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
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.
]]>“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
]]>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.
]]>I thought I’d post about it here because in several respects it was unlike any symposium I have ever participated in. Overall, it was a strangely airless event in which few references were made to anything outside of what I came to think of as the Dick Bubble. Apart from my own talk, only one other addressed more recent writers or events—an interesting joint talk by UC Riverside’s Sherryl Vint and UC Irvine’s Jonathan Alexander on post-9/11 allusions in the TV version of The Man in the High Castle. I connect this restricted field of discussion with the fact that there was almost no direct criticism of Dick’s writing apart from Lisa Raphals, who brought up the superficiality with which Dick sometimes referred to Asia, and brief references by Sherryl Vint and myself to issues with Dick’s depiction of women. (At one point I touched on the link between female puberty and violence in Luba Luft’s murder in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and someone approached to me afterwards about this precise section of my paper—but only to ask why I had left out an extremely minor detail.) I am no specialist in science fiction, and I found myself wondering where were the science fiction scholars who could have upped the critical-historical-theoretical ante on Dick’s writing? Perhaps they’re attending the next phase of the Acacia Conference, taking place today at Cal State Fullerton; at least I hope so.
The whole event had a distinct aura of hagiography, which may have been partly due to the number of people present who had known and liked Dick—at least four by my count, and probably more. During the post-talk Q&A sessions, commenters often opened with some variation of “Phil Dick once said to me…”—and these tangential remarks left little space for substantive dialogue. The only women science fiction writers I can recall being mentioned during the entire day— James Tiptree, Jr., and Ursula Le Guin—were brought up in some context having to do with how they knew Dick rather than anything they wrote. It was as if science fiction as a field ended in 1982 with Dick’s death.
Just as troubling in a different way was the panel during which one of Dick’s former wives, Tessa Dick, and one of his former lovers, Grania Davis, shared friendly reminiscences about life with Philip Dick. Their remarks were fairly disjointed, and for the most part they steered away from discussing the writing itself, instead detailing patterns of daily life and sharing anodyne anecdotes. I could sense no real interest in the women themselves—both of whom are writers in their own right and have already published plenty of Dick reminiscences elsewhere. It was hard not to conclude that they were present as living databases that might, with luck, spew forth a hitherto unknown nugget of Dick lore that could be embedded in somebody’s thesis on Agoraphobic Constructions: Habitat in the Writing of Philip K. Dick (or whatever). At one point it was suggested that to reduce audience confusion over all the insider name dropping, a chronological list of Dick’s five wives be written on the whiteboard above Tessa Dick and Grania Davis—and that this would be a terrific photo op. Later someone reminded the audience that the two women would be speaking again today at Cal State Fullerton, saying: “I’m sure they haven’t used up all their gossip.”
So: if you’re a male academic/writer and knew Dick, you’re an authority on his life and work; while if you’re a woman who knew Dick, you’re a gossip?
]]>That’s a chant from the 1980s. Student protests on California campuses (at Stanford, most famously) brought national attention to the problems of Euro-centric bias in the literary canon, precipitating radical shifts in curriculum design. I’ve been thinking about the historical significance of that moment for a number of reasons. There have various cultural, political and economic shifts since the 1980s, and yet some challenges remain similar to the ones those Stanford students faced.
Here I muse – and invite your thoughts — on cross-cultural shifts, historical shifts, and challenges of canon-formation as the sites of canon-struggles migrate beyond the literary arenas of the 1980s protests.
Time Travel
Times have changed, and the victories of multiculturalism sometimes return to bite us from behind. I am enormously grateful for the sea-change from Eurocentric to multicultural, from Dead White Male readings lists to global voices. Yet, the ways in which capitalist social relations co-opted and reworked the politics of identity through the 1990s has left many progressives perplexed. Add up the decline of post-War liberalism, the rise of neo-liberalism, and the time-delayed travel of the US multicultural wave to European academies, and you understand from whence cometh those myriad lefty critiques of the university and of the futility of postcolonialism.
Literary Loss
It seemed as if, for a century and a half, we were fighting the legacy of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous claim that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
A New York Times reviewer recalls the canon wars:
“Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation.”
While multiculturalists finally decisively won a war in the 1980s, it seemed that few were prepared for the new global consensus that was already building at the time, and which now shapes the economics of educational profit and student debt: the discourse on risk, which suggests that choosing majors in the arts and humanities, being an unwise investment toward future income opportunities, ought to entail more expensive debt. Incentives towards majors in science, technology, engineering and medicine are marketed as a means of protecting students from rash decisions and future debt. It doesn’t take a lot of math to see how the humanities and arts might soon, by this logic, become once again the playing ground of the elite, schooling only those who can afford not to worry about future salaries.
Alt-Control-Shift?
The Humanities are no longer campuses’ ground zero for democratic debate and multicultural representativeness. Even as Arts and Humanities scholars are reshaping curricula to respond adequately to the demands of the canon wars, their student demographics have already moved away from the characteristics of populations forged of Cold War liberalism.
It falls once again to the sciences (as it did in the seventeenth and eighteenth century), to become the ground for debate about what methods might be followed by rational, freedom-loving, anti-clerical, democratic seekers after the truth. What kinds of canon-shifts are happening, or should happen, in the areas collectively referenced as STEM? (STEM, for which funding is likely to grow rather than shrink over the next decades, refers to Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine.) How are these happening differently in Europe and the Global South?
The question about multiculturalism and STEM is not reducible to one about possible diffusion of “non-western perspectives” from the literary canon to the scientific one. Although many in the emerging area of techno-science policy and interdisciplinary curriculum have experimented with creative ways of teaching “cultural sensitivity” and “global diversity” to technophiles and geeks, the challenge is more akin to the essential tension that Thomas Kuhn laid out: the tension between normal science and paradigm-based puzzle-solving on the one hand, which can be enormously powerful both intellectually and instrumentally, and, on the other, the extraordinary thinking that precipitates revolutionary shifts in science. While Kuhn’s models have been critiqued and modified by historians and philosophers of science, his insights into the nature of science teaching have not been fully explored by the emerging discourses of curriculum re-design in the STEM and allied fields.
In part, this is because many of us in STS and STEM-allied fields do not read deeply enough in the extensive critique of institutional forms and disciplinary structures that research in the Humanities has produced over the last two decades. As Roderick Ferguson points out, academia now manages difference through (inter)disciplinary trends, a process deeply connected to the shifts in economy and governance that we shorthandedly refer to as neo-liberalism. Ferguson’s most recent book, The Reorder of Things, shows how the academy and its institutional power are linked to education’s place in US geopolitics; we have “placed social differences in the realm of calculation and recalibrated power/knowledge as an agent of social life.” (Ferguson 2012, 34)
Collective Curricular Conversations
What would the canon wars look like in STEM and STS fields today? How do the global south’s histores of science and technology impinge on the current status of technoscience in Europe and North America? What are the politics of the move to make “postcolonial STS” speak to these unspoken tensions?
I’m often asked to provide a canonical list of readings. I get this request from various directions: earnest students seeking to round out their exam reading lists; well-meaning instructors trying to add a week of global readings to their US-focused curricula; public intellectuals trying to get a read on the current debates. It seems to me that the provision of a list of readings would simply kick a ball down the road, possibly exacerbating the mix-and-stir modes in which many of us devise curricula.
It’s not that I dislike lists, nor that I am loath to share them. On the contrary; I love the explosion of lists and curricula that one can find on the web now; I love stumbling on rich curricular conversations in disciplinary listserves and teaching-oriented journals. I make, collect, and re-mix lists constantly, and I share them promiscuously. But there’s something going on at the intersection of science, technology, and society that I think calls for some closer inspection.
I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to return to the stakes of that post-Kuhnian moment in which models of science and technology were engaged from many sides – with real-world stakes on the science, policy, and humanist angles. It wasn’t a model historical moment by any means; Cold War politics and scientific arrogance prevented a broader diffusion of the potentially radical implications of the conversation; misunderstandings between scientists, historians, and humanists were endemic. It was a moment in which more radical voices than Kuhn’s surfaced briefly (such as Feyerabend and Fleck) but did not become the source of any significantly different STS research programs. So going back to this moment is only a momentary gedanken experiment. I’m not really advocating going backwards in time. I’m using the possibilities of that moment as a reminder that the task remains. Intellectuals are constantly faced with (and are continually evading) the challenge of finding vocabularies and thematics that make sense across these persistent disciplinary divides; that spark arguments with stakes in the world that aren’t only about the neo-liberal governance of difference and the conversion of diversity into profits.
What I’m seeing the need for as a first step in the conversation about ‘reading lists’ is some set of issues and practices that might make the political, economic, and cultural stakes of this moment come alive for us, now. As the student protests at Stanford in the 1980s showed, curriculum design is a political, public matter. Perhaps our Alan Bloom moment has already happened: the Sokal hoax made headlines in the mid 1990s, bringing STS to the public. But we need better public conversations, and public intellectuals who seek to do more than score points against academic rivals. How might we form more productive collective conversations on STEM-affiliated curricula and canons? And how do we make these conversations transnationally engaged, in ways that don’t reproduce historical forms of privilege in conversations across post-, neo- and de-colonial movements?
Culture Clash
I’ve been spending time in universities outside the US, and often hear similar concerns about canon, voiced most commonly by ‘minority’-identified researchers in various cultures. In the absence of a persistent social movement, however, curriculum change has not swept any other academic system in a similarly dramatic way, as far as I can tell. My most recent context for comparison is Germany. The German academic system seems rather feudal/hierarchical in its intellectual and bureaucractic structures, so change has been slow. Although there are, of course, pockets of radicals, and groups of people who read widely in “non-western” traditions, most European intellectuals seem to be schooled largely in a “western” canon. There is a significant increase in the amount of European money being channeled to something called “postcolonial studies”, but it seems to flow toward flashy conferences with high travel and hotel costs, rather than being directed towards any systematic transformation of the curriculum for undergraduate instruction and post-graduate research. My other context for comparison is India – where I’ve watched the educational scene changing significantly, but not radically enough, over the last quarter century. In some ways an obvious site for the growth of Humanities along non-canonical paths, India is home to pockets of intriguing experiments in alternative institutional arrangements for thought/praxis, but there have been no humanities-equivalents of the grand state-led institution-building initiatives that so successfully built science- and technology-oriented institutes in the middle of the 20th century.
In other words, I don’t find much cause for celebration in academic conversations about canon-formation and reading lists either inside or outside the US academy. But unlike the US, Europe and Asia are putting money into academic research programs. Their story doesn’t make me overly optimistic, though; the forms of investment in academic research seem tailored to rather unimaginative models of what industry will need in some mythical technological future.
Why raise the global, then? I’m guessing the stakes of this conversation become more complex and urgent as we globalize its scope. The gains we made in the second half of the 20th century are too precious to give away. The academy is being purged of radical hopes and designs. And our reading lists can help or hinder that process. Even as capital seeks new ways of monetizing academic research, most of us in academia are burying our heads in the sand and missing opportunities for engagement not merely across academic cultures, but beyond academic fortresses and with shifting publics and politics.
No Reading Lists without Collective Conversations? No justice, no peace.
In my dreams, every request for a reading list should come with a willingness to engage in difficult conversations about history, politics, the academy, and the public.
We predictably open our scholarly monographs with maps of the scholarly conversations of which we are a part. But the conversations I am imagining here are broader and more difficult still than those (and I don’t mean to disparage or minimize the hard and worthwhile work that is often entailed in being part of scholarly conversations). How might we broaden the frames of the “conversations” we are already trained in forging?
What is a Canon and At What Do We Point It?
I haven’t been able to think through these questions individually; I’ve always turned to collectives. I draw inspiration from friends who are already thinking about this question with no small degree of commitment and energy.
Norma Mollers recently wrote:
I wish that the conversation about curricula would include discussion of hard questions among a range of different people (by this I mean not
only academics from the humanities and social sciences), such as “do we actually want a liberal arts education?”; “who should we teach?”; “who should be able to get an education; and who can actually get one?” among other things. Isn’t that what turns the canon into a struggle, because what’s at stake is not some canonical “view from nowhere”, but the configuration of who is teaching what to whom (real people and real problems).
And Lilly Irani suggests this provocative To-Do list:
– How do we become parts of more extensive networks of struggle over the shape of technoscientific futures?
– What functions might canonical curricula have now? Warnings of failure? Archives of inspiration and hope? Tactical toolboxes?
– What if STEM students had to learn the history of computers as a history of labor?
– What would computer science look like if every student had to learn a history of work automation and labor struggles through which it was forged?
Inspired by private conversations with Lilly and Norma and others, as they’ve worked through their own canon-challenges, I’m making this post public in the hope that it might be the beginning of a broader engagement with the need for “reading lists,” and the future politics of canon-formation in science- and technology-related fields. This means thinking not only about scholarly content, but political processes, economic forces, and social forms. It means not only about what we read, teach, and learn, but opening the conversation to challenges about who gets to read, who wants to teach, and how we all come to learn.
]]>
If the reaction to the Charleston massacre is to be realized as something beyond a singular moment of redemptive mourning, then neither the intersectional dynamics of racism and patriarchy which produced this hateful crime, nor the inept rhetorical politics that sustain the separation of feminism from antiracism, can be allowed to continue.
Decisions about where to live, how to identify a “safe neighborhood” or a “good school,” whom to police, and to whom police are to be accountable, also rest on a longstanding demonization of Black bodies. These choices, grounded in ideologies of Black threat, frame separation from Blackness as a rational choice.
Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity — whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics or white wealth — to justify the brutal assaults against Black people of all genders.
Why Stand Your Ground laws, white masculinity, private property, logics of threat and security, human capital social mobility, and so much more are gendered and raced. I’m not sure what it means to sign the petition other than adding to a long list, but I thought it might both spread the message and make me available to them for further organizing efforts so I signed.
]]>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.)
]]>Across my research on Uber and readings on taxi drivers (as done by Sarah Sharma, Biju Mathew and others), the questions of immaterial labour, emotional and risk labours associated with taxi driving are very much highlighted. As I go through realms of academic material on taxis and yellow cabs before ridesharing disrupted the market, it’s a striking realization that the issues haven’t changed at all! In that sense, they make my research on ridesharing slightly less exciting for novelty purposes but very sobering because they point to continuities, something that theorists of technology are not often thrilled to reckon with.
Coming back to the crowd work talk, a member of the audience asked a question about the publics of crowd work at large – the recruiters, workers, mediating companies. The speaker also briefly addressed the variety of workers on Mechanical Turk (Americans but also many Indians) and then moved on to say that not all conversations in the Turker community are positive or solely dedicated to knowledge building about Turking. To me, it seemed like they conflated ‘crowds’, ‘publics’ and ‘community’ – which all have different connotations for me. While crowds maybe incidental and accidental, publics may unsuspectingly form around patterns of consumption and conditions of production, communities definitely carry a more deliberate, aware and empowered meaning.
My question (echoed by the responses that I have been getting from Uber work) was that how do we start talking about assembled publics – those assembled by conditions of production and capital accumulation, not as innocently and naturally in alignment or solidarity as citizen subjects of different physical socio-economic contexts ? Surely, the Indian Turkers or the Indian call center employees (as Winifred Poster’s work shows) are being exploited because their wage expectations (as determined by their physical/national lifestyle and salary structures) are lower. But it is also the truth that 1) having lower wage expectations isn’t necessarily a bad thing (because it depends on what you define as good wage and the particular configuration of social support within which it is framed) and 2) platforms like MTurk and Uber are havens for those who do not fit within or have lapsed out of ideal citizen-making projects of different countries (as Sarah Sharma shows with immigrant taxi driver troubles and something that I am grappling to address in Uber work). For instance, Sharma narrates the story of an immigrant driver who came to the United States to become a doctor and started driving in a bid to settle down before starting education but never managed to return to education because he always had some bills to pay, visits to make back to his homeland and finally, no time left after driving. Mathew highlights the fact that in order to get a TLC (Transport and Limousine Company) hack license, which is a necessity apart from the regular commercial license, drivers would have to undergo compulsory 80 hours of driving, language and etiquette training, making their initial investments too big to just move on. An Uber driver I spoke to had migrated from Libya a few years ago before the 2011 Civil war because he was simply lucky to get a refugee visa but upon arrival, since he had to start afresh, get certifications that could allow him to be absorbed into regular full-time jobs, he has been driving for a while till he can get back in. What many other interviewees said is that they loved ridesharing because you don’t need a degree or expertise to drive and there was always space for more drivers.
They are not just in-between jobs or transient employment because economic demands change but also because as a trickle down of who has the right to be employed in an economy in crisis, immigrants, those with foreign diplomas, those without the language skills and cultural knowledge to stake claims to jobs will definitely start preparing to blend into the citizen/worker crowd.
Conversations about legality, rights and payment are anchored to physical geographies for good reasons and when unanchored, what can a universal discussion mostly emerging from the First World do for those who are inextricably employed and oppressed by the platform they work for? For example, if we start talking about minimum wages for hundreds of independent contractors that form the backbones of such economies, we cannot simply rally for minimum wage or some sort of a right for universal recognition because the seamless ‘digital’ nature of these enterprises fundamentally changes how we can talk about the right to be employed or paid.
Starting a conversation, then, about worker unions, solidarity and economic protections from within First World geographies, then, may not really change the terms of work and employment for the real underbelly in the Global South. I think the argument can be extended to the (legitimate yet problematic poverty porn of) sweatshop discussions. Indeed, sweatshops are terrible because they function on uneven financial geographies but we must simultaneously interrogate those who think they are horrible. I guess what I am broadly trying to signal at is that in conversations on ‘minimum wage’, and what constitutes respectable thresholds of worker treatments, unless we find ways to include those who are employed by MTurk, Uber etc without having to uncritically fall back on the ideas of unions and cooperatives as universally good, we might find ourselves (as academics and activists) working against those who we seek to speak for.
To elaborate, Shannon Liss-Riordan, a prominent Boston lawyer has filed a class action lawsuit for independent rideshare contractors in the U.S. to be recognized as employees – a move that is widely being criticized and feared in driver communities because salaried employment status will land them in conflict with their existing and potential full time jobs, business enterprises or the windows of leisure that they have flexibly created by driving for Uber. Even further, the wage conversation appeared irrelevant to some of the Uber driver and passengers I spoke to in India because they had no conception of minimum wage with regard to taxi driving. What they wanted is to break even and get better returns. They reminded me of pirate modernities, subaltern urban forms and informal arrangements outside the legal structure; basically telling us that the State/Market-citizen/worker relationship is not either the German (pro-welfare) or the American binary (free market) but a lot of in-betweens. In which case, what citizen/workers expect from work itself needs longer and wider engagement.
In both cases, a blanket critique of the existing work configuration (and a work present/future) because it does not sync with how “we” imagine fair work and welfare is dangerous as it seeks to erase the work public (bound by temporal and financial needs) in search of the work community unicorn. What is also at play is that such theorization flattens the otherwise uneven landscapes of digitally enabled work because when it starts to locate the entire MTurk public or Uber public as a digital public, we gloss over the race, class, gender and citizenship etchings on bodies and at the same time, we also turn unions (or any other alternative to current crowdwork systems) into universally understood categories, which they are not.
Edit:
Lilly pointed me to a bunch of readings that might benefit everyone:
Life Support by Vora and Cultures of Servitude by Ray and Qayum. Priti Ramamurthy’s work on feminist commodity chains: “Why Is Buying a” Madras” Cotton Shirt a Political Act? A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis.”
I would love to hear more thoughts on this and if any writing has already been done
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A famous mathematician is mentally ill and spends years in his house writing in notebooks as his daughter, also a mathematician working her way through an undergraduate degree, drops out to take care of him. During these times, she labors in her room on her own mathematical work but when the work is discovered, she meets only with others’ disbelief that she could have done it. She claims authorship; her sister wonders if she is lying; another friend wonders if she is mad like her just passed father; neither the sister nor the friend (nor the audience, in many cases) can quite believe that a young woman could have done much work. I say the audience doesn’t believe it because the suspense of the film is about the question of who really wrote the proof. The movie editors themselves assume that the woman’s claims to authorship are not really claims at all.
Like in Helene Mialet’s Hawking Incorporated, Proof depicts the social milieus and distributed labors by which mathematicians live and sustain who they are. The film, like Mialet, offers an “anthropology of the knowing subject.” Proof goes more in the direction of books like Lawrence Cohen’s No Aging In India, in that it looks at how social location mediates one’s ability to become a knowing and self-possessing subject.
Like for Mialet, authorship is an accomplishment achieved by creating networks around oneself. But unlike Mialet, the film also brings into plain sight the way authorship is a claim that must be accepted — an attribution by others. Some people seem like more plausible authors than others. This process of attribution is shaped by discourses of gender and mental illness, and mediated through the ethos and everyday practices of a culture of mathematical guys.
]]>(1) There are more than an obviously token number of women involved. Let’s lowball it and take 25% for now, though obviously the number to shoot for is 50%.
(2) These women are not all chosen from within the organizing group—the editorial team or gallery staff, for instance.
As I write this, I pause to salute the Guerrilla Girls, who started trying to make this problem go away in the mainstream art world three decades ago.
I got to thinking about this because somebody recently pointed me to a newish publication, HOLO, from Creative Applications Network. The CAN website is plugging their first edition of HOLO like crazy:
226 pages, 34 contributors from 8 different countries, 12 months of blood, sweat and tears – the first issue of HOLO magazine, CAN’s exciting print spin-off that is “more a book than a magazine,” is near. And it’s bigger and better than what any of us could have hoped. Kickstarted in late 2012, HOLO set out to go beyond CAN’s daily project feed, step into the artist’s studio and uncover “the things we’re missing from the web: the faces, personalities and anecdotes behind important work”. A year of full-on, globe-spanning production later, we’rewe’re proud to say that HOLO is so much more than that. A unique blend of editorial formats, voices and ideas, HOLO captures what we feel no other print or web publication does: a carefully curated, comprehensive and people-centric snapshot of the creative dynamics at the intersection of art, science, and technology.
Here and on the main magazine page, they name-check 20 of the 34 contributors that make this a “comprehensive” look at “important work”: Philip Beesley, Greg Borenstein, James Bridle, Derivative, Eno Henze, Golan Levin, Wolf Lieser, Tim Maly, Raquel Meyers, NORMALS, David O’Reilly, Chris O’Shea, Ivan Poupyrev, Paul Prudence, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt), Jer Thorp, Mitchell Whitelaw, Will Wiles, and Zimoun. Leaving aside the gender-indeterminate Derivative and NORMALS, 16 of 18 are men and 2 are women, or 11%. Either they’re hiding all the contributors who are women, or they just aren’t there.
This pattern continues elsewhere. Here is the mission statement of CAN itself:
CreativeApplications.Net [CAN] was launched in October 2008 and is one of today’s most authoritative digital art blogs. The site tirelessly beat reports innovation across the field and catalogues projects, tools and platforms relevant to the intersection of art, media and technology. CAN is also known for uncovering and contextualising noteworthy work featured on the festival and gallery circuit, executed within the commercial realm or developed as academic research. Contributions from key artists and theorists such as Casey Reas, Joshua Noble, Jer Thorp, Paul Prudence, Greg J. Smith, Marius Watz, Matt Pearson as well as CAN’s numerous festival involvements and curation engagements are a testament to it’s vital role within the digital arts world today.
Skipping over the grammatical error in the last line, one notices that of 6 people name-checked (presumably due to their importance), 6 are men. Representation of women: 0%.
And here is the masthead of CAN:
Editorial
Filip Visnjic (fvda.co.uk) – Founder, Editor-in-ChiefContributing Editors
Greg J. Smith (serialconsign.com)
Alexander Scholz (alexanderscholz.com)Tutorials
Amnon Owed (amnonp5.wordpress.com)
Joshua Noble (thefactoryfactory.com)
Mike Tucker (mike-tucker.com)Guest Writers
Casey Reas (reas.com)
Paul Prudence (dataisnature.com)
Matt Pearson (zenbullets.com)
Emilio Gomariz (triangulationblog.com)
Andreas Zecher (pixelate.de)
Jer Thorp (blprnt.com)
David Wallin (whitenoiseaudio.com)
Nial Giacomelli (nial.me)
Jason Franzen (formationalliance.com)
Richard Almond (rafolio.co.uk)
Of this list of 16 names, 16 are men. Representation of women: 0%.
Does not pass the Guerrilla Girls test. Not even close.
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For instance, before I even came across the term, I had identified for myself something that looks to me like an uncanny valley of history: the period between the end of living memory—for practical purposes, about 100 years ago—and the beginning of what we are comfortable thinking of as history because there is substantial scholarship on the primary documents—roughly 125 years ago. In that uncanny valley we can’t quite find our familial connection to history any longer, but it’s close enough that it doesn’t yet feel completely autopsied by conflicting lineages of critical scholarship. Right now, that valley falls roughly between 1890 and 1915. Others might place the valley slightly differently, or even disagree that it exists at all, but it certainly exists for me.
I’ve recently identified a second, more culturally bound, uncanny valley pertaining to digital culture. This valley exists in the 70 years between 1923—before which nearly all printed matter is out of copyright in the United States—and roughly 1993—when the generation of early web adopters began putting the documents of their lives online. Although a good deal of writing and other media from this uncanny valley has been uploaded, a lot of it is behind paywalls of one kind or another (including the copyright-driven paywalls of Amazon.com and its ilk). Huge amounts of pre-1923 media have been uploaded through Project Gutenberg, Google Books, YouTube, major libraries and archives, and oddball projects like BiblioOdyssey. At the near end of the valley, you can find important or just interesting writings, artworks, and documentation by all the digerati online for free (as well as some behind paywalls). For a lot of what’s in the uncanny valley itself, you have to buy the materials online, pirate them, or go to a traditional dead-tree library. I’m not saying it’s not worth the effort to do this—far from it!—but that as one reads, skims, surfs, browses, and devours one’s way around the web these days, it can feel as if Rudyard Kipling is closer to us than William Faulkner, R. Austin Freeman than Sara Paretsky, D.W. Griffith than the Marx Brothers, Julia Margaret Cameron than Margaret Bourke-White.
What’s your uncanny valley?
]]>To resist what we might identify as an exploitative labor relation by walking off the job—by refusing social media participation—would mean giving up at least two sources of value that settle on the workers themselves…Professional and Social Payoffs
Read Care Work and the Stakes of Social Media Refusal at The New Criticals
]]>I did not know it yet, but I had been falling in love with the ways that pop artists imaginatively projected of blackness into the future since my early teens. I dug on Busta Rhymes and later, got sugar-high on Nicki Minaj’s crazy wigs and alter-egos. But Janelle was special. She approached the future as not a funhouse, but an ongoing struggle, and carried herself with grace and dignity. For starters, she wore a tuxedo, which as I was to come to learn, she saw as a uniform, and like a uniform, was a social signifier of labor. She doesn’t just sing, she works. Monae is conscious and she wants her music to raise the consciousness of others.
In point of contrast, consider Nicki singing about how she’s the greatest and how Lil Kim (truly, her mentor) is a “stupid hoe” (even if she does pay homage in the video to legendary Grace Jones). Janelle sings instead about how she wants to lead people towards their salvation by inspiring revolutionary love.
Janelle sings sings of comfort being an android (as Nicki does with being a Barbie girl). These figures do not shy away at “dehumanization,” but rather appropriate tools and technologies for self-discovery. These are hallmarks of Afrofuturism, a term coined by cultural critic Mark Dery. While cybertheorists have often studied the ways in which information technologies provide a challenge to liberal humanist views of subjectivity (e.g. Katherine Hayles), too often they overlook the ways in which groups of people who have historically been denied their full humanity make sense of these technologies. For example, sound studies scholar Alexander Weheliye provides a rebuttal to contemporary critiques of the degradation of the human voice in the recording industry by analyzing vocoders and autotuning as posthumanist technologies that expand rather than degrade the ability of black voices to make music. He and others included in sociologist Alondra Nelson’s special issue of Social Text illustrate how considerations of race and the goals of Afrofuturism likewise expand the analytic power of cybertheory.
Cyberfeminism and Afrofuturism have more than a few things in common. At the core of both is the idea that there is no garden to get back to, but rather that humans are deeply shaped by their technologies. Always have been, always will be. So if we want our politics to help us shape a brighter future, we had better consider what technologies might offer. For cyberfeminism, the erasure of the biology of reproduction (as in the writings of Shulamith Firestone) and the possibility of living beyond gender in online spaces (Sadie Plant) has been key. For Afrofuturists (from novelist Octavia Butler to jazz musician Sun Ra), the desired futures have been ones that do not erase race, but allow difference to not only peacefully coexist, but thrive in so doing.
In the science fiction world that Monae speculates as the scene until which her musical narrative and “emotion pictures” (her creatively apt term for music videos) unfold, humans have finally perfected androids and gynoids–human-shaped robots who serve them. This drive for robotic assistants as a replacement for uppity servants who are likely to complain about their human rights has been fundamental to American technological production. But so too have we also longed for make matter in our own image: from Pygmalion to Japanese Geminoid robots, non-reproductive humanoid creations offer a sense of godlike power—perhaps man’s freedom from women, as well as his servants. In Monae’s world, both these dreams have come true, and her alter-ego Cindy Mayweather, is just such a gynoid: a woman made to serve.
I was long skeptical about the idea of humanoid robots, especially the idea that machines could be made conscious–not politically conscious, but just having a mind, a sense of self and emotion. I saw these a dreams coming from a reductionist view of humanity. Monae changed that for me. By articulating the android as the fantasy of servitude, she highlighted the gendered and racialized dimensions of this figure. Androids are the ultimate exploitable “other,” a human-like being who does not need to be afforded the rights of humanity because it was created by human hands instead of human loins. But is this really okay? Especially if we do succeed in making conscious robots, what kind of society would we create by treating them as lesser humans? Our need for dehumanized service degrades us all.
Mayweather becomes a pop star. She starts out singing at android auctions (Many Moons emotion picture) but she’s singing about freedom. Android freedom. She wants androids to respect themselves and self actualize. She sings about love and that, too is revolutionary. She was made capable of love (a little gold door opens), perhaps because that was considered an engineering feat, but it’s not merely good entertainment for a robot diva to belt her heart out. She wants to share that love. She wants robots to love themselves and each other. She wants them to respect themselves, to grant themselves enjoyment and pleasure (Electric lady, get way down). Saying these kinds of things to a people who have been placed (engineered) within a role of servitude is revolutionary. Robots are not supposed to care about self-preservation. That is antithetical to Azimov’s three rules of robotics.
But Mayweather’s revolution is not just a matter of us versus them. Instead, it is important to Monae’s narrative that Mayweather breaks the rules of her society by transcending boundaries and falling in love with a human. When Mayweather and Anthony Greendown fall in love, Monae demonstrates a symmetry, an equivalence between the oppressor and the oppressed, a common core of something which may or may not be humanity in a biological sense, but which is nevertheless the deeply powerful, spiritual capacity to love.
In love is the possibility for something that is much bigger than a happy conclusion to a romantic story. In recognizing a universal capacity to love is the possibility for unity, for a better society. Love is the foundation for revolution. This is not to say that there will not be violence and struggle in the fight for a better future—after all, the narratives of both the Metropolis and the ArchAndroid albums follow Mayweather as she unsuccessfully tries to flee her dismantling, a a fate she fears.
We do not yet know what her fate will be, but we can hope that she will be saved by an uprising of those androids and human allies who she has helped make conscious through her music, those willing to fight the Cold War that will “bring wings to the weak” and “grace to the strong,” leading evil to crumble. We can hope that their cyborgian revolutionary love will come to the rescue and in so doing destroy the oppressive society so committed to exploitation of the weak that it literally builds its own slaves. These revolutionaries will Dance Apocalyptic, as Mayweather herself foretold, and will be given a chance to build a better future that celebrates the humanity and cultural contribution of diverse beings, no matter how they were made.
This post is by Marisa Brandt and cross-posted to her blog technomediatrix
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So I initiated the tumblr with the URL, but you can see it is already a seed generated through collective labors. Nathan Ensmenger has been co-moderating and posting more of his great images from the archive around The Computer Boys Take Over.
Volunteers wanted! You can submit images, submit ideas for kinds of images, or even submit interesting interviews and stories (though tumblr as a medium works best with a lot of images). Let’s make nobrocomputing a place where people can send images, documents, and sources that transform what counts as computing.
]]>Given all the ongoing conversations aimed at eliminating other forms of prejudice—homophobia, racism, sexism—when and how did it become ok to tag large groups of people as defective according to when they were born? There is a good deal of really quite silly discussion about whether specific labels apply (Millennials: just dependent or also lazy?), but practically none that I’ve read suggesting that this kind of labeling is odious on the face of it. I find myself wondering what larger function this outburst of generational prejudice is serving. Could it be a way of bleeding off energy that could otherwise be applied to discussing the economics of class in America? Generational warfare instead of ‘class warfare’?
]]>I think I have one of these cooking that I need to write about efforts to get girls to code or celebrate women who hack. I just need to wait for the next time Google or Facebook launch one of these things. Probably a few weeks from now.
]]>I’ve been following People of Color in European Art History (medievalpoc.tumblr.com) this week. The experience of seeing very old manuscript paintings of Dante’s Inferno showing Virgil as a person of color just pulls a jenga piece out of the bottom of my white supremacist basic education from kindergarten onwards. According to an NPR profile, the tumblr started with an art historian sharing pieces she encountered in her own work and exchanging ideas with other academics. It seems to have spread like wildfire though. As a media / STS / informatics person, I don’t do research related to medieval people for the most part at all, but the tumblr has been powerful for me because these images of medieval Europe are so central to American education from grades 7 on. How many history classes did we have that showed images of an all white medieval West, except when interrupted by those Moors or when crusaders went a traveling? The tumblr shows mundane cominglings of people of different colors in medieval art, images purified away by dominant historical practices and pedagogy. The topic of this blog vividly, compellingly, simply puts a set of images out there and seems to have ignited people’s interest. People from different parts of the world send questions, send their own finds, or even go out and produce interviews and generate archives to contribute back. To top it all off, the production of the archive is itself a kind of spectacle — an evolving story that, as a follower, I watch with anticipation and excitement.
Then again, medievalpoc’s challenge is to place show that people of color have always been part of Europe. The public (including my) view of medieval Europe is so whitewashed, that simply the presence proof — the image — is compelling. This is the kind of text that circulates well through the dashboards of tumblr — the colorful image that catches your attention as you casually scroll scroll scroll. Once she has you, then the second argument — that people of color were actually erased follows on.
Zinc has been talking about generating archives for science and technology in the global south for a few years. Workshops and online networks of participants are one way to do it. FemTechNet has also been generating archives and materials for feminist science studies, but their efforts have been largely among networks of academics. Those academics have been working with their students to storm wikis, generate interviews, compile research. I’m inspired by the way medievalpoc seems to circulate more casually and broadly than femtechnet work and wonder if there is something to learn from medievalpoc. Medieval POC makes me wonder if tumblr can be used as one way of reaching wide audiences, collecting from many places, and making the production of the archive a spectacle and event in itself (rather than materials for the production of other events).
By analogy, maybe there’s a feminist STS project that could take similar form. Women in computing advocates (e.g. Anita Borg Institute) often use the presence of women in computing history as the exception that proves the possibility. I’ve been frustrated for a while about the way well-meaning computing institutions deal with gender in computing by simply attempting to include women (future, present, and past) in the already gendered mold of the contemporary computer programmer. Here’s a picture of Grace Hopper and some women who wrote Fortran; they could code so can you! This Google Doodle from Dec 2013 celebrates Grace Hopper by showing her as a coder directly manipulating a machine — the model of computing celebrated today as one of a person/craftsman/artist manipulating media as an act of creativity.
Take the above Doodle, for example. It is anachronistic; during Hopper’s time and for the next few years, computer programming was considered women’s work lower in status than the occupations of manager and scientist occupied by men. The word computer used to name women who would calculate, and even after machines were introduced, it was often those women who would manipulate them to do calculations, as Jen Light has shown. There were lots of “Computer Girls,” as Nathan Ensmenger has tracked, but they were displaced as computing professionalized as a male-dominated discipline. Let’s say nothing of how the concept of computer science was defined to exclude the computing work women were more likely to be doing — assembly, technical writing, building educational tools.
Is it possible to crowdsource an archive of non-men in computing in a way that also challenges the boundaries of what is considered computing? Interviews with secretaries who coded, pictures of ads recruiting women to assembly like the one found by DiffEng contributor Göde Both, scraps of evidence from information processing student in the 80s who witnessed the professionalization of Computer Science into a male-dominated Engineering bachelor’s degree course of study. Rather than women in computing, perhaps it could just be nobrocomputing. Why nobro? I was looking for a category that would let the project generate insights about the exclusions of women, people of color, queer people, and others in a concept of “computing” that privileges the participation of white men. Bro is not perfect, but it’s the most succinct I could think of for the moment. I’m happy for alternatives, please suggest!
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