Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fictions (Commune Editions, $16) are on my mind, along with a review Poetry is not Revolution by Xari Rivera Maya:

It’s rare to read poetry that concerns itself with the particulars of how to get things done. Trevino’s poetry does not ruminate on metaphysical concepts, nor does it approximate heady political theory. Instead it works out the complications and obstacles of fighting back, and it does this in terms recognizable to ordinary people.

Excerpt of Cruel Fictions

one thing i’ve learned / come to a provisional conclusion about:
when it comes to fighting, there are people who will help you
fight & there are people who will not & there are people
who will stand in the way. find the people who will help / be loud
& clear so they know where you are—focus on them, be encouraged
by them, encourage them, work with them. don’t worry
about the people who won’t help. they will be of no help even
if they are on your side. waste as little energy as possible
fighting people who stand in the way, which is to say don’t talk
don’t argue, just get them out of the way of the fight you came for.

tl;dr: you don’t need or want
the people who you know
aren’t “with you” to be
with you. really, you don’t
~~~
Zinc and I have been puzzling over counter-imperial solidarity building and networking practices, how to feel them, do them, point to them or grasp for them with words. This book reminds me how we are doing it with others.

Another poem by Trevino, “The Tiny”:
We can’t individually “win” in this world
& simultaneously create another
Together. Another friend of mine
His mother

Will probably spend
Some time in prison.
I ask if
She’s scared.

“Well all her friends
Are there,” he says.
You can’t argue
With that

Today, a journalist asked me, “Clearly ICE is doing terrible things, but is providing cloud services to an organisation that does terrible things also terrible?”

If ICE and DHS want to use Bluehost, my webhost that just told me it won’t let me run Ruby on Rails today, they can go ahead and try. But Microsoft is enabling much more than storage and computational cycles like the sort that would run on my laptop or even my own server at UCSD. The Microsoft Azure blog boasted of the cloud architecture’s capacity to support facial recognition tasks (source). Cloud architecture that supports algorithms rapidly jumping across streaming or stored images, real time from cameras all over the world, needs to have state of the art data processing capabilities — that means cutting edge database, disk access algorithms, custom chip designs. A cloud is never simply a cloud.

Google attempted this Clouds-are-General-Purpose argument with Project Maven. They said that the Pentagon would just be using open-source software, which meant the military could still carry out the work without Google’s help. Google employees, the ones who knew “the cloud” and its APIs intimately didn’t agree. Google has even gone so far as to design custom microprocessors — TPUs, or Tensor Processing Units — to speed up “inference” to keep up with real time image, sound, and video flows (source).

Similarly, Microsoft Azure Government dedicates its engineers to developing AI and systems architectures to suit major clients — and clients don’t get much bigger than the government or military. Microsoft’s cloud services have APIs, or application program interfaces, that do face detection and identification, as well as real time translation of voice audio. As a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft put it at an April meetup for government employees and contractors, “With the translation stuff, we’re talking about use cases like real time interviews, border patrol, immigration. I mean, a lot of this they sky’s the limit with your imagination. We’re seeing a lot of interesting scenarios coming up.” (source)

If the government and the military didn’t have access to Google, Amazon, and Microsoft clouds, they would have to invest designing a whole stack of computer systems, from databases, to chips, to storage architecture, on their own. Denying the military and militarized police and border patrol the corporate cloud can forestall automated surveillance and targeting for years. For some, this is precisely why they want the military to have access to private sector innovation. But there are many, including service members I have met who have seen our operations first hand, who are appalled at the destruction wrought by the militarization of our foreign policy, our borders, and our police. Engineers, product managers, and data workers are also citizens and have a right to ethical and moral judgement about how they want to contribute to these processes.

So the cloud is not just a cloud. Clouds are complex infrastructures engineered and optimized for some social needs and not others. We are throwing social resources into engineering clouds for security, for cutting people off of welfare rolls, and for making examples of communities fleeing war.

Microsoft’s, Google’s, and Amazon’s rush to provide cloud translation and face recognition for government, including border patrol and spy agencies (source), alerts us to how society’s computing skills have been directed to technologies of surveillance and control rather than human flourishing.

As algorithms and the cloud services that run them have entered into government work, researchers demonstrate how automated bureacuratic judgement becomes even less accountable to oversight, audit, and appeal. Virgnia Eubanks, for example, shows how automated welfare decisions remove power from social workers and place them in privately-owned algorithms and call centers, removing them from public oversight. Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (especially Chapter 4) shows us what happens when citizens lose the right to have their pasts forgotten once they are stored in corporate servers, possibly informing the algorithms by which everyday people are judged. ICE’s use of Microsoft Azure and the military’s use of AI drone targeting is just the tip of the iceberg.

A review of a new book on the history of women in UK computing industries. The book is called Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks.

“By the 1950s, both government and commercial agencies were waking up to the huge potential of automated data processing. What could have been an explosive opportunity for female employment was marred by dangerously antiquated management. For example, the Civil Service had a growing need for punched card and calculating machine operators, yet by forming a class of “machine operators”, Hicks tells us, it sought to create a “job category designed to deskill workers and depress wages” – a population she describes as a “feminised underclass”.
…
Sadly, sexism in the computer industry did not end with the 1960s. As late as the 1980s, “professional” trade shows in the UK still used scantily clad young women as marketing gimmicks on their stands – where they were subject to a range of demeaning duties.”

Also, 20 years later the same thing was happening at SIGGRAPH. I worked at NVidia in 2002 and people would pass around renderings of naked fairy characters to demo the graphics card capabilities. Permanent state of ugh. -li

There’s a well researched New York Times article everyone is passing around on how Uber uses psychological techniques to get more work out of its workers. The headline is “How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons.”

It is easy to imagine that it is Uber and Travis Kalanick in particular who is a particularly malicious actor. Let’s #deleteuber and #deleteexploitation, or at least reduce back to previously naturalized and tolerable forms.

Uber and Travis Kalanick are not the problem. They’re just the most scrutinized (now) and obvious manifestation of how capitalism combines with social science to “create value.” Create value is what we call it when we like how people use workers and resources to make nice new things we like. Extract value is how we talk about it when we feel like something about it has violated some other ethical barrier. Many, for example, consider it free consent when someone takes on a third job to make rent and pay for health care because wages are down and housing is deregulated. But the Uber seems to cross the line when it uses interface design to nudge overwork.

Welcome to the history of American Cold War social sciences.

There’s a long post-New Deal history of the social sciences working to get employees to work harder. The Hawthorne studies were famous for finding that simply being observed by researchers was enough to make people work harder — dubbed “The Hawthorne Effect.” (They thought at first that improving lighting would make workers produce more, but found it was instead the observation.)

The Tavistock Institute, from whom we STS and Informatics people get our socio-technical system language, were also how to manage labor relations to keep industrial peace — code for preventing strikes while maintaining or increasing output. They worked with Ahmedabad industrialists in the mills, as part of a raft of Cold War projects to keep India from going red. (See Productivity and Social Organization: The Ahmedabad Experiment by AK Rice, 1958.)

In the 1980s, Total Quality Management brought worker feedback into management decision making to improve assembly process efficiency and quality. It sounds participatory, but it also increased the intensity of monitoring and communicative labor demanded of workers. (I read this a few years ago, after being a bit of a Deming fan, and need to find a cite but it’ll take me some time.)

Over the last 10 years, well before Uber, Human-Computer Interaction researchers have led the charge on researching gamification and its possibilities as a way of creating non-monetary forms of motivation.

When we make it about Uber, we miss that this is actually both the long trajectory of much post-Cold War social science. Remember how HCI was trying to gamify the workplace 10 years ago? We have been totally complicit in this as a research community.

At Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2017, we had a panel on social justice. Cliff Lampe of U Mich came to the mic and succinctly asked, “Do you think CSCW has been on the side of management rather than labor?” My jaw dropped. Few of us talk about “labor” at CSCW. I said, “Yes.”

When we blame Uber, or even blame psychologists, we miss how sociology that doesn’t look at flows of value or distributions of injury has long silently assented or assisted creating the state of affairs that makes us want to #deleteuber.

The fabulous Nathan Schneider has written a piece called The Joy of Slow Computing over at The New Republic. The piece’s URL and TITLE HTML tag reveals possible histories of the piece as “The Pleasure of Do-It-Yourself Computing” as well.

In the piece, Nathan describes the experience of switching over to open source tools as a way of forming a “consciousness” (he uses the scare quotes) about the infrastructures and political economies that make his digitally mediated life possible. Elsewhere, Nathan writes about religion, gleaning practices, activism, and capitalism. He gives an account of getting help to set up encryption, operating systems, and other infrastructures from fellows in hackerspaces and online.

My first reaction was to celebrate the way the piece foregrounds temporality of computing in this way — the slowness of moving outside of monopoly technology forms and the frictionfulness of tools that have more seams and rough spots.

Then, slowly, the latent gender of the experience Nathan describes came to me. I began imagining a small Dell netbook I hackintoshed 5 years ago and making it into a small linux book. I started to think through the process of learning to set it up, relying on others for help. And memories began to flood back of getting help in a culture where expertise and mastery is a source of pride and valor as well as a source of care. And the memory came of feeling condescended to when asking for help because I was seen as never quite a member of the gendered community of hard core techies, but rather as person they get to help.

As long as computing production communities celebrate code over affective labor, inscription over interpretation/use, I would fear that the hierarchy of value would generate microcondescension. (Do people get celebrated for submitting awesome bug reports, for example? Or teaching lots of people how to use open source tools?) I know there are lots of women linux hacker types of groups. I worry that they too celebrate the same hierarchy of value, but simply want to bring women into its higher echelons. Slow computing for me also needs to be a computing with a different hierarchy of labor and value.

(I actually posted these thoughts to Nathan over at his diaspora page, to which he responded “Yes yes yes this is so right” and that he had been thinking about the gender dimension as well. I post it to Difference Engines to extend this conversation beyond the diaspora page into the community I know lurks and reads these pages.)