1851 – books mentioned in the Coded Bias documentary

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.

In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.

Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

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1771 – Weitermachen Sanssouci (film directed by Max Linz 2019)

timespace coordinates: somewhere in the present or near-future Berlin (or close to you)

Attempts at reviewing this movie might fail miserably. It is an incredibly – very dry though very funny – slapstick movie about some really serious shit. It is many things – for one it is probably the best recent German (and probably contemporary) film on the increasing corporate interests and pressures encroaching upon students, assistants, researchers, postdocs, universities and high education institutions.

Most probably one of my favorite movies lately. It is a very low budget looking movie. Its made-up and unreal low aesthetic serves its scope perfectly – toning down the huge investments and media craze behind variously hyped “technological fixes” and gimmicks (as this TechNO-fix book argues) that seem to worsen up things the more they juggle quick ‘solutionism’ with hidden costs and a big price-tag. The most ridiculous fixes and exploitative solutions abound in such a desperate situation (dire annual reports, accelerating ecological collapse). Although there are probably very good reason to attempt large-scale geo-engineering, there is also the feeling that there is no grand plan and that everybody is trying to circumvent, ignore or redirect the increasing flows of climate migrants. Blue screens only makes the VR developers attempts at making the forest fires or hurricanes more realistic, more close to home seem impractical and plainly wrongheaded. Everything is muddled, completely detached from anything outside holodeck. The main character is Phoebe (Sara Ralfs) who is not an actress – and this helps bringing some real picaresque cine verite – as well allowing all the other proper actors to play ham (and quite hateful) roles. Phoebe is completely enmeshed in Academic exploitative situations. Instead of a “quant” role – she gets mired into the machinations of higher faculty members. She lands a university bullshit job (David Graeber with a smile in heaven) that isn’t even a part-time (25%?!). A precarity that proves what Universities risk becoming, and how insecurity and exploitation go hand in hand.

At no other time in history has Innovation, A.S. (artificial stupidity), VR/AR founder magic leaps, transmedia festivals or generally VR development (dah! experience economy!) – felt so just-in-time, just simple cover-up gimmicks (that is why we need apud Suzanne Ngai a Theory of the Gimmick). Expensive gadgetry that seems to basically exists just in order to secure badly needed (and dwindling) research funds. There is nothing to predict, there is nothing to anticipate, since it all seems crystal clear from the point of view of the scientists (and a good part of humanity as well as various other species that are forced to adapt as well as they can) that the current situation is untenable and leading only to an increasing sense of doom.

And yet almost in symbiosis with the above, lots of initiatives are bound up in the same display (rut) of smartness & innovation. There’s lots of money especially in desperate times – funding is not lacking if you’re in the high-tech Demo branch. In fact the core team in the movie has so much unspent money from the previous assignments that they feel one should buy new furniture, new lamps (more decor for more meetings and farcical brain storming!). Yet, funding bodies themselves seem oblivious, complacent and bound up with the same carousel of justifying their own investments – encouraging high-tech low concept toys and exercizing market pressures to outdo any competitors by promising better tomorrows. It is a Welt am Draht (1973) without the wiring and with visible strings attached.

Both the university, the creative sector and the NGO environment seems to veer towards what amounts to a cognitive sweat shop (“concept sweathops” mind you – which u could extend to anything: from corporate boardrooms to neo-Stakhanovite (стахановец) brainstorming- heartstorming workshops.

This is a movie about the huge arrogance and cynicism of (how else can u call them without espousing the same balmy anti intellectualism & anti-science tropes?!) specialists, elites and (even worse) tech gurus & pundits everywhere giving paid advice on how to motivate depressive and increasingly loan-dependent and indebted students. Weitermachen Sanccouci is about how to incentivize and still keep all hierarchies intact (the constant joke of the movie is nudging – a sort of neo-behaviorist Pavlovian methods dressed as evolutionary cognitivism, behavioural economics or hokey evo- psychology). Let’s pretend and keep things afloat during austerity economics via minimal positive reinforcement (cookies, medication, drugs, gamifictation? or anything else in btw) with a theory behind: Nudge Theory. The abstruse self congratulatory language of seminars, bizarre surreal PowerPoint presentations is also being fully explored and ridiculed.

It is not a dark or spiteful movie – and it is easy to identify with the main heroine that seems to stray off beaten paths and genuinely try something different. She teaches math that actually listens to the problems of her students (not much younger than her) and tries not to transform everything into a Monopoly game.

A VR or augmented reality that fails to augment is a basic glitch – (not only in the sense explored by Asher in his recent documentary A Glitch in the Matrix) but also as a feature of post-cinematic, post-phenomenlogical media apparatuses (Steven Shaviro). Glitches, bugs, technological failures should not be seen just as breaks of an otherwise smooth technological progression but as valid manifestations of what lies beyond current capabilities of technology. A ‘demonic realm’ featured in recent paranormal found footage horror (Paranormal Activity series) and recent meta horror sci-fi (Resolution or Mandela Effect) movies seem to communicate with hapless humans correspond more often than not with new technical devices that stand outside of the human sensorium. What is untouchable, inaccessible – peers trough the boundless technological promises where another reality might find itself excluded, junked and reduced to the status of a blindfolded audio walk. The unreality of our current hell gets simulated because we don’t seem to take notice, leaving us immersed as before, Sanssouci -like the title. No worries. Keep going as if. The air cooling systems in the main university building goes crazy starts an artificial snow storm almost in solidarity with the planetary climate system. The same chaotic effects of a buildings thermostat that augment the student strike (as most student strike go gets shut down or gets described as minor nuisance by the VR faculty staff). The climate change inside faculty hallways unexpectedly makes it finally experienced and touchable.

This slapstick situation becomes almost our default way to express harsh truths. Weitermachen S – humorously retrieves another forgotten or slowly emerging backlog – the history of Socialist computing via its Chilean Cybersyn Project. A decentralized computer vision that was never fully implemented (stopped short by the military CIA backed coup) and that was not trained on War Games but on managing economic emergencies red blinking in a slick room designed almost like a futuristic planned-economy example of a Star Trek-like spaceship deck.

read hear another review

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