News from the Collective – Page 39 – Radical Open Access Collective

INC

OUT NOW: TOD#38 Satellite Lifelines

Satellite Lifelines: Media, Art, Migration and the Crisis of Hospitality in Divided Cities just launched and can be found online!

“Hospitality is central to the question of political frontiers where admittance and refusal across state borders may be a matter of life or death, and also touches on the fundamental ethical question of the boundaries of the human, the constitution of the subject, how and why we set these up, and ways in which we can attempt to bring them down. A majority of migrants today now seek refuge in cities rather than in camps, prompting us to reconsider the way in which we need to rethink urban space to accommodate newcomers more long-term. Who has the right to belong? And on what terms? As we can no longer separate cityscapes from mediascapes, we need to also reconsider how these now almost indistinguishable ‘-scapes’ constitute ‘connected’ places of exclusion and belonging. In this dilemma of who is in or out, the political unwillingness and inability of dealing with the notion of the Other, the blame has been assigned to those who are assumed to “unprogrammable” within national narratives, which resulted in the ad nauseam repetition of the term “refugee crisis”.

What I argue is that it is not the refugee, migrant or immigrant who is in crisis. If we shift the lens to include host societies as part of this so-called crisis, my suggestion is that we instead call it a “crisis of hospitality”, where host societies are equally implicated in this dilemma. What we lack in political and media discourses is a language of hospitality, a way to properly name these issues and these subjects if we are to act politically towards emancipatory politics of the right to the land, the right to the city, the right to belong, and the ethical responsibility towards the Other.

Considering that politics, urban planning and media platforms are unable to resolve this dilemma, in Satellite Lifelines, I turn to philosophy and art instead. Satellite Lifelines is a the same time philosophical inquiry, a historical survey of divided cities and politics of urban exclusion, and artistic research. I take the reader to a multiethnic suburb in Sweden, where a participatory art installation on satellite dishes on modernist façades become a surface for understanding host-guest relations. In working closely with residents in a co-generative capacity, notions of belonging through transnational media and multiple reflections on what it is we call home flourished. Is it the vibrations from television broadcasts from faraway homelands resonating in large TV screens in living rooms while in exile? Is it the notion of community building from the ground up, which provides the grounds for social, urban and media justice movements? Or can home be found in the essential meeting with the Other through the face, as Emmanuel Lévinas suggested? Questions about being trapped in eternal guesthood also came to the surface, and suggestions as to how art projects through a “hospitable turn” can open pathways for the right to host.”

– Isabel Löfgren

Download or order a copy of the book here:

INC

Out now: Internet, Mon Amour – Chronicles before yesterday’s collapse

‘The future was yesterday, when we were inseparable from computers and smartphones, for better or for worse. Even when we would have preferred to do without them, because we knew they could prove to be our worst enemies. The global surveillance scandals of the Internet were just the tip of a icebergs, mass manipulation was just the beginning: we were all vulnerable! Misplaced curiosities, scams, identity and data theft, porn sales, haters…’

The Great Internet Plague

In her book, ‘Internet, Mon Amour – Chronicles before yesterday’s collapse’, a collection of short novels in a Decamerinian frame, Agnese Trocchi sketches a situation where ‘we are at the end the Great Internet Plague and a group of hackers, artists and geeks escape in the mountains to tell each other the stories before the collapse’.

‘Internet, Mon Amour’ was born from the desire to understand our relationships with the machines that are part of our daily life. ‘We are aware that too often we are embroiled in chains of command that are invisible to us as they are covered by layers of make-up. The distance that separates us from understanding hardware and software is hiding under comfortable and smart surfaces. We are alienated from the tools that we use.’

The result is a hybrid between an essay and a collection of short stories framed in speculative science fiction. Above all, it’s an invitation to collectively use our imagination and to play together.

Post covid-19 era

‘One could sense discouragement and sadness in the air. The intentions were good: to let go of the disaster and to meet with friends again, in a welcoming and protected place. But each one brought the wounds of the vicissitudes just experienced. Many had lost loved ones, all had to abandon their jobs, or their homes too. Distorted lives. How could anyone remember? Telling what had been before, without getting caught up in melancholy, anger, fear?’

The prologue of ‘Internet, Mon Amour’, could indeed very well be situated in a post covid-19 era to come. Ironically enough, the book was written before the current pandemic, yet the crisis gives the book new meaning. The scenario imagined for the book, a ‘Great Plague’ was born from the bad habits perpetrated by human beings in their unhealthy relationships with technological devices, technical beings; mutual abuse and oppression led humans to isolate themselves and destroy the social bond that held them together.’ Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And, of course, the logical follow up question would be when the situation will return to normal. ‘Obviously there is no turning back and in the meantime it will have become even more difficult to eradicate the technologies of domination from our lives, addicted as we will have become to the platforms of e-something. In the meantime the capitalism of disaster, joyfully rubbing its hands at the unanticipated opportunity, collected an enormous amount of data and metadata about our behavior.’

Trocchi remains positive however. She wants to imagine that ‘once out of the emergency some of us will have treasured this experience, observed the vulnerabilities and started recreation to transform us starting from the weak points. A path that begins looking at non-gamified tools and conscious choices.’

To learn, teach and play with machines

The short novels include various themes; from AwayFromHome (‘we remember and think of those who relied on technological tools of undoubted power, connected in extraordinarily large networks throughout the whole world, fast and omnipresent; and they trusted in the prodigious help of these networks owned by others to communicate with other humans, to find what they were looking for when they were not at home’), relationships (‘because the great denied of […] relationships mediated by digital machines were precisely the machines themselves. Only a few tried to know them, only a few cared’) and sex (those who entrusted their intimate relationships to powerful technologies […] [-] if they worked for professional, emotional, and family relationships, why shouldn’t they work for sexual relationships) to scams (unrepeatable business prospects, stratospheric gains, exceptional savings, opportunities not to be missed) and recreation (the desire to find new, intriguing paths, never definitive solutions, to confront problems as ancient as the world; to the enthusiasm of the game made for the pleasure of playing, without prizes or awards. […] Machines as street companions, from which to learn, to teach and above all, to play with).

You can read the entire book here. For hard copies, mail ima[at]cirex.org (you will be asked for a donation), buy it on Amazon or find it at L200: Langstrasse 200 in Zurich, Switzerland.

Agnese is also open for publishers that distribute in Europe, the United States or Australia. She is also open to collect more stories. Suggestions can be sent to ima[at]cirex.org.

Agnese Trocchi is social media strategist, copywriter and storyteller. She has always been curious about our relationship with information technology and with the media, was videomaker and net.artist. Her net.art and video art works have been exhibited in events and galleries around the world. She deals with hacker pedagogy (conferences and training) with C.I.R.C.E.

C.I.R.C.E. (International Research Centre for Electric Convivialities) proposes workshops of digital self-defence, hacker pedagogy, convivial informatics for all curious people to get to know each other better, and to get to know the machines they live with.

Open Book Publishers

Vigilantes in the Digital Age

by Christopher Hubbard

Click. That’s how easy it is for social media users to upload information to public platforms, whether as text, pictures, or videos. This simple capability has transformed the public from an audience of passive observers into a crowd that can take collective action, and thus have an impact on social and political life. Social media platforms allow their users to engage with others on topics ranging from the trivial to issues of life and death.

With the advent of social media came the inevitable rise of digital platforms being used for the purposes of vigilantism. Introducing Vigilant Audiences, edited by Daniel Trottier, Rashid Gabdulhakov and Qian Huang, explores the groups and audiences that behave in this way. As the introduction notes, vigilantes can be organized either individually or collectively and are oriented about a target that has allegedly violated a “social order” via criminal activity or an action or utterance considered “morally offensive”. Vigilantism itself is characterized by acts that seek to right some wrong, where law enforcement has failed and others feel compelled to take the law into their hands. Besides motivations that might align with justice, vigilantes might engage in such acts for financial gain, such as revenue from YouTube videos.

The book takes a case-study approach, diving into particular examples of vigilantism: actions and discourses of fandoms; select groups in Russia who claim to act on behalf of society, such as Lev Protiv, who compels smokers and drinkers to respect the law; and the 2017 white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville which prompted Twitter users to post pictures of participants and asked followers to identify those people, to name a few. The societal and cultural backdrop of vigilantism comes under scrutiny, and the connections between digital media platforms and those activists who utilize them is considered through the lens of performativity and technical mediation.

Aside from the various aspects of vigilantism mentioned above, this text also factors in the role of the audience and how digitally oriented groups might differ from more conventional, non-digital groups.

Backlash

Vigilante-esque actions are easy enough to find on social media, with so-called ‘cancel culture’ often explicitly targeting someone’s reputation or their job. This is explored in Introducing Vigilant Audiences, which notes the backlash faced by high-profile figures such as Amy Poehler and Daniel O’Reilly, whose comedy has resulted in negative consequences for the creators themselves. A character in the show Difficult People, produced by Poehler, made a joke about R. Kelly urinating on Blue Ivy when she turns 18. O’Reilly, through his character Dapper Laughs, utilized offensive comedy that, albeit that is what originally attracted his audience, resulted in the cancellation of his show.

Recently on social media, I came across instances of vigilantism on both Reddit and Twitter that stuck out to me. On Reddit, someone had exposed racist and anti-immigrant comments that blamed Asians for the current Covid-19 pandemic. Not only were the comments, which originally came from Facebook, relayed to other Reddit users, but so was the identity of the person responsible for the comments (an act that actually contravenes the rules for posting). The person who reposted the comments also revealed the original commentor’s work address and urged others to call her workplace to file complaints against her.

Similarly on Twitter, one often finds a hashtag including a show or famous person’s name alongside “isover,” calling for that show or person to be cancelled and boycotted. A few recent instances include a short clip of Billie Eilish forcefully throwing a bottle into the crowd and liking a meme that implied that Louis Tomlinsin was uglier than a former band member, both of which caused #BillieEilishIsOverParty to trend. A few people on Twitter expressed frustrations over cancel culture and how insidious it has become. Last year, #CamillaCabelloIsOverParty was posted by a few, with some citing the reason as her Tumblr account with racist posts years prior.

It is worth noting that the consequences of acts of digital vigilantism can be startling, unintended, and call into question the proportionality of this form of ‘justice’. A case explored in the book involves a 68-year-old woman who pocketed another person’s wallet; footage of the incident circulated online and went viral. Following a slew of hateful comments against her, the woman ended up taking her own life.

Introducing Vigilant Audiences offers a vast array of such case studies from around the world. Given how prevalent and pervasive instances of digital vigilantism is, this open access book will give both scholars and social media users alike the tools to recognize acts of digital vigilantism and their origins and motivations

Minor Compositions

The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee – The “Red Guard” Tells Its Story (Milan, 1975-78)

The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee – The “Red Guard” Tells Its Story (Milan, 1975-78) Emilio Mentasti In a large factory in Milan in the mid-70s, a few dozen workers organized themselves against both the management and the unions in an autonomous Workers’ Political Committee. Soon, this “Red Guard” consisted of hundreds of workers fighting against layoffs and relocation. The Committee … Continue reading →

Open Book Publishers

On ‘Making Up Numbers’

by Ekkehard Kopp, Professor Emeritus in Mathematics, University of Hull, UK.

When people meet at social events, their first question often mirrors that of the Queen: 'And what do you do?' Mathematicians tend to dread this moment, since, more often than not, the answer 'I am a mathematician' will elicit an embarrassed silence, or (worse) the response 'Oh! I was never any good at maths' or 'I always hated maths at school'.

This phenomenon might be universal, but in my experience it seems especially acute in the anglophone world. I have often wondered why this is so and how we might counteract it.

This book does not address that question directly. Instead, it presents episodes in the development of number, that most basic of mathematical concepts, in a historical framework. The thinking of mathematicians is presented in terms of their everyday reality. My purpose is to illustrate how practical considerations, as well as problem-solving, necessitated the extension of the number concept at various times, and how this was achieved.

Mathematics has a very long history. Very little of it features in traditional school or university mathematics curricula. The pressure to teach standard methods and techniques in diverse areas of the subject leaves little time for reflection on how these areas are linked or what motivates it all. Today, it is quite possible to be a successful researcher in mathematics while knowing very little of its history.

During my 37 years of teaching mathematics at university, which began in 1970, undergraduate options dealing with the history of the subject were few and far between in university mathematics departments. And, if anything, time pressures are felt even more acutely in A-level courses, I suspect.

I recall the sceptical looks of my colleagues at Hull when I proposed such a course in the 1980s. I persuaded them to indulge me. Student feedback was positive—at times more so than students' understanding of the topics we covered. It was not an 'easy option'. Participants who had sought an escape from 'technical' mathematics did not last long. Students who persevered frequently commented that the experience had led them to appreciate the links between their other modules more clearly.

This book is aimed at a somewhat different audience, one with perhaps less (or less recent) experience of abstract mathematical ideas. While I hope to persuade aspiring students of the unity of the subject, I concentrate on the conceptual development of the more familiar number systems in use today. This requires discursions into simple geometry and number theory along the way. The last three chapters deal more directly with the evolution of the axiomatic method, the foundational crisis in 'naive' set theory of a century ago, and modern attitudes to the nature of mathematical statements.

For all this, a substantial 'Mathematical Miscellany' resource is provided on the OBP website for those wishing to refresh their basic knowledge and find out more on specific points. 'Making up Numbers' should not be mistaken for an academic treatise or textbook. It is aimed at classroom practice as a resourcefor teachers. It also aims to encourage interested A-level pupils and new undergraduates looking for a more holistic approach to their subject.

So the question 'why add to the literature?' (other than 'to fill a much-needed gap', as the saying goes) perhaps has three answers. My intentions can be summarised as follows:

to bring together in one place the various extensions of the familiar 'whole numbers' that we need in many areas of science and commerce today, and to do this in a detailed but sufficiently relaxed way for the newcomer to follow;
to highlight conceptual hurdles that were overcome (in the distant past as well as within living memory) in the creation of ever more comprehensive number systems, by giving unambiguous meaning to previously nebulous entities—including counting 'beyond the finite' and handling the elusive concept of 'infinity';
to illustrate how the meanings that we attach to mathematical objects can change over time, leading to modern re-assessments of what is permissible, what is achievable and what might constitute mathematical 'truth' today.

I contend that we do'make it all up'. We should do it collectively, critically, rigorously and systematically, and with sufficient humility. So far, this has mostly been the case.

This is an open access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in paperback, hardback or in various e-book editions here.

INC

Designing the Politics of Public Data for Public Events: A Conversation with Designer & Programmer Joel Calvez

When web developer Joel Calvez quitt Facebook, he realized he had no accessible overview of events anymore – “newsletters and Instagram are just not the same, they give glimpses, but they don’t tell you what you could do this Saturday”. That’s why he started his project Public Data for Public Events (publicdata.events), a simple, low-tech, FLOSS solution, where you can curate your own calendar based on the event data that institutions made publicly accessible – all you need is their domain-name. And most importantly, all of this is completely open source and independent from closed platforms such as Facebook.

As we made our INC event data public to support Joel his project, we sat down with him to talk about his plans, how Public Data for Public Events works exactly and, of course, the politics behind it.

Pop-up on apocalendar.today, Joel his personal calendar.

Hey Joel! First things first. Why quit Facebook and not Instagram?

“Haha, I know, I know. Facebook makes you feel weird. Instagram enters my life a little bit less. I’ll do it eventually. First things first; finish my calendar.”

Yes, tell us more about it. How does it work, exactly?

“You could see it as a dumbed-down, special-case of the semantic web, perhaps. If the semantic web was an airplane, this is a bike without gears. All the event data is already out there, locked up in various websites of institutes that organize events. It’s not like we need to put more effort into writing it and publishing it for yet another platform. It just needs to be opened! That’s basically what I’m doing. Public Data Events exists out of three projects.”

Okay. Tell us more.

“The first is getting a critical mass of theaters, venues and galleries to export their events in iCalendar format. This is the biggest challenge, because I have to convince them it’s worth it to pay their developers for a couple of hours work, to create an automatic export.”

What’s the second project?

“To propose a standard way this calendar data is findable by only knowing the domain name of the theatre, venue or gallery. The dream is that a calendar-developer, like me, can think ‘Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has public events – they probably have a public calendar, and then be able to find that calendar by only knowing their domain name (stedelijk.nl)’. Under the hood, from the domain, I could find the calendar through a link – which would be a simple text file, like this one.”

And the third?

“To make a working calendar using the data from the first two projects. My personal calendar is called apocalendar.today. It’s currently a boring calendar and I realize I need to make another one that looks more dazzling – a lot of people can’t see past the utilitarian nature of it.”

Can anyone make one?

“Yes! The model I propose for the third project is just one proposal. Someone else might have a different idea – hopefully mine won’t be the only one. My proposal is based on federated personal ownership. You go to apocalendar.today, because you trust me. Brussels.fyi is run by Byrthe Lemmers is Brussels and you go there because you trust them. They have one calendar and the rest comes from my server, so they trust me to subscribe to my list. This way, if one of ‘my’ calendars get hacked, you can trace it back to me through a network of trust, and you can see it’s not Byrthe’s fault, for example. This model won’t work with 50.000 calendars of course, but hopefully the first two projects are independent enough for it to be possible to experiment with different models on top of this data in a collective manner.”

Does this work for events only?

“In general, I like events as the basis for this project. It’s a very simple and tangible entity, unlike what ‘friend’ means with social media platforms, for example. My dream is that someone else will make a different calendar on top of this data, or maybe tie it together with some other date to create something completely different.”

And how about censorship. Could I organize an off the grid LHBTIQ+ event in Russia and put it on there safely?

“You’re right. In its current form it’s impossible to combine distributed and restricted access at the same time. I hope I can get into a discussion with someone that is good at encryption and security about this soon. For now the focus is on it being entirely public.”

What about the other side of this – what if right extremists decide to create their own domain and share their events with the same technique?

“It’s unavoidable. The question is how to react when this enters a more public setting, I think. When it comes to public discussion, I wonder if the domain-based trust model could help distributing the work of classification and moderation. You might judge something from ‘dodgy-vpn.com’ differently than a response from ‘that-particular-organization.com’. Let’s say we have a threaded discussion with comments from both of these sources. How to handle the difference in trust within the same discussion could then be a public and collective design project. In the platform/data-silo there are no domains, so some nuance on trust is also lost. It’s a shame, I think. I love domain names – I love buying domain names. Anyway, I haven’t discussed this very much with others – so this project is a way to pose the question if domains could maybe help.”

Let’s get away from the hypothetical for now. What kind of institutes would be interested in this now?

“Right now it’s mostly publicly funded art spaces. It’s a good way to start, they are already used to participating in projects like these and usually understand the added value straight away, and they are close to my heart. Later down the road it could be interesting for any organisation, perhaps.”

How would you balance publicly funded and commercial organisations?

“Spending another 500 bucks to make their data public is something a lot of (commercial) companies don’t want to do, because there is not much infrastructure for using it, but more importantly, it does not benefit them directly. It might even harm them because someone else could build a platform with their data. Plus it’s harder to make money with advertising. It’s a situation where self interest doesn’t work. My plan is to get the attention of public institutions that could fund those extra 500 bucks companies would need. It’s maybe easier to achieve this if the organizations are already publicly funded.”

“To give you an example: Kidsproof.nl is a great site for finding stuff to do with my 5 year old son. If theirs and Stedelijk’s calendar data was available together, I could plan my weekend easier. That combination has value to me. Stedelijk does export their events to Kidsproof. OT301 does nice stuff for kids too, but their events are not on Kidsproof. With open data I could make this combination myself. I could ‘fork’ kidsproof, and make my own version that includes OT301.”“If this takes off, there will be some danger that someone with a lot of resources makes a much better calendar aggregation service but tweaks it to their purposes and ruins things for those with less resources (such as the EEE approach Microsoft is known for). So far it’s just a hobby project for me, but it’s still good to be mentally prepared, perhaps.”

“To answer your question. It’s not about a balance between commercial and noncommercial – both should use this. It’s just easier to start with publicly funded organisations, since this project needs to be funded with public money eventually, somehow.”

apocalandar.today – casually notice the INC events on there as well

What’s your personal motivation for this project?

“I spent the last 10 years trying to make new things in a practice close to conceptualism, which started to feel a bit introspective – too much self referencing within the traditional arts and into the medium itself. This is my attempt to try something different. I wanted to try and do something more political in a way that didn’t feel forced to me, so I stayed close to the heart. Perhaps, it’s partly a response to the detachment created by COVID and the transient nature of being an independent without a boss or employees as well – I want to go out more. I hope this will become a long term thing. I’ve been getting very rewarding responses on this project.”

What kind of responses?

“Most are excited for the potential hope to not be dependent on Facebook anymore. But not everyone gets it, however. I was on the phone with someone who said ‘why are you doing this, when there is Facebook?’. If that person realizes the benefits of open data, it would feel like I’ve achieved something. It doesn’t take that much effort, just a moment of synchronized dancing. This needs to exist.”

Why does the world need this?

“In an ideal dream scenario: let’s say De Balie decides that they want to propose using hashtags for the events, but Spui 25 doesn’t want that. We could have a discussion about whether or not this is a good idea and how it should be implemented. It’s about that discussion – being able to define it ourselves, instead of having to deal with whatever platforms decide behind closed doors. We could make several variants, to see what sticks. It sounds very utopian, but it’s not that far fetched, since the data already exists.”

By the way, could non-programmers create a calendar too?

“Yes! It will take someone who isn’t a programmer a bit longer, but the plan is to automate the process as much as possible and present a clear guide. You can ‘fork’ my calendar, change the list and all the description texts, without being a programmer.”

Where do you see this going in the future?

“Every organization added to this project that uses an automatic export is adding to a continuous stream of public data. When they fill their website, they automatically fill my calendar. I’ll keep trying to add these sources the coming year. It won’t be a superfast process, but once it’s added, it’s automatic. If I have collected enough data, it will be easy to say “look here to stay updated”, but that will take some time. Like I said, my hope is to find some funding soon, to be able to give some money to these organizations to speed up the process of opening up the data. That would make it easier to say ‘look developers, here is nice public data to experiment with’. If this idea really takes off, I’ll need a solid non-profit organization underneath it too, for support and to maintain its independence.”

We’re sure you’ll pull it off!

“It’s still early in the project. It could happen that someone says ‘this won’t work because of X’, or worse, ‘this already exists’. This hasn’t happened yet. But if it does, I hope someone tells me as soon as possible.”

Joel Galvez has been making websites since 1996. He never felt happy about the distinction between programming and design, as things tend to get predictable. He studied Informatics in Sweden and Graphic Design in Denmark and in Amsterdam at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

INC

Memory for the Future Symposium: Thinking with Bernard Stiegler (online, Dec. 3/4, 2020)

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2020/12/lccp-symposium-memory-for-the-future-thinking-with-bernard-stiegler

Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) and the Institute for Science in Society of the Radboud University of Nijmegen welcome all interested persons to a symposium on Bernard Stiegler’s work on 3-4 December 2020.

Bernard Stiegler’s unexpected passing away in August 2020 left many things unfinished. His philosophical work, that had started by a seminal theory of technics as memory and evolved towards an interrogation of the automatic society, now examined from the perspective of anthropic and neganthropic tendencies of the world marked by pervasive AI, ultra-liberalism and climate catastrophe. His influence went also beyond philosophy to many practical engagements.

In order to commemorate the span of this multifaceted work, but above all in order to probe its future, the Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) and the Institute for Science in Society of the Radboud University of Nijmegen summon a meeting of both academics and actors from civil society. The meeting will surely summarize his philosophical legacy, but above all it will explore possible futures in the spirit of Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical project, both practically and theoretically.

How should we take care of the world marked by ubiquitous digitalization, global ecological destruction and increasing economical turmoil? How should we face this reality in thinking? What should philosophy consist of when digitalization has entered the domain of knowledge production and cultural reflection? Is philosophy mainly a matter of concept production or also an engagement with reality? What is philosophizing for Stiegler, and how should we philosophize with Stiegler and after him?

Due to Covid restrictions the symposium will take place online. More than anybody else, Bernard Stiegler led us to interrogate both the misery and the emancipative potential of this media, so let this also be an occasion for putting this element of his thinking in practice.

The program will be updated on the symposium website, see below. People interested in the symposium should register with the conference secretary Donovan Stewart: donovanstewart@protonmail.com

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2020/12/lccp-symposium-memory-for-the-future-thinking-with-bernard-stiegler

INC

CDI Public Talk: Mapping the Covid-19 App Space

On the 9^th of November, our friends from the Centre for Digital Inquiry, Warwick’s hub for critical digital research, organize a public talk about their ‘COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies’ project.

Apps have emerged as a key part of the response to COVID-19 around the world. Initial research and critical assessments of COVID-19 apps, however, have raised a number of important concerns from issues around privacy and security to the adoption rates required for their effectiveness. This project contributes to emerging public and policy debates through digital methods research of COVID-19 apps.

Their approach is unique because they are moving beyond an analysis of single apps, but they look at multiple apps and their inter-relationships. Critical data studies have demonstrated that a focus on relations between apps and data infrastructures is vital since no apps operate in isolation.

Some facets of the project include: mapping algorithmic and curatorial ordering practices in app stores, tracing data flows by capturing network connections, decompiling apps to identify third-parties, and performing data-centric walkthroughs to consider the mediation of information disclosure and consent. By combining these methods, the project aims to provide an assessment of the governance risks and ethical challenges posed to the public by COVID-19 apps.

On the 9^th of November investigators Dr. Michael Dieter (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick), Dr. Anne Helmond (Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Dr. Nathaniel Tkacz (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick), Dr. Esther Weltevrede (Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) and contributing researchers Fernando van der Vlist (University of Siegen, Germany) and Jason Chao (University of Siegen, Germany) will have an online dialogue about their project.

Mapping the Covid-19 App Space
November 9th, 09:30 – 1-:30 am GMT
Online
Register here

This project is funded by an ESRC COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant and partnered with the Ada Lovelace Institute.

Open Book Publishers

Stephen Robertson on the Pre-history of the Digital Age

At just around the time I was born, just after the second world war, the first working digital computers were being put together in a handful of laboratories in Britain and the United States. During my lifetime, computers and computing, and more broadly, the information and communication technologies, have pervaded vast areas of our lives.

Should we see that point in history as a revolutionary moment? as a hiatus? Was it the beginning of a fundamental change in human existence? Certainly there is much about the world today that would have seemed like pure fantasy to my parents at the time I was born. The world of email, the internet, online shopping and payment, online management of bank accounts, mobile phones doubling as cameras, digital radio and television, downloaded recorded sound and films, satellite navigation, ebooks, Google, Wikipedia, and social media — all science fiction of the most way-out kind. There is an SF novel by James Blish, written in the late fifties but set in the far future, in which the young protagonist asks a complex question of the City Librarian (a computer). The response sounds like nothing so much as a Wikipedia article.

All those now-familiar elements listed above have been made possible by computers and digital information technologies, and have been brought into existence by means of the same — and this might speak to the idea of a revolution. Nevertheless, such sea-changes do not happen without precursors, and the roots of this particular sea-change go way back. The aim of my book is to unravel this pre-history — all the things we had to learn, to understand, all the ways we had to adapt our thinking, in order to reach this point. Some of these ideas arose during the industrial revolution and the immensely inventive Victorian period that followed it, but many of them go back much further.

The book starts right back at the beginning — the invention of writing. It then follows a number of separate strands of ideas and ways of doing things — not as a linear narrative, but rather in a thematic arrangement. It tries to show how the concept of data has emerged from a multitude of disparate sources to gain an all-pervasive status in the twenty-first century — absorbing along the way numbers, text, images and sounds.

For text, the crucial first step was the invention of the alphabet, around three millennia ago. That was a necessary precursor for many things, including Gutenberg-style printing and, later, the typewriter — and also for developments in writing such as word-spacing and punctuation. The typewriter and its keyboard were central to the process of turning text into data. For numbers, we first had to develop the so-called Arabic numbering system, before we could think about mechanical or electric calculators. But all of this takes place in the context of human communication. Books, libraries, postal systems, pulpits, posters on walls, political rallies — and later, the telegraph and telephone, radio, cinema, television — all these not only preceded but also informed the development of communication systems in my lifetime, including the proliferation of such systems on the web and through the mobile phone network.

The storage, retrieval and transmission of information is central to human communication in all its forms. However, the mechanical processing of information is something else. We see the seeds in ideas about calculators, from the seventeenth century, and in much more ambitious form in the experiments of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth. The first practical machinery emerges at the very end of the nineteenth century, largely due to the work of Herman Hollerith on the US census. A substantial data processing industry arises directly out of Hollerith's ideas in the first half of the twentieth, and then morphs into the computing industry in the second half.

The inclusion of images in the scope of digital communication systems depends not only on the development of photography and the later technology of digitisation, but also on much earlier ideas about how we see the three-dimensional world. We owe a great deal to the Renaissance artists who formulated our idea of perspective, as well as the artists and scientists who got to grips with colour. In the contexts of colour, of 3D images, and of sound, we can think about either the physics of the situation, or the physiology of perception. It was necessary to call upon our understanding of both these domains in order to bring these phenomena into the digital world.

These are the kinds of connections which I seek to bring out in my book.

Stephen Robertson is the author of 'B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data'. This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats here.

INC

Architectural Filter Bubbles – On the Society for the Nonpreservation of Brutalism

What does it mean to infiltrate the other side of the argument?

All images are fragments from Society for the Nonpreservation of Brutalism.

The Fetish for the Image and the Digital Ethnographer

Coming from the field of design, my online feeds and timelines are flooded in aesthetics. Even after carefully picking accounts to follow and pages to like, the aestheticized image keeps on slipping through. Especially the iconic black and white Brutalist picture. It isn’t completely surprising, since a particular Brutalist Facebook group holds more than 40 of my digital friends. Brutalism photography is a celebration of its architectural rigidness, there is a certain appeal to its straight lines, awkward shapes, and obvious similarities to graphic design. Is it a building or merely a fetishized image?

On a regular afternoon, waiting for the train, Facebook suggested to me a ‘group I might be interested in’: Society for the Nonpreservation of Brutalism. With none of my Facebook friends already there, the Society for Nonpreservation feels like a Secret Society, a virtual sense of belonging to something with a seemingly official status. Upon sending my member request the group double checks if I comply with their values. “1. Least fave brutalist building?” and “2. Do you secretly like brutalism though?” as if they are waiting for Brutalist lovers to infiltrate their sacred space of dislike …

To set up a Society for Nonpreservation means there is a serious threat of others who strive to preserve what one would like to see demolished. Quite quickly after Brutalist buildings were constructed in the 50s as low-cost social housing in Great Britain, the general opinion about them shifted. By the 70s, what was once a socialist agenda of providing housing for everyone, became a symbol of totalitarianism.^[1]

The revival of Brutalist popularity seems to be sparked or at least perpetuated by social media, with Instagram accounts and Facebook groups flooding in concrete loving imagery. The #SOSBRUTALISM campaign, book, and exhibition, has collected 42.7k Instagram followers to “save the concrete monsters!”. The Brutalism Appreciation Society, of which many of my digital friends are a part of, has over 127k members. Voicing concern over this development, the Society for Nonpreservation forms a counterweight.

While it is very easy to think about the reproducibility of the brutalist building within Instagram and blogging, I think one also needs to think about the relational networks, cultures, and ecologies of images that are being reproduced by new connectivities online. I think that is a correlation to the kind of aspiration the architects and designers had about the new communities they were also trying to imagine and revisualise in the spaces.

– Victory Walsh at RA talk ‘The concrete fetishes: the ghost of Brutalism’s radical social agenda’^[2]

I’m not an architect. My quest into the Society for the Nonpreservation of Brutalism is more digital ethnographic than anything else, employing participant observation to study the community that is formed around the Nonpreservation argument. Not involving myself in the argument itself, but rather in the way the conversation is held, I focus on the form rather than the content of the discussions. Consciously not disturbing the regular interactions, I embody a fly on the wall, taking note of what is happening. Not very different from the classic lurker, the passive social media account everybody has in their digital friend groups, I join in, listen, and watch.

As discussed in Schutz’s essay The Stranger, the observer ought to look at an environment as being a total stranger, to expose the social and cultural construction of an environment that might be taken for granted by its members.^[3]Moving beyond what I think I know about digital societies, yet acknowledging my bias as a secret lover of the fetishized image, I’m a stranger in disguise.

Nonpreservation Observation: Jokes and Politics

I return to my new community – the Society for Nonpreservation that is. Once I’m allowed in (answers to the questions: 1. The Barbican 2. Maybe, I’m not sure), the description text of the group welcomes me. Clearly stating what to expect, it reads:

Some people want to preserve brutalist architecture–they’re the people who don’t have to live with it. From Boston to Birmingham, from Tel Aviv to Tiraspol, cities the world over have been scarred by these inhuman, concrete monstrosities. They’re unpleasant to look at and worse to walk by. They damage the historic and unique character of a place. They must go.

Created on the 13th of August, 2019, the group now has 1.6k members. Contrary to the Appreciation Society, the Society for Nonpreservation is public, allowing non-members to view its content. Posts are made on a regular basis, approximately once a week.

Jokes, memes, and gifs

Taking a look at the discussion section of the Society for Nonpreservation, one finds what one expects to find. The members share images of what should not be preserved, generally met by likes, shares, and comments; expressions of agreement. There is a lot of “hideous!” and “how fugly” to be found, as well as some “ooooh i’d love go go unpreserve that one yes i would”. A poll allows members to vote for the worst brutalist building ever – the winner is Boston City Hall. A Google review of the same building is shared, Boston City Hall – 2 stars “The outside is the worst looking building on the planets. I built a tree fort When I was 9 or 10 that was better looking”.

These kinds of disapproving jokes is what the majority of the group’s content consists of, and let’s be honest, the reason for me to stay in the group and have a good laugh. The best ones are the visual references, it is an easy joke to make – things always tend to look like other things. But when the comparison is apt, and housing complexes do look like themed wedding cakes and stacks of washing machines, I can’t help it for a grin to appear on my face.

Socio-political arguments

Underneath the wrecking ball gifs and “I hope the Groningen earthquake takes care of this” comments, there are larger socio-political arguments at play. The first layer is the difference between an image and the lived experience: “These kids live in the suburbs and only know architecture through Pinterest and never have to wonder what it’s like to actually Iive and work in the buildings they think they like.”

More than “objectively ugly architecture”, Brutalism is seen as “a pseudo-intellectual competition”, not validating “the experience of people who live, work and pass by it day to day”. Similarly, the idea of the building versus the experience of the building is emphasized, but with an added layer of “elitism” on the behalf of the “Pinterest kids”. The “objectively ugly architecture”: is later explained by someone else: “… said that Brutalism is ‘objectively’ ugly. Is that overreach? Perhaps, but barely: what else would you call a style that ACTIVELY and EXPLICITLY rejected beauty — that acknowledged that ‘beauty’ was a norm, called it evil, and then sought to embody its opposite?”

Building on the idea versus the lived experience argument, ivory tower architects are the ones to blame: “Brutalism often looks great on paper. That’s the whole problem. It’s self centered, ivory tower architects who don’t think past the drafting table and don’t care how a building is actually realized assuming that their designs are brilliant because of some obtuse geometrical logic that doesn’t actually make a building livable.” When another post points out the fascist ideas of star architect Le Corbusier, “FYI, all these students, architects and designers who often think they’re radical leftists are supporting the work of an actual Nazi collaborator”, the political character of the group can no longer be disputed.

Trolls

The elitism argument resulted in easy critique as brutalism itself was created as housing for the masses, yet this critique is quickly shut down in a way that closely resembles the expelling of trolls. “Brutalism was essentially a troll movement against the average person’s aesthetic sensibilities, so it makes sense that people who like would troll people who don’t.”

When someone disagrees with something, their argument is easily taken as favoring brutalist architecture. A comment to the ‘brutalism is a pseudo intellectual competition’ -rant reads “Lol did you read what you wrote? Are you instead into the funeral parlor aesthetic of the suburbs?”, which is immediately met with “did you even read the group description?” and “Are you lost”?. An “its beautiful” comment is met with a gif of a silence gesture. Starting with the questions upon being led in, throughout the group admins and members question the intentions of potential pro-brutalist. “Guys be careful it seems like pro brutalists are trying to infiltrate the group”.

The comment “So is this group for ironically hating brutalism or for real?” is met with “for real”, and later “why would anyone assume that a person’s hatred of ugly ecologically disastrous buildings is ironic?” The Society for Nonpreservation is clear about its point of view. Sharing a link to The Other Group, The Appreciation Society, results in the comment “Why do you guys need to come in here and post this stuff. I dont come to brutalism groups and post good architecture” and “Like actually can you please just leave or stop posting if you’re just here to troll? Let us have this little corner of the internet while numtot drools over concrete slab”.

Similar lived experiences

Having such disdain for a particular architectural style, begs for a good origin story. If not personal trauma, then what can elicit such a strong response? Members share their personal experiences throughout the discussion. Replying to a post of a university student who was afraid of developing Stockholm syndrome for her brutalist university buildings, a member says that working and studying in brutalist architecture “only radicalised me more”. Studying philosophy “in despair” at De Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, to spending 3 years in law school “in brutalist monstrosity”, the urge to Nonpreserve exceeds strictly theoretical arguments.

In sharing their lived experiences, members reach out to see whether others are from their region. “Post the worst brutalist buildings in your city!” is met with 50 comments – mostly buildings in Israel, the US, and Canada. To the poll “Where do you live now?”, a majority votes for “NYC is not in New England”, “Northeast US”, and “Southern US”. Whereas for Brutalist Appreciators one’s physical location might not matter as much, for Nonpreservationists one’s place of residence has more meaning. People relate to architecture through their geopolitical context, where one lives and how policies (do not) regulate housing influences the experience of living among ‘monstrosities’. Within the group, people look for others from their regions: “As someone who grew up near the UMass Amherst campus, I had to see this thing too many times. Any other Western Mass peeps here?”

The Other Groups

The Society for the Nonpreservation of Brutalism is a counterweight to The Other Group, its enemy The Brutalism Appreciation Society. Within the myriad of Facebook groups, some are more like-minded, such as Preservationist Memes for Turret-Oriented Teens (“We’re here to enjoy old buildings and not to fight, so please take the ‘but muh density’ elsewhere, thanks.”), Dank Neo-Traditional Architecture Memes for Premodern Teens (“Surreal Memes dissing LeCorbusier are encouraged”), and liking brutalism is not a personality (whose standpoint is self-evident).

The relationship to the famous group New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, or numtot in short, is more complex, as a member states “So they’re basically going back to Corbusier in that group? NUMTOTS are so bizarre. That group messes with my brain. ” An ex-numtot states “So this group is anti-NUMTOT, right? I had to leave because it was turning into a hyper-density, Kowloon-level circle jerk. (No offense to the mods, they’re cool af.)”. Someone replies: “we’re anti to the hyper density shit for sure” and “Also, not that this group is anti left wing, it’s a mix of people from all political spectrums but there’s a lot of …open communism there and I think most people here don’t go that far”. The numtots are seen as ill-informed: “A lot of people in NUMTOTs don’t really know as much as they think they do, especially on things like architecture. I say this from experience being an observer in the group.” Within the context of the Society for Nonpreservation, the numtots become, in turn, the subject of a meme.

Opinions and the Architecture of the Platform

The question remains – how does the Brutalist discussion play out online? Is the formation of groups yet another example of the much-discussed (and disputed) echo chamber and filter bubble? Does the Facebook group facilitate polarisation and intellectual isolation? Sunstein’s work on the echo chamber argues that joining groups with ones own views and values, cuts people off from information that might challenge these beliefs.^[4]

Similar (and sometimes exactly the same) imagery circulates in groups on both sides of the Brutalism argument, the difference is to be found in the values and arguments that are assigned to them. Unlike the filter bubble, the members of the Society for Nonpreservation consciously decide to position themselves on this side of the argument. The algorithm has not strategically filtered the wrecking ball comments over the adoration ones. The group’s opinion in Brutalism is clearly of a homogenous nature, the name portrays its standpoint and seemingly pro-brutalist arguments are shown the door.

However, the Society for Nonpreservation exists within a larger hybrid media ecology. Other groups are actively discussed, their conversations observed, and new Nonpreservationist members originate from them. In its origin, the Society for Nonpreservation is a counterweight to Appreciation Society. The true vacuum, as such, doesn’t hold up. When architecture turns image and these images circulate online, the Facebook groups are simultaneously a stage for and a product of this imagery, existing within and because of ecologies of virtual communities, perpetuating yet negotiating their ideas.

What does it mean to infiltrate the other side of the argument? For my opinion on Brutalist architecture, I’m not sure. Having spent hours looking through posts and comments, I can’t say I have grown fond of the Nonpreservation argument, nor the Appreciation one. Sometimes I enjoy the image, as to get lost in a dystopian alternate reality. Yet, having visited the Barbican and not being able to find my way out of the complex for more than half an hour, this particular lived experience could have turned me into a Nonpreservationist. The entrance question number 2. “Do you secretly like brutalism though?”, I could best answer with ‘Maybe, I’m not sure. Try to convince me of your argument, if you please.’

I do believe that becoming part of the other side of the argument gives a breath of nuance every argument on the internet could use once in a while. What to do with the Brutalist buildings comes second to listening to what the opponent has to say, in all their likes, comments, gifs, and argumentation. If not because of your investment in the topic, then the jokes are worth passing by for. You don’t have to agree to share a laugh, after all.

References

All images are fragments from Society for the Nonpreservation of Brutalism, modified to guarantee the privacy of its members.

^[1] “Brutalist Architecture: What Is Brutalism?” Architecture & Design. https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/features/list/a-look-at-brutalist-architecture.

^[2] Walsh, Victoria. “The Concrete Fetishes: the Ghost of Brutalism’s Radical Social Agenda.” Royal Academy: Futures Found The Real and Imagined Cityscapes of Post-War Britain. Lecture presented on March 20, 2017.

^[3] Schuetz, A. (1944). The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology. American Journal of Sociology, 49(6), 499-507.

^[4] Sunstein, Cass R. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009.