The Sweet East is a 2023 American satirical surrealist road film directed by Sean Price Williams in his directorial debut from a screenplay by Nick Pinkerton. It stars Talia Ryder, Earl Cave, Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris, Jacob Elordi and Rish Shah. (wiki)
It is a good bet to say that the kind of free-market libertarian militantism represented by this series and this episode, in particular, guided many governments and brought us to where we are right now, especially in terms of fighting against democracy, denying climate change and deflating politics. Since the late 70s we have seen the cavalcade of the Chicago Boys (Friedman was perhaps the most famous Chicago boy) from Chile to South Africa to Bucharest and to Moscow. The dreams of Reagan and Thatcher in the UK were spiked by the holy word of these economists. They come in several flavors – and Quinn Slobodian a historian of neoliberalism has in his last (great) book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of A World Without Democracy (2023) basically made a taxonomy of their anti democratic dreams and also made me search for this documentary series and try and watch it. Far from being the end of history the nation state was seen as an impediment in the face of the Zone. And I also mean here the Romanian Km Zero – in Piața Universității Bucharest. This used to be called anti communist zone, basically a zone free of communism and also protection. In the end the protesters from the early 90s dreamed about full capitalism.
To be precise – I wanted to watch the first chapter on Hong Kong, because it was the first on the freedom index, the fist city-state model idolized by the neoliberal free market radicals. Why? Quinn discusses at large the context of the series and of “uncle Miltie” standing smiling with the back on the HK skyline of tall thin scrapers. For many HK was just Jackie Chan, the martial arts kung fu movies or the toy industry. HK was one of the “Asian Tigers” but it was also a model for deregulation which amounted to the fact that the tiny city-state and financial capital of Asia was being ruled like a corporation. The highest position was that of an economic Chief Executive (like the CEOnof a company), more powerful than the governor (till 1997 HK was still a colony of the UK and one built initially on the Opium trade). Quinn recalls time and time again how HK became something of a mirage, the first ‘smart city’, the first example of what became plans for Hong Kong on Hudson or Hong Kong on Thames (Canary Wharf). And although it had a unique colonial history, a local history and local situation connected with the Pearl River and Guangdong, ij the minds of the free market radicals it came to be seen as eminently transplantable and easy to copy.
Basically all that because the principle of “the sweatshop” and no labor protection legislation, no voting rights – became its. key to economic success. Everything that the West forgot or lost in the words of Friedman. This reverse Orientalism (reverse in the sense that it takes all the tropes of the lazy, unchanging Orient and turns it on its head) was taken directly from the very tycoons and wealthy families who steered the city towards “prosperity”.
This is for Friedman the place where the free market is unfettered and undirected and where the states exist only to protect the interests of the investors and business elite. To be sure, and even of James Clavell Noble House is half true – it eas a den of spies and it’s corporate world was totally enmeshed in Cold War dealings. It is also the place where workers have no protection whatsoever, where the market prices signal is clear, and where you do not need any coordination from above (oh yeah the invisible hand). He does not miss any moment to poke fun at the Soviet Model and to consider HK something completely inimical to the ‘unnatural’ socialist planned economy. It is both bland and incredibly annoying to hear him express his ideas about how his mom worked in a sweatshop and how that has been the birthplace of success. While this may be true like it was for so many East European migrants, the story was also one of racism, eugenics and anti-immigration and working class struggle. Working conditions got improved with demands and growing capacity to unionize. This is completly missing. So this is basically a propaganda documentary (or a dogma) that has helped bring about a dystopia we’re living in right now. This is not sci-fi, and this is not cyberpunk, it is future inequality sold as present solution. Here we have the origin of the destruction of the welfare state, the divestment from education, ecological concerns, health, and why we lack infrastructure.
One had to lower or eliminate tariffs, offer incentives for investors and corporations, and forget about voting rights, forget about labor rights, and forget about colonialism. So ethno states and tariffs and trade wars feel anti free market only of one realizes that all the protectionist authoritarians such as Orban or Trump have actually permitted free trade only in chosen areas. The bet was to import this model and hope that the carrots (or sticks) will work out. If one wanted to be “free” (free to be poor could be another subtitle for this episode) one had to work under horrific conditions and just be infinitely adaptable, resilient, and exploitable/flexible. Voting with your feet – its the first time when this expression makes sense. HK existed because a tightly controlled pool of migrant pool was always at its disposal. It was this combination of Confucianism, lack of democracy, and unfettered capitalism that HK was exuding in the 70s and 80s. That’s why it came to be seen as the way forward for both the new turbo-charged capitalism that both US, as well as the UK and Germany, saw as the way forward out of an economic slump, generally high wages and rising oil prices. One should never forget that the so-called Californian ideology – the deregulatory thinking behind Big Tech (Musk and Co) was a subset of this school of economic thinking. Apple amd Foxconn stems as much from Friedman’s ode to the markets power to innovate and keep the labor force disenfranchised and disorganized. When Peter Thiel talks about escaping the nation state – or establishing as maby secessionist micro nations he speaks the language of free market radicals. The pattern of Global Cities had to be eminently reliable, not interested in redistribution, only in absorbing and ejecting the global flows of capital. And that is where we are now.
The Flat Tax was also basically an HK fiscal innovation that became the rule in the 1990s in the former East and a lot of the EU countries (including Germany where it is called tax brake – basically a brake on how much the state may be allowed to invest in public facilities, infrastructure, education etc). Its ideals were basically to circumvent the barriers of politics by any means and to establish “zones” of exception within the state. Fragmenting the planet and supporting the formation of micro-nations and crypto coin enclaves all over the planet (there are currently over 5400 special zones grouped into around 81 categories) was the aim of such free market radicals. Anarhapulco – the libertarian convention in Mexico was also modeled around the same ideals. We know how that turned out.
The secret story is that even in HK the government action was at work, just that this government action was never in the interest of the immigrants (cheap labor from the Chinese mainland), and all the rights were also achieved with the cost of blood (and protests from the late 60s on. There’s also a total mesh of contacts and friendships across ths border even as HK became the bottle neck and preparatory area for China’s extensive reforms. It is ironic to see this whole idea of the free market zone taking root in China and being completely overturned (hear the Adam Tooze talk) after China joined the WTO with the US became sudden gatekeeper. China had just invited the world community to join its investment bank anf Cameron eas the only one to join. This was the first crack in the US/UK pact. Suffice to say Eastern Europe (including Russia) has become the playground of ‘intentional community’ micro nation building. The Rothbardian decomposition of the state and of the nation state is strongest there, and even it’s warlordism is a case in point.
One small detail, libertarians who advocate for a minimal state are usually called minarchists, and those who advocate for no state are anarcho-capitalists. One final word – Friedman filmed there while he was on a trip invited to the Mont Pèlerin Society meeting at the most luxurious hotels in town sitting on Plot Nr 1. PBS series was sponsored by Getty Oil and Sara Scahill Foundation.
The Hunt is a 2020 American satirical horror / political action thriller film directed by Craig Zobel and written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof. The film stars Betty Gilpin and Hilary Swank. Jason Blum was a producer under his Blumhouse Productions banner, along with Lindelof.
The film is about a group of high income progressive people who kidnap working class people with conservative political views to hunt them for sport. Zobel and Lindelof have said that the film is intended as a satire on the profound political divide between the American left and right. (wiki)
imdb
“A Documentary about how Hustle Culture, Workaholism, Toxic Productivity, Self Improvement, and Self-Help gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk function as a form of Social Control which the Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls Psychopolitics. Psychopolitics is a form of smart power that governs our Neoliberal Society of Control and Hustle Culture and Positive Psychology (Toxic Positivity) are just some of its many manifestations. It is leading to burnout, depression, and anxiety.” (1Dime channel)
Honestly sometimes I find the concepts used by Byung-Chul Han a bit simplistic, and also a bit redundant, considering that others have been using nearly the same terms. For me it is a bit unclear why psychopolitics is better than neuropolitics, or why smart power is somehow better than soft power. Some of these terms feel a bit too fancy or just slightly upgraded versions of something else. When calling something ‘smart’, just because everything tend to be called ‘smart’ nowadays, there is always the pitfall of reinforcing or even unwittingly hyping up the very things one tries to warn against.
That being said, this documentary is voicing out a general dissatisfaction and sense of doom regarding work – bullshit jobs and the whole protestant ethic, as well as the entire self help industry that is trying hard to re-educate and optimize everything in times of climate crisis, dwindling opportunities and general burnout. There also more and more the feeling that the so-called CEO mindset is being sold and advertised to everyone. This is not anymore the get rich quick scams online but an inescapable reality of theological proportions, of insanely rich CEOs (what the Chinese are already calling their own rich as crazy rich) acting like everybody else is disposable.
“Disco Elysium, an award-winning game from developer ZA/UM, created what I would consider one of the most brilliant pieces of interactive literature in recent memory. For this, we explore its foundational philosophy and narrative(s) throughout.” (Epoch Philosophy channel)
I continue to admire the incredible quality of these YT channels, and Epoch Philosophy is one of the best (although I just watched the Deleuze & Spinoza and Friedrich Engels, Socialism and Utopia ones – Engels which I have learned to appreciate during the years). This one is again on gaming and a particular game – a push to analyse games and treat them as true objects of philosophy or as applied philosophy, with movies (or anime or cartoons) already being the established medium of such exercises. This particular game dwelling on the intricacies of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the pervasiveness of ideology and the role of relationships in a dysfunctional world with its own history seems like a prime example, one that makes (in the words of the maker) it on par with Kafka, Sartre or other examples of the modernist canon. What i like is how, without spoilers encourages a certain critique or critique and dialectical analysis. Even if it psychoanalytic determinism is there (including neuro- determinism), there is a lot to be said about how political identity works nowadays. Politics is somehow everywhere and discussions in the game always turn into political discussion without transforming it all into a permanent critique or postmodern irony.
spacetime coordinates: in the not too distant-future of a devastated Earth
Tides (also known as The Colony) is a 2021 German-Swiss science fiction thriller film directed and written by Tim Fehlbaum. In the not too-distant future: after a global catastrophe has wiped out nearly all of humanity on Earth, Blake, an elite astronaut from Space Colony Kepler. must make a decision that will seal the fate of the people on both planets.(wiki)
Tides is a small independent European SF – that I have seen together with the recently released Settlers. Very different from Settlers that plays on a future biodome Mars that feels like a Marstern (?) that tips it hat over to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, rather than Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star. Nevertheless they both exbit a contemporary preoccupation, not to say anxiety around what Dominic Pettman has termed Peak Libido or what Rebekah Sheldon identified as a common thread in recent SF as “The Child to Come” of Generation Anthropocene.
Demographic fears, low fertility etc are part of contemporary ‘breeder culture’ baggage that sees to be hailed along movies as different as Interstellar (2014) and Children of Men (2006). It is also part of the usual pro-Family values propaganda of an unlikely alliance between free market warriors and traditionalists. I am not saying they endorse this way of thinking, although breeder culture is to be found everywhere from Ikea adverts to political campaigns. SF does what it does best if it keeps receiving all of these vibrations yet it splits the spectrum, trying out other outcomes, changing conclusions, sometimes against the premises or the initial (even unspecified) presuppositions.
Demographic fears coupled with anti-immigrant sentiments, homophobia, transphobia and ethno-politics, has become a familiar tune that seems to afflict and flare up nationalistic fervor diverting attention from unsolved wide income disparties, lack of opportunities, dissatisfaction with working conditions. unemployment or climate change. Restarting or jumping back into productivity mood has been difficult for many after having their time back after so much lack of time and probably old fears and insecurities abound. Again I want to emphasize, I do not dismiss the reality of these concerns and fears, considering just that they do not go wide enough, or comprehensive enough. ‘Replacement’ fears and discussions online are easy to ridicule or to join into, there virality is demonstrated, what is more difficult to grasp is their underlying, unspoken larger concerns or what is left out of them. There is a sense in which it is good to take seriously the idea that the planet has an “expiration date”. The simple, banal, very basic observation, that translates from products onto planetary matters and towards our overall growing obsolescence is far from being just cursory or trivial matter. Yet the conjunction btw commodities, unstoppable productivity, climate trouble, job making and job killing, entire failed cities, genomic-capitalist intertwining etc seems to escape our SF imaginary, only then entering only once it is SF entering the bounds of what cannot happen yet happens.
The rapid and growing aging population and what is seen as a failure to reproduce (reproduction of the rapidly obsoleted workforce!) seems to take precedence as a major obsession all around the so-called developed world. Increased technological prowess, high living standards and higher education is coupled with lower reproduction rates and thus becomes always an easy propaganda tool banded about or inserted into conspiracy materials that energize right-wing ‘replacement’ paranoia. QAnon pedophilia rings built on older antisemitic conspiracy memes derived from a poor understanding of kosher traditions as well as blood symbolism add to that. Children are being suddenly invested with this double sacrificial value and also hope for a confiscated future. Children become the ultimate object of vulnerability and globalist abuse. What is evident is that they are suddenly in opposition with older interests, with entire generation that seem to have spent the future’s chances beforehand. Not only reproduction is at stake, but children constant status as sacrificial lambs, as the primary target of satanist plots and elite perversion. It is intersting this shift from the 1970s fear that we are eating our old (in 1973 Soylent Green) to the current children being the hidden cost behind what we see around (just think of 2013 Snowpiercer). In a sense we seem to have reverted to the Victorian fears about the early workforce that did not magically disappear but was moved out of sight in sweatshops all over the world. This also obsession with satanist rings pastes over some of the most demonic and atrocious attempts at forced urbanization, brutal nation-making and colonial education projects, including the criminal ineptitude and squalor of modern civilizing projects in the ‘New World’ that targeted mostly indigenous children. What is also new is also China’s joining the aging trend, and the associated demographic fears from this powerhouse of the world, made it life its One Child Policy and start pushing cash for families with more kids.
Firstly a few things on the aesthetics of Tides – it is quite a beautiful cinematography, a sort blueish extended beach world (North Sea? Reminded me of Kiel or Gdansk?). Earth is seen mostly as abandoned harbors, inundated coast. Imagine all the hubs of international maritime trade and supply chains of today being now derelict places populated by the newly formed societies that have reverted to small, scattered, scavenger gatherer-fishermen tribalism. My only critique is that somehow these maritime folk do not really appear plausible in the movie. Where is the whole range of adaptations of real Sea Nomands or Sea Gypsy austronesian, Han or Indian etc people? These existing people together exhibit an incredible much more diverse range of architectures, lives and a much more tight connection with water that is far more convincing somehow (see Man on the Rim 1988). The mudflats like the mangrove are a very specific and hugely important route of migration for contemporary maritime populations as well as for older prehistoric peoples. Yet, I appreciate the effort in building and suggesting such a clific future post-climate change world.
That being said, the vast horizon, the light and the misty, rusty musty atmosphere of the place transports you out there among the new tribalism of future Earth. These tribes find themselves in a neo-colonial situation – as the technologically advanced returnees from the elite ruling class colonies return to Earth, take over and start educating and ‘civilizing’ the remains of woman/mankind. This top down attitude never worked out. Earth seems to miraculously bring back their fertility and so secretly the elite explorers start siring their own offspring in relative secrecy before giving information back to their home colony. This brings to me several recent scandals, as the 2018 Oxfam sex exploitation scandals in Haiti after the devastating earthquake and a dark history of international aid charities. The capitalist charitable spirit is also plagued by a certain Malthusian preference and bias in practice. Availability to contraception methods is vital all over the world, yet Population Bomb fears generally end up in targeted population controls, state-sponsored forced sterilization campaigns and skewed family planning (aptly described by Mytheli Sreenivas), that contrary to the Western ‘replacement’ conspiracies, do not target the Global North, but take underdeveloped and unprotected areas of the world as their terrain for clinical trials or as lop-sided charitable action.
The transhumanist elites that settled on an off-world colony become sterile and cannot reproduce (mysteriously) after some sort of Peak Libido, seemingly also because they have been using some dubious eugenics or genetic screening methods. Negative biopolitics is a boring staple of SF dystopia (Brave New World, GATTACA etc), yet here the elites have to deal with the limits of their technology (bodies?) and with material consequences of their action. Having a small gene pool was never a good idea and a presumably grooming for an elite genome speaks about how intimately genomics has been subsumed into the abstractions of capital (as detailed by Eugene Thacker in Global Genome).
The expedition on Earth crash lands and the surviving female pilot gets trapped into local power plays and skirmishes that turn out to be not conflicts over resources but conflicts over demographic politics,kidnapping children and abusing (or at least trying to control) ‘native’ terrestrial women. The colonist men’s access and ultimate dependence on local women’s reproductive cycles seems to drive a lot of current right-wing pro-Family propaganda. So this SF, in its small wy is trying to think trough some of these questions. Tides strives for honesty and non-masculinist take on things, outing the hypocrisy behind such selfish concerns, uncovering a masculinist dogma that somehow got embedded into the laws and cultural customs of Maid’s Tale as well (and similar real-life examples). That is whenever women get reduced to just ‘mobile wombs’. Extinction and X-Risk as such, and as more probable and calculable risk is an absent topic somehow, seemingly drowned by the movie’s Elites own self-preservationist and classist modus.
Tides also combines something like the old The Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now by Joseph Conrad with It Is Hard to Be a God concerns over interventionism by Strugatsky Brothers, yet it is still an interesting mix, managing to steer as along a difficult return to future Earth.
“When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, she embarks on a journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation against bias in algorithms that impact us all.”
This is probably one of the most important documentaries to address many issues that are not any longer strictly the domain of SF. Cod Bias is definitely within the bounds of any socially inflected SF worlds u can think of. Maybe it used to be just the figment of dystopian – Cold War tinged imagination, but now it is very much part of ours. Made me actually mentally revisit theat primordial Silicon Valley 1984 promo – the ad for Apple Macintosh PC released in December 1983. Feels puzzling how this new televised technological muscle was part of a much wider and concerted Reaganite response to the -(still) Socialist East. ‘Free World’ computing as easily turned and facing off the eponymous Orwellian 1984 villain, a drab, grey, docile citizenry of the standardized monolithic solid-state, the ideological ‘other’ where a repressive & monstrous surveillance apparatus – (be it Securitate/Stasi) enforced obedience & ‘rightminding’. Only that, in retrospect, the newly competitive Silicon Valley product was a launch-pad for a much wider privacy Dragnet and much more insidious scope and certainly fancier in looks & design. Buying into a system of personal, automated & generalized consumer surveillance that also brought the pretense of neutral, un-biased coding.
Coded Bias documentary is the strongest advocacy of algorithmic justice i have seen, watched or heard of. A critical introduction to the current algo-capitalistic trends & as well as some of the ways needed to counter act AI-supported disparities & disenfranchisement. It is no mystery that you actually need people from across the board, including industry ppl (call them what u want, ex- Quants/former flash trading brokers, tech renegades, whistle-blowers, technological deserters, industry watchdogs, etc). Yes, not only EFF members, STEMs, geeks and blerds, but also people from the social housing blocks, the hood, the street corner youngsters and those with migrant-background – those that are primary targets and have been already mis-measured, data stripped and data mined and whose bodies and faces are literally the training grounds of computational modernity. Most of them, are the unwilling informants and unpaid trainers of emerging tech deployments that under-girds surveillance capitalism.
One of the most important takes from this documentary – was for me the counter-intuitive demonstration that goes against old cyberpunk sayings (paraphrasing: ‘the future is already here but it is just unequally distributed’). In the 21st c we learn time and time again, that the 1%, or 10% or the rich, powerful and wealthy are not the future’s bleeding knife- since they have mostly lived live of unfettered privacy and non data retention. They are not a tested minority, and clearly not the ones who get first unwanted access beforehand and do not suffer the effects of those things that will get distributed later one a vast scale. In fact (as one of the participants of Coded Bias points out) – the post-apocalyptic poor, the unprotected, those with previous histories of discrimination, enslavement, incarceration, abusive family background, profiling etc those already under some state of surveillance, registration and control (ID checked mostly in terms of constituting some form of risk), are the ones who suffer the blunt of these new technologies.
They are the un-glamorized testers of unequal futures, and not the privileged rich beta testers that mostly seem to opt-out of their own companies technological wonders. Accordingly, technological transformation is so important that it should not be defined just in terms of access – or left at the whim of company board members, Big Tech, Innovation hubs or ‘smart’ city planners & cheerleaders. It is not just a question of ‘users’ – since it is about the ‘used’ more than the users nowadays. It is – without nostalgia or pre-technological naivity in tow, that in spite – of these tremendous and complex planetary changes, legislation and lobbying for digital rights & accountability seems to lag behind, since both public attention and consciousnesses gets bypassed. Direct oversight and regulation or consciousness itself seems so trivial, and yet it is constantly remade into a threshold to be bypassed by the free markets & mantras hailing for ‘disruptive’ transgressions. Nonetheless, there is this incredible alliance and (as seen below) a lot of initiatives have sprung up, that espouse not just a neo-Luddite conviction, but one of tekk-savvyness, informed by the above ‘renegades’and industry insiders and/or burnouts as well, by previous historical black liberation examples as by the new empowering SF alternate histories (i see some clear signs of Wakanda there) having been written (thinking about Solomon Rivers,Nalo Hopkins and Nisi Shawl & others here) or waiting to be written in collaboration with automated text generators or not.
There is emerging calls from both government and by popular demand to at least be able to opt-out of these technologies in the US and EU (face recognition being just the most obvious case), altough I’m not sure about the vast majority of the world (which is clearly not from the Global North) or even the accelerating use & deployment of drone wars & DARPA abroad in the wake of protracted but inevitable US retreat from Afghanistan. There of course the possibility to learn how optical governance works or is put to use/abused in other parts of the world, since the West does not hold the monopoly over AI. China, in particular is an interesting divergence, since machine vision has been widely rolled out by the CCP via its social credit score, as well as being repurposed from below during the Pandemic response. SF has been historically very wary with attempts to modulate or influence behaviors such as behaviourism, to tuning or pegging controls or strong emotional responses towards a common good (Just think of swath of movies from Equilibrium 2002 to Brave New World 2020 or the new Voyagers 2021). ‘Brainwashed’, ‘the Manchurian Candidate’ etc are just a few of the inherited standard fear responses churned by both Cold War warriors, strategists, Pentagon brass and the run of the mill Hollywood movie output whenever they tried to depict or describe actual, imagined or suspected ideological traitors and US army deserters. ‘Brainwashing’ especially was made up into a sort of explain-all – to cover a whole range of ‘enemy'(past & present) responses, as the only possible logical explanation for the divergent behavior of former US troops (many of them black) who decided to opt-out of the racist US capitalist system after living as POW (during Korean War). When former army personnel decided to question, defect & live outside their bounds they must have been ‘brainwashed’, especially if they happened to be choosing Mao’s China for a while (a forgotten history detailed with tremendous wit in Julia Lowell’s fascinating book: Maoism: A Global History 2020) instead of racism back home or in the army. Change of mind and qualms about incoming orders also equals treason as we know from the case of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning or Edward Snowden.
In a rare and courageous move – The White Space (Machine/Ancestral Night duology) space opera universe of Elizabeth Bear avoids the usual ‘brainwashing’ suspicion of previous SF dystopian conventions by offering exactly what so much canonic SF eschews. It opens the possibility of a wide, non-coercive future galactic union where every human (altough the union is made by many non-sapient but sentient syster species) has the option to decide how much it alters, allows or wants to dial-down or fine-tune (what amounts to certain AI assisted ‘mindfulness’) a central nervous system evolved to automatize responses to emotional distress. Changing developmental patterns etc including universal non-coercive(!) access (called “bumping” in the novel) to what amounts to puberty blockers is not automatically a bad thing or a monstrous unnatural hybristic act(altough there’s libertarian privateers who think so in that universe like in ours)!
White Space opens up a way to modulate, discuss and deal in other ways with trauma, isolation, addiction, puberty, dysphoria, sex or gender assignment by birth etc bypassing automatic, hormonal or non-cognitive ‘habitual’ responses, being able to imaginatively limit violent behaviors at a minimum. Curbing willingly so much of what is anti-social behavior was apparently frowned upon even in that far future, but there’s room for so much more. It’s of course always important to pay attention to who decides what and when one misbehaves or when disobedience becomes accepted & when not. Of course there is a thin line, and there are those who want to skip and actively propagate opting out of the opting out. Body (non modification) extremists surely exist in that future that deem it sacrilegious to intervene or to dabble with ‘natural’ responses, while acting (on whole) quite egoistically and self-centered. In this galactic union – new forms of piratical freeports keep offshoring resources and escaping the central taxing authority, thus harboring non-mindfulness terrorism arising in response to a largely benefic mental & emotional tuning widely available. Even if coding bias into hardware based on white wetware bias is the main focus of Coded Bias, it ultimately supports a malleable wetware-hardware continuum that allows for modulation and even requires it.
Black-boxing of the operative logics of machine vision or acknowledging that machinic cognition or decisionality is essentially collaborative, not isolated, nor impervious to questioning, thus, cannot just settle for the human/nonhuman or creator/created, nonhuman/posthuman binaries. It feels very wrong, since it closes down our own sensitivity either to the same old repackaged as new, or to a newer wider & largely collaborative nonhuman ‘worldy sensiblity’ that is always risks being tipped towards whiteness and reactive toxicity if left unattended. Microsoft’s Tay 2016 chatbot that developed 24h a proclivity for hate speech is a test in case. It’s not just the simple powerful logic of trash in trash out, but of how easily this tipping point might be achieved today under trolling & targeted attacks. At the same time, one should never loose sight of other machinic bridges &conceptually as well as emotionally more progressive examples that developed as part of writing practices & modernist techniques such as automatic writing or Alan Turing’s automated Loveletter generator.
One cannot unbox anything in a straightforward way, since Shalini Kantayya’s diverse cast of protagonists and invited guests make clear that not even programmers or makers do not understand how the AI does what it does. One more thing cannot be remedied with just more data, simply more information. Even acknowledging that we can fully understand those internal processes, we can still feel trh results, see the hard facts and harsh reality whenever these AIs tend to ignore black and brown or female faces. AIs do need some deep unlearning in order to ‘re-educate'(not such a bad word) themselves and make sure they will not act out just the mathematical sums of the worst of the worst and select by default for the chosen few while deselecting everybody else.
Pushing the logic of this documentary, it is time to find out more about how decisions, ‘chance’, contingency may still be directed so as to redistribute luck on a more equal way in an increasingly unequal world economy. Economy is itself futurism served frozen & pre-cooked, and different debt ridden lives and widely different futures are being handed down, bent along pre-selected trajectories, trajectories that are being doctored (who cares if knowingly or unknowingly, intentionality is always ulterior anyway) actively make impossible the lives of a majority. A ‘pan-selectivity’ needs yo be developed that refuses yo be ‘gamed’ easily and influenced only by the influent few armed with predictive algorithms – at the tip of a capitalistic drive that actualizes every potential out there, no matter how horrific and brutal as long as it pays dividends.
Like probably any ideological formation – bias is not just invisible, it probably maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but this should not stop us trying to change it and actively imagine what’s to be done. Bias seems to work and act by being unspecified, invisibilized, left out of the loop. Again, like ideology, it is the missing mass that bends everything according to its set of preemptive expectations, almost like a constant enactment of a single, unilateral inner experience, making itself ubiquitous. Bias is not simply an apparently whimsical conceit, it is not just a pre-programmed part of the system, but something that needs to be enforced, hard-coded and programmed at every level of future decision making, at ever threshold of resistance.
Bias is made seemingly non-existent each time output and prediction is put at a premium. If if blaring, it feels like an itch you cannot scratch, because it starts to seem so intrinsic & para-systemic. Technology or AI is not neutral nor is inherently bad it gas been often said, and it is getting as bad or worse or as good as the whole context/environment allows it, or the drift promoting it keeps on pushing it, or as long as the coded ideals and values are what they are. Remember even if everything is being turned into ‘driver-less’-everything, it’s not less of driven- market economy.
We can not see it and measure it because its effects are measured on those who are made to matter less and less, on those ‘others’ that even the states, law or constitution does not seem to ‘notice’ or care for any longer. It is easier to wave bias aside, to bring undigested misconstructions on board and heap them on top of those being distributed the loosing lots, the bad seats(if any), and even if those stories just give you bad dreams, goosebumps, depression or severe need to disconnect from another’s catastrophic or already dystopian reality. So this necessitates different, collective and directed research approaches & coordinated effort to ‘black boxing’ so many current decisional processes. There’s also a different venue (not tackled in Coded Bias) – a sort of related QWERTY bias, of path dependencies whenever we have historically & incrementally built conventional (man-made) computational infrastructures. This ‘convention’ not only only stands in the way of more evolutionary – developmentally inclusive, unconventional approaches to computation & computing, but might leave out or blind us to other venues or other modes of problem solving existing or evolved (as those investigated by Andrew Adamatsky studying maze-solving slime molds). While most computation & research nowadays follows old & certainly well-tested arhitectures, it only builds upon existing & specific constraints – all too human ones we might add, moreover a very restrictive & biased account of what counts as ‘human’ (amply documented throughout Coded Bias), one that both engineering and coding seems to take as granted. ‘Worth’ – in a constantly devalorizing environment becomes constantly threatened, at the same time we should welcome the erosion of old, gendered biased and individualistic notions of singular genius(unmoved mover?) and farcical ‘great men’ through our plural AI – human interactions.
Coded Bias gets the highest marks in advocating for an A.I.X -research, attempting to build an explainable artificial intelligence, a research that should be aware of ‘artificial unintelligence'(Meredith Broussard), as well as to demands that humans hone their response-ability (Haraway), both allowing for aesthetic, epistemologic and ethical responsiveness whenever technological 21st upgrades and optimizations start pouring in.
Algorithmic Justice League (AJL)
AJL TW
Association for Computing Machinery code of ethics
Critical Race and Digital Studies Syllabus
No Biometric Barriers Housing Act of 2019
A Toolkit on Organizing Your Campus against ICE
stopping big data plan to flag at risk students
Responsible Computing Science Challenge
Hacking Discrimination hackaton
Our Data Bodies is a human rights and data justice organization.
Data & Society studies the social implications of data-centric technologies & automation.
You do not need to be a tech expert to advocate for algorithmic justice. These basic terms are a good foundation to inform your advocacy. For a more detailed breakdown of how facial recognition works, see the guide titled Facial Recognition Technologies: A Primer from the AJL. For more on surveillance, see the Community Control Over Police Surveillance: Technology 101 guide from the ACLU.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS (extracted from Coded Bias Activist Toolkit)
Algorithm. A set of rules used to perform a task.
Algorithmic justice. Exposing the bias and harms from technical systems in order to safeguard the most marginalized and develop equitable, accountable, and just artificial intelligence.
Benchmark. Data set used to measure accuracy of an algorithm before it is released.
Bias. Implicit or explicit prejudices in favor of or against a person or groups of
people.
Artificial intelligence (AI). The quest to give computers the ability to perform
tasks that have, in the past, required human intelligence like decision making,
visual perception, speech recognition, language translation, and more.
Big data. The mass collection of information about individuals who
use personal technology, such as smartphones.
Biometric technology. Uses automated processes to recognize an individual through unique physical characteristics or behaviors
Black box. A system that can be viewed only through its inputs and outputs, not its internal process.
CCTV. Closed-circuit television cameras are used by institutions to record activity on and around their premises for security purposes.
Civil rights. A broad set of protections designed to prevent unfair treatment or
discrimination in areas such as education, employment, housing, and more.
Code. The technical language used to write algorithms and other computer programs.
Data rights. Referring to the human right to privacy, confidentiality, and
ethical use of personal information collected by governments or corporations through technology
Data set. The collection of data used to train an algorithm to make predictions.
Due process. The right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without
proper legal proceedings, protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR). A data rights law in the European Union that requires technology users consent to how their data is collected and prohibits the sale of personal data.
Facial recognition. Technologies – a catchall phrase to describe a set of technologies that process imaging data to perform a range of tasks on human
faces, including detecting a face, identifying a unique individual, and assessing demographic attributes like age and gender.
Machine learning. An approach to AI that provides systems the ability to learn
patterns from data without being explicitly programmed.
Racism. The systematic discrimination of people of color based on their social
classification of race, which disproportionately disadvantages Black and
Indigenous people of color.
Recidivism risk assessment – Automated decision making system used in
sentencing and probation to predict an individual’s risk of future criminal behavior based on a series of data inputs, such as zip code and past offenses.
Sexism. The systematic discrimination of women and girls based on their social
categorization of sex, which intersects with racism for women and girls of color.
Social credit score. An AI system designed by the Communist Party of China
that tracks and analyzes an individual’s data to assess their trustworthiness.
Surveillance. The invasive act of monitoring a population to influence its
behavior, done by a government for law and order purposes or by corporations for commercial interests.
Value-added assessments. Algorithms used most commonly to evaluate teachers by measuring student performance data.
Voice recognition. An application of AI technology that interprets and carries out spoken commands and/or aims to identify an individual based on their speech patterns.
TimeSpace Warps 