia, and Germany. Here, “mapping is integrated in individual consciousness in a way that is typical of the modern self’s ‘cartographic impulse’” (Wallen 2014, 185). In a variety of genres, presumptions about the supposedly scientific quality of maps come into dialogue with individual and national histories (182). Wallen focuses on the ways that individual figures relate to maps physically and mentally, locating themselves within and beyond German borders. She writes: “While satellite and GPS-based mapping technology give the impression of a totally accurate and impartial rendering of reality, even these mapping systems do not escape Alfred Korzybski’s famous statement that ‘the map is not the territory’” (184). Wallen’s critical perspective allows us to reflect upon mapping in ways not encountered before. What is unique to her perspective is precisely the juxtaposition—one might even say the coexistence—of two modalities, the scientific and the imaginative, so that they are always in dialogue.

Conclusion

The above insights provide an alternate mapping to open up avenues for a critical engagement with big data and its constellation of forms and meanings as they extend to mapping practices. Drawing on these and other ways to amplify, question, and reframe notions of the map as fixed and unyielding, migrationmapping seeks to be a creative and analytical tool for more comprehensive inquiry into the multiple histories and languages of migration.

Notes

1. Between the time this essay was written and its publication, the world has been engulfed with a crisis of unforeseen proportions through the impact of COVID-19, bringing new urgency to questions of migration and border crossing whose implications will unfold in the months and years ahead.

2. Walter Benjamin’s phrase is “homogeneous, empty time,” which he distinguishes from the medieval conception of time in which simultaneity meant prefiguring and fulfillment. See Benedict Anderson’s (1991, 22–36) explanation of how this differs from the modern conception of time measured by clock and calendar.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Burkeman, Oliver. 2012. “How Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us.” Guardian, August 28, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/28/google-apple-digital-mapping.

Cosgrove, Denis. 2005. “Maps, mapping, modernity: Art and cartography in the twentieth century.” Imago Mundi 57 (1): 35–54.

Harley, J. B. 2001. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kurgan, Laura. 2013. Close Up at a Distance: Mapping Technology and Politics. New York: Zone Books.

Marciniak, Kartazyna. 2003. “Transnational anatomies of exile and abjection in Milcho Manchevski’s ‘Before the Rain’ (1994).” Cinema Journal 43 (1): 63–84.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 2016. Seeing through Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nye, David. 2003. “Technology, nature and American origin stories.” Environmental History 8 (1): 8–24.

Schulten, Susan. 2012. Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wallen, Anne. 2014. “Mapping the personal in contemporary German literature.” In Literary Cartographies, edited by Robert Tally, 181–198. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press.

Wood, Denis. 2010. Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press.

35

(Mis)gendering

Os Keyes

I came out as trans, in fits and starts, when I began my PhD. My rationale was that it would be smoother to come out at the start of my PhD than in more familiar contexts where I was already known under my old name, pronouns, and identity. In early 2019 I happened to go to a used bookstore in Seattle with a colleague who had only known me as my new self. I absentmindedly gave the clerk my phone number to take advantage of my discount card—and the clerk casually read out my pretransition name from his screen.

This is a not-uncommon occurrence for me. Changing your name is hard for US immigrants, and updating your name in every (infrequently used) logging system assumes an amount of spare time I lack. My usual reaction is to grit my teeth. My reaction here, in front of a (posttransition) friend, was internal panic. A wall between contexts had been breached; my friend knew my pretransition name, could use it out of forgetfulness or to trawl for who I used to be rather than who I am, or could communicate it to others who might do the same.

Context

Part of the point of this anecdote is that before we talk about gender or (mis)gendering, we must first talk about context and self. A person’s identity and/or presentation is contextual to some degree: it differs between locales and between temporal moments. You behave differently with your friends than with your coworkers. You behave differently now than you would have five years ago. In each place you have a different identity and/or presentation, some very close to each other and some drastically different. These identities and presentations are shaped by a complex mixture of “architectural affordances, site-specific normative structures, and agentic user practices” (Davis and Jurgenson 2014, 482): what the space permits you to do, what other occupants consider (in)appropriate for you to do, and what your (current) sense of self is.

Crucially, contexts sometimes “collapse,” with multiple contexts (and their associated expectations and norms) suddenly overlapping. This carries with it a demand that you satisfy both sets of expectations and (particularly if unexpected) opens up the possibility of embarrassment or harm. Collapses can be the result of overlapping multiple identities or of information from a long-departed context coming back to haunt you (Brandtzaeg and Lüders 2018).

Gender

Gender is one such contextual phenomenon. As Viviane Namaste (2000, 140) puts it, gender is “a social function, neither timeless nor historical.” On the whole, gender takes different forms in different societies. Some societies have two socially recognized genders; some have more; some see rigid gender roles as entirely alien (Oyèrónkẹ́ 1997). Even societies that appear to match a normative Western gender framework may use very different criteria for determining someone’s gender and the appropriateness of their presentation (Darwin 2018). Gender has varied throughout time within the “same” society, with gender roles and associations looking very different today from a century ago (Laqueur 1992). Gender is constantly being reshaped within societies by new technologies, cultural understandings, and senses of embodiment (Shapiro 2015); by shifts in time and shifts in space.

The same is true on an individual level. Our sense of who and what we can be is constantly shifting, unfolding, changing, and never completed: it varies between places with different rules, expectations, and possibilities and alters as we proceed through life and engage in the continuous and never-ending process of becoming. This roiling complexity of identity is particularly apparent to transgender (trans) people: those of us who transition between gender categories and identities. Doing so brings with it, as sociologist Harold Garfinkel (2006, 59) put it, “uncommon sense knowledge” of gender. We are different people today from those we were at birth. We may be out as trans in some spaces but not others, hide with family but not at work, or hide as cisgender (nontrans) at work but not at home. As a consequence we gain an unfortunately deep knowledge of the structures of gender: what accountability mechanisms exist, what standards are at play in different situations, what meets these standards, and what is insufficient (Fricker and Jenkins 2017).

The reason for that deep knowledge (and my use of the term unfortunately) is that Western society does not like to think of gender as contextual in the slightest. Anthropologist Michael Lambek (2013, 838) notes that the “forensic ideology”—the view of people as “unique, continuous and unitary actors . . . carrying moral responsibility for past and future deeds”—is a defining feature of Western modernity. A person is expected to be authentic at all times and for this to mean the same thing at all times. A person’s gender must be “natural”: it must meet the overarching expectation that it consistently match across space and time, all the way back to birth. The very existence of trans people, which proves the illegitimacy of such a claim of naturalness, is thus treated as an affront. We are often met with invalidation, harassment, assault, and the constraint of life chances since pushing us out of sight and existence is the one certain way to keep that myth of naturalness alive.

Misgendering

One form of invalidation is misgendering, addressing someone with gendered terms of address that do not match their identity.

Although academia has spent scant time on misgendering, we-as-academics do know some things about it. We know that experiences of misgendering are associated with negative health outcomes (McLemore 2015). We know that the gender entitlement associated with misgendering—the presumption on the part of the (usually cisgender) person doing it that they have the sole authority to know the trans person’s gender—represents, and reinforces, the rigid and constraining normative model of gender. We know that misgendering is, in philosopher Stephanie Julia Kapusta’s (2016, 502) words, “harmful, oppressive and contestable”: that, even if only for a moment, it denies the legitimacy of trans people’s self-knowledge and denies us a voice in our own destinies. And it is rarely “only for a moment”—one often experiences it as a ubiquitous feature of day-to-day life.

We-as-trans-people know different things, and far more viscerally. We know that this contestable denial of voice does not simply feel contestable: it feels like being pinned in place with a precision that would make a lepidopterist seethe with envy. A similar phenomenon—deadnaming (referring to a trans person by the name we were assigned at birth, rather than the name by which we are known now)—can be experienced in a very similar way: as marking, as pinning in place, and as a denial of legitimacy. Misgendering and deadnaming sweep context aside, denying you the possibility of different selves at different places in different points in time. Your existing self is irrelevant, invalid, and dismissed. Your “true” nature is stamped on you, whatever you do.

In both cases this refusal of context and agency can have very material consequences. It often serves specifically to mark you as trans and to communicate to you that your trans status has been noticed by those around you. In a society where transphobia is rife and violence is common, this marks you as vulnerable.

Stateful Data and Administrative Violence

The marking of trans people does not just occur in personal interactions; it also occurs through data. Yet scholars investigating data rarely consider trans people at all. This is not to say that gender does not appear in data theory but to say that it makes an appearance largely in the abstract—largely as theory (Leurs 2017). A trans reader of Cheney-Lippold’s (2018) “We Are Data,” for example, will be deeply amused to discover that it is novel, shocking even, for personal attributes such as gender to be determined without our consent. Trans scholars do not need the metaphor of a “doppelgänger” or “double” to imagine the far-fetched possibility of an alien person whom, over your denials, others insist on treating as your true self (Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Robinson 2018).

Whether data theorists know trans people exist or not, data systems certainly do. Historian Mar Hicks (2019), writing in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, describes trans Britons’ navigation of the national insurance system in the 1950s, working to correct the names and genders associated with their records in the (newly computerized) databases. Lars Z. Mackenzie (2017) discusses trans Americans’ experiences with credit report systems, to which they become illegible on transition. Turning to the more transparently coercive and malevolent, Beauchamp (2018) unpacks trans efforts to respond to the new security state post-9/11 and the data systems (from identity cards to biometrics) that came along with it.

In each case of trans people struggling to survive these systems, we see what Spade refers to as administrative violence, “the ways in which systems that organize our lives in seemingly ordinary ways—determining what ID we carry, what government records exist about us, how roads or schools or garbage pick-up are organized—produce and distribute life chances based on violent forms of categorisation” (Nichols 2012, 41). National insurance IDs are used to determine eligibility for state pensions and are required for employment. Inaccuracies can spell disaster for the material well-being of trans citizens. Credit scores, in a US context, are essential not just for loan access but also for employability and access to rental housing. The consequences of illegibility in immigration, border security, and policing contexts, particularly for already Othered populations, should be obvious.

But we also see a refusal of contextuality. These systems demand that citizens and their biographies be consistent in order to be considered “authentic.” Those who are not are illegible, invalid, and disadvantaged: the issue is not a doppelgänger but a dybbuk, a dead life clinging to you and weighing you down. Reformist attempts to resolve this—logging one’s change of gender marker—also require outing one’s trans status, fixing it as an additional factoid the system’s users can access and so collapsing context in a different way. In both cases we are made vulnerable to harm; in both cases a symbolic kind of violence is additionally done by requiring us to witness our own vulnerability and the assumption of our illegitimacy.

The Violence of Stateless Data

But data systems are much wider than administrative systems: we live in a datafied society. A vast range of actors, from corporations to individuals, have access to analytical systems, databases, and tracking mechanisms. Data studies has long investigated how this brings new actors into play, allowing them to construct their own assemblages of tracking, identification, and logging (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). The credit reporting systems discussed as administrative violence provide an excellent demonstration of this: while such systems are legally mandated, they are administered by private companies.

But traditional notions of administrative violence are silent on actors and their systems when it does not involve the state. This leaves a worrisome gap. Systems administered by nonstate actors can commit violence against particular populations and create space for additional violence by third parties. This has led to Anna Lauren Hoffmann’s (2017, 11) definition of the term data violence: “The harm inflicted on trans and gender nonconforming people not only by government-run systems, but also the information systems that permeate our everyday social lives.”

As an illustration of data violence, consider background check websites. Generic, ubiquitous, and endlessly frustrating, they populate search results for any name you can think of, promising private information for anyone willing to pay. In the case of at least two of my friends, googling their phone number produces websites that associate that number with their deadname. In other words, these websites’ business models serve to functionally mark and out those people as trans; to collapse the distance between contexts in which one is out or not, opening up the possibility of physical violence or discrimination and rendering it impossible under normative views of gender for them to be considered “natural.”

Background check websites are not unique in this; one could point to abandoned Myspace accounts or outdated academic publications as other examples. In all of these cases, the state is nowhere to be seen, and yet the possibility and probability of violence through data remain. The presence of data, not just about our current selves in our current contexts but about our past selves and contexts, becomes a weapon to be wielded that prohibits vulnerable populations from obtaining a present. It opens up what philosopher M. Draz (2018, 14) evocatively calls “memory that burns”: the persistence of data about gender that sears one’s sense of self. Even when no (online) data is available, the case of the used bookstore demonstrates how easily this marking and burning can take place—at least book discount records are correctable. Unknown data stores replicated an unbound number of times, and accessible to an arbitrary but undetermined number of people, are an entirely different thing.

Just as with administrative violence, these systems alter life chances and trajectories, given the stigma attached to trans existences and the range of possible consequences of being outed. What happens if the new friend who googles the phone number is, unbeknown to the trans subject, a bigot? What happens if this data is obtained en masse and used to determine access to private-sector, rather than state, opportunities? And just as with administrative violence, there is an additional layer of harm done through the trans subject’s awareness of this exposure and vulnerability—through the sensation of being pulled back through time and context and of being inexorably pinned to one’s past. Through these data stores and the way they surface, our past selves are made available to unknown publics, outing the often complex nature of our gendered selves and in the process making clear our nonconformity. As a consequence, they expose us to violence, to outing, and to the possibility of ill treatment.

Conclusion

As we travel through an increasingly datafied world, we leave traces and forms of identity, in a society that often expects certain crucial markers of identity (such as gender) to be consistent. When these encysted representations of past selves burst—over and over again—they open up space for outing, marking, and the possibility of violence. To be misgendered is to be gendered incorrectly; to be (mis)gendered is to be gendered in a way that, by collapsing contexts, leaves one vulnerable to harm. The gendering does not have to be “incorrect”—it merely has to be unexpected in the current context, rendering one vulnerable to those who witness it.

My point in all of this is not that any datafied society is harmful or that “big data” is inherently violent. The work of Shaka McGlotten (2016) and Mendenhall et al. (2016) provides examples of these technologies being used by African American communities to create and reclaim space; Mackenzie’s (2017) work, mentioned earlier, also articulates ways these systems (accidentally) provide paths for trans people to evade constraints. But all of this work is dependent on contextuality being recognized and permitted; on credit reporting systems not being able to “see” everything; and on technological spaces that have not been colonized. Such spaces are outliers in a world where datafied systems, by surfacing seemingly innocuous data, render the Other additionally vulnerable—and additionally monstrous.

For critical data studies scholarship to be truly critical and do more than illustrate a narrow and monolithic range of the datafied society’s consequences, it must consider (among many others) trans lives. It must consider the contextuality of gender specifically and identity more broadly, the way data systems work to strip contextuality, and how we might preserve and rebuild that. It must consider not only the flows of data but the eddies: the dead data, left static and in place until it is reanimated in a temporal context where it can do harm. Only then can we work to be free.

Note

Any work is the product of many minds, gratefully stolen from. In this case, I am grateful to Frances, for teaching me to live; Claire, for teaching me how to keep that going; David, Jodi, and Charlotte, for teaching me to write; and Nikki, for teaching me the joy that comes with writing with and for those who matter. My many thanks to Adam Hyland and Ridley Jones for their patient copyediting of my impatient scribbling. Vel ich shtarben mit gezangen.

References

Beauchamp, Toby. 2018. Going Stealth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Brandtzaeg, Petter Bae, and Marika Lüders. 2018. “Time collapse in social media.” Social Media + Society 4 (1): 1–10.

Cheney-Lippold, John. 2018. We Are Data. New York: New York University Press.

Darwin, Helana. 2018. “Redoing gender, redoing religion.” Gender and Society 32 (3): 348–370.

Davis, Jenny L., and Nathan Jurgenson. 2014. “Context collapse: Theorizing context collusions and collisions.” Information, Communication and Society 17 (4): 476–485.

Draz, Marie. 2018. “Burning it in? Nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (2): 1–21.

Fricker, Miranda, and Katharine Jenkins. 2017. “Epistemic injustice, ignorance, and trans experiences.” In The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry, Serene Khader, and Alison Stone, 1–22. London: Routledge.

Garfinkel, Harold. 2006. “Passing and the managed achievement of sex status in an ‘intersexed’ person.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 58–93. London: Taylor & Francis.

Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. 2000. “The surveillant assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 51 (4): 605–622.

Hicks, Mar. 2019. “Hacking the cis-tem.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 41 (1): 20–33.

Hoffmann, Anna Lauren. 2017. “Data, technology, and gender: Thinking about (and from) trans lives.” In Spaces for the Future, edited by Joseph C. Pitt and Ashley Shew, 3–13. London: Routledge.

Kapusta, Stephanie Julia. 2016. “Misgendering and its moral contestability.” Hypatia 31 (3): 502–519.

Lambek, Michael. 2013. “The continuous and discontinuous person.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (4): 837–858.

Laqueur, Thomas W. 1992. Making Sex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leurs, Koen. 2017. “Feminist data studies.” Feminist Review 115: 130–154.

Mackenzie, Lars Z. 2017. “The afterlife of data.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 4 (1): 45–60.

McGlotten, Shaka. 2016. “Black data.” In No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, edited by E. Patrick Johnson, 262–286. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

McLemore, Kevin A. 2015. “Experiences with misgendering.” Self and Identity 14 (1): 51–74.

Mendenhall, Ruby, Nicole Brown, Michael L. Black, Mark Van Moer, Ismini Lourentzou, Karen Flynn, Malaika Mckee, and Assata Zerai. 2016. “Rescuing lost history.” In Proceedings of the XSEDE16 Conference, edited by Kelly Gaither, 56. Miami: Association of Computing Machinery.

Namaste, Viviane. 2000. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nichols, Rob. 2012. “Toward a critical trans politics: An interview with Dean Spade.” Upping the Anti 14: 37–51.

Oyèrónkẹ́, Oyěwùmí. 1997. The Invention of Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Robinson, Sandra. 2018. “Databases and doppelgängers: New articulations of power.” Configurations 26 (4): 411–440.

Shapiro, Eve. 2015. Gender Circuits. London: Routledge.

36

Misreading

Lisa Gitelman

If, like me, you are a scholar in the text-centered fields of the humanities, or even if you are not a scholar and you navigate life partly by reading, you need to think about misreading. And by think, I mean worry. Even if you live in a pod, you consider yourself a “numbers person,” or you have full confidence in a future made bright by big data and machine learning, you should probably still think about misreading. But what is misreading? Puzzling over the category of misreading is instructive, I will suggest, since it opens such an ample prospect on error. It gets us beyond the glitch, that is, to look upon impossibly vast regions of uncertainty, not so we can despair about knowing anything at all but so we can better imagine the icebergs of potential incapacity, misperception, and misconstrual that forever dot—and thus in a sense determine—our paths toward knowing whatever it is that we have or will come to know.

The problem of misreading as a category, then, is partly one of sprawl. Reading itself is such a “roomy” concept (Mills 2012) that by implication misreading must be at least as roomy. Yet the problem of misreading as a category is more than one of its capacity because misreading is such a relative term. Misreading implicates reading amid a cascade of questions that are as much about the situations and agencies of reading as they are about anything else. For example, can a poet misread her own work? Not really. Textual studies (a good scholarly editor) would examine the variants established if a poet’s performed reading involved any departure from the page. Two recorded readings by Sylvia Plath, for instance, are said to document revisions of “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” (Neefe 2012). For that matter, can a Supreme Court justice misread the law? Not in the majority, it would seem, unless hypothetically in light of future majority opinions. Today’s Citizens United decision is overturned only wishfully, in an as yet unimagined legal test on as yet unknowable legal grounds.[1] The rest of us are probably not so lucky. Our misreading includes everything from accidentally transposing two numerals—as when dialing a wrong number—to episodes of rank misinterpretation, such as when we misunderstand the instructions on a form or fail to grasp the gist of an author’s statement.

Transposing two numerals is misreading as fact and is readily evidenced when one reaches that wrong number. But failing to understand an author’s statement can be misreading in much less certain terms. So the students fictionalized in one of Jerome McGann’s delicious provocations about criticism interpret the “Attic shape” of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as one that might be stored away in an attic—something old, neglected, and possibly haunted. To them this is a reading, but to their instructor it is misreading, a transgression of the “limits that are permitted by the poem” and the lexical imperative of the capitalized adjective Attic (McGann 2001, 38). The students have dialed the wrong number, at least as far as he is concerned, but instead of telephony their mistake inhabits the disciplinary norms of poetics, practical criticism, and discussion-based pedagogy. Or consider poor Menocchio, the sixteenth-century protagonist of Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistory The Cheese and the Worms. Menocchio is a misreader, according to the Inquisition; he is questioned, persecuted, and ultimately burned at the stake. He dialed the wrong number, too, the hapless if curiously self-possessed victim of Counter-Reformation Friuli, where the old ways and new ideas abut and abrade (Ginzburg 1976). In cases like these, misreading as misunderstanding lies in the eye of the beholder: it depends on who calls the shots.

The professor and the Inquisition act as arbiters; working within their own frameworks, they audit the meanings that their subjects make of the texts they read. Each arbiter presumes to stand on an island of certainty and thus to oversee the manifold uncertainties introduced to the frame by potentially errant others, who are subject to their discipline. Sometimes, we must imagine, the arbiter and the errant other can even be one and the same person. Thus have I all too often retraced my steps from “ah” to “oops.” For his part, Sigmund Freud considered misreading to be a slip, like a slip of the tongue or a slip of the pen, incidentally indicative of the psychopathology of everyday life (Freud 1920). Like speech or writing, that is, reading can be garbled by the irruption of an active unconscious. Any slip can then be analyzed—its psychic work revealed—in a process (psychoanalysis) that reads misreading right.

Even those who do not accede to Freud’s model might be prepared to agree that misreading happens largely inside the head, whether as the epiphenomenal outcome of neurological events within the visual cortex and other areas of the brain or more broadly as the aberrant interpretations of a wrongheaded reader or the incomprehension of an absent-minded, careless, or incapable one. Yet if misreading happens inside the head, it cannot only happen there since the matter being read forms such a necessary stimulus, an “input” in mechanistic terms, against which reading (“output”) is assessed. In this sense writing that is misread always participates in its own misreading. Misreading is a distributed process, one might say, a misadventure categorically involving a reader and a text. And what if the text is blurred, faintly registered, or presented in a color lacking contrast with the page or screen? Junky input might lead to junky output. Or what if the writing is just too small or my reading glasses are not handy? What if the text is too far away or my car whizzes past too quickly, and the turnpike authority has put too many words on one sign (Nir 2016)? What if the text includes vocabulary that I do not recognize or syntax that bedevils me? It would seem upon reflection that misreading is a misadventure played out by a potential cast of thousands, a reader plus all of the material conditions of textual reception and production: my mind, my glasses, my car, my text, its author, design, condition, composition, and display.

Misadventure on this scale can be difficult to parse. Who or what dialed the wrong number? How do we know for sure? Maybe most importantly, who gets to say? When a person misreads the label on his or her prescribed medication, for example, where should we locate the error, and by what calculus should we ascribe blame? Here—under the sign of ethics—I am usually eager to draw the line between human and nonhuman agencies. Was it the patient’s fault for misreading the label or the pharmacist’s fault for making it somehow misreadable? Finger pointing is not easy, but do not blame the label by itself. Suppose the drug company (who?) is to blame for ambiguities on the label or the government (who?) for imperfect oversight of labeling in general. Structured hierarchies—corporations, administrations, bureaucracy—refract responsibility (Kafka 2012, 117), making it hard to locate misreading at its root.

As assiduously as I might prefer to draw the line between humans and nonhumans when it comes to pinning blame, this distinction is less than apt in other contexts. Whether one takes a page from mechanist perspectives—human input/output, for instance—or follows through on the logic of human-computer interaction, humans and nonhumans often seem to blend into one another. This is a familiar proposition in media history. For his part, Freud had it that writing externalizes the human “mnemic apparatus,” and he briefly imagined an infinite piece of paper as an analog for the mind (before rejecting it in favor of the toy he called “the mystic writing-pad”; Freud 1961). Alan Turing, too, imagined an all but infinite piece of paper in his famous work on computability (Turing 1937). These are modern twists on Plato, who thought writing was a technique for forgetting. They analogize memory and inscription in order to suggest the ways that so-called man surrogates and extends himself into his tools.[2] Seen in this light, the label on your medication is not only made of paper and ink; it is also a social composite made of governance, of research, of pharmacy, and of medical practice, as well as of human anatomies and abilities (see Latour 1999, 211).

Now that so many of the tools we use are computational, the situations and agencies of reading seem even more obscure. Can an algorithm misread? That depends on what we call reading (Mills 2012).

Reading machines—even self-reading machines—have been a long-lived fantasy, part of the way that modernity imagines its own conditions. At least since the inception of sound-recording media in the nineteenth century, we have tapped a metaphor of reading to think about playback or retrieval, ultimately coining read-only memory (that is, ROM). Today optical scanning technology, not audio, introduces new metaphors and additional puzzlements. For instance, does the scanner at a cash register really “read” a bar code, or is this just anthropomorphism? Is OCR (optical character recognition) properly “reading” if it identifies and encodes characters through structured processes of pattern recognition and algorithmic analysis? More to the point, is it “misreading” when a scan assigns the incorrect code point when the resulting text is junky (that is, dirty) and thereby imperfectly retrievable via search (see Cordell 2017)? Here it is probably less important that we all agree on the semantics of scanning and/as reading than that we recognize that scanning and misscanning, like other algorithmic implementations, are also distributed processes. Cue another potential cast of thousands, the dance of a thousand variables. Any dirty OCR is the possible result of hardware or software limitations or inappropriate or skimpy reference data, as well as additional conditions of production that have rendered a specific source text for analysis. Maybe the text was badly printed long ago, imperfectly preserved along the way, poorly reproduced at some point, or sloppily handled as it was scanned (Gitelman 2006, 124)?

Of course, most of the textual data being operated on today is not scanned; it is “born digital,” fully encoded and variously structured, marked up, tabulated, and interlinked. It can be restructured, cleaned, and made commensurable with new architectures and additional data. As big data, it can be algorithmically analyzed or used to predict what a user is about to keyboard, for instance, or what a user might be interested in seeing or buying. Opportunities for error abound, but whose exactly? Technical complexity, trade secrecy, and the corporate environments within which they are designed, implemented, optimized, and exploited all work to confound the ethical project of holding algorithms accountable (see Ananny and Crawford 2016; Dourish 2016; Neyland 2016). Like the medicine label, algorithms are social composites. This perspective helps to humanize them: “Algorithms are human too,” explains one engineer in a recent Silicon Valley ethnography. He means that complex algorithms are partly made up of—and not just made by—the different groups of people who are working to design, implement, optimize, and exploit them (Seaver 2017, 3). The same perspective can also obfuscate. When a recent mass shooting in the US was followed by the irruption of fake news online, “Google and Facebook blamed algorithm errors,” according to the New York Times. I found it infuriating when a spokesperson for Facebook said, “We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen” (Rose 2017). Thus do issues become agents. Shit happens.

Instead of “Can algorithms misread?” maybe a better question for us to ask would be “How is it misreading when someone believes fake news?” That is, can we better McGann’s students or Ginzburg’s Menocchio by reading the relevant frameworks, not just the words they frame? Misreading is a subject that quickly invites philosophical reflections about language (e.g., “What is the meaning of a word?”; Wittgenstein 1965, 1) and about artificial intelligence (e.g., “Can computers think?”; Searle [1983] 2002). But it also clearly calls our attention to the many loci and contingencies of control.

Notes

1. Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 310 (2010) holds that campaign contributions by corporations and other associations are a form of free speech.

2. I am thinking of McLuhan’s (1964) title, but today this is a point with significant resonance elsewhere in different ways.

References

Ananny, Mike, and Kate Crawford. 2016. “Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its applications to algorithmic accountability.” New Media and Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816676645.

Cordell, Ryan. 2017. “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking dirty OCR seriously.” Book History 20: 188–225.

Dourish, Paul. 2016. “Algorithms and their others: Algorithmic culture in context.” Big Data and Society 3 (2): 1–11.

Freud, Sigmund. 1920. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York: Boni and Liveright. http://www.bartleby.com/283/.

Freud, Sigmund. (1924–1925) 1961. “A note upon the mystic writing-pad.” In Vol. 19, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud, 227–232. London: Hogarth Press.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1976. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gitelman, Lisa. 2006. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kafka, Ben. 2012. The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. New York: Zone Books.

Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

McGann, Jerome John. 2001. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Mills, Mara. 2012. “What should we call reading?” Flow, December 3, 2012. http://www.flowjournal.org/2012/12/what-should-we-call-reading/comment-page-1/.

Neefe, Lauren. 2012. “‘Rook’ errant: The sophistications of Sylvia Plath’s early voice.” Textual Cultures 7 (2): 98–121.

Neyland, Daniel. 2016. “Bearing account-able witness to the ethical algorithmic system.” Science Technology and Human Values 41 (1): 50–76.

Nir, Sarah Maslin. 2016. “Signs for New York draw federal disapproval.” New York Times, December 1, 2016.

Rose, Kevin. 2017. “Capitalizing on a mass killing to spread fake news online.” New York Times, October 3, 2017.

Searle, John R. (1983) 2002. “Can computers think?” In Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, edited by David Chalmers, 669–675. New York: Oxford University Press.

Seaver, Nick. 2017. “Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems.” Big Data and Society 4 (2): 1–12.

Turing, A. M. 1937. “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2: 230–265.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1958) 1965. The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper Colophon.

37

Natural

Mimi Onuoha

A woman sits on a section of drystone wall in front of an uneven wire fence. Hills swell and press into the distance behind her. The cloth that wraps her hair matches the teal of the socks pulled taut over her pants. Her skin is dark. She looks away from the camera.

Each image in British-Guyanese photographer Ingrid Pollard’s 1988 Pastoral Interlude series features two unlikely characters. The first is the English countryside, fulfilling a storybook role as the pinnacle of peace and leisure. In every print, Britain’s Lake District unfolds in familiar scenes: lazy rippled creeks, idyllic cottages that poke out through pockets of trees.

But it is the solitary Black subjects who bring the series to life. In one photograph, a man stands knee-deep in a creek, body bent at the hips and face serenely turned toward the haul of a fishing net. In another, a woman peers at the landscape over a waist-high stone wall.

“It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment,” Pollard (1988) writes under one of these photographs. “I thought I liked the Lake District; where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease; dread.”

A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease. Where are the places that we are allowed to be? Pollard’s figures seem to search for answers. They gaze over fences, into water, and through and within the natural world around them. They search despite, or because of, unwritten rules that govern their movements. These are rules that insist that even within their own land are places where it is unnatural for them, as Black people, to be. (Another caption reads: “The owners of these fields; these trees and sheep want me off their GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND. No Trespass, they want me DEAD”; Pollard 1988.)

It is a comfortable form of control, the easy certainty that purports to know where some people belong and others do not. Some of us get the inner city, the photos in Pastoral Interludes say, while others have the world at their disposal. The subjects within Pollard’s images are not out of place, but they are out of their imagined place. This is an offense just as dangerous.

Figure 37.1

So much data about Black people is out of the hands of Black people. what if we were in charge of the places where we are counted? what if we were in data centers instead of in the data?

The machine of contemporary American society insists that people have imagined places, and I have come to see that in the tech world, the preferred place for Black people is within data. In data sets we appear as the perfect subjects: silent, eternally wronged, frozen in a frame of injustice without the messiness of a face/accent/hint of refusal. It is easier to deal with data sets about Black people than it is to dwell on the great gears of a system that penalizes darker skin tones or to consider the resentment that generations of state-sanctioned neglect could breed. It is easier to see Black people as numbers and bodies than as encounters and people. When structural workings of racism meet the distancing power of quantification, both combine to freeze us in place.

In a sense, this experience is not unusual. Data-driven systems have a churning logic of their own that stems from data’s ability to stand in for so much more: truth, certainty, insights, power. In an economy in which data can be slurped up for no justifiable reason beyond the tenuous possibility of future profit, the possession of data sets operates as a form of Foucauldian power-knowledge. As a result, datafication as a process is routine. Today, the fate of being relegated to a data set can fall upon anyone who dares own a device, send an email, or open a bank account.

What is unique are the ways in which data-driven stories concerning Black people begin, too often, from an assumption of disenfranchisement. This has only become more pronounced with advances in corporate and state applications of machine learning and automated decision-making systems.

So the stories have poured out: A software engineer discovering that Google’s image recognition algorithms classified his Black friend as a gorilla (followed by Google’s frantic update, which involved making gorillas unsearchable rather than correcting the mistake; Simonite 2018). The 2016 beauty contest in which algorithms charged with choosing the most beautiful images of women soundly rejected darker contestants (Levin 2016). The abysmally low rates at which a few large tech companies’ facial recognition programs were able to recognize Black women and the cries in response from activists about whose aims would be furthered by improving those rates (Lohr 2018).

Countless more examples exist, but to list them is a trap. It is a trap into which I have already stumbled. My routine recounting of these events numbs their effect. It treats them as though they are surprising bugs rather than the latest edition of a time-old narrative. The more such recitations are invoked, the more they normalize the idea that routine suffering of Black people is natural and expected. This is what Saidiya Hartman (1997, 4) refers to as the need for Black suffering to be evidenced in “endless recitations of the ghastly,” and it is a need that is impossible to satisfy precisely because it transposes pain into point rather than proof while reproducing the logic that declares that only data give credible testimony to this pain. And so the recitations become infinite attests to an argument that is not intended to be won.

One of Pollard’s most striking captions in Pastoral Interludes is a heated correction of the narrative that removes her figures’ ownership of the lands upon which they stand: “A lot of what MADE ENGLAND GREAT is founded on the blood of slavery, the sweat of working people / an industrial REVOLUTION without the Atlantic Triangle” (Pollard 1988).

Pollard’s work insists, over and over again, that the Lake District her subjects traverse is not what it seems. Though the land she situates her Black British subjects within is one to which they have always been tied, it is not the same as the conception of nature they confront. It is not that Pollard’s subjects disrupt the English countryside but that England subscribes to a notion of nature that removes them from it. That this removal is then treated as normal—as natural—is the myth that Pollard must push against.

This is what the process of norming and naturalization do: they smooth out the complications of the fuller story in pursuit of a simpler one. But there is a cost to the exchange.

It is true that the tangled tendrils of empire, capitalism, and racism have led to the obscene brutality that accompanies the Black experience(s) in the US. It is true that data can and should be used to surface the specific trends and accounts that reveal this and could otherwise hide tucked away. The issue is not about what is true but about how the act of repeatedly focusing on only these things produces a woefully incomplete picture. Narratives tied only to disenfranchisement place Blackness into a box of fragility so that Black people are always in need of saving rather than justice or liberation.

Figure 37.2

I wanted to be in the Room, to pretend to have control, to be in the places where our information is more valuable than us.

And it is liberation that is at the heart of the matter. Liberation of movement and space, a liberation that allows Black people to exist across all the realms of our own lands, from concrete streets to muddy countrysides. Liberation from portrayals that flatten and reduce. It is a freedom to exist wholly, to hover out of frame, to be resentful and irresponsible, and to insist upon opacity while fighting for equity and disavowing intelligibility. It is a freedom beyond easy solutions or appeals, a freedom that steps over the invisible rules of public space with a lightness that alternately claims, reveals, speaks to, and catches all the things that have always been ours . . .

Figure 37.3

I do not want to be the counter-narrative. I do not want to be the response, I want to be enough. it is as if to be Black you have to acknowledge your own pain before searching for joy but today I would like to skip the pain.

References

Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levin, Sam. 2016. “A beauty contest was judged by AI and the robots didn’t like dark skin.” Guardian, September 8, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/artificial-intelligence-beauty-contest-doesnt-like-black-people.

Lohr, Steve. 2018. Facial recognition is accurate, if you’re a white guy. New York Times, February 9, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recognition-race-artificial-intelligence.html.

Pollard, Ingrid. 1988. Pastoral Interlude. Ingrid Pollard Photography. Accessed May 4, 2019. http://www.ingridpollard.com/pastoral-interlude.html.

Simonite, Tom. 2018. “When it comes to gorillas, Google photos remains blind.” Wired, November 20, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google-photos-remains-blind/.

38

Obfuscation

Mushon Zer-Aviv

Obfuscation is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.

The white cyclosa trashline spider has finished weaving its web, but the spider does not rest. It collects the remains of its prey, some rubble and debris, and uses its white web to stitch it all together (see figure 38.1). The white cyclosa spider is sculpting a life-size self-portrait to be exhibited on its web. It is not a very anatomically correct portrait, but the audience of that piece is not picky. And that is exactly the point. This spider’s main predators are wasps, and the self-portrait is set as a decoy. If the wasps attack, every sculpture will help reduce the spider’s vulnerability. A wrong identification leads to a failed targeted killing attempt. This might be all the spider needs to escape. Not a perfect protection, but an obfuscation.

Obfuscation is defined by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum (2015, 1) as “the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection.” While a chameleon camouflages by changing itself to blend with its surroundings, the white cyclosa spider obfuscates by changing its surroundings to blend with itself.

The unique creative resistance of the white cyclosa spider sets the stage for discussing obfuscation in terms of conflict and information. While it is not common in nature, human culture and history provide many examples of obfuscation. In a famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), when the Romans demand to identify the slave leader, every slave in the crowd shouts: “I’m Spartacus!” In World War II, Allied forces’ planes threw tons of aluminum chaff to jam German radars and make it harder for them to identify Allied attack planes. In 2008, Anthony Curcio used obfuscation to rob a Brink’s armored car in front of a Bank of America branch. He posted an ad on Craigslist inviting cleanup workers to meet outside the bank wearing identical suits—the same one he was wearing as he escaped with two bags’ worth of $400,000.

From my own perspective and training in graphic, interaction, and information design, obfuscation is somewhat counterintuitive. In my first year as a visual communication student twenty years ago, I learned about gestalt theory and how our visual/cognitive system constantly processes vast visual data, separates foreground from background, groups similar signals, identifies contrasts and patterns, and dictates order on the visual world. As designers we take advantage of this order bias to build artificial graphic systems that leverage this visual sense-making. To direct and shape human attention, designers make choices about typographic hierarchy, balanced color schemes, interaction flows, and information visualization.

And as a media activist working with the Israeli nongovernmental organization the Public Knowledge Workshop, I have been investing a lot of energy in trying to make sense of messy government data to find signals in the noise and to use clear evidence to hold the government accountable.

So what led me to work against all of this and take up obfuscation as my weapon of choice?

Data and Its Discontents

The celebration of data and its “big” promises to inform our lives has met with a mixed response. The popularity of social media and mobile technology has also increased the invasiveness of commercial and government surveillance. What were initially regarded as rumors and tech conspiracy theories were later substantiated by Edward Snowden’s leak of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) extensive surveillance program and the tech giants’ compliance with it. All of this has led to a widespread concern about the slow erosion of privacy and the widening use of cognitive manipulation by algorithms. This growing data anxiety is mostly impotent, however, as people find it hard to exercise their political agency online and are often not sure whether such agency can even exist. This power imbalance feeds the common technodeterminist approach that claims this is “what technology wants” and there is nothing we can do about it. Unable to rebel, feeling like the battle was already lost before it even began, many try to belittle the losses. They imagine their lives without privacy, determining that they have “nothing to hide” and that this technocultural shift does not present grave personal consequences.

A “crypto culture” has evolved around a technological response to surveillance (see, e.g., Let’s Encrypt, n.d.). It is centered on the use of encryption technologies in an attempt to hide and protect data and communication from being tracked by third parties. Complex mechanisms involving the exchange of trusted keys and elaborate processes of encryption and decryption provide individuals with some refuge from the all-watching eyes of online surveillance. Indeed, when Google can only send your emails but not read them or when your text messages are encrypted, these communication platforms’ ability to peek into your content is severely diminished. Some advocate not only for encrypting as much as possible but often also for “just saying no.” Feeling exploited by abusive communication platforms, some advocate for simply opting out, committing so-called social media suicide (Seppukoo 2009).

Yet I am afraid these solutions are not gaining enough traction to become viable alternatives to the big data surveillance status quo. At best, both encryption and opting out provide individual protections for the tech-savvy elite few while at the same time removing these critical agents from the scene of the action and making it harder for them to deliver their message to the unencrypted “ignorant” masses. At the end of the day, people do not go online to restrict their communication; they go online to express themselves and to interact with others. My concern is that by focusing on individual encryption, we displace the responsibility onto those who “simply don’t get it,” rather than challenging the systematic vulnerabilities of the web and working together to hold those who exploit them accountable.

Fighting Data with Data

Data obfuscation has emerged in recent years as a different countermeasure. While encryption and opting out are based on restrictive measures and individual protection, data obfuscation takes online expression to a whole new level. In 2006, in an effort to fight against search engine profiling, my colleagues Daniel C. Howe and Helen Nissenbaum (n.d.) developed the TrackMeNot browser extension. TrackMeNot continuously performs random search queries, thus obfuscating the genuine searches performed by the individual. Similarly, the AdNauseam browser extension that we launched in 2014 (Howe, Zer-Aviv, and Nissenbaum, n.d.) not only blocks ads but also clicks on all of them simultaneously (see figure 38.3). Both of these browser extensions surround the genuine data with automated noise, fighting big data surveillance by making it bigger than can successfully be analyzed.

In the TOR network, each communication packet ping-pongs between many relay nodes before hitting its target. With every communication session broken into different small packets, each of them apparently coming from a different IP address, it is nearly impossible to track down who in this vast network is “on the other line.” During the public uprising following the Iranian election in 2009, people all around the world set up TOR relays and proxy servers in solidarity to help obfuscate Iranian activists’ communications and protect them from the Iranian government’s surveillance. This aspect of collective action and solidarity is an important complement to the individual solutions of cryptography and a refreshing alternative to a culture of determinist defeatism.

Why Obfuscate?

In their book Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum (2016) categorize the different functions of obfuscation. While it is far from being a silver-bullet solution to privacy and data protection, in many cases it could provide the right means, depending on the end.

The white cyclosa and Anthony Curcio were not using obfuscation as a permanent protection but simply as a way to postpone identification and buy time enough to escape from their captors. The rebel slaves were shouting “I’m Spartacus” to provide cover and express protest. The TOR network is used to prevent individual exposure. TrackMeNot and AdNauseam are used to interfere with profiling and provide plausible deniability. Many other examples show different uses and different goals for the use of obfuscation. Therefore, we should always analyze obfuscation means in the context of the obfuscation’s goals.

Is It Wrong?

Data are mostly used as proxies toward a more scientific and possibly reliable knowledge-gathering process. If obfuscation is set to tamper with that, is it ethical? Some ethicists would answer with a flat no. Kant, for example, held truth to be the highest value, claiming you should not even lie to a murderer asking you about the location of an intended victim (Kant [1785] 1986, [1797a] 1986, [1797b] 1986). Many other ethicists criticize Kant’s uncompromising position, arguing for a more nuanced approach to the ethics of knowledge exchange.

Questionable uses of obfuscation definitely exist, be they Anthony Curcio’s robbery or governments deliberately obfuscating open government data to make them adequately transparent yet practically unintelligible. In fact, obfuscation is always questionable, and that question is the key to understanding the informational power structures it addresses.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks use obfuscation to generate many automated hits, flooding the target servers to slow down traffic to a halt, often crashing the servers or making them practically unusable. The automated requests are impossible to differentiate from genuine users, and hence not serving some requests would mean not serving any request, basically shutting down all communication. Many hacktivist groups justify this tactic as a legitimate tool for fighting against tyrannical governments and corrupt corporations. But the use of DDoS does not stop there. The practice and the technology, which became iconic through groups such as Anonymous, are more often used for criminal activity, blackmail, and even by repressive governments against opposition groups and civil society organizations.

So am I trying to argue that the ends justify the means? They might, but the means cannot be justified out of context. Nor should any use of data be outright justified or vilified, whether it claims to be truthful or not. We should generate, collect, analyze, or obfuscate data with the larger social and political implications in mind. Obfuscation manufactures uncertainty as a tactic; it begs the question of how “big” data can really get before they collapse under their own weight. Most of today’s algorithmic mechanisms are left vulnerable to obfuscation and other forms of noise since they rely heavily on identifying trends, patterns, and correlations automatically in large data sets. The more authoritative and influential the algorithm, the higher the stakes for influencing it. Additionally, the more data sources the algorithm relies on, the more it exposes itself as a potential target for obfuscation.

Such “gaming” of algorithmic authority has become more and more controversial in the past few years with the rise of fake news, obfuscated through clickbait and disseminated through social media filter bubbles. While obfuscation could potentially promote healthy data skepticism, it may also help to further the mistrust in the scientific process and in fact-based public discourse.

To conclude, I would argue that data obfuscation should not be read outside the wider cultural and political context of today’s big data controversies. In this context, tech giants develop clandestine corporate surveillance apparatuses to spy and manipulate our perception of the world to further serve their business interests. Governments either cooperate with these tech giants or use their own tech might and outreach to do the same. And some bad actors use this crisis of trust to throw the baby out with the bathwater and dismiss any notion of truth as the product of lies and manipulation serving narrow interests. I argue that obfuscation allows us the much-needed benefit of the doubt, for it exposes the seams within these opaque algorithmic control mechanisms.

Rather than go down the nihilistic trajectory of posttruth, a constructive use of these technologies and countermeasures could challenge the balance of power between tech giants and the wider public and lead us back to define the ethics of big data and to reevaluate the terms of its collection, analysis, storage, accessibility, and use. Finally, when considering obfuscation’s impact on our technological, cultural, and ethical landscape, we may apply Melvin Kranzberg’s (1986) first law of technology and realize that . . .

Obfuscation is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.

Figure 38.1

The cyclosa spider—also known as the trashline orbweaver—sculpts its own self-portraits to obfuscate its true identity on the web. From DiegoDCvids (2014).

Figure 38.2

https://bengrosser.com/projects/scaremail/. In 2013, Ben Grosser (n.d.) created the ScareMail browser extension, which adds “scary” text to an email in Gmail. ScareMail adds algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. Every story is unique to decrease automated filtering; every story is nonsensical to increase tracker frustration (Howe 2014).

Figure 38.3

AdNauseam.io, 2014–present, by Daniel C. Howe, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and Helen Nissenbaum (n.d.). While the AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/) extension blocks and then quietly clicks all ads on the websites it visits, its ad vault shows all of these ads at once. This colorful visual overdose exposes the targeting failure of surveillance advertising when the ads are doomed to fight for attention all at once—an illustration of the data glut generated by the extension’s automatic clicking function.

Figure 38.4

A Fitbit biotracking device mounted on a metronome. Unfit-Bits (http://www.unfitbits.com/) is a series of obfuscation solutions to “release your fitness data from yourself.” Tega Brain and Surya Mattu advocate attaching fitness trackers such as the Fitbit to different motor devices to trick the trackers and potentially gain insurance discounts.

Visual Examples

References

Brunton, Finn, and Helen Fay Nissenbaum. 2015. Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

DiegoDCvids. 2014. “White cyclosa trashline spider (Araneidae).” March 6, 2014. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYdN6i8_-Fo.

Grosser, Benjamin (website). n.d. “ScareMail.” Accessed August 14, 2019. https://bengrosser.com/projects/scaremail/.

Howe, Daniel C. 2014. “Surveillance countermeasures: Expressive privacy via obfuscation.” Post-Digital Research 3 (1). http://www.aprja.net/surveillance-countermeasures-expressive-privacy-via-obfuscation/.

Howe, Daniel C., and Helen Nissenbaum. n.d. TrackMeNot. Accessed February 18, 2018. https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot.

Howe, Daniel C., Mushon Zer-Aviv, and Helen Nissenbaum. n.d. “AdNauseam: Clicking ads so you don’t have to.” Adnauseam. Accessed February 18, 2018. http://adnauseam.io/.

Kant, I. (1785) 1986. “Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals.” In Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, edited by Mary Gregor and Allen W. Wood, 37–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, I. (1797a) 1986. “The metaphysics of morals.” In Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, edited by Mary Gregor and Allen W. Wood, 353–604. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, I. (1797b) 1986. “On a supposed right to lie from philanthropy.” In Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, edited by Mary Gregor and Allen W. Wood, 605–616. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kranzberg, Melvin. 1986. “Technology and history: ‘Kranzberg’s laws.’” Technology and Culture 27 (3): 544–560. https://doi.org/10.2307/3105385.

Let’s Encrypt. n.d. “Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority.” Accessed August 14, 2019. https://letsencrypt.org.

Seppukoo. 2009. “Join the legend of Seppukoo: Get your own memorial page!” Accessed August 14, 2019. http://www.seppukoo.com/.

39

Organization

Timon Beyes

1

Write Everything Down, said Malinowski. But the thing is, now, it is all written down. There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t documented. . . . Each website that you visit, every click-through, every keystroke is archived. . . . Nothing ever goes away. And as for the structures of kinship, the networks of exchange within whose web we’re held, cradled, created—networks whose mapping is the task, the very raison d’être, of someone like me: well, those networks are being mapped, that task performed, by the software that tabulates and cross-indexes what we buy with who we know, and what they buy, or like, and with the other objects that are bought or liked by others who we don’t know but with whom we cohabit a shared buying- or liking-pattern. Pondering these facts, a new spectre, an even more grotesque realization, presented itself to me: the truly terrifying thought wasn’t that the Great Report might be unwritable, but—quite the opposite—that it had already been written. Not by a person, nor even by some nefarious cabal, but simply by a neutral and indifferent binary system that had given rise to itself, moved by itself and would perpetuate itself: some auto-alphaing and auto-omegating script. . . . And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains. (McCarthy 2015, 123; italics in the original)

2

The narrator spellbound and terrified by the all-encompassing, algorithmically automated, and software-driven archive is “U,” the protagonist and narrator of Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island. U is an anthropologist with a PhD in club culture. Plucked “from the dying branches of academia,” he now works for “the Company,” a “febrile hothouse” of a consultancy firm (McCarthy 2015, 24). Apart from being tasked with yet failing to write the “Great Report,” U participates in the “Koob-Sassen-Project,” a massive endeavor that is “supra-governmental, supra-national, supra-everything” (110). Otherwise, the narrator does not have much of a clue. The project is a “black box” (60), amorphous, shape-shifting, and opaque; “it has to be conceived of as in a perpetual state of passage, not arrival—not at, but in between” (74; italics in the original). Its processuality and inscrutability are tied to network architecture, to its infrastructure, and to the amassing, extraction, and employment of data. After all, contemporary capitalism seems to increasingly rely upon data as a specific kind of raw material to be gathered, extracted, and commercialized (Srnicek 2017).

Satin Island is set in the world of organization in digital cultures (Beyes 2017). The ubiquity of digital computing and the “datafication” of everyday life correspond to new organizational “scripts,” to use U’s term for the “auto-alphaing and auto-omegating” modes of ordering that structure, fill, and exploit the vast archive of data. “Organizational scripts” is also sociologist Bruno Latour’s (2013) term to ponder processes of organizing as a mode of existence (50). In connecting “organization” to “uncertain archives,” I deploy McCarthy’s novel precisely because it reflects such scripts of organizing in the age of so-called big data and its automated, invisible archives. More specifically, Satin Island stages uncertainty as a key aspect of these organizational conditions. Uncertainty here hinges on the opacity and heterogeneity of organizational scripts.

3

That U is himself a researcher and writer is the book’s conceit to ponder the limits of—while simultaneously exploring the options for—researching and writing in and on digital cultures. The corporate anthropologist is a scholarly archivist in his own right. Working on what is supposed to become the Great Report, he gathers and systematizes material on accidents: oil spills, parachute deaths. The novel plays with the patterns and analogies that might surface when such material is “run through the ethnographic mill” (McCarthy 2015, 134). That data has become the new oil—that is, an equally opaque raw material to be extracted and exploited through platform-based forms of organizing (and its data spillages)—is the most obvious analogy. The archive of parachuting accidents yields the metaphorical hyperbole of corporate speech, such as the “in-transit-metaphor” and the “perpetual-state-of-passage analogy” (134). Yet the Great Report never materializes. The novel documents U’s increasing uncertainty, uneasiness, and suspicion with regard to the rationale and form of such a grand narrative. It is impossible to write precisely because today “it is all written down” (123) by the mega-archive of big data automatically assembled and mined for patterns of consumption and habits. The scripts that do the labor of monitoring, aggregating, fusing, sorting, indexing, and targeting resemble a new invisible hand of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019). At times, Satin Island stages a media-technological arcane that while connected to the infrastructures of server farms, satellite dishes, and computer hardware comes across as fundamentally intransparent, unknowable, and of unfathomable intelligence (Beyes and Pias 2019). In such sections, U’s imagery and vocabulary bring to mind media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s (1999) dark prognosis of how digital media would come to “determine our situation”: “A total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop” (1–2).

4

Beyond questions of writing and being written, U is trying to find his way in a datafied organizational environment that is marked by uncertainty. The Koob-Sassen-Project remains opaque and in flux, so the corporate anthropologist makes do with collecting and analyzing material as well as conducting and participating in meetings without obtaining a clearer understanding as to the nature of his overall contribution, which he considers to be negligible and meaningless. (At the end, U is praised and revered for being “one of the Koob-Sassen-Project’s ‘architects’ or ‘engineers’”; McCarthy 2015, 160). Peyman, the boss, is presented as a kind of fabulator in chief who specializes in inventing enigmatic aphorisms, slogans, and metaphors for a world in transition, which become sales pitches to potential clients. (“If I had, he’d say, to sum up, in a word, what we (the Company, that is) essentially do, I’d choose not consultancy or design or urban planning, but fiction”; 44; italics in the original). Otherwise, he is rarely around, leaving U in a state of insecurity as to what might be expected of him. In response, the protagonist seems to make things up as he goes along, which includes successfully marketizing his education in radical thought and “feeding vanguard theory . . . back into the corporate machine” (31).

5

In wrestling with uncertainty, the novel’s protagonist seems to embody what Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2013) announced as an ultimate lesson of their discussion of the “big data revolution”—namely, that it would instigate no less than a change in human beings. Humans would need to learn to cope with, even to become comfortable with, uncertainty and disorder. U reads as “you”: the corporate anthropologist can be perceived as a contemporary “organization (wo)man.” And Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier also argued that the new technologies of datafication and exchange would spawn new forms and processes of organization, with Google standing in as primary example. In this spirit, McCarthy’s rendering of the Company barely registers conventional organizational traits such as formal hierarchies, functional departments or units, or preestablished structures of decision-making. Instead, the book foregrounds a fuzzy, shifting, and partly incomprehensible array of organizational scripts and practices, which are tied to networked infrastructures and media devices as well as data and communication flows.

6

Yet what kind of “organization” is this? A specific logic of organizational thought comes into play here. It is not or not primarily interested in conventional organization entities with clear boundaries and discrete functions (Lovink and Rossiter 2018). Or more precisely, it does not presuppose these entities and their elements as given units of analysis. Rather, this kind of organizational theorizing is attuned to phenomena of organizing as processes of social ordering: how organization comes into being and is continuously effected. In other words, it is particularly attuned to uncertainty. As the organization theorist Robert Cooper (1998) wrote, “To think of organizations is to think of specific objects external to us. To think of organization is to recognize a more general force which includes us in its perpetual movement between order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty” (154; italics in the original). There is a governing assumption of “unfinished heterogeneity” (Cooper and Law 2016, 269), then, that Satin Island captures so well: organization is a situational and uncertain outcome of heterogeneous processes that do not add up. It is both predicated on uncertainty and produces uncertainty precisely by way of constructing and maintaining an often messy range of scripts of ordering. Moreover, such processes interweave human and technological actors. Drawing upon cybernetic thought, which sees organization as information processing, and Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics, Cooper, John Law, and Martin Parker suggested speaking of “cyborganization” some twenty years ago (Parker and Law 2016). Thinking organizationally in the age of ubiquitous computing therefore entails a double uncertainty: how media organize, and how media are organized, seems far from given.

7

To axiomatically put it: if “media determine our situation” (Kittler 1999, xxxix), then “media organize” (Martin 2003, 15). If media shape contemporary life, then they need to affect social, or sociotechnical, ordering. Raising the question of organization means raising the question of sociotechnical ordering by focusing on media technologies’ capacity to organize. In Latour’s (2013) words, organizations therefore “remain always immanent to the instrumentarium that brings them into existence” (49). In this sense, organization in Satin Island—including writing about it—is immanent to big data and the pervasively networked condition of contemporary organizing. Yet if media determine our situation, then it also follows that media are organized. They become part of organizational scripts or modes, and these modes can coalesce into what Reinhold Martin (2003) calls an “organizational complex.” There is a recursive logic at play: to condition the social, media technologies need to have organizational effects. And the ways in which media technologies are produced and employed, disappear, or are transformed are shaped by the organizational constellations in which they are inscribed and that they make possible. To qualify Latour’s statement, then: organization is immanent to the instrumentarium as well as its agent (Beyes 2019).

8

This way of thinking organizationally is a reminder that the nexus of organization and uncertainty is not a new one. For example, it seems obvious to perceive U as a revenant of K, whom Kafka situated in the contingent and impenetrable, uncanny, and violent world of bureaucratic ordering and organization. If the “organization of life and work in the human community”—indeed, organization as destiny—was Kafka’s main concern, as Benjamin (1999, 803) wrote, then this organized world appears to be a far cry from any standard notion of rational and functional ordering. It might be a world of “small data,” but its bureaucratic apparatus is no less incomprehensible and arcane. Or consider the proverbial “organization man,” embedded in and dutifully loyal to the (US) postwar corporation (Whyte 1956). As Martin (2003) has shown, this organization man already needs to be understood as a cyborg, “a technologically mediated module circulating within the organizational complex” (12). Part of an emerging cybernetic regime of control and its spaces, the organization man was already more than one: he/she was expected to conform to corporate expectations and to demonstrate individuality; to be both modular and flexible. To think organizationally thus cautions against generalized assertions of revolution and disruption. It calls for tracing the heterogeneous modes of ordering the social, the ways they are shaped by media technologies, and the ways they shape the employment and development of these apparatuses in return.

9

Thinking organizationally therefore enables tracing and reflecting how scripts of organizing appear and affect social ordering. The Company in Satin Island trades in “fictions” that become “real” (McCarthy 2015, 44), even if this “real” remains opaque to people assigned to, for instance, the Koob-Sassen-Project. In similar terms, consider the rise of platform capitalism as the contemporary stage of extracting value from “big” amounts of data (Srnicek 2017). Such platforms are predicated on powerful infrastructures of hardware and software that enable the sensing, archiving, and analyzing of data as raw material. They are sites for relating users and simultaneously recording these relations. Through these recordings, the processes of relating further educate the automated algorithms themselves, which remain opaque to the people that populate these sites. Emphasizing the technological-organizational processes undergirding such platforms (which continuously develop through what happens on these platforms), Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has termed the contemporary organizational complex “surveillance capitalism” (also focusing on Google as a primary case, see Ridgway [2017]). Data or “surveillance assets” are extracted from user populations, then used for pattern recognition and predictive analytics in order to achieve what Zuboff (2015, 82) calls “anticipatory conformity.” This is a new logic of accumulation, indeed “a new kind of sovereign power” (Zuboff 2015, 86), that relies on the recording, modification, and commodification of everyday experience. Perhaps a notion such as surveillance capitalism risks making invisible the messiness of organizational scripts, organization’s “unfinished heterogeneity.” Consider, for instance, the uncertainty produced by potentially incoherent data masses that erodes big data’s usefulness for corporate organization (Constantiou and Kallinikos 2015), the gaps and glitches that McCarthy wonderfully captures in the phenomenon of buffering, resistant tactics of “data undermining” (Munster 2013), or practices of disconnection (Stäheli 2016). Yet this notion convincingly shows what is at stake when techno-organizational ordering takes place.

10

As a way of concluding, it is equally enticing to read Satin Island for traces of a new organization (wo)man. In his globalized pursuit of selling fictions of the future to state and nonstate actors, corporations, and city councils alike, Peyman, the head of the Company, bears an uncanny resemblance to Keller Easterling’s notion of the “new orgman.” According to Easterling (2004), the latter trades in logistics, flogging suitable styles of management and protocols for networking on a global scale. And U? His uncertain plight certainly illustrates how in today’s datafied economy, relationships are to some degree unconstrained from “traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization” (Benkler 2006, 8). Conditioned by the comparably horizontal practices of networked organizing, the corporate anthropologist embodies a mobile network sociality (Wittel 2001) untied from stable organizational relations. Moreover, his training in anthropology and radical theory has prepared him for a perpetually self-reflexive and observant labor of data extraction and analysis that the Company can monetize. In this sense he resembles Alexander Galloway’s characterization of the “new spirit of capitalism,” which is to be “found in brainwork, self-measurement and self-fashioning, perpetual critique and innovation, data creation and extraction” (Galloway 2014, 110). U’s labor perhaps represents a satirical enactment of what Galloway calls “low-agency scholarship.” Low-agency scholars cannot access the new data archives and are thus unable to make what used to be numerically valid claims reached through adequate data sets. These sets are lost to the datafied arcane of surveillance capitalism. Yet U’s pedestrian, flexible, and malleable practice of pattern recognition keeps yielding corporate profits too.

References

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “Franz Kafka.” Vol. 2, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Gary Smith, and Howard Eiland, 794–819. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Beyes, Timon. 2017. “‘The machine could swallow everything’: Satin Island and performing organization.” In Performing the Digital: Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, edited by Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, and Timon Beyes, 227–243. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript.

Beyes, Timon. 2019. “Surveillance and entertainment: Organizing media.” In Organize, edited by Timon Beyes, Lisa Conrad, and Reinhold Martin, 29–61. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Beyes, Timon, and Claus Pias. 2019. “The media arcane.” Grey Room 75 (Spring): 84–107.

Constantiou, Ioanna, and Jannis Kallinikos. 2015. “New games, new rules: Big data and the changing context of strategy.” Journal of Information Technology 30 (1): 44–57.

Cooper, Robert. 1998. “Interview with Robert Cooper.” In Organized Worlds: Explorations in Technology and Organization with Robert Cooper, edited by Robert Chia, 121–164. London: Routledge.

Cooper, Robert, and John Law. 2016. “Organization: Distal and proximal views.” In For Robert Cooper: Collected Work, edited by Gibson Burrell and Martin Parker, 199–235. London: Routledge.

Easterling, Keller. 2004. “The new orgman: Logistics as an organising principle of contemporary cities.” In The Cybercities Reader, edited by Stephen Graham, 179–184. London: Routledge.

Galloway, Alexander R. 2014. “The cybernetic hypothesis.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 25 (1): 107–131.

Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2013. “‘What’s the story?’ Organizing as a mode of existence.” In Organization and Organizing: Materiality, Agency, and Discourse, edited by Daniel Robichaud and François Cooren, 37–51. London: Routledge.

Lovink, Geert, and Ned Rossiter. 2018. Organization after Social Media. Colchester: Minor Compositions.

Martin, Reinhold. 2003. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, and Kenneth Cukier. 2013. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

McCarthy, Tom. 2015. Satin Island. London: Jonathan Cape.

Munster, Anna. 2013. An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parker, Martin, and John Law. 2016. “Cyborganization: Cinema as nervous system.” In For Robert Cooper: Collected Work, edited by Gibson Burrell and Martin Parker, 236–252. London: Routledge.

Ridgway, Renée. 2017. “Against a personalisation of the self.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 17 (2): 377–397.

Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stäheli, Urs. 2016. “Das Recht zu schweigen: Von einer Politik der Konnektivität zu einer Politik der Diskonnetivität?” Soziale Welt 67 (3): 299–311.

Whyte, William H. Jr. 1956. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Wittel, Andreas. 2001. “Toward a network sociality.” Theory, Culture and Society 18 (6): 51–76.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2015. “Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30: 75–89.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

40

Outlier

Catherine D’Ignazio

“Outlier”: Statistics. An observation whose value lies outside the set of values considered likely according to some hypothesis (usually one based on other observations); an isolated point.

—Oxford English Dictionary 2017

Communities . . . come into being not through the recognition, generation, or establishment of universal, neutral laws and conventions that bind and enforce them, but through the remainders they cast out, the figures they reject, the terms that they consider unassimilable, that they attempt to sacrifice, revile and expel.

—Grosz 2001

In statistics, an outlier is a data point that does not conform to the rest. When plotted on a chart or a graph, it lies outside the pattern displayed by the rest of the data. It is “very different to the other observations in a set of data” (Doyle 2016, 256). The outlier is “an isolated point” (Oxford English Dictionary 2017). Outlier values “do not agree with the pattern of the majority of other values” (Holloway and Nwaoha 2012, 391), and extensive statistical literature discusses when one may reasonably reject outlier values while undertaking a data analysis or mitigate their influence by weighting them differently. But there is often uncertainty as to whether an outlier is an error in the recording of data or represents a true variation in the population. Since rejecting outliers may come at the risk of excluding valid observations, the best-practice guidance for dealing with outliers is to “inspect the data as it is collected during the experiment, identify discrepant values, and determine their cause” (Holloway and Nwaoha 2012, 391).

This chapter represents exactly such a practical and ethical inspection of outliers in relation to gender data, computation, and big data sets. From my standpoint as a software developer and scholar, a data-driven approach to gender has a great deal of potential for exposing the structural and systemic forces of inequality operating in society. As feminist geographer Joni Seager says, “What gets counted counts” (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020, 97). But counting comes with caveats, particularly in relation to categorizing people and making them visible to powerful institutions. Here I draw on feminist theory to understand that categories of gender identity are not intrinsic, natural, or biological distinctions between people and groups but rather are social, cultural, and political distinctions based on the way power is allocated and wielded unevenly across a population (Butler 1990; Fausto-Sterling 2008).

Gender data are often more complicated than they appear on the surface. The received wisdom is that two categories exist: the world is made up of men and women. And yet the historical record shows that there have always been more variations in gender identity than Western society has cared to outwardly acknowledge or collectively remember. These third, fourth, and nth genders go by different names in the different historical and cultural circumstances in which they originate, including transgender people (Williams 2014), female husbands (Weeks 2015), hijras (Sharma 2012), two-spirit people (Driskill 2011), pansy performers (Chauncey 1994), mahu (Mock 2014), and sworn virgins (Zumbrun 2007). This chapter argues that while nonbinary genders represent outliers in terms of population ratio, they also represent an expected variation in the population—which is to say that there have always been and will always be more than two genders. While most current computational applications ignore and exclude nonbinary gender data (if they consider gender at all), a theoretical framework informed by intersectional feminism and transfeminism offers an opportunity to deal with gender data more appropriately and ethically.

Broadly speaking, feminist theory uses the fact of unequal gender relations to challenge concepts such as neutrality and objectivity precisely because of the alternative perspectives that they exclude (notably, women’s and trans* people’s). Intersectional feminism, created and elaborated by Black feminists and women of color in response to the exclusions of white feminism, roots its analysis in the overlapping dimensions, such as race, class, and ability, of any examination of unequal power relations (Combahee River Collective 1978; Crenshaw 1990). Transfeminism links feminist theory to transgender oppression and activism (Erickson-Schroth 2014). There are increasing attempts in human-computer interaction (HCI) and design to mobilize intersectional feminist approaches to computation that serve justice-oriented goals. The Design Justice Network asks designers to sign up to ten principles, including the idea that design should “sustain, heal and empower our communities” (Costanza-Chock 2020). Feminist HCI starts by centering the perspectives of those who are marginalized and excluded “so as to expose the unexamined assumptions of dominant epistemological paradigms, avoid distorted or one-sided accounts of social life, and generate new and critical questions” (Bardzell 2010, 1302). From a gender identity standpoint, this would involve centering women’s and trans* people’s viewpoints as a way of understanding why society (and its software systems) is so invested in maintaining and policing the gender binary (for an example, see Currah and Mulqueen [2011] on traveling while trans). In Data Feminism (2020), Lauren F. Klein and I assert that using data and computation for coliberation requires challenging the gender binary.

The term gender datafication can be used to refer to the external digital classification of gender and its representation in databases and code (Bivens and Haimson 2016). But how we choose to datafy gender can have profound consequences. The majority of people are cisgender, meaning that their gender identity aligns with their assigned sex. They are assigned female at birth and identify as a woman or assigned male at birth and identify as a man. While assigned sex, gender identity, and gender expression are aligned for cis people, they are not aligned for people who identify as transgender, genderqueer, and/or gender nonconforming (GNC). Nonbinary gender is an umbrella category for the gender of people who do not identify as men or women.

Researchers at the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, estimate that 0.6 percent of the US population is transgender (Flores et al. 2016) and 3.5 percent is not straight in sexual orientation (Gates 2014). This means that the vast majority—99.4 percent—of people are cisgender, and 96.5 percent are straight. However, when you scale the numbers at the size of the country’s population, those who are not cisgender and heterosexual amount to nine million individuals, about the population of the state of New Jersey. At scale, then, a computational system that only classifies gender along a binary, or makes assumptions about heterosexuality, will be missing critical information for a significant portion of the population. Thus, what appears to be a categorical outlier in any smaller data set should in fact be considered an expected outcome of measuring gender and/or sexuality in the population.

Yet big data and artificial intelligence research that deals with gender has almost invariably treated it as a binary. Competitions on Kaggle.com, a popular web platform for predictive modeling and analytics, have sought to predict gender from fingerprints and handwriting. Other work has sought to automatically identify the gender of bloggers (Belbachir, Henni, and Zaoui 2013), novelists (Koppel, Argamon, and Shimoni 2002), movie reviewers (Otterbacher 2013), and Twitter users (Kokkos and Tzouramanis 2014) based on the style of their language. There are multiple libraries for predicting the gender of people based on their name, such as OpenGenderTracker, the R gender package, and the controversially named “sex machine” Ruby Gem (now called Gender_Detector; Muller 2014). Nathan Matias (2014) gives a comprehensive account of more of this research, including different uses, methodological choices, and ethical guidelines. In 2018, HCI researcher Os Keyes (2018) evaluated fifty-eight technical papers about automatic gender recognition (detecting gender by analyzing images of people’s faces) and found that 95 percent of papers treated gender as a binary (see also Keyes, chapter 35, this volume).

Consumer-oriented platforms, responding to user pressure, have slowly begun to recognize more than two genders. Sort of. In 2014, Facebook expanded its gender options from two to fifty-eight for English speakers in the US and UK. The gender options it added were created in consultation with the LGBTQ+ community and ranged from “GNC” to “two-spirit” to “trans man.” The corporation later added the abilities to identify as more than one gender and to input a custom gender. Other social networking and dating sites have followed suit. For example, OKCupid provides more than twenty genders and thirteen sexual orientations for users to choose from. While these changes may appear to be progressive, Facebook’s databases continued for several years to resolve custom and nonbinary genders into “male” and “female” on the back end, based on the binary gender that users select at sign-up, where the custom option is not available (Bivens 2015). As recently as 2015, the Facebook Marketing API resolved gender to 1 = male, 2 = female. So while a user and their friends may have seen them presented as the gender they selected, they were a 1 = male or 2 = female to any advertisers looking to purchase their attention. This reinforces Bivens’s (2015) point that changes at the level of the interface are mere marketing, and platforms do not actually have an interest in “deprogramming” the gender binary.

While these platforms and applications seek to generalize about majority populations who largely do fall within the binary categories of men and women they reinforce the idea that the world is made up of only these two groups, which is categorically, historically, and empirically untrue. Moreover, gender detection applications erroneously assume that gender identity is a natural, essential property of a person that can be detected by an outside observer—that is, that it can be reduced to the curvature of one’s handwriting, the length of one’s hair, or the shape of one’s face. Finally, these works tend to codify (literally, to write into code) essentialist, stereotypical characterizations of men’s and women’s communication patterns and present them as universal, context-free, scientific truths. For example: “Women tend to express themselves with a more emotional language”; “men are more proactive, directing communication at solving problems, while women are more reactive” (Kokkos and Tzouramanis 2014). As we know from disciplines such as media studies, geography, and science and technology studies, representations do not innocently reflect reality but also have a role in producing it. This applies to code and statistical modeling just as it does to television shows, movies, images, and visualizations. Bivens and Haimson (2016) have argued that digital representations of gender on social media platforms have a strong influence on categories of gender in wider society. Ignoring and excluding the lived experiences of trans* and nonbinary people, especially in data and statistics—forms of representation perceived to be comprehensive and systematic—reinforces their societal erasure. As Keyes states: “This erasure is a foundational component of the discrimination trans people face” (Keyes 2018, 3).

Official, state-sanctioned acknowledgments and rights for people who are minoritized for their gender identity have been expanding in Western democracies and the Global South over the past fifty years. Nations around the world provide varied and uneven abilities for individuals to officially amend their sex marker on official documents. Some, such as Japan, mandate hormone therapy, surgery, and sterilization before one can be legally recognized as another gender. As of 2017, only five countries allowed individuals to determine their own gender: Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Greece, and Malta. Iran is the global capital of sex reassignment surgery (Tower 2016). Amnesty International (2017) advocates for LGBTQ+ rights as basic human rights. At least three countries—Australia, Nepal, and India—have included third gender options in their censuses. The state of California now recognizes three genders on state identification documents: nonbinary, female, and male. But in practice, GNC people face harassment, discrimination, and violence, even in the most legally progressive places, despite the fact that they represent a significant subpopulation (Albert 2019; Bettcher 2014).

Trans and GNC people will represent statistical outliers in small data sets and numerical minorities in almost any data set that collects gender at the scale of the population, just as Native Americans will represent a small proportion of any US-based data set that collects race and ethnicity. As Brooke Foucault Welles states: “When women and minorities are excluded as subjects of basic social science research, there is a tendency to identify majority experiences as ‘normal,’ and discuss minority experiences in terms of how they deviate from those norms” (Foucault Welles 2014). Indeed, transgender studies traces the relatively recent rise of the idea of “the normal” through both the statistical and sociopolitical meanings of the term (Stephens 2014) and demonstrates how “normalization” is used to justify administrative violence against those that fall outside of the category (Spade and Rohlfs 2016). Minority experiences are typically relegated to the margins of analysis or, as mostly happens with trans* people in relation to computation and gender, excluded altogether. This has dubious ethical and empirical implications and has even been called “demographic malpractice” by researchers at the Williams Institute (Chalabi 2014). Instead, Foucault Welles proposes that data scientists use the experiences of minoritized groups as reference categories in themselves. This means not just collecting more than two genders but also disaggregating any data processing, data analysis, and results based on these categories.

Here there is an opportunity to go even further and engage in an equity-focused approach: instead of creating data sets that represent minoritized genders according to their occurrence in the population, we can create data sets where they are the majority. Whether a data point (or a person who has been datafied) constitutes an outlier is contextual—dependent on which other data (or people) have been selected for comparison. It has to do with whose identities are centered and whose are relegated to the margins. Feminist HCI centers the people at the margins in order to challenge the ongoing dominance of those at the center.

At the same time, it is important to work with GNC people to understand whether they want to have their data included in any particular system. Research by Hamidi and coauthors (2018) found that transgender users had overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward automated gender recognition technology. Depending on what data are being collected and whether such data are personally identifiable (or easily deanonymized), it is also important to recognize the potential risk of stating one’s gender as something other than man or woman. If the data set aspires to be representative of a geographically bounded population, for example, the number of nonbinary people may be small enough to identify these individuals, even within otherwise large data sets. Even when individuals do not volunteer gender identity information to an application, it may be possible to attempt to algorithmically infer their gender identity or sexual orientation from their social networks (Jernigan and Mistree 2009). This can pose risks of repercussion in the form of either personal shame for people who have hidden their gender identity or discrimination, violence, and imprisonment, depending on the context and community where they live. These potential harms have led scholars to argue that computational systems should be designed to support obscurity and invisibility, key safety strategies for trans*, nonbinary, and other marginalized users (Haimson and Hoffman 2016).

It can also be challenging to collect information about nonbinary genders. How many and which other genders exist in a society depends heavily on culture and context. For example, the government of Nepal attempted to add to its census the category of “third gender,” but nonbinary gender communities, more likely to consider themselves kothi or methi, did not identify with this term (Park 2016). The Williams Institute and the Human Rights Campaign provide short guides for collecting inclusive gender data (HRC 2019; Park 2016). But just changing the user interface (providing more choices in a drop-down menu, or a write-in option, or the ability to choose multiple options) is not always the best path. Depending on the circumstances, the most ethical thing to do might be to avoid collecting gender data, make gender optional, or even stick with binary gender categories. For example, communications scholar Nikki Usher and her coauthors (2018) undertook a large-scale analysis of political journalists’ gendered communication patterns on Twitter. Their study stuck with binary categories because, as they state, “if you are trying to make a point that the gender binary, which is so strong and endemic, shapes and structures all sorts of inequality—then the binary has to be the point of analysis because you’re trying to show the problem as it is manifest in the dominant interpretation of reality, not the counterhegemonic one we wish were more pervasive and accepted” (Usher, personal communication, August 9, 2019). Moreover, if gender data are going to be used in processes with known structural inequalities, such as hiring and promotion, the most ethical action might be to entirely obscure a person’s gender from both the human decision-makers and the algorithms making discriminatory decisions, in order to avoid bias (Datta, Tschantz, and Datta 2015; Goldin and Rouse 2000).

Finally, even if there is low risk of personal harm in collecting gender data, cisgender institutions can still use those data in ways that cause group harm, such as perpetuating deficit narratives and pathologizing trans and nonbinary people. For example, while it is true that there are high rates of suicide among transgender youth, insensitive accounts of these statistics can inadvertently paint youth as passive victims in need of saving by cisgender adults. This points to the crucial importance of involving trans* people at every stage of the process in a gender data project, from data collection to analysis to communication.

So where do we land in relation to gender datafication and outliers? Outliers are not rejected and ignored in all computing contexts. In fact, outlier detection is a lively subfield of computer science and statistics. It has many applications, ranging from detecting fraud to identifying land mines to noting failures in aircraft engines. Outlier detection can also help identify intruders in security systems and focus on “bursts” in information systems, such as when a hashtag goes viral in a breaking news situation (Hodge and Austin 2004). From a technical standpoint, outlier detection for the purposes of preventing human harm and safeguarding financial investments is thriving. But it is important to recognize that values are always embedded in these applications and models. The decision to invest resources in detecting credit card fraud from a sea of otherwise unobjectionable transactions is made based on values that prioritize profit for a corporation. What if, instead or in addition, we prioritized safety and inclusion for women and GNC communities?

For those computational applications that deal with gender data: What might they look like if they de-outliered nonbinary people’s data? This would involve disaggregating and centering the experiences of nonbinary people, as in Starks, Dillahunt, and Haimson’s (2019) exploratory study about transgender and nonbinary digital practices of safety. What might these applications look like if they were designed by and with trans and nonbinary people, as in Ahmed’s (2019) proposal for a trans voice-training application? What other outliers might we be systematically missing, excluding, suppressing, and willfully ignoring, and what does that tell us about ourselves? Gender data represent complicated terrain for computational applications, for numerous reasons outlined here. But there is an ethical and empirical imperative to tackle this complexity. The world is not and has never been populated by only two genders. To assume gender is a simple binary is simply empirically wrong.

Note

Many thanks to Kendra Albert and Isabel Carter for reading and giving feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.

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41

Performative Measure

Kate Elswit

To collect information on breath in the form of data requires accounting for the multidimensional nature of breathing.[1] Breathing is both voluntary and involuntary, managed unconsciously in a manner that can be overruled by conscious breath control. In neuroimaging, this manifests as activity in different parts of the brain. Breath also consists of both external respiration, in which gases are transferred between the respiratory organs and the outer environment, and internal respiration, which occurs at a cellular level. In this sense, breath represents the body at its most permeable. A gas saturated with water that can undergo state changes, breath has a robust and sometimes visible life outside of the body as force, heat, and moisture. But it goes the other way too—as I was writing during the 2017 Northern California wildfires, in the time it took me to alternate grieving over the thick air outside with putting three thousand words on-screen, 210,217 acres burned, and I felt the particulate matter of people’s lives in my chest with each breath.

Proxies for measuring breath can involve motion, emotion, displacement, and sound. Even a simple proposal for locating breath within the body, such as measuring the expansion of the torso, requires accounting for motion both up and down the vertical axis in the transverse plane of the abdomen (diaphragmatic breathing) and laterally across the coronal plane in the thorax (costal breathing). Lung plethysmography accounts for volume, but not the sensation of volume—how breath makes the chest empty and full at the same time. However, contemporary breath techniques often use ideokinesis to encourage aware breathers to breathe into and thereby affect parts of the body located far from the trunk. Breath can also be used intersubjectively to tune individual proprioception toward and ultimately synchronize multiple bodies. In addition, breath can call forth or be called forth by various feeling states, including fear, mindfulness, anxiety, surprise, and pleasure, and it also has an intimate link to other physiological patterns, such as heart rate. It is no wonder then that breath has tended at various historical moments to be connected to time, to thinking, and to the soul. Without breath, there is no voice, but without breath there is also death.[2]

I start with the multidimensional nature of breath to suggest how “data selves” of the breath body in particular might be productive for teasing out the relationship between biodata and the messiness of physical experience. The term data double has often come to stand for the reassembly of various fragments of data emanating from the body into a duplicate, decorporealized, virtual form; in this volume Schüll contextualizes the phrase within a broader landscape of understandings around data selves. Although scholarship has foregrounded aspects of control around such shadow bodies, including the role of surveillance in producing them, the private ends they serve, and how they condition daily lives, there is further work to be done on the complexity of the data collection itself that underlies such fragments vis-à-vis the thickness of embodiment. If “digital monitoring practices tend to position the body as a data repository” (Lupton 2018, 2), then it is critical to continue to ask which aspects of bodies are most easily transposed by wearable technologies into the contents of such a repository, as well as how to deal with those that elude capture. Tracing a hundred-year history of self-tracking devices, media scholars Crawford, Lingel, and Karppi (2015) argue that the overstated celebration of precision can be dangerous—for example, such data are now being used as evidence in court: “The claims to accuracy and reliability of these devices are mythic: it [sic] gives some accurate data, some of the time” (489). Instead, they posit that more attention needs to be paid to the “transition from feelings to numbers,” a problem that is particularly acute in breath’s uncertain archives.

My contribution to Uncertain Archives arises from a larger project about the intersections of breath, measurement, and performance from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. As Wernimont points out, the understanding of quantum media as performative enables interventions by positioning data and their interfaces not as inert or descriptive but rather as “always already engaged in processes by which bodies and people have become and are becoming visible to themselves, others, and nation-states” (Wernimont 2018, 14). Here, I outline the concept of performative measure as a model for engaging with the many dimensions of breath that are lost in the promise of distillation to a singular measurement, ultimately gesturing briefly to media and performance projects that have attempted since the 1990s to use a performer’s or user’s real-time breath data as a biofeedback controller. On the one hand, there has been so much scholarly groundwork that establishes the potential of such artistic practices, in terms both of using digital tools to heighten sensory awareness and of the breadth of humanistic and artistic modalities available to bridge qualitative and quantitative representations of embodied experience. On the other hand, there has also been significant attention to the gaps, biases, and forms of cultural knowledge built into the collection, analysis, and manipulation of any data and thus the ways in which biodata need to be cautiously approached in relation to knowledge of the self or indeed the other.

I begin by connecting the fields of medical humanities, media studies, performance, and feminist technology studies to locate these twin anchors of potential and risk for artistic projects involving biofeedback with breath data. From there, I show how the inaccurate or partial breath data built into the interactive feedback loops of such artistic projects may not necessarily represent what they purport to, and yet interactions with such uncertain data may nonetheless, or perhaps even better, provide insights into more dimensions of the breath body and embodied experiences of breath. Such examples offer alternative approaches to biodata and physical experience capable of negotiating multiple dimensions of breath on terms that have to do with a balance of spectacle and measurement.

A key argument for the limitations of understanding breath as data and the need for new, interdisciplinary methodologies to better account for breathing and breathlessness comes from philosopher Havi Carel and medical anthropologist Jane Macnaughton, coinvestigators on the Life of Breath research project. As Carel (2016) explains: “A well-known enigma in respiratory medicine is the discrepancy between objective lung function, as measured by lung function tests, and subjective feeling and function” (118). Lived experiences of breathlessness tend not to correlate to the ways in which lung capacity is descriptively understood by standard forms of pulmonary function and respiration testing. As a result, Macnaughton and Carel (2016) argue that understanding the full pathophysiology of breathlessness requires finding new methods in the critical medical humanities to bridge the “epistemic gap between clinical knowledge and two other interlinked kinds of knowledge”: cultural knowledge and personal experience (297).

Beyond clinical settings, Macnaughton and Carel’s argument for building medically meaningful communication around a broader repertoire of lived breath experiences, rather than reducing the patient to their data, resonates with discussions in technology and media. While the miniaturization of computers and expanded forms of networked transmission enabled wearable configurations for the collection of bodily data that in turn facilitate a kind of ubiquitous and reductive monitoring, this has been countered by demands for more complexity in both the human experiences that such data abstract and the ethics of where and how that information is shared (see Cohen 2016; Sanders 2016; Schüll 2016). Already in 1998, affective computing pioneer Rosalind Picard raised concerns about how these developing technologies were ultimately being used primarily to increase the efficiency of workers; instead, Picard (1998, 57) proposed the potential for technologies to increase “affective bandwidth.” It is this proposition that media scholar-artist Susan Kozel (2007) addresses in suggesting that the whisper(s) project in which she was involved might be read as “wearables for the telepathically impaired”: “Contemporary Western bodies have forgotten the full scope of our ability to transmit and receive qualitative and affective messages from one another and . . . wireless wearable devices can step into this lacuna to help us regain these sensory and cognitive dataflows” (282). Further studies reiterate that such affect is not disembodied; rather, somatic practices offer interdisciplinary frameworks to contribute to technological understandings of embodiment and experience to ultimately shape design, creativity, and use (Schiphorst 2009; see also Bleeker 2010).

In this sense, performance is often understood as a laboratory for the transmission of multidimensional human experience. The use of biosensors in performance is most commonly dated to the 1960s (see Dixon 2007; Salter 2010). However, such early works tended to operate in a framework that privileged causality and control, in more simplistic mappings of bodily sensor data, often movement or heart rate, to some form of analog or digital output. By the third wave of digital interfaces, far more intricate interweavings of interoceptive (somatic) and exteroceptive (technological) agency emerge, which ultimately offer new “viewing-sensing devices” for both performers and audiences (Davidson 2016, 22). Artistic collaborators Naccarato and MacCallum (2016) characterize this transition as that from “biocontrol” to a kind of “biorelational feedback” that is attentive to the processing, mediation, and/or feedback loops between data, output, and performer. This transition likewise produces artistic practices capable of better reflecting on the complexity of the biodata themselves that are present and that are absent in such artistic interfaces.

Turning to accounts of performance tech projects, the challenges of data collection and the idiosyncrasies of mapping those data to particular outputs are often outweighed by the focus on accomplishment. In looking at recent histories of biofeedback works, there is more space to borrow from the approaches that attend to the biases, symbolic nature, and cultural embeddedness of code, platforms, and algorithmic processing (see Marino 2006; Noble 2018), rather than celebrating such work in a black-box way as a feat of hardware and/or software engineering. These types of critiques have already been advanced against biometric technologies themselves in other contexts for the ways in which they reproduce biases in collection and analysis. As feminist media scholar Shoshana Magnet (2011) puts it in her influential study When Biometrics Fail, human bodies are not “biometrifiable”; while industries built around such practices rest on the (false) “assumption that human bodies can easily be rendered into biometric code,” such technologies should rather be understood as reimagining the human body and producing new meanings in the process (2, 11).

However, to think more specifically about the ways in which such tools enable circulation beyond the physical form requires first seeing how they engage with the multiplicity of data formations already inherent in bodies. In this sense, we need to go even beyond the important critique of data collection and processing by Magnet and others, in order to capture the ways in which biodata may stand, partially, in relation to the many sensory and affective dimensions of breath experience and how such partial, uncertain, and biased data may nonetheless operate in multimodal forms to share such experiences with others. Although strategies are already under consideration in fields such as human-computer interaction to change the frame of reference away from the capacities and limitations of various technologies for sensing and mapping data (for example, Gaver, Beaver, and Benford 2003), performance has something to add because, in some respects, it already began this conversation a century ago. If, as Elise Morrison (2016) argues in her study of surveillance technologies in performance, “the logic of naturalism also governs biometric science” because the latter shares with naturalist theater a certain reduction of the individual to physically and environmentally determined traits beyond their control (189, 194), then there is potential in looking to other performance and media practices to intervene. On the one hand, theatrical performance lends itself to stagings that emphasize the constructed, even spectacular nature of the knowledges for which those data stand. But on the other hand, the flawed and incomplete nature of biodata also offers opportunities to think more closely about such performances themselves, particularly the ways they share bodily experience by means of feedback loops built on such partial data that may yet—or in fact better—give access to the multidimensional nature of that experience.

Performance and media practices based on a claim to be in some way driven by breath data include controlling the navigation of virtual environments in Char Davis and Softimage’s Osmose (1995) or of real ones, as in Thrill Laboratory’s Breathless: An Interactive Ride Experiment (2010). In such works the breath is often seen as intrinsic to the feeling of a world, whether in a person-to-person participant-interactive installation such as Thecla Schiphorst and Susan Kozel’s exhale: breath between bodies (2005) or in a performance such as Pulse (2003) by Lynn Lukkas, Mark Henrickson, Paul Verity Smith, Marika Stamenkovic Herranz, Paulo C. Chagas, and Kelli Dimple. On the one hand, the collection of biodata for these projects might seem to follow relatively straightforward processes, whether though extensible bands capable of measuring expansion of the torso at one or more points, correlating to the two primary modes of breathing; airflow sensors near the mouth; or the measurement of electrical energy. However, accounts that remain from this catalog of breath works suggest they should not be understood in terms of the mapping of that singular parameter of breath data to a particular representational output. Instead, although these projects and others like them may seem to be powered by straightforward biomeasurement, they in fact highlight multiple dimensions of breath that cohere into data bodies, not only through what is collected but also through what is not. The breath body that they assemble calls up so many facets of breath experience through performer, participant, and audience interactions with partial data. There is an intricate balance between articulations of enhanced sensory awareness and the unknowability or theatricality of breath that threads through these project narratives.

In a virtual reality environment, the premise of navigation by breath produces an opportunity to tune into physical experience for the immersant, through, rather than despite, a system primarily responsive to exceptional breathing, rather than privileging granular measurement. In a performance where breath is meant to control live film playback, the dancer’s sensorial world is amplified for audience members most clearly by perceived correlations between her body and the reactive environment, which in fact require a separation of breath, sound, and movement on the part of the performer. In a participatory installation that slips from biodata to affective data, the premise of measuring breath is first and foremost, as the artists explain, “a metaphor for synchronizing and coordinating the giving and receiving of data” (Schiphorst 2006, 177; emphasis added) but one that nonetheless leads participants toward expanding their proprioception and ultimately synchronizing their breath in concert with increasing numbers of others. In some, mapping the quality of breath from data to fluttering (via a fan or vibrator) or floating (via navigation in virtual space) is unlikely to respond to nuanced patterns of respiration because of the imprecision of such outputs. Instead, these choices in output draw tactile attention to breath’s close relationship to air and rhythm.

It would be impossible to argue that any of these projects is powered primarily by quantitative measures of breath in the way biofeedback might conventionally be understood. However, my point is not to advocate for more precise biometric capture or mapping. Rather, a closer look at projects such as these, which explore the communicability of the multidimensional breath body in theatrical contexts, might offer new models for the mixture of biomeasurement and spectacle that constitute them. Since 2014, I have worked on Breath Catalogue—“a cabinet of breath curiosities in performance”—which uses experimental dance in conjunction with technologies entangled with theater and medicine in order to collect, reuse, and share breath experiences and breath data. In so doing, my collaborators and I propose “breath experience as a kind of living archival material that can be investigated and re-accessed using bio-media” (Elswit 2019a, 340). At the same time as I consider this collection of artistic practices as part of my project’s extended cataloging of breath’s curious choreographies, I posit that these choreographies have the potential to catalog and thereby offer access to more wide-ranging understandings of breath itself, through a closer engagement with its uncertain archives. Over the past few decades, performance practices have tended away from engaging with breath data because of the complications of their capture. However, this is precisely where we are best trained as scholar-artists to work: to deal with such messiness as an opportunity to undo the authority of the overdetermined mapping between biodata and lived experience; to instead lean into the partial and uncertain nature of performative measure and, in so doing, to pose new prompts to our own somatic practices and model a way in which breath might become shareable, differently.

Notes

1. This chapter draws on material from Elswit (2019a, 2019b).

2. For introductions to breathing from multiple perspectives, see Calais-Germain (2006), Eccleston (2016), and Macnaughton and Carel (2016).

References

Bleeker, Maike. 2010. “Corporeal literacy: New modes of embodied interaction in digital culture.” In Mapping Intermediality in Performance, edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Andy Lavender, Chiel Kattenbelt, and Robin Nelson, 38–43. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Calais-Germain, Blandine. 2006. The Anatomy of Breathing. Seattle: Eastland Press.

Carel, Havi. 2016. Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cohen, Julie E. 2016. “The surveillance-innovation complex: The irony of the participatory turn.” In The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, edited by Darin David Barney, E. Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, and Tamar Tembeck, 207–226. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Crawford, Kate, Jessa Lingel, and Tero Karppi. 2015. “Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self-tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 479–496.

Davidson, Andrea. 2016. “Ontological shifts: Multi-sensorality and embodiment in a third wave of digital interfaces.” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 8 (1): 21–42.

Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Eccleston, Chris. 2016. Embodied: The Psychology of Physical Sensation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Elswit, Kate. 2019a. “A living cabinet of breath curiosities: Somatics, bio-media, and the archive.” International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media 15 (2): 340–359.

Elswit, Kate. 2019b. “Toward a performative measure of breath bodies.” Unpublished manuscript.

Gaver, William W., Jacob Beaver, and Steve Benford. 2003. “Ambiguity as a resource for design.” ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 5 (1): 233–240.

Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lupton, Deborah. 2018. “How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data.” Big Data and Society 5 (2): 205395171878631.

Macnaughton, Jane, and Havi Carel. 2016. “Breathing and breathlessness in clinic and culture: Using critical medical humanities to bridge an epistemic gap.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, 294–309. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Magnet, Shoshana Amielle. 2011. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marino, Mark C. 2006. “Critical code studies.” Electronic Book Review. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/codology.

Morrison, Elise. 2016. Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Naccarato, Teoma, and John MacCallum. 2016. “From representation to relationality: Bodies, biosensors and mediated environments.” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 8 (1): 57–72.

Noble, Safiya. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.

Picard, Rosalind. 1998. Affective Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Salter, Chris. 2010. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sanders, Rachel. 2016. “Self-tracking in the digital era.” Body and Society, no. 23: 36–63.

Schiphorst, Thecla. 2006. “Breath, skin, and clothing: Using wearable technologies as an interface into ourselves.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 2 (2): 171–186.

Schiphorst, Thecla. 2009. “Body matters: The palpability of invisible computing.” Leonardo 43 (2): 225–230.

Schüll, Natasha. 2016. “Data for life: Wearable technology and the design of self-care.” BioSocieties 11 (3): 317–333.

Wernimont, Jacqueline. 2018. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

42

Pornography

Patrick Keilty

PornHub, one of the world’s largest distributors and databases of pornography online, is part of a US$97 billion global media industry. As the primary platform by which people interact with pornography today, online pornography companies wield enormous influence over the ways we learn about, play with, explore, and construct sexuality and sexual desire. Each day, hundreds of millions of people visit pornographic video-streaming sites. These websites may seem like amateurish distribution services. Instead, they are sophisticated technology companies that employ hundreds of technical staff to design and develop interfaces, algorithms, data-mining software, data analytics software, video-streaming software, and database management systems. They are part of an innovative industry engaged in the kinds of algorithmic and data science practices that drive the profits of more widely recognized industries, such as social media, online gambling, online games, search engines, and electronic commerce. Their staff is responsible for making strategic choices about information management and the graphic organization of content that translate into large profits, innovative capitalist media techniques, and dominant modes for curating, distributing, and regulating our experience of sexual desire today. This makes PornHub a massive online archive not only of pornography but also of captured data on pornographic viewing practices worldwide.

The profit motives of the pornography industry have long driven new forms of media and technological innovation, including the development and proliferation of the Panoram, cable television, VCR, VHS, Blu-ray, broadband, and 3G mobile services, as journalists and film historians have shown (Alilunas 2016; Tynan 2008). In recent years media scholars have shown how the industry has driven the development of web technologies and online business practices, such as hosting services, live chat, secure credit card processing, banner advertisements, pop-ups, web promotions, and streaming video technology (Paasonen 2011).

Unlike many web-based technology companies, PornHub seems eager to promote the fact that it collects a lot of data on its users. It publishes statistical and data trends compiled by PornHub’s research and analysis team on its blog PornHub Insights, a version of the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight for porn, whose playful motto is “digging deep into the data.” Based on user browsing patterns, PornHub’s ostensible aim is to “explore the intricacies of online porn viewership.” In fact, PornHub Insights is largely a marketing tool that summons the wonder of quantification to promote the video-streaming service through social media and news outlets. A Google Alert for PornHub returns almost daily news articles. A sampling of headlines from July and August 2017 reads: “All the Porn Russians Watch While Masturbating” (Inverse); “A Surprising Number of Men Prefer Small Boobs” (Men’s Health); “PornHub Dishes Dirt on North Korean Porn Preferences” (Gizmodo); “Women across the World Are Streaming Lesbian Porn” (Out Magazine); “These Are the Most Popular Porn Sites in India” (GQ India); and “Comic-Con Nerds Watched a Ton of Cartoon Porn in San Diego” (Inverse). Among other “findings,” PornHub Insights features blog posts claiming to reveal the prurient interests of French and Belarusian users, what type of gay porn is popular in the US, and what effect national events such as the NBA Finals, the US Senate testimony of James B. Comey, the UK general election, the 2017 solar eclipse, and the season premiere of Game of Thrones had on PornHub’s web traffic.

PornHub Insights makes explicit the media company’s vast surveillance powers as well as a public fascination with data’s promise to reveal something about us to ourselves. Paradoxically, PornHub Insights functions as an ideal of our late capitalist data-driven economy while exposing pornography as a ubiquitous public secret: widely consumed, yet a source of great cultural anxiety. Our pleasure in PornHub’s data is predicated on that cultural anxiety. We are surprised and titillated, even scandalized, by what the data supposedly reveal. The blog invites us to delight in our own perversion. Pleasure derives from data as confession, data as striptease, data as the shame of exposure. However, unlike FiveThirtyEight, PornHub Insights does not take a critical approach to quantification and statistical methods. For example, it does not mention that a data sample limited only to PornHub viewers is not generalizable or that the methods of collection and analysis go without verifiability, replicability, or scrutiny. Statistical analysis is seemingly a downer, a cockblock to the sexual promise of data. Instead, PornHub peddles strategically salacious conclusions, narrowly tailored to expose an entire nation’s sexual tastes, conveniently cataloged, indexed, and inventoried according to prescribed fetishistic categories, or metadata. This is the reverse of pornification, an increasing acceptance of explicit sexual imagery in mainstream culture. Instead, it is the datafication of pornography or the fetishization of data as an extension of the titillating goal of pornography.

PornHub Insights offers only a glimpse into the company’s data strategies and the breadth of its data collection practices. PornHub also collects vast quantities of user browsing data. Its influence manifests through two design strategies: by structuring and regulating sexual desire through algorithmic categorizations that attempt to softly persuade viewers into continuing to search for an “imagined perfect image” and by designing an immersive viewing experience. By data mining individuals’ browsing habits, PornHub uses what Internet scholar John Cheney-Lippold (2017) calls “algorithmic identities” to mediate and fetishize categories of cultural difference and to suggest content and advertisements. Importantly, each viewer’s identity is always changeable, based on newly observed behavior or the input of new metadata. The purpose of this adaptability is to create a capacity of suggestion. That is, to softly persuade viewers to continue searching for an imagined perfect image and to enable repetitive and recursive browsing, encouraging viewers to forgo the pleasures of the known for the pleasures of the unknown. Drawing on both individually generated data and aggregated data in calculating search results, these computer algorithms also track geographic location, IP addresses, and viewer-generated tags, categories, and video titles. Examining the design of these systems helps researchers better understand the workings of biopower (that is, the regulation of individuals through diverse technics of subjugation) at the level of the category, computer code, statistic, and surveillance as a form of interpellation. In this way, PornHub’s design works as a disciplinary regime that structures and regulates sexual desire to fit within the context of algorithmic categorization.

In collecting our browsing behavior for profit, PornHub turns our bodies over to the service of capital. The pornographic experience is meaningful to viewers precisely because of their bodies. To the extent that it attempts to arouse sexual feelings, pornography functions in and through a direct visceral appeal to the body. Just as capitalist economies stress production, so, too, does a datafied understanding of pornography proceed with this relentlessly productive logic in mind. The datafication of pornography replicates that which regulates exchange value: data, like capital, must circulate and be reinvested in new productive logics. The body is simply a model of exchange value in late capitalism’s data-driven economy. It becomes a value-producing machine that must continually reinvest its energies by browsing for pornography online. For PornHub, a viewer’s sexual desire is human labor, and the libido parallels labor power because they are both natural energies that a capitalist economy demands should be treated in an entrepreneurial spirit. Such a regime of sexuality resembles a capitalist eager to seize on the surplus value that accrues as data. Capitalism’s data-driven economy therefore transforms pornography from its psychoanalytic understanding as a phantasmatic regime that puts various fetishes and perversions into play toward a mechanism of capital. One might argue that such an analysis suffers from a certain degree of economic determinism—that is, the belief that economic changes necessarily dictate all other social and cultural relations. While it is difficult to pin down the degree to which capitalist economics shapes our experience of sexuality in the distributed networks of the Internet, an understanding that capitalism structures our experience of sexuality gains some plausibility when we consider that cum scenes in the pornography industry are frequently referred to as “money shots.”

The design of pornographic video-streaming sites (including their graphic organization, algorithms, and database management systems) reveals the graphic organization of pornographic content as a cultural value system that structures and regulates individuals’ sexual desires. For many designers, pornographic streaming sites are often a good example of poor design due to their seemingly chaotic nature. However, the design of these sites is highly strategic: many pornography websites provide an enormous range of selection that seems to promise satisfaction. Following psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1992, 2007), however, nothing compares to an imagined perfect image, leaving every image inadequate. This concept of design participates in an aegis of “getting what you want” but in excess of it. Its intention is to create the technological conditions by which interacting with a pornography website becomes an entry point for immersion. The scripts of the sites’ graphic interfaces preclude certain actions while inviting or demanding others. In this way, designers delegate to technology the task of soliciting and sustaining absorption. Ultimately, PornHub reveals the social and political implications of technical design in our engagements with sexuality, representation, and desire, blurring the line between surveillance and access, design and experience, bodies and capital, and autonomy and automation.

Data collected on individual viewers’ browsing habits are a key element that informs online pornography’s graphic design. Designers determine the graphic organization of content in part based on analytics that indicate whether the juxtaposition of particular images invites more clicks or longer browsing times. Such an approach to design is intended to entice viewers into serendipitous discovery and creates an environment for wandering, browsing, meandering, or prolonging engagement for the purpose of pleasure, even a lower-level notation such as keeping boredom at bay, or idle distraction and time squandering. PornHub creates a space of dwelling, not merely a realm of control panels and instruments. Its graphic design is often disruptive, disorienting, and frustrating in its defeat of expectations. As such, PornHub’s interface must be thought beyond representation, toward ecology, a zone between cultural systems and human subjects, and the interspace between information space and a task-supporting environment. This is neither the self-evident map of content elements and their relations nor simply a way to organize tasks. PornHub’s data-driven design challenges the illusion of the interface as the static presentation of a thing, revealing instead an active, dynamic field of forces acting on each other within a frame of constraint to produce the conditions that provoke the constitutive act of viewing by which one experiences graphic design.

In this sense, the graphic elements on PornHub are probabilistic entities, subject to constrained but intermediate possible interactions. The placement of images on the site is based on probabilities that aggregate viewers’ browsing habits and clicking patterns. The interactions viewers have with the graphic elements are also probabilistic, rather than deterministic. PornHub’s probabilistic design therefore makes a difference to prevailing approaches that attempt to map a direct relation between structure and effect. Such an approach to interface design is reductively mechanistic. Its goal is to design an environment to maximize efficient accomplishment of tasks by individuals who are imagined as autonomous agents whose behaviors can be constrained in a mechanical feedback loop (sometimes called user experience). By creating a serendipitous quality of design based on probability rather than mechanization, PornHub implicitly recognizes that the act of viewing constitutes an event that is never stable or static but rather active and dynamic.

PornHub’s data reveal a lot of uncertainty. We do not know all of the data that PornHub collects, and our only glimpses into its surveillance practices manifest obliquely in PornHub Insights, its content and advertising recommendations to individual viewers, and the graphic organization of content. PornHub Insights relies on the rhetorics of quantification to cultivate narratives about national desires and to place pornography centrally within a cultural zeitgeist. Acknowledging the limits of these data—that they are not statistically generalizable, verifiable, or replicable—would only serve to undercut the promotional aims of PornHub Insights and dispel the myth of data’s promise to reveal something about us to ourselves. Yet while PornHub traffics in bad statistics to promote itself, it also harnesses the power of probability. It collects data on individuals’ perceived desires in order to craft an “algorithmic identity.” Yet its reliance on probability to craft such an identity recognizes the limits of its knowledge about its viewers: tastes and desires change over time and so recommendations to viewers must change with the input of new data. Its graphic organization of content relies on the same principle. By creating a probabilistic graphic design, PornHub recognizes a certain amount of uncertainty in how it can keep viewers browsing for an imagined perfect image. Thus, whether PornHub is able to continually reinvest bodies in the service of capital is only as certain as statistical calculation. Perhaps this new economy of the datafication of pornography can best be understood as strategically probabilistic: bodies as calculation.

References

Alilunas, Peter. 2016. Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cheney-Lippold, John. 2017. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Vol. 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton.

Lacan, Jacques. 2007. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.

Paasonen, Susanna. 2011. Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tynan, Dan. 2008. “12 ways porn has changed the web (for good and evil).” Network World, December 22, 2008. http://www.networkworld.com/article/2271139/smartphones/12-ways-porn-has-changed-the-web--for-good-and-evil-.html.

43

Prediction

Manu Luksch

We can predict it for you wholesale.

Before You Even Know It

What do others buy after viewing this item? Well, if you like the sound of that, then you’ll love what’s coming up next.

—Luksch, Reinhart, and Tode 2015

US Patent No. 8,615,473 B2 of December 24, 2013, “Method and System for Anticipatory Package Shipping,” is assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of one of the world’s most data- and dollar-wealthy corporations. Using forecast analysis of business variables—the predicted desire for an item based on a customer’s prior online behavior (such as previous orders, searches, wish lists, cart contents, and cursor “loiter time” over items)—the corporation proposes to “speculatively ship . . . without completely specifying a delivery address” to cut down on fulfillment times: the shipped item is held locally and offered to customers with almost immediate delivery.

Prediction Is Difficult

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.[1]

Predictions are claims about specific, well-defined events in the future whose occurrence can be uncontroversially verified. A prediction ought to be sharp (precise) and accurate (have a significantly greater than even chance of being correct).

Of the diverse strategies and approaches to prediction deployed historically, those involving the systematic observation of nature have proved more successful than those based on numerology, the examination of animal entrails, or the interpretation of dreams. Ancient astronomers predicted eclipses based on the periodicity observed in past records; foreknowledge of cosmic events endowed them with immense cultural authority. During the Scientific Revolution, natural philosophers formalized observational and experimental procedures and generated theories with formidable predictive power. Mathematics continues to prove “unreasonably effective” (Wigner 1960) in the natural sciences. (For example, experimentally determined values of a quantity called the electron g-factor agree with theoretical computations to within one part in a trillion.) Despite dramatic epistemological complications arising from twentieth-century developments (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, chaos theory), mathematics and natural sciences set the standards for both deterministic and probabilistic reasoning, most conspicuously as they quantify the uncertainty of their predictions.

What has constrained predictive power in the humanities and social sciences—even in the most mathematized of all, economics, where Homo sapiens has been rationalized beyond recognition into a monomaniacal Homo economicus (see figure 43.1)? Historically, the obstacles have been located in the very nature of the objects of study. Human and social phenomena arise from the actions of self-interpreting subjects who are susceptible to influence, inclined to rebelliousness and akrasia,[2] resistant to reductionist analysis, and (unlike electrons) heterogeneous. However, the application of machine learning to large data sets appears to have brought about dramatic improvements in the prediction of human behavior. Does this augur the end of individual independence, inspiration, improvisation—and also of mystery, suspense, romance (see figure 43.2)?

Past Performance Is No Guarantee of Future Results

The computed likelihood of an event may be underwritten by different conceptions of probability, as determined by, for example:

- (i) Relative frequency in the statistical record of the past. (Although, as financial service providers typically hedge, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”)

- (ii) Symmetry. The chance of an event is constrained by logical or physical symmetries of the system, such as those of an unbiased coin. (But a complete model of an unbiased toss would have to include at least the probability of the coin landing on its edge, among other, possibly more exotic outcomes.)

Figure 43.1

Advertisement by investment management company Winton Capital: a depiction of Cinderella annotated with parameters of time, pupil dilation, adrenaline, heartbeat, charm quotient, shoe size, composition of shoe, foot size, subject profile, available transportation, distance to destinations, and current speed. London, 2015. Photo by Manu Luksch.

Figure 43.2

Advertisement by online dating platform eharmony: “35 years decoding the science of lasting love. The Brains behind the Butterflies.” London, 2018. Photo by Mukul Patel.

- (iii) A causal mechanism or model. (Consider an event as an outcome of a random natural process, such as radioactive decay.)

- (iv) The degree of belief of an individual that the event will occur (subjective probability).

Prediction in the human sciences is heavily driven by (i) and deeply vulnerable to (iv).

Real-World Counterfactuals: What Could Have Been

To reason counterfactually is to consider what might have been, to speculate about alternative outcomes. But this requires causal understanding, and in messy, complex human domains such as economics, causation is neither simple nor uncontested.

If, five years after leaving the EU [European Union], the UK economy booms, would this refute the prediction of the Remain Camp that Brexit would ravage Britain’s economy? If, instead, after five years the UK is in recession, would this confirm the prediction? In both cases, the answer is no; neither observed outcome proves anything. In order to “prove” our predictions, we would need to establish the counterfactual. But there are too many factors that would need to be accounted, and the outcome quantified under the counterfactual. And that is something we simply are unable to do. (Simon Bishop, RBB Economics, pers. comm.)

The impossibility of the counterfactual arises in another way too. The decision to grant a defendant bail can be assessed ex post based on compliance—but not the decision to deny bail. You cannot run a controlled experiment on a society[3]—or on an ecosystem.[4]

The Long and Short of IT

The proliferation of networked sensors and ubiquitous processing makes possible a fully embedded urban information infrastructure—an operating system for smart cities. Trends gleaned through data correlation can be extrapolated into future patterns. Anticipatory algorithmic management will, it is claimed, lead to a resilient, ecologically balanced future free from uncertainty—as you remember it from techno-utopian fictions (Dick 1966).

Just as Joe Chip discovers in a face-off with his smart door in Ubik (Dick 1969),[5] even everyday infrastructure is not above suspicion. Closed-circuit television manufacturer Hikvision (40 percent owned by the Chinese Communist Party) has supplied over a million cameras compatible with facial recognition technology to the UK—including to the parliamentary estate and the police. These contracts were awarded with full knowledge of Hikvision’s association with Skynet (China’s nationwide surveillance network) and its development of a centralized facial recognition database, for which it is amassing data (Gallagher 2019).

In its full expression, the corporate-governed smart city epitomizes a new enclosure movement. Using network surveillance, it builds private databases that fuel prediction products. These products are traded in a behavioral futures market that Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has identified as the mainspring of surveillance capitalism.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies I: Classification and Profiling

“Behind every customer is an individual,” claims consumer credit reporting agency Experian (2016), advertising its Mosaic tool, which enables corporations to “personalise customer experience and increase share of wallet.” For useful patterns to emerge from this data, categories must be created. Mosaic classifies consumers into sixty-six types across fifteen groups, using criteria such as home ownership and location, career stage, and ethnicity (see figure 43.3).

Figure 43.3

Classification examples in Experian Mosaic (2016) “the consumer classification solution for consistent cross-channel marketing.”

The classification system is riddled with arbitrariness and value judgments—“affordable but pleasant,” “bright young singles,” “time-honored elders”—that propagate through decision algorithms that run on the database. Experian markets the tool across the retail and service sectors, including human resources and financial agencies that can have life-changing impact. “Through denying credit or screening career opportunities, negative profiles can haunt an individual across various domains. A person’s data shadow does more than follow them; it precedes them” (Kitchin 2015).

Better Than You: False Consciousness, True Intentions

Network intelligence corporations declare, with no sense of hubris, that their extensively correlated data sets “know” you better than you know yourself.[6] They have the capacity to infer your creditworthiness, voting intentions, relationship status, and sexual preferences through a combination of first-order data (such as what your neighbors are like) and second-order metadata (the topology of your network).[7] It is very specifically you, with all your peculiarities, and not just as a member of some category, that these corporations want to know. Deep personal knowledge yields valuable information on how you might behave (what you might buy, when you might die). And data anonymization provides little protection against a motivated, mathematically sophisticated agent.[8]

The Easiest Way to Predict the Future Is to Produce It

The smart city invites citizens to devolve their precious processing to it, allowing it to curate a preselected menu of options. Informed by neuroscientific research on perception and cognition, fed by behavioral data harvested from phones and smart cards, and driven by the need to compete in the attention economy, the agile vendor of products and services learns to nudge user behavior (“if you like the sound of that . . .”). Is the actual reason for Google’s heavy secrecy around its YouTube recommendation engine that the algorithms are driven by an unutterably simple-minded agenda—maximizing ad click-through? Reap viewer desire, inflate the filter bubble, but remain agnostic as to content.

Some illusions need to be maintained. Prediction is much less hazardous when the user, confronted with an explicit and limited set of options, feels that she is choosing freely. And seemingly inconsequential changes in the framing of options may lead to dramatically different behavior.[9] Swipe which way?

The act of prediction aspires to be an epistemic act. But a culture governed by predictive algorithms is less a factory of knowledge and more a factory of conformity. A culture that understands itself to be predictable homogenizes. All prophecies become self-fulfilling (provocations).

A Prediction

If you suspect that anything you think might be held against you—you will self-censor.

The Fast Mirror and the Slow

To protect the Khazar princess Ateh from her enemies, blind men paint letters of a proscribed alphabet on her eyelids each night. Anyone who reads the letters dies. One morning, the princess receives a pair of extraordinary mirrors as a gift, one fast and the other slow. “Whatever the fast mirror picked up, reflecting the world like an advance on the future, the slow mirror returned, settling the debt of the former” (Pavic 1989, 23). Having not yet cleaned the letters from her eyelids, she looks into the mirrors and dies instantly, killed twice in an interblink.

What Wouldn’t You Want to Foresee?

Personal: If you could know exactly when you will die—would you want to? If you did know—who else ought to know? Should some predictions not be made, even if they could be? And exactly how would you police that?

Pedestrian: “Every technological intervention that is made with the intention of smoothing out urban experience deprives us of an opportunity to encounter something external to our own will, and so doing robs us of a moment in which we might reflect on the contingency of our own values, choices and beliefs” (Greenfield 2013, location 732–734). Foreknowledge makes life—boring?

Antiexistential: Cassandra foresaw deglaciation, extreme climatic events, and ecosystem collapse but was cursed by sulking Apollo, never to be believed. This tragedy brings about no catharsis.

Correlation Is Enough: The End of Theory?

The spectacular growth of data acquisition and computational capacity, together with the development of algorithms for data correlation and pattern recognition, has given rise to a new class of predictive models of unprecedented accuracy—it is claimed. For corporations who trade in network intelligence and surveillance, correlation suffices—with the healthy returns produced by pattern-matching algorithms, there is no need to develop causal models. If economic gain can be secured on the basis of privileged knowledge of what will be the case, there is no need to understand why it will be so. Moreover, where the prediction engine is a neural network, it is practically impossible to trace the reasoning behind a particular computation. Only the ends matter—not the means.

Evangelists of machine learning who place short-term efficacy over deep causal understanding contend that science, too, should be conducted under such a program (see, e.g., Anderson 2008). But in the natural sciences, theories are valued not merely for their predictive accuracy; other important criteria for choosing among competing theories that fit the same observations include consistency, simplicity, elegance, generality, and explanatory power.

Correlation is not causation.

What Is It Like to Be a Cat?

Predicting cats: the physics of the falling feline—just how it rights itself midair to land on its feet—exercised nineteenth-century scientists, including James Clerk Maxwell. A rigorous mathematical solution only emerged in 1969 (Kane and Scher 1969), but already in 1894 the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey had published empirical studies with photographs that made crucial details of the cat’s double-rotational movement visible (see figure 43.4). Marey shot the falling cat with his chronophotographic gun, a twelve-frames-per-second camera that he had developed specifically to study motion. Through geometric analysis of image sequences, Marey not only gained insight into the underlying biomechanics but also saw the possibility of optimization and control. The French military was his first client.

To prevail in the scramble for unconquered territory, an army must tune its soldiers’ movements. Like the falling cat, it cannot rely on luck (Luksch, Reinhart, and Tode 2015).

Contemporary predictive analytics is a direct descendant of Marey’s work, via the early twentieth-century time-and-motion studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (see figure 43.5).

Cats predicting: biomechanical explanations do not exhaust totemic associations with luck and death: the feline mind remains mysterious to us. Oscar, the resident cat at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Providence, Rhode Island, has an “uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor. . . . His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by . . . staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death” (Dosa 2007, 328–329). If an artificial agent made such predictions well, would you heed it?

Correlation is not causation, and behavior is not experience.

Figure 43.4

Still from Chat. Chute avec retournement, by Étienne-Jules Marey, 1890–1904. Cinemathèque Français, FM-CT5. In: Dreams Rewired by Luksch, Reinhart, and Tode (2015).

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies II: Cybernetic Failures

“Virtually all predictive policing models . . . use crime data from police departments. But police department data is not representative of all crimes committed; police aren’t notified about all crimes that happen, and they don’t document all crimes they respond to. . . . If a police department has a history of over-policing some communities . . . predictive policing will merely reproduce these patterns in subsequent predictions” (Isaac and Lum 2018). Similar fundamental errors in conceptualization and specification can be found across other sectors where predictive analytics is hailed as a panacea, including job recruitment and university admission.[10] In control theory, positive feedback is a source of instability. The amplification of historical bias is an elementary failure of cybernetics.

Figure 43.5

Still from Original Films of Frank B. Gilbreth, 1910–1924 by Ralph Barnes, Lillian Gilbreth, and James Perkins, 1945. Purdue University Libraries, Karnes Archives and Special Collections. In Dreams Rewired by Luksch, Reinhart, and Tode (2015).

Enclosure of the Future (Foreclosure)

In its full expression, the corporate-governed smart city epitomizes the contemporary enclosure movement. The enclosure movement of thirteenth-century England took common land into private ownership. The neoliberal transfer to private enterprise of common services, utilities, community knowledge, and space, beginning in the 1980s, constituted a new enclosure of the entire public sphere. Today’s enclosure movement, driven by prediction engines (see figure 43.6.), is the most egregious of all—it brings about the enclosure of the future, which is also a part of the commons.

Figure 43.6

Homepage of WibiData, a software company for personalized customer experience. http://www.wibidata.com. Last accessed February 21, 2015.

There’s a more personal world out there.

A world that knows what you like and predicts what you need.

Where your experience feels less like it was produced by a machine,

and more like it’s coming from a friend.

This is the world we’re creating. . . . (WibiData, public statement)[11]

Prediction engines warrant close public scrutiny for their impact on human rights—in particular, the rights of privacy, autonomy, and self-determination; the right to information; the rights to due process and freedom from the arbitrary effects of social sorting; and the “right to a future tense” (Zuboff 2019, 20). The opacity of such machine procedures threatens to make our own decisions opaque to us—was that truly an informed choice that we made? And when the very idea of human agency is in flux, the cogency of rights discourse is diminished.

Toward the Superfluous Human

Figure 43.7

Alfiya—A Found Dystopia by Manu Luksch, 2019. Paper collage of text excerpts from China’s Algorithms of Repression: Reverse Engineering a Xinjiang Police Mass Surveillance App by Human Rights Watch (2019).

Futures Reclaimed

Even as we are objects of prediction and optimization technologies and their algorithmic amplification of arbitrariness, bias, and error, we are further subject to autocratic decisions from centralized power. Competitive advantage and revolutionary surprise are rooted in asymmetries of knowledge; volatility is celebrated equally by Mark Zuckerberg (“move fast and break things”) and Donald Trump (“We must as a nation be more unpredictable” [Trump 2016]). There is a widespread belief within the Silicon Valley tech elites that they are “the people who not only can [shape the future], but . . . the only people who can” (Robert Scott, founder of the festival Further Future, quoted in Bowles 2016).

To reclaim the future—perform (parfournir: furnish) the unexpected? One suggested mechanism of resistance is the deployment of protective optimization technologies (Overdorf et al. 2018): techniques to collectively nudge or pollute the data and inferential processes of optimization systems; détournement for the algorithmic age. Despite various vulnerabilities (unintended consequences, hijacking by special interest groups, the ethical chasm of deception . . .), such tactics of collective action might well prove effective as a first salvo in the battle against centralized predictive power. However, sustainable systemic change requires robust models for accountability and transparency, processes for deliberative justice, and a conception for human and planetary flourishing. Reclamation does not suffice; an envisioning is necessary. Prediction is the uncanny sister of hope.

Notes

With thanks to Mukul Patel for invaluable discussion and support in producing the manuscript.

1. Variously attributed to Niels Bohr, Robert Storm Peterson, and others.

2. Understood as acting against one’s better judgment due to weakness of will.

3. See, for example, the discussion on algorithms predicting for recidivism in Fry (2018, 49–78) and also the paper discussed therein (Kleinberg et al. 2017).

4. Temporal factors predominate: When will unintended consequences become apparent? And how will we recognize them as consequences?

5. Chip is held up by his own front door—a door that is aware of its contractual rights.

6. In 2002 statistician Andrew Pole worked for the US chain of Target stores to discover newly pregnant customers. Shopping habits change due to major life events, opening a window for brand switching. The chain was diversifying its stock and wanted to secure new customers through targeted promotions. “As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too,” Pole claimed to Charles Duhigg (2012). Pole sniffed out pregnant shoppers by looking for changes in their regular basket—for example, to unfragranced or additive-free toiletries. These consumers received custom mailers with vouchers for new lines of baby goods. An angry father of a teenage girl accused Target of encouraging her interest in babies, only to find that she was already pregnant (he apologized to the store manager, who had called to apologize on behalf of Target).

7. See, for example, Zhong et al. (2015) and Facebook’s 2009 patent application US20100257023A1, “Leveraging Information in a Social Network for Inferential Targeting of Advertisements.”

8. Given a small amount of auxiliary information, an individual’s identity can be inferred purely from the topological features (connections) of their networks (see Narayanan and Shmatikov, n.d.).

9. The classic exploration is Kahneman and Tversky (1981).

10. Cathy O’Neil discusses the discriminatory admissions procedures, perpetuated by algorithms, of a medical school in her Weapons of Math Destruction (2016, 115–118).

11. Data analytics company WibiData had major investment from Google’s Eric Schmidt.

References

Anderson, Chris. 2008. “The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method.” Wired, June 23, 2008. https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory.

Bowles, Nellie. 2016. “‘Burning Man for the 1%’: The desert party for the tech elite, with Eric Schmidt in a top hat.” Guardian, May 2, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/02/further-future-festival-burning-man-tech-elite-eric-schmidt.

Dick, Philip K. 1966. “We can remember it for you wholesale.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 30, 1966, 4–23.

Dick, Philip K. 1969. Ubik. New York: Doubleday.

Dosa, David M. 2007. “A day in the life of Oscar the cat.” New England Journal of Medicine 357: 328–329.

Duhigg, Charles. 2012. “How companies learn your secrets.” New York Times, February 16, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html.

Experian. 2016. “Mosaic: The consumer classification solution for consistent cross-channel marketing.” Accessed July 15, 2019. https://www.experian.co.uk/assets/marketing-services/brochures/mosaic_uk_brochure.pdf.

Fry, Hannah. 2018. Hello World. London: Doubleday.

Gallagher, Ryan. 2019. “Cameras linked to Chinese government stir alarm in U.K. parliament.” Intercept, April 9, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/04/09/hikvision-cameras-uk-parliament.

Greenfield, Adam. 2013. Against the Smart City. New York: Do Projects.

Human Rights Watch. 2019. China’s Algorithms of Repression: Reverse Engineering a Xinjiang Police Mass Surveillance App. N.p.: Human Rights Watch.

Isaac, William, and Kristian Lum. 2018. “Setting the record straight on predictive policing and race.” Medium, January 3, 2018. https://medium.com/in-justice-today/setting-the-record-straight-on-predictive-policing-and-race-fe588b457ca2.

Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. 1981. “The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice.” Science 211: 453–458.

Kane, T. R., and M. P. Scher. 1969. “A dynamical explanation of the falling cat phenomenon.” International Journal of Solids and Structures 5 (7): 663–670. http://doi.org/10.1016/0020-7683(69)90086-9.

Kitchin, Rob. 2015. “Continuous geosurveillance in the ‘smart city.’” Dis. Accessed July 15, 2019. http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/73066/rob-kitchin-spatial-big-data-and-geosurveillance.

Kleinberg, Jon, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2017. “Human decisions and machine predictions.” Working Paper 23180. Cambridge, MA: NBER.

Luksch, Manu, Martin Reinhart, and Thomas Tode, directors. 2015. Dreams Rewired. Film. Austria/United Kingdom.

Narayanan, Arvind, and Vitaly Shmatikov. n.d. “De-anonymizing social networks.” Accessed August 1, 2019. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak09.pdf.

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. London: Penguin Books.

Overdorf, Rebekah, Bogdan Kulynych, Ero Balsa, Camela Troncoso, and Seda Gürses. 2018. “POTs: Protective optimization technologies.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02711v3.

Pavic, Milorad. 1989. Dictionary of the Khazars. Female edition. New York: Vintage.

Trump, Donald J. 2016. “Foreign policy remarks of D. J. Trump.” Federal News Service, April 27, 2016.

Wigner, Eugene. 1960. “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1): 1–14. http://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp078108.

Zhong, Yuan, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Wen Zhong, Fuzheng Zhang, and Xing Xie. 2015. “You are where you go: Inferring demographic attributes from location check-ins.” In Proceedings of the Eighth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, 295–304. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

44

Proxies

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Boaz Levin, and Vera Tollmann

Without proxies, there is no big data. Proxies embody correlation, making them crucial to relations within an “uncertain” archive. By indexing and speaking for what is absent, they both introduce and reduce uncertainty.

We are told—over and over again—that the twenty-first century is the era of big data. Data is the “new oil”—the new resource to be exploited (Economist 2017). Why? Because the massive amount of data being produced by most electronic processes can now be stored, networked, recycled, and interlinked. With big data, one can use “all” the data, rather than a mere sample—Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier (2015) have gone so far as to describe “N = all” as its defining trait. Because of this, we can now comprehend everything. It is thus not surprising to find Cisco or IBM visualizing big data as a sphere or a globe, communicating a fantasy of totality and wholeness in a scale-free dimension, no coordinate system needed.

Tellingly, these claims of comprehensiveness—which are actually undermined by the technical impossibility of “reading in” and analyzing all accumulated data—are linked to the “discovery” of correlations within the data that reveal important patterns of behavior. Because of these interrelations, theory and traditional ways of knowing are allegedly dead: Chris Anderson (2009) has declared, “The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete”; Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2015, 190) have asserted, “A worldview built on the importance of causation is being challenged by a preponderance of correlations. The possession of knowledge, which once meant an understanding of the past, is coming to mean an ability to predict the future.” As evidence, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2015, 56–58) offer canonical examples such as FICO’s Medication Adherence Score, which determines how likely patients are to take their medications regularly based on information such as car ownership, and Target’s “pregnancy prediction” score based on the purchase of vitamin supplements and unscented lotions. What big data discovers and proffers are therefore proxies: proxy purchases that reveal hidden or latent states.

The proxy is literally a stand-in or a surrogate. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it stems from the classical Latin term procurator, which means “manager, superintendent, agent, steward, financial administrator of a province, attorney,” but that became, in postclassical terms, “proctor in the ecclesiastical courts . . . university official.” Proxies were first human substitutes or agents: the term proxy is a synonym for agent, a person who acts as a substitute for another; one who undertakes negotiations or transactions on behalf of a superior, employer, or principal. Proxies, though, seem less independent than agents—they are always tethered to their source; they are not supposed to get a cut or go rogue. Over time, proxies became things that ensured direct and equivalent substitution: “Document[s] empowering a person to represent and act for another” or, in the Christian Church, “an annual payment by incumbents . . . as a substitute for providing for or entertaining a visiting bishop or his representative.” In statistics and economics, proxies usually correspond linearly; they associate with hidden or unknown variables. In terms of networks, proxies are computer servers that act as intermediaries for requests from clients. By facilitating indirect connection, they stand at the intersection of control and subversion. Proxy servers route traffic through servers in other locations and under different jurisdictions, thus circumventing censorship or blockage and providing users with anonymity. They can, however, also be set up for the opposite task: to monitor traffic.

Proxies have become emblematic of a postdemocratic political age, one increasingly populated by bot militias, puppet states, and communication relays. Bots are software applications running automated tasks over the Internet, often in the guise of human users. Whether crawling the net and harvesting data or disseminating information—spams and scams, propaganda, fake news, advertising—they expose and exploit the web’s essential vulnerability to abuse. In the case of the Mirai botnet, malware was used to track so-called smart devices—baby cams and webcams, old routers and new vacuum cleaners—that in turn were infected and conscripted into the botnet (Lily Hay Newman 2016). Mirai created a centrally controlled militia of zombified devices. Puppet states are a different, not necessarily digital, manifestation of proxy politics, a form that might be as old as the state itself (Tollmann and Levin 2017). A puppet state or government may seem independent and sovereign while in fact being subservient to an outside, unseen power. Whether or not a state is truly controlled from without, it is evident that our belief in such displaced authorities is increasingly widespread. Wireless networked communication often functions through relays, where the source and end point are connected to one another by a series of nodes. The Internet is characterized by the topology of a relay network, and networks such as TOR provide a further layer of relays to obfuscate their users.

Proxies are thus fundamentally ambivalent. A proxy embodies what Jacques Derrida (1981, 70) has called a pharmakon: a supplement or intermediary, “a philter, which acts as both remedy and poison.” It absolves one of responsibility—a payment in lieu of hospitality—by creating new dependencies and relations. A proxy is woven into the fabric of networks, where action and cause seem to be masked, calculated, and remote-controlled. It dwells where it becomes obscure; a proxy means distraction, obfuscation, suppression, and secrecy but also privacy, security, and activity. It can be found in deep states, deep webs, and outsourced and offshored affairs. A proxy can be a go-between on the Internet, an intermediary, a new kind of medium, potentially in disguise as a reverse-engineered phone or an avatar on a screen. Any proxy causes a mess; that is the rule. It destabilizes existing orders and dichotomies and undermines fixed structures just to open a door for humans, packages, or messages to pass. The proxy creates its own temporary world of intervention. Revising Friedrich Kittler’s (1999, 39) adage “media determine our situation,” we can now say that “proxies determine our situation.”

Proxies touch unknowns—they extend the archive, the knowable, by capturing or synching to what is not there. Because of this, they spark controversy. This is clearest in global climate change research, which uses proxies such as ice cores and tree rings to determine global temperature for eras and areas not documented through human records. A proxy, however, is an approximation, a kind of concession to imprecision, an intrinsically incomplete foray into unknown terrain. As Stefan Helmreich’s (2014, 273) example of the modeling of ocean waves demonstrates, “wave models often demand more data points than there are buoys. When that is so, models can conjure proxy data points—virtual buoys created by interpolating between known data points. Such simulated ghost buoys—making ‘waves’ in the ‘cloud’ (that is, in remote computer network servers)—speed up prediction.” In other words, when there is insufficient data through which to generate a predictive model, proxies are often simulated and employed to expedite the process. Given this, proxies are a flashpoint for dissent and “theory.” As Christoph Rosol (2017, 120) has shown, “paleoclimatology, the study of climate prior to the period of direct, instrumental measurements, is an epistemically radical field, one which directly abolishes the distinction between data and model, and reconfigures the notion of experiment.” Proxy data, he goes on to assert, “does not even pretend to be raw. From the perspective of paleoclimatology, observational data is the result of a long chain of technical transformation processes that translate physical or chemical traces found in rock, ice, or ooze recovered from lakes or seabeds into proxy data and then climate data” (123). Global climate deniers seize on the use of proxies to attack global climate change models. Proxies, as the controversy over Michael E. Mann’s hockey stick reveals, engender politics (see figure 44.1). Mann’s hockey stick documented the rise in mean temperature in the Northern Hemisphere and was used by politicians as a proxy for global climate change. It was attacked for its use of principal component analysis to create a “fair fight” between the network of proxies. He was also attacked for moving from proxy data to instrumental data after 1980. In the end, his reconstruction was validated as accurate—but not before death threats, threats of congressional interference, and email hacking (Mann 2012).[1]

Figure 44.1

Graph by Klaus Bitterman. Wikimedia Commons. Mann’s hockey stick, showing the rise in mean temperature in the Northern Hemisphere.

The ongoing controversy over global climate change models within the US reveals that proxies do not obviate questions of causality. Refusing to think causally—refusing to ask why certain correlations exist—is a cop-out: political bad faith. Mann’s hockey stick was so controversial not simply because of what it revealed—an unrivaled spike in mean temperature in the twentieth century—but also because of what it implied: the spike in temperature in the twentieth century, which dwarfed all other variations over time (the medieval climate anomaly cited over and over again by deniers paled in comparison), had to be due to the accelerated human use of hydrocarbons since that was the only new factor (Chun 2018). The politics of correlation is also clear in the “surprising” correlations that big data reveals. To whom is morning sickness a discovery? And what is the relationship between paying for car insurance in the US and class and race?

Proxies open further questions and chains of relations. As Cathy O’Neil has documented in Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, zip codes—among many other proxies—are central to the operations of weapons of math destruction (WMDs). WMDs “draw statistical correlations between a person’s zip code or language patterns and her potential to pay back a loan or handle a job. These correlations are discriminatory, and some of them are illegal” (O’Neil 2016, 17–18). For example, for-profit universities most likely “target people in the poorest zip codes, with special attention to those who have clicked on an ad for payday loans or seem to be concerned with post-traumatic stress” (74). Predictive policing software determines the zip codes in which crimes are most likely to occur—and thus which areas should be most heavily policed. As the Atlantic pronounced in its October 14, 2014, edition: “Big Data Can Guess Who You Are Based on Your Zip Code. . . . Your zip code is a window into what you can afford to buy . . . and, in essence, who you are.” Businesses, on the other hand, profit from leasing (virtual) office spaces offshore or in tax-free locations, without ever being physically present. One can tell that at the time Hannah Arendt wrote The Human Condition, criticizing a loss of trust in human senses and an increasing instrumentalization, she did not foresee that a number, in her example a telephone number, would in the future become personalized, mobile, and trackable. For Arendt (2013, 261), a telephone number was as arbitrary and opaque as the output of measuring instruments.

It is crucial to pursue the “proxy chain.” The example of zip codes, for instance, reveals the deep relationship between networked and physical segregation: if zip codes are correlated with class and race, it is because of a long history of inequality that affects both physical and networked neighborhoods. The creation of “White” and “Black” neighborhoods in the US is linked to legally enforced segregation, to the now illegal practice of redlining (only selling homes to White Americans in certain neighborhoods), and to various benefits given to White GIs after the war (Katznelson 2005). To call this a mere “correlation”—to refuse to the see the “why” behind the “what”—is to perpetuate inequality stupidly and deliberately. Crucially, the relationship between big data, association, and segregation is even more profound (Chun 2019). Network science takes homophily—the principle that similarity breeds connection—as its grounding principle: users and things are put into network neighborhoods based on their similarities. Fundamentally, network science assumes that neighborhoods should be segregated: that they should be filled with people who share intense likes and dislikes. The existence of residential segregation is often given as “proof” of the naturalness of homophily—but the very term emerged from a sociological study of US residential segregation. Writing in the 1950s, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton (1954) coined the term homophily in their study of friendship patterns within two towns: “Craftown, a project of some seven hundred families in New Jersey, and Hilltown, a bi-racial, low-rent project of about eight hundred families in western Pennsylvania” (21). Crucially, they did not just coin homophily; they also created the term heterophily, and they did not find homophily to be “naturally” present. Rather, documenting both homophily and heterophily, they asked: “What are the dynamic processes through which the similarity or opposition of values shape the formation, maintenance, and disruption of close friendships?” (28). Homophily in their much-cited but clearly unread chapter is one instance of friendship formation.

Proxies are traces of training, habits, and institutions. They are “philters” that mediate and thus open possibilities as they search for what is unknown, or “latent.” Yet, to return to global climate change models, proxies can also be used to imagine different futures. As Mann’s hockey stick demonstrates, these models make predictions based on past correlations, not in order to affirm the status quo but so that we will act differently and create new futures. This is the promise of proxies—if we just hear them.

Note

This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program.

1. This discussion is the latest chapter in the relationship between mechanical objectivity and the role of the scientist. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007) have written in their study of objectivity, the beginning of the twentieth century heralded new ways of training scientists to “see, manipulate, and measure—a calibration of head, hand and eye” (326). New technologies—such as electroencephalography, which enables the graphical representation of brain activity—signaled the rise of mechanical objectivity and with it a flurry of debate around the role of human judgment and interpretation. These debates led to a quest for a scientific self of a new kind that was more “intellectual” than algorithmic, perceiving judgment as an act of trained perception and recognition. Similarly, the current debates around big data reveal a divide between those who believe data can “speak for itself,” supersedes theory, and disposes of the search for a cause and those who nonetheless understand correlation as an interim step in a pursuit after causation.

References

Anderson, Chris. 2009. “The end of theory: Will the data deluge make the scientific method obsolete?” Edge, June 30, 2009. http://edge.org/3rd_culture/anderson08/anderson08_index.html.

Arendt, Hannah. 2013. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2018. “On patterns and proxies, or the perils of reconstructing the unknown,” e-flux architecture, October 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/212275/on-patterns-and-proxies/.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2019. “Queerying homophily.” In Pattern Discrimination, edited by Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer, and Hito Steyerl, 59–98. Lueneburg: Meson Press.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Economist. 2017. “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data: The data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules.” May 6, 2017. https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721656-data-economy-demands-new-approach-antitrust-rules-worlds-most-valuable-resource.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2014. “Waves: An anthropology of scientific things.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 265–284.

Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

LaFrance, Adrienne. 2014. “Database of zip codes shows how marketers profile you.” Atlantic, October 14, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/big-data-can-guess-who-you-are-based-on-your-zip-code/381414/.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and Robert K. Merton. 1954. “Friendship as social process: A substantive and methodological analysis.” In Freedom and Control in Modern Society, edited by Morroe Berger, Theodore Abel, and Charles H. Page, 18–66. Toronto: D. Van Nostrand.

Mann, Michael E. 2012. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, and Kenneth Cukier. 2015. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Newman, Lily Hay. 2016. “The botnet that broke the Internet isn’t going away.” Wired, December 9, 2016. https://www.wired.com/2016/12/botnet-broke-internet-isnt-going-away/.

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown.

Rosol, Christoph. 2017. “Data, models and earth history in deep convolution: Paleoclimate simulations and their epistemological unrest.” Berichte zur Wissenschafts-Geschichte 40 (2): 120–139.

Tollman, Vera, and Boaz Levin. 2017. “Proxy politics: Power and subversion in a networked age.” In Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age, edited by Research Center of Proxy Politics. Berlin: Archive Books.

45

Quantification

Jacqueline Wernimont

When people think of quantification—the ascription of number to a thing, event, or sensation—they often turn to apparently rudimentary or elementary acts such as the counting of fingers, or notches, or stones . . . one, two, three. Such quantification is often positioned as descriptive: there are five fingers, three notches, zero stones. Indeed, large-scale quantification practices tend to depend on such reductive characterizations in order to allay or entirely circumvent fears about how the numbers work. People may find comfort in a commonsense notion that numbers are a transparent description, reassuring themselves that big data is no different from when a host asks, “How many for dinner?” and a guest responds, “There are four of us.” Counting and quantification often deploy the indicative mood (there are four of us), which enables people to read such utterances as descriptive because they obscure the choices made to assign numerals to particular features or units. But it is possible to assign numbers otherwise. A guest might respond to the host with a count of paired couples or family units rather than individual diners: “Two couples, please.” Furthermore, quantification need not entail counting as such; take the example of the familiar patient pain scale—a relative measure of someone’s experience of pain on a scale from one to ten.

Quantification Is Something We Do

While there are nuanced differences between counting, measuring, and quantifying, a feminist materialist approach suggests that all are “agential practices, which are not simply revelatory but performative” (Barad 2012, 6–7). Quantification, assigning quantity to something, is not a simple, transparent act. It does not reveal absolute truth. Instead, quantification should be understood as an interpretive and creative practice of world-making. Choices about who and what to count authorize and limit individual and collective knowing and being. Consequently, power is expressed and performed through quantification. While assigning the number four to indicate the size of a dinner party may seem trivial and mundane, it is precisely this kind of small, quotidian quantification that is often rolled up into the much larger quantifications that are the basis of big data analysis and tracking.

Quantification Is Situated

As Dawn Nafus (2016, xviii) observes, “Data always have a date,” and the practices of quantification that are a part of big data today also “have a date”: they are historically and culturally situated. The verb to quantify was uncommon in English usage before the nineteenth century, but words such as quantity, measure, enumeration, and count have long been part of Anglo-American and Western European life, albeit with very different political and epistemic meanings. The study of nature and the natural world was qualitative first, and numbers were associated with the magical and mystical, rather than with the factual in the sense we commonly use today. Early modern thinkers fought extensively about the value of quantification, with the question remaining unsettled even as mathematical demonstration became increasingly fashionable in the late seventeenth century. Mercantile practices—trade balances, inventories, standard measures, and exchange rates—along with the quantification of certainty (probability) and state support of statistical and actuarial thought in the eighteenth century helped to bolster the prestige of quantification in Europe and North America. By the end of the eighteenth century, the ability to quantify observations, people, goods, and wealth was highly prized and positioned as more objective than qualitative observation. In part this was due to a trick of representation: the use of Arabic numerals had been standardized, and it was easy enough to suggest that a 10 in one column matched the 10 in another—that they were commensurable quantifications. But quantification has also long depended on a feeling that the validity of numbers can be readily assessed. This is positivism in the traditional sense, in which the validity of any quantification resides not with abstract or universal truth but rather depends on the measure of its usefulness (Porter 1995). Since at least the late eighteenth century, quantification has been utilitarian and situated, deployed to address particular needs and for particular people or organizations.

Quantification also depends upon the rhetorical presentation of precision, each number representing a phenomenon or object—“ninety-nine red balloons” rather than “many red balloons.” Quantifying steps, that great example that has so many buying self-tracking devices, depends on either a set of proxies, such as distance traveled as measured by a variety of instruments, or a standard mechanical process, such as a weighted lever or other sensor recording each footstep. Both methods are subject to a wide variety of variables, including the stride length of the walker, the reliability of distance proxies, the strength of foot strike needed to activate a sensor, and more. Since at least the early twentieth century, the phenomenon then known as “the nurse’s walk”—steps considered too quiet or gentle to effectively register on a pedometer—has plagued mechanical step tracking. Women’s footsteps, especially in caregiving settings such as the hospital or home, have long been miscounted, undercounted, or not considered worth counting at all. While quantification depends on the rhetorics of realism or precision, quantifying practices are part of the political and moral economy of knowledge production and work to “overcom[e] distance and distrust” between individuals or groups of people (Porter 1982).

Quantification Is Creative

Indeed, the design decisions that determine what will be measured are a form of interpretation or an expression of a worldview, despite whatever trust we or others may place in numbers (boyd and Crawford 2012). Quantification as an aspect of big data cultures depends upon media and machines—census forms, spreadsheets of sales data, metadata logs created in the interactions between phone towers and mobile devices, heart rate monitors, step counters, and more. Deciding what and how to count is to decide how a set of tools, interfaces, knowledge systems, people, and objects/subjects will interact in order to create meaning. This is a process that I call quantum mediation, a process that does not produce “facts” but creates useful streams of numbers (Wernimont 2018). While a long history of validity and objectivity suggests that useful numbers are valid numbers, it is important to remember that quantification is less a mirroring or truth-telling process than it is one of remediation and storytelling (Daston and Galison 2007; Porter 1995). Quantum mediations “are material-discursive practices of mattering”; they are ways of producing the temporary stabilizations we know as object and subject, or as device, nation, or citizen (Barad 2012, 810; Wernimont 2018).

Quantification Is an Expression of Power

Validity and utility are vectors for the expression of power. The American census system, for example, clearly marks nondisabled white male citizens of military age as different from women, children, African Americans, Native Americans, and disabled persons. The early census even rendered enslaved persons as something other than “whole persons,” instead assigning a three-fifths value to enslaved bodies and lives. The US government, in part due to lobbying efforts by the National Rifle Association to limit such quantification, does not track gun deaths. The “quanta of mortality” that are part of human rights abuses in Guatemala, Serbia, Croatia, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (among others) are sites of extraordinary contestation, a testament to how much power can flow through “valid” quantification (Nelson 2015; Seybolt, Aronson, and Fischhoff 2013).

Quantification Is Useful and Uncertain

Quantitative sciences have long acknowledged the imprecision that can be a fundamental part of numbering, no matter how clean-cut those figures look. To continue with the American census system for a moment, scholars and government officials alike formally acknowledge that the official census figures represent an undercount that is inflected in particular ways. Despite the apparent precision of counting each and every person, there is a known “differential coverage of permanent residents, naturalized citizens, and undocumented residents” (Woodrow-Lafield 1998, 147; see also Bouk 2015). In an effort to address the uncertainty endemic to counting, demographers and bureaucrats often turn to sampling surveys that attempt not to count individuals but to count a sample and then extrapolate the whole from the sample. Indeed, American surveys such as the Current Population Survey (a monthly survey of sixty thousand households) or the Nielsen television ratings depend on both sampling and additional modeling of uncertainty to address any faults in the sampling model. This might include the use of uncertainty modeling and the publication of confidence intervals, which themselves attempt to quantify certainty/uncertainty.

Additionally, those who work regularly with quantifications understand the paradox that “the ultimate test of quantitative methods and results . . . is not quantitative, but qualitative: do the numbers give us something we can work with?” (Hope and Witmore 2014, 125–126). Quantitative results depend on a community or a legal sanction to render them meaningful and valid (Porter 1995). Thus, it is not simply that numbers speak for themselves but rather that numbers speak to particular people in particular ways, advancing arguments and worldviews through quantification. Such quantifications produce “matters of value as well as matters of fact,” which in turn make possible or impossible lives that are demarcated along the lines of race, nation, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ability, and more (Sha 2013, 2). Such matters of value and fact are always acting, authorizing and reinforcing group solidarities (some positive and others not, all of them manifesting privileges and oppressions) and creating universal paradigms that can often harm nonnormalized subjects unless interventions are made.

Quantification is not inert or “merely” descriptive but rather always already engaged in the processes by which bodies and people have become and are becoming visible to themselves, to others, and to nation-states. Practices of quantification unfold within complex sociotechnical networks, as situated and as subject to uncertainty as any other representational schema. Perhaps the greatest source of uncertainty when undertaking quantification is that complicated, political zone of interface where the being-quantified encounters that-which-quantifies. We might think of ourselves as made up of fleshy matter, or perhaps hopes and aspirations, but many of our quantum media see us in terms of imperfectly counted steps, pounds, and heartbeats. Our value to such media and those who control them is in our ability to be quantified and for that quantification to be given meaning within a late capitalist paradigm. And what of those whose heartbeats and steps are excluded from systematic quantification? The murdered transwomen, disappeared families, and executed Black men who are not quantified by North American governments may well look for the protections afforded by late capitalist quantification. As Diane Nelson (2015, xi) observes, we must recognize that quantification is “both essential and insufficient, dehumanizing and reparative, necessary and complicated.”

References

Barad, Karen. 2012. What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice [Was ist das Maß des Nichts? Unendlichkeit, Virtualität, Gerechtigkeit.] Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz.

Bouk, Dan. 2015. How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. 2012. “Critical questions for big data.” Information, Communication and Society 15 (5): 662–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Boston: MIT Press.

Hope, Jonathan, and Michael Witmore. 2014. “Quantification and the language of later Shakespeare.” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 31:123–149.

Nafus, Dawn. 2016. “Introduction.” In Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life, edited by Dawn Nafus, ix–xxxi. Boston: MIT Press.

Nelson, Diane M. 2015. Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Porter, Theodore. 1982. “Quantification and the accounting ideal in science.” Social Studies of Science 22 (4): 633–651. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631292022004004.

Porter, Theodore. 1995. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Seybolt, Taylor B., Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff. 2013. Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sha, Xin Wei. 2013. Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wernimont, Jacqueline. 2018. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. Boston: MIT Press.

Woodrow-Lafield, Karen A. 1998. “Undocumented residents in the United States in 1990: Issues of uncertainty in quantification.” International Migration Review 32 (1): 145–173.

46

Remains

Tonia Sutherland

When we die, we leave behind our bodies and belongings as our ancestors have for millennia. Unlike our ancestors, however, today we also leave behind a trail of digital litter scattered across our digital environments. All of this detritus, these digital records and digital traces, are our digital remains—digital and digitized photos, tweets, Facebook posts, high scores on Candy Crush, texts and emails, passwords, and search histories. It is my goal, in this chapter, to articulate some contemporary conceptions of what it means to be Black and to die in an increasingly digital culture and to identify some concerns about the uncertain nature of our digital remains.

Our digital remains are not only what we create; they are also what is created for and about us: our online movements are being tracked for the purposes of machine learning and data analytics, and our analog traces—medical records, school records, driving records—are quickly being moved to digital environments. Each of us generates gigabytes of data on a daily basis. While the concepts of digital detritus and digital remains have only existed throughout the relatively short history of our networked society, as we age in the era of big data, what to do with a person’s digital remains after they die has become a significant social issue. This chapter addresses concerns at the intersections where race, records, and the digital afterlife converge, specifically thinking through questions of representation, embodiment, commodification, memorialization, spectacle, and carcerality. I will first address the historical record, problematizing both what remains and the new digital afterlives of analog records. Next, I will offer two examples of embodied records, discussing the complex concerns raised by digital resurrection practices—or what it means to raise the dead from digital remains. Finally, I will speak to agency, empowerment, and conflicting notions of “rights” in the era of ubiquitous digital remains.

Records

Records of Trauma

The archives of Atlantic slavery were created by colonizers and slaveholders. Rather than being faithful representations of the colonized and enslaved, they are a deeply complex, fraught, and often problematic set of sources that speak to how archives hold, produce, and reproduce agency, privilege, and power. While on one hand the mass digitization of slavery era records holds the promise both of new historical knowledge and of genealogical reconstruction for descendants of enslaved peoples, on the other hand, this trend belies a growing tendency to uncritically circulate records rooted in generational trauma, hatred, and genocide.

The increasing number of digital archives, databases, and other digitization projects focused on the slavery era is also transforming how scholars in the humanities and social sciences study the history of human enslavement (Agostinho 2019; Johnson 2018). Digital archives are, for example, making new additions to the corpus of available slave narratives while at the same time transforming the very definition of the slave narrative. Digitization projects such as the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said allow powerful narratives about enslavement to emerge where there was previously an instance of archival silence. Other projects, however, take a data-centered approach to the lived experiences of enslaved people. The Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network (n.d.) project, for example, allows users to search data sets generated from archives, courthouses, churches, government offices, museums, ports, and private collections to gain information about enslaved people in colonial Louisiana and Brazil. While this repository offers important information about enslaved people, including rare records about disease and illness, this database raises concerns about how more quantitative approaches, and a turn to data more generally through digitization, may transform how we understand narratives of enslaved people. Even older databases of digitized narratives that allow full-text downloads may enable more big data approaches to the slave narrative tradition, a tradition that necessarily rests on deep reading and engagement with narrative texts as personal stories.

The mass digitization and datafication of slavery-era archives has arguably contributed to a distancing of the lived experiences of enslaved people from slavery’s historical imaginary. Performance studies scholar Harvey Young (2010) has argued that societal ideas of the “Black body” (where the “Black body” is an imagined—and inescapable—myth of Blackness upon which narratives are projected and around which mythologies are formed) are too often projected across the actual bodies of Black people, rendering Black people frequent targets of abuse. This separation of the imaginary—the myth of Blackness—from the lived experiences of Black people is dangerous: it creates the conditions of possibility for severing idea from corpus. This separation is more pronounced in digital spaces, where pain and other embodied experiences often fail to connect—where there is a failure to translate the virtual image to the experience of the physical flesh. Because of the significant temporal gap between the violence of the past and the visual experience of the present, when slavery-era records are digitized en masse, records appear and circulate in different contexts. This decontextualization removes the immediacy of trauma, giving records that document that trauma new afterlives independent of their historical context and creating new digital remains where none previously existed.

Records of Hate

From the period following the Civil War until the early 1930s, the ritual, extrajudicial practice of lynching was commonplace in the US. Between 1880 and 1930, an estimated four thousand Black Americans were executed at the hands of their White neighbors. Lynching was a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation; it was also a photographic sport. Photography was not an accidental by-product of lynching but rather was critical to the practice. Many lynchings were announced in the press, and when they were, photographers would arrive early on the scene and jockey for good positions for their cameras; after the lynching they quickly produced prints of their photographs as mementos for the spectators. These photographic souvenirs, often made into postcards, worked to extend the visual rhetoric of lynching, its claims about white supremacy, and the legitimation of violating Black bodies beyond the crowd present at the lynching to the far-off friends and family who received these harrowing images through the mail. Lynching was arguably further culturally enabled and normalized by the broad and rapid circulation of lynching records using the technologies of the time—the telegraph, the railroad, and, according to some texts, the phonograph (Stadler 2010).

Concerns about the mass circulation of records of trauma and hate extend into the digital. For example, in 2017, digital publisher Reveal Digital began developing a collection of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) newspapers called Hate in America: The Rise and Fall of the KKK in the 1920s (Rowell and Cooksey 2019). Digital records that document hate, including digital representations of violent loss of life, serve as evidence of a collectively witnessed or experienced event and offer opportunities to confront difficult pasts. But too often these records are appropriated as fetish objects and souvenirs, testaments to—and tools of—white supremacy. Even though early twentieth-century technologies made it easier to circulate records of hate, there was no social media to replay or autoplay this hate, no surprise encounters or repetition of moving images to reinstill trauma. In this way, digital culture has created an epistemic shift. In 2012, when seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was murdered while walking home from the store in Sanford, Florida, it was in part as a result of then rapidly growing digital culture trends—digital documentary practices, content creation, citizen journalism, for-profit photography, and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—that photographs snapped of Martin’s deceased body were quickly made available online, his digital remains circulating in much the same way as lynching postcards did. The death of Trayvon Martin—and those of so many others—shifted the landscape of public mourning practices to digital platforms, where death and trauma are continuously reinscribed and reexperienced, visually and, perhaps, eternally.

In the years since Trayvon Martin’s death, Google Images has classified subsets of photographs of Trayvon Martin as “body in casket” and “body on the ground.” That these images of Trayvon Martin recall the historical traditions of American lynching is not accidental. Scholars such as Safiya Umoja Noble have written on the political economy of Black death, and I have previously argued that for the media, and for those in positions of power, there are political, social, and economic gains to be made by reinscribing images of Black death: these visual records serve as a means of power and control, a powerful reminder that one must be ever vigilant and ever in fear for one’s life (Noble 2014; Sutherland 2017).

Moving deeper into thinking about the bodies of Black men, women, and children as part of what remains in the historical record, I will offer another example of the “Black body” as record, demonstrating how a single cell came to represent an entire “Black body” and how a single cell, as an embodied record, can be manipulated and disarticulated from the humanity of the “Black body” from which it came.

Resurrection

The Resurrection of Henrietta Lacks

In the past, bodily integrity maintained the illusion of being separate from the technologies human beings have employed. This illusory integrity is breaking down, however, as modern technologies are increasingly attached to, inserted in, and designed to represent or even alter our bodies. In her book Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies, Hannah Landecker argues that there is now an assumption of living matter as technological matter that is constitutive of the times—the line of demarcation between technology and human bodies is an increasingly difficult one to draw.

Living cultured cells, for example, are used widely in research programs, and the cell is an important economic entity, both patentable and productive. “The cell,” Landecker asserts, “is making a particular kind of reappearance as a central actor in today’s biomedical, biological, and biotechnical settings. From tissue engineering to reproductive science, culturing the living cell outside the body has become increasingly important” (Landecker 2007, 5). A single human cell might not seem like a record in the traditional sense because it is a living and moving thing. But the cell is a representation and expression of the simplest form of human life—a single cell holds so much recorded information about the human body that we can think of the cell as representing the whole body, or as embodying the record of a human life.

In January of 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, went to Johns Hopkins Hospital—the only hospital in the area that treated Black patients—after noticing a lump in her vaginal canal during a self-examination. Lacks was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Although she received treatment, Lacks passed away in October 1951. When Lacks checked into Johns Hopkins in 1951, it was in fact de rigueur to use human material as pathological specimens in medical research. Researchers at Johns Hopkins had studied Lacks’s cancerous cells and observed that they were unique—they reproduced at a higher rate than other cells and could consequently be kept alive long enough to allow in-depth examination and experimentation. Before Lacks, cells cultured for laboratory studies only survived a few days, which did not allow multiple tests to be performed on the same sample. Lacks’s cells were the first to be observed that would divide multiple times without dying, and so they became known as “immortal.” Colloquially dubbed “HeLa” cells (taken from the first two letters of Lacks’s first and last names), Lacks’s cells allowed groundbreaking scientific discoveries (such as the polio vaccine) and pharmaceutical developments. With HeLa cells also came a new way of understanding the body as data. When we consider the body as data, we can situate the historical record as being encoded and genetically stored in our bodies’ DNA.

The origin of HeLa cells remained mysterious for several decades, however, for both the general public and for the Lacks family, who were unaware that Lacks’s cancer cells had contributed to an enormous body of research in the fields of virology, immunology, cancer research, and genetics. Then, in 1976 Henrietta Lacks’s family discovered that people were buying and selling Lacks’s cells. By 1985 portions of Henrietta Lacks’s medical records had been published without her family’s knowledge or consent. In March 2013, a group of researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory sequenced the genome of the HeLa cells and published the code online. Lacks’s family argued that the published genome laid bare their most intimate health information, making her digital remains available to the public and denying the family’s descendants the opportunity to craft their own narratives about their bodies, heritage, health, and future selves. Lacks’s son told writer Rebecca Skloot that it felt as though the doctor had “raped her cells” (Skloot 2010). Genetic information can be stigmatizing, and while it is illegal for employers or health insurance providers in the US to discriminate based on that information, this is not true for providers of life insurance, disability coverage, or long-term care. After the complaint from the Lacks family, the European team quietly took the data off-line. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) later worked with the Lacks family to establish a process to make HeLa cell whole-genome sequencing data available for biomedical research. Today, NIH-funded researchers who sequence HeLa cell lines are required to deposit their data in the NIH’s database of genotypes and phenotypes, and requests for access to the data are subject to special review and approval by the HeLa Genome Data Access Working Group.

The story of Henrietta Lacks exemplifies the commodification of the “Black body” by resurrecting the dead from the data in a single cell; the posthumous performance of rapper Tupac Shakur offers another compelling example of how white supremacy benefits socially, culturally, and financially from exploiting the “Black body,” even in death.

The Resurrection of Tupac Shakur

Holography and other three-dimensional technologies, as well as two-dimensional illusions such as Pepper’s ghost, have been used to create lifelike reproductions of bodies—reproductions capable of addressing the audience, moving around stage, and interacting with others using prescripted effects. Employing a complex mix of creative sound editing, motion-capture techniques, computer-generated imagery, and holographic technologies, it is now possible to see a reanimated virtual facsimile of the dead. Pepper’s ghost is an illusion technique used in theaters, amusement parks, museums, television, and concerts. It operates on the principle that glass is both transparent and reflective, so it is possible, with the right angles, to bounce an image off glass that appears to be floating in air. Notable examples of the Pepper’s ghost illusion are teleprompters and Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion “ghosts.”

Another notable example is the posthumous performance by Tupac Shakur. Born in Brooklyn in 1971, American rapper and actor Tupac Shakur is consistently ranked as one of the greatest and most influential rappers of all time. Shakur’s shooting and subsequent death in 1996 was a devastating loss to his family and friends, as well as to the Black community that loved and supported him (and to whom he was also loyal). In 2012, sixteen years after his death, a Pepper’s ghost reproduction of Tupac—a digital resurrection enhanced by Musion Eyeliner technology—performed onstage alongside rapper Snoop Dogg and producer Dr. Dre at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival.

Many tout the promise of digital resurrection technologies to extend life and liberate humanity from the inevitability of death. But the use of technology to reanimate the dead comes with a complex set of social, cultural, technical, and ethical concerns—including questions of race, representation, embodiment, commodification, memorialization, spectacle, and carcerality. From an archives and records standpoint, archival scholar Randall C. Jimerson theorizes three different types of collecting institutions: the temple, the prison, and the restaurant (Jimerson 2009). In temple institutions the archivist preserves the “original” interpretation of items or collections. In restaurant institutions, by contrast, the archivist guides the users, allowing them to make their own decisions and allowing the collections and items to speak for themselves. In prison institutions, however, the archivist serves only the interpretations of an oppressive higher power.

If one considers the Tupac “hologram” as an embodied record, it is arguably one that belongs to the carceral archives of Jimerson’s prison institutions. The hologram as record resides within a narrative interpretation that serves commercial interests, souvenir and fetish cultures, Othering, spectacle, and whiteness as oppressive higher powers. Digital Tupac is a carceral artifact, imprisoned by the archives of folklore and of longing—and digitally incarcerated by white supremacy’s need to possess and control Black people’s bodies. The extension of Tupac’s corporeality allowed a posthumously (re)constructed identity. As an artist, Tupac Shakur experienced death only to have an echo, a version of his identity, (re)constructed as a means of extending life, primarily to satisfy the spectacular gaze of whiteness. As Simone Browne (2015) argues, this is what happens when certain bodies are rendered as digitized code through such techniques as “facial recognition, iris and retinal scans, hand geometry, fingerprint templates, vascular patterns, gait and other kinesthetic recognition, and increasingly, DNA” (109). All of these ultimately treat the body as evidence that supersedes individuals’ accounts of who they are and where they belong. Tupac is a man perhaps reconstituted and resurrected—but not reincarnated—by the digital; he does not get a second chance at life. Rather, his death has been coopted and commercialized. Tupac himself had no agency, no rights, over his digital remains; rather, his digital resurrection sits at the nexus of conflicting concerns about our human rights (and responsibilities) in the age of digital remains.

Rights

The Right to Be Remembered

Attesting to the human desire to remembered, Black Americans have developed culturally specific rituals around grieving, mourning, and death. For example, death is typically not seen as an ending but as an important transitional ritual intimately linked to liberation. For Black Americans, ritual practices support and preserve the bonds of community; rituals of mourning and memorialization are therefore vitally important, as they tend to reflect the importance of community in a world where the potential for death by violent racism is a mainstay of daily life.

Black and African American homegoing rituals, for example, are elaborate practices—rooted in ancient Egyptian funerary practices—that reflect a rich culture of preparing for a funeral and preserving the deceased for their afterlife. The funerary traditions that originated during slavery, from a fusion of North and West African burial traditions and Protestant Christianity, were first practiced in the US during the era of chattel slavery. Homegoing rituals specifically resisted a culture wherein enslaved people were required to stage elaborate funerals for deceased slaveholders and their families while enslaved people themselves were buried, without ceremony, in unmarked graves in non-crop-producing ground. Contemporary homegoing or “going home” rituals are equated with heavenly glory, and these rituals remain strongly resonant in Black American funerary traditions today.

As I have argued previously, in the digital sphere an iterative process of digital and real-life mourning and remembrance that constitutes its own ritual practice has emerged: a Black life ends at the hands of racist violence; the violent death is documented on cell phones and security, body, and dashboard cameras; the images are shared; the public, bearing witness to this violent loss of Black life, mourns; spontaneous real-life and digital memorials appear, vigils are held, and protests are initiated. These events are then also documented and shared in a cycle of public mourning and outrage that creates new digital records that can be—and often are—appropriated; these digital records live on, in perpetuity, reinscribing white supremacy, violence, and trauma.

The right to be remembered, as a human right, often exists in spaces of contradiction. For example, recordings of police violence—created to document injustice and serve as legal evidence of wrongdoing—are increasingly being used against records creators and victims, rather than as evidence of law enforcement impropriety. There is a marked tension here that remains unresolved: white supremacy circumscribes both the need for sousveillance practices and the potential of the record to be used as evidence for restorative and transitional justice.

The Right to Be Forgotten

Dead Black people’s bodies have taken on both the archival permanence of digital records and the broad potential for datafied manipulation. Rather than watching lynched bodies on display in the night, humans have moved the spectacle of Black death to the Internet, to social media, and to comment sections. Race and racism are the forces that contribute to Black death, and this racism endures in digital spaces, making and remaking—staging and restaging—the deaths of Black people. This repetition of remembering and rituals of memorialization reinscribes racist ideologies and the trauma of the death event in perpetuity.

An instance of digital permanence occurs whenever documentary evidence and bystander documentation reach the Internet. The Internet, as information professionals understand perhaps better than anyone else, is forever. Duplication, migration, backups, data storage, and a host of other data curation and information management practices ensure that even if something is “taken down” from the Internet, it is never actually gone or deleted. It always leaves a digital trace, and there are usually locally held duplicates as well as general copies (such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). This leads to a set of compelling questions that archivists and archival studies scholars must start asking about digital remains: As humans, do we have the right to decide how we will be remembered? Do we have the right to be forgotten? Do we have the right to separate how we died from how we lived? Where is the line between memorialization and commodification? Where is the line between documentation and fetishization? And what is the archivist’s role in defining ethical data practices, documenting human rights abuses, securing privacy, and laying bare inequality and injustice in an uncertain future replete with digital remains? There is marked tension, here, between memorialization—the right to be remembered—and an increasing desire for technological and digital oblivion.

Recent developments in the European Union (EU) have highlighted the potential need for a universal online “right to be forgotten.” The right to be forgotten, in its current incarnation, is the application of a more general right of erasure under the EU Data Protection Directive of 1995, a directive that applies to search engines as well as any organization that controls and processes EU consumer data. Individuals in the EU have the right to request that data controllers remove personal data if the information is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive.” While these developments in the EU have brought to the fore the need for a digital “right to be forgotten”—and it is important to note that the European framework is not without its problems—in the US enforcing such a right proves to be especially problematic, primarily due to First Amendment conflicts: the public’s right to know stands in direct conflict with an individual’s right to be forgotten. A recent study of UK media websites found that the most frequently delisted content refers to violent crime, road accidents, drugs, murder, prostitution, financial misconduct, and sexual assault (Xue et al. 2016).

In the EU and the UK, those who kill are afforded the right to be forgotten, but what about the victims? The right to privacy in the US is intrinsically linked to whiteness, which is to say that Black people do not enjoy the same rights to privacy in the digital sphere that whiteness affords (Osucha 2009). Trayvon Martin, for example, does not enjoy the right to be forgotten; nor do Henrietta Lacks or Tupac Shakur. The enslaved Black people resurrected through the digitization of slavery-era archives do not enjoy the right to be forgotten. What is perhaps most compelling in the cases presented here is the archival permanence of Black bodies through digital records: how these ordinary (and extraordinary) Black people lived, how they died, how they are remembered, how their digital remains are constituted, and what happens to those remains is forever intimately linked to systemic and structural practices of anti-Black (and often state-sponsored) violence, a violence too frequently reinscribed and reified in—and then justified by—the archival record.

References

Agostinho, Daniela. 2019. “Archival encounters: Rethinking access and care in digital colonial archives.” Archival Science. doi:10.1007/s10502-019-09312-0.

Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jimerson, Randall C. 2009. Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice. Chicago: Society of American Archivists.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. 2018. “Markup bodies: Black [life] studies and slavery [death] studies at the digital crossroads.” Social Text 36 (4): 57–79.

Landecker, Hannah. 2007. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2014. “Teaching Trayvon: Race, media, and the politics of spectacle.” Black Scholar 44 (1): 12–29.

Osucha, Eden. 2009. “The whiteness of privacy: Race, media, law.” Camera Obscura: Feminism Culture and Media Studies, May 2009, 67–107.

Rowell, Chelcie Juliet, and Taryn Cooksey. 2019. “Archive of hate: Ethics of care in the preservation of ugly histories.” Lady Science (blog). https://www.ladyscience.com/blog/archive-of-hate-ethics-of-care-in-the-preservation-of-ugly-histories.

Skloot, Rebecca. 2010. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown.

Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network. n.d. http://slavebiographies.org/main.php.

Stadler, Gustavus. 2010. “Never heard such a thing: Lynching and phonographic modernity.” Social Text 28 (1): 87–105.

Sutherland, Tonia. 2017. “Archival amnesty: In search of black American transitional and restorative justice.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. http://libraryjuicepress.com/journals/index.php/jclis/article/view/42/0.

Xue, Minhui, Gabriel Magno, Evandro Cunha, Virgilio Almeida, and Keith W. Ross. 2016. “The right to be forgotten in the media: A data-driven study.” Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, no. 4: 389–402.

Young, Harvey. 2010. Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

47

Reparative

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld

American queer feminist and literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick passed away in 2009, when the air was being stuffed with big data. Even though, to my knowledge, she did not care much for big data, I would like to use this chapter to think with Sedgwick and her notion of reparative practice/reparative reading as a critical method for the big data “times we’re in” (Sedgwick 2003; Wiegman 2014).

Repair/rɪˈpɛː/

The verb repair (restore [something damaged, faulty, or worn] to a good condition: faulty electrical appliances should be repaired by an electrician), the noun repair (the action of repairing something: the world was beyond repair), and the adjective reparative seem to turn off people due to their flirtation with the following terms:

Religious repair: The obligation upon religious people to repair the world as tiqqun, defined by the eponymous French philosophical journal as “to recreate the conditions of another community.” Tiqqun is a French transcription of the original Hebrew term tikkun olam, a concept issuing from Judaism and often used in the kabbalistic and messianic traditions, which simultaneously indicates reparation, restitution, and redemption. It has also come to designate a contemporary Jewish conception of social justice more broadly.

Moral repair: Seeking to restore moral relations after wrongdoing (Walker 2006).

Reparations: “the act of making amends, offering expiation, or giving satisfaction for a wrong or injury” (Merriam-Webster 2020); “the right of the victim of an injury to receive reparation, and the duty of the part responsible to provide redress” (Wikipedia 2020); defined by Moorhead (2008) as the following:

Acknowledgement between communities which share a common history with the aim to heal the wounds from past human rights violations. The aim of reparations is to heal consequences of inhumanity and to create bonds of equality between communities divided by the historic roles carried out as offender and offended. Reparations are the joint obligation to truth-telling, to ensure that the relevant historical facts are uncovered, discussed and properly memorialized. Reparations, through initiatives in education, restoration and reconciliation, will succeed in making some form of amends in the present to give material substance to expressions of regret and responsibility.

At the root of reparation is repair—the root gone:

Dear Girl I went to the Indian Health Services to fix a tooth, a complicated pain. Indian health care is guaranteed by treaty but at the clinic limited funds don’t allow treatment beyond a filling. The solution offered: Pull it. Under pliers masks and clinical lights, a tooth that could’ve been saved was placed in my palm to hold after sequestration. I don’t share this to belabor suffering, facts are what they are I share to explain. Dear Girl, I honor your response and action I do. Yet at the root of reparation is repair. My tooth will not grow back ever. The root, gone. (Long Soldier 2017, 84)

Repair has enjoyed a long trajectory as a critical term in areas of media and information studies (Burrell 2012; Jackson 2014; Mattern 2018; Parks 2013) that move away from modernist thinking about technology toward “broken world thinking,” which “asserts . . . breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design” (Jackson 2014, 222). In this chapter I wish to make an intervention into the predominant discourse of repair in media and information studies, by deploying the notion of the reparative. Exploring Sedgwick’s notion of reparative practice through artistic research, I have been developing a method and critical framework I term reparative critical practice (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2015). Indebted to feminist and queer theory, the reparative critical practice that I put forward has a different trajectory from the notion of repair developed by information science and media studies, although it shares that notion’s concern with the materiality of technology and the brokenness of social worlds. Rather than repair, I insist on using the adjective reparative, suggesting that the reparative is a continuous practice that is never over. Reparative is followed by its twin adjective critical, suggesting that a reparative practice is not about restoring something to a preexisting whole or a fixed normative subjectivity. Rather, reparative critical practice is an additive aggregation of new forms of subjectivity, creating assemblages of affect, materiality, and time.

This idea of reparative practice is borrowed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), who called for reparative reading as a response to what she described as a mode of suspicious or paranoid reading that had become predominant in cultural criticism. But rather than providing the reader with a manual on how to pursue reparative readings or practices, she performatively left the concept open. It is a sensibility.

In this chapter I want to consider reparative critical practice in relation to reparations discourse in the aftermath of colonialism and slavery. While the relationship between technological repair and reparations has largely remained unaddressed, reparative critical practice allows us to think about processes of archival digitization and their colonial histories, as well as to develop critical modes of engagement with digital colonial material. To expand on this, I draw on my own artistic research practice and the production of my video installation and performative lecture The Christmas Report and Other Fragments, which I developed as part of the Uncertain Archives collective (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2017). Here, I explore the relationship between reparative practices and Danish cultural institutions’ digitization of colonial archives from the former Danish West Indies (today the US Virgin Islands), Ghana, and the transatlantic.[1] The Christmas Report addresses how the logic of digitization of these archives bears implicit biases and continuities with the technologies of chattel slavery that created the archives in the first place. That modernity and capitalism in their many forms are a product of the colonial system is by no means unknown (Baucom 2005; Keeling 2019; Lowe 2015; Yusoff 2018). As many scholars and artists in the fields of postcolonial and Black digital studies have pointed out, digital archives and datafication processes have both colonial roots and colonial effects (Risam, chapter 15, and Onuoha, chapter 37, in this volume; Sutherland 2019). I wish to add to this conversation by thinking about how the reparative might be mobilized as a decolonial digital and creative practice. As Françoise Vergès argues in relation to coloniality, we need a “temporality of repair”: we are repairing the past, which is not yet repaired, but as we do so the present is itself being broken. This means that we constantly have to engage in processes of repair that do not return a fully recovered body but acknowledge and bear witness to that body’s wounds (Vergès 2019).

But before we begin, I consider it useful to highlight three aspects of Sedgwick’s notion of reparative practice that might assist us in thinking through alternative methods to navigate our datafied worlds: the relationship of the reparative to paranoia, its accumulative and accretive textural production through camp performance, and its complex relationship with temporality.

(Para)paranoia

To arrive at the reparative, Sedgwick has to enact the same form of paranoia of which she accuses everyone else. By enacting the very paranoia that Sedgwick sets out to criticize, her call for reparative practice seeks not to do away with critical enterprise but rather to destabilize our habitual ways of knowing—to open up to an ecology of knowing that can be tied to other, weaker affects, rather than to paranoia’s strong theory of negative affects. As Sedgwick notes, “It is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices” (Sedgwick 2003, 150). In her essay Sedgwick performs what I call (para)paranoia: a self-reflexive form of paranoia in which the subject is fully aware of its own paranoia and where it is only through a stylization of its own paranoid position that the subject is able to fashion a reparative practice (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2019). However, Sedgwick’s conception of paranoia is very much linked to the Cold War paranoia of the twentieth century. To account for the data regimes under which we are living today, we need to update that paranoia to a digital (para)paranoia of (late) late capitalism.

Camp Performance

Toward the end of the essay, Sedgwick approaches something like a definition of reparative practice through the queer-identified practice of camp performance:

To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the “over”-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture. (Sedgwick 2003, 149–150)

Rather than situating camp within the paranoid logics of gender mimicry and parody, Sedgwick highlights camp’s accretive, textual, and affective qualities, in which “selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of culture—even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick 2003, 150–151). I find Sedgwick’s description of camp particularly useful to think with in relation to Wendy Chun’s (2016) punchline: “Because of changes in how we (humans and machines) read and write, we are now characters in a universe of dramas putatively called Big Data” (363). Is it possible for the reparative data miner to turn the data drama within which we are constantly producing and being produced into a camp performance by creating overattachments to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover data?

Temporality

Finally, reparative practice engages in a complex relationship with temporality that burrows backward and forward. The paranoid temporality is locked into predictions where the future is already known—a temporality crucial to the scheme of big data. The reparatively positioned reader engages with surprise and contingency to organize the fragments and part objects she encounters and creates: “Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (Sedgwick 2003, 146).

To further develop the reparative critical practice in relation to data strategies in what follows, I carve out the figure of the Data Thief/Data Giver from The Christmas Report to speculate on how a reparative practice might constitute a critical method for addressing emerging logics of datafication, as well as to imagine different worlds of possibility for big data.

The Data Thief/Data Giver

The Data Thief/Data Giver is a time-surfing roughneck, a shapeshifter, part human, part cyborg, a stateless, a beheaded pardoned by a king, a fugitive, a revenant, a digital return, an orphan of a convicted rebel queen. . . . Transported to 1917/2017 via the Internet to roam the archives. (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2017; voice-over by Oceana James[2])

To gain access to the archive of the former Danish empire, I draw on the figure of the Data Thief/Data Giver, embodied through the photograph of Hezekiah Smith taken in Horsens State Prison, Denmark, around 1909 (figure 47.1). The image of Hezekiah Smith continues to haunt me in the archive as a digital signal, as if it comes from the future but belongs to the past. He makes it possible to travel the digitized archive (whose archival logic is pretty impossible to navigate).[3]

Figure 47.1

Still from The Christmas Report and Other Fragments (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2017), based on an archival prison photograph of Hezekiah Smith, 1909.

The Data Thief/Data Giver is inspired by the Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal sci-fi documentary The Last Angel of History (Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective, and Gopaul 1995). The Black Audio Film Collective created the figure of the Data Thief to advance the concept of Afrofuturism and Black aesthetic traditions in music, tracing a lineage from the blues to jazz, funk, Afrofuturism, hip-hop, and techno. The Data Thief travels across time and space in search of crossroads, where he makes archaeological digs for fragments of history and technology in search of the code that holds the key to his future. The Last Angel of History was made at a time when the Internet was becoming available to the masses, but the film, with its Afrofuturistic, predigital quality of being inside and outside of time, proposes a sensibility and methodology that speaks to the vulnerabilities and ethical dilemmas that digitization and datafication pose today. In The Last Angel of History, by evoking what Kara Keeling (2019) has termed “algorithmic editing,” the Data Thief is able to edit, animate, and combine images from the database of “human history”; he proposes a sensibility that attunes us to the sonorous and affective reverberations of the archive, where time keeps folding itself into the present. With The Christmas Report, I attempted to expand on that method by organizing a horizontal editing workflow (through Prezi and After Effects) that visually captured the verticality and nausea caused by the architectural infrastructures of mass digitization and by the archival records’ interactions with other archives as they circulated in the digital realm.

Katrine: The digitization of the archive is presented as a “gift.”

Oceana: But they thief it [sic] and disguise it as a “gift.”

Katrine: Or rather, it is neither a gift nor a theft.

Oceana: It is a gift-theft, or a sticky gift.

Oceana: We will call him/her/ze Hezekiah.

(Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2017)

In The Christmas Report, the Data Thief/Data Giver is mobilized to reference the fact that Denmark absconded with the archive after selling the Danish West Indies to the US—leaving the islands’ inhabitants without access to more than 250 years of written history (Bastian 2003). Upon the centennial of the sale, commemorated in 2017, Denmark returned the archive as a “gift” in digitized form. This “gift” was given as a form of reparation without being named as such since calling it reparation would have paved the way for an official apology followed by a process for material compensation. At the same time, no actual handing over of physical or digital archives took place. It was as if the state of Denmark were engaging in a shoddy reenactment of the Obama administration’s delivery of the congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans. As Layli Long Soldier’s (2017) poem Whereas, cited above, so eloquently describes, President Obama signed the so-called Apology Resolution in obscurity; no Native Americans were present to receive the apology, and in fact most people never knew that an apology had been made. In a similar fashion, digitizing the colonial archives and making them available by simply putting them online can be seen as a way of offering a form of reparation without having to deliver an apology to those who were wronged or account for the atrocities that the archives recorded. The dialogue about and acknowledgment of damage that the digitization of the archives should have opened up remain locked in the digital vaults.[4]

Hezekiah Smith was the son of Queen Mary, one of the four rebel queens who, in St. Croix in 1878, initiated and led the labor uprising known as the Fireburn—a rebellion against the slave-like conditions that workers endured after the abolition of slavery in 1848 (Ehlers and Belle 2018). After the uprising, Queen Mary was sentenced to death and sent to the women’s prison in Christianshavn in Copenhagen, an ocean apart from her children and family. Hezekiah was a child when his mother was sent to jail on a different continent. Despite the fact that photography was fully developed at the time, there are no photographs of the queens of the Fireburn. The prison records held in the Danish archives have become a testimony to the lives of these women. As is testified in a Facebook post by artist La Vaughn Belle, who has worked extensively on the Fireburn and Queen Mary (figure 47.2), it remains crucial for Virgin Islanders to gain access to these archives in order to obtain a multifaceted view of history that combines oral histories with written accounts (see Belle et al. 2019).

In 1903 Hezekiah Smith, charged with the murder of his partner, was himself sentenced to death by Frederiksted’s Special Criminal Court. He was sent to Horsens State Penitentiary in Denmark, where he remained imprisoned until 1919. By that time Denmark had sold the Danish West Indies to the US, and since the US did not want him back—and the islands’ African Caribbean inhabitants were not granted Danish citizenship—Hezekiah had become stateless. In 1923, five years after his official pardon, he was released from prison and put on a Polish schooner bound for Trinidad, where he disappeared or was murdered. Referencing this tragic destiny, his spectral image—which suddenly appears as one browses through scans of material from 1.5 km of shelves containing ships’ logs, plantation account books, and census records—is able to travel through the spatiotemporal coordinates of the archive without a passport (he is literally stateless: a revenant). The story we are told about Hezekiah, which is the Danish criminal court’s and the prison records’ version, subtends the carceral archive. The circulation of this photograph, and its placement within the history of criminal photography, contributes to the production of black and brown men as “criminal until proven otherwise.” This visual tradition, and the racialization schemes that it upholds, as scholars such as Ramon Amaro and Simone Browne have argued, are extended today into datafied modes of surveillance and machine learning that reconstitute Blackness through the same racial logics (Amaro 2019; Browne 2015). While it belongs to the past, Hezekiah’s image comes to us from a future—that is, our current present. Like Benjamin’s “angel of history” (which comes from Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, and to which the Black Audio Film Collective’s title refers), he sees one “single catastrophe which keeps piling [ship]wreckage upon [ship]wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet”; caught in the digital circuit, “the pile of (data) debris before him grows skyward” as the discretization of modernity’s archive (Benjamin, Arendt, and Zorn 2015, 257).[5]

Figure 47.2

Facebook post by La Vaughn Belle.

Denmark’s archival abduction and later digitization of these archives constitutes a triple cutting off of a connection. There is a sense in which the violent and physical cut in lineage that slavery marks—which Kodwo Eshun in The Last Angel of History compares to “alien abduction” (Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective, and Gopaul 1995)—was repeated in Denmark’s taking of the archives. Consequently, a people that had already been cut off from their own history and origins were cut off a second time from access to that little remainder, that name, that list, that scrap of cloth that might still exist in the ledgers. With the digitization, we can talk of a triple “cut”—a material cut, a rasterization, and a discretization: what was returned was not the actual archival records but a scanned copy in 300 dpi.

How then are we to attune to the silences, the breaks, the cuts in those accounts as a reparative critical practice? And how are we to envision a reparative critical practice when, to echo Françoise Vergès, we are on a continuum of repair, repairing a past that is not yet repaired and continues to be broken in the present?

Reparative Algorithms: Affective Assemblages across Space and Time

The Data Thief/the Data Giver gathers the fragments and textures that she is left with; the snippets of Indian textiles that were traded for enslaved Africans on the Danish Gold Coast. (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2017; voice-over by Oceana James)

Pairing methods propelled by the Data Thief’s algorithmic editing (Keeling 2019) with Sedgwick’s reparative practice, I want to end with a few notes on what we might term the reparative algorithm.[6]

The Data Thief/Data Giver embodies the reparative algorithm that “thiefs” back what has been stolen by giving the data new meaning and by attuning to the silences and gaps reproduced in the archive (Hartman 2008).[7] No less paranoid than zir paranoid sisters, the Data Thief/Data Giver assembles the data ze is left with: the affects, textures, and materialities in the archive. The Data Thief/Data Giver extracts sustenance from discarded data sets—even though the data are from a culture whose avowed desire has been not to sustain them. By reclaiming speculation and engaging with the imaginary, ze is able to advance an ethico-aesthetic practice: one that we might call a reparative critical practice that does not seek to repair or restore a preexisting whole but forces us to stay in the cybernetic fold of radical, creative, decolonial, and technological reimagination.

Figure 47.3

Still from The Christmas Report and Other Fragments (Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2017), based on an archival photograph of snippets of madras fabric produced in the Danish colony of Tranquebar (Tharangambadi), India, and sent to Ghana to be traded for enslaved Africans.

Without further ado, I will leave it to you, in your own time.

Notes

I thank the Uncertain Archives research collective: Daniela Agostinho, Kristin Veel, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Annie Ring, Pepita Hesselberth, La Vaughn Belle, Oceana James, Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer, and many others who have shaped this research project.

1. It is important to note that these archives are dispersed across different cultural heritage institutions, including the Danish State Archives, the Royal Library, the Film Institute, the National Museum, and the Museum of Natural History, to mention a few. Each has treated the task of digitization very differently, and their databases do not necessarily communicate. I mainly focus on the Danish State Archive and Royal Library collections.

2. The voice-over was sampled from The Last Angel of History (Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective, and Gopaul 1995), mixed with Hezekiah Smith’s story.

3. Again, I am speaking here of the Danish State Archives, where the digital interface is built on the analog and can be difficult to navigate if one is not a trained historian or does not know where to look. This is by no means the same for all digital archives.

4. A number of important interventions are taking place in the archives, including I Am Queen Mary by La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers (2018); Helle Stenum’s translation of the Fireburn records (2018–ongoing); Temi Odomuso’s What Lies Unspoken (2017); Mathias Danbolt, Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer, and Sarah Geirsing’s exhibition Blindspots (2017–2018); the work of the VISCO Study Collective: La Vaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer, and Tiphanie Yarnique (2019); the Society for Black Archeologists’ use of the archive (Flewellen 2019); and the conference and journal Archives That Matter, organized and edited by Daniela Agostinho, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Karen Loise Søilen, and myself.

5. It would be interesting to further study the messianic relationship between Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the reparative and The Last Angel of History, but this lies outside the scope of this chapter.

6. Following Keeling, I use algorithm here in the sense of “a procedure or set of rules used in calculation and problem solving; (in later use spec.) a precisely defined set of mathematical or logical operations for the performance of a particular task” (Keeling 2019, 139, citing the Oxford English Dictionary).

7. I use thief here instead of thieves to reference Oceana James’s voice-over for The Christmas Report, in which she translates the text into Crucian (Virgin Islands Creole).

References

Akomfrah, John, Black Audio Film Collective, and Lina Gopaul. 1995. The Last Angel of History. Smoking Dog Films

Amaro, Ramon. 2019. “As if.” E-Flux Architecture. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/248073/as-if/.

Bastian, Jeannette Allis. 2003. Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited.

Baucom, Ian. 2005. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Belle, La Vaughn, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer, and Tiphanie Yanique. 2019. “Ancestral queendom: Reflections on the prison records of the rebel queens of the 1878 Fireburn in St. Croix, USVI (formerly Danish West Indies).” In Archives That Matter: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Histories in Colonial Archives, edited by D. Agostinho, K. Dirckinck-Holmfeld, and K. L. Søilen, 19–36. Copenhagen: Nordisk Tidskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling.

Benjamin, Walter, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zorn. 1999. Illuminations. London: Pimlico.

Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Burrell, Jenna. 2012. Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2016. “Big data as drama.” ELH 83 (2): 363–382.

Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Katrine. 2015. “Time in the making: Rehearsing reparative critical practices.” PhD diss., University of Copenhagen.

Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Katrine. 2017. The Christmas Report and Other Fragments. Video and performative presentation.

Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Katrine. 2019. “(Para)paranoia: Affect as critical inquiry.” Diffractions: Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture, 2nd ser., 1–24.

Ehlers, Jeannette, and La Vaughn Belle. 2018. I Am Queen Mary. https://www.iamqueenmary.com.

Flewellen, Ayana Omilade. 2019. “African diasporic choices: Locating the lived experiences of Afro-Crucians in the archival and archaeological record.” In Archives That Matter: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Histories in Colonial Archives, edited by D. Agostinho, K. Dirckinck-Holmfeld, and K. L. Søilen, 54–74. Copenhagen: Nordisk Tidskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in two acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26:1–14.

Jackson, Steven J. 2014. “Rethinking repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 221–239. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://mitpress.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.001.0001/upso-9780262525374-chapter-11.

Keeling, Kara. 2019. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press.

Long Soldier, Layli. 2017. Whereas. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mattern, Shannon. 2018. “Maintenance and care.” Places Journal, November 2018. https://doi.org/10.22269/181120.

Moorhead, Shelly. 2008. “‘Reparations’ defined: The VI/Danish symbol of partnership.” Movement (ACRRA): An Open Forum to Discuss Reparations in the Context of the Virgin Islands Reparations Movement (blog). December 2008. http://acrra.blogspot.dk/2008/12/reparations-defined-vidanish-symbol-of.html.

Parks, Lisa. 2013. “Media fixes: Thoughts on repair cultures.” Flow Journal (blog). December 2013. http://www.flowjournal.org/2013/12/media-fixes-thoughts-on-repair-cultures/.

Sedgwick, Eve. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sutherland, Tonia. 2019. “The carceral archive: Documentary records, narrative construction, and predictive risk assessment.” Journal of Cultural Analytics. https://doi.org/10.22148/16.039.

Vergès, Françoise. 2019. “Memories of struggles and visual/sonic archives.” Paper presented at Archival Encounters: Colonial Archives, Care and Social Justice, Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen, 2019.

Walker, Margaret Urban. 2006. Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2014. “The times we’re in: Queer feminist criticism and the reparative ‘turn.’” Feminist Theory 15 (1): 4–25.

Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

48

Self-Tracking

Natasha Dow Schüll

The reason you begin tracking your data is that you have some uncertainty about yourself that you believe the data can illuminate. It’s about introspection, reflection, seeing patterns, and arriving at realizations about who you are and how you might change.

—Eric Boyd, self-tracker

Over the past decade, the capacity to gather, store, and analyze individuals’ physiological, behavioral, and geolocational data has come to affect a wide array of domains, from policy-making to policing, corporate marketing to health care, entertainment to education—a phenomenon known as datafication, or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2014; Van Dijck 2014).[1] So-called big data fundamentalists embrace this development, arguing that large data sets, properly mined for correlations and patterns, will render up previously elusive insights, predictions, and answers to challenges of individual and collective life, replacing the need for theory and science and facilitating new freedoms and forms of self-empowerment (e.g., Anderson 2008; Goetz 2010; Topol 2012).

Taking a more skeptical stance, scholars in the emerging field of critical data studies emphasize the ways in which datafication has benefited governments, medical institutions, and corporations at the expense of citizens’ and consumers’ liberty and privacy. To characterize the kind of subject that datafication produces, some apply Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) prescient notion of the dividual as an archive of traits, habits, and preferences that can be systematically extracted and marketed to, reshuffled, and compared with those of others.[2] Bernard Harcourt (2015, 157) gives the term a twist, proposing that duodividual better describes “the object of the algorithmic data-mining quest of the digital age”—which, he argues, is not so much to divide an individual into parts as to find its digital “match” or “twin.” Many adopt the term data double (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) to name this digital doppelgänger, while for Rob Horning (2012) data self best describes the virtual versions of ourselves that arise through our engagements with online media. “Disembodied exhaust gives rise to a data-proxy, an abstracted figure created from the amalgamation of data traces,” writes Gavin Smith (2016, 110). Dana Greenfield (2016, 133) discusses the “pixelated person” as “a subject ever divided into finer granularity, but also whose partial datasets can be joined with others.” Switching from the register of data to that of the algorithm, John Cheney-Lippold (2011, 165) describes algorithmic identities as “categories of identity [that] are being inferred upon individuals based on their web use,” while Frank Pasquale (2015, 39) argues that we are treated as algorithmic selves or “set[s] of data points subject to pattern recognition engines.”

For all the subtle nuances and asymmetries this array of neologisms captures about the processes of fragmentation, amalgamation, and aggregation through which selves are made objects of power in a digitally networked world, they are less helpful when it comes to grasping how selves inhabit, experience, reflect on, and act in their datafied lives. Starting from the premise that the datafication of life does not simply benefit powerful stakeholders, this chapter explores the case of digitally facilitated self-tracking, in which individuals monitor, quantify, and make meaning of their own “data exhaust” via sensors, analytical algorithms, and visualization software. In archived sequences of bitified life and their aggregate sums, they seek to bring to awareness the patterns and rhythms that define their existence and that might, without digital tools, remain uncertain forces below the threshold of perception. Here, data and data technologies are a means not just for governing others but for cultivating oneself; they are “technologies of the self” in Michel Foucault’s (1988) sense.[3] The point is to “arrive at realizations about who you are and how you might change,” the self-tracker Eric Boyd tells us in the quotation that begins this piece. “You set up this kind of external person or version of yourself, an avatar or companion—or something.” Boyd echoes Foucault’s (1998) characterization of ethics as “establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself”: “You’re ultimately setting up a framework by which you can establish a relationship with yourself.” This chapter is an attempt to better understand the workings of this relationship—a worthwhile endeavor, I suggest, if one wishes to effectively critique the broader dynamics of datafication and its discontents.

Self-Knowledge through Numbers

Nearly a decade ago in the San Francisco Bay Area, small groups of technologically savvy, existentially inquisitive individuals began to gather and reflect on what they might learn from data-gathering devices and analytical software about the mundane mysteries, dynamics, and challenges of their day-to-day lives—drug side effects, sleep disorders, and the association between diet and productivity. One at a time, they would show-and-tell their experiments in self-data, delivering ten-minute presentations scripted to answer a trio of guiding questions: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? After sharing their experiences, speakers would entertain questions and solicit feedback from those in attendance.

The group was anointed Quantified Self (QS) and, evoking the Delphic maxim “know thyself,” given the tagline “self-knowledge through numbers” by cofounders Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, both former editors of Wired magazine. Through social media, especially Meetup.com, QS quickly established a presence in major urban areas across North America and Europe, drawing in newcomers through a website featuring videos of members’ presentations, a message board where people could discuss tracking tools, and links to local meetups. QS gained national prominence in the US in April of 2010, when a long-form essay by Wolf, “The Data-Driven Life,” ran as the lead article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, a human figure collaged from graph paper, calipers, and folding rulers appearing on the cover. The article proposed that data could serve not only as a means of inspecting others’ lives (as an actuary, policy-maker, or welfare officer might) but as a new kind of digital mirror in which to see and learn new things about ourselves.

“Humans have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention,” wrote Wolf (2010). “We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut. That is, some of us do. Others use data.” In heart rate spikes or mood dips charted over time, individuals could better grasp how they were affected by seemingly trivial habits or circumstances than by relying on expert advice, guesswork, or even intuition. “If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data,” Wolf insisted. “Once you know the facts, you can live by them.” In this do-it-yourself formula for self-care, data-intensive technologies such as automated sensors, enumerative metrics, and statistical correlation were presented as tools for living a good life—imagined here as an ongoing project of archiving data so as to clarify uncertainties.

Most readers reacted negatively to the cover story, expressing disdain for the intensively tracked and monitored life that Wolf prescribed, diagnosing it as a “loss of human-ness.” A woman from New Jersey asked in her comment: “When do we reach the point that all we’re doing is logging data for a life that’s not being lived?” A reader from Kansas wondered what of lived experience we might miss by dwelling on “how many licks it takes to eat a lollipop” while one from Philadelphia wrote that “we are not machines and no amount of data will make us so—or give us all the answers to the bigger mysteries.” The general response was that an excessive emphasis on that which can be measured degrades existence, rendering the unquantifiable stuff of life as so much noise to be filtered out.

A similar sentiment ran through the stream of one-off journalistic profiles of self-trackers that appeared between 2010 and 2013 in the pages of Forbes, Vanity Fair, and even Wired itself, accounts that typically portrayed them as caricatures of technological boosterism and American individualism (e.g., Bhatt 2013; Hesse 2008; Morga 2011). The cultural critic Evgeny Morozov (2014), relying largely on these pieces, launched an acerbic attack on the QS community, alleging that its abandonment of narrative reflexivity in favor of soulless numerics was both dehumanizing and politically troubling.

Academic critiques of self-tracking technologies over the past decade rehearse many of the arguments appearing in these more popular sources, articulating them with a focus on themes of discipline, normalization, exploitation, neoliberal subjectification, and dispossession. Self-quantification algorithms are said to “structure and shape possibilities for action” (Williamson 2015, 141) and are designed to reinforce certain behaviors and discourage others (Millington 2016; Schüll 2016); social norms become embedded in tracking devices’ target numbers, presentation of scores, and gamified incentives (Depper and Howe 2017), such that a “numerical ontology” comes to suffuse everyday practices and “the ways in which people relate to their own bodies” (Oxlund 2012, 53). Self-trackers are depicted as enacting cultural values of entrepreneurial, autonomous behavior, responsibly managing and optimizing their lives as cogs in a neoliberal wheel (Lupton 2013, 261; see also Ajana 2017; Depper and Howe 2017; Lupton 2016; Lupton and Smith 2018; Oxlund 2012; Rich and Miah 2017).

While these critiques are justified and important, an emerging body of ethnographic research has begun to pull the curtain back on a more nuanced reality, challenging the idea that quantified selves are necessarily existentially impoverished, depoliticized, exploited, or victims of false consciousness. Quantification “rarely produces a definitive truth, a one-to-one representation of one’s life or one’s identity” (Sharon 2017, 114); instead, it involves a “situated objectivity” (Pantzar and Ruckenstein 2017) in which certain prior experiences, understandings, and shared expectations come to matter. Self-tracking is an aesthetic practice in which bits of the self, extracted and abstracted, become material for differently seeing and experiencing the self (Sherman 2016). Looking at personal data charts and visualizations can trigger critical reflection and raise new questions to pursue; the data do not displace or freeze but rather enhance and enliven self-narratives (Ruckenstein 2014, 80). In this sense, data serve as a kind of “transducer” that preserves only some qualities of the thing being measured such that “there is much room for people to maneuver in the imperfect translation” (Neff and Nafus 2016, 25). Self-quantification “sets up a laboratory of the self” in which “devices and data contribute to new ways of seeing the self and shaping self-understanding and self-expression” (Kristensen and Ruckenstein 2018, 2). In this chapter I approach QS practices as a form of experimentation in datafied subjectivity that is reflexive, sometimes noncompliant, and often creative—with as yet undetermined individual and collective possibilities. This experimentation comes to the fore in the following scenes and conversations, which unfolded among participants in a two-day QS meeting in 2013.[4]

Seeing the Signal

After the four hundred-odd conference attendees had settled into their seats in the airy main hall of an Amsterdam hotel for a weekend of presentations and discussions, Gary Wolf took the stage to open the proceedings with a question: What exactly is a quantified self? While it was clear that “quantification” involved collecting and computing data about ourselves, “self” was a more ambiguous term. How to understand the self in quantified self? What happens to the self when we quantify it—when “computing comes all the way in”?

Robin Barooah, a British technology designer now working in Silicon Valley, offered his answer to that question in the first show-and-tell session following Wolf’s address. Wearing his signature fleece jumpsuit, he used a mixture of data visualization and personal backstory to share how he had measured his mood. Less fleeting than emotion but not as entrenched as temperament, “mood is mysterious,” he noted. Robin had been drawn to a QS approach to mood because he thought it could help him find nonintuitive, nonobvious connections between his life circumstances, daily habits, and mood. In 2008, a year he described as the most painful of his adult life, finding these connections was a matter of necessity rather than curiosity or self-experimentation. “I had to start examining my life and work out what to do.”

He turned to look at the time line of data projected on the large screen behind him, which spanned four years and plotted two variables whose relationship to his mood he had been curious to explore: above the line, in blue, appeared the amount of time he meditated daily, which he had tracked with a timer; below the line, in red, appeared the number of entries he made each day in an online calendar he had set up to track his mood (see figure 48.1). The choice to plot how many entries he was putting in the journal rather than some measure of their semantic content (a rating of the relative turmoil or calmness expressed in his words, for instance) was deliberate; as with the variable of meditation minutes, it was a way to measure the practice of journaling and see what it might reveal about his mood. What he was surprised to see when he finally (years later) plotted his data on minutes meditated and entries written was the uncanny correspondence between those two variables: “The coupling between the two lines should be very clear,” he told us. On any given day, more minutes of meditation were mirrored by more journaling, and vice versa. The tight correspondence gave his time line the look of a Rorschach inkblot turned on its side, its top half in blue and its bottom half in red.

Robin drew the audience’s attention to particularly volatile moments in the moving averages along the time line: “This dip is where I was flying a lot”; “This trough with no color at all is a time of crippling anxiety and depression.” Travel and major life events, including the death of his father, decoupled his otherwise correlated routines or lessened their symmetry. He pointed out a spot on the time line with a large glacier of red activity beneath it and explained that a new psychopharmacological regimen had spurred a period of intensive journaling. “A massive amount of narrative began to unfold at that time,” Robin remembered. The color red fell off his time line entirely in November 2012, at which point the intensity of his anxiety had for the most part resolved, and he no longer felt “the same impulse” to write in his journal.

Figure 48.1

Robin Barooah on stage at QS 2013, explaining his data time line. Screenshot from Snyder (2013). Photograph by author.

Contemplating the visualization, Robin reviewed what he had learned. The overlaying of disparate tracking routines, though not a direct representation of his mood, was profoundly revelatory: “It’s a kind of signal, one I hadn’t seen before; it reflects my activation level, my energy level, my ability to engage with the world. . . . It’s there as an envelope around my whole life, affecting everything I’m doing.” Being an engineer, Robin uses the word signal to describe information transmission—in this case, the conveyance of energies that powerfully affect his lived experience into a form he can perceive and assimilate. The signal, communicated visually in a shifting silhouette of numeric values, is “beyond words. . . . It’s this very deep thing that ultimately becomes thinking and becomes action.”

Discussing the Data

The next day, in a smaller “breakout session” dedicated to the theme of data and identity, Robin elaborated on how (data-)tracking turns into action and thinking. “Tracking isn’t additive—it’s subtractive: you work on some question about yourself in relation to this machine-produced thing and, afterward, you’re left with a narrower range of attributions you can make about your behavior or your feelings; you have eliminated uncertainty and gained a kind of liberation—you can move on with your life, with a new perspective.”

Joshua, a bearded venture capitalist in his early thirties from California, agreed that the conversion of qualitative into quantitative could help one to exit uncertain impasses: “The self can be very overwhelming as an integrated, whole thing. By doing QS, you can disaggregate various aspects of self, work on just those aspects, maybe let them go, put them back in. . . . It takes an incredible burden off you when you can take these small slices out and say, all that other stuff is complicated, let’s just look at this.” This extractive, bitifying process was a form of self-narration, he concluded, and we should call it quantitative autobiography.

Joerg, a German activist with a background in business and philosophy, further specified the term narrative as it pertained to self-quantification: “Numeric expressions of ourselves are inherently syntactic, not semantic.” The power of self-data lay in the relational grammar that emerged across their data points—not in the authorial intentions of “transcendent phenomenal selves” storying themselves forth. His position at once echoed and countered Morozov’s criticism of self-quantification: yes, it departed from traditional humanist modes of narrative—but that did not make it dehumanizing; rather, it was vital, enlivening.

An American anthropologist in her thirties, employed at a leading technology firm, suggested that art, rather than narrative, might be a better metaphor to describe what selves do with their data. “Maybe tracking is like sketching yourself,” still another participant speculated. “You have to fill in the details, it’s a kind of self-portrait, an art.” Robin, from his seat along the side wall, nodded in agreement. He remarked that he had once characterized his tracking as a kind of “digital mirror” but now felt the metaphor was inaccurate “because mirrors represent a whole, projected image—which is not what we get from our data bits.” Robin had come to prefer the metaphor of self-portraiture: “What we’re doing when we track and plot our data is focusing in on one part of our lives and slowly building up that portrait as we collect data on it.” The session moderator pressed the group to further specify the metaphor. If not photorealistic, was the portrait expressionist? Impressionistic? Pixelated? “I think it would have to be an algorithmic mosaic, with shifting composition, color, and patterns,” Robin suggested. “And the portrait is ever-changing.” “It’s continuous,” Joshua chimed in. “We are all continuously selfing—at all times we have to make decisions about what to take as relevant points.”

Joerg wondered about the risk of self-unmaking—that “if you start breaking yourself down piece by piece, it could lead to non-self, disaggregation, seeing ourselves as a big stream of data.” Robin thought not: “If self-quantification, breaking ourselves down into bits, enables us to create new experiences of ourselves, then those experiences are gateways to new degrees of freedom in how to act.” The kind of portraiture at stake in the quantified self, he suggested, “allows you to imagine new types of self and move in new directions; you are no longer trapped in a limited set of pathways.” Self-tracking, it seemed by the end of the discussion, was a means of liberation not only from the impasses of uncertainty but from those of certainty as well.

Askesis 2.0

At the close of the 2015 Quantified Self summit, held in San Francisco’s Presidio, longtime QS show-and-tell organizer Steven Jonas gave a short tribute to the community’s “practice of self-examination.” He began with a quote from Sarah Blakewell’s (2011) book on the sixteenth-century French philosopher Montaigne, whose work she characterized as “capturing that distinctive modern sense of being unsure where you belong, who you are, and what you are expected to do.” What distinguished Montaigne’s sometimes “meandering and digressive” essays, Jonas went on, was their probing honesty and self-reflection. “Montaigne’s philosophical inquiries were not expansive and universal; they were small.” Their resonance for the reader derived from their limited scope and personal experience. Likewise, QS show-and-tell talks are “small, honest, and vulnerable.” They are presented by individuals who are “trying to figure out who they are and what they should be doing.” In them, “we can see ourselves and figure out how to navigate our own place in a huge, immensely interesting but very confounding world.”

As the media scholar Mark Hansen (2014, 196) suggests, “The specific affordances of technical data gathering and analysis” can be used “not solely to anticipate our tendencies and susceptibilities for purposes of manipulation and exploitation, but also to inform us about these tendencies and susceptibilities and let us act on and in virtue of them.” As Robin told us earlier, archives of personal data bits can be “gateways to new degrees of freedom in how to act.” The kind of freedom he invokes here is not the freedom of autonomy or self-mastery but rather, as Colin Koopman (2016) has characterized the philosophy and life of William James, “freedom amid uncertainty as the work of self-transformation.” James’s ethics of self-transformation was “not only a means for adjusting to modern chance,” notes Koopman (2016), “but also an energy for resisting its normalization.” It involved “instigating alternatives, provoking differentia, becoming undisciplined and even undisciplinable” (43). Likewise, for self-trackers metrics can serve for “detouring from prescribed courses, exploring limits, and defying rules” (Sanders 2017, 21).

Rather than dismiss self-quantifiers—as life avoiding and robotically inclined, as victims of data capitalism and its surveillance apparatus, or as symptomatic figures of neoliberal subjectivity and its self-mastering, entrepreneurial ethos—we might regard them as pioneers in the art of living with and through data. Their experiments in “quantitative autobiography,” “continuous self-portraiture of shifting composition,” and computational-graphic analyses of time-series data to detect signals “beyond words” can be understood as an important accompaniment to the scholarly neologisms that have proliferated to describe the fragmented, alienated, and exploited selves of the datafied world. Inviting digital tools and epistemologies to partake in and supplement their self-transformational ethics, they gain new methods for apprehending, knowing, and inhabiting their lives—and, potentially, for resisting, repurposing, and rendering uncertain the big data proxies,[5] behavioral categories, and governing logics that seek to drive their conduct down certain pathways.

Notes

1. This essay draws from Schüll (2018; 2019) and adapts two opening passages from Ruckenstein and Schüll (2017).

2. It should be noted that a different conceptual trajectory for the term dividual exists in anthropology, where it is used to describe forms of selfhood that are not based in Western dualisms and that are constituted by social relations rather than discrete units (e.g., Strathern 2004).

3. Michel Foucault (1988, 18) distinguished between technologies of power, “which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject,” and technologies of the self, through which individuals perform “operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” The latter take a literal, material form in the assemblages of sensors, analytical algorithms, and data visualizations that constitute contemporary self-tracking practices.

4. This chapter draws on ethnographic research conducted between 2013 and 2017 at QS meetups in Boston and New York as well as three annual conferences.

5. For more on the work that proxies perform in the world of big data, see chapter 44 of this volume by Chun, Levin, and Tollmann.

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49

Shifters

Celia Lury

Introduction

This entry explores the role of shifters in digital culture. In linguistic terms, shifters are indices or signs of reference—that is, they are signs that can only be understood by reference to the context in which they are uttered. As the context in which they are used changes, so, too, does what they refer to (Benveniste 1971). As many have noted, the activity of indexing has acquired a newly expanded importance in contemporary informational infrastructures. For example, Amoore and Piotukh observe that “so-called unstructured data demands new forms of indexing that allow for analysis to be deterritorialized (conducted across jurisdictions, or via distributed or cloud computing, for example) and to be conducted across diverse data forms—images, video, text in chat rooms, audio files and so on” (Amoore and Piotukh 2015, 345). To understand the significance of the hugely expanded role of indexing and its potential to activate data as part of new kinds of analytics, we need to consider what kind of sign an index—in particular, a shifter—is.

Crucially, however, to focus on signs is always to focus on a process—a process of semiosis or signification. In the case of indices—or the semiotic activity of indexing—what is involved is a process of referencing, indicating, or pointing to something (a subject or object). That is, indices are signs that draw the attention of someone or something to something but do not describe it. In relation to data, the (newly expanded) activity of indexing involves the activation of data by employing it to point to the presence of something by referring to context(s). This activation necessarily involves an informational infrastructure of some kind, whether this infrastructure only comprises people, or people, objects, technologies, and environments of a variety of kinds. Importantly, as a special kind of indexical activity, shifters do not simply employ data to point to something by referring to preexisting contexts (that is, they do not locate data as data points) but presume and propose contexts for data. In doing so, shifters can be understood as facilitating a kind of prepositional signification, in which they put what they refer to into distribution or circulation across contexts. Equally importantly, however, insofar as the activity of indexing does not describe but “merely” indicates something, it always invites inference—that is, the indexing activity performed by shifters introduces (un)certainty into distributed or circulating styles of reasoning—inductive, deductive, and abductive—as well as providing the basis of ad hoc hypotheses. As such, indexing is a key dynamic of cognitive assemblages (Hayles 2017; but see also Gell 1998).

With the dual aim of exploring how digital culture provides a new distribution environment for shifters and showing how shifters distribute inferential (un)certainty in digital culture, I consider the slogans “Not in our name” and “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie). In both cases, the shifter is a pronoun—our and je or I—and in both cases the analysis focuses on how political figures or personae emerge in circulation, paying special attention to the kinds of speech such figures can occasion.

In the essay “The Nature of Pronouns,” the linguist Benveniste addresses the special characteristics of pronouns as shifters in relation to the general concept of deixis, by which he means a mode of expression that cannot be understood without reference to context. The personal pronouns I and you, he says, refer differently each time they are used, according to the relationship set up in each instance between “the indicator (of person, time, place, object shown, etc.) and the present instance of discourse” (Benveniste 1971, 218). The existence of this relationship means that not only does the subject to which the pronoun refers change in use but that there also is a doubling—a splitting or a division—in the (presence of the) subject indicated. In the indexical use of the pronoun I, for example, there is a doubling or splitting between the subject of enunciation (who is speaking) and the subject of the statement (the subject referred to).

The analysis below will suggest that how this doubling, division, or noncoincidence of the subject circulates in time and space informs the kinds of inferential (un)certainty the pronoun as shifter makes possible. While the scale and nature of the circulation of this doubling has hugely changed with the growth of new informational infrastructures, it is important to remember that in all uses the distributed (non)coincidental (un)certainty introduced by pronouns is complicated by the fact that as the (split) subject shifts, so, too, may relations with the addressee. The addressee of an utterance containing a shifter need not be specified in time or space at all: as Peirce puts it, “It is not necessary that the Interpretant [of a sign] should actually exist. A being in futuro will suffice” (quoted in Hulswit 2002, 136).

Figures of Speech

“Not in our name” is a slogan with a long history, but its recent usage is associated with Not in Our Name, a US organization founded in 2002 to protest the US government’s response to the events of September 11, 2001. Its “Statement of Conscience” calls on the people of the US “to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.” Among the principles advocated are the rights of self-determination for peoples and nations and the importance of due process and dissent. The organization was disbanded in 2008. A slightly adapted version of the name of this organization—“Not in my name”—was adopted as a slogan as part of public demonstrations in cities across the UK against the involvement of the UK government in the war against Iraq in 2003. At the time of writing (2017), among other uses revealed by a Google search, “Not in my name” has been adopted by a British Muslim organization, the Active Change Foundation, based in East London, which states: “As British Muslims we utterly condemn ISIS who are abusing the name of Islam with their acts of terrorism. We call on fellow British Muslims to unite and denounce this evil group and their acts—which are done #NotInMyName” (Active Change Foundation, n.d.). And the same slogan is also being used in religious and political protests relating to the slaughter of cows in India.

The hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie) emerged on Twitter (and then spread throughout the Internet) in 2015, following an attack by gunmen at the offices of the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo. Two days after the event, the hashtag had been used over five million times on Twitter, making it one of the most immediately popular topics in the platform’s history.[1] The most frequently shared external sources were images, and most uses of this (initially) French-language hashtag were not from French accounts. Leone remarks: “This very simple sentence was rhetorically strong because it was based on empty deictic positions . . . : an ‘I’ identifying with Charlie; a time coinciding with the enunciation of the sentence itself; no indication of space. As a consequence, everyone in the world could appropriate this ‘I,’ inhabit the time of its enunciation, and transport its content to whatever latitude” (Leone 2015, 659).

Immediately following the appearance of this hashtag, another appeared—#JeNeSuisPasCharlie (I am not Charlie), although in much smaller numbers (just over seventy-four thousand in the first few days). Later that year, Willem, one of the cartoonists employed at the magazine, declared: “We vomit on those who suddenly declared that they were our friends” (Le Point 2015).

From these brief descriptions, it is possible to see similarities and differences in these two examples of the use of shifters relating to the way they hide or make visible the doubling or division they involve, as well as to the recursive mise en abyme of pronouns and nouns they introduce. In the first example, Not in Our Name both mobilizes and mutes the possibilities afforded by shifters as tokens of inference: the pronoun our—and its potential to be a shifter—is subsumed by its use as part of the name of an organization. In this cognitive assemblage, Not in Our Name symbolically individuates—names—a collective entity. Additionally, in this use, this collective entity comprises individuals whose membership is indicated by their signatures, a use of names to indicate a unique individual whose persistent existence across time and space is conventionally held to be independent of any specific aspect of context in which the signature is used. The figure of speech that is composed here, we may infer, is a collective entity composed of many unique Is whose association as a collective entity is formal rather than substantive; both the collective entity and the singular individuals who comprise the collective entity are context independent, and their existences are independent of each other. Their coming together is an entirely formal or symbolic matter. In short, the layering of nouns and pronouns reduces the inferential (un)certainties of shifting in the name of an authenticity of identification that operates independently of context, or perhaps better, renders context irrelevant.

However, focusing on the role of the shifter as part of this cognitive assemblage allows us to see that the inferential logic involved here relies upon an ellipsis or short-circuiting.[2] The names of individuals that are the basis on which Not in Our Name functions as the name of a collective entity comprising distinct individuals are not in fact the individual entities’ “own” names but rather, as signatures, are a use of names that “own” the individuals. It is only the political and legal authority of the state—including the maintenance of an apparatus of naming, including registers of birth and death, as well as laws of forgery and impersonation—that allows the division or splitting in collective and individual entities indicated by the shifter to be sutured and their name(s) to be recognized—as a layered, noncoincidental coincidence—as theirs, giving legitimacy to their speech.

In other uses of this phrase, however, such as when “Not in our name” or “Not in my name” appear as words on a placard held by a person who is not further identified by a signature (although of course they may be uniquely identified in other ways by people who come into physical proximity with them, or by remote surveillance technologies), the symbolic register of names held by the state is much less significant. In the context of a political demonstration comprising many persons coming together in an assembly, as one person after another holds the placard, the specific person to which my refers shifts. While relying on the symbolic convention that the person holding a placard agrees with the meaning of the statement on the placard, the subject of the statement is not given a unique, fixed identity (and prior and future existence) by reference to a proper name (proper is used here in the sense of both property and propriety). As part of this cognitive assemblage, the shifter indicates another figure of speech: a generic subject, simultaneously—but only contingently—singular and collective.

The shifter in “Not in my name”—if inscribed on a placard that moves from one person to another—references a singular individual-among-other-singular-individuals, all of whom, if or when they carry the placard, are individuated, not in their uniqueness but in equivalence. As the placard moves from person to person, my name has the same function or standing as your name; in each case, the meaning of the words on the placard is not tied to the identification of you or me as a unique (context-independent) individual but to our indication (a pointing out) as a member of a collective of one-among-other-ones. At the same time, while it is possible to infer—if we understand the symbolic nature of political demonstrations—that one of the intended addressees is the government (in part, perhaps, because of some other aspects of the context of use, such as the route of the march that the placard holders follow), we can also infer that the individual indicated is also addressing other individuals, who by their copresence can point to and be pointed out to each other. Making a shared context to mitigate the (un)certainty of inference is one of the ways in which the solidarity of this political collective or figure of speech is given substance as well as form.

Like the we that is the subject of Not in Our Name, the shifter in the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie involves a doubling. In this case, however, the subject’s double character is made visible for all—or many—to see—that is, the distinction between the I of the enunciation (the user of the Twitter account) and the I of the statement is immediately problematized by the claim that the I is “Charlie.” While Charlie is a proper name, it is not functioning properly in the senses identified above. The shifter I of “I am Charlie,” we may infer, if we are aware of the events of the attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo, is a shortening of the magazine name, the first part of which refers, more and less respectfully, to both the cartoon character Charlie Brown and Charles de Gaulle (with the second part, Hebdo, short for hebdomadaire—weekly). However, we may also infer that the subject of “I am Charlie” is not a member of the magazine’s editorial team or staff. Indeed, that the subject who says “I am Charlie” is not to be identified as a member of Charlie Hebdo the magazine is, so we gather (as we assemble), the point of this pointing. Indeed, as we assemble, we are not surprised to find that the visibility of the split between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement elicits a negative response from others or that the most common form this negative takes is not “No, you are not Charlie” (although this seems to have been the response of Willem) but “I am not Charlie.” Indeed, it is not a negation but a counter- or antagonistic claim formulated to make use of the same doubling or split—between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement.

The form of this response can perhaps be explained by considering how the distributive informational infrastructure in which the subjects and addressees of both utterances—“I am Charlie” and “I am not Charlie”—are configured. In both instances the subjects are Twitter account holders; in both instances, addressees (followers) are also account holders (although they may not be natural persons). Their relation to one another is determined by the platform, which, in the case of Twitter, while enabling reciprocity between subject and addressee, also—through the facility of retweeting—enhances forms of amplification. In both instances the split or division between referent and referee that is inevitable in the use of a pronoun as a shifter is put into an open-ended distribution, and this distribution is one in which the (non)coincidental indeterminacy of the relation between subject and addressee is compounded.

In this assemblage, then, the relation between the singular and the collective is not configured as either outside of time or merely momentary but is continually being remade by the platform in which it moves: the figure of speech is not composed as a collective entity of unique, independent ones, or of one-among-other-ones, but as a moving (exchange) ratio (Rabinow 2007) of more-and-less-than-ones in which authenticity, belief, doubt, and speculation are the always contingent (though platform orchestrated) outcome of a serial calibration of signal and noise, in(ter)ference, and (un)certainty across contexts. This figure of speech allows for ignorance (at least as to identity) while amplifying the possibilities of conjecture, as was evident in, for example, the debates that took place as to whether the use of the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasCharlie was an example of the “hypocrisy and shared misunderstanding of what were sometimes called Anglo-Saxons” (Robcis 2015) or a criticism of French republicanism’s blindness to structural racism. As such, it points to both the limits and the possibilities of a non-symbolic or non-representational politics.

Conclusion

To conclude this brief exegesis, the aim of this analysis has been to show how, in the activity of indexing, data may become tokens—or spatiotemporal particulars—of complex infrastructures of inferential (un)certainty, circulating in and helping constitute constantly changing causal milieus. It further sought to show that the characteristics of this (un)certainty are linked to the myriad properties of the shifter as a sign or shifting as a process of signification: the referent or subject shifting in relations of preposition; the doubling or division of the subject; the addressee shifting in relations of preposition; and the absence of any requirement to specify the addressee at all. The final aim was to show how the inferential (un)certainty introduced by the activity of indexing—in particular, shifters—in our new informational infrastructures has the capacity to inaugurate figures of speech, specifically political personae with novel capacities for speech, and transform epistemological and affective criteria of verification.

Notes

1. This account focuses on the use of the hashtag on Twitter; hashtags are also widely used on other social media platforms, including Facebook.

2. The political significance of the uneven implementation of the formal rights associated with naming are made visible in campaigns such as #SayHerName.

References

Active Change Foundation. n.d. “Not in my name.” Accessed 2017. http://isisnotinmyname.com/.

Amoore, L., and V. Piotukh. 2015. “Life beyond big data: Governing with little analytics.” Economy and Society 44 (3): 341–366.

Benveniste, E. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by M. E. Meek. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.

Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hayles, N. K. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hulswit, M. 2002. From Cause to Causation: A Peircean View. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.

Leone, M. 2015. “To be or not to be Charlie Hebdo: Ritual patterns of opinion formation in the social networks.” Social Semiotics 25 (5): 656–680.

Le Point. 2015. “Willem: ‘Nous vomissons sur ceux qui, subitement, disent être nos amis.’” Le Point, October 1, 2015. https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/willem-vomit-sur-ceux-qui-subitement-disent-etre-nos-amis-10-01-2015-1895408_23.php.

Rabinow, P. 2007. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Robcis, C. 2015. “The limits of republicanism.” Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-republicanism-racism/.

50

Sorting

David Lyon

Social sorting is a key concept in surveillance studies. It refers to the ways in which surveillance practices cluster people in social categories so they can be treated as members of those groups. While this may have beneficial effects, it inevitably also has negative ones. The more surveillance is digitized and data dependent, the more acutely the effects of social sorting are felt and the more vulnerable certain groups become. This is particularly so for those caught in “intersectional” categories, such as those associated with race-and-class-and-gender.

The sorts of vulnerabilities associated with surveillance as social sorting are magnified by dependence on algorithms and on the practices known as data analytics, which engage new forms of data capture and data processing. They are also magnified, and gain new features, through the development of social media and self-tracking devices that facilitate new forms of collaborative surveillance: voluntary, lateral, and self-surveillance. This is so because the data on which assessments are made are generated largely through constant use of social media and self-tracking.

Today, globally, citizens are subject to the power of corporations—especially Internet companies—as well as to the state, plus of course to the two working in conjunction with each other, as the Snowden disclosures have been demonstrating since 2013. This makes itself felt in many ways. There is at least a dim understanding of how this happens, through knowledge of how Internet companies treat their users, consumers, and employees or through a sense expressed among many that there is no need to resist because we ourselves choose to communicate online and knowingly leave a data trail.

In what follows, old and new forms of social sorting are contrasted. The data regimes are different, and the new forms deepen already existing vulnerabilities. Everyone is at risk in a sense, but certain groups experience both cumulative and cascading forms of disadvantage. Big data practices offer both force and flexibility to their users. However, to assume the story ends there is to forget that the new data regimes merely describe the operator perspective, without examining how big data practices are experienced by subjects (Lyon 2018).

If one explores how so-called data subjects experience this newer kind of surveillance, the concern is often not with the old surveillance and privacy issues, even though researchers continue to probe such questions. Privacy, though important, can be limiting, especially when many users think of it as something between them and their friends and acquaintances, rather than a question of what corporations and governments do with their data. However, if one does not start with surveillance and privacy, other layers of awareness appear, such as concerns about fairness. How far can this be translated into “actionable” surveillance imaginaries or new surveillance practices among data subjects?

Surveillance as Social Sorting: Old and New

Surveillance practices, especially from the 1970s onward, offered increasingly automated means of distinguishing between different categories, such that different groups could be treated differently. This practice, traceable to the earliest forms of bureaucratic organization, in itself is unexceptional and may of course be used to counteract social vulnerabilities. But in the research that grew around the turn of the twenty-first century, plenty of evidence was offered for the opposite socially negative effect (Gandy 1993; Lyon 2003, 2007; Eubanks 2017).

The basic argument was that while classification is basic to human life and also to modern science, in the later twentieth century it became a widespread means of making policy and marketing decisions. Under newly developing actuarial approaches to matters such as policing, these often produced results rightly described as inequity and injustice. Computing technologies were enthusiastically utilized for data gathering, data mining, and data analysis. They used methods spanning previously different spheres to enhance opportunity maximization and risk management.

Thus, in the corporate sphere of, say, insurance, people were classified in terms of residence and sociodemographic criteria, socially sorted such that they paid premiums unrelated to other, arguably relevant, criteria. In law enforcement, the actuarial model encouraged the use of techniques for identifying, managing, and classifying groups based on levels of perceived dangerousness. In other words, social sorting by risk assessment rather than credible evidence of criminality became a leading practice.

This was accomplished with simulation and modeling practices depending on networked, searchable databases and were future rather than past oriented. Surveillant assemblages (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) that appeared to be very fluid and mutable had some common characteristics, prominent among which was the desire to classify, to socially sort populations for a variety of purposes. This works nicely with Foucault’s emphasis on biopower (Ceyhan 2012). But in the concrete circumstances of daily life, social sorting had—and has—impacts for better or for worse on life chances and choices.

In the twenty-first century, social sorting of these kinds persists. The continuity between the old- and new-style social sorting is this: surveillance offers the means of distinguishing between different categories so that different groups are treated differently. However, today’s social sorting displays some differences from the earlier kinds. It is more collaborative, depends on multiple data sources, and uses algorithms and analytics to produce its effects, especially in the area of scoring. It also depends on opportunistic data gathering without a necessarily prior purpose.

Just as big data represents a change of scale that may be viewed as a qualitative as well as quantitative shift, so the social sorting changes shape in some important ways. What makes the difference, arguably, is the increased use of arcane algorithms (Pasquale 2015), the increasingly diverse data sources on which sorting is based (Kitchin 2014), and the participatory or collaborative nature of the provision and capture of data (Andrejevic 2013).

Simple forms of negative discrimination occur, for example, when employers check on potential job candidates. For instance, in the US, name searches using Google AdSearch and the Reuters website produce a much higher proportion of “black” than “white” names linked to ads that suggest an arrest has occurred. An apparently dubious past is more associated with “black” than with “white” names. This is despite the fact that algorithms could be developed precisely to counteract such disproportionate racialized suggestions of criminal pasts (Sweeney 2013).

Sorting algorithms may also affect actual hiring decisions. Employers use algorithms for data analysis: their construction is critical to the likely impacts of the system. For example, hiring strategies using algorithms can have disparate effects, either unintentional or deliberate (Barocas and Selbst 2016). Data sets are far from neutral; they are built on years of racist, misogynist, and other prejudiced ideas. And in each case, they are hard to correct. But Barocas and Selbst (2016) conclude that there should be a duty of care on the part of employers to try to minimize known problems. Forms of positive discrimination could help.

For the past few years, an awareness has been growing that big data may contribute to worsened disadvantage. The Podesta Report, issued under President Obama in the US in 2014, suggested that “big data analytics have the potential to eclipse longstanding civil rights protections in how personal information is used in housing, credit, employment, health, education, and the marketplace” (Podesta et al. 2014). However, the report does not comment on the data mining that enables this to occur and that currently lacks legal sanction (Barocas and Selbst 2016).

Of course, algorithms are coded and implemented by humans, which in principle may infuse them with subjectivity at any point. Data fed into them are often based on existing criminal histories—which include the human bias that these algorithms seek to remove. Algorithms are marketed as neutral, so their bias is masked as impartiality. Claims to objectivity should be treated critically to consider the implications for the already overpoliced and disadvantaged groups these programs claim to protect (see also Gillespie 2014; Striphas 2015).

As algorithms become increasingly ubiquitous, the consequences of what they produce shape and govern the way we move through the world. They sort us and make assumptions about who we are and how we will act, subsequently determining our opportunities. If, as Haggerty and Ericson (2000) suggest, they create digital data doubles that lack the context and nuance to truly represent us, then without proper precautions policing algorithms stand to determine our social standing and legal realities.

Discrimination still occurs as an aspect of surveillance, much like the social sorting observed from the 1990s. Systems not discussed here, such as predictive policing, also create further vulnerabilities. It is vital to examine these carefully as the standard bearers for other potential uses within older categories of gender, race, and class and also in intersectional contexts. Durable differences live on (Tilly 1999). But opportunities for resistant action could also be enhanced. This is already happening in some corporate and government contexts (where data sharing may also amplify discrimination).

Awareness and Fairness

A key aspect of big data surveillance today is that it depends heavily on access to data originating with social media. That is, while police and intelligence services have access, normally under warrant, to social media accounts, the bulk of big data surveillance, primarily conducted by corporations, is informed by communication and transaction metadata. For advertising purposes in particular, many social media users are targeted with information about specific goods and services that relate to recent sales or signs of interest or to the interests of fellow users with whom they may have some connection.

However, such users are not innocent in these developments. There is evidence that many are aware of how data originating with them are used to try to solicit further business or to retain their loyalty to the platform in question. At a broadly cultural level, surveillance imaginaries and practices are also more volatile, fluid, and mutable, although informed through awareness of and involvement in data production and dissemination.

Some users are, of course, aware of how they are involved—for example, through self-tracking. The so-called quantified self is all too aware of generating data, even though it is unlikely that such users are aware of the extent of data sharing with third parties. But involvement also occurs in both voluntary and lateral ways with social media in general. Users may not be in control of the archive, and although corporations control the flows and, in a sense, the futures of those users, their control is far from complete. For one thing, their algorithms are not perfect, and for another, the very nature of user involvement is performative. This means that the collaborative or participatory dimension also affects end user awareness and the potential for looping effects and alternative outcomes.

Thus, while anxiety may be generated by some aspects of involvement in surveillance, whether at security in the airport or in engaging with self-tracking, or even in social media use, these kinds of vulnerability are circumscribed. One constructive way of thinking about this is in terms of potential exposure—even though it is by definition ambivalent. As Ball (2009, 641) says, “The fact that individuals sometimes appear to do little to counter surveillance does not mean that surveillance means nothing to them.”

The sorts of issues raised by these kinds of vulnerabilities are real enough but do not necessarily prompt the language of surveillance and privacy. As with other kinds of surveillance experience, users of social media and devotees of self-tracking may use different language from that of surveillance or privacy. But this does not mean they have no language for it. One term that appears to have some traction is fairness.

Without mentioning surveillance or privacy to their respondents, Kennedy, Elgesem, and Miguel (2015) found that age, nationality, occupation, social media use, and prior knowledge of social media can all make a difference in how these are perceived by users and what they might do about them. They frequently discussed what is fair or not within new data practices and what might be done to mitigate perceived unfairness. Also, platform practices and user expectations often differ, producing an enhanced sense among users of what a fairer way of operating might be. Concerns for contextual integrity, well-being, social justice, and fairness could yet make a difference.

Thus, while surveillance may still facilitate social sorting, now with the kinds of added strength and dexterity that characterize even sober understandings of big data, its collaborative, cocreative aspects help create new openings for negotiation. While big data may well have some socially negative impacts, data also generate politics and interests in rights (Isin, Ruppert, and Bigo 2017). After all, data are always part of some purpose or some project, either governmental or commercial. Corporations and government agencies use big data to pursue their goals, which can be traced.

Meanwhile, people take up different positions relative to technologies and data, and this contributes to the subject formations they fill. At the same time, feedback, as with the so-called Quantified Self movement, leads to the reshaping of those positions, defining them in fresh but fluid ways. There is constant modulation, which affects the forms of control implicit in the original formulation of the data. At the same time, such subjects may also be rights-claiming citizens, producing yet new possibilities. Data become crucial to everyday life, understanding, and engagement with the world, and as data questions arise—as with Facebook and “fake news”—questions may be asked.

The world of social sorting still affects all kinds of surveillance, not only matters such as self-tracking and social media use, where to an extent users engage with the data world itself. Social sorting is also prominent in airport security, where the name flag and no fly relate to names generated through data analytics. The challenge is that the life of data and the world of everyday experience increasingly part company, despite the ways that the former influences the latter.

Shoshana Zuboff’s (2015, 2019) work on surveillance capitalism is one way to show how connections may be made. As far as Google is concerned, scoring and sorting are baked into the business model, creating disparities and disadvantages from the outset. But this Internet company, like others, does not seem to care. At a very basic level, the model is revealed as indifference to users, consumers, and employees. Will this prompt wider resistance?

The issue explored here is one of data-driven disadvantage via surveillant social sorting. These enable the creation and perpetuation of social divisions and durable difference. So-called big data is enhancing corporate and governmental means of perpetuating such divisions, fluidly but consequentially. It is highly unlikely that data analysts understand the effects of enhanced social sorting. But as the effects are felt in embodied experience, new questions and new resistance may be generated.

References

Andrejevic, Mark. 2013. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. London: Routledge.

Ball, Kirstie. 2009. “Exposure: Exploring the subject of surveillance.” Information, Communication and Society 12 (5): 639–657.

Barocas, Solon, and Andrew Selbst. 2016. “Big data’s disparate impact.” California Law Review 104:671–732.

Ceyhan, Ayse. 2012. “Biopower.” In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty, and David Lyon, 38–45. London: Routledge.

Eubanks, Virginia. 2017. Automating Inequality. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Gandy, Oscar. 1993. The Panoptic Sort. Boulder: Westview Press.

Gillespie, Tarleton. 2014. “The relevance of algorithms.” In Media Technologies, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, 167–194. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Haggerty, Kevin, and Richard Ericson. 2000. “The surveillant assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 54 (2): 605–622.

Isin, Engin, Evelyn Ruppert, and Didier Bigo. 2017. “Data politics.” Big Data and Society 4 (2): 1–7.

Kennedy, Helen, Dag Elgesem, and Cristina Miguel. 2015. “On fairness: User perspectives on social media data mining.” Convergence 23 (3): 270–288.

Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution. London: Sage.

Lyon, David, ed. 2003. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. London: Routledge.

Lyon, David. 2007. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lyon, David. 2018. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Pasquale, Frank. 2015. The Black Box Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Podesta, John, Penny Pritzker, Ernest J. Moniz, John Holdren, and Jeffrey Zients. 2014. Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values. Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President. https://perma.cc/ZXB4-SDL9.

Striphas, Ted. 2015. “Algorithmic culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 395–412.

Sweeney, Latanya. 2013. Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.6822.pdf.

Tilly, Charles. 1999. Durable Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2015. “Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of information civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30:75–89.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Profile Books.

51

Stand-In

Olga Goriunova

A stand-in is a substitute for something important: dummy text on a page stands in for content, and a mannequin in a crash test stands in for a human. A calculated average in statistics is used to stand in for all people, and a limited data set, such as a biometric template, stands in for the individual, promising the certainty of identification. A version of a stand-in—a proxy—is central to understanding the world in terms of data.

Stand-ins range from throwaway things, empty of meaning, to sentimental artifacts with cult status. They can be manufactured using statistical conventions that benefit one group of people at the expense of another. Such stand-ins lay a claim to universality and neutrality while being part of the history of domination and oppression. Stand-ins can be objects or operations, where a part stands in for the whole in biometric identification, or a foundation of the systematic, structuring capacities of big data. In uncertain archives, stand-ins augment and acquire new standing, shifting the balance of factual and fictional in data analytics.

This chapter is a journey through different kinds of stand-ins and their poetics, politics, and operational prominence. It starts with text and content stand-ins in the practices of printworkers and programmers and examines some of the roles stand-ins might play in the craft (Sennett 2009) of printing and coding. It then briefly considers stand-ins as stupid errors before moving to an examination of stand-ins’ claims to universality, with some of the deadly consequences described in the section on the average man. The roles of stand-ins in data correlation and attribution are further presented in the section on biometrics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a number of artworks that capture the changing character of stand-ins today.

From Lorem Ipsum to Hello, World: Content Stand-Ins and Craftspeople

Lorem ipsum—the beginning two words of a passage in Latin—is the default model text used in the printing industry, it is claimed, since the 1500s. This text dummy has successfully migrated from the printing press to desktop publishing software. The reason for using lorem ipsum is to test a usual distribution of letters without distracting the designer with the meaning of the words, and yet it carries meaning. It is quite difficult to produce random or absurd content. Lorem ipsum is a scrambled excerpt from Cicero, with variations produced over time, many for fun. Another placeholder text, Li Europan lingues, is written in the international auxiliary language Occidental, with a bit of Esperanto and variations on the name of the person that introduced it into wide use in 1998. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is yet another fill-in text, used to test typefaces because it contains all the letters of the English alphabet. All these examples are text artifacts that form part of the cultures and practices of printing, laying out, and designing text. As part of the craft of text, they have folkloristic value. Their use is a confirmation and continuation of a shared cultural practice that is easily mythologized. As shared culture, these folklore artifacts are used for learning and practicing skills and for affirming a certain version of practice—and with it, reality—by rooting it in a tradition through repetition and occasional innovation.

Using stand-ins steeped in the tradition of a practice signals belonging to a community of practitioners: such a stand-in is a claim to knowledge of a certain craft. Stand-ins as initiation mechanisms are very pronounced in the rich practices of programming. “Hello, world” is one such example: it is the first test program, run to output “hello, world,” when someone learns a programming language or tests a new system. Apparently, the tradition of making a program execute “hello, world” as a test message goes back to the example program in the seminal manual The C Programming Language. It made its way there from a 1974 Bell Labs internal publication, Programming in C: A Tutorial, written by Brian Kernighan, who had also included it in his 1972 Tutorial Introduction to the Language B. For many, the first lesson in html was <html> <body> Hello, world! </body> </html>. The discourse, folklore, traditions, and humor of programmers have dedicated publications (such as Jargon File, n.d.), researchers, and fans. Here, to name a fictional character Shrdlu (from etaoin shrdlu, the equivalent of QWERTY on type-casting machine keyboards) nods to a shared history, signals belonging, and calls upon a practice. The repetitive nature of such seemingly unchanging stand-ins, something that at first may seem banal, hides a poetics of practice.

The almost ritualistic use of dummy content in all of the above-listed examples is poetic in the primary sense of the word: it enchants the world, giving an aesthetic dimension to the drudgery of testing, the repetitiveness of tasks, or the difficulty of working. Where stand-ins are used as naming conventions for certain problems, they act as condensed pieces of knowledge in a particular practice. The functional character of a stand-in is augmented to accommodate poetics—that is, investment in the creation and maintenance of a practice and the renewal of self as a craftsperson, a coder, or a geek (Fuller 2017). To play with a doll as a stand-in for a baby is one of the first acts of imagination. Such is the character of the stand-in: not simply a replacement of the actual thing with something empty but a poetic act, whose poesis is like a spell cast to create something new through repetition of the same.

Update

But let’s not get too excited. Stand-ins can also be boring. Sometimes stand-ins are only placeholders, and erroneous at that. The National Westminster Bank recently sent a printed booklet to its customers’ home addresses with “???0.0%” printed in red instead of the current interest rate. Stand-ins make their way into the final form of many contemporary information products. University handbooks may contain “insert here” or “update” in the final published versions. Important documents bear traces of editing, question marks, and tracked changes—stand-ins for professional secretarial support.

In a data-intensive culture, the high volume of data entry and the constant need to update mean that stand-ins become a “normal,” although often erroneous and annoying, type of content. These stand-ins signal disorganization, bad management, and data workers’—that is, nearly everyone’s—exhaustion. Data entry imposes stupefaction on knowledge workers who are supposed to be creative and able to take initiative and work independently. Instead, they have to act as plug-ins into ludicrous content management systems and various control and optimization systems that manufacture them in their own image (Fuller and Goffey 2012).

Universality of Stand-Ins

Stand-ins, however, are not only either meaningful or erroneous or both; they can also be politically charged, and they shape reality. Stand-ins are often meant to be universal. This is the universalism of the European project of Reason. It is quite easy to see how the dummy texts of printing carry on the history of the Enlightenment and thus a European legacy: the use of Latin as the language of science, the development of the printing press, secularization, and the Scientific Revolution. The universalism of stand-ins is an undertone of assumed universality in the notions of man, ownership, cultivation, and a myriad others, part of the project of Reason, carried around the world and applied with various forms of colonial power. Feminist, critical race, disability, and critical posthumanities studies problematize such universality as a project of exclusion and domination. “The Jargon File” centers firmly on the US, with the East Coast and Silicon Valley versions of capitalism set to dominate the world today. Stand-ins thus carry and normalize colonial ambition and military domination under the guise of global capitalism. They may denigrate women, reinforce gender stereotypes, and reproduce racism. The examples of these are multiple and prolific, with no end in sight. Photographs of white, conventionally pretty women have been used as standard test images—stand-ins for all images—for photo printing, scan calibration, and image processing since the 1940s. Kodak’s “Shirley cards,” featuring first a porcelain-skinned brunette called Shirley who had once worked for Kodak and then a variety of nameless white women, were used around the world to test photo-printing quality. If Shirley looked good, everyone would (Roth 2009; see also Menkman 2017). “Lena” is the standard test image in image-processing software used since 1973. It is a cropped photograph of a Swedish model posing for Playboy. This stand-in not only exhibits race bias but, standing in for all women, posits them as sexualized objects above all. Chemistry for film stocks was historically favorable to lighter skin, making the rendering of darker skin problematic. In 2013 an exhibition on race in early color photography explored the tailoring of the filmic apparatus toward skin with higher reflectivity; here, a range of stand-in photographs and film-testing images are leftover evidence of race bias in the history of imaging technology (Broomberg and Chanarin 2013).

Today, the stand-in changes its constitution: it is no longer a piece of text or a standard image; instead, conceptual stand-ins are formed through, for instance, the process of training neural networks on specifically constructed data sets. Such stand-ins are more akin to generalized abstracted positions that everyone can be slotted into, although they are still modeled on white faces and male voices and hands. Such stand-ins are harder to put a finger on, and their generation requires more explanation, but the results of their work can be as clearly observed as before. In 2009 an HP face-tracking webcam could not follow a Black person (CNN 2009). In 2010 Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing camera did not work so well with dark-skinned users (PCWorld 2010). In 2015 Google Photos classified Black men as gorillas (a “feature” Google fixed by removing “gorilla” from its set of image labels; Simonite 2018). Joy Buolamwini (2016), a Black researcher, had to wear a white mask to test her own face recognition software.

These stand-ins for humanity are diffused, abstract. They are newly generated norms, resulting first from the application of specifically constructed computational models that might, for instance, weigh facial features in a way that excludes certain faces; second, from training data sets that are not diverse; and third, from the general reuse of code and annotated data that are racially biased.[1]

Reference Man

Stand-ins manufactured through mathematical procedures did not only appear with the rise of data analytics; they are core to modern mathematics. Variables themselves could be seen as stand-ins. The variable, a core component of modern calculus, allows sufficient abstraction from the known. Variables denote relationships between known objects so that the relationships themselves may become objects at the next higher level of analysis. The use of variables indicates a departure from the direct correspondence between mathematics and the physical world. Here, a stand-in can be something that allows abstraction of different kinds. One such abstraction is both process and result: the average man—reference man—of statistics.

Stand-ins constructed through the operations of statistics, predecessors of the models of data analytics, are still active today, in manufacturing, the automobile industry, pharmaceuticals, and even astronautics. The recent book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (2019) methodically documents how objects standing in for all humans, without fail, represent only a proportion of the population. It turns out that the stab vests that female police officers often wear are not suited to female bodies; other protective equipment does not fit women either (TUC 2017). Dummies for crash tests are manufactured to represent a Caucasian male twenty-five to thirty years old and, on average, 177 cm tall and 76 kg in weight. It turns out that the average woman is shorter, lighter, and sits further forward in the driver’s seat. Back seats also throw women forward faster than men. The safety features of cars modeled on the reference man work less efficiently for women drivers. Women drivers are 47 percent more at risk of serious injury and 71 percent more at risk of moderate injury (Bose, Gomez, and Crandall 2011). Perez (2019) piles example upon example. The standard office temperature was calculated around the metabolism of an average resting male, overestimating the female metabolic rate by 35 percent and making offices five degrees too cold for women (Kingma and van Marken Lichtenbelt 2015). Radiation exposure in adulthood has a different effect on women compared with men: women are 50 percent more likely to die of radiation-related cancer. It is even more dramatic in cases of childhood exposure: girls are ten times more likely to develop cancer later in life (see Olson 2017). In all these examples, the stand-in is no longer an object but a statistical average arrived at through a set of mathematical procedures. And it is not neutral.

Biometric Data Tropes

The stand-in as a calculation of the reference model expression is further augmented for the operations of data analytics. The premise of some of the core operations of identification, of data attribution, and indeed of some of the key functionality of data analytics in general is that a part can stand in for the whole. Generally, a metonym—a poetic trope—is a language in which a part represents the whole or an element stands in for systematic quality—for instance, “lend me your ears.” Biometric identification is one example in which the vein structure of the hand, or a gait pattern, or the blood vessel structure of the retina—a part of the body—stands in for the whole person, identified on the basis of the body principle—that is, of being pinned to one unchangeable, readable body that guarantees the truth of identification (Magnet 2011). Whereas biometric identification succeeds in that people are successfully constructed in terms of demographic attributes—such as having a name, citizenship, no right to cross a certain border—it is still a somewhat poetic, metonymic operation, and in this it is fictional, despite appearing to be wholly factual. An element—the geometry of the face—is captured in a sample or a number of samples, from which a template is generated. Future samples are then compared with this template. A sample is also compared with samples of other people (so-called attacker data) and the comparison weighed according to the probable distribution of certain characteristics in the given section of the population. Both comparisons need to pass a match rate (not 100 percent). Here, first, a part stands in for the whole body; second, it stands in for the person as a complexity of lived experience; third, the operation of standing in, itself subject to adjustment and fine tuning, is tested in relation to all bodies, all people. Such is the poetics of biometrics: metonymic, correlative, probabilistic (Goriunova 2019).

Stand-In Infrastructures in Art

Finally, digital art is fascinated by stand-ins as objects, operations, and logics of the data age. The speculative digital art exhibition All I Know Is What’s on the Internet, curated by Katrina Sluis at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2018, exhibited a number of artworks that could be seen as creations of critical stand-ins for the current data culture. In ScanOps by Andrew Norman Wilson (2012–), a tip of a finger scanned by mistake, or a scrambled page, stands in for the immense and underpaid human effort behind book digitization for Google Books. Humans are turned into hands or faces (of Google cars’ drivers) captured by chance in Google Street View and collected in The Driver and the Cameras by Emilio Vavarella (2012). Constant Dullaart (2018), in his project Brigading_Conceit, exhibits a small part of his collection (which runs to thousands) of SIM cards used to register followers on social media. A SIM card, in this case a valuable Phone Verified Account, stands in for the person in social media metrics—and can do so with lethal consequences (when used to locate people in drone attacks). Having a SIM card is like having a body, only better, as one can buy ten for £10. A stand-in as abstracted capacity is clear in Stephanie Kneissle and Max Lackner’s (2017) Stop the Algorithm: here, a mechanical apparatus rotating a brush so that it sweeps the screen of a tablet stands in for the gesture of swiping, usually reserved for the human user. In a series of elegant mechanical constructions, they extract clicking, liking, pausing, and other obsessive-compulsive gestures invented by social media and from which value is derived from the human user into an abstract machine. This is an example of stand-in infrastructure: gestural infrastructure of attention. The exhibition title hijacks an infamous statement, replacing its content and context; the exhibition meaningfully stands in for an endless networked proliferation of meaninglessness.

Conclusion

Stand-ins, core to our linguistic capacity and indispensable for safety, are also a medium for a poetics of practice and a means of reenchantment of the world. At the same time, stand-ins can be errors and can exhibit limits to human capacity—and sometimes some humans’ capacity to survive. The use of stand-ins inherited from statistics, together with its biases, is broadened in relation to the saturation of the world with data, in terms of both its operations and the construction of new kinds of agreement concerning the use of stand-ins. One can only speculate as to what kinds of stand-ins artificial intelligence will create and populate the world with. Maybe then we can all have a lie-in while our stand-ins are getting a shoo-in to various sit-ins.

Note

1. Is it possible to fix these without fixing society? What uses will the correct identification of Black faces be put to in a racist society? See Samudzi (2019).

References

Bose, Dipan, Maria Segui-Gomez, and Jeff R. Crandall. 2011. “Vulnerability of female drivers involved in motor vehicle crashes: An analysis of US population at risk.” American Journal of Public Health 101 (12): 2368–2373.

Broomberg, Adam, and Oliver Chanarin. 2013. To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light. Goodman Gallery. http://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/311.

Buolamwini, Joy. 2016. “InCoding—in the beginning.” Medium, May 16, 2016. https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/incoding-in-the-beginning-4e2a5c51a45d.

CNN. 2009. “HP looking into claim webcams can’t see Black people.” December 24, 2009. http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/22/hp.webcams/index.html.

Dullaart, Constant. 2018. Brigading_Conceit. https://constantdullaart.com/□□☁☁☁☠□☁☁☁□□□☁☁□□☠💣□□/.

Fuller, Matthew. 2017. How to Be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software. London: Polity Press.

Fuller, Matthew, and Andrew Goffey. 2012. Evil Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Goriunova, Olga. 2019. “Face abstraction! Biometric identities and authentic subjectivities in the truth practices of data.” Subjectivity 12 (9): 12–26.

Jargon File. n.d. “The jargon file.” Accessed August 14, 2019. http://catb.org/jargon/html/.

Kingma, Boris, and Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt. 2015. “Energy consumption in buildings and female thermal demand.” Nature Climate Change 5: 1054–1056. https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2741.

Kneissle, Stephanie, and Max Lackner. 2017. “Stop the algorithm.” https://stephaniekneissl.com/reset-social-media.

Magnet, Shoshana. 2011. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race and the Technology of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Menkman, Rosa. 2017. “Beyond the white shadows of image processing: Shirley, Lena, Jennifer and the Angel of History.” https://beyondresolution.info/Behind-White-Shadows.

Olson, Mary. 2017. “Females exposed to nuclear radiation are far likelier than men to suffer harm.” PassBlue, July 5, 2017. https://www.passblue.com/2017/07/05/females-exposed-to-nuclear-radiation-are-far-likelier-than-males-to-suffer-harm/.

PCWorld. 2010. “Is Microsoft’s Kinect racist?” November 4, 2010. https://www.pcworld.com/article/209708/Is_Microsoft_Kinect_Racist.html.

Perez, Caroline Criado. 2019. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Vintage.

Roth, Lorna. 2009. “Looking at Shirley, the ultimate norm: Colour balance, image technologies, and cognitive equity.” Canadian Journal of Communication 34 (1): 111–136.

Samudzi, Zoe. 2019. “Bots are terrible at recognizing Black faces. Let’s keep it that way.” Daily Beast, February 8, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/bots-are-terrible-at-recognizing-black-faces-lets-keep-it-that-way.

Sennett, Richard. 2009. The Craftsman. London: Penguin.

Simonite, Tom. 2018. “When it comes to gorillas, Google Photos remains blind.” Wired, January 11, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google-photos-remains-blind/.

TUC (Trades Union Congress). 2017. Personal Protective Equipment and Women. London: TUC. https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/PPEandwomenguidance.pdf.

Vavarella, Emilio. 2012. The Driver and the Cameras. http://emiliovavarella.com/archive/google-trilogy/driver-and-cameras/.

Wilson, Andrew Norman. 2012. ScanOps. http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/ScanOps.html.

52

Supply Chain

Miriam Posner

A company’s supply chain is one of its key competitive advantages. The term, which emerged alongside the spread of globalization in the 1970s, refers to the path goods and materials take from their origins to the consumer. A reliable, efficient supply chain is critical to delivering goods to market at the speed of consumer demand. This imperative has only increased as companies have embraced just-in-time production, in which a manufacturer aims to keep the bare minimum of inventory on hand in order to avoid tying up capital in unsold goods.

As companies search endlessly for the cheapest possible materials and labor, global supply chains have become incredibly complex. A cell phone might feature a lithium-ion battery from one place, an LCD from another, and a chip from a third, to name just a few components. Moreover, the sources of each of these components, and their subsuppliers, might shift with great speed as vendors drop in and out of the chain.

When I began investigating global supply chains several years ago, I wondered how companies could wrangle control over all of this complexity. Lots of research later, I discovered the answer: they do not. One manager at an automobile manufacturer described the conundrum:

A few years ago, our engineers mapped a supply chain of a small assembly [by] tracing it all the way back to the mine. From that exercise, we demonstrated the benefits of supply chain management, and we set out to manage the supply chain as a system. Frankly, we have not been able to do it. The problem was, as soon as we came up with a strategy for managing the chain, the chain changed on us—we got new suppliers and new relationship configurations. It took a lot of effort to map one supply chain, and we could not possibly map it every time something changed. (Quoted in Choi, Dooley, and Rungtusanatham 2001, 352)

Rather than observe and manipulate the supply chain from some kind of data control tower, most companies rely on subcontractors themselves to self-organize. Indeed, a self-organizing supply network is critical to delivering goods at speed and scale. A single tendril of a supply network—say, the route by which raw minerals become lithium-ion batteries—could be hundreds of nodes deep. If one node drops out, its nearest neighbors can simply route around it by substituting another vendor. Were they required to communicate this change to a central management authority, the chain might grind to a halt while they waited for a decision. Instead, supply networks can “self-heal” by keeping other network actors in the dark.

Companies thus dwell permanently in a state of uncertainty with regard to procuring goods—which is arguably their most vital function. The nature of this uncertainty is notably strange, for it is a condition that corporations both despise and depend on. As we will see, modern corporations work ceaselessly to eliminate uncertainty even as they require it in order to operate successfully in what anthropologist Anna Tsing (2009) has called “supply chain capitalism.”

Tactical Uncertainty

For those familiar with global trade, Rana Plaza sums up everything wrong with the system. On the morning of April 24, 2013, the eight-story Rana Plaza building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The building housed five clothing factories, in which 1,134 garment workers perished: one of the largest structural failures in human history. The factories’ overseers were well aware of the building’s precariousness, as was the building’s owner. A day earlier, the building’s occupants had been evacuated after an engineer found large cracks in the structure. But factory owners, desperate to meet the quotas demanded by retailers, nevertheless ordered garment workers to return to work the next day, where they were instructed to sew apparel for a slew of American and European retailers, including Walmart, Benetton, the Children’s Place, and Mango (Ahmed and Lakhani 2013; Manik and Yardley 2018; Stillman 2013).

Who gets the blame for a hideous tragedy like Rana Plaza? Certainly, the factories’ overseers were unforgivably irresponsible. But then again, they likely would not have made the same decisions had they not been under intense pressure to produce garments on time and for minimal cost for the clothing companies. And yet all of these companies themselves professed ignorance, each retailer insisting it had no idea that any of its garments were being supplied by the factories located in Rana Plaza.

Rana Plaza was not the only time we heard these claims of innocence-via-ignorance from big corporations. In Malaysia, Samsung and Panasonic had no idea Nepalese migrants were forced to labor under outrageous conditions (Pattisson 2016). Nestlé was appalled when researchers found child slaves within its cocoa supply chain (Furneaux 2018). Apple had no inkling that workers were handling noxious chemicals with no safety equipment (Seiko 2018). Hugo Boss was shocked to discover that supervisors were holding workers captive in Indian mills (Bengtsen 2018). Once you start noticing, the pattern becomes clear: time and again, a horrifying abuse of labor is “uncovered,” and time and again, a large firm is absolutely aghast.

Are these companies lying? Anything is possible, but there is a simpler, and more likely, explanation for their insisting they were clueless about labor abuse in their supply chains: they are telling the truth. It is entirely possible to develop a lightning-quick, astoundingly efficient supply chain without having any notion of the labor it comprises. On the contrary, this ignorance is actually a precondition for the delivery times to which we have grown accustomed.[1] Unlikely as it seems, most companies have no idea how their products get produced.

Logistics (the term is often used interchangeably with supply chain management [SCM]) has always been, and still is, intimately tied with military activity, as Deborah Cowen (2014) has demonstrated. Logistics as a field began in earnest following World War II, when military veterans applied to business the lessons they had learned about transporting wartime matériel. The name logistics is in fact a military export to the private sector, just as many corporate logistics experts started their careers in the military (Bonacich and Hardie 2006).

The 1943 propaganda film Troop Train, produced by the US Office of War Information, contains many of the elements that would continue to define rhetoric about logistics throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the “nerve center” of a troop transfer operation, military personnel busily make notes and phone calls before a wall painted with a map of the US rail system. (It looks like nothing so much as a giant semiconductor.) A sequence of phone calls and flipped switches and a battalion of typists create the impression of an information epicenter, from which logistics personnel can monitor the movement of people and goods with seamless speed and accuracy. Troop Train depicts logistics headquarters as a zone of perfect information, where monitors keep tabs on conditions with absolute efficiency. Troop Train’s vision of perfect omniscience continues to lure SCM professionals, who demand ever-larger streams of data. Calls for increased transparency and more information are a hallmark of the field.

And yet even as “nerve centers” attempt to monitor every movement of resources, a countervailing tendency has also characterized supply chains: that of the black box, the zone where information is disavowed in favor of efficiency. Its most visible emblem might be the shipping container, whose modularity allows it to travel the world with unprecedented speed, even as its contents remain shrouded in interchangeability. It, too, is a wartime invention, deployed in quantity for the first time to run goods between California and Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War. The shipping container’s main selling point was its modularity: by standardizing the container’s dimensions, shipping companies and manufacturers began to regularize, automate, and impose order on what had been a relatively unpredictable industry (Levinson 2006).

This tension—between the scale and variety of contemporary supply chains and the rigid time lines that business demands—continues to define the logistics industry. Supply chain managers continually demand more information, and supply chain “traceability” is a hot topic within the industry. And yet it is also obvious that supply chains’ ungovernability provides critical cover to companies like those caught up in the Rana Plaza disaster. We are given to understand that the chaos of contractors and subcontractors (a chaos that, it must be said, conjures colonialist images of disorderly life in the Global South) frustrates the best intentions to tame and discipline supply routes.

Algorithmic Uncertainty

Sixty-five years after Troop Train, the information nerve center has reemerged within the interface of SAP SCM, the most widely used SCM software. A sprawling enterprise resource management software suite, SAP offers large companies modules for activities as diverse as human resources and facilities management. Within the SCM module, the Supply Chain Cockpit, the highest-level view of a company’s supply chain, depicts distribution centers, shipping routes, and manufacturing locations, all arrayed on a map, as though they can be monitored from above.

In fact, however, this vision of perfect information has always been a fantasy. The Supply Chain Cockpit is not real time; it is a forecast. Conditions on the ground can easily supersede the vision planners have laid out, and neither the cockpit nor most actors in the supply chain will register the change. This uncertainty permeates SAP SCM software, just as it suffuses large-scale global supply chains. A distinct arrangement of software and data allows supply chain engineers to remain uncertain about the effects of their work, even as they control labor down to the smallest increment. This holds true not only in cases where companies subcontract their labor but also in factories that they themselves control and oversee.

Contemporary supply chain managers begin their work with a forecast of market conditions. Using historical data, information about seasonality and demography, and any other sources they can gather, forecasters generate a prediction of product demand on the scale of six months to a year. They then package this prediction as data and pass it to a supply chain planner (usually a different person or team), who matches product demand with the company’s factories, distribution centers, and labor pool. In contrast to the forecaster, this expert works on the scale of a month or two. He or she then packages this supply plan to yet another person, who works on the scale of increments as small as one minute. This supply chain professional matches the plan with actual worker shifts, existing machinery, and company resources.

Because of this arrangement, no individual in the chain of planning can realistically claim full knowledge of the system in its entirety. The forecast arrives in the planner’s inbox with a sense of inevitability; the planner could not know the basis of the forecast even if she or he wanted to because of the format in which the data arrive and likewise for the instructions transmitted to the factory overseer. Workers’ shifts and production quotas are out of anyone’s hands; their basis is generated too far down the chain for anyone to discern. Like a shipping container itself, these imperatives—critical to people’s work and ability to live—arrive blandly and identically packaged, with no hint of the way stations they encountered on their journey to the worker.

Could a different software suite lead to different outcomes for workers? It might be possible, for example, to track indicators of worker welfare, just as companies track labor productivity. However, it seems to me that the fatal flaw in the supply chain, from workers’ point of view, is the entire system’s intolerance of latency. Any hesitation between stations along the route of product delivery cannot be anything but a vulnerability, in business terms. As David Harvey observed, the system of global capital is likely only to speed up relentlessly until, perhaps, it reaches a breaking point (Harvey 2001, 312–344).

The conjunction of a rigorous control of labor with a relentless sense of uncertainty might seem to be a contradiction. But it might equally be a feature of algorithmic labor: I think of the retail shift worker who is not told her schedule in advance but is ordered to come in precisely when the computer projects a need for her, or the Uber driver who cannot say whether he will earn enough to pay back his car loan but knows he must be exactly where he is summoned, exactly when expected. From this perspective, uncertainty begins to look less like an accident and more like a condition workers have been trained, and ordered, to expect. From the company’s perspective, on the other hand, this combination of uncertainty and precision is an invaluable business strategy. It allows corporations to make exquisitely detailed predictions about market conditions and product supplies while simultaneously disavowing—with total credibility—any knowledge about how and where their products were created. Why build accountability into a system that, from a company’s point of view, is functioning perfectly?

Note

1. As Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (2008) point out, the strategic deployment of ignorance is an established corporate strategy, used, for example, by the tobacco industry to sow doubt among consumers.

References

Ahmed, Saeed, and Leone Lakhani. 2013. “Bangladesh building collapse recovery efforts end, toll at 1,127 dead.” CNN, May 14, 2013. https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/14/world/asia/bangladesh-building-collapse-aftermath/index.html.

Bengtsen, Peter. 2018. “Workers held captive in Indian mills supplying Hugo Boss.” Guardian, January 4, 2018, Global development sec. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/04/workers-held-captive-indian-mills-supplying-hugo-boss.

Bonacich, Edna, and Khaleelah Hardie. 2006. “Wal-Mart and the logistics revolution.” In Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, edited by Nelson Lichtenstein, 163–188. New York: New Press.

Choi, Thomas, Kevin Dooley, and Manus Rungtusanatham. 2001. “Supply networks and complex adaptive systems: Control versus emergence.” Journal of Operations Management 19 (3). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-6963(00)00068-1.

Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Furneaux, Rosa. 2018. “Your Halloween candy’s hidden ingredient: Child slave labor.” Mother Jones (blog), October 31, 2018. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2018/10/halloween-candy-hidden-ingredient-chocolate-child-slave-labor-nestle-mars-cargill/.

Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge.

Levinson, Marc. 2006. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Manik, Julfikar Ali, and Jim Yardley. 2018. “Scores dead in Bangladesh building collapse.” New York Times, October 19, 2018, World sec. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/asia/bangladesh-building-collapse.html.

Pattisson, Pete. 2016. “Samsung and Panasonic accused over supply chain labour abuses in Malaysia.” Guardian, November 21, 2016, Global Development sec. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/nov/21/samsung-panasonic-accused-over-supply-chain-labour-abuses-malaysia.

Proctor, Robert N., and Londa Schiebinger, eds. 2008. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Seiko, Adrienne. 2018. “Why can’t the supply chain get rid of abuse?” Material Handling and Logistics (MHL News), February 22, 2018. https://www.mhlnews.com/labor-management/why-can-t-supply-chain-get-rid-abuse.

Stillman, Sarah. 2013. “Death traps: The Bangladesh garment-factory disaster.” New Yorker, May 1, 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/death-traps-the-bangladesh-garment-factory-disaster.

Tsing, Anna. 2009. “Supply chains and the human condition.” Rethinking Marxism 21 (2): 148–176. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935690902743088.

53

Technoheritage

Nora Al-Badri

Institutional Angst and Online/Off-line Tales

In a time of uncertainty—and I wonder what time was not uncertain—when robot vacuum cleaners smile and spy on their owners, when people deliberately throw themselves in front of self-driving cars, and when companies have branches devoted solely to art and culture, let us begin with a conclusion: a futurity, not a summary of the past as a problem. A new discussion about the originality and truth of data, as well as about material objects from other cultures and their agency, is necessary because the institutional practices of museums and collections all around the Global North are corrupted. Museums today tell fictional stories, often even without realizing it. But they are the museums’ own stories because they control the artifacts, as well as their digital derivations and the means of representation. The museum is a hakawati (from haka: to tell, to relate), a traditional Arab storyteller, who is herself labeled as heritage and ancient. The essence of the hakawati is the way the story is conveyed; how you tell it and bring it to life, with spectacle and fury.

There are more objects on the planet than humans, more machines than humans, and more animals, and yet everything we create is humancentric. Museums and cultural institutions are power structures. They were constructed to display the power of the country and the nation-state, whereby possessing things from all over the world was like possessing the world, in a quite literal way (Baudrillard 1991). One can detect this notion right up to the present day (think of the so-called Humboldt Forum currently in the making in Berlin[1]), mixed in with a great deal of institutional self-preservation. Museums serve an ideological role by separating artifacts from their origins, depriving people of their historical memory, and presenting the history of “Others” from a truly (!) scientific standpoint. There are a million examples of this, from the heated debate around the Greek Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum to the Bamum throne from Cameroon currently held in Berlin. By museum I refer mainly but not exclusively to contemporary encyclopedic institutions, such as the ethnographic, archaeological, and natural history collections that emerged from the nineteenth-century museum, because their logics and mechanisms are still in place.[2]

The dominant concept of universal heritage as a construct of the alleged past in a universal museum is itself colonial. Hence, buzzwords such as shared heritage are duplicitous terms little better than the exploitative sharing economy we all are part of. Institutions cling to their roles as gatekeepers of cultural objects and their data, using proprietary systems that mimic the big-five tech giants—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), which are among the most valuable companies on Earth—with their own methods of control (photography bans, licenses, and more). A significant number of public museums have chosen not to open access to their digitized collections. Yet when these museums are publicly funded institutions, this appears to be a highly questionable practice: Why should cultural data be locked away or behind a paywall? Unsurprisingly, the changing conditions of the digital and its uncertainty have increased institutional angst about losing control and relevance. Losing control means not being able to control the distribution, attribution, (re)presentation, and transformation of the collection single-handedly and thus losing interpretational sovereignty (Deutungshoheit). Control has already been lost once the data are made accessible to thousands online, as the Nefertiti Hack in the Neues Museum proved.[3] To be clear: nowadays, the Wikipedia entry for an object is far more widely read and more significant than any label inside any museum.

The agency of inanimate things can be seen as a part of the subaltern, which comprises more than humans and includes everything and everybody outside the colony and thus outside the dominant narrative. Machine intelligence and interfaces such as chatbots revived from databases are digital embodiments of the human-artifact interaction. Through intelligent, machinic mediation, artifacts are not reduced to their ascertainable materiality or to their social and cultural construction or meaning prescribed by humans (curators and audience) as a mere epiphenomenon to humans. Following this thought, the database can be seen as a political and emancipatory (inanimate) thing that is not bound to global power structures. On the contrary, it can be a means of overcoming them.[4]

The Museum as a Database, or the Database as a Museum?

In times of digitization fever inside the museum, one should ask: Who owns the data? Who generates it? Who rules over the database? Who built its architecture? Like datenkraken,[5] the museum has exclusive access to its collection, and it collects and collects. This data (and object) monopoly is too easily exploited, although this is not a story about corporations (where exploitation is almost normalized nowadays) but about public institutions committing copyfraud—analog as well as digital.

Figure 53.1

Disentangled No. 1, 2017. ©Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles.

Copyfraud here refers to a legal as well as moral argument. It was no surprise that the Neues Museum decided not to sue Jan Nikolai Nelles and me when we scanned the bust of Nefertiti clandestinely, without its permission, and released the data set into the public domain. This artistic intervention, later referred to as the Nefertiti Hack, was discussed in the media worldwide. Legally, the museum’s own practice was not only questionable and controversial in public discourse but most likely would not have withstood a lawsuit. In fact, some museums are hoarding their data to protect it from the uncertainty of “bad taste.”[6] Not every curator or museum director is happy to find their “treasures” remixed in pop culture or planted (literally: there was a maker who 3D-printed a Nefertiti plant pot) into unrelated contexts. Others hoard their data merely to gain profit (for example, through licenses) or to secure a potential future research advantage (in the case of natural science collections, for example). But the politics of the public domain and cultural commons need to be negotiated. Clearly, open access and application programming interfaces for developers can also improve the museum’s brand, as happened in the case of the Rijksmuseum. This particular museum is considered to be an example of “best practice” through its early adoption of the release of high-resolution data into the public domain through Creative Commons CC0 licenses. The increase in traffic to the Rijksmuseum’s website alone, from thirty-five thousand to three hundred thousand visitors per month, seems to be noteworthy, not to mention the publicity surrounding the introduction and discussion of the museum’s open access policy and related activities (art competitions, hackathons, products using its images, and so on; Steyerl 2016).

Although cultural objects have become assets and we face the seductive order of a database architecture, it is not too late to activate ghosts. While museums slavishly serve their own imperial and thus pseudosuperior founding ideas, data are no slave to either the archive or the database. The ghosts can take over the database, dissolve the proprietary, and create mirrors, remixes, and emulsions. To quote Achille Mbembe (2015): “A museum is not a dumping place. It is not a place where we recycle history’s waste. It is first and foremost an epistemic space” (4). It is not about the sheer quantification of balance sheets and profits, or the number of visitors and views, or the neoliberal concept of audience engagement in the digital attention economy (the museum experts probably mean nudging unknowingly, a concept from behavioral science originally developed by James Wilk in cybernetics); it is not about an individualization of the artifact or the encroaching idea of universality. Rather, it is about access to a cultural commons without limits, a freedom to engage with culture to render possible future creations. Let us expect the public to ask for a cloneable artifact, not the original. A database as a museum can be proprietary—hierarchical or horizontal—or decentralized, but the public had better be aware of the built-in bias in the database:[7]

Machine intelligence should become sociomorphic in a good way. Machine learning and data analytics do manage to unveil a superior social dimension that is intrinsic to any piece of digital information and that has been intangible and inaccessible until now. The techniques of data visualization and navigation finally give an empirical form to the collective mind and to modern concepts of collective agency, such as Marx’s general intellect, Foucault’s episteme, and Simondon’s transindividual, which have been so far pretty abstract and invisible to the eye of the individual mind. (Pasquinelli 2016)

Liberating digital objects from their proprietary and commodified chains is an act of emancipation from the narrated archive. So how will we use and shape technology to make sense of culture?

The paradox here is that the museum as a platform might be even more relevant with all that loose data around. In order to achieve this, the museum needs to reimagine itself in a time of digital artifacts by entering online forums. If artificial intelligence (AI) is only as good as its database, the museum is probably only as good as its database too. And good refers to the presence of ethics, open access, and the absence of biases. In a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018, AI expert Jürgen Schmidthuber speculated that machines might very soon be able to generate and gather their own data, no longer relying on open databases or permissions from museums. This translates into the becoming of the (museum as) database without walls. I leave it open as to whether this leads to a good, bad, or just better path than the present unjust and biased moment of representation and historical narration under human stewardship. But any change seems desirable to me at this point.

The Chatbot Dreaming of Museums

Take our latest project: NefertitiBot, a chatbot. With its neuronal AI capabilities, it can be described as a voice of the subaltern taking on a critical agency for objects, opposing the dominant narrative as well as experimenting toward postauthorship through machine intelligence in curatorial practice and interpretational sovereignty. The bot is an interface with which the audience can talk through language. It confidently discusses other stories of the future, hope, resistance, and emancipation within a postcolonial framework trained by the artists. The bot can be a self-learning system, an interface, and maybe an entity that can be held accountable. Corporations and institutions use scripted people with written notes. Obviously, there is no need for a bot—just a convincing and immersive story, a corporate identity that employees are willing to embody and enact. But today, more and more chatbots are used, mostly in business as banal servants (service providers) or for entertainment (customer engagement) and cost reduction.

Figure 53.2

Disentangled No. 2, 2017. ©Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles.

It will be crucial that these technologies are not simply created, developed, and distributed by a few multinational software companies or governmental services but formed by people. Hence, NefertitiBot challenges not only the politics of representation but the politics of technology as well. The curatorial process is currently under the dictatorship of the expert and the institution. A very few specially educated people make decisions about the collection. One could argue that almost any other model, including an AI, would be more independent and democratic than that because the AI does not judge the data in terms of a social construct or by individual experience. For example, it does not differentiate between “high” and “low” culture. But besides being more democratic, it is also less biased and less humancentric. An AI can embody a massive amount of data, which can lead to a new gain in knowledge and a new rationale (if it is not just more of the same biased data). It has the possibility to narrate history from different perspectives, including nonhuman ones, without taking sides and without the need to be diplomatic or under the spell of an institution.

It is too simple to see AI as primarily a product of culture. It is a machine that recognizes pattern, including patterns that go unspoken in our culture. Clearly, if the input is biased, the output will be too. So the crucial question is: Who writes the code and trains the AI? Yet even just the fact of having a bot recontextualize and decolonize a collection (from any group outside the institution) as an addition to a human curator will defy the overall perception. A bot—which is neither employed by the institution nor paid by it—might be in a position to ask other questions, don’t you think? The bot is a speculation, a gesture of what is possible and what might be done if other collectives or communities (or let us say the subaltern) write, train, and thus reconfigure the AI. But as an experience for the audience, NefertitiBot certainly also interferes with the apparent neutrality of technology, mixed with flickering reminders of the libertarian tech dystopia of machines unleashed for performative ends.

NefertitiBot is a chatbot that seeks to seize the power of interpretational sovereignty from administrative and curatorial museum structures, a bot through which material objects from other cultures in museums in the Global North will start speaking for themselves, shaking off the violent and ugly colonial patina by deconstructing the fiction inherent in institutional narratives and challenging the politics of representation. As soon as objects—in entangled and disputed collections—start speaking for themselves and machines transcend biases, this might affect us to the marrow of our bones and reveal the darkness in our minds and the unjust conditions humankind has created.

Figure 53.3

Disentangled No. 3, 2017. ©Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles.

The Colonial in Real Time

We can steer drones with our minds, but can the museum step out of time? Can a database? This will probably require a chaotic infrastructure, with torrents, unlabeled files, remixes, and a serene contemporaneity of the same data sets over and over again, thereby transcending biases and creating an infinity of aesthetically equal data sets. Such an anarchistic multiplicity, none of which could be categorized according to specific rules of power (by the museum as a ruling institution), might potentially lead to resistance against biases and to extrapolation rather than affirmation. Within the heritage discourse, there is a fundamental problem with time.[8] Why are collections designated “ancient” or cultures “dead”? People who live in those spaces—for example, in spaces categorized in museums as Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt—still feel related to the objects of the past. They are living culture. But the construction of the “antique” does not allow for contemporary social practices, let alone ties (Leeb 2017, 103).

To make matters worse, one can find no adequate reflection inside the collections of the violent entanglements of museums and their inherent colonial patina. But isn’t representing the Other always violent, as Edward Said (2003) asked? When one publishes data sets globally in the public domain, the question of ownership dissolves—in the digital realm. This is also an important step toward overcoming the oppressive and obsolete concept of the nation-state. This is not a country-to-country digital repatriation, and it must not be instrumentalized as such by the institution—and it is no substitute whatsoever for a comprehensive and sincere debate on the colonial in real time, which has yet to be discussed and faced in Germany and its museums, as well as in the rest of the Global North.

But more important than actual repatriation—which is sometimes a proxy war anyway, clouded by the flamboyant promise of provenance research as an apologetic act—is a change of mindset, a reconfiguration and unlearning within Western museums that will update their supremacist point of view—namely, the institutions’ deeply rooted belief that only they have the capacity to safeguard, preserve, and research the objects. The result would be a willingness to restitute it all, thus making the museum meaningful again.

In the same breath, one needs to respect the fact that not all cultural data wants to be free and dispersed. For example, in the case of the Tamaki Paenga Hira War Auckland Memorial Museum in New Zealand, the Māori took the power to decide whether their objects, images, and ancestors should be digitized or not (Powell 2016).[9] Some cultural data should not be digitized at all. In some cultures, a 3D-printed object can hold the same power and enable the same connection as the original. The constant state of negotiation over the collection, and therewith the constant state of uncertainty of an institution, promises a productive and meaningful psychic state. The old, rehearsed, and vicious museum was always proprietary and is a part of a representational postdemocratic institution beyond public trust and the concept of the commons. To acknowledge Derrida’s assumption that technology affects the structure of the mind and potentially inspires new imaginaries regarding our reality leads to a possible and vigorous decolonization supported by technology (Derrida 1995, 16).

Of course, the very reverse might be even more likely. Also, the public domain as just another battlefield obscures structural inequalities, often to the detriment of Indigenous groups and their knowledge and data. If people clone cultural data, that might be brutal and unpleasant too: besides the aforementioned NefertitiBot, there is also already a “simple crypto trading bot” called NefertitiTM. Concurrently, nimble robots are being sent into the dystopian landscapes and temporary shafts of looters around a grave in El-Hibeh in Egypt—supposedly Nefertiti’s tomb. Sometime soon, organized looters themselves will start using the help of robots, which will in some ways be a good thing because in many cases to date children have been forced into the shafts, leading to frequent accidents and deaths (Hanna 2014, 81).

Today, all around the Western world, we see plenty of small-scale digitization experiments coming and going where museums really are not risking much. There are even more priceless cultural data generated by another ambiguous entity: the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). UNESCO has digitized a significant but undisclosed number of “important” heritage sites globally, but it is not releasing any of this data. This is unsettled technoheritage, and it is only a matter of time before all these ghosts are activated. It is not about an indigenization, or a romanticized view of the museum as a database, but rather about emancipated narratives and explorations of the museum as a meaningful public and epistemic space.

What comes after decolonization? A recasting of the museum with its cultural data as process and as a space of openness, sincerity, embodied ethics, and constant negotiation about its own nature, with the database torn from the museum. Certainly, the imperial museum is passé! Where is the door that will allow us to enter the database? There is none, and there are myriads. The database is ubiquitous, and it might also be created and experienced through patterns, just as the AI’s pattern-based recognition is used as a key for large collections of digital artifacts through digital light tables or location mapping or is based on color, as is the case in quite a few museums. Yet as of now, Google’s Arts and Culture Experiments project puts things in a chronological time line.

But let me reassure you, dear reader: the database will always be a public space, anachronistic and oblivious, just like the museum. Some say that viewing a database is not the same as experiencing a museum! Well, I think that is uncertain . . .

Figure 53.4

Disentangled No. 4, 2017. ©Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles.

Notes

This text has been made possible thanks to inspiring conversations with Michael Peter Edson, Anselm Franke, Denny Gayton, Haidy Geismar, Monica Hanna, Sonia K. Katyal, Sarah Kenderdine, Susanne Leeb, Achille Mbembe, W. J. T. Mitchell, Fazil Moradi, Ciraj Rassool, Merete Sanderhoff, and many more.

1. The controversial Humboldt Forum, with an estimated budget of about €670 million, is Europe’s largest cultural museum project. It is situated on Museum Island in Berlin, where the former Palace of the Republic was demolished. The architect Franco Stella won the architecture competition and is resurrecting the Prussian castle, which is scheduled to open in stages by September 2020. It is planned to be a universal museum with so called non-European collections for “discovering the world” (Humboldt Forum, n.d.; Association Berliner Schlosses E.V., n.d.).

2. “The legacy of the nineteenth-century object lesson continues to inflect our understanding of how museums ‘work’ today. Discussions about the right of museums to ‘own’ culture, to speak on behalf of people and their culture(s) and to represent others often start inside the nineteenth century during which the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, and the class hegemonies, normative standards for citizenship and consumer identities were consolidated across the (museum) world” (Geismar 2018, 14).

3. Nefertiti Hack (http://nefertitihack.alloversky.com/) is the website onto which the artists released the data at the 32C3 hacker congress in Hamburg, Germany, in December 2015.

4. Haidy Geismar (2018) offers a thorough analysis of the digital object as well as of the decolonization of the database in her recent book Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age.

5. “Internet-oriented companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook that have a large number of users and possess detailed personal information on them, presumably without their consent” (Wiktionary 2019).

6. When students from Stanford University scanned Michelangelo’s David, they had to promise to “keep renderings and use of the data in good taste” because the artifacts “are the proud artistic patrimony of Italy” (Katyal 2017, 1148).

7. “Machine intelligence is sociomorphic, but not in a good way. Machine intelligence mirrors social intelligence in order to control the latter. The Turing universe is one of those magnifying mirrors, and it makes the collective body look grotesque, disproportioned, abnormalized by the glitches of computational power. We feed algorithms our racist, sexist, and classist biases and in turn they warp them further. As Marx knew, absent political action, machines do not just replace but amplify previous divisions of labor and social relations” (Pasquinelli 2016).

8. See also Hito Steyerl’s (2016) interesting argument about the futurities of preservation.

9. For example, through the museum’s approach of kaitiakitanga, which mainly deals with the copyright framework and principles for the reproduction of images of Māori or Pacific material online.

References

Association Berliner Schlosses E.V. n.d. “Financing of the Humboldt Forum.” Accessed March 20, 2018. https://berliner-schloss.de/en/new-palace/financing-of-the-humboldt-forum/.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. Das System der Dinge: Über unser Verhältnis zu den alltäglichen Gegenständen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.

Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “Archive fever: A Freudian impression.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics 25 (2): 9–63.

Geismar, Haidy. 2018. Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age. London: UCL Press.

Hanna, Monica. 2014. “Testimonial and Report to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) of the USA.” Detailed report on site looting in Egypt.

Humboldt Forum. n.d. “What is the Humboldt Forum?” Accessed March 20, 2018. http://www.humboldtforum.com/en/pages/humboldt-forum.

Katyal, Sonia K. 2017. “Technoheritage.” California Law Review 105 (4). https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol105/iss4/3/.

Leeb, Susanne. 2017. “Lokalzeit oder die Gegenwart der Antike.” Texte zur Kunst 105:99–117.

Mbembe, Achille. 2015. “Decolonizing knowledge and the question of the archive.” Accessed March 20, 2018. http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf.

Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2016. “Abnormal encephalization in the age of machine learning.” e-flux 75. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67133/abnormal-encephalization-in-the-age-of-machine-learning/.

Powell, Sarah. 2016. “Considering ethics when reproducing traditional knowledge.” Tuskculture. Accessed July 3, 2018. https://www.tuskculture.com/writing/ethicstraditionalknow.

Said, Edward W. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin.

Stacey, Paul. 2015. “Made with Creative Commons.” Medium. Accessed March 20, 2018. https://medium.com/made-with-creative-commons/rijksmuseum-2f8660f9c8dd.

Steyerl, Hito. 2016. “A tank on a pedestal: Museums in an age of planetary civil war.” e-flux 70. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60543/a-tank-on-a-pedestal-museums-in-an-age-of-planetary-civil-war/.

Wiktionary. 2019. “Datenkraken.” Last modified March 23, 2019. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/datenkraken.

54

Throbber

Kristoffer Ørum

When I was around ten or eleven, my mother used to take me to the shopping mall roughly once a month. While I waited for her to finish shopping, I would spend hours browsing discount boxes filled with computer game tapes.

Their cassette covers, wrapped in images of exotic cartoon animals and colorful airbrushed logos, were unlike anything I had seen on the solitary channel of Danish national television. Their brash and exotic visual tropes seemed to hold the promise that things might be different, that other worlds existed. Much later I learned they had their roots in the pulp magazines of the 1950s, rather than being the inventions of some advanced alien civilization. But at that moment, the illustrations on the cassette covers still held the promise of something outside the infinite monotony of the well-regulated suburban life that was already beginning to seem inescapable.

Digging through the bewildering mass of computer games in the crates, on most visits I would pick the best-looking cover, handing over my savings to the cashier with the inevitable disappointment at the crude graphics of the actual game already stirring in the back of my mind.

On the way home in the back seat of the car, I would clutch the game tightly, seeing the fantastic worlds trapped on the magnetic tapes in my mind’s eye. When I inserted the tape into the datacorder at home,

LOAD                                                                                                                                   colorful bars flashed across the edges of the screen                                                                                                                                                                                           as I watched it expectantly and anxiously,                                                                                                                                                                                                                             accompanied by the random computer noises                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           that were my first encounter with computer-synthesized sounds.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             . The bars flashed by quickly enough to make colors appear on my retina that never appeared on the screen,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   which was covered in fill characters, letters transmitted for the purpose of consuming time, not as an act of communication.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       .

RUN

Today I remember my hopes for the computer games much more vividly than I remember what the actual games were like. It was a fledgling interest in the possibility that the world might contain something other than the mainstream monoculture of the suburbs.

Later I was one of a group of friends who discovered and grew fascinated with what was at that point known as “the warez scene,” a nerdy subculture of international software piracy and programming with its own rituals, value systems, and visual tropes.

It was a highly competitive culture that looked down upon the people who actually used the software or played the games, eschewing the limited entertainment and productive potential of commercial software for self- creation. It was also a metagame of one-upmanship focused on intense competition as to who could remove copyright protection from software the fastest. It fostered alternative ways to enjoy software to the constrained structures of the primitive computer games.

The subculture was connected by a global network consisting of US Robotics modems, private bulletin board systems, and hacked telephone exchanges. At a time when only universities had access to what would later become the Internet, every connection to the world outside the suburbs depended on telephone lines.

More often than not, you would hear a series of sharp buzzing tones—

beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep

—a sound that indicated the line was busy, and you would have to wait and redial. Often, multiple times. But once you got through, you would be treated to the sweet sound of ringing through your modem’s speaker, followed by the electronic beeping and scratching of modems handshaking to negotiate speeds and protocols.

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch

*ding*ding*ding

This sound remains as evocative and emotionally charged as earlier memories of the constant ticking of my grandparents’ longcase clock, or Bornholm clock as it is known in Danish. This clock’s inner workings were nearly identical to those made on the Danish island of Bornholm since 1774, when, through an act of incidental industrial espionage, the local clockmakers got their hands on a wrecked ship full of technologically superior Dutch or English clocks.

I do not have any images of the clock, or even clear memories. But I do remember pressing my hand against the cool lacquered wood and feeling the slow pulse of the pendulum inside, its steady ticking a physical expression of my grandparents’ social aspirations and dreams of a future solidly anchored in the past.

I do not remember what the face of the clock looked like. But I remember the slow pace of unfolding time made palpable by the rhythmic sounds of a machine-age wonder. Each gap in the ticking seemed longer than the last as the hands of the clock traveled steadily back toward their point of departure.

It was as if the regularity of the clockwork’s tempo distorted my sense of time, leaving me anxious rather than instilling a new sense of time. There was a stillness in the air, in which nothing ever seemed to change. I may be imagining things, but I seem to remember sensing, without being able to articulate it at the time, the sound of the clock ticking as a promise of my own eventual demise at the hands of time. The clock was a coffin for the future.

Later in life, on my way home from nights in town, I would wake up each time the train stopped at a station, only able to go back to sleep once the train was set in rhythmic motion again. The irregular rhythm of the tracks calmed me, just as the sound of two US Robotics modems shaking hands had done earlier.

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch

*ding*ding*ding

This was followed by a blank screen showing a looping sequence of characters in its upper right-hand corner—one character after another.

|

/

-

\

|

/

-

\

|

/

-

\

|

/

-

\

|

/

-

\

I would see a spinning bar made out of text, as well as slashes, dashes, and pipe characters, used not to convey meaning, intonation, or questions but to make the flow of time visible. A small rotation reminiscent of a minimal clock would appear, indicating that something was going on, as if to say, “Don’t despair—something will happen on this screen, eventually.”

Then symbols would begin to emerge line by line.

_._ ____ ____._______ .__ _ .___ _._ __ ._ __.___ .__ _ _._._ .__ .___ ._ _

._

At first these were indecipherable alien patterns for the eyes to wander across, unsure how to decode them,

_._ ____ ____._______ .__ _ .___ _._ __ ._ __.__–_ .__ _ _._._ .__ .___ ._ _

._

\ _:| \ \_/ /: _ _ |: .__ / | _/: ._ \ : |: . __/\__ _:|: | \ : __|: \ :_ _\

| :| \ _ _ / | : || : _/\ |_ \| : | || \ / || : _/\ | :|| : || : || || | _

before becoming something that resembled letters.

_._ ____ ____._______ .__ _ .___ _._ __ ._ __.___ .__ _ _._._ .__ .___ ._ _

._

\ _:| \ \_/ /: ____ |: .____/ | ___/: .___ \ : |: . __/\__ _:|: | \ : __|: \ :_ _\

| :| \ _ _ / | : || : _/\ |_ \| : | || \ / || : _/\ | :|| : || : || || | _

| | | | | | _|| / \ | /| : || |\/ || / \ | || . || || | || / |

| | |___| | _| |_.: / |__:_ / \_. ___/ |_ | | ||_.: __/ | ||_ | || ||_ | ||. __ |

|___| :/ : :/ |___| :/ |___| |_ ||___| |_ | :/ |. |

: : :/

New fonts were fashioned out of rarely used typographical symbols that happened to be on a keyboard for various historical reasons. Letters were built out of the ruins of graphic or mathematical symbols originally representing unspoken parts of language. A refined subcultural system developed within the constraints of the primitive technology of our pre-WWW communication channels.

In the meticulous recreation of letters using other letters, the meaning of the original letters used as building blocks was lost. A subcultural alphabet emerged out of text mode graphics used for digital “branding” via the ultraslow modem connections of prebroadband computer networks; a parallel vision of what the Internet could have been that was not necessarily better than the global telecommunications network we have today.

The slowness of the construction, reading, and distribution of these constructed letters held an unarticulated hope for another Internet: one that was never organized into a working sociopolitical movement but remained encapsulated as a nerdy and self-referential subculture; the passage of time and text something more than a medium subsumed by its supposed message. Geeks and freaks dreamed of a less commercial and passive version of the Internet, where the distance between those who create and those who consume was less clear. A subculture waited for a future that never arrived.

I first remember noticing small circular animations toward the end of the 1990s in the web browser of the early Internet. And as activities on the Internet grew increasingly complex during Web 2.0 and the AJAX application within the web browser would wait for some operation to complete, one would spend a lot of time staring at that little animation, waiting and hoping that the net would present something amazing. Just like my grandparents’ clock, throbbers aim to make the progress of time appear orderly, predictable, and mechanical . As if we always know what is about to happen. Black and white. Either, or. Comfortingly modernist-looking shapes not so different from statistics, these tiny animations held a strange sensation of hope . Waiting for something to happen. Small breaks in the flow of the productive time we spend in front of our screens. A moment to reflect, rather than produce. A moment to hope something unexpected might happen. There seems to be no standardized duration or visual format that defines a throbber. Each looping animation is a world unto itself.

It fades quietly into existence, already in the process of circling around its own center. Called forth by a graphics library and seemingly unaffected by its context, it remains alone in a time zone of its own making, keeping time according to an ultralocal and unstable environment inside the computer. Far from the global synchronicity of International Atomic Time, which is based on cesium 133—9,192,631,770 oscillations per second—

the periods of time marked by throbbers are based on a multitude of vibrating frequencies inside the computer.

As the graphic library’s internal timekeeping mechanisms retrieve individual frames of the animations from spinning storage disks or memory chips that have their own individual frequencies and ways of keeping time, unaffected by the leap seconds that are added to International Atomic Time at irregular intervals to compensate for the irregularities of the earth’s rotation,

these tiny animations may look reassuringly predictable in a world that increasingly depends on complex networks of indecipherable systems. And clocks that mark the progress of time without measuring it. If the invention of the clock was an assertion of humankind’s control of itself and its surroundings, these spinners seem to indicate the opposite of a clockwork universe whose gears are governed by the laws of physics, making every aspect of the machine predictable. They mark a return to the local and relative time of the sundial, obelisk, and hourglass, hidden inside apparently universal systems. It is as if the memory of past dreams of other kinds of networks, and the possibility that things might yet become different, are hidden in plain sight within the current global Internet. Just as I used to look at cassette art and dream of an escape from the order of things, today I lo at throbbers and remember that the net could have become something different. Small, unproductive spaces on the Internet, such as these animations that were originally meant to quell our restlessness, might provide a tiny fissure in the Internet where appropriation and misuse of existing symbolic systems can thrive.

These tiny fissures hint at larger cracks in the popular image of the entangled mess of sensors, physical infrastructure, and statistics we today call big data, both omnipotent and omniscient. The size of big data’s increasing stores and multiplying sources of data ensures that a delay will remain, no matter how much processing power or bandwidth computer systems possess. Should the throbber and its clocklike face disappear from common use, the sensation of time’s passage following the final mouse click on an instruction for data transfer is sure to remain, a moment of uncertainty before a transfer of data begins, or an error message is displayed. It is a bit of unproductive time that hints at the limits of the technologies we call big data in daily parlance.

Just as the local tradesmen on Bornholm reinvented what they found in the wreckage of the global trade networks of their time, these small pauses will remain as the promise of something outside the monotony of global algorithmic big -data suburbs. As we wait for new dreams of another kind of network, gaps in the flow of data afford us a chance to consider a number of possible futures yet to be decided, rather than a singular future preordained by self-fulfilling statistical prophesies based on past data.

55

Time.now

Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund

The title of this text is expressed in the style of the Ruby programming language to emphasize that the computer is temporal in its inner structure.[1] More precisely, the time now according to the computer’s system clock is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970.[2] This is the so-called Unix epoch (or epoch time) that provides a time stamp in seconds, milliseconds, and microseconds that can be converted into human-readable dates. In Ruby, for instance, typing the script “Time.at(epoch)” in the console will convert the epoch into the human-readable calendar time, which (at the time of writing this sentence) is expressed as follows: the epoch time stamp of 1511860529 becomes 2017-11-28 9:15:29 GMT (Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 9.15.29 a.m. GMT + 00.00) (EpochConverter, n.d.). How to tell the time in Ruby?

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

time = Time.new

# Components of a Time

puts “Current Time : “ + time.inspect

puts time.year

puts time.month

puts time.day

puts time.wday

puts time.yday

puts time.hour

puts time.min

puts time.sec

puts time.usec

puts time.zone

The precision of this is clearly important to the computer and the various processes running in real time that need to synchronize accurately. Although not our focus here, a good example of this is blockchain technology, where time is standardized into a linear and successive form using Unix time.[3] Each block in the decentralized network typically contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block so that new transactions are time stamped to verify their validity and so on. Under the computational logic of blockchains, there seems to be one true if not totalitarian version of history, despite the radical decentralized claims associated with the technology itself (Bowden 2018).[4] Thankfully, as the standardization of time is necessarily political, synchronization on computer networks is rarely managed perfectly, even on a technical level, and systems are open to other destabilizing factors.[5] Moreover, the key point we wish to emphasize is that what we consider to be “now time” in a more general sense is contingent on “real time” systems—in which operations appear to be immediate and instantaneous—and yet operates through unstable human-machine registers. So what constitutes the historical present is highly complex and contingent, and this is especially important in the context of “contemporaneity” as the descriptor for a new kind of time in which past and future converge in the present. Unlike the linear concept of history that blockchain appears to demonstrate, contemporaneity signals a time in which periodization and progressive chronological thinking have become untenable and untimely.

What we intend to do in this short text is to explore the uncertain dynamics of this—at once a convergence and divergence of temporalities and concepts that demonstrate the potential to both explode and implode possibilities for change. In saying this, and if it is not already apparent, we make explicit reference to Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History” and the concept of Jetztzeit (translated as now time, or the presence of the now), which describes time at a standstill where the past, in a flash, enters into a constellation with the present, objectively interrupting the mechanical temporal process of historicism (Benjamin 1992, 398–400; cf. Benjamin 2002, 262).[6] Our concern is that rather than this dynamic vision of now time, all visions of past and future seem to have collapsed in on what sociologist Helga Nowotny (1994, 53) has called “an extended present.” The present is no longer conceived of as a point from which to imagine a qualitatively different future—that is, another temporal horizon. The present has rather become omnipresent, as remarked by historian François Hartog (2015). In keeping with many other theorists dealing with “the crisis of time”—including Fredric Jameson (1994, xi–xii), who regards the cancellation of a futural moment as “a weakness in our imagination”—Hartog (2015, 17) sees a change in our sense of historical time, which used to be generated by the distance and tense between past and future, between what historian Reinhart Koselleck (2004, 255–275) famously called the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. When these two temporalities collapse, as they appear to have done in our extended present, in the contemporary condition, the production of historical time—understood as social transformation—is suspended.

Politics in the Time of Real Time

The politics of time are fairly well rehearsed by now, especially in the historical materialism of Benjamin, yet contemporary now time seems to collapse the transition from past to future into an inert presentism rather than a revolutionary impulse.[7] The associated feeling of powerlessness indicates our inability to act in the present: we are left to passively wait for a tomorrow that never arrives and is endlessly deferred. “It’s an avoidance of the now,” as the Invisible Committee (2017, 17) claim.[8] Indeed, how do we conceive of now time now, in the context of so-called real time, understood as the perceived nondelayed correspondence between actions and their effects and communication, and between incoming data and their computation? The present becomes even harder to grasp when it becomes entangled with machine time, in which conceptualizations are upended; we thought computer storage memory was supposed to help to program the future, as Wendy Chun (2008) has identified, whereas the future itself has become a memory. An irony here, as she points out, is that we need predictive models—of, for instance, climate change—in order to prevent the predicted future from taking place (Chun 2008, 153). Clearly, it would also be a mistake to simply refer to the date time at the top of the computer screen and read off the figures, assuming it to be “real,” perfectly synchronized global time, as this is evidently only served up to us by a mathematical logic that fabricates “real time” for vested interests. Your smartwatch, if you have one, is another example of how keeping time has become an expensive lifestyle choice that involves third-party app developers to render it even more commodified and fully integrated into lives before it again needs upgrading—the watch and the life. Indeed, to computational devices there is no such thing as real time, only massively generalized prediction and inevitable delay—what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst (2017, 10) refers to as the “delayed present”—even if measured in milliseconds and hardly discernible to the human sensory apparatus.

We are curious as to whether the anticipation of what came before or what comes next indicates the deferral of politics altogether.[9] If culture and social organization are defined by particular experiences of time and temporality, then social change is dependent upon an alteration of these experiences: “The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to ‘change the world,’ but also—and above all—to ‘change time,’” as Giorgio Agamben (2007, 99) writes in a chapter entitled “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum.” What kind of politics is possible under contemporary conditions, which according to some are already a “postcontemporary” state in which what is experienced as present was actually defined by algorithmic calculations in the immediate past, meaning that the future has always already been preempted (see Avanessian and Malik 2016)? This predictive aspect is particularly important for financial markets and risk assessment, of course, and the ways in which the future reacts to attempts to control it, as explored in the work of Elena Esposito (2011), or the ways in which predictability itself needs to be rethought through theories of contingency, as proposed in the work of Elie Ayache (2010, 2015). How might we begin to reconcile this predictive capacity and our inability to imagine a qualitatively different future?

The Need to Conceive of Time Differently

Concerns over the increased automation and standardization of lived experience resonate with the older philosophy of Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, among others. Against the logic of mathematical time divided into a sequence of distinct, discontinuous instants or units, Bergson (1991) proposes “pure time,” the inner experience of time as duration. In the work of Heidegger (2010), too, time is conceived beyond the model of common time (or vulgar time), as measurable by clocks, for instance, and the scientific time associated with mathematics and physics—or, we might add, computer science. Heidegger proposes a state of original temporality (ekstasis) as the basic structure of presence or being-there (Dasein), conceptualized through the coming together of three temporal phases that do not refer to a linear chronological sequence of past, present, and future but instead refer to how past and future events cannot be separated from the present at all. But arguably, these positions seem somewhat dated when highly complex human- and machine-time regimes have become thoroughly entangled, and our concern is that it seems impossible to talk about presence or the present without thinking of the ways in which computation creates the illusion of it—for example, through real-time web and communication forms such as instant messaging, which involve a compression of time that creates the illusion of “pseudo-co-presence” (see Ernst 2013), or in the ways that blockchain technologies reconceptualize the distribution of assets across space-time. Furthermore, the determinism of the clock or blockchain is symptomatic of the ways in which different kinds of time exist contemporaneously across different space-times and as part of global capitalism wherein real-time computation reproduces both our experience of time and our seeming disconnection from it (leaving us “alone together”).[10] The irony of the naming of the Facebook “wall” provides a further example of how social media renders the real-time flows of information solid and gives standardized form to subjectivities (Invisible Committee 2017, 21). So how to now understand our ways of being in and out of time and of being able or unable to grasp or shape it? If a politics of time is fundamental to experience, how to conceive of it differently?

The Challenge of Exploding the Technologically Mediated Now

For Benjamin, the dialectical convergence of past and present is what provides the politics. In Benjamin’s (1992, 253) words, this is a “tiger’s leap into the past,” where a “leap in the open air of history is a dialectical one,” the awareness of which will “make the continuum of history explode” in such a way as to allow its recomposition. Moreover, Isabell Lorey’s (2014) reading of Benjamin’s now time emphasizes the point: “It is constructive temporality, in which the slivers of history are newly composed, in which history persistently emerges. The now-time is the creative midpoint, not a transition of the past into the future.” Thus now time becomes time filled with creative possibilities (rather than mere probabilities, we would add): “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (Benjamin 1992, 252–253).

We would stress that there remain some important connections to technology that can be developed from this reference to Benjamin and his philosophy of history.[11] In the opening passage of Benjamin’s essay, historical materialism is introduced as the chess-playing automaton that wins every time and through which artificial intelligence (or machine learning) appears superior to human intelligence.[12] Yet the autonomy of the machine is revealed to be fake, and the illusion is achieved through trick mirrors and magnets that move the chess pieces, guided by a small person hidden in the mechanism (as with machine learning, we might add, where the labor of people remains fundamental, albeit with a quite different sense of agency through production). The knowledge of the mechanism provides access to the means of production, or consciousness of conditions, such that success is contingent on the ability to gain control of the technology (the Hegelian move from “in-itself” to “for-itself”).[13] The intention of the allegory becomes clear in that the dynamic of history is evidently fake too, as for Benjamin the unfulfilled time of the present can only be activated by political struggle, and it is the human-machine apparatus that holds the key to the unlocking of its secrets—and in turn to any possibility of change in the relations of production.

The illusion of real time operates in a similar manner, it seems. Although the expression real time refers to the effect of information being delivered apparently as it happens, in computing it serves to describe the actual time elapsed in the performance of a computation by a computer, in which the operation appears to be immediate and able to correspond instantaneously to the operations of an external process. Moreover, real time describes a human rather than a machine sense of time and is only ever an approximation: there is no such thing as real time or the present to the computer, only degrees of delay between the occurrence of an event and the use of the processed data, exemplified by the buffering effects when streaming audio or video data from the Internet. The illusion here conceals the fact that humans and machines are entangled in multiple renderings of now time that distract us from knowledge of contemporary sociotechnical conditions. Historical materialist positions would at first appear hard to maintain when these highly complex human- and machine-time regimes have become thoroughly entangled. But more crucially, we ask: How might they still be ready to explode (or crash and reboot)? What we might conclude is that the various contingencies at work make any strict distinctions between past, present, and future highly uncertain, following Karen Barad’s (2007, 19) observations: states, events, and processes are constantly changing without recourse to any received notions of space-time.[14] Evidently, subjects and objects operate within mutated time-space regimes that are no longer developmental in their temporality but more caught in an implosion of forces—an explosion in reverse—and as such are limiting possibilities for change (Barad 2007, 245–246).

A fuller understanding of how the present is rendered might allow us to challenge and extend our understanding of change and action in ways that would include the nonhuman realm of computation. This might demonstrate modes of uncertainty and constituent processes in what otherwise would seem to be determinate computational processes that restrict our ability to imagine rupture in the omnipresent present—that is, begin to reinstall a sense of now time that is radically present.

Notes

1. Ruby is a dynamic open-source programming language with a focus on simplicity, using a syntax that is relatively easy to read and to write (Ruby, n.d.).

2. The Unix-time number is zero at the Unix epoch and increases by exactly 86,400 seconds per day from the epoch onward. The 32-bit representation of Unix time will end after the completion of 2,147,483,647 (2^31 −1) seconds from the beginning (00:00:00 January 1, 1970)—i.e., on January 19, 2038, 03:14:08 GMT. This is referred to as the “year 2038 problem,” where the 32-bit Unix time will overflow and will take the actual count to negative. See Wikipedia (2018b).

3. A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Blockchain is largely associated with the development of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. See Wikipedia (2018a).

4. Calum Bowden describes the crucial role time plays in the governance of blockchain networks and how it might be used to destabilize concentrations of power. Accelerationist philosopher Nick Land controversially argues that blockchain “solves the problem of spacetime by enforcing succession through consensus” (Bowden 2018).

5. For instance, in the case of the Ruby programming language, numerous problems arise in trying to keep an internal clock synchronized, as the system is multithreaded: it finds it difficult to execute multiple processes or threads concurrently. The time management of concurrent processes requires permanent checks and tricks, which introduce instability. We thank Nicolas Malevé for this explanation. See GitHub (n.d.).

6. Now time works in opposition to the everyday historicist meaning of the contemporary as “living, existing, or occurring together” in what Benjamin calls a “homogenous, empty” historical time (see Osborne 2014).

7. We take our cue from Benjamin, as stated, but we also recognize that a politics of time is being explored through feminist new materialism and postcolonial perspectives that would nuance the argument in other ways. For instance, see the work of Elizabeth Grosz (2005), Jane Bennett (2010), Karen Barad (2007), and Victoria Browne (2014), as well as that of Achille Mbembe (2001) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000).

8. The Invisible Committee (2017, 17) continue: “A mind that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It doesn’t seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like a monstrous accumulation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But life is always decided now, and now, and now.”

9. In saying this, our position comes close to that of Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen (2018).

10. Here we allude to Sherry Turkle’s (2012) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Moreover, inversely, the contemporary for Agamben is an experience of disconnection from it in a potentially fruitful way; it is an achievement to establish a disjunctive relationship with one’s own time, which is a precondition for being able to actively act on and against it: “Those who are truly contemporary, who belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. . . . But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time” (Agamben 2009, 40).

11. Esther Leslie (2000, 172) cites a statement by Adorno (in a 1962 radio lecture), who insists that the angel of history is also the angel of the machine.

12. Benjamin is drawing upon a well-known example of chess-playing automata built by the Hungarian mathematician Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769.

13. For Mladen Dolar (2006, 9), this connects usefully to the biopolitical dimension of technology in the development of speaking and thinking machines—or, we might add, social media, where the voice is paradoxically included and excluded at the same time. Dolar neatly takes this to represent the Hegelian move from “in-itself” to “for-itself.”

14. Barad (2007) is referring both to the uncertainty principle that confirms the trade-off between knowing more or less about position and momentum and to Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle as a means to understand how individual things have their own independent sets of determinate properties, and yet other properties remain excluded—not as a consequence of the design of the experiment or will of the scientist but because of the material conditions in which the apparatus operates.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. London: Verso.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. “What is the contemporary?” In What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, 1–24. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Avanessian, Armen, and Suhail Malik. 2016. “The speculative time complex.” In The Time Complex Post-Contemporary, edited by Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, 5–56. Miami: Name.

Ayache, Elie. 2010. The Blank Swan: The End of Probability. Chichester: John Wiley.

Ayache, Elie. 2015. The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1992. “On the concept of history.” In Volume 4 of Selected Writings 389–400. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bergson, Henri. 1991. Matter and Memory. London: Dover.

Bowden, Calum. 2018. “Forking in time: Blockchains and a political economy of absolute succession.” A Peer-Reviewed Journal about Research Values. http://www.aprja.net/forking-in-time/.

Browne, Victoria. 2014. Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2008. “The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory.” Critical Inquiry 35: 148–171.

Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

EpochConverter. n.d. “Epoch and Unix timestamp converter tools.” Accessed June 18, 2018. https://www.epochconverter.com/.

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. “Printed letters, acoustic space, real time Internet: The message of current communication media, deciphered with (and beyond) McLuhan.” SITE 33: 197–212.

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2017. The Delayed Present: Media-Induced Tempor(e)alities and Techno-Traumatic Irritations of “the Contemporary.” Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Esposito, Elena. 2011. The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

GitHub. n.d. “Code results in ruby/ruby.” Accessed April 8, 2020. https://github.com/ruby/ruby/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=synchronize&type=.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Space, Nature, Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hartog, François. 2015. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Invisible Committee. 2017. Now. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Leslie, Esther. 2000. Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. London: Pluto Press.

Lorey, Isabell. 2014. “Presentist democracy: Exodus and tiger’s leap.” Transversal Texts 6. http://transversal.at/blog/Presentist-Democracy.

Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nowotny, Helga. 1994. Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Osborne, Peter. 2014. “The postconceptual condition: Or the cultural logic of high capitalism today.” Radical Philosophy, no. 184, 19–27.

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. 2018. Hegel after Occupy. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Ruby. n.d. “Ruby: A programmer’s best friend.” Accessed June 18, 2018. https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/.

Turkle, Sherry. 2012. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

Wikipedia. 2018a. “Blockchain.” Last modified June 18, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain.

Wikipedia. 2018b. “Unix time.” Last modified June 9, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time.

56

Unpredictability

Elena Esposito

Uncertainty and the Open Future

Meanings and forms of prediction are radically changing as a result of big data and learning algorithms. Algorithmic procedures promise to precisely forecast the movement of financial assets, to predict the behavior of a consumer, to calculate the risk of an accident or the likelihood that a patient will suffer a certain disease, and also to foresee where and when a crime will take place. The fascination is obvious, but there are also problems. Even when it is correct, algorithmic prediction can distort our relationship with the future, producing specific forms of blindness.

In order to analyze how the mechanisms and epistemologies of prediction are changing in the digital society, a sociological approach must first describe the background and the implications of the current understanding of prediction, established in Western society since the seventeenth century. Facing uncertainty has been one of the central issues in our society for a few centuries, especially in the temporal dimension. Modern prediction is used to manage uncertainty, which offers itself as challenge and opportunity. Modern society has been confronted with an open future, meaning a future that is not determined in advance. Unlike in the premodern worldview, the image of the future from the seventeenth century onward becomes a horizon that is not decided by a higher entity or a preestablished order. Forms and contents of the future depend on the course of time and thus also on present events and actions. The future, therefore, is indeterminate for any present addressing it.

This condition is still both a big opportunity and a constant problem in our society. The future is open, so it can be shaped and influenced by our behavior, and everyone to some extent experiences its freedom and carries responsibility. But this of course does not mean that we can decide the future to match our plans. Precisely because it is open, the future is radically unpredictable—for everyone, even a hypothetical higher entity: not even God can know in advance a future that does not yet exist. What will come about tomorrow depends on what is being done (or not) and is expected today. But we are so many, and the world and society already have complex structures that make every prediction uncertain: what we expect can happen or not happen, or can happen otherwise. This uncertainty, also expressed as contingency, is the basis for our orientation to the future.

Probabilistic Uncertainty and Algorithmic Forecast

Yet how can we manage contingency, and how can we make decisions, knowing that we do not know all we need in order to make an informed decision? Since the early modern age, the tool for dealing with the uncertainty of the future has been the calculus of probabilities (Daston 1988; Esposito 2007). The calculus does not promise to reveal what will happen tomorrow but to calculate the present’s lack of knowledge about the future (40 percent, 27 percent), in order to decide rationally even under uncertainty (even if the events can disappoint our expectation, and we know it). Prediction takes the form of planning: preparing the present to face, in a controlled way, a future that is always uncertain. Since we cannot know in advance what will happen tomorrow, we calculate and manage our present uncertainty.

This approach is the basis of the scientific and technological attitude of modernity, which today is also producing the most advanced techniques of artificial intelligence and machine learning. But these techniques, using statistical tools derived from probability calculus, seem now to contradict the assumption of the open unpredictable future. The recent revival of artificial intelligence, combining deep learning and big data, promises to reveal in advance what will happen in the future. The research area of predictive analytics (PA) is explicitly devoted to this: mining data to discover the structures of the future (Siegel 2016). The promises are glittering. The ability to anticipate future trends should help to optimize the use of resources—for example, targeting advertisements to the people who are or can be interested in a certain product or service, finding out about problems or possible fraud in advance, preventing illness—but also focus prevention and crime deterrence on the people and groups most at risk.

The idea that the future can be known in advance, however, also raises great concerns, whether it works or not. On the one hand, one fears that algorithmic prediction makes fundamental errors and is not correct. On the other hand, even correct predictions raise worries. If the guidelines of algorithms are followed and are effective, one fears that algorithmic prediction might lead to highly disputed preemptive policies, which could deprive the future of its open possibilities for all actors involved.

These concerns, and enthusiasms as well, are legitimate and motivated but partly misguided. For good and bad, in fact, algorithmic prediction is very different from the idea of prediction that has established itself in modern society since the eighteenth century, oriented and guided by the idea of probability and its calculus (Hacking 1975; Porter 1986). When the forecasting agent is an algorithm and not a human being, procedures and criteria are different, and results and problems change as well. Algorithmic prediction makes things possible that would be impossible for human beings, even if equipped with the tools of statistics. But it also faces a set of conceptual problems.

Individual Prediction versus Statistical Average

The main difference between the tradition of statistics and the new developments in machine learning is that in algorithmic prediction the purpose of the calculation is an individual, specific indication. “Whereas forecasting estimates the total number of ice cream cones to be purchased next month in Nebraska, PA tells you which individual Nebraskans are most likely to be seen with a cone in hand” (Siegel 2016, 56). Digital techniques abandon the statistical idea of the average, in which all elements of the population should be more or less imperfect replicas. The new frontier of customization should lie in the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. “Now in medical science we don’t want to know . . . just how cancer works; we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. . . . Individualization trumps universals” (Siegel 2016, 75).

The meaning of prediction changes because algorithms themselves are part of the world in which they operate—from within, not from the outside, referring to a model. When algorithms make predictions, they do not see an independent external in advance; a future that is not yet there. This would be impossible. Algorithms “manufacture” the future with their operations (Cardon 2015, 22), “using the twin strategies of altering predictions to fit the world, and altering the world to fit the predictions” (Clark 2016, 123)—and can therefore anticipate it. Algorithms see the future that will be there as a result of their intervention.

Algorithmic predictions are individual and contextual and refer only to the specific item they address. The algorithms used in predictive shopping, for example, do not say what consumer trends will be in the next season or which products will increase or lower their market share. Instead, they anticipate which specific products an individual consumer will be willing to buy, even before the individual chooses them and possibly before she or he becomes aware of a need—and suggest them to him or her. They can also be products the person has never seen but that the algorithm identifies as compatible with his or her features and with the past choices that she or he or similar people have made, according to often inscrutable criteria. The user bought whole-grain cereals, and the system offers exotic travel. If the prediction of the algorithm is correct and the person buys the product, this is not because the algorithm saw the future in advance, because that future would not exist without its intervention. By suggesting the product to the future buyer, the algorithm shapes the future and thereby confirms itself—or learns from experience, if the suggestion is rejected. The same should happen in other cases, such as crime prevention. If we know that someone will commit a crime—with a name and address—we try to stop it by constraining that person’s movements. The prediction should allow us to act before an individual at risk begins a criminal career.

Preemption: How Performative Prediction Can Be Ineffective

According to this description, algorithmic predictions should always be effective. Even when their anticipations are not realized, algorithms should offer the best possible predictions given the available data. If the prediction fails, moreover, the algorithm should learn from experience, improving future performance. But this is not always the case. Even when correct, algorithmic prediction can prove ineffective (O’Neil 2016). The production of prediction (MacKenzie 2015, 441) affects the effectiveness of the prediction. The performativity of the procedure can lead to self-fulfilling circularities, confirming the forecast, but also (at the same time) to preemptive policies, which limit future possibilities. If decisions are made today on security measures about profiled possible criminals, their behavior is constrained, and the options of the decision-maker are limited. If the crimes end up happening somewhere else, one will be watching the wrong people. Or, as in the case of recommendation systems, one sees the users’ responses to only the recommended items and still does not know how users might have reacted to the other items. Additionally, one does not get any information on users for whom no recommendation has been made. Instead of looking ahead, one will be looking back, and the present will be forced to reproduce the image of the future that the algorithm foresaw. The present future is reduced to the past future. The problem in this case is not just the risk of a wrong prediction but the reduction of future possibilities for all involved actors.

How does this happen, and why is it different from probabilistic prediction? The programmers of machine-learning algorithms use the same tools of statistics (Breiman 2001; Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville 2016, 98) but with different assumptions and different goals. When you do statistics, you want to explain, inferring the process by which the data you have were generated. In machine learning, on the contrary, you do not want to explain anything. You only want to know how the future will look with regard to some variable (Shmueli 2010). The difficulties of algorithmic prediction, then, are different from those of statistical forecasting. They do not depend on sampling problems, data shortages, or the use of misleading interpretative models (Huff 1954). Algorithms do not have these worries: according to the ideology of big data (e.g., Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013), they do not use samples but the entire universe, have huge quantities of data, and do not refer to models. The difficulties depend instead on specific problems of machine learning and in particular on the way algorithms address the relationship between past and future. Algorithms are trained by maximizing their performance on some set of training data, which come from the past and correspond to the available experience. The predictive effectiveness of algorithms, however, depends on their ability to perform well on different data: the previously unseen real data. Training data and real data are different, as the past is different from the future, but algorithms only know the training data, and the difference between the two sets gives rise to their specific difficulties.

Learning to Forget

Learning algorithms must find a balance between two partially incompatible objectives. Training error must be minimized, and the algorithm must learn to recognize and successfully process the examples on which it is trained. If not, the problem is underfitting: the algorithm has poor performance and is unable to solve complex problems. At the same time, test error should also be minimized, controlling the effectiveness in dealing with examples never seen before. If the algorithm learns to work well on the examples given to it (reducing training error), however, it becomes rigid with respect to each variation and test error increases. The algorithm learns the training examples so well that it becomes blind to every other item. It has learned so successfully to interact with the right-handed users with which it has been trained that it does not recognize a left-handed person as a possible user. The problem in this case is overfitting, which has been called “the bugbear of machine learning” (Domingos 2012). Overfitting arises when the system builds its own rigid and somewhat hallucinatory image of objects, losing the ability to capture the empirical variety of the world. The system is overly adapted to the examples it knows and fails to effectively distinguish relevant information (signal) from irrelevant (noise).

Overfitting is a risk for all learning systems, especially when learning is performed too long or the training examples are observed in too much detail, but it is particularly a risk when dealing with big data. In very large data sets, the data are often high dimensional, and many elements are new (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville 2016, 155). They can be images, handwritten digits, or informal conversations with a large number of aspects, many of which are idiosyncratic and each time different. Diversity is so high that even with a lot of available data the number of examples is still insufficient for the dimensions involved (Barber 2012). In practice it is as if training were always too long and the sample always too small. If the task is to predict the future, the training data are inevitably insufficient because they cannot include the future that does not yet exist.[1] It even becomes more unpredictable the more we rely on the correctness of prediction.

The future remains unpredictable but in a different way. In the digital world, the problem is not so much the missing data but rather the available data and the way they affect our attitude toward the future. In this, as in many other cases, the problem of algorithmic processing is learning to forget[2]—that is, having controlled and nonarbitrary procedures to handle not what is unknown but what is already known.

Notes

1. This insuperable blindness with respect to the future is expressed in the “no free lunch theorem” for machine learning: models optimized for one task will likely perform worse at others (Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville 2016, 116).

2. See, for instance, the debate on the “right to be forgotten” on the web (Esposito 2017; Jones 2016).

References

Barber, David. 2012. Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Barber/textbook/171216.pdf.

Breiman, Leo. 2001. “Statistical modeling: The two cultures.” Statistical Science 16 (3): 199–231.

Cardon, Dominique. 2015. À quoi rêvent les algorithms. Paris: Seuil.

Clark, Andrew. 2016. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Daston, Lorraine. 1988. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Domingos, Pedro. 2012. “A few useful things to know about machine learning.” Communications of the ACM 55 (10): 78–87.

Esposito, Elena. 2007. Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Esposito, Elena. 2017. “Algorithmic memory and the right to be forgotten on the web.” Big Data and Society, January–June 2017. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717703996.

Goodfellow, Ian, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville. 2016. Deep Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hacking, Ian. 1975. The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huff, Darell. 1954. How to Lie with Statistics. New York: Norton.

Jones, Meg Leta. 2016. Ctrl + Z: The Right to Be Forgotten. New York: New York University Press.

MacKenzie, Adrian. 2015. “The production of prediction: What does machine learning want?” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 429–445.

Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, and Kenneth Cukier. 2013. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. London: Murray.

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. New York: Crown.

Porter, Theodore M. 1986. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Shmueli, Galit. 2010. “To explain or to predict?” Statistical Science 25 (3): 289–310.

Siegel, Eric. 2016. Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie or Die. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

57

Unthought

N. Katherine Hayles

Two currents flow into Unthought. The first comes from Foucault’s comment at the end of The Order of Things: “The whole of modern thought is imbued with the necessity of thinking the Unthought—of reflecting the contents of the In-itself in the form of the For-itself, of ending man’s alienation by reconciling him with his own essence, of making explicit the horizon that provides experience with its background of immediate and disarmed proof, of lifting the veil of the Unconscious, of becoming absorbed in its silence, or of straining to catch its endless murmur” (Foucault 1974, 356). Recast in terms of Foucault’s archaeological approach, the Unthought consists of experiences, ideas, concepts, and affects that do not fit into the reigning episteme. Since, as he has shown, epistemes are historically and culturally specific, this also implies that the Unthought is a moving target: what is Unthought for one age may become accepted doctrine of another. Foucault’s formulation emphasizes that although epistemic borders may shift, something always remains on the other side, an irreducible otherness that can never be brought into the confines of conscious reflection.

The other current has many manifestations. My favorite comes from Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1987), in which she imagines the Zen-like cult of the Handdarata. The Handdarata aspire to ignorance, which they understand not as a simple lack of knowledge but as a disciplined undoing of received assumptions that they call “unlearning.” That this mode of unthinking—or, as some have called it, thinking without thinking—could have cognitive capacities is a thread running through many literary texts, foregrounded in cognitive literary studies by such scholars as Alan Richardson (2001), Vanessa L. Ryan (2012), and Marcus Iseli (2014). It has also received popular attention in works such as Malcolm Gladwell’s (2005) Blink.

The two currents converge in recent research in neuroscience, cognitive science, and neuropsychology (Damasio 2000; Dehaene 2014; Edelman and Tononi 2000; Lewicki, Hill, and Czyzewska 1992), revealing what I call the cognitive nonconscious, a level of neuronal processing inaccessible to conscious introspection but nevertheless performing tasks essential for consciousness to function. While many literary texts have intuited the existence of the cognitive nonconscious, only within the last couple of decades has it been possible, with more sophisticated methodologies, to determine with precision what those functions are. They include processing information much faster than consciousness can, discerning patterns too complex for consciousness to perceive, creating a coherent body image, interpreting conflicting or ambiguous information, and drawing inferences from complex data. The cognitive nonconscious differs from background awareness (the mode of perception that broadly monitors environmental information) because it is inaccessible to consciousness; it also differs from the Freudian unconscious because it does not communicate through the coded language of symptoms and dreams. Rather, the results of its information processing manifest as subtle intuitions that dissipate after about half a second unless they receive top-down reinforcements from consciousness. Thus, the cognitive nonconscious, previously terra incognita, is brought partly within the circle of Thought. Nevertheless, there remains a gap between understanding these functions intellectually and experiencing them as affective, embodied reality, something that remains forever outside the grasp of consciousness.

The Corporeal Archive

The embodied and enactive brain is the center of our interior archive. Indeed, it may be considered the ur-archive, since all other archives originate with it. Just as Foucault’s trajectory led him beyond archaeology to genealogy, so to explore the nature of this interior archive we must go beyond anatomical brain structures to dynamic models of integrated brain processes and their relations of embodied cognition: the brain not as sculpture or plasticized exhibit but as vibrant and transforming interactions; not as noun, but as verb.

In addition to its dynamism, the interior archive also exceeds the boundaries of conscious reflection. The cognitive nonconscious reveals, with startling clarity, how extensively our cognitive resources extend beyond consciousness, and so the archive, too, must go beyond conscious memory into nonconscious processes that underlie memory formation. Moreover, the archive also reaches beyond the brain into what Lawrence Barsalou (2008) calls embodied cognition, including muscle memory, affective dispositions, sensations, and perceptions in the central and peripheral nervous systems outside the brain and in such organs as the skin and viscera. Not just the brain as archive, then, but all the sensing and perceiving sites within the body that receive, process, transmit, and store responses to stimuli, so the result may be more properly called a corporeal archive distributed throughout the body and, through the body’s interactions with the environment, into the world (Clark 2008).

Central to understanding this larger sense of the corporeal archive is the work of Walter J. Freeman III, a University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientist and polymath who died in 2016 after making important contributions to a variety of fields, including neural biology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of brain research, and mathematical modeling of brain dynamics. He was the son of Walter Freeman II, a brain scientist who advocated and practiced lobotomies with mentally ill patients; Freeman II was the principal force behind the (supposedly therapeutic) medical practice of destroying parts of the human frontal cortex (for an account of his legacy, see Day 2008). Ironically, his son dedicated himself to understanding how the cortex uses interactions with the environment to create meaning.

I will foreground three of Freeman III’s contributions that most strongly connect Unthought with this book’s central theme of uncertain archives. By tracing the experiments and arguments that form the basis for his work, we can get a better sense of how uncertainty is defined in cognitive brain research and how this research connects it with the ability of brains to think new thoughts. Since, as Einstein observed, God is in the details, this journey will necessarily take us into the minutiae of specific models and theories. The point is not to elevate these theories as “truth” but rather to demonstrate the emergence of an epistemological understanding of brain processes that emphasized their flexibility, potential for change, and essential openness to the world.

Unlearning

At a time when neuroscience was split between using microelectrodes to study individual neurons and technologies such as the electroencephalogram (EEG) to study cortical activity as a whole, Freeman pioneered the study of mesoscopic cortical research, focusing on coalitions of cortical units, called Hebbian cell assemblies (named after Donald Hebbs), that work together to create memory traces and other cognitive functions involved in learning. Experimentally, as Kozma and Noack (2017, 3) explain, this meant that he “took the electrode out from the interior of the individual neuron and placed it in the interstitial matrix between cells [using electrocorticogram recording to] listen to not only one single neuron but to the collective effect of thousands of neurons in a local pool.” Freeman’s (1995) distinctive contribution was to argue for the concept of unlearning, showing on a neurobiological level how unlearning dissolved existing patterns of rigid and stereotyped behavior to make way for new forms of behavior. Moreover, he emphasized that these new forms could be constructed communally through such shared activities as group singing or partners learning to dance together, thus making clear the adaptive advantages of unlearning for the evolution of community cohesion and bonding. It is unlearning, he concluded, that opens cortical pathways and makes them receptive to novel kinds of experience emerging from cooperative activities and shared affects. In this sense, he modeled the brain as an “uncertain archive” capable of undoing static forms and creating new possibilities, much as Le Guin imagined in the “unlearning” of the Handdarata.

Chaotic Processes in the Brain

A second contribution emerged from his modeling of brain dynamics as chaotic processes (Skarda and Freeman 1987), work that established a dynamic and mathematical basis for the process of “unlearning.” Working with Christine Skarda, a philosopher with an appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, who was given the rather droll title “Lab Associate in Charge of Philosophical Analysis of Models for Interpreting Data,” Freeman conducted a series of experiments on the olfactory bulb in rabbits (a frontal portion of the rabbit brain that detects, analyzes, and recognizes odors) using electrodes implanted along one side of the olfactory bulb and testing the rabbits’ reactions to known versus new odors. Skarda and Freeman obtained results consistent with the connectionist model that now forms the basis for advanced forms of artificial intelligence such as AlphaGo and AlphaGoZero (DeepMind 2017). They also identified mechanisms not present in (contemporary) connectionist models that “may be necessary to solve problems critical to the efficient functioning and survival of any system that has to behave adaptively in an environment subject to unpredictable and often violent fluctuations,” suggesting that these could provide clues for further refinement and development of connectionist models (Skarda and Freeman 1987, 161).

Essentially, their data suggested that the base state for olfactory neurons was low-level chaotic dynamics. Chaotic systems differ from noise or randomness because chaotic systems are deterministic rather than stochastic and operate within attractor basins (Hayles 1990). Their specific trajectories within the basins cannot be predicted (and in this respect resemble random movement), but unlike random processes, the movements of a chaotic system, as mapped with phase state diagrams, remain within the attractor basin unless or until their energy levels change, as with the famous butterfly shape of the Lorenz attractor. “Chaos,” Skarda and Freeman (1987, 165) explain, “is controlled noise with precisely defined properties. Any system that needs random activity can get it more cheaply and reliably from a chaotic generator than a noise source.”

When a rabbit encounters a new odor, their model indicates that the animal’s neural system is propelled from its base chaotic state into a “high-level chaotic state” with more degrees of freedom. The emergence of this new basin of attraction then “enables the system to avoid all of its previously learned activity patterns and to produce a new one” (Skarda and Freeman 1987, 171). Thus, they conclude that “without chaotic behavior the neural system cannot add a new odor to its repertoire of learned odors. Chaos provides the system with a deterministic ‘I don’t know’ state within which new activity patterns can be generated, as shown by what happens when the system encounters a previously unknown odor” (171).

The philosophical implications include a shift from the then-current pattern completion model, in which a connectionist system is given partial information and then learns how to complete it, to a model of destabilization that leads to emergent novelty, in which it is not a matter of completing a pattern (for how would the animal know in advance that the data would fit a pattern?). Rather, they envision that “in an alert, motivated animal, input destabilizes the system, leading to further destabilization and a bifurcation to a new form of patterned activity” (Skarda and Freeman 1987, 172). Uncertainty and destabilization thus become the allies, rather than the enemies, of corporeal archives, enabling them to adapt to new situations and learn from them. In this sense Freeman’s research has something in common with Gregory Chaitin’s (2001, 2006) discovery of omega numbers, which, as Luciana Parisi (2015) has noted, reveal an irreducible presence of randomness in mathematics. Like Chaitin, Freeman was interested in the positive aspects of uncertainty and destabilization as escape routes from a prison of order so excessive it became rigid and stereotypical.

Around 1988, I heard Freeman give a presentation on this research, when I was in the midst of writing Chaos Bound (Hayles 1990) and thus very much into chaos and complexity theory. He concluded with a gesture, unique in my experience, indicating his commitment to going beyond stratified protocols into new forms of behavior and learning. He thanked the rabbits.

Corporeal Archives in Environments

A third contribution of Freeman’s work was to develop a model of how an animal’s perceptual and sensory systems related to environments that transformed the animal’s role from passively receiving information to actively seeking it. As Kozma and Noack (2017, 5) note, Freeman linked the creation of knowledge and meaning to “sequences of oscillatory patterns of activity in sensory network distributed across time and space,” a topic developed in Freeman’s (2000) book on neurodynamics, which integrated results from EEGs and electrocorticograms (ECoG). As he writes in that book’s preface, “the patterns [of electrical fields detected by EEG and ECoG] are enigmatic, ephemeral, easily dismissed as noise, and by most accounts epiphenomenal. . . . Yet, some of the patterns are neural correlates of intentional actions, specifically the perception and discrimination of sensory stimuli by alert, aroused human and animal subjects” (Freeman 2000, vii). (The idea that cortical electrical fields could have implications for the construction of intention and meaning has subsequently also been proposed by Nicolelis and Cicurel [2015].)

Working from this premise, Freeman developed a model of action-perception interactions that moves from searching through the environment to receptors, progressing through subcycles that include loops for proprioception, control, and reafference. Essentially, as Kozma and Noack (2017) summarize, this model moved from “posterior sensory cortices toward the frontal motor cortices, then out in the environment and back into the sensory cortices” (6). It begins with an animal’s brain reaching out to an environment by searching for a specific sensory stimulus (an efference signal), as when a dog or rabbit sniffs the air to detect prey or predators. This information initiates the cycle, which reorients the animal’s bodily disposition toward appropriate action. Reafference occurs when the animal has developed certain anticipations about stimuli (based on previous iterations of the cycle) and then experiences something very different. It represents moments within the cycle when the vast repository of the Unthought breaks through and creates a breach in the boundary of Thought that opens the organism to new experiences and new kinds of cognitions. In epistemological terms, the model gives priority to curiosity as an intimation of the great unknown beyond while also foregrounding internal processes that interpret the results of curiosity’s search to create meaning for the organism, which incrementally changes the corporeal archive through the formation of new memories and the creation of novel predispositions.

Connecting Unthought to Thought

In larger terms, Freeman’s work shows with paradigmatic clarity the reflexive dilemma that humans face as they contemplate their existence: the embodied brain working to understand how the embodied brain can understand.

In Unthought (Hayles 2017) I focus on cognition as a key term through which we can reorient humanistic understanding so that it encompasses nonhumans as well as humans, technical as well as biological cognitions. Searching for a definition that would have a low entry threshold for something to count as cognitive but also be able to scale upward in complexity, I arrived at the following: “Cognition is a process that interprets information in contexts that connect it with meaning” (22). The formulation emphasizes cognitive processes as interfaces where the great unknown is encountered and transformed into meanings vital to an organism’s survival, in a continuing process of altering and extending the corporeal archive. This definition implies that all life forms have some cognitive capacities, including unicellular organisms; it also positions plants, which compose about 90 percent of the world’s biomass, as cognitive entities. In addition, it acknowledges that technical devices, specifically computational media, are capable of nonconscious cognition and thus opens possibilities for critical analyses of complex human-technical systems as cognitive assemblages.

Within this framework, Unthought has multiple significances. It names the cognitive nonconscious within biological life forms as a process inaccessible to consciousness and only recently admitted into scientific theory; it affirms the existence of extended cognitions throughout the body; it provides a way to think about cognitive technical media in terms that link them to human cognition and agency; and it locates humans within a planetary ecology less anthropocentric and more balanced about the cognitive capacities of nonhumans. In the most encompassing terms, Unthought names the great unknown itself, considered to be an inexhaustible reservoir vast orders of magnitude more complex than any cognitive system and ultimately the source of all cognitions.

This version of Unthought connects with many other articulations: virtuality in the work of Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Massumi 2002); transindividuation in Simondon (1989; Combes 2012); process reality in Whitehead (1978; Hansen 2015); trace and différance in Derrida (2016); autopoiesis in Maturana and Varela (1980); reflexive differentiation in Luhmann (1996) and Wolfe (2009); the “great outdoors” in Meillassoux (2010). While each of these frameworks has its specific emphases and terms of elaboration, they share a family resemblance in aspiring to articulate and understand how that which exceeds all attempts at articulation and understanding animates and gives vitality to our efforts.

Distinctive to Unthought as I have sketched it here is an emphasis on cognitive interfaces, including but also extending beyond the brain, and on acts of interpretation and meaning as central to the formation of corporeal archives in biological life forms and cognitive technical systems. As I have shown through the example of Walter Freeman III’s work, critical to the creative potential of biological corporeal archives are uncertainty, chaos, and undecidability, traces and intimations of Unthought within Thought.

References

Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2008. “Grounded cognition.” Annual Review of Psychology 59: 617–645.

Chaitin, Gregory. 2001. Exploring Randomness. Heidelberg: Springer.

Chaitin, Gregory. 2006. MetaMath! The Quest for Omega. New York: Vintage.

Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. London: Oxford University Press.

Combes, Muriel. 2012. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Mariner Books.

Day, Elizabeth. 2008. “He was bad, so they put an ice pick in his brain.” Observer, January 13, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/jan/13/neuroscience.medicalscience.

DeepMind 2017. “AlphaGo: Learning from scratch.” October 18, 2017. https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/.

Dehaene, Stanislas. 2014. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Penguin.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2016. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Edelman, Gerald M., and Giulio Tononi. 2000. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books.

Foucault, Michel. 1974. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage.

Freeman, Walter J. 1995. Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate. Milton Park: Psychology Press.

Freeman, Walter J. 2000. Neurodynamics: An Exploration in Mesoscopic Brain Dynamics. New York: Springer.

Gladwell, Malcolm. 2005. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown.

Hansen, Mark B. N. 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 1990. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hebbs, Donald O. 1949. The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Iseli, Marcus. 2014. “Thomas De Quincey’s subconscious: Nineteenth century intimations of the cognitive unconscious.” Romanticism 20 (3): 294–305.

Kozma, Robert, and Raymond Noack. 2017. “Freeman’s intentional neurodynamics.” https://binds.cs.umass.edu/papers/2017_Kozma_Noack_Freemans_Intentional_Neurodynamics.pdf.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 1987. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books.

Lewicki, Pawel, Thomas Hill, and Maria Czyzewska. 1992. “Nonconscious acquisition of information.” American Psychology 47 (6): 796–801.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1996. Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht D. Reidel.

Meillassoux, Quentin. 2010. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Nicolelis, Miguel A., and Ronald M. Cicurel. 2015. The Relativistic Brain: How It Works and Why It Cannot Be Simulated by a Turing Machine. Self-published, CreateSpace.

Parisi, Luciana. 2015. “Critical computation: Digital philosophy and GAI.” Presentation at the Thinking with Algorithms conference, University of Durham, UK, February 27, 2015.

Richardson, Alan. 2001. British Romanticism and the Science of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ryan, Vanessa L. 2012. Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Simondon, Gilbert. 1989. L’Individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité. Paris: Éditions Aubier.

Skarda, Christine A., and Walter J. Freeman. 1987. “How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 102: 161–173.

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology. New York: Free Press/Macmillan.

Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

58

Values

John S. Seberger and Geoffrey C. Bowker

The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.

—Derrida 1998

The Uncertainty of Values

The logic of Derrida’s words above is equally provocative when reversed: what is no longer lived in the same way is no longer archived in the same way. This reciprocal view—the view up from the living body to the archive, rather than the view down from the archive—serves as the framing for this chapter.

We theorize the uncertain relationship between the emerging epistemic modes of a bifurcated archive and the evolution of human values. We take the human in its most basic operationalization: as a biological and autopoietic (Maturana 2002; Varela, Maturana, and Uribe 1974) actant; we define the archive as the world-in-time (and the representations thereof) that is accessible, through sensation, perception, and cognition, to humans.[1] Even with these simple assumptions, the complexity of the human and of the archive emerges in the form of values that are perpetuated, stifled, imagined, and nurtured.

In hopes of arriving at a concrete definition of “value,” we begin with a broad premise: values make us human as much as our biological conditions do, albeit in a more humanistic sense. The biophenomenological being of the human forms the archive based on embodiment-derived modes of interacting with environments and temporalities; in turn, the material representations that populate the archive—inscriptions, documents, gadgets, infrastructures, and therefore the possible modes with which we might interact with them—perpetuate certain values (Knobel and Bowker 2011; Sengers et al. 2005).[2]

As biological and cultural-historical animals, humans alter themselves through their very act of being through and by means of the archive they create: the lived world that we come to characterize and periodize in the form of epochs and isms.[3] This process of autopoietic alteration gives rise to the historical divisions we describe in the form of eras and that Foucault speaks of in terms of discursive transformations (Foucault 1972). As Donna Haraway (2003) has noted, “The world is a knot in motion” (6). This biocultural process is our preliminary framing of that knot’s motion.

The archive—once fundamentally grounded in the human experience of sensation, perception, and cognition—is splitting. The human no longer relies on itself to generate the archive in full. Rather, the rise of big data and advances in machine learning allow cognitive, sensorial, and perceptual off-loading. The archive is constructed now through both human and prosthetic, computerized experience. While the bifurcation of the archive has been underway for some time, it is only now, through the proliferation of computing—its spread into all areas of life, as in the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT)—that the bifurcation becomes complete. Wherever the human and the computer interface, the world-as-archive is bifurcated.

Resident in the world-as-archive, with its heterogenous epistemologies, the human as embodied and biological actant lives simultaneously in the subjective archive of experience and in the objectifying archive of computerized empiricism. (Am I a shopper on Amazon leaving a trace or a behavioral profile fashioning a human subject? Or both?) The experiential and prosthetic-experiential archives ultimately reside in parallel; the human straddles them. They become an ontological chimera, equally describable as an agential subject and as an object that is acted upon. But what does it mean to live as a chimera? Are the epistemological assumptions of experience and prosthetic experience commensurable? How do we approach values when they arise from the entanglement of human conditions and computerized conditions (Barad 2007)?

Just as these changes transform certain discursive constellations that subtend traditional values (privacy now is just not the same kind of thing it was in the past, nor is democracy [Veyne 2010]), they also potentiate the emergence of new value sets, new humans. Indeed, those changes reframe the human as a value in itself: something that must be protected and fostered, perhaps in spite of technological developments and the increasing ubiquity of big data–driven approaches to knowledge production. We argue that among the most uncertain effects of the contemporary culture of big data, ubiquitous networking, and smart objects is the concern for, and evolution of, the human as a value to be preserved: not only the human that emerges through the Enlightenment and liberalist values that dominate Western discussions of technology (e.g., agency, equality) but also emergent value sets that are not yet thinkable.

The Biological Human, the Human Archive

The traditional archive as a site of historical knowledge production emerges from human embodiment: the physical state of being human, replete with sensorial and perceptual abilities and bound by the temporality of bodily change. Thus, the archive and the human comprise one another. In our framework, it is possible to envision infinite archival forms, or topologies, relative to the diversity of biological life. As a biologically defined actant, the human lives within this archive; in living, it forms this archive and maintains it.

There are many ways of approaching the structure of the archive. Through the lenses of cognitive science and contemporary phenomenology, one might speak of affordances (Gibson 1977); in terms of twentieth-century phenomenology, one might speak of thrownness or nearness (Heidegger 2001; Heidegger, Stambaugh, and Schmidt 2010). From the vantage of performance, one might approach the bifurcation of the archive as an exercise in remaining even as datafication always already signifies an existential disappearance (Schneider 2001). Still further, and in reaction to the Heideggerian strain of phenomenology as well as Schneider’s work on performativity, one might also employ Derridean notions of spectrality and violence (Derrida 1998). While these framings serve as a backdrop for the present topic, we begin our discussion of the archive using the language of Michel Foucault, whose early work on the archive serves as the foundation for much of the current return to archival theories (Eliassen 2010).

In Foucauldian terms, the bounded lives of the human biological actant are lived within eras, or what Foucault called historical a priori conditions (Foucault 1972). The archive is the set of possible statements that can be made within any given era. Thus, until there was a legal definition of homosexual in 1882 in France, the concept just did not exist and could not be expressed (Foucault 1978). In this theory, one historical a priori era gives way to another through a process of widespread discursive transformation that forms an epistemic break—the means for cataloging the world in order to act on it are different before and after the break. The interface (whether on-screen or in text) between human and archive changes, and with it, new sets of values are made possible. It is useful to think of this interface in terms of affordances (Gibson 1977) between material objects and human subjects such that meaningful, actionable interaction between the two emerges.[4] What is no longer lived in the same way is no longer archived in the same way.

Thus, the archive is, indeed, in motion (Røssaak 2010), and the human is in motion with it. The archive is in motion because it both moves with the human and drives the human. Its latest motion—that associated with big data—reifies the human as chimerical: partly embodied, partly disembodied; partly subjective and partly objective. As the rhetoric and logic of big data become ubiquitous, so, too, does the presence of the chimera. Whereas once—say, in the form of government statistics (Foucault 1991)—the chimera was relegated to certain corners of the archive, it now comes to reside in all areas touched by computerization. This distribution across categories is the root of the complete archival bifurcation and the impetus for renewed concern for what constitutes a value.

An Archival Bifurcation

The inherent tension between the ontogrammatical categories of the subject and the object, between phenomenology and objectivism, has long set the stage for a data-driven, archival bifurcation. Alfred North Whitehead famously theorized what he referred to as “bifurcation of nature” (Stengers and Latour 2014). By this, he referred to the division of the world into two categories: that of science and that of intuition; that which is known through the inductive methods of objectivist empiricism and that which is known through the experience of the phenomenal:

What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. . . . I am arguing against [the bifurcation of] nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is the fact is apprehended in the greenness of trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influence and the apparent nature being effluent. (Whitehead 1920, 30)

Whitehead’s concern echoes through the emergence of an ontologically chimerical human. Consider, as an example, the IoT and the archival structure it portends. The rise of the IoT heralds a greater trend toward the networked computerization of our environments, cities, homes, and bodies. Already, IoT devices are poised to become obligatory passage points (Latour 1987) relative to such phenomena as carbon emissions, water consumption and traffic patterns, in-home temperatures and ambient lighting, sexual activity, medical conditions, and fitness levels. Interestingly, the IoT represents the values of individual actants (Latour 1996) interacting (a very American vision), as opposed to the more communalist coinage of smart cities more common in Europe. The humans in the IoT are both subjects and objects. They are subjects because they act with agency (through inherent mechanisms of sensation, perception, and cognition) on objects: they are part of the gathering that produces the thing (Heidegger 2001; Latour 2012). But the human in the IoT is also an object. The human, as user, enrolls in a media ecology of devices that sense, perceive, and are not subject to the shortcomings of human attention and perception (Ashton 2009). In either enrolling or being interpellated into such a media ecology—in support of such values as convenience, efficiency, surveillance, or control—the human offers itself up as a site of data extraction: the human becomes a mountain from which to mine ore—digital gold (Peters 2012; Zuboff 2019). Still further, through enrolling in such a media ecology, humans poise themselves to receive the synthesized output of the data generated. In receiving always already partial, incomplete output, the interpellated subject comes to know itself, in part, as a data-driven object. When the human straddles the categories of subject and object, the very ontological status of the human comes into question. The human resembles less a fact than a matter of concern (Latour 2004): it comes to resemble a value, something that is negotiated, constructed, nurtured, or stifled.

The bifurcated archive generates two vantages, each of which is contextualized by the cultural-historical conditions in which a given person resides. These are categorical vantages that contain the historical a priori conditions of a given place, space, or tradition. From one vantage, objectivism reigns; from the other, subjectivism. The biological human is both user and human-as-value. The latter derives from embodied experience, the phenomenology of the daily world as it is encountered and constructed through the functions of a biologically standardized embodiment; the former derives from the design, production, and implementation of a pervasive network of connected objects designed to gather data (or rather capta [Drucker 2014]) about certain phenomena.

Knowledge derived from both of these pathways will ultimately reside in the same experiential realm: these knowledges will describe ever larger parts of the lived worlds of those engaged in the new archive (many are denied access or choose not to access—paradoxically, “dropping out” becomes easier the more tech savvy you are—and there will be a choice of which knowledge to subscribe to across a range of scenarios. When is it best to view myself through the lens of my Amazon profile?) As a chimera in the bifurcated archive, the human is tasked with the unenviable obligation of discerning the validity of each mode of archival statement across myriad situations. This obligation is all the more unenviable because it occurs in the face of a gray system: the human user is not generally in possession of all of the facts or of an understanding of how its objectified subjectivity is created.

The Human-as-Value in the Bifurcated Archive

The interdisciplinarian Simon Penny (2018) once remarked that the practice of anthropomorphosis is as old as art itself. Humans have, through the production of art, always already troubled the ontological dichotomy of subject and object: in rendering objects more humanlike, they have (tacitly) acknowledged the porousness of the membrane that separates subject from object. Classical statues, white and austere when they come to mind, were once brilliantly painted, often with precious stones used to mimic eyes. In the bifurcated archive, the human becomes both model and sculpture: it sees through the lens of both biological eye and algorithmic gemstone.

In enrolling into media ecologies that generate chimeras—where the experiential subject meets its doppelgänger in the form of an objectified subject—the user concretizes the new bifurcated archive. It might be said that for some people we are realizing a long-held goal: rendering oneself wholly an object to break the final barrier of the human skin (Bentley 1941)—the organ that experientially divides us from our environment—so as to belong to an ontological category that is not subject to the same biological pitfalls, the spectrality of death and violence, as the human animal.

It is tempting to argue that the human is killing itself to know itself differently (The human is dead! Long live the human!); that in objectifying itself through continued and extended engagement with objects that extract data from it so as to produce knowledge about it, the human ceases to be human and strives to become its own incomplete doppelgänger.[5] But such a characterization would be too moralistic, too retrofocused on the maintenance of outdated Renaissance and Enlightenment values.

Through the construction of, and residence in, the bifurcated archive, the human is simply transforming. This transformation, like many before it, precipitates new values (see Rose [2012] for the priority of ethics over ontology). The duty with which we—as humans, as users, as scholars, as subjectivities—are now tasked is the development of a new ethics: an epistemic ethics that nurtures the values we choose, even up to the point that the human—the biologically derived gestalt that emerges through sensation, perception, and cognition—becomes a value, a constrained variable. Interpreted in terms of epistemic ethics—when, and relative to what type of phenomena, is it appropriate and beneficial to employ the reductionist tendencies of big data?—the question of the bifurcated archive, and therefore the future computing paradigms that will continue to evolve it, is necessarily one of values. Faced with fundamental ontological change, the human—as experiential animal, as researcher, as cultural inheritor—must engage with difficult questions about which human values are worth fostering.

In light of this new bifurcated archive, we should not be focused on attaining the apotheosis of Enlightenment values or their derivatives. (That would be an attempt to normalize our futures relative to the past; to put a different shirt on a body and call it a different body [Canguilhem 1991].) It is quite possible that the objectification of subjectivity constitutes the apotheosis of Enlightenment modes of knowledge production in any event. Rather, the matter that resonates from the core of this question about the future human and future computing—the possibility of being human inside and outside the bifurcated archives of future computing—is that we should be concerned with the place of values to begin with.

As we risk collectively slipping further into the technological imperatives of big data and computerized empiricism, we must not lose sight of the fact that the creation and development of values are core to the experience of being human and to the definition of humanity. We must not lose sight of the fact that being human might be a value unto itself. Values will remain central to the human experience, even as they are distributed across the bifurcated categories of the archive: a human that occurs at the nexus of the map and the territory, the present and future archives, the model and the sculpture, and the human and its data doppelgänger. It is our task now, as humans writ large, to consider how much of ourselves we are willing to forget so that we might come to know ourselves better.

Notes

1. In this light, the archive might be defined as the gestalt representation of the human Umwelt or lifeworld (Von Uexküll [1934] 2009). That we refer to “the world” is not meant to imply a universalized experience of the world. Rather, it is meant to imply that the world constitutes a set of possible worlds, each of which is subject to the cultural-historical rules of given populations.

2. While it is tempting to discuss values through the lenses of privacy, agency, equality, or justice, we refrain from that approach. Value systems vary widely across cultures but are unified through their belonging to the category “values.” So, rather than speaking through particular values, we focus on the category. We do not feel it appropriate to prescribe beyond the consideration of values: it is not our place to promote this value system or that. Any prescription is ultimately a proscription.

3. We do not argue for the superiority of certain isms over others. Rather, we invoke them so as to highlight the heterotopic state of the world-as-archive: a state that supports multiple, simultaneous, and possibly conflicting isms. Our goal is not to address these particular traditions but rather to address the logics upon which they stand.

4. For readers not familiar with this approach to the archive, we might readily rephrase it as follows: human life occurs within the boundaries of historical eras; historical eras are defined by the sense that can be made, heretofore in a post hoc fashion, of the archives that represent them; these archives, by and large, are composed of inscribed documents; any change in the means by which archives are constructed implies a change in the way that their era might be understood.

5. In the bifurcated archive, humans become their incomplete doppelgängers because of the limited accessibility of the data that are collected about them in order to construct them: they are known through the output of graphical user interfaces and the recommendations of algorithms, but they do not necessarily know the mechanisms underlying those outputs.

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Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. “Performance remains.” Performance Research 6 (2): 100–108.

Sengers, Phoebe, Kristen Boehner, Shay David, and Joseph “Jofish” Kaye. 2005. “Reflective design.” In Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: Between Sense and Sensibility, 49–58. New York: Association of Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1094562.1094569.

Stengers, Isabelle, and Bruno Latour. 2014. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Varela, Francisco G., Humberto R. Maturana, and Ricardo Uribe. 1974. “Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model.” Biosystems 5 (4): 187–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/0303-2647(74)90031-8.

Veyne, Paul. 2010. Foucault: His Thought, His Character. Cambridge: Polity.

Von Uexküll, Jakob. (1934) 2009. “A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds.” Semiotica 89 (4): 319–391. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1992.89.4.319.

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1920. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Accessed August 15, 2019. http://archive.org/details/cu31924012068593.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.

59

Visualization

Johanna Drucker

The Status of Vision

The term visualization carries powerful metaphorical, sensory, and cognitive connotations. It is used to refer to the capacity to picture ideas and experiences mentally, as well as an equivalent for understanding in frequently used phrases such as “I see.” These aspects of visuality have little parallel in the auditory—and even less in the tactile—senses. Vision obviously carries a striking force. At least in Western culture, vision dominates the hierarchy of perception. This privileged status is conferred in part because visual experience is able to be construed as a nonphysical, merely cognitive function. We do not have to touch the world to see it. Embodiment has long plagued the Judeo-Christian tradition, carrying a stigma of fleshly temptation and sin. Taste and touch are associated with sexual appetite, not knowledge.

In spite of this privileged status, visual forms of knowledge production have faced challenges in claims to authority and legitimacy. Numeracy and literacy have greater cultural credibility than pictorial or gestural modes of expression or creation, in part because the codes of numbers and letters are stable, fixed, and recognizable. (The irony is that these notation systems are always apprehended and read through the eye.) The mathematician René Thom went so far as to state explicitly that only mathematical notation and written language could be used to communicate knowledge (Thom 1982, 9–21). The discourse on the differences between visual and verbal codes, which wove through early structuralism and semiotics, had an earlier basis in the distinctions of poiesis and pictura and can be tracked into antiquity (Lee 1967).

Visualization Tools and Platforms

But in our current suite of tools for humanities work, we find a collection of ubiquitous methods for data visualization. In this context, visuals have a diagrammatic and schematic (nonpictorial) explicitness, perhaps too much so. Their stable codes embody reductive presentation even as they offer a means of “representing metrics as graphics”—to invoke the standard formulation. To explore the problems posed by this standard approach, we have to unpack the black box of “representing” and also question the concept of representation. In current standard software platform–based practices, representation conceals as much as it reveals. As I have stated repeatedly, “Information visualizations are reifications of misinformation” (Drucker 2011). They present a false image: “Visualizations are representations passing themselves off as presentations” (Drucker 2011). And they put visualization in a secondary display-of-data role in the activity of knowledge production. The presentational stance naturalizes a declarative mode of rhetorical expression—visualizations simply appear to be straightforward statements. The enunciative aspect of visualizations remains largely overlooked. In addition, the ideological fictions of the omniscient, free-willed, autonomous subject placed in an observer independent relation to knowledge are inscribed within the apparatus of the viewing situation (Drucker 2017a).

Reification of Misinformation: Data Production

Let us take each of these issues in turn, beginning with the reification of misinformation as a crucial feature of information visualizations. All quantitative data depend upon a process of parameterization, a model of what can be identified and counted. This process depends upon explicit criteria that can be modeled computationally. For example, if I wish to assess gendered language and use string searches for adjectives and pronouns—his/him/he, hers/her/she—in the English language, many gendered incidences in a text will escape the results (Mandell 2016). My model is based on a parameter that has only limited accuracy in relation to the vocabulary of a language in which plural nouns and pronouns do not carry gendered identity. More importantly, the binaristic model fits only certain constructs and concepts of gender. In our current contexts, the subtleties of their/them/they could not be communicated, and all plurals would drop out of the results. The general problem is exemplified by this specific case: that quantification is a result of a modeling process that is rarely made explicit as part of a final visualization. Other factors affect statistical processing, such as sample size, randomization, choice of corpus or data set, and so on, which are also not made evident in final graphics. The first part of a conventional data visualization, the creation of quantitative “data,” is fraught with factors that cannot be addressed, recovered, or examined through the visualization produced. The final visualization, however, is actually a representation of this data model—not of the phenomena from which the data are extracted. But that modeling process is never shown in the visualization—and rarely noted or recorded in an annotation. We are presented with the results of a mediating process without any chance of accessing and assessing the model.

Reification of Information: Graphic Issues

The next phase of production, the generation of a graphic from the so-called data (which are “so-called” because the notion of data as “given” and thus self-evident is patently false—all data are constructed, made, and should be referred to as constructa or capta), relies on a display algorithm. In its simplest form, this algorithm says: take this value and chart it in this way against a graphic coordinate system. Deeply rooted in the Cartesian rationalization of surface, this approach embodies other unexamined assumptions: that a surface can be rationalized with a standard metrical system so that its area and space are used to present data in an objective, user-independent manner. This may work when we are charting the number of nails in a barrel, but it becomes extremely problematic when we are working with text mining, or analysis of human expressions and social or cultural phenomena. What kinds of standard metrics are to be used in assessing the impacts of violence? Or measuring trauma? Or expressing joy? The idea of affective metrics—not standard metrics used to create a graph of affective forces but a metric created from affective dimensions that vary in scale, intensity, and relative value—is far from realization in any current visualization platform. The rationalization of surface is an ideological act, not a neutral one, and yet goes unnoted in daily habits of use.

But even if we accept that a Cartesian grid is sufficient for visual presentation of information, many of the currently standard visualizations depend on display algorithms that reify intellectual limitations. For instance, when we display a sequence of values (say, the number of emails received a week, broken into twenty-four-hour periods), the demarcation or chunking of the temporal units may produce an inaccurate picture. Time units can be gerrymandered as surely as political districts so that if a spike occurred in email communication just at and after midnight and then fell off entirely, the average between two days might give the same value to both segments, but the actual pattern of timing would reveal something very different. The granularity of the segmentation can skew the display toward a semantic interpretation of what is an incidental artifact of the algorithm, not an accurate surrogate for the phenomenon. This critical position is relevant for any graphic that takes continuous phenomena and breaks them down into discrete data points. The “chunking” is another activity based on a model that in turn shapes the display. Similarly, the use of continuous plots to display discrete data points is a frequent violation of the rules of good graphics. The continuous graph, meant to show rates of change, should never be used to show relative values. This is just one example among many of the ways charts or graphs generated from commonly used platforms (Google Sheets, Excel, or Tableau) produce displays whose visual features are semantically misleading.

Other all-too-common abominations, word clouds, and network graphics are visualizations whose semantic value is almost always invalid since the display algorithms optimize screen space according to rules that do not reflect the underlying structure of the data. Thus, when a network diagram spreads its hairball mass across a screen and bounces all points in a network to the same distance from the center, it is not registering any actual “information” about the relative values, degrees of proximity, or quality of the relationships marked by the edges connecting the nodes. The algorithm is optimizing the screen display. The results should never be read as semantically meaningful except in highly reductive terms. The main features of network graphs, centrality and betweenness, can be extracted from the graphic, but nothing about relative distance or similarity of edge-line reflects the data. Word clouds are even worse: their relative size, color choices, orientation of vertical and horizontal display, and compressed proximities are all artifacts of the algorithm, not of the data. The words’ dimensions demonstrate a classic graphing problem—the creation of area is almost always a result of changing the value of one metric in a way that distorts the outcomes (Schmid 1983). When the area of a circle is altered by changing the value of either the radius or the diameter, or the area of a rectangle by changing the value of one side, the result is a fundamental error in the relation between quantitative value and graphic display.

Reviewing all of the above, we can see that each of these procedures participates in the reification of misinformation: the original data model, its transformation into metrics, the use of rationalized standard metrics, and the production of visualizations whose artifactual properties are incorrectly read as semantically meaningful representations of underlying data.

The Epistemological Problem: Representation versus Presentation

The second issue with visualizations is an epistemological one couched in rhetorical terms: they are representations passing themselves off as presentations (Drucker 2017b). This means that the elaborate processes described succinctly above (the life cycle of data production) are all concealed in a final graphic statement that appears to say “this is . . .” whatever the graphic shows. So a recent, quite striking, and well-executed visualization on the front page of the New York Times graphed gun sales against shooting deaths in all countries of the developed world (Fisher and Keller 2017). A cluster of points at the low end of the grid contained every country except the US, whose isolated position at the far outside of the chart required that the scale be stretched to accommodate it. This was a compelling graph, rhetorically persuasive and immediately legible. No argument can be made with its effectiveness. But it is not a presentation of relative amounts of gun violence and gun sales; it is an image that represents numerical data extracted from official and reported sources within certain domains of the cultural system in which this information is selectively produced, stored, accessed, and released before being processed through a graphing program whose display features were set to create an image with a certain weight of lines, color of data points, size of labels, and so on.

The point is not that the image lies or is inaccurate but that it presents itself as a declarative statement of quantitative expression when it is really a rhetorical argument created through a complex set of processes of selective mediating alteration. The elaborate processes through which the representational machinations work cannot be recuperated from the graphic. In this particular instance, the graph made its point so clearly that any modifications that might occur from a nuanced investigation of underlying sources would only alter the image slightly. But the graphic hides distinctions among different kinds of data sources, degrees of reliability, and methods of reporting gun sales and violence, not to mention cultural patterns of regulation, control, and use. What appears to be a statement should be a highly qualified and annotated commentary, but we have no graphic conventions for this kind of display. Thus, the knowledge statement is false, if taken as a presentation of information, since the visualization is an elaborately constructed surrogate produced through a chain of manipulations, all of which participate in the separation of the phenomena from their appearance in the graph.

The answer to this problem is not greater accuracy. The gap between representation and phenomena can never be closed—they are distinct, and different from each other ontologically. The surrogate will always stand in a secondary relation to the phenomena. This is a fundamental premise of critical epistemology and a foundation of the illusion of correlationism (Bryant 2014). On the contrary, the point is to push the recognition of the interpretative machinations of the representational process into view.

Perversely, the closer the correlation between representation and an “original” or “originary” phenomenon, the greater the problem of misrepresentation since the illusion that the graphic presentation of “information” is the “same as” the phenomenon from which the quantified “data” were extracted becomes even greater. For functional purposes and practical demands of actual situations that need instrumental solutions, these issues have to be put aside. A weather map, traffic alert, chart of blood pressure, or graphic showing interest rates and poll results has to do its mundane work. But the fundamental surrogate character of the epistemological work it is doing should not be misconstrued.

Primary Modes of Knowledge Production

Finally, visualizations can be used as primary modes of knowledge production, not representations or presentations of information that exists in advance of their creation. Very simply, this is a matter of direct engagement with graphic production. If I draw a circle around two words in a poem, I have performed an interpretative act, not represented it. The graphic stands, after the fact, as a representation of that action, of that interpretative argument, but the act itself produces the relationship. If I draw a sketch for a house plan, even before I indicate the allocation of space to functions and activities, I have created a graphic schema as a primary act of modeling. A mathematician working out an equation on a piece of paper, producing a proof of a geometric theorem or a complex algebraic formula, is creating knowledge immediately, not in a remediated or representational mode. The knowledge does not exist in advance of the graphic but is constituted in it and through it. The modes in which graphicality is a direct method of knowledge production are many, but the cultural authority of images as knowledge has always been uncertain. Portraits lie, landscapes are romanticized, the past is imagined, the future conjured, and scenes of myth and fantasy adopt the realist techniques used in photographic rendering. True, many of the natural and physical sciences depend upon visual methods of study and presentation, as well as representation, for the very work they do—from microbiology to astronomy, from the ancient conventions of botanical drawing to the use of computational methods of imaging from the aggregation of features extracted by a variety of processes. Only a handful, such as the now largely outmoded graphic calculus, actually generate knowledge using graphic methods.

Implications of Graphic Conventions

The convention of presenting visual information on a flat surface oriented to the eye in the position of a screen, canvas, page, wall, or other material support reinforces the illusion of the declarative statement. Because we face the image directly, seeing it in our field of vision, we do not look through, around, or behind it to test its veracity or authenticity. We accept its mode of address, its very directness, as a natural condition of visual communication. But that very naturalness conceals yet another aspect of the communicative system—the enunciative apparatus. Enunciation is a concept developed in structural linguistics, particularly in the work of Émile Benveniste (1966, 253), who articulated the concept of the speaking and spoken subject of any utterance. Someone speaks to someone in every instance and in so doing creates a relation between the positions of the speaking and spoken subject and the enunciator and enunciated. This positionality inscribes the spoken subject within the enunciation of the speaker. The spoken subject, like the object of a “hail” message from one person to another, is positioned as the other and object of enunciation. This othering carries power since the spoken subject is enunciated by and through the speaker’s discourse. Benveniste focused on the use of pronouns, I/you, and deictics, here/there, now/then, in studying positionality as a feature of enunciation. In graphic systems, these positions are necessarily structured through other means.

The enunciative apparatus of information visualizations goes largely unacknowledged. Even the authorship and originating source of visualizations are often concealed or masked by the use of a tool or platform that is so conventional it seems to speak itself, unmarked by an enunciative framework. Yet every graphic expression, information visualization, or display hails its viewer. The image positions the viewer in a subject relation to its enunciating activity. If we shift our frame of focus from images to interfaces, to those environments where the controlled conditions of interaction are designed to favor the illusion of free-willed autonomy and control, then the issue of enunciation aligns with illusions of agency. Interfaces, more than visualizations, are built on models of agency in which an individual engaging with its features (point, click, link, scroll, and so on) imagines himself or herself in control of the experience. The back-end constraints and obvious, evident disciplinary regimes that control the experience are naturalized through a combination of familiarity and ease of use (as well as the gratification of immediate results, click sounds, and other sensory rewards). Rather than imagining or perceiving oneself as a subject in such circumstances, produced by and in relation to the enunciative apparatus, one may easily imagine oneself as an autonomous consumer, independent of and thus in control of the situation of use. Agency is reinforced and returned to the subject as a produced experience of illusory autonomy, and thus the mode of graphic interface functions as an ideological instrument, not merely an epistemological one.

These features are all elements of long-standing traditions within the graphic lineage of, at the very least, Western and many Eastern art practices. Whether we are looking at mathematical tables from the ancient Near East, gridded on clay tablets, ancient Chinese star charts, or mappings of the moon’s phases from prehistoric caves, our habits of producing visualizations that presume to make unmediated statements are deeply embedded in the ergonomic conventions and habits associated with knowledge production. We face the wall, tablet, page, and screen in the same position, and visualizations pass themselves off as mere statements, as presentations. The life cycles of production that express themselves as computationally manipulated graphics are only different in scale and complexity, not fundamental epistemological structure or ideological function, from those of earlier epochs. William Playfair’s (1786) printed graphics stand in the same relation of enunciative systems as an online chart. But the ease of creation, ubiquity of use, and blindness to the conditions of our own production as subjects of these visualizations intensify: the more natural a circumstance appears to be, the more it is an instrument of cultural forces. And all cultural forces are in the service of some interests over others. Learning to read visualization graphics as the rhetorically and epistemologically entangled expressions they are is an essential critical tool in the struggle for understanding whose interests are being served—by the graphics and by us.

References

Benveniste, Émile. 1966. Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard.

Bryant, Levi R. 2014. “Correlationism: An extract from the Meillassoux dictionary.” Edinburgh University Press Blog. December 12, 2014. https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-extract-from-the-meillassoux-dictionary/.

Drucker, Johanna. 2011. “Humanities approaches to graphical display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5 (1). http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html.

Drucker, Johanna. 2017a. “Information visualization and/as enunciation.” Journal of Documentation 73 (5): 903–916. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2017-0004.

Drucker, Johanna. 2017b. “Non-representational approaches to modelling interpretation in a graphical environment.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33 (2). https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqx034

Fisher, Max, and Josh Keller. 2017. “What explains US mass shootings?” New York Times, November 7, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html.

Lee, Rensselaer. 1967. Ut Pictura Poeisis: The Humanist Theory of Painting. New York: Norton.

Mandell, Laura. 2016. “Visualizing gender complexity.” Lecture given at University of Hamburg, June 9, 2016. https://lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de/l2go/-/get/v/19498.

Playfair, William. 1786. Commercial and Political Atlas. London: Printed for J. Debrett.

Schmid, Calvin. 1983. Statistical Graphics. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Thom, René. 1982. “Stop chance! Stop noise!” SubStance 40:9–21.

60

Vulnerability

Birkan Taş

Big data practices shape and are shaped by multilayered interactions of humans and nonhumans, which generate new forms of knowledge.[1] These practices concern human lives, but they also have their own lives in an ever-growing complexity that undergirds regulations about public health, medical practices, economic measures, policy-making, and other issues, due to their epistemic power. A growing area of interest for governments and policy-makers is big data on disability. On the one hand, these data are meant to address the inequalities and exclusions people with disabilities face in their everyday lives and to contribute to inclusive development.[2] On the other hand, they pave the way for the exclusion of people with dispositional or potential illnesses or health problems from equal job opportunities or public participation. For instance, purchasing or eating habits, sleep patterns, and stress levels can shape a person’s chance to be employed. Recent studies suggest that it is possible to diagnose clinical depression and risk of heart failure and to predict diabetes-based problems up to a year in advance through the predictive analysis of data (Allen 2014). The neoliberal merging of big data with biobanks or data brokers, which quantify and monetize human experiences, labor, and desires for maximum profit, pose further risks in the context of “anticipative prevention and pre-emptive intervention” regarding disabilities (ten Have 2016, 143). Produced intentionally or unintentionally, big data can be used to monitor and exclude possible disabilities for cost-efficiency purposes and thus potentially create further vulnerabilities.[3]

Thus, big data are a site of political struggle. Critical scholars in big data studies question perspectives that consider data to be raw, impartial, or objective (Boellstorff 2013; Gitelman and Jackson 2013). Instead, they aim to show that data are always already cooked, unfinished, and lively (Kitchin 2014; Lupton 2015). In a similar vein, debates in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies aim to show that things considered to be neutral, given, or objective facts are better considered as matters of concern and care.[4] As María Puig de la Bellacasa writes: “Transforming things into matters of care is a way of relating to them, of inevitably becoming affected by them, and of modifying their potential to affect others” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 99). Engagement with these concerns reflects the mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion, appropriation, and neglect that underpin knowledge politics within technoscience (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 30).

As a matter of care, disability is not a fixed material and experiential entity located merely at the site of the body but a social construction shaped by historical, political, and cultural processes. Whereas a medical model posits disability as a biological condition, or a deviation from the norm, which necessitates cure or rehabilitation, the social model of disability emphasizes the environmental barriers that disable people, leading to social exclusion (Kafer 2013). The latter model introduces a conceptual distinction between physical impairments, on the one hand, and social barriers and mechanisms of exclusion on the other.[5] Building on this tension between medical and social models of disability, cultural, relational, and discursive models explore the ways in which bodily and mental differences converge at the intersections of society and the individual (Shakespeare 2014; Thomas 2004). It is the complex interplay of environmental and individual factors that shapes the disability experience.

Discussing vulnerability in the context of big data as matters of care, rather than as measurable objective truths, “expose[s] the lively lives of [big data]” and their ramifications for people with disabilities (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 92). Subsumed under a linear and developmentalist neoliberal temporal logic, the conventional framing of vulnerability as an obstacle that should be eliminated for maximum efficiency needs to be challenged. As a matter of care, politicizing vulnerability requires us to disrupt and rethink its normative understanding, which matures into an unquestioned propriety. This is crucial to reconsider the temporal imaginaries and ways of knowing that big data enable or disable, insofar as they involve multiple concerns and temporalities embedded in a politics of knowledge that generates “possibilities for other ways of relating and living” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 99).

The use and implementation of big data may obfuscate and marginalize people with disabilities by rendering disability a biological deficit that needs to be eliminated or screened out. For example, technological innovations such as whole-genome sequencing based on big data sets aim to identify genetic causes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by isolating ASD-related genes through the analysis of biomedical big data (Biegler 2017).[6] Such a medical approach, which aims to cure autism through biomedical big data, considers autism not as a human difference but as an unwanted vulnerability, resulting in the marginalization of disabled people.[7] It considers people on the autism spectrum as faulty individuals who need to be eradicated through cure, prenatal screening, and selective abortion. The particular meanings attached to disability result in the collection and analysis of big data in ways that do not consider how neurodiversity is shaped by cultural, economic, and social processes.

Big data shape and are thus shaped by temporal imaginaries. Their prognostic power imagines and scripts the course of time, subsumes the present under the inevitable weight and shadow of the future, and constrains alternative attachments to time. A negative framing of vulnerability as an obstacle that has to be eliminated for cost-efficiency purposes within neoliberal big data practices can lead to exclusionary attitudes toward people with disabilities, who are regarded as intrinsically vulnerable. From antiabortion stances to prenatal screenings, debates around vulnerability involve a multiplicity of emotions and affective attachments to the future. In this context, discussing vulnerability in relation to big data practices is important to show that “we need to ‘date’ not just . . . data but the temporal imaginaries shaping those who use it” (Boellstorff 2013). To this end, a framing of vulnerability merely as “the odds of experiencing bad things,” which links it solely with shortcomings, reduced capacity, and diminished or lost autonomy, needs to be critiqued (Scully 2014, 205). Even though vulnerability involves exposure to risks and uncertainties, or a “wound,” as the etymology of the word (vulnus) suggests, it also calls for “special care, support, or protection because of age, disability, or risk of abuse or neglect,” as the Oxford English Dictionary (2017) puts it.

Judith Butler’s examination of vulnerability provides a compelling ground to bring together these two aspects. For Butler, vulnerability is an abiding concept in any analysis of body politics, linguistic or physical violence, mourning, or the politics of terror and war. By resuscitating the potential of vulnerability, she emphasizes the importance of the concept in community building, care, and ethics. In her work, vulnerability is no longer merely attributable to certain impaired bodies but becomes constitutive of life because nobody can completely evade the risk of injury. Butler argues that our existence is conditioned by and dependent on infrastructures and discursive power (of language, of a certain discourse we are born into), and therefore embodiment is interdependent and relational (Butler 2014, 11). That is why vulnerability is a political concept: insofar as vulnerability demarcates our relationship to ourselves and others, our bodies can be regarded “as a site of common human vulnerability” so that vulnerability is not a weakness but a shared condition of existence (Butler 2004, 44). For Butler (2009), “the body is a social phenomenon: it is exposed to others, vulnerable by definition” (33).

This does not mean that everybody experiences vulnerability similarly. Butler (2009) notes that we must pay attention to the “mass difference of conditions that distribute vulnerability across the globe” (31). For her, our ethical task lies in accepting responsibility for its differential allocation, albeit in myriad affective, economic, social, cultural, legal, and political contexts (3). The political task Butler posits is to undermine the ways in which vulnerability is differentially allocated across bodies as a mechanism of control or oppression. In other words, the political task is not only to identify which populations are vulnerable but also to focus on situations that make certain people vulnerable. The latter focus calls for a temporal, social, and economic perspective that uncovers how some individuals, groups, or countries are rendered more vulnerable. For instance, disabled people are more vulnerable to homelessness, economic instability, inappropriate housing, unemployment, and discrimination. Within this matrix, disabled people are situationally vulnerable because some dependencies or care relations are made invisible or have been naturalized. Social barriers to inherent vulnerabilities can produce situated vulnerabilities, which in turn can produce further inherent vulnerabilities. In this context, focusing on how bodies and minds are made susceptible to harm and injury provides an important ground to depathologize and politicize vulnerability as an inalienable human condition and a political category of analysis.

The uncertainty of vulnerability, which shapes our interaction with the world, encompasses a certain politics of hope as an affective orientation in time—not just an individual affair, but a social one. Challenging negative connotations of vulnerability that link it solely with victimhood or pain, and create paternalistic responses or idealized care relations, can contribute to the use of big data for nondiscriminatory purposes insofar as vulnerability is constitutive of life. Such a politics of hope suggests being open to vulnerability, rather than walling oneself off from pain or harm, insofar as hope is inherently prone to disappointment because it is vulnerable. To hope opens one up to disappointment because to hope is to risk pain, injury, and despair. It emphasizes an openness to risk. We can work to minimize the risks involved, yet we cannot completely eliminate them. Risk is endemic to neoliberalism, but the risk that I suggest here is that of challenging epistemological certainty in an attempt to open up space for vulnerability and disability as constitutive of life. Even though risks can lead to disappointment, disappointments can also be hopeful. As a source of hope and connection, politicizing vulnerability involves a critique of neoliberal big data practices that pin their hopes solely on the elimination of vulnerability and looks at the ways in which invulnerability as mastery is selectively allocated to certain bodies. Such a politics of hope questions normative definitions of vulnerability and the special vulnerabilities that big data produces.

The Perils and Promises of Big Data

Thinking disability data through vulnerability offers a productive ground to challenge ways of knowing that are based on a consistent definition of disability and normative understandings of vulnerability. Analyzing the ways big data is imagined, processed, managed, and controlled helps us to reflect on “knowing what we know” and to unearth its rhetorical power (Gitelman and Jackson 2013, 4). For that reason, one needs to pay close attention to what counts as a disabled body/mind in big data practices by politicizing vulnerability and questioning stable disabled identities insofar as vulnerability is embodied, experiential, and relational. It is located “in the encounter with others. Interrelating with other persons is uncertain and ambiguous” (ten Have 2016, 84). The language of epidemic and crisis, which shapes much research on the genetic causes of ASD based on medical big data, does not take into account how neurodiversity is interrelational (Waltz 2013). It is a certain understanding of concepts such as communication, acceptable social behavior, and cognition that determines how data are collected and analyzed, rather than taking into consideration the heterogeneity of living with autism and the needs of people.

As a form of uncertainty, vulnerability is universally and equally shared but differently distributed. Ignoring this uncertainty plays a crucial role in accounting people with disabilities especially vulnerable insofar as disability is “the activity of perceiving and thus representing how we orient to . . . certainty and ambiguity” (Titchkosky 2011, 59). Big data archives can stabilize disability and vulnerability as fully measurable commodities that can be managed or profited from. Challenging this stability, and showing how certain abilities and disabilities are institutionally, economically, and culturally praised or devalued, “opens up a world of possibility” and “proliferat[es] crip horizons” (Johnson and McRuer 2014, 137–145).[8] In this context, “disability acts as an alternative lens through which to examine existing theories of vulnerability and to propose alternatives that better account for the experiences of people with impairments” (Scully 2014, 217–218).

Big data represent a site of hope, inclusion, and care that offers new insights, but such data are also a site of surveillance, harm, violence, and invasion of privacy. Insofar as data are always in flux, unfinished, and leaky, we should oppose approaches that take big data as facts that fully reflect human behavior. Big data practices open a fruitful ground to discuss not only critical ontologies and epistemologies but also ethical decisions, caring relations, and activism to create space and time for unknown and uncertain futures, which are inseparable from the notions of justice, social (in)equality, and power relations. As various corporate and governmental institutions can repurpose data, the difficulty of mapping their future and the values attributed to them raises important questions about who can have access to archives and about issues of privacy. As in the case of ASD, rather than focusing merely on cure, it would be more inclusive to use big data to better understand human (neuro)diversity and to value the rich experiences of people all along the spectrum and their needs.

Collecting and interpreting big data might generate other forms of vulnerability that can be called pathogenic vulnerabilities, referring to “the ways that interventions such as health policy can compound or create vulnerability” (Rogers 2014, 84). Insofar as the way we gather and interpret data is a site of political contestation that demands critical scrutiny, big data analysis does not automatically reveal better or objective knowledge about the world we inhabit. Not only does it help us to predict the course of the future and take actions against possible negative outcomes but it can also be used in ways that flatten out the particularities of human experience, smooth out differences, and oversimplify cultural phenomena by turning them into equal-sized bits of information. For instance, the medicalization of ASD through genetic research can result in diminished resources for education, thus creating pathogenic vulnerabilities.

Disability Data and Technology

In order to mitigate vulnerabilities that big data exacerbate, we need to focus on how to make data more accessible and equal. To this end, a retheorization of vulnerability and disability and a reorientation toward uncertainty are crucial steps for promoting accessible, democratizing, and nonpaternalistic big data archives. A democratizing way of using big data requires a transdisciplinary analysis that brings together philosophy, ethics, and care in order not to attribute special vulnerabilities to certain populations. This requires an analysis of how vulnerability operates multidimensionally in relation to gender, race, nation, religion, ability, class, and sexuality, among others. Moreover, including the so-called vulnerable groups in the generation, analysis, sensing, and sense-making of big data is crucial. Another important area of inquiry is to look at how global neoliberal policies have different effects across nations. For instance, the decline of welfare states, increased global precariousness, and the privatization of care create specific vulnerabilities that are related to structural inequalities and unequal power distributions.

The cultural, economic, and social processes that shape big data, the data sets that are used, and the ways data are analyzed are all sites of political struggle. The collection and analysis of big data should focus on the ways certain dependencies or needs are counted as specific forms of vulnerability, while others are naturalized or made invisible. Politicizing vulnerability, interdependence, and their value in our lives can help us to resist the individualizing, commercializing, and monetizing ideologies that neoliberal big data practices perpetuate. This requires us to affect and be affected by the shifting abilities of different bodies.[9] Such a politics of noncompliance entails embracing vulnerability and living with uncertainty, through which different ways of being, hoping, and caring in this world become possible.

Innovations in assistive technologies change our understandings about what a body can or should do and thus have a significant impact on the discussion of dis/ability, normality, and functionality.[10] Thus, it is important to open up a discussion of disability and its relation to technology and datafication because technologies shape and are shaped by particular meanings attached to disability. Data sources are not enough to reflect on and analyze the multifaceted interactions between new technologies and people with disabilities, as different stakeholders can interpret these data differently. For that reason it is vital to include people with disabilities in research and design processes. Rather than retrofitting accessibility, it is important to include people with disabilities in various design processes from the start, in order to make technologies “born accessible.” Big data derived from the interaction between people with disabilities and smart devices can help to design new assistive technologies and provide a more reliable picture of disability experiences.

Integrating disability as a critical category of analysis broadens our understanding of big data, which shapes and is shaped by definitions of average health, bodily norms, sickness, and so on. Thus, big data archives open up a space to question knowledge about impairment, debility, and disability, who knows about disability, and which impairments are counted as disabling or not as they are embedded in complex technosocial and affective assemblages. For that reason, reflecting on big data opens a space-time where new nonidealized caring relations between bodies, objects, and environments can emerge. Because big data are a disability issue.

Notes

1. By practice, I mean the generation and analysis of big data, both as process and as digital materiality.

2. Even though it is said that more than one billion people in the world are living with disabilities, disabled people are one of the most underrepresented minorities in society (WHO 2011).

3. For instance, disability weight is a measure that places value on many different embodiments. In 2004 blindness was weighted at 0.594, but the weight was reduced to 0.195 in 2010 since blindness is not regarded as an illness. These weights are used for cost-efficiency purposes and for determining how “disabled” a person is.

4. Latour’s (2004) notion of “matters of concern” questions the objectivity and neutrality of technoscientific knowledge production by bringing to the fore the underlying political, cultural, and social interests. Latour’s work explores the ways in which scientific “matters of fact” are fabricated, stabilized, presented, and aestheticized, and re-presents and restages them as matters of concern. Building upon Latour’s work, María Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of “matters of care” emphasizes the inevitable vulnerability and interdependency of human and nonhuman actors by examining care as an ethicopolitical issue.

5. Despite its benefits for politicizing disability, the social model is criticized for its simplistic distinction between impairment and disability and for underestimating the materiality of living with impairments regardless of social barriers.

6. The current (fifth) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which was published in 2013, brought together four categories of autism under the term autism spectrum disorder. The previous categories were autistic disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. Changes in diagnosis can have an impact on access to care and education, as some people who no longer have the same diagnosis will not qualify for certain services.

7. Jim Sinclair’s (1993) essay “Don’t Mourn for Us” is a key text on autism culture that criticizes the cultural prevalence of “mourning” for the “normal” child by the parents of autistic children.

8. The word crip comes from cripple, which has been (and is) used pejoratively to describe people with physical disabilities. It emerged in disability activism as an oppositional political response to ableism and to describe people with various disabilities and allies of disability culture and community. Like the term queer, which has taken on new meanings and political agendas within (and beyond) LGBT communities, crip theory and practices have also accumulated political and analytical power beyond disability studies. Just as queer theory undermines concepts and practices of normalcy in a more contestatory manner than LGBT studies, crip theory has, as Robert McRuer (2006) writes, “a similar contestatory relationship to disability studies and identity,” although the distinctions are not fixed or clear-cut (35). Rather than aiming to fit into society as it is, crip theory, like queer theory, aims to transform society and probe the boundaries for imagining alternative futures and communities.

9. The shifting abilities of bodies can be situated within an epistemology that Robert McRuer and Merri Lisa Johnson (2014) call “cripistemology” (128). It is a call to rethink how we know what we know about disability “as though it could be a thoroughly comprehended object of knowledge” (130). Cripistemology questions claims about knowledge production and “destabilizes the category of disability and opens its borders to include more and different kinds of bodily and affective experiences” (135). It puts notions of ability and disability into crisis, not to resolve them once and for all but to attend to which bodies/minds/impairments are naturalized, made invisible, or publicly excluded.

10. For instance, the Internet of Things as a system of interconnected devices, objects, and human or nonhuman animals, which collect, share, and act on data in a network, has enormous potential for people with disabilities. From smart canes to Braille watches, new assistive devices improve the quality of life for people with disabilities by making everyday tasks easier through the customization of devices to accommodate their changing needs. This provides substantial benefits for further research and analysis. Yet the accessibility of personal information and day-to-day activities, which are easy to track and hack, raises important questions about privacy and security.

References

Allen, Arthur. 2014. “Big Brother is watching your waist.” Politico, July 21, 2014. http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/data-mining-health-care-109153.

Biegler, Paul. 2017. “Big data reveals more suspect autism genes.” Cosmos, March 9, 2017. https://cosmosmagazine.com/chemistry/big-data-reveals-more-suspect-autism-genes.

Boellstorff, Tom. 2013. “Making big data in theory.” First Monday 18 (10). http://firstmonday.org/article/view/4869/3750.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.

Butler, Judith. 2014. “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance.” Accessed May 1, 2017. http://www.institutofranklin.net/sites/default/files/files/Rethinking%20Vulnerability%20and%20Resistance%20Judith%20Butler.pdf.

Gitelman, Lisa, and Virginia Jackson. 2013. “Introduction.” In “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 1–14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Johnson, Merri Lisa, and Robert McRuer. 2014. “Cripistemologies: Introduction.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8 (2): 127–147.

Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London: Sage.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–248.

Lupton, Deborah. 2015. Digital Sociology. London: Routledge.

McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press.

Oxford English Dictionary. 2017. “Vulnerable.” Accessed May 20, 2017. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/vulnerable.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2011. “Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things.” Social Studies of Science 41 (1): 85–106.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2012. “‘Nothing comes without its world’: Thinking with care.” Sociological Review 60 (2): 197–216.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rogers, Wendy. 2014. “Vulnerability and bioethics.” In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, 60–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scully, Jackie Leach. 2014. “Disability and vulnerability: On bodies, dependence, and power.” In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, 204–221. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shakespeare, Tom. 2014. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. New York: Routledge.

Sinclair, Jim. 1993. “Don’t mourn for us.” Autism Network International. Accessed August 16, 2019. https://www.autreat.com/dont_mourn.html.

ten Have, Henk. 2016. Vulnerability: Challenging Bioethics. London: Routledge.

Thomas, Carol. 2004. “Developing the social relational in the social model of disability: A theoretical agenda.” In Implementing the Social Model of Disability: Theory and Research, edited by Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, 32–47. Leeds: Disability Press.

Titchkosky, Tanya. 2011. The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Waltz, Mitzi. 2013. Autism: A Social and Medical History. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

WHO (World Health Organization). 2011. Disability: A Global Picture. Geneva: WHO.

61

Word

Daniel Rosenberg

As an experiment, think the history of words through their exclusion. When we speak and write, we choose words. Ferdinand de Saussure’s foundational distinction between langue and parole evokes this dynamic. Every speech act energizes certain words. Others in the background remain important: significance is generated through a play of presence and absence in a larger system of relations. But there are systems, and then there are systems. Increasingly, during the past half century, words have been produced, processed, and consumed by machines that operate on more definite rules than the old-fashioned language-making creatures that Saussure depicted in profile (figure 61.1)

In our recent history, the relationship between words that are present and those that are absent has moved from analogy to description and then, in important ways, back to analogy again. This is because the first computers that manipulated words did so in a rigidly mechanical way. A striking artifact of this phenomenon is a programming device known as a stop list, a list of words that a computer is instructed not to process (for a history of the stop list, see Rosenberg 2017). Stop lists have a variety of uses. In electronic full-text processing, the convention of stop listing arose in the late 1950s, when computing and storage costs were high—the usual storage medium was still paper, and the fastest computers crawled at a fraction of the speed of the processor in your cell phone—and engineers were on the lookout for ways to cut words.

Figure 61.1

Diagram of the speaking circuit. From Saussure (1916, 27).

The first electronic stop list that bore the moniker was compiled by the IBM engineer Hans Peter Luhn around 1958. At that time, Luhn was building an auto-abstracter, a computer program that could distill the argument of a scientific article into only a few sentences. His first stop list comprised sixteen common English articles, conjunctions, and prepositions—a, an, and, as, at, by, for, from, if, in, of, on, or, the, to, with—that he considered superfluous to the goals of indexing. That first stop list was quite effective. Early on, it was employed, and also elaborated, especially in scientific indexes (figure 61.2). As was noted at the time, the removal of just the word the—the most frequent word in the English language, twice as frequent as number two on the list—from the processing loop resulted in great efficiencies. And in the electronic analysis of documents, the technique was widely adopted.

Luhn’s stop list, then, owns an important place in the history of computing—along with several other key innovations that Luhn achieved while at IBM, including a key word indexing system and an early optical scanner—but it also holds a place in the longer history of the management—and more specifically, the removal—of words from texts.

Figure 61.2

List of forbidden words. From Meteorological and Geophysical Titles (1962, 67).

Could we write a history of missing words? One version was imagined by Jorge Luis Borges (1941) in his “The Library of Babel,” but this goes beyond our capacities. More plausible would be a history of systems of lexicographic exclusion ranging from censorship and redaction to taboo, levels that frequently interact and reinforce one another. If the computer employing Luhn’s stop list is working correctly, the words it contains never make it through the filter. After a document has been processed, these words persist only on and as the list itself.

When Google was new, electronic language was still mostly stopped in a mechanical way. If you typed a phrase containing an article or a preposition into its search box, Google told you this explicitly: it first ran a search that excluded those function words in just the same way that Luhn’s system had half a century earlier, offering results with a brief message telling you what words had been excluded from its analysis. Curiously, the behavior of the machine also served a kind of pedagogical function: in time, users became accustomed to removing articles, prepositions, and pronouns from queries themselves because they knew Google would not process them anyway.

Then, around 2008, Google stopped stopping words in this simple way. The fundamental reason for the change was scale. One decade in, Google had amassed so much computing power that it had become possible to search a word as common as the. As a result, previously occulted words became visible to search, along with the rich linguistic patterns they make in text. Lists of words could now be eliminated.

Of course, word stopping did not end overnight. It remains still a useful tool for most systems that operate on a scale smaller than Google, which is most systems. But Google’s change in strategy marked a watershed in the history of word removal, a shift from a mechanical approach to presence and absence to something more fluid and more like what Saussure had observed in human linguistic practice.

We are in a strange moment. On the one hand, the enormous capacities of data systems such as Google have made possible the compilation of word lists at a scale that could previously only be dreamed. And the approach that computers apply to language implies the production of lists where none were previously necessary. To you, reader—are you there?—this is a sentence; to Google, it is first of all a list. If one of the strings of characters between spaces in this sentence is a mistake, it still belongs to that list. Which gets us to the other hand: while this new thing is very much a list, it is not exactly a word list anymore. It is a list of character strings separated by spaces, bounded by periods at either end. These, whatever they may represent, are given to the system. The machine operates on parole, or what we more commonly today call data.

To see what language looks like when you are Google, you can peek under the hood. Among the entries under A in the 4 GB long list of “words” in the Google Books corpus—one of the signal documents of our time—in addition to recognizable terms in our lexicon including ACTOR, AEOLIAN, and APPENDIX, we find the pataphysical A.N, A/65, A/CONF.62/WP.10/REV.1, A00E0, AA, AA44, AAAAAAAAAAAAA, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, AAEM, AARGH, ABCDEF, and ACT1VITY. In the regime of big data, the word is a special case of the string (figure 61.3).

Luhn saw this coming, and he mapped it out in the first two iterations of his stopping system. His first device, a vocabulary list, stopped words. His second, a statistical frequency filter, stopped strings. And it did more: it commenced a reorientation of the problem of language, away from that of words per se.

As previously noted, that displacement is still in process, yet ironically, in the transition the word list has become comparatively more important. When we search, we search words, not sentences. When we tag, we use tokens that are often not words in a conventional sense at all but crazy-quilt portmanteaus (#CareerEndingTwitterTypos) and gnomic abbreviations (#OOTD). Functionally, our impulse to tag reflects an effort by humans to maintain control over significance by overriding automatic sorting protocols and forcing computers to treat our as-if words as if they were words.

Figure 61.3

Normalized views of the ratio of misspelling to proper spelling of two words, maintenance and ecstasy. Over two centuries, the word maintenance appears to have become more difficult and ecstasy more intuitive. Author’s illustration, using gNormalizer Projects (n.d.).

The problem of the word in general becomes more pressing as human communication is increasingly mediated by electronic systems capable of weaving linguistic fabrics with a feeling of wholeness. This is reinforced by human adaptations to the demands and protocols of our devices, reciprocating the adaptations of our devices to our own patterns and demands. As the television commercials tell us, “Hey, Google!” works; “Yo, Google!” works as a joke. (And a joke at a second level when you say it to Siri: “Very funny, Daniel. I mean not funny ‘ha-ha,’ but funny.”) In this respect, the style of language that humans use online on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram is characteristic of a larger phenomenon by which discourse is reduced to message, and the relationship between sender and receiver is formalized (subjected to mechanical rules), quantified (the medium is the message), identified (every person or entity has an address in the system), and back-traced (there is no longer a public to which to publish: functionally, every audience remains an assemblage of individuals)—all of this embodied for the time being in a vibrant but limited human-machine pidgin.

The recent and major shift in procedures for making words illustrates a more general pivot from automatic approaches to language oriented to problems of langue toward those of parole, a transition of focus from something that is to something that happens, from words to data. The fact that our voices are coming back into play, through systems such as Google Home and Alexa, is emblematic of the closing of this circle. It illustrates a way of interacting with both words and words that at once harks back to the first moments of structuralism and flashes forward toward a nascent framework of creativity for which we and our devices are both currently in apprenticeship.

References

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. “The library of Babel.” In Labyrinths, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, 51–58. New York: New Directions.

gNormalizer Projects. n.d. “gNormalizer projects: Ngram analysis tools.” Accessed August 24, 2019. https://gnormalizer.uoregon.edu/.

Meteorological and Geophysical Titles. 1962. “List of forbidden words.” Meteorological and Geophysical Titles 2 (1): 45.

Rosenberg, Daniel. 2017. “An archive of words.” In Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures, edited by Lorraine Daston, 271–310. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Paris: Payot.

Contributors

Amelia Acker—assistant professor at the School of Information, University of Texas at Austin. Acker’s research is concerned with the emergence, standardization, and transmission of new information objects in mobile and social media platforms.

Daniela Agostinho—Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. She works at the intersection of media and cultural theory, with a focus on feminist and post/decolonial perspectives on archives, digital culture, and new technologies. She is the coeditor of (W)Archives: Archival Imaginaries, War and Contemporary Art with Solveig Gade, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, and Kristin Veel (Sternberg Press, 2020).

Louise Amoore—Department of Geography, Durham University. Amoore is a political geographer whose research focuses on the politics and ethics of algorithms, biometrics, and machine learning borders. She is the author of The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability, published by Duke University Press in 2013. Her most recent book, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others, was published by Duke University Press in 2020.

Christian Ulrik Andersen—Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. Andersen teaches and researches software and computer interfaces as a culture and a means of expression (“software studies” and “interface criticism”).

Nora Al-Badri—artist. Al-Badri, who has a German-Iraqi background, is based in Berlin. Her work explores the emancipatory and decolonial potential of different technologies such as 3D printing, computer vision, and chatbots or databases. In most of her works she relates to Indigenous or ancestral knowledge intersecting with museum collections, questions of ownership, and cultural datasets. Her work The Other Nefertiti, aka Nefertiti Hack, went viral and was exhibited and covered all over the world. She was the first artist in residence at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and its Laboratory for Experimental Museology.

Caroline Bassett—Cambridge Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge. Bassett’s research is centered on investigating and critically analyzing the relationship between communication technologies, cultures, and societies. She has written on digital transformation, mobile and pervasive media, gender and technology, medium theory, digital humanities, science fiction, imagination and innovation, and sound and silence. Her current work is exploring anticomputing.

Timon Beyes—Institute for Sociology and Cultural Organization, Leuphana University Lüneburg; Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. Beyes’s research focuses on the spaces, technologies, and aesthetics of organization in the fields of media culture, art, and cities as well as higher education.

Lisa Blackman—Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University. Blackman works at the intersection of body studies and media and cultural theory and is particularly interested in subjectivity, affect, the body, and embodiment. She has published four books in this area. The most recent is Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation.

Geoffrey C. Bowker—Bowker is professor and director of the Evoke Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He is the coauthor (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences and the author of Memory Practices in the Sciences, both published by the MIT Press.

Sumita S. Chakravarty—School of Media Studies, Culture and Media, Lang College, The New School, New York. Chakravarty’s research interests include media theory, media and globalization, film and national identity, digital cultures, and the history and philosophy of media technologies. She is currently working on a book on the intersections of media and migration with the working title Unsettled States: Towards a Media History of Migration. She is also the curator of the website http://migrationmapping.org, devoted to extensive archiving of news, information, and multimedia resources on the subject of global migration.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun—Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication, where she directs the Digital Democracy Group. She is author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press, 2016); Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011); Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006); and coauthor of Pattern Discrimination. She is currently finishing Discriminating Data: Individuals, Neighborhoods, Proxies.

Marika Cifor—assistant professor, Information School, University of Washington. Cifor is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. Her research investigates how individuals and communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV status are represented and how they document and represent themselves and their social groups and movements in archives and digital cultures.

Tara L. Conley—School of Communication and Media, Montclair State University. Conley teaches courses and conducts research on race, feminism, digital cultures, and storytelling. She believes the way stories are told, produced, and disseminated can bring about justice. Conley is currently working on The Hashtag Project, an integrated index platform and storytelling project that tracks hashtags about activism, politics, and culture.

Frances Corry—Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Corry’s research is concerned with digital pasts. She is interested in the social histories of digital technology and in asking questions at the intersection of digitality and historiography, particularly in the context of online archiving.

Geoff Cox—Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University, and Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. Cox’s research interests lie in the critical discourse of art and software, software studies, and network culture; application of historical materialist and post-Marxist thinking; and speculations on the performative and transformative action of code.

Catherine D’Ignazio—Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. D’Ignazio is a hacker mama, scholar, and artist/designer who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy, and civic engagement. She directs the Data + Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work toward gender and racial equity.

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld—Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Dirckinck-Holmfeld is a visual artist and researcher. Her artistic practice and research centers around developing reparative critical practices in different collaborative constellations. She is the acting head of the Laboratory for Art Research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and cofounder of Sorte Firkant, a café and cultural venue in Copenhagen.

Johanna Drucker—Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Drucker is known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities.

Ulrik Ekman—Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Ekman’s main research interests are in the fields of cybernetics and ICT, the network society, new media art, and critical design and aesthetics, as well as recent cultural theory.

Kate Elswit—Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. Elswit is an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies combines dance history, performance studies theory, cultural studies, experimental practice, and technology.

Elena Esposito—Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, and Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. Working in a systems theory framework, Esposito studies problems of time in social systems, including memory and forgetting, probability, fashion and transience, fiction, and the use of time in finance.

Aristea Fotopoulou—School of Media, University of Brighton. Fotopoulou’s research focuses on social transformations that relate to digital media and data-driven technologies (e.g., self-tracking, wearables, big data, AI). Fotopoulou has published widely on critical issues of digital and emerging technologies from a feminist perspective, including the quantified self, wearable sensors and fitness tracking, citizen everyday data practices, digital media and feminist activism, intersectionality, and queer theory.

David Gauthier—Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. Gauthier’s research focuses on computational epistemologies and their artifacts and looks at how they have affected notions of sense and sense-making, both scientifically and culturally, since the late twentieth century.

Brooklyne Gipson—Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests center on the intersections of race and digital technology. Specifically, she interrogates the utility of social media and other digital tools in facilitating grassroots organization and civic engagement among traditionally marginalized groups.

Lisa Gitelman—Department of English and Media, Culture and Communication, New York University. Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American print culture, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book, titled Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, was published by Duke University in 2014.

Olga Goriunova—Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London. A cultural theorist working with technological cultures, media philosophy, and aesthetics, she has contributed to the theories of curating and digital arts, digital media cultures, and software studies. More recently, she has worked with the notions of ecological aesthetics, digital subjects, and cultures of abstraction.

Orit Halpern—Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University. Halpern’s work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice. Her recent book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press 2015) is a genealogy of interactivity and our contemporary obsessions with “big” data and data visualization. She is now working on two projects. The first, titled The Smartness Mandate, is a history and theory of “smartness,” environment, and ubiquitous computing and the second, tentatively titled Resilient Hope, examines the forms of planetary futures being produced and destroyed through high-technology large-scale infrastructural projects.

N. Katherine Hayles—Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles. Hayles teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Pepita Hesselberth—Department of Film and Literary Studies, Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University. Hesselberth’s main research interests are in the fields of contemporary cinematics, machinic cultures, speculative ethics, and the production of subjectivity today. She is currently finalizing an edited volume on the significance of the Politics of Withdrawal for our times (fc. with Joost de Bloois, Rowman & Littlefield 2020), and collecting notes towards a monograph on the paradox of dis/connectivity in practices and discourses on media (non) use, precarious labor, off-grid living, leaving academia, retreat culture, and the 2020 Covid-19 quarantine.

Mél Hogan—Department of Communication, Media and Film, University of Calgary. Hogan’s research is on server farms and data centers—their social implications and environmental impacts. Lately, she has focused on the intersection of biology (DNA) and technology as it pertains to data storage.

Tanya Kant—School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex. Kant’s research investigates how web users negotiate and engage with contemporary algorithmic personalization practices—that is, practices that seek to infer (via data-tracking mechanisms and other algorithmic means) a user’s habits, preferences, or identity categorizations in order to “make personal” some component of that user’s web experience.

Patrick Keilty—Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Keilty’s work examines the political and economic implications of digital infrastructures in the pornography industry, including questions of embodiment and technology, data science, the history of information retrieval, transformations of gendered labor, design and experience, graphic design, temporality, and taxonomies of pornography.

Os Keyes—PhD candidate at the University of Washington. Keyes’s work focuses on the intersection between gender, technology, and power. Their work on facial recognition has been recognized and discussed by the ACLU, the United States Congress, and a range of media outlets. Their current focus is on the ways in which imbalances in epistemic authority make themselves known in the design of algorithmic systems. They are the inaugural recipient of an Ada Lovelace Fellowship.

Lila Lee-Morrison—Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. Lee-Morrison is a researcher in visual culture. Her research focuses on the political and cultural implications of machine vision, including the use of biometrics and drone warfare.

Sune Lehmann—Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Technical University of Denmark, and Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. A physicist by training, Lehman has slowly shifted his interests toward complex networks and massive data sets, and he is currently working in the intersection between physics, sociology, and computer science.

Alana Lentin—associate professor in cultural and social analysis at Western Sydney University. She lives on unceded Gadigal land where she works on the critical theorization of race, racism, and antiracism.

Boaz Levin—Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Art, Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Levin is a writer, curator, and occasional filmmaker. Together with Hito Steyerl and Vera Tollmann, he cofounded the Research Center for Proxy Politics.

Manu Luksch—Open Society Fellow, Visiting Fellow, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London; Somerset House Studios Resident. Luksch’s work scrutinizes the effects of network technologies on social relations, urban space, and political structures. From drawing and software, to telematic performance and feature film, her work interrogates technological notions of progress and the regulation of public space, the disciplining of time, and autonomy and identity in a hyperconnected world. Techniques and effects of live data transmission provide the theme, medium, and performative space for many of her works.

Jacob Lund—Department of Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University. Lund is broadly interested in aesthetics, contemporary art, and critical theory. His recent research is focused on the notion of contemporaneity understood as the temporality of globality and planetary scale computation and how this affects our experience of time and the ways in which we picture the world.

Celia Lury—Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick University. Lury’s research contributes to the development of the interdisciplinary study of culture. Her current focus involves looking at the role of methods such as ranking, optimization, and biosensing in the making of a topological culture.

David Lyon—Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen’s University, Canada. Lyon’s research, writing, and teaching interests revolve around major social transformations in the modern world. Questions of the information society, globalization, secularization, surveillance, and debates over “post-” and “digital” modernity feature prominently in his work. Lyon was formerly an editor of Surveillance and Society and is associate editor of Information Society.

Shannon Mattern—Department of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research. Mattern’s writing and teaching focus on media architectures and infrastructures and spatial epistemologies. She has written books about libraries, maps, and the history of urban intelligence, and she contributes a column about urban data and mediated spaces to Places Journal. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Romi Ron Morrison—Media Arts + Practice, University of Southern California. Morrison is an interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across the fields of critical data studies, Black feminist praxis, and geography. Focusing on boundaries, subjectivity, and evidence, their practice works to investigate the generative ways in which the unassimilable refigures, complicates, and dissolves our understandings of race plus geographic space as fixed and knowable.

Tahani Nadim—Humanities of Nature, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, and CARMAH, Humboldt University of Berlin. Nadim’s research is concerned with the structures and infrastructures of data collections and attendant practices, experiences, and orderings. It is also concerned with establishing and maintaining productive conversations across disciplines, institutions, and ways of knowing. Nadim has carried out ethnographic research at genetic sequence databases and worked on institutional open access strategies.

Safiya Umoja Noble—Department of Information Studies, Department of African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Noble’s academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the Internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology.

Mimi Onuoha—Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Onuoha is a Nigerian American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection. Her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation, and video to call attention to the ways in which people are differently abstracted, represented, and missed by digital systems.

Kristoffer Ørum—Danish artist born in 1975. His practice revolves around the digital spheres wherein we interact and construct our identities. He works with algorithms of everyday lives to make visible the power and impact that they have on our lived lives. Ørum studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, and he graduated with an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. He was professor at Funen Academy of Art in 2012−2015, and from 2015−2018 he was an artistic researcher at Uncertain Archives, Copenhagen University.

Luciana Parisi—Literature Program, Duke University. Parisi’s research draws on continental philosophy to investigate ontological and epistemological transformations driven by the function of technology in culture, aesthetics, and politics.

Minh-Ha T. Pham—Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Pham’s research focuses on fashion labor in the digital age specifically and the digital architectures of racial capitalism more broadly.

Søren Bro Pold—Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. Pold has published on digital and media aesthetics from the nineteenth-century panorama to the interface in its various forms—for example, electronic literature, net art, software art, creative software, urban interfaces, and digital culture.

Miriam Posner—Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Posner is writing a book about how data work in global supply chains. She has been in the field of digital humanities for over a decade now, where she experiments with data visualization, mapping, and network analysis techniques.

Annie Ring—School of European Languages, Culture and Society, University College London. Her work focuses on topics of surveillance and complicity in modern German and comparative culture and on theories of the archive, subjectivity, and collectivity. She is a founding member of the Uncertain Archives research group.

Roopika Risam—Department of English and Secondary and Higher Education, Salem State University. Risam’s research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, digital humanities, and new media. Her first monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018.

Sarah T. Roberts—Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Roberts is internationally recognized as a leading scholar on the emerging topic of commercial content moderation of social media. She is a 2018 recipient of the EFF Barlow Pioneer Award.

Craig Robertson—Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University. Robertson is a media historian with expertise in the history of paperwork, information technologies, identification documents, and surveillance. In this research he defines media in terms of the recording, storage, and circulation of information.

Daniel Rosenberg—Department of History, University of Oregon. Rosenberg’s research focus is the history of data. In addition, he writes on a wide range of topics related to history, epistemology, language, and visual culture.

Audrey Samson—Art Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. Samson is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist-researcher whose work points to the materiality of data and its consequences—for instance, through explorations of erasure as a means of knowledge production.

Rebecca Schneider—Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University. Schneider has written extensively on practices that puncture or stretch the borders of media, including plays, performance art, photography, architecture, and “performative” everyday life. She teaches theater history as well as dance studies, visual culture, and performance studies.

Natasha Dow Schüll—Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University. Schüll’s research has focused on compulsive gamblers and the designers of the slot machines they play to explore the relationship between technology design and the experience of addiction as well as the rise of digital self-tracking technologies and the new modes of introspection and self-governance they engender.

John S. Seberger—Department of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington. Seberger works using a multidisciplinary approach to the human-centered, social study of emerging technologies and hopeful infrastructures.

Eric Snodgrass—Department of Design, Linnaeus University. Snodgrass’s research looks at the intersections of politics and technology, with a focus on infrastructures of power and forms of intervention.

Winnie Soon—Department of Digital Design, Aarhus University. Soon is an artist-researcher whose works intersect media/computational art, software studies, cultural studies, and code practice. Her research and practice is dedicated to the cultural implications of technologies in which computational processes are increasingly manifesting our programmed experiences. Her works deal with topics around computational culture, particularly with regard to automated censorship, data circulation, real-time processing/liveness, invisible infrastructure, and the culture of code practice.

Nicole Starosielski—Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University. Starosielski’s research focuses on the global distribution of digital media and the relationship between technology, society, and the aquatic environment.

Tonia Sutherland—Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Global in scope, Sutherland’s research focuses on entanglements of technology and culture, with particular emphases on critical and liberatory work within the fields of archival studies, digital culture studies, and science and technology studies. Sutherland’s work critically examines the analog histories of modern information and communication technologies; addresses trends of racialized violence in twenty-first-century digital cultures; and interrogates issues of race, ritual, and embodiment in archival and digital spaces.

Miriam E. Sweeney—School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alabama. Sweeney is a critical cultural digital media scholar whose work operates at the intersection of gender, race, information, digital media technologies, and culture.

Birkan Taş—Department of Social Work and Social Welfare, University of Kassel. Taş’s research has centered on the instrumentalizing and emancipatory dimensions of hope. His research interests encompass theories of gender and sexuality, as well as the politics of temporality in disability and queer theory.

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup—associate professor in Digital Media and Communication at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and cofounder of the Digital Methods lab at CBS. She is particularly concerned with the politics of digital infrastructures at the intersection of gender, race, and the environment. Her recent book, The Politics of Mass Digitization (MIT Press, 2018), explores the political infrastructures of mass digitization processes in the field of cultural memory. Her current empirical research interests are content moderation, digital sustainability, and digital epistemologies.

Vera Tollmann—Institute for Media, Theatre, and Popular Culture, University of Hildesheim. Tollman’s work focuses on the practice and theory of the Internet, urban and digital publics, the discourse of climate change, and China’s reception in the West.

Frederik Tygstrup—Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Tygstrup, who originally specialized in literary history and continental critical theory, presently works as principal investigator on two research projects: Finance Fiction (2018−2021) and Art as Forum (2020−2024).

Magda Tyżlik-Carver—Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. In addition to her academic work, Tyżlik-Carver is also an independent curator based in the UK and Denmark. Recent curated exhibitions and events include Movement Code Notation (2018), Corrupting Data (2017), Ghost Factory: Performative Exhibition with Humans and Machines (2015), and Common Practice (2010, 2013). She is coeditor (with Helen Pritchard and Eric Snodgrass) of Executing Practices (2017), a collection of essays by artists, programmers, and theorists engaging in critical intervention into the broad concept of execution in software.

Kristin Veel—Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Veel’s research engages with invisibilities, uncertainties, overload, and the gigantic in contemporary cultural imagination. Her most recent book, coauthored with Henriette Steiner, is Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architecture and Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2020). She is of the Uncertain Archives project and a founding member of the Uncertain Archives research group.

Jacqueline Wernimont—Digital Humanities and Social Engagement, Dartmouth College. Wernimont is an antiracist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures. She writes about long histories of media and technology—particularly those that count and commemorate—and entanglements with archives and historiographic ways of knowing.

Mushon Zer-Aviv—designer, educator, and media activist based in Tel Aviv. His love/hate relationship with data informs his design work, art pieces, activism, research, lectures, workshops, and city life. Mushon is an Eyebeam alumnus. He holds a master’s degree from New York University’s ITP and a bachelor’s degree in visual communication from Bezalel. He teaches digital media as a senior faculty member at Shenkar School of Engineering and Design.

Index

Note: authors cited in parentheses and endnotes are not included in the index. Page references in italics denote illustrations

Absent archives, 129

Abuse, 18–19, 29–35, 213, 434. See also Human rights abuses; Malware; Violence

child sexual exploitation material, 31–34

content moderation, 29–31

PhotoDNA project, 31–35

of data, 93, 94–95; see also Complicity

of labor, 495

platforms of communication, 361

Accountability, 2, 19, 77, 152, 183, 340, 361, 415, 497, 503

algorithmic, 203, 204–205, 350

Accumulation of data, 4, 112, 117, 144, 242, 266, 326, 374, 419

Acker, Amelia, 15, 196

Active Change Foundation (London), 471

Adendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 423

Adirondack Mountains, 110

Administrative violence, 342–344, 373

AdNauseam, 361, 362, 366

Affect, 16, 37–43, 213–214

Affect studies, 38–39

Affinity categories, 305, 325

African Americans. See Black Americans

African American studies, 9, 165

African diaspora, 165–166, 265

Afrofuturism, 448

Afterlives. See Digital afterlives

Agamben, Giorgio, 525

Agassiz, Louis, 75, 77

Aggregation, 14, 47–54, 173, 283–284

misleading results, 49, 51–52, 53, 54

queer aggregations, 280, 285

Simpson’s paradox, 49–51

unpredictability, 174

unruly data, 51–53, 54

Agostinho, Daniela, 2–3, 19–20, 92

Agricultural breeding, 173–174

Ahluwalia, Pal, 13

Ahmed, Sara, 383

AI (artificial intelligence), 1, 15, 58, 94, 100, 101, 134, 136, 173–175, 317–318, 351, 503, 505, 508. See also Chatbots; Digital assistants

content moderation, 30–34; see also PhotoDNA

AIDS Memorial, The (TAM), 16, 40–42

Aikhatib, Ali, 192–193

Ainsworth, Claire, 280

AI Renaissance, 102

Airus Media, 156

AJAX, 519

Akhter, Majed, 183

Al-Badri, Nora, 17

Alexa, 65, 69, 70, 99, 151–152, 152–153, 156, 583

gender and race, 154, 155, 156

interaction with, 66–67

Alexandria, library of, 154

Algorithmic accountability. See Accountability

Algorithmic automation, 291, 292, 294–296, 297

Algorithmic autonomy, 69

Algorithmic bias and racism, 17, 57–63, 77, 90, 203, 219

Algorithmic ethics, 19, 202–206

Algorithmic identities, 399

Algorithmic inference, 295

Algorithmic information theory, 296

Algorithmic prediction. See Prediction; Unpredictability

Algorithmic randomness. See Randomness

Algorithmic sorting. See Sorting

Algorithmic violence, 249

Ali, Syed Mustafa, 62, 63

A.L.I.C.E., 152

Aliens (LC subject heading), 322, 323

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, 164

All I Know Is What’s on the Internet (exhibition), 490

Alonso, Carolina, 166

Alphabet, 500

AlphaGo, 94, 544

AlphaGoZero, 544

Al-Qaeda, 186

Alt-right media, 93–94

Álvarez, Maira, 166

Amaro, Ramon, 451

Amazon, 65, 172, 212, 301, 324, 403, 500, 555. See also Alexa

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 93

American Civil War, 435

American Library Association, 323

American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, 111

American Studies Association, 164

Amin, Shahid, 129

Amnesty International, 94, 381

Amoore, Louise, 12, 19, 469

Anand, Nikhil, 13

Andersen, Christian Ulrik, 15

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 334–335

Anderson, Chris, 419

Android, 99

Anna (IKEA), 153

Anonymous, 362

Anthropomorphism. See Digital assistants

Anti-Semitism, 325

Apata, Annette M., 166

Apology Resolution, 449

Appadurai, Arjun, 127

App cleansing, 143

AppDetox, 146

Appel, Hannah, 13

Apple, 65, 67, 143, 192, 301, 494, 500. See also Siri

Application programming interfaces (APIs), 59, 212

Applied statistics, 191–192

Archaeological and heritage sites, 231

Architecture Machine Group (AMG), 136, 138

SEEK installation (New York, 1970), 136–138

Archival ethics. See Care ethics; Colonial archives; Ethics

Archival leaks, 93

Archival neutrality, 29, 30

Archival reason and practice, 10

Archival science, 10, 78

Archival studies, 38

Archival turns and returns, 8–11

Archive Fever (Derrida), 6

“Archive of feelings,” 9, 40, 43

Archive of Feelings, An, 39

Archive(s), 7, 30, 35, 262–263; See also Cultural heritage institutions

affect and, 37–40

of colonialism and slavery. See Colonial archives; Slavery

Archivists Responding to Climate Change, 231

ARGUS-IS, 185, 186

Aristotle, 236

Arkhe, 134

Armed drones. See Drone warfare

Arnall, Timo, Internet Machine, 110

Arondekar, Anjali, 10, 129

Art, 3, 134–138, 139–14. See also Glitch art

stand-in infrastructures, 490–491

Artificial intelligence. See AI

Art News, 137

Asbestos removal, 147

Asian Americans, 325

“Asian century,” 119–120

Asian fashion labor, 122

Asianness, 121–122

Ask.com, 153

Askesis 2.0, 464

Aspen Movie Map, 138

Associated Press, 323

Associationism, 289

Asymmetrical warfare, 180, 181–182

ATCG, 172

Atlantic, The, 423

Atlantic Database Network: The Slave Biographies, 434

Atlantic slavery. See Slavery

Atlas of Protein Sequence Structure (Dayhoff), 126

Attributes, 202

Auerbach, Erich, 238, 239

Austin, J.L., 265

Australia, 167, 381

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 570, 573, 574

Automated decision-making, 18, 286

Automatic speech recognition systems, 99–101, 102

Avizienis, Algirdas, 193

Ayache, Elie, 526

Baartman, Sarah, 75

Bachelard, 284

Background checks, 156, 343

Bailey, Moya, 164

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13

Ball, Kirstie, 481

Baltimore Police Department, 201

Baltimore protests, 201–202, 203

Bamun throne (Berlin), 499

Bangladesh, 494

Bank of America, 359

Bannon, Steve, 120

Barad, Karen, 284, 528

Bargh, John, 285

Barker, Tim, 263

Barkley, Charles, 305

Barocas, Solon, 479

Barooah, Robin, 461–464, 462

Barsalou, Lawrence, 542

Bassett, Caroline, 15

Bastille (Paris), 6

Bates, David William, 194

Bauditz, Louisa, 80

Beauchamp, Toby, 342

“Beautiful data,” 92

Before the Rain (film), 334

Behavioral data. See also Datafication; Data mining; PornHub; Prediction; Self-tracking; Unpredictability; Unthought

aggregation of, 47–54

algorithmic racism, 57–63

and feedback, 135

interface culture, 299–301

metadata standards, 324–325

political allegiances, 59–60

Behavioral futures markets, 89

Belle, La Vaughn, 449, 450

Bell Labs, 486

Bem, Daryl, 285

Benetton, 494

Benjamin, Ruha, 308

Benjamin, Walter, 334, 336, 373, 451, 524, 525, 527

Benveniste, Émile, 470, 566, 567

Bergis, Jules, 309

Bergman, Torbern Olof, 228

Bergson, Henri, 526

Berkeley (California), 542, 544

Berlin, 499

Betancourt, Michael, 262

Beta testing, 133

Bethesda (Maryland), 126

Beyes, Timon, 15

BGI (Shenzhen), 126

Bhabha, Homi, 122

Bhandar, Brenda, 76

Bias, 19, 77, 89–90, 175, 195, 489. Algorithmic bias and racism; Discrimination

and risk modelling, 252–253

Biblical hermeneutics, 239

Bifurcated archive, 554–557

Big data archives, 1–10, 93

errors in, 191–194

latent uncertainties, 315–316

Big data fundamentalists, 457

Big data revolution, 102, 371

Bimodal data, 51, 54

Bing, 32

Biodata, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394

Biodiversity, 127

Biological human, 553–555

Biology, 126, 251, 280

Biometric data, 152, 489

Biometric identification, 128, 489–490

Biorelational feedback, 392

Bioscience databases, 127

Biosensors, 392

Biotechnology, 57, 126, 262

Birney, Ewan, 171

Bishop, Ryan, 13

Bishop, Simon, 406

Bivens, Rena, 380

Black, Michael Ian, 115

Black Americans, 61, 62, 138, 305, 325, 344, 429, 438. See also Slavery

digital humanities and, 165–166

discrimination against; see Racial discrimination; Racism

homegoing rituals, 439–440

images and bodies of; see Black body

redlining, 58, 310, 423

tactical resistance, 265

violence against, 60, 431, 435, 436, 438, 440; see also Racist violence

police violence, 20, 76, 201–202, 274–275, 440

Black Audio Film Collective, The Last Angel of History, 448, 451

Black body, 76, 80, 250, 254, 434–441

commodification of, 437–438, 441

homegoing rituals, 439–440

resurrection, 436–437

Black box, 212, 305, 308, 310, 369, 495

Black feminist theories, 20, 77, 80–81, 249, 273, 306–308, 378. See also Intersectionality

Blackman, Lisa, 16, 284–285

Blackness, 20, 58, 165, 166, 249, 250, 251, 254, 255, 267, 356, 451

myth of, 434

transformative potential of, 253

Black people, 4, 17–18, 251, 353, 434–435, 488. See also Black Americans; Black body; Black women; Slavery

criminal sentencing and, 252–253

data-driven stories about, 354–356

deaths of, 435–441

Black studies, 251, 255

Black Twitter, 166, 275–276

Black women, 273, 437

facial recognition, 90, 355

gender-specific discrimination against, 306–307

misrepresentation of, 80, 82–83

Blakewell, Sarah, 464

Blas, Zach, Queer Technologies, 302

Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony, 80

Blockchain, 35, 314

Blu-ray, 397

Bohr, Niels, 316

Bonilla, Yarimar, 274, 275

Borderlands Archives Cartography, 166

Borges, Jorge Luis, 581

Borgesian cartography, 47

Bornholm clock, 515–516, 521

Boston (USA), 138

Bots, 18, 65–72, 420, 503, 505. See also Chatbots; Digital assistants

Bourdieu, Pierre, 221

Bowker, Geoffrey, 321–322

boyd, danah, 222

Boyd, Eric, 457, 458

Boyne, Roy, 13

Braidotti, Rosi, 13

Brain. See Human brain

Brakhage, Stan, 261

Brautigan, Richard, 133

Brazil, 434

Breath, 389–394

Breath Catalogue, 394

Breathless: An Interactive Ride Experiment, 393

Breathlessness, 391

Breivik, Anders, 60

Brennan, Shane, 111

Brexit, 12, 59, 87, 206, 406

Briet, Suzanne, 228

British Government, 93

British Museum, 499

British Muslims, 471

Broadband, 397

Brock, André, 166, 275, 276

Brooklyn, 438

Broussard, Meredith, 308

Brown, Michael, 20, 76, 274, 275

Browne, Simone, 78, 89–90, 439, 451

Brown University, 280

Brunton, Finn, 359, 362

Bulk warrants, 89, 93

Buolamwini, Joy, 90, 222, 488

Burke, Tarana, 213, 273

Burnell, Jocelyn, 175

Burton, Antoinette, 7

Business of Fashion, 120

Butler, Judith, 204, 571

Cabinet logic, 243

Calculus of probabilities, 534

California, 381, 389, 463, 495

Cambridge Analytica, 12, 87–88, 141, 206, 219

Cameroon, 499

Cam Ranh Bay, 495

Canada, 117, 118, 167

Candy Crush, 433

Canguilhem, Georges, 194, 284

Carbon-based capitalism, 230, 231

Carbon footprint, 147

Care ethics, 19–20, 75–83

digital afterlife, and, 77–78, 81–83

Carel, Havi, 391

Caribbean studies, 9

Carnival, 265

Carpenter, Francis Bicknell, 335

Carroll, Lewis, 105

Cartographic impulse, 337

Cartography. See also Migrationmapping

of slavery, 335–336

CASA (computers are social actors), 66

Castilhon, Jean-Louis, 194

Caswell, Michelle, 34, 78–79, 273, 276, 306, 309

Cenac, Wyatt, 115

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USA), 191

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 183, 184, 187. See also Drone warfare

CERN, 126

Certeau, Michel de, 5, 6, 148 (n8)

Cervenak, Sarah Jane, 264

Cetina, Knorr, 218

Chagas, Paulo C., 393

Chaitin, Gregory, 296, 297, 545

Chakravarty, Sumita S., 17

Chaotic systems, 544

Charlie Brown (character), 473

Charlie Hebdo, 471, 473

Chatbots, 152, 174, 500, 503, 505

Cheney-Lippold, John, 342, 399, 458

Cheyer, Adam, 153

Chicana Por Mi Raza, 166

Chicanx activism, 166

Child detention, 167

Children’s personal information, 155

Children’s Place, the, 494

Child sexual exploitation material

identification and removal

PhotoDNA, 31–35

Child slaves, 494

Chimera, 281–282, 552, 553–554, 555, 556

China, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121

China’s Algorithms of Repression (Human Rights Watch), 415

Chinese Communist Party, 406

Cho, Alexander, 43

Chow, Rey, 285

Christchurch attack (New Zealand), 60, 62

Christen, Kim, 167

Christian Church, 420

Christianshavn (Copenhagen), 449

Christmas Report and Other Fragments, The, 445, 446–452, 452

Chrome, 89

Chun, Wendy, 14, 15, 17, 57, 61–62, 88, 262, 303, 446, 525

Church, Alexander Hamilton, 242

Church, Alonzo, 210, 294

Church, George, 171

Cicero, 486

Cifor, Marika, 8, 16, 78–79

Cisco, 419

Cisgender people, 340, 341, 379, 383

Citational ubiquity, 307

Citizens United, 347

Cixous, Helene, 6–7

Clark, Meredith, 309

Clarke, Cyrus, 172

CLEAR, 22 (n2)

Clickbait, 363

Climate change, 16, 21, 90, 110, 111, 227–232, 421–422, 424

uncertainty and loss, planning for, 231–232

Climate data archive, 110, 228–231

Cloud computing, 152, 172, 202, 421, 469

Cloud ethics, 19, 203–204

Coachella Music and Arts Festival, 438

Coast Salish, 118

Cockburn, Cynthia, 221–222

Coded Gaze, The, 90

Cognitive assemblages, 470, 472, 546

Cognitive manipulation, 360

Cognitive nonconscious. See Unthought

Cognitive sciences, 135, 316, 541, 542–543, 553

Cohn, Jonathan, 69

Cold War, 295, 446

Collective phenomena, 279

Collins, Harry, 221

Colonial archives, 3, 4, 9–10, 18, 75–81, 128–129, 285. See also Danish West Indies

digital “afterlives,” 17, 77–81

digitization of, 17, 78, 449; see also Digital humanities

ethics of care and, 77–83

reparative practices and, 444–452

Colonialism, 62, 63, 122, 163, 196–197, 251–252, 265, 334–335

Columbia University, 229

Comey, James B., 398

Community-oriented archives, 29, 34, 39, 273

Complicity, 15, 20, 21, 87–95

cooperation, steps towards, 92–94

COVID-19, and, 94–95

disconnection, ambivalence of, 91–92

Computational errors. See Error

Computational traffic commodity, 111

Computer games, 513–515

Computerization, 62–63, 554

Cong-Huyen, Anne, 164

Conley, Tara L., 20

Connolly, William, 203

Consumer capitalism, 146

Content moderation, 29–31, 90

machine learning and AI, 30–31; see also PhotoDNA

worker burnout, 30

Conversational agents, 15, 100–106

complexity and uncertainty, 102–106

“intelligent,” 100, 102

Cookies, 89, 143

Cooling, 16, 109–112

energy costs, 111, 173

Cooper, Brittney, 307

Cooper, Robert, 372

Cooperation, 92–94

Copenhagen, 80

Copycat culture, 121

Copyfraud, 500, 502

Copynorms, 17, 115–122. See also Fashion copynorms

Copyright, 17, 116, 117

Coronavirus pandemic. See COVID-19

Corporeal archives, 542–547

Correlation. See Data correlation

Corry, Frances, 20

Cortana (digital assistant), 99, 103, 151–152, 154

Cosgrove, Denis, 333

Cotera, Maria, 166

Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), 60

COVID-19, 21–22, 94–95, 191

contact-tracing app, 192–193

Cowen, Deborah, 495

Cox, Geoff, 16

C Programming Language, The, 486

Craftown (New Jersey), 423

Craigslist, 359

Crash test dummies, 489

Crawford, Kate, 222, 390

Creative Commons CC0, 502

Credit reporting, 343, 344, 407

Creech Air Force Base (Nevada), 180

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 20, 306–307

Criado-Perez, Caroline, 195

Crick, Francis, 172

Criminality, 154, 478, 479–480, 536. See also Predictive policing

“black on white crime,” 60

sentencing, racial imbalances in, 252

CRISPR, 172

Critical archival studies, 8, 10, 29, 34, 39, 77

Critical data studies, 21, 252, 306, 344, 457, 569

Critical legal theory, 76

Critical race theory, 17, 76, 196–197

Critical Software Thing, 14, 16

Croatia, 429

Crowder, Steven, 90

Crump, Benjamin L., 76

Crutchfield, James, 296–297

Cryogenic cultures, 112

Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, 111–112

Crypto culture, 360

Cryptography, 361

Cubitt, Sean, 246

Cukier, Kenneth, 191, 371, 419

Cultural Anthropology, 13

Cultural heritage institutions, 111, 231–232, 499. See also Museums

Cultural heritage record, 162–168. See also Digital humanities

Cultural neoteny, 219

Cultural strain, 38

Curcio, Anthony, 359, 362

Curie, Marie, 175

Customer service industries, 152, 156

Cuvier, Georges, 75

Cvetkovich, Ann, 9, 39, 43

Cyberattack, 110

Cyberculture, 272

Cybernetics, 126, 135–137, 291, 292, 293, 297, 372, 373, 452, 502

control, 295

failures, 411

“Cybernetic turn,” 63

“Cyborganization,” 372

Cyborgs, 140, 372, 373

Cyclosa spider, 359, 362, 364

Dagta analytics, 279

Daguerrotypes, 75–77, 79–80

Daniels, Jessie, 59

Danish colonialism. See Danish West Indies

Danish Research Council, 2, 147n

Danish West Indies (US Virgin Islands)

colonial archive, 445, 448, 449

digitization of, 78, 79–80, 448–449, 481

Fireburn uprising, 449, 450

Dante, 239

DARIAH, 22 (n2)

Daston, Lorraine, 295

Data abuse. See Abuse; Complicity

Data “afterlives.” See Digital afterlives

Data analytics, 90, 281, 325, 489, 503

Database, 17, 30, 125–130

genetic database histories, 126–127

museum as, 500, 502

Database imaginaries, 125–130

Database management system, 125

Data bias. See Bias

Data capitalism, 15, 20, 465

Data capture, 8, 37, 151, 152–153, 155, 213, 236

drones; see Drone warfare

and exclusion, 9–10

new technologies, 90, 92

Data centers, cooling of. See Cooling

Data correlation, 49, 53, 103, 201, 203, 281, 363, 406, 409–410, 411, 419, 422–423, 457

stand-ins, 485

Data Detox, 142–145, 146, 147

Data Detox Bar, 143, 145

Data double, 390, 457–458

Data ethnographies, 283

Data Feminism, 379

Datafication, 10, 11, 16, 18, 20, 37, 40, 65, 77, 194, 267, 291, 332, 354–355, 371, 445, 447, 448, 457, 553. See also Gender datafication

of colonial and slavery-era archives. See Colonial archives; Slavery

disability and, 574

of everyday life, 370, 458

of knowledge, 294

of pornography, 398, 399, 401

Data fictions, 127, 129, 130

Data for Black Lives, 309

Data ghosts. See Haunted data

Data justice, 20, 21, 94, 95, 218, 249, 309

Data love, 92

Data mining, 21, 92, 93, 152, 266, 290, 325, 397, 399, 457, 478, 479, 534

complicity with, 87–88, 89, 92–94

Data sharing, 5, 40, 42, 152, 480

Data Thief/Data Giver, The (Christmas Report), 446–452

Data trading, 87, 89, 94

Data undermining, 374

Dataveillance, 12, 21, 88, 91, 92, 93

Data violence, 343

Data visualization. See Visualization

Dating sites, 174, 380, 407

Davis, Char, 393

Davis, Miles, 172

Davos, 503

Dayhoff, Margaret O., 126

DDoS, 362

Deadnaming, 341, 343

Dearborn (Michigan), 275

Debates in the Digital Humanities, 165

Decolonial studies, 10, 20, 62

Decolonization, 252, 253, 333, 508

Decolonizing Design, 22 (n2)

Deep artificial neural networks, 101–102

Deep cleaning, 143

Deep fakes, 12

Deep-learning algorithms, 206

Deep-learning speech recognition systems, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105–106

Deep Purple, 172

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 67, 185, 187

Defense Information Systems Network (DISN), 180

de Gaulle, Charles, 473

Degoogling, 143

DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, 306

de Kosnik, Abigail, 34

de la Bellacasa, María Puig, 569

Deleuze, Gilles, 236, 295, 457, 547

Delisting, 441

de Luna, Rubria Rocha, 166

de Maizière, Thomas, 180

Democracy, 61, 88, 133–134, 137, 139, 221, 222, 552

abuses of, 89

proxies and, 422–423

Democratic Republic of the Congo, 429

Demographic malpractice, 381

Demos, 133–140, 192

Denmark, 381, 448, 449, 451

Department of Homeland Security (USA), 201, 202

Department of Housing and Urban Development (USA), 305, 310, 325

Deproletarization, 147

Derrida, Jacques, 5, 6–7, 134, 146, 284, 420–421, 508, 547, 551, 553

Design justice, 93, 378

Design Justice Network, 378

Detox (digital), 20–21, 141–147

Dewey, John, 289–291, 294

Dhaka (Bangladesh), 494

Dialectical image, 334

Dias, Nélia, 230

Dick, P. K., Ubik, 406

Dictionary of uncertainties, 13

Dietrich, Craig, 167

Digital afterlives, 17, 57, 76, 279, 433–441

care ethics and, 77–81

haunted data, 16, 279–287

of property, 76, 81–82

Digital AIDs archive. See AIDS Memorial, The (TAM)

Digital art. See Glitch art

Digital assistants, 18, 65, 66–68, 151–157. See also Alexa; Cortana; Emma; Siri

anthropomorphic design, 151, 153–154, 157

gender and race, 66, 67–68, 151, 153–154, 155–157, 174, 222

UX (user experience), 151, 153, 154, 155–157

voice commands, 66, 69–70, 99

Digital Black Atlantic, The, 165–166

Digital capitalism, 262

Digital cultural record, 162–168. See also Digital humanities

Digital detox. See Detox

Digital epidemic detection, 191, 192

Digital genealogy, 57

Digital humanities, 17, 161–168, 220

African diaspora, 165–166

cultural record, 162–168

feminist approaches, 165

indigenous communities, 166–167

#transformDH, 164–165

Digital Humanities@MSU, 164

Digital Library Foundation, 232

Digital remains. See Digital afterlives; Remains

Digital resurrection technologies, 438–439

D’Ignazio, Catherine, 3, 12–13, 14, 18, 92, 195, 379, 382

Dillahunt, Tawanna, 383

Dimple, Kelli, 393

Diné, 167

Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Katrine, 14

Dirty data, 91

Disability, 19, 164, 429, 569–573. See also Machine “disabilities”

data and technology, 574–575

Disaggregation, 49, 51, 464

Disconnection, 20–21, 88, 91–92, 142, 374

Discrimination, 18, 21, 58, 94, 195, 218, 286, 306, 310, 325, 343, 383, 422–423. See also Gender discrimination; Racial discrimination; Sex discrimination

disabled people, 572

social sorting, 479, 480

structural, 19, 77

Disembodiment, 18, 458

in drone warfare, 179, 181–183, 184

Disentangled, 500, 504, 506, 509

Disintoxification, 142, 147

Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, 438

Distributed denial of service (DDoS), 362

DNA, 16, 139, 171–175, 202, 437, 439. See also PhotoDNA

databases, 126, 127

DNA Database of Japan (DDBJ), 126

Documenting the Now, 309

Dr. Dre, 438

Drabinski, Emily, 323

Drake (rapper), 276

Drake, Jerrett M., 75

#DrakePunchlines, 276

Draz, M., 343

Dreyfus, Hubert, 221

Drone warfare, 16, 90, 92, 179–187

Drucker, Johanna, 15

Dryer, Theodora, 254

Dullaart, Constant, Brigading_Conceit, 490

Dummy content. See Stand-ins

Dynamic automation, 294–296

Earth observation, 129

Easterling, Keller, 374

Ecology, 135

Economist, 89

Edenheim, Sara, 9

Edwards, Paul, 227–228, 229

EEGs, 543, 545

Efficient causality, 250, 251

Egypt, 90, 507, 508

Einstein, Albert, 543

Ekman, Ulrik, 15

Electrocorticograms (ECoG), 545

Elgesem, Dag, 481

El-Hibeh (Egypt), 508

ELIZA, 152

Ellison, Treva, 255

Elswit, Kate, 16

Elting, Liz, 175

Emma (digital assistant), 156–157

Emotion-detecting software, 43

Encryption, 360–361

Endangerment sensibility, 230

Energy costs, 90, 111, 173

ENgenderingGenderChangers, 302

England, 333, 355, 412

Enlightenment, 20, 194, 196, 264, 271, 487, 552, 556

Environmental Humanities, 13

Environmental protection, 94, 135

Environmental satellites, 129

Environmental sequencing, 127

Epistemic closure, 222

Epistemic cultures, 218, 223

Epistemic things, 284

Ericson, Richard, 480

Erlich, Yaniv, 171

Ernst, Wolfgang, 317, 525

Error, 2, 15, 18, 43, 58, 110, 191–197, 350. See also Misreading

aesthetics of, 261; see also Glitch

big data archives and, 191–194

politics of, 195–197

Eshun, Kodwo, 451

Esperanto, 486

Esposito, Elena, 16, 526

Ethical fashion, 118, 120

Ethical mimicry, 122

Ethics, 19–21, 252. See also Accountability; Fairness

algorithms, for/of, 19, 201–206

archival, 77–78; see also Care ethics

hashtag archiving, 20, 274–277

obfuscation and, 362–363

Ethnic affinity categories, 325

Ethnic clothing, 118

Ethology, 135

Eubanks, Virginia, 89, 91

EU Data Protection Directive (1995), 441

Eugenics, 173, 174, 194

Europe, 128, 251, 428, 459, 554

European Molecular Biology Laboratory, 437

European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), 126, 127

European Space Agency, 129

European Union (EU), 12, 406. See also Brexit

Data Protection Directive (1995), 441

Evans, Robert, 221

Execution, 16, 209–215

Exhale: Breath between Bodies, 393

Experian Mosaic, 407–408

Experimental axiomatics, 296

Expertise, 15, 217–224

machine-learned, 223–224

F1000 publishing platform, 286

Facebook, 12, 42–43, 58, 87, 88, 115, 118, 201, 212, 219, 283, 300, 301, 302, 303, 433, 436, 449, 482, 500, 526

abusive history, 89

ad preferences portal, 305, 325, 326

affinity categories, 325

Arctic data centre, 109

gender options, 380

HUD lawsuit, 305, 310, 325

Like button, 146–147

Marketing API, 380

photoDNA, use of, 32

race, modalities of, 59

“redlining,” 310

FaceMash, 89

Facial recognition, 12, 43, 58, 77, 152, 174, 406, 439

Black women, 90, 355

moratorium, call for, 93

Fairness, 19, 77, 478, 481

#FakeDrakeLyrics, 276

Fake fashion, 121

Fake news, 363, 420, 482

Farge, Arlette, 6

Farid, Henry, 31–33

Far right, 59, 60, 62, 90, 92, 93–94, 120, 175

Fascist content, 5

Fashion copynorms, 115–122

and ethics, 118, 120

and racial stereotypes, 115–116, 120–122

Fauna Europaea, 128

Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 280, 281

Featherstone, Mike, 13

Feedback, 117, 127, 135, 136, 293, 295, 391, 393, 401, 481

biorelational, 392, 394

positive, 411

Female clerks, 244, 246

Female husbands, 378

Feminist digital humanities, 165

Feminist ethics of care, 20, 78, 80–81

Feminist HCI, 378, 382

Feminist theory, 6–7, 8, 9, 38–39, 307, 378. See also Black feminist theories

#Ferguson, 274, 275

Ferguson (Missouri), 20, 274, 275

FICO’s Medication Adherence Score, 419

Field, 16, 227–232

Figura, 15, 235, 238–240

File, 18, 241–246

File-sharing tools, 33

Filing cabinets, 241, 242–245, 246

Fiorina, Carly, 120

Fireburn rebellion (1878), 449

Fister, Karin Ljubic, 172

Fitbit, 367

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 161

FiveThirtyEight, 398

Flesh, 20, 249–255

Flores-Hutson, Patricia, 166

Florini, Sarah, 275, 276

Flu epidemics, “nowcasting” of, 191–192

Forbes, 459

Forbidden words. See Stop lists

Foreclosure, 412–413

Forensic databases, 128

Forensic ideology, 340

Forever 21, 115–116, 117, 120

Fortress Europe, 331

Fotopoulou, Aristea, 18

Foucault, Michel, 5, 6, 194, 195, 204, 206, 284, 458, 478–479, 503, 541, 542, 552, 553

Foucault Welles, Brooke, 381

Foxx, Jamie, 152

Franklin, Rosalind, 175, 284

Frederiksted (US Virgin Islands), 449

Freeman, Walter, II, 543

Freeman, Walter J., III, 542–544, 545, 546, 547

Free speech, 17

Freud, Sigmund, 315, 348, 349

Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 286

Fuller, Matthew, 13, 282

Further Future (festival), 416

Gallon, Kim, 165

Galloway, Alexander, 374–375

Galton, Francis, 173

Game of Thrones, 398

“Gaming” of algorithmic authority, 363

Garcia Merchant, Linda, 166

Garfinkel, Harold, 340

Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 336

Gaussian mixture models, 101, 103

Gauthereau, Lorena, 166

Gauthier, David, 145

GenBank, 126, 127

Gender, 280, 340–341, 378–382. See also Gender identity

AI assistants; see Digital assistants

detection applications, 379, 380

Gender datafication, 379, 382–383

Gender discrimination, 89, 90, 286, 380, 381, 382

Gender entitlement, 341

Gender identity, 378–382. See also Nonbinary people; Transgender people

recognition, 379; see also Misgendering

Gender justice, 81

Gender nonconforming people. See GNC people

Gene mutations, 172

General Data Protection Regulation, 12

General Motors, 306

Genetic code, 57, 126–127, 128, 135. See also DNA

Genius Bar (Apple), 143

Genome Project, 250–251

Genomics, 172, 173, 174, 175, 250. See also DNA

Geography, 184

Geological archives, 110, 228, 229

Germany, 337, 507

Gestalt theory, 360

Ghana, 445

Ghost data. See Haunted data

Gil, Alex, 166

Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian, 410, 412

Gilliland, Anne J., 39

Gilroy, Paul, 57

Ginsburg, Carlo, 348, 350

Giorno Radio System, 136

Gipson, Brooklyne, 20

GIS, 333

Gitelman, Lisa, 15, 279

GitHub, 217

Gladwell, Malcolm, Blink, 541

Glass Room, The (Mozilla), 143–145, 144, 145

Glenn, John, 261

Glitch, 2, 18, 192, 196, 259–267

Glitch art, 261–263

Glitch Feminism Manifesto, 263–264

Global biodiversity index, 127

Global Biodiversity Information Facility, 127

Global capitalism, 252, 487, 497

Global digital humanities, 163–164

Global economy, copynorms and, 119–120

Global Information Grid, 180

Global information society, 63

Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH), 164

Global positioning system. See GPS

Global warfare. See Drone warfare

Global warming, 110–112, 227–228. See also Climate change

Glossary, 12–13

Gmail, 365

GNC people, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383

Gödel, Kurt, 404

Goldman, Ben, 231, 232

Goldman, Nick, 171

Gonzales, Laura, 166

Google, 60, 61, 62, 88, 89, 111, 143, 145, 283, 301, 302, 303, 360, 371, 408, 471, 482, 581, 583

AdSearch, 479

affinity categories, 325

AI assistant, 65, 69–70

API, 212

Arts and Culture Experiments, 508

COVID-19 contact tracing app, 192–193

image recognition algorithms, 355

manifesto, 175

photoDNA, use of, 32

Google Alert, 398

Google Books, 490, 581–582

Google Home, 583

Google Images, 436

Google Now, 99

Google Photos, 488

Google Street View, 490

Google Trends, 192

Flu Trends, 191–192

Gordon, Lewis R., 222

Gorgon Stare, 185, 186

Goriunova, Olga, 18, 259

Gove, Michael, 220

GPS, 67, 92, 94, 119, 333, 337

Granted Clothing, 115–116, 117, 118, 121

Granted Sweater Company, 115

Granular certainty, 242–243, 245, 247

Gray, Freddie, 201, 202

Gray, Kishonna L., 166

Greece, 381

Greek Parthenon sculptures (British Museum), 499

Greenfield, Dana, 458

Gregory, Derek, 184

Grosser, Benjamin, 300, 365

Grosz, Elizabeth, 377

Grow Your Own Cloud, 172

Guardian, 171

Guatemala, 429

Guattari, Félix, 236

Guerrilla Radio, 136

Guiliano, Jennifer, 167

Gulf War (1991), 180

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 314–315

Gupta, Akhil, 13

Guzman, Andrea, 67

Haacke, Hans, 136

Habit Summit (San Francisco, 2017), 141

Haggerty, Kevin, 480

Haigh, Thomas, 241

Haimson, Oliver, 380, 383

Haitian Revolution, 196–197

Halberstam, Jack, 196

Hall, Stuart, 57

Halo game series, 154

Halpern, Orit, 13, 16, 92, 192

Hamidi, Foad, 382

Hancock Alfaro, Ange-Marie, 307

Hancock Field Air National Guard Base (Syracuse, NY), 181

Hankey, Stephanie, 143

Hansen, Mark, 464

Haraway, Donna, 93, 140, 224, 262, 284, 308, 372, 552

Harcourt, Bernard, 457

Harley, J.B., 333

Harris, Verne, 7

Harrison, Sarah, 87, 93

Hartman, Saidiya, 76, 77, 82–83, 355

Hartog, François, 524

Harvard Medical School, 171

Harvard University, 75–76, 79, 89

Harvey, David, 497

Hashtag Feminism Archive, 20

Hashtags, 271–272

archiving, 20, 271–277

“Not in Our Name” shifters, 470–474

Hate, records of, 435–436

Hate in America: The Rise and Fall of the KKK in the 1920s, 435

Hate speech, 17, 60

Haunted data, 280, 282–285

Hauntology, 16, 279–287

Hayles, N. Katherine, 15, 91, 92, 94, 316, 545, 546

Health data, 236

Hebbs, Donald, 543

Heidegger, Martin, 57, 526, 553

Heisenberg, Werner, 316, 404

Heitman, Carolyn, 167

HeLa cells, 437–438

HeLa Genome Data Access Working Group, 438

Hellfire missiles, 180

Helmreich, Stefan, 421

Henrickson, Mark, 393

Herranz, Marika Stamenkovic, 393

Hess, Thomas, 137

Hesselberth, Pepita, 20–21, 91

Heteroglossia, 13

Heteronormativity, 20

Heterophily, 61–62, 423

Hickman, Larry, 291

Hicks, Mar, 342

Hijras, 378

Hikvision, 406

Hilltown (Pennsylvania), 423

Hirano, Brian, 115–116, 118

Historiality, 280–281

Historical epistemology, 284

Historiography, 6

HIV/AIDS, 40–41

Hlavajova, Maria, 13

HMMs, 103, 104

Hodge, Charlotte, 80

Hoffmann, Anna Lauren, 343

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 235, 240

Hogan, Mél, 16

Holmqvist, Caroline, 183–184

Holt, Jennifer, 109

Homegoing rituals, 439–440

Homophily, 61–62, 423

Homophobic content, 5

Honig, Bonnie, 82

Hopi, 167

Hopper, Grace, 175

Horning, Rob, 457–458

Horsens State Prison (Denmark), 447, 449

Houston, Keith, 271, 272

Howard, Yetta, 195

Howe, Cymene, 13

Howe, Daniel C., 361, 366

HP, 488

Huat, Chua Beng, 13

HUD v. Facebook, 305, 310, 325

Hugo Boss, 494

Human archive, 553–554

Human behavior, data on. See Behavioral data

Human brain, 100, 101, 106, 348, 542–547

chaotic processes in, 544–545

Human error, 58, 110

Humanities scholarship, 10, 161–163. See also Digital humanities

Human memory, 263

Humanoids, 66

Human populations, management of, 138, 139

Human rights, 29, 78. See also Privacy

right to be forgotten, 440–441

right to be remembered, 439–440

Human rights abuses, 5, 34, 90, 429, 441. See also Protest movements

Human Rights Campaign, 382

Human Rights Watch, 415

Humbold Forum, 499

Humboldt, Alexander von, 336

Hunter, Jane, 286

Hutnyk, John, 13

Hyperobjects, 236

IBM, 103, 419, 580

Ibn Said, Omar, 434

#icantbreathe, 213

Iconology, 333

Identity politics, 62

Identity tourism, 59

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 342

IKEA, 153

Illegal aliens (LC subject heading), 322, 323

Imagined records, 129

Immigrant populations, 4

Incomputables, 294, 295, 296–298

Indeterminacy preservation, 292–294, 296

Indexing, 246, 272, 275, 469–470, 474

India, 119, 381, 444, 471, 494

Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of (New Mexico), 167

Indigenous Digital Archive, 167

Indigenous digital humanities, 166–167

Indonesia, 119

Industrial innovation, 192

Inequality, 89–90, 91, 93, 94

Information, 106, 235, 236–240

retrieval, 244–245

uncertainty, 11

validation of, 219, 222

Informational dominance, 141

Information economy, 133

Information infrastructure, 99, 119, 125–126. See also Smart cities

Information professionals, 231, 322

Information society, 63, 235–236, 237

Information workers, 156

Infotainment, 99

Infrastructure Toolbox, The, 13

Instagram, 37, 40–42, 115, 201, 325, 436, 583. See also Aids Memorial, The (TAM)

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 193

Instrumentality, 15, 289–298, 423

Interfaces, 15, 299–303. See also Metainterfaces

International Atomic Time, 519, 520

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine, 441

Internet infrastructure, 109–110

Internet of Things (IoT), 152, 174, 552, 554–555

Internet racism, 58, 59

Intersectional feminism, 378

Intersectionality, 8, 20, 305–310

Intersex activism, 280

Intimate data, 37, 42, 88, 151, 152–153, 155, 437

Intimate surveillance, 157

Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (UK), 89, 93

Invisible Committee, 525

Iran, 361, 381

Iraq, 429, 471

Ireland, 381

Irigaray, Luce, 6–7

IrLH, 22 (n2)

Iseli, Marcus, 541

ISIS, 471

Islam, 471

Israel, 360

Israeli Air Force, 180

J. Craig Venter Institute (California), 126

Jackson, Samuel L., 152

Jackson, Virginia, 279

James, William, 464–465

Jameson, Fredric, 524

Japan, 381

Jargon File, The, 487

JavaScript, 172

“Jeeves” (digital assistant), 153

Jelinek, Fred, 103

#JeNeSuisPasCharlie, 471, 473, 474

Jenkinson, Hilary, 4

#JeSuisCharlie, 470, 471, 473

Jetztzeit, 524

Jewish Museum (New York)

Software exhibition (1970), 134–138, 139–140

Jibo, 67

Jimerson, Randall C., 438–439

Johns Hopkins Hospital (USA), 437

Johnson, Jessica, 78, 166

Johnson, Steven, 299

Jonas, Steven, 464

Jørgensen, Lehmann, 14

Judaism, 443

Justice, 92, 93, 94, 250, 252. See also Data justice; Social justice

Kafka, Franz, 373

Kaggle.com, 379

Kahn, Paul, 182

Kaiser, Brittany, 1

Kaminska, Izabella, 90

Kansas (USA), 459

Kant, Immanuel, 204, 362

Kant, Tanya, 18

Kapusta, Stephanie Julia, 341

Karppi, Tero, 43, 390

Keats, John, 347

Keeling, Kara, 78, 196–197, 448

Kehlmann, Daniel, Measuring the World, 336–337

Keilty, Patrick, 15

Keller, Evelyn Fox, 126

Kelly, Kevin, 459

Kennedy, Helen, 481

Kernighan, Brian, 486

Ketelaar, E., 35

Keyes, Os, 18, 195, 326, 379, 380

KGB, 88

King, Martin Luther, Jr, 172

Kitchin, r., 326

Kittler, Friedrich, 219–220, 371, 421

Klee, Paul, Angelus Novus, 451

Klein, Lauren F., 92, 379

Kneissle, Stephanie, 490

Knowledge economy, 237

Kodak, “Shirley cards,” 488

Koopman, Colin, 464–465

Korea, 119

Korzybski, Alfred, 337

Koselleck, Reinhart, 524

Kowal, Emma, 111–112, 230

Kozel, Susan, 391, 393

Kozma, Robert, 543, 545, 546

Kranzberg, Melvin, 363

Krishnamurthy, Prem, 13

Kubrick, Stanley, 359

Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 78, 435

Kuoni, Carin, 13

Kurgan, Laura, 331, 333

Kuri, 67

“Labor of liking,” 147

Lacan, Jacques, 400

Lackner, Max, 490

Lacks, Henrietta, 436, 437–438, 441

Lacks family (USA), 437–438

Lake District, 353, 355

Lambek, Michael, 340

Lamont-Doherty Core Repository (Columbia University), 229

Landecker, Hannah, 436–437

Lanier, Jaron, 219

Lanier, Tamara, 75–76

Lapp, Jessica M., 7–8

Lash, Scott, 13

Last Angel of History, The (documentary), 448, 451

Latency, 14, 16–17, 313–318

Latin (language), 487

Latina digital assistant, 156–157

Latina Transportation Security Administration agents, 156

Latour, Bruno, 221, 370, 372, 373

Law, John, 372

Lazarsfeld, Paul, 61–62, 423

Lazarus, Emma, 156

Lazer, David, 191–192

LCD, 493

Lee-Morrison, Lila, 16

Le Guin, Ursula K., 541, 544

Lehmann, Sune, 14

Lenoir, Tim, 284

Lentin, Alana, 17

Leone, M., 471

Lepecki, Andre, 267

Let’s Encrypt, 360

Levin, Boaz, 14

Lewis, Rebecca, 90

LGBTQ+ community, 39, 280, 380, 381

Liberty, 93

Libra, 271, 272

Libraries, 246–247. See also Cultural heritage institutions

Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH), 322–323, 326

Li Europan lingues, 486

Life and human sciences, 135

Life of Breath (research project), 391

Lincoln, Abraham, 335–336

Lingel, Jessa, 390

Literary theory, 2, 9

Literature, 239

Logistics, 495

Logocentrism, 6–7

London, 471, 490

Lorem ipsum, 485–486

Lorenz attractor, 544

Lorey, Isabell, 527

Los Alamos National Laboratory, 111, 126

Los Angeles (California), 116

Losh, Elizabeth, 165

Lothian, Alexis, 164

Louisiana (USA), 434

Lovelace, Ada, 175

LSTM methodology, 104

Lucretius, 239

Luhmann, Niklas, 547

Luhn, Hans Peter, 580, 581, 582

Lukkas, Lynn, 393

Luksch, Manu, 15, 16, 403, 414

Lund, Jacob, 16

Lury, Celia, 15

Lyon, David, 18–19

McBride, Renisha, 275

MacCallum, John, 392

McCarthy, Tom, Satin Island, 369–372, 373, 374–375

McGann, Jerome, 347, 350

McGlotten, Shaka, 344

Macharia, Keguro, 249

Machine Bias, 252

Machine “disabilities,” 65–66, 68

Machine learning (ML), 1, 3, 15, 18, 89, 100, 101, 296–297, 317–318, 410, 503, 552; see also AI

content moderation, 30–31; see also PhotoDNA

expertise, 223–224

“uncertainty,” meaning of, 151

Maciel, Maria Esther, 13

Mackenzie, Lars Z., 342

McLuhan, Marshall, 92, 219–220

Macnaughton, Jane, 391

McNeil, Maureen, 221–222

Magnet, Shoshana, When Biometrics Fail, 392

Mahu, 378

Malaya, 334–335

Malaysia, 494

Mallick, Samip, 309

Malta, 381

Malware, 172, 420

Manchevski, Milcho, 334

Mango, 494

Mann, Michael E., 421–422, 424

Manoff, Marlene, 30

Maori people, 507

Maps and mapping, 17, 331, 332, 333. See also Migrationmapping

slavery, cartography of, 335–336

Marciniak, Katarzyna, 334

Marcus, George, 13

Marey, Étienne-Jules, 410, 411

Marginalized groups, 8, 9, 10, 39, 43, 69, 195, 305, 306–307, 308, 378, 382, 570

digital humanities and, 162, 163, 167

hashtag archiving and, 273

misrepresentation in search engines, 196

Margulis, Lynn, 286

Marini, Anton, 263

Markov models, 101

Marres, Noortje, 192

Martin, Reinhold, 373

Martin, Trayvon, 60, 76, 435–436, 441

Marx, Karl, 503

Mary, queen (St. Croix), 449

Mason-Brown, Lucas, 309

Massachusetts (USA), 93

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 61, 135. See also Architecture Machine Group

Media Lab, 134, 136

Urban Systems Laboratory, 136

Massive Attack, 172

Material archives, 16

Matias, Nathan, 379

Mattern, Shannon, 16, 111

Maturana, Humberto, 547

Max Planck Institute (Berlin), 284

Maxwell, James Clerk, 410

Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 191, 371, 419

Mbembe, Achille, 502

Meetup.com, 459

Meillassoux, Quentin, 547

Mellon Foundation, 166

Melville, Herman, 91

Mendenhall, Ruby, 344

Merton, Robert K., 61–62, 423

Mesopotamia, 507

Messina, Chris, 272

Metadata, 5, 15, 129, 321–327

Metadata justice, 323

Metagenomic sequencing, 127

Metainterfaces, 301–302

#MeToo, 20, 213–214, 274

#MeTooIndia, 274

#MeTooK12, 274

#MeTooMosque, 274

Me Too movement, 213, 273, 274

Mexico, 337

Michigan State University, 164

Microsoft, 31, 32, 174, 500

digital assistant; see Cortana

Kinect motion-sensing camera, 488

PhotoDNA, 32, 33

Microsoft Windows, 99

Middle Ages, 239

Migrationmapping, 18, 331–337

Miguel, Christina, 481

Milano, Alyssa, 213

Military technologies, 90. See also Drone warfare

Miller, Greg, 186

Milner, Yeshimabeit, 93, 309

Mind’s Eye, 185–186, 187

Minh-ha, Trinh T., 249, 253

Minoritized subjects, 41. See also AIDS Memorial, The (TAM); Marginalized groups

Mirai botnet, 420

Misgendering, 18, 195, 339, 341–345, 379

Misogyny, 5, 195, 213, 222, 479

Misreading, 15, 347–351

Mitchell, W.J.T., 333–334

Mittell, Jason, 142

Molecular biology, 126

Montaigne, Michel de, 464

Monteiro, Stephen, 303

Mood-manipulation, 93

Mood-tracking, 93

Moorhead, Shelly, 443

Mooten, Nalinie, 82

Moral repair, 443

Moretti, Franco, 317

Morozov, Evgeny, 460, 463

Morphological imagination, 282

Morrison, Elise, 393

Morrison, Romi Bon, 20

Morton, Timothy, 236

Mosaic (Experian), 407–408

Moten, Fred, 266

Mouffe, Chantal, 219, 220

MozFest 2017, 143

Mozilla, The Glass Room, 143–145, 144, 145

Mr. Robot (TV show), 110

Mukurtu, 167

Multimodal data, 51

Multiracial democracy, 61

Muňoz, Trevor, 309

Murphy, Michelle, 81

Museums, 162, 167, 231, 334, 499–509. See also Jewish Museum; Peabody Museum

Musion Eyeliner, 438

Muybridge, Eadweard, 172

Myanmar, 5

Myspace, 343

Naccarato,Teoma, 392

Nadim, Tahani, 10, 17

Nafus, Dawn, 428

Nakamura, Lisa, 17, 59, 60

Nake, Frieder, 301

Namaste, Viviane, 340

National Center for Biotechnology Information, 126

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), 31, 32

National genetic databases, 128

National Institutes of Health (USA), 126, 437–438

National insurance IDs, 342

National Library of France, 7

National Rifle Association (NRA), 429

National Security Agency (NSA), 87, 91, 93, 360, 365

National Westminster Bank, 487

Native Americans, 167, 381, 429

Apology Resolution, 449

Natural, 17–18, 353–357

Natural history, 128

Naturalism, 393

Nature, 191, 280

Natureculture, 262

NBA, 398

Nebraska (USA), 535

Nefertiti, 502, 508

NefertitiBot, 503, 505, 508

Nefertiti Hack, 17, 500, 502

NefertitiTM, 508

Negroponte, Nicholas, 136–139

Nelles, Jan Nikolai, 502

Nelson, Diane, 18, 431

Nelson, Ted, 136

Neoliberal governance, 11

Nepal, 381, 382

Nestlé, 494

Netflix, 303

Network science, 61, 62

Neues Museum (Berlin), 500, 502

Neural network models, 101–102, 103

Neuroscience, 106, 286, 408, 541–545

New Jersey (USA), 379, 423, 459

New Mexico, 167

Newton, Sir Isaac, 271

New York Times, 137, 564

New York Times Magazine, 227, 230

New York Times Sunday Magazine, 459

New Zealand, 507

Nielsen television ratings, 430

Nissenbaum, Helen, 359, 361, 362, 366

Noack, Raymond, 543, 545, 546

Noble, Safiya Umoja, 8, 17, 20, 58, 60, 61, 89, 195, 306, 436

Nonbinary people, 213, 378–379, 380, 381, 382, 383

Noncompliance, politics of, 19

Nonconscious cognition. See Unthought

Normalization, 381

North America, 428, 459

Norway, 381

“Not in Our Name” (slogan), 470–473

Not in Our Name (US group), 470–471

Nowotny, Helga, 524

Nowviskie, Bethany, 232

Nuance, 67

Nucleotide sequence databases, 126–127

Nye, David, 336

Nyong’o, Tavia, 265

Obama, Barack, 449, 479

Obama, Michelle, 305

Obesity regimens, 147

Obfuscation, 16, 184, 326, 359–367

Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, 362

Obineme, Ejike, 309

Occidental (language), 486

Octothorpe, 272

Office of War Information (USA), 495

Offtime, 146

OkCupid, 380

Olly, 67

Omission, 4, 7, 9, 162, 166, 326

“Omnipotence-others,” 7

O’Neil, Cathy, 89, 147 (n1), 422

Weapons of Math Destruction, 148 (n3)

Ong, Aihwa, 13

Onuoha, Mimi, 17–18, 445

OpenGenderTracker, 379

Oppression, 18, 19, 20

Optical character recognition (OCR), 350

O’Reilly, Tim, 212

Organization, 15, 369–375

Ørum, Kristoffer, 15

Osmose, 393

Outliers, 14, 18, 195, 196, 255, 344, 377–384. See also Nonbinary people

Overfitting, 104, 537

Oxford English Dictionary, 261, 377, 420, 571

Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, 307

Oxford Living Dictionary, 141, 142

Paglen, Trevor, 184

Pakistan, 90

Palaeoclimatology, 421

Palantir, 206

Panasonic, 494

Pandian, Anand, 13

Panoram, 397

Pansy performers, 378

(para)paranoia, 445–446

Paris climate accord, 227

Parisi, Luciana, 15, 545

Parker, Martin, 372

Parks, Lisa, 90

Parks, Suzan-Lori, 265

Pasquale, Frank, 458

Pathogenic vulnerabilities, 573–574

Patriarchy, 6–7, 20, 163

Pattern recognition, 409–410

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Harvard), 75–76

Peer review. See Postpublication peer review

Peirce, Charles S., 293–294, 470

Pennsylvania (USA), 423

Penny, Simon, 555

Pepper’s ghost, 438

Perez, Caroline Criado, 89, 489

Performance studies, 9

Performative measure, 16, 389–395

Personal digital assistants (PDAs), 99. See also Digital assistants

Personal information, 155. See also Intimate data

Personalized political advertising, 12

Personalized platform products, 324

Phallogocentrism, 7

Pham, Minh-Ha T., 17

Phan, Thao, 155

Pharmakon, 145, 146, 147, 420–421

Phenomena, 284

Philadelphia (USA), 459

Philippines, 119

Phillips, Amanda, 164

Phillips, John, 13

Phone Verified Account, 490

PhotoDNA, 30, 31–35

child sexual exploitation imagery, and, 31–34

“rogue archive,” 34

Photographers’ Gallery (London), 490

Phrenology, 58

Picard, Rosalind, 391

Piotukh, Volha, 469

Platform capitalism, 373–374

Platforms, 324–326

Plath, Sylvia, 347

Plato, 146, 263, 349

Playboy, 488

Playfair, William, 567

Podesta Report, 479

Pold, Søren, Bro, 15

Police violence, 20, 76, 201–202, 274–275, 440

Policing predictions. See Predictive policing

Pollard, Ingrid, Pastoral Interludes, 353, 355

Polygenism, 75

Pondo (pound), 271–272

PornHub, 15, 397–401

PornHub Insights, 398, 399, 401

Pornography, 15, 195, 397–401. See also Child sexual exploitation material

video-streaming sites, 400

Posner, Miriam, 15

Postcolonial studies, 9, 10

Posthuman Glossary, 13

Postpublication peer review, 279, 284–285, 286

Poststructuralist theories, 5–8

Posttraumatic stress disorder, 90, 183–184, 423

Posttruth, 292, 297, 363

Povinelli, Elizabeth, 267

Power law distributions, 51–52

Predator UAV, 179–180

Prediction, 11, 12, 15–16, 65, 135, 243, 292, 294, 379, 403–416, 533–536. See also Unpredictability

Predictive analytics (PA), 410, 411, 534

Predictive policing, 129, 252, 253, 411, 423, 480

Predictive shopping, 535–536

Prelinger, Rick, 232

Presidio (San Francisco), 464

Privacy, 33, 88, 91, 93, 141, 143, 274, 457, 478, 481, 552, 573. See also Obfuscation

digital assistants and, 152, 153

erosion of, 360

right to, 76, 203, 309, 413, 441

Probabilistic prediction, 534, 536

Project Maven, 185

Proletarization of desire, 146–147

Property, digital afterlives of, 76, 77, 81–82

ProPublica, 252, 325

Protestant Christianity, 439–440

Protest movements, 201–202, 203, 274–275, 470–471

Prototyping, 133

Providence (Rhode Island), 410

Proxies, 14, 228, 305, 362, 390, 419–424

Public Knowledge Workshop (Israel), 360

Puig de al Bellacasa, María, 569–570

Pulse, 393

Punch cards, 241

Punzalan, Ricardo, 273, 276, 306

Puppet states, 420

Pynchon, Thomas, Bleeding Edge, 109–110

Quantification, 18, 20, 398, 401, 427–431, 460, 461. See also Self-tracking

Quantified Self (QS), 459–465, 481

Quantum mediations, 429

Queer aggregations, 280, 285

Queer OS, 196

Queer theories, 9, 196

Queries, 211–213

Questlove, 115

Quintanilla, Sylvia Fernández, 166

Raagan, Ronald, 134

Race, 57, 62, 128, 250–251. See also Blackness; Digital assistants; Whiteness

Racial discrimination, 58, 195, 286, 306–307, 309, 310, 479. See also Redlining

criminal sentencing, 252

Racial justice, 81, 309

Racial passing, 59

Racial profiling, 58

Racial stereotypes, 115–116, 120–122

Racism, 17, 18, 57, 58, 75, 76–77, 89, 90, 138, 163, 165, 213, 252–253, 306, 308, 309, 440. See also Algorithmic bias and racism; Colonialism; Slavery; White supremacism

cultural and institutional, 195–196

misogynist, 222

stand-ins and, 487–488

surveillance, 4, 58, 93

Twitter bot, 174

YouTube, racist content on, 59, 60–61

Racist violence, 60, 251–252, 435, 436, 439–440, 441. See also Police violence

Radiation exposure, 489

Radin, Joanna, 111–112, 230

Ramdeen, Sarah, 228, 229

Rana Plaza (Dhaka), 494, 496

Randomness, 293, 295, 296–297, 544, 545

Rao, Vyjapanthi Venuturupalli, 13

Raqqa (Syria), 94

Reading machines, 349–350

Read-only memory (ROM), 350

Real objects, 251

Real time, 527–528

Reaper UAV, 179–180, 181, 182

Reardon, Jenny, 173

Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, 166

Redlining, 58, 310, 324, 423

Refugees, 4, 323, 331

Reinhart, Martin, 403

Religious repair, 443

Remains, digital, 17, 76, 433–441. See also Digital afterlives

“rights” notion of, 17, 439–441

Remembering, 439–440

Re-moval, 284–285

Renaissance, 556

Renty and Delia, daguerrotypes of, 75–77, 76

Reparation, 18, 252, 309, 443–444

Reparative algorithms, 451–452

Reparative practice, 14, 81, 82, 443–453

RescueTime, 146

Restorative justice, 10, 440

Resurrection, digital, 17, 438–439

Reuters, 120, 479

Reveal Digital, 78, 435

R gender package, 379

Rheinberger, Hans-Jorg, 280, 284

Rice, Tamir, 76

Richard, Thomas, 128

Richardson, Alan, 541

Ride, Sally, 175

Right-wing propaganda. See Far right

Rijksmuseum, 502

Ring, Annie, 2, 5, 6, 21

Risam, Roopika, 17

Risk modeling, bias in, 252–253

Roberts, Dorothy, 250–251

Roberts, Sarah T., 18–19, 90

Robertson, Craig, 18

Robertson, Roland, 13

Robots, 65–66, 136, 174, 222, 499, 508, 515, 516. See also Bots; Digital assistants; Drone warfare; Social robots

“Rogue archives,” 34

Roman Empire, 271

Romero, Verónica, 166

Roof, Dylann, 60

Rorschach inkblot, 461

Rosa, Jonathan, 274, 275

Rosenberg, Daniel, 15

Rosenstein, Justin, 146–147

Rosol, Christoph, 421

Royal Danish Library, 80

Ruby (programming language), 523

Ruby Gem, 379

Ruge, Eugen, In Times of Fading Light, 337

Runia, Eelco, 315

Russell, Legacy, 263–264

Russia, 12, 337

Russo, Mary, 195

Ryan, Vanessa L., 541

Said, Edward, 162, 507

St Croix (US Virgin Islands), 449

Samsung, 494

Sanford (Florida), 435

San Francisco Bay Area (California), 458

Sangwand, T-Kay, 306

Santa Fe Indian Industrial School, 167

SAP SCM, 496

Satellite data, 129, 130 (n1), 228, 337

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 579, 581

ScanOps, 490

ScareMail, 365

Schalansky, Judith, Atlas of Remote Islands, 336

Schiphorst, Thecla, 393

Schmidthuber, Jürgen, 503

Schneemann, Carolee, 18, 196, 263, 264–265, 266, 267

Fuses, 260, 261

Interior Scroll, 260–261, 262, 264

More Wrong Things, 259–260, 260, 262, 264, 265, 266

Schneider, Rebecca, 9, 18, 196, 553

Schor, Naomi, 265

Schüll, Natasha Dow, 20, 93, 390

Schulten, Susan, Mapping the Nation, 335–336

Science and technology studies, 68, 220, 221, 222, 223, 280, 380, 444, 569

Scientific gatekeeping, 286

Scientific Revolution, 404, 487

SciNet High Performance Computing consortium, 111

Scott, Robert, 416

Scourti, Erica, 302

Seager, Joni, 378

Search engines, 70, 89, 117, 143, 292

misrepresentation of marginalized groups, 195

profiling, 361

“right to be forgotten,” 441

Seberger, John, 14

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 443, 444, 445–446, 451

SEEK installation (Jewish Museum, NY), 136–138, 139

Selbst, Andrew, 479

Self-driving cars, 174, 192

Self-fulfilling prophecies, 411

Self-tracking, 20, 70, 390, 428, 457–465, 477, 480, 481

Sentiment analysis, 42

Sentinels, 129

Sepkoski, David, 228

Sequencing technologies, 126, 127

Serbia, 429

Sex discrimination, 61, 175, 286, 306. See also Gender discrimination

Sexist trolling, 89

Sexual abuse. See Child sexual exploitation

Sexual orientation, 380, 382

Sexual violence, 20, 274

Shakespearean sonnets, 172

Shakur, Tupac, 438–439, 441

Shared heritage, 500

Sharma, Sanjay, 59

Sharma, Sarah, 91, 92

Shaw, Ian, 183

Shenzhen, 126

Shifters, 15, 469–474

Shipman, Seth, 171

“Shirley cards,” 488

Shulgin, Alexei, 259

ShutApp, 146

Signature strikes (drone warfare), 186–187

Signifying monkey, 275–276

Silicon Valley, 31, 350, 414, 416, 461, 487

refuseniks, 141, 142, 146

Silva, Denise da, 249, 250, 251

Simanowski, Roberto, 92

SIM cards, 490

Simondon, Gilbert, 503, 547

Simpson’s paradox, 49–51

Sina Weibo, 212

Siri (digital assistant), 65, 67–68, 69, 70, 99, 103, 151–152, 156, 214, 583

aesthetic code, 155

gender and race, 154, 155

name, meanings of, 153–154

Skarda, Christine, 544

Skloot, Rebecca, 437

SkyDrive, 32

Skynet, 406

Slave Biographies (Atlantic Database Network project), 434

Slavery, 57, 60, 75, 254, 355

archives of, 10, 75–76, 78, 441

records of trauma, 434–435

reparative practices and, 444–452

“right to be forgotten,” 441

cartography of, 335–336

child slaves, 494

funerary traditions, 439–440

Sluis, Katrina, 490

Smart cities, 99, 406, 408, 412

Smart homes, 99, 110, 152

Smart infrastructures, 134, 406

Smith, Gavin, 458

Smith, Hezekiah, 447, 447–448, 449, 451

Smith, Paul Verity, 393

Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC), 137

Smoking ban, 147

Snoop Dogg, 438

Snowden, Edward, 1, 87, 93, 360, 477

Sobchack, Vivian, 282

Social justice, 3, 10, 19, 20, 29, 77, 78–79, 81, 309, 443, 481

digital humanities, 164

drone warfare, and, 185

hashtag archiving, 273, 276

Social listening, 42

Social media, 12, 20, 42, 116, 380. See also Data mining; Hashtags

child sexual exploitation imagery, 31–34

content moderation, 29–31; see also PhotoDNA

copynorms and; see Fashion copynorms

far-Right propaganda, 90

Social networking, 40, 42, 135, 380, 382

Social robots, 65–72. See also Digital assistants

decision-making capacities, 69, 70

partner robots, 66

Social sorting. See Sorting

Society of American Archivists, 231

“Society of control.” See Detox

Socrates, 263

Soda straw capture, 185

Softimage, 393

Software. Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (Jewish Museum, NY, 1970), 134–137, 139–140

Software Studies: A Lexicon, 13

Søgaard, Anders, 2

Soldier, Layli Long, Whereas, 449

Sorting, 18–19, 477–482

algorithims, 479–480

South Asian American Digital Archive, 309

South Carolina church killings (2015), 60

Southeast Asia, 334–335

Southern Poverty Law Center, 60

Spade, Dean, 342

Spartacus (film), 359, 362

Speculation Now, 13

Speculative archives, 281

Speech recognition. See Deep-learning speech recognition systems

Spillers, Hortense, 251, 254

Spirit of uncertainty, 11

Spotify, 93, 303, 324

Spyware, 89

SQL, 211, 214

Standard Classification for Software Anomalies, 193

Standardization processes, 18

Stand-ins, 18, 485–491

Stanfill, Mel, 153

Star, Leigh, 321–322

Starks, Denny, 383

Starosielski, Nicole, 16

Stasi, 88

Stateful data, 342

Stateless data, violence of, 343–344

Statistics, 11, 54, 103, 104, 106, 191, 335, 380, 383, 420, 520, 535, 536, 554

aggregation, 283

calculated average, 485

outliers, 377

stand-ins, 489, 491

Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitaion Center (Rhode Island), 410

Steyeri, Hito, 91

Stiegler, Bernard, 146, 147

Stop lists, 579–582

Stowaway, 314–315

Strike Tracker, 94

Supercomputers, 174, 175

Supernudge, 219

Supply chain, 15, 35, 493–497

Supply Chain Cockpit, 496

Supply chain management (SCM), 495, 496

Surveillance, 15, 58, 89–90, 119, 480–481. See also Dataveillance

as social sorting, 477, 478–480

Surveillance assets, 374

Surveillance capitalism, 370, 374, 375, 406, 482

Sutherland, Tonia, 17, 76

Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 110–111

Sweeney, Miriam E., 18

Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, 130

Sworn virgins, 378

Synthetic biology, 171

Syria, 5, 90, 94

Taş, Birkan, 19

Tactical Technology Collective (Berlin), 142–145, 146, 147

TallBear, Kim, 173

Tamaki Paenga Hira War Memorial Museum (Auckland), 507

Tansey, Eira, 229, 230, 231

Target’s “pregnancy prediction” score, 419

Tarrant, Brenton, 60

Tay (robot), 222

Taylor, Charles, 127–128

Taylor, Diana, 9

Taylor, Frederick, 242

Taylor, Linnet, 308–309

Technochauvinist, 308

Technoheritage, 17, 499–510

Technoscience Research Unit, 22 (n2)

“Teen Girl” AI, 174

Telluride Film Festival (1977), 260

Temperature regulation. See Cooling

Temporality, 16–17, 446–447, 523–529

Tenney, James, 261

“Terrorism” content, 35

Thailand, 119

The Aids Memorial. See Aids Memorial, The (TAM)

Thematic flows and constellations, 14–21

Theory, Culture and Society, 13

Thermal problems, 110

Thom, René, 561

Threat streams, 201

3G mobile services, 397

Thrill Laboratory, 393

Throbber, 15, 513–521

Thylstrup, Nanna Bonde, 2

Time.now, 523–529

Tinder, 174

Tiqqun olam, 443

Todd, Sarah, 332

Tode, Thomas, 403

Tollmann, Vera, 14

TOR, 361, 362, 420

“Total archive,” 128

Total information awareness, 129

Toxicity, 141, 146, 147. See also Detox

Toxikon. See Pharmakon

Tracker cookies, 89

TrackMeNot, 361, 362

Transatlantic studies, 9

Transfeminism, 378

Transformative scholarship, 164

#transformDH, 164–165

Transgender people, 5, 18, 174, 195, 340, 378, 379, 381, 383

discrimination, 380

misgendering, 341–345

Transgender Studies Quarterly, 13

Transmedial storytelling, 285–286

Transparency, 19, 29, 116, 152, 264–265, 362, 416, 495

Transphobia, 5, 341

Trauma, records of, 20, 76, 80, 435–436, 440

Traumatizing content, 90, 274

Trinidad, 449

Troop Train (film), 495, 496

Trump, Donald, 12, 59, 61, 87, 415

Truth, 7, 138, 191, 218, 219, 285, 292, 295, 297, 427, 460, 499, 543, 570. See also Posttruth

end of, 293

ideological “truths,” 151, 153

Kant on, 362

Truth-telling, 203, 279, 429, 444

Tsing, Anna, 494

Turing, Alan, 65–66, 68, 70, 209–210, 294, 295, 296, 349

Turing tests, 138

Turner, Bryan, 13

Tuszynski, Marek, 143

Twain, Mark, 231

Twin Towers (New York), 259

Twitter, 52, 59, 115, 201, 206 (n5), 212, 283, 379, 382, 436, 583. See also Black Twitter; Hashtags; Shifters

feminist discourse, 272–273

gendered communication patterns, 382

photoDNA, use of, 32

Twitter bot, 174

Twitter Meltdown, 174

Two-spirit people, 378

Tygstrup, Frederik, 15

Tynes, Brendesha, 306

UAVs. See Drone warfare

Uber, 497

Ubik, 406

UGC (user-generated content)

adjudication of, 29–35; see also PhotoDNA

child sexual exploitation imagery, 31–33

Uncertain Archives research group, 2–3, 12–13

Uncertainty, 2–3, 9, 13, 254–255, 291, 292–293

algorithmic, 496–497

contemporary condition, as, 11–12

copynorms and, 119–120

embracing, 231–232

Uncertainty (cont.)

hashtag archiving and, 272–273

interface, 300–301

latent, 315–316

open future, and, 533–535

social robots, 65, 66–67, 70

statistics, 103–106

tactical, 494–495

temporality of, 313–314

values, of, 551–552

Underfitting, 537

Undocumented immigrants (subject heading), 323

UNESCO, 508

Unfit-Bits, 367

United Fronteras, 166

United Kingdom, 380, 398, 406, 471. See also Brexit

delisted content, 441

United States, 60, 61, 117, 120, 126, 156, 201, 202, 227, 305, 310, 325, 380, 381, 398, 437, 440, 449, 459, 470, 479, 487, 495, 564. See also Black Americans; Library of Congress; National Institutes of Health; Native Americans

9/11 attacks, 342, 470–471

census system, 429, 430

Citizenship and Immigration Services, 156–157

Current Population Survey, 430

global climate change models, 422

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 206

militarized drones; see Drone warfare

Patriot Act, 152

predictive policing, 129

presidential elections (2016), 12, 206; see also Trump, Donald

privacy, right to, 441

racism and racial violence, 60, 62, 138, 423, 441; see also Black Americans; Police violence; Slavery

lynching, 435, 436, 440

“redlining,” 58, 310, 423

transgender people, 379

United States Senate, 398

Universal heritage, 500

University of Alberta, 110

University of California (Berkeley), 542, 544

University of California (Los Angeles), 39. See also Williams Institute

University of Houston, 166

University of Maryland, 165

University of Toronto, 111

Unix time, 523, 524

Unlearning, 543–544

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 179–180. See also Drone warfare

Unpredictability, 16, 174, 533–538

Unthought, 15, 316, 541–547

Urban information infrastructure. See Smart cities

Urban planning and design, 135, 136, 138

US Air Force, 180

User-generated content. See UGC

Usher, Nikki, 382

US Latinx digital humanities, 166

#usLdh, 166

US Robotics, 515, 516

US Virgin Islands. See Danish West Indies

UX (user experience). See Digital assistants

Values, 14, 551–557

Vancouver, 115, 118

Vanity Fair, 459

Varela, Francisco, 547

Variables, 488–489

Vavarella, Emilio, The Driver and the Cameras, 490

VCR, 397

Veel, Kristin, 2, 14, 16–17

Veiled masculinity, 6

Velkova, Julia, 111

Venn, Couze, 13

Ventura, Gabriela Baeza, 166

Vergès, Françoise, 445, 451

Versioning, 133

Vesna, Victoria, 261, 264

VHS, 397

Vidal, Fernando, 230

Vietnam, 119

Vietnam War, 180, 495

Villarroel, Carolina, 166

Violence, 5, 60, 80, 201, 251–252, 275, 381, 382, 507, 553, 563. See also Administrative violence; Colonialism; Drone warfare; Police violence; Racist violence; Sexual violence; Slavery

algorithmic, 249–250, 255

banality of, 266

gun sales and shooting deaths, 564–565

trauma; see Trauma, records of

Violent patriarchive, 6–7

Virtual agents. See Digital assistants

Vismann, Cornelia, 241

Visualization, 15, 279, 281, 282, 286, 317, 458, 461, 503, 561–568

tools and platforms, 561–562

Visvanathan, Shiv, 13

Voice-activated controls, 99, 152

Voice recognition technologies, 69, 99, 152

Vondereau, Patrick, 109

Von Neumann, John, 296

Vulnerabilities, 11, 19, 37, 43, 448, 477, 478, 480, 481, 569–576. See also Disability

Wallace-Wells, David, 227, 230

Wallen, Anne, 333, 336–337

Walmart, 494

War, 90–91. See also Drone warfare

War on terror, 181

Warren, Kellee E., 8, 82

Warumungu Aboriginal community (Australia), 167

Waste heat, 111

Watson, James, 172

Weapons of math destruction (WMDs), 422–423

Web 2.0, 519

Web queries, 212–213

WeChat, 212

Weheliye, Alexander, 254, 267

Weiner, Eric J., 147

Weizenbaum, Joseph, 220

Weizman, Eyal, 185

Wernimont, Jacqueline, 18, 78, 165, 390

West, Sarah Myers, 29

Westworld (TV show), 110

WhatsApp, 88

Whisper(s) project, 391

White Box Gallery (New York), 259

Whitehead, Alfred North, 547, 554

Whiteness, 20, 76, 154, 441

White supremacism, 59–61, 59–61, 62, 78, 309, 435–436

WibiData, 413

Wide Area Airborne Surveillance (WAAS), 186

Wiener, Norbert, 202–203

Wikipedia, 217, 500

Wilk, James, 502

Williams, Raymond, Keywords, 13

Williams Institute (University of California), 379, 381, 382

Wilson, Andrew Norman, 490

Wind farm technology, 94

Winner, Reality, 1

Winton Capital, 406

Wired, 459

Withdrawal imaginaries, 21

Withey, 167

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 205

Wolf, Gary, 459, 461

Wolfe, Cary, 547

Women, 4, 7, 18. See also Black women; Feminist theory

Wood, Denis, 333

Wood, Stacy, 8

Word, 579–583

Word stopping. See Stop lists

World Economic Forum (Davos, 2018), 503

World Health Organization (WHO), 21

World War I, 4

World War II, 180, 359, 495

World Weather Watch, 228

Worm genetics, 129

www.docnow.io, 273

www.hastagfeminism.org, 272

x86, 214

Xenophobia, 156

Yelp, 324

Yemen, 5

Yom Kippur War, 180

Yong, Ed, 172

Yoshimi, Shunya, 13

Young, Harvey, 434

YouTube, 5, 90, 174, 324, 325

racist content, 59, 60–61

recommendation engine, 408

“shocking” content, incentivization of, 90

Yugoslavia, 334

Zealy, Joseph T., 75

Zer-Aviv, Mushon, 13, 16, 91, 361, 366

Zielinski, Dina, 171

Zuboff, Shoshana, 89, 374, 407, 482

Zuckerberg, Mark, 89, 414