The Boys is an American superhero streaming television series developed by Eric Kripke for Amazon Prime Video. Based on the comic book of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, which was originally published by DC Comics under their Wildstormimprint before moving to Dynamite Entertainment; it follows the eponymous team of vigilantes as they combat superpowered individuals who abuse their abilities.
The series is about a young black man who travels across the segregated 1950s United States in search of his missing father, learning of dark secrets plaguing a town on which famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft supposedly based the location of many of his fictional tales. (wiki)
I cannot add much the excellent review by Lauren Michele Jackson in the New Yorker. In spite of my own initial enthusiasm for the new takes on Lovecraft’s inheritance – I was dumbfounded by both what she aptly signals (the lack of melodrama, the lack of tension and of bi-dimensional characters), as well as the sensation (sensed by others as well it seems) that everything has to be spelled out, and that we are made an unwitting participant in a prestige piece that takes all historical struggles either as a clear given or that tries to dispel all ambiguity and supply all the answers. All the ideological problems are already marked as finished, explained or to be check-boxed. It is as if Lovecraft’s perverted sense of inchoate slimy materialism, both formless, as well as degenerative and racist, gushes out to over-write, over-describe, literally to suffocate and overload all that could be said or shown about power or class relations. It is as if the desire to actually finally film and remake black history in a more just way, and the urgency of this nowadays, ends up over-labeling and indexing all historical settings and severely limiting all outcomes, circumscribing all relationships of this series, beyond the actual segregation and racial apartheid into some sort of finished, vacuum proof product.
This said, I liked the portrayal of racist occult cop KKK cabal – and how the Lovecraftian monsters were turned against the racist cops, one thing that I badly miss happening in reality. The cabal of rich white immortalist Southerners is a good addition, but then again they all feel incredibly bi-dimensional and out of a right-wing Satanist plot proliferrated today by QAnon. That itself, might be a good lead, yet it remains undeveloped and rudimentary. A much better (comics this time) example I have in Saladin Ahmed’s and Sami Kivelä Abbot by Boom Comics – the villain being much more tangible upper class white old dude academic or even a dark web intellectual (IDW) that uses brutal occult forces to recruit and transformed the black characters into monsters. The battle over Lovecraftian Necronomicon manuscripts and the high seats of academia is much more engaging. I am not sure if flop is a good term, just because season 2 was cancelled in 2021, or because it definitely has somehow closed down some interesting and very important Lovecraftian – systemic-racism venues.
I speak thus with a certain deeper and bitter dissatisfaction, but who am I to say. Although there was so much production effort, good vfx, CGI galore, good action science, and ample classic era pulp exaggerations and body horror ontological excess – it still left a vacuum. Body swapping is an important feature of this series and it really shows the corpo-reality of it, the pain and difficulty of such a metamorphosis which I also found does not get representation in movies. The creature and monster design is just wow, and yet i am still left with the “Sundown” pilot episode as setting the scene, and being actually the best of the entire series (especially the Shoggoth design).
I feel it could well have stayed a long feature movie. There is also an attempt at K- and J-horror “Meet Me in Daegu”, with finally an impartial portrayal of the Communist side during the Korean War that is not being dehumanized or instantly relegated to the enemy side. There is also another intriguing eps with the multiverse branchings (“I am” eps), portal jumping trough a larger multiverse with various highlights of black history from Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturist imaginings, places and other times where black lives matter. This was finally one funky adventure with a black middle aged woman in the role of inter-dimensional Hippolyta – at its center!
I liked a lot of over the topness of it, the kitsch, the way everything is carnal as well as magical, the way racism is more horrific than the most horrific of Lovecraftian entities, at the same time like Michele in her review, felt actors skills and characters got reduced to just anti-racist Ghostbusters. I like the queering of it and the actors effort, yet I am left craving for something else, maybe miss a touch of that good weird fiction that has resulted in such good literary and aesthetically interesting materials (dunno why the prose of Sofia Samatar Monster Potraits comes to mind).
spacetime coordinates: somewhere in near-future Germany
Transfer is a 2010 German science fiction/drama film directed by Damir Lukacevic.
I have seen this SF movie back when it came out. I somehow think it is still an important genre movie, and one woefully ignored I think. I did not see many reviews or many reactions to it. Maybe it is because it dealt quite early with some very difficult and sensitive areas: corpo-reality (Manuela Rossini), class, race, gender, refugees, rising inequality, poverty, and a rapidly aging population, things that are getting more traction outside of the immortalist/transhumanist frame etc
As in the best of SF – it is not just a riff on existing technologies, it takes actually existing tendencies and latent conflicts (even philosophical body mind issues), social tensions and pushes them further to their limits and beyond. Claire Colebrook has been one of the most incisive critique of the posthuman turn, or the new ultrahumanism of transhumanism and why the ‘Anthropocene’ starts from a rather parochial ‘anthropos’ where humanity is actually just standing for “an affluent, urban, Western lifestyle.” Kathryn Hayles has identified how key values of liberal-humanist ideology have survived the transhumanist transfer – and how such a technologically empowered ‘uber-humanism’, a kind of evil twin to ‘enlightened’ critical posthumanism. There is the blaring fact of power fantasies of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity theory that express an upgraded neo-Cartesian desire to transcend the body – the common trope of uploaded minds perhaps exemplified best in Transcendence (2017) movie. The durability of the technological forms of embodiment are always made at the expense of relegating “the vulnerable physical body […] [to the] allienum.”
I have seen Transfer quite a while ago, so it is not very fresh in my mind, but it struck a chord back then, and I don’t want risk forgetting or ignoring its role. The possibility to transfer a part of you – a mental of you that somehow gets neurally transferred into another (younger, more ‘alive’) body is a long been a staple of SF, in cyberpunk and in particular in biopunk’s more biotechnological or neuropolitical iterations of dystopia. Mind transfer was explored at large in the 2002 Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (as well as in the eponymous series loosely based on it), as well as the follow-ups to that – Broken Angels and Woken Furies who feature the same Takeshi Lev Kovacs, an ex-mercenary recruited to solve a series of crimes and abuses by the rich of the 26th century. Altered Carbon takes this transfer into new bodies called ‘sleeves’ using cortical stacks implanted in their vertebral column to record their consciousness. More importantly this sleeving or even storage of minds and experiences is not neutral, and the body is not just a residue, a supplement. This is turn makes possible that re-sleeving, using this prior backup is always quite complicated not just a one off clean process. There is also the possibility of torture at the level unforseen by mere one time one body identities. Once technologically stored, a future prisoner can be kept for an indefinite period, as well as tortured possibility in this digital virtual world. without bodily endurance limits.
The dream of upraded transfer is familiar to most transhumanist versions of Californian ideology type of Singularity, with the possibility of mind upload as one of the most salient or expected beneficial results of such a technological rapture. The way ‘mind uploads’ are presented and described by Singularitarians or their futuristic brethren is quite naive and almost a direct extension of their constant talk about extending a ‘faster’ capitalist neo-liberal (their business model obsession) into the future. Such post-Singularity and its VC proponents seems to promise a technological revolution, while at the same time being socially, economically and even philosophically quite drab and regressive. It literally is a badly thought out SF, a very un-reflexive and vengeful-nerd attitude to it, leaving everybody (who pissed you off) back and especially those cannot afford the transfer – being condemned to ’embodiment’ and ‘matter’. For Altered Carbon as well as for Damir Lukacevic’s Transfer the ability to jump bodies is not just a technological fix or a result in current advances of neuro- surgery, neural networks, cognitive sciences, but primarily a question of resources, or demand and offer and rigged economic systems. In Transfer African refugees Sarah and Apolain have their own agendas, and they stake their bodies and their minds as temporary storage – in the hope of making a better life for themselves or their children, or even just briefly escaping the horrors and violence of back home.
There is the constant reminder that these mind uploads and mind transfers do not come easy but at a price or a primium price, and that the technoscientific has fused completly with the corporate
What becomes more clear by the day is that a lot of former state life support system, such as health care and welfare (pension funds), even in the rare cases they did not get dismantled (as in the former East) or privatized by neoliberal shock therapy, have been heavily invested in some of the ecological, climatic and military disasters the world is full of. Maybe a generations ago, one would completely ignore such webs of interrelations and co-depedencies. In the UK for exemple, council worker pensions were heavily invested in military-industrial complex arm dealer and supplying the conflicts of this world. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was also partially involved in getting badly needed ‘hard currency’ by any means – sometimes joining the world market of art and arms deals. Even more biological products (one would say cybergothic or biopunk!) such as the blood supply of their own citizens where exchanged for hard cash from their Western enemies in the 1980s, during the last years of actually existing Socialism. Apparently blood trade was the most important source of revenue of unscheduled foreign currency for the health sector in East Germany.
Only recently, Norwegian government’s pension fund (the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund!) sold its last investments in fossil fuel companies. There is a non-metaphoric quite perverse and quite hard to follow financial trail between the investments in a profitable future of an ageing Western (or global North) population and fueling the instability of the Global South as well as the larger ecological depredations and diminution of their children’s or grandchildren’s future. The bad dystopian quality of such news – makes the Western technological civilization responsible for dealing in the most profitable things: fossil fuels and arms deals at the expense of all others. Extinction and future security be damned – lets just secure the shareholder investments! Such security of funds – is now directly and causally efficient in a larger insecurity and lack of resources of a future that is denied to a majority of others. Few SF movies have addressed this directly at the levels of bodies and Transfer is one of those few. Mind transfer are from the start very unequal, or as unequal as the financial flows of investments. Mind transfers follow lets say other flows of abstract, ‘immaterial’ resources that are backed by exploitation and environmental depredation. It is important to understand how such transfer are also about time, about calculated lived time and how this gets curtailed under current capitalist efficiency metrics and ability to quantify aspects that where previously out of the range of capital.
An availability of black African bodies or refugee bodies – makes them prey to biomedical interests or Big Pharma experimentation, even if for mostly benign of circumstances, let’s say with even the best of old, sick white clients. The white couple’s minds that temporarily inhabit these black bodies for 20 h out of 24 h are somehow lost in their own memories and nostalgia and somehow their mental lives preclude or have precedence over the minds (and affects) of their hosts. Their African hosts have just 4 h at their disposal to be themselves. This is a very literal example of LTV (labour theory of value), yet here the ncessary time is just the necessary time that you are you and have one’s own body at disposal. The body is staked and becomes borrowed by well to do owners of minds that can afford in their old age such transfers and are motivated enough by their personal histories, class and cultural background, ethics, attachments etc to even start considering inhabiting these ‘fresh others’. Life is not being sucked out vampirically from these available black bodies, yet they are diurnal vehicles of two Western minds, of a literalized ‘double consciousness’. Their own and their masters (employers) consciousness is located in the same body, quite close to what W. E. Burghardt Du Bois had in mind in his anticipative critique, even before such technologies where dreamt of. Also we are taking about some form of renewable energy – not the old lifeforce, but the lived experience of these people. Black bodies have also been an image of white ‘lust’, quite differently invested with libidinal energies. These is also made pulp – clear (somehow much to clear and spelled out) in the recent Lovecraft Country series where there is a back and forth shape-shifting (as well as gender shifting) from white women into white men and from black women bodies to white women bodies. We are not talking about the right-wing misgenation narratives of degeneracy and eugenics, but of black refugee bodies as the salvation of a Western aging world. Black bodies are presented iconically and in advertising as fit, sporty, wild, etc as a place of Western projection, white desires and fears. Black Marxism has been key in giving due importance to this transaltlanic trade, its vertebral centrality at the core of incipient Agricultural and Industrial Revolution. The Transatlantic Slave Trade – has been violently and forcefully already physically transferring bodies of already debased or abjected (non)humanity. Biopunk’s transference of minds or renewal of bodies has to always deal with this history that is so present in Afrofuturist SF. The transatlantic Trade was a first Atlantic transfer – that reduced and commodified these enslaved populations trough a brutal regime of free trade transfers and circulation by effectively transforming them into disposable things and mere disposable bodies (many have died being transported under horrific conditions and then thrown overboard). The massive tragedy of the refugee crisis, transiting under terrible, inhuman conditions Mediterranean also speaks about transfers and bodily displacement and annihilation. Only this year more than 1000 people have died trying to reach European shores and this is also a continuation and a reminder that high-tech technological “transfer” is only one side of the coin, that cannot detach other forms of bodily exploitation from their underlying historical factors.
This is also the pitfall of an easy – occupation, especially in a situation of inequality, where all purpose, all intentionally is somehow subsumed to the Western individualized, monadic and agential technosubject. Such total apathy and total occupation is always impossible. The total dream of perfect transfer is based on the fallacy that a person would reside just in one’s own dead, brain or be defined only as a narrow yet ruling consciousness. To restrict interior experience only to conscious experience is blaring mistake and one that has been repeatedly made in the history of Western philosophy from Descartes to Kant. The privileging of mind over matter has been slowly collapsing in the face of a “strange or weird sort of realism”(Levy Bryant) that admits the radical unkownability of things and way every entity, from human bodies to insect swarms to bacteria to comets exists regardless of whether one bothers to think about them or not. Consciousness is indeed something quite peculiar and special, but in no way essential (as in the ‘hard problem of consciousness‘). Consciousness is differing from many other, more diffuse, and more graded non-human sentient experiences and is just one of widely distributed modes of thought and feeling developed and existing all around us. It is important to emphasize that the difference is only in degree, not in kind. A proper evolutionary account of human consciousness has to take this wide spectrum of sentience seriously. Transfer is not neutral to its substrate, nor is it about the perfectibility of transfer. It gathers momentum after a slow burn for the possibility that cross-overs of all sorts are happening, nothing staying the same or isolated (as just body or minds). Consciousness, POW, perspectives get changed as they get transferred, expanded and dilated by these literal in’s and out’s of each other’s embodied experiences.
Nothing could be more bizarre as this picnic that seems to get closer to Get Out, although getting out is actually always linked with someone other getting in
Unintended pregnancies are some of the worst cases of breeder culture SF, where everybody stumbles into it accidentally, especially in places where it is widely available. Such accident always feel scripted. Apart from this emplotment fluke that is not a fluke, there is also the possibility that the older white women actually enjoys her surrogate bodies pregnancy. Sarah the real cum surrogate mom realizes that she will be just a ‘womb’ and somehow giving her baby to adoption is the only choice. Although it is just starting, here the terms of appropriation are all biocultural – in a patriarchal capitalist society where women’s bodies from the Global South are already carrying out this reproductive labour in the name of white ‘low natality’ rich others. Full Surrogacy Now! starts with the current situation but asks for reproductive equality and justice. Cultural appropriation (ex white rap) somehow precludes the fact that identity politics goes and in hand with a rapid commodification (like in the nativist Nike logos) of the ‘native’ or or the ‘indigenous’. Indigenous knownledges that gets deleted at the same time as more material, biological forms of biocapital get indexed and turned into ‘green gold’. In biopunk such as Paolo Bacigalupi Wind Up Girl – follows these constant and hard to represent transfer of seeds, cultivars, genes, bodies, hybrids – mined and escaping from the agroindustry biotech labs. as well as traded by biohackers that are in a constant search for seeds, breeds and long lost or potentially valuable and forgotten heirlooms cultivars.
Bodies and their feelings (good or bad) also get rapidly appropriated in this biopunk world of genetic copyrighting and bio hunting. This is why movies such as Transfer are needed in order to follow up on those consequences and think the unthinkable of unlivable situations. Not sure how the movie ends, I would have to see it one more time, yet according to other reviewers, it appears to be another bad deal in the sense that the African parents are actually remunerated with just 1% for their troubles.
“In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I look at how white supremacy pervades not only the history of environmentalism and environmentalist leaders, but also how white supremacy now threatens the climate change movement and climate action today. The forefathers of environmentalism, conservation, and preservation like Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and Teddy Roosevelt all espoused white supremacist ideas that were often intermeshed with their views of the natural world and environmentalism. Later as authors like Paul Ehlrich stoked fears of overpopulation, these racist sentiments were blended once again into concerns about overpopulation. In short overpopulation and environmental destruction as a result of overpopulation were wielded as racist and white supremacist tools to oppress people of color, especially in the majority world. Now, mass shooters and eco-fascists are harkening back to the environmentalist, racist, white supremacist views of the past and using climate change as a dangerous weapon and excuse to harm people.”
Edge of the World is an adventure drama film directed by Michael Haussman and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the British soldier and adventurer James Brooke (1803-1868). Edge of the World is a co-production between the US, the UK, Malaysia, and China. (wiki)
The first season of ten episodes debuted worldwide on Netflix on October 13, 2017. The second season was released by Netflix on August 16, 2019. In January 2020, Netflix announced that the potential for a third season was on indefinite hold as Fincher wanted to pursue other projects but may “revisit [the series] in the future”.
Mindhunter revolves around FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), along with psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), who operate the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit within the Training Division at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Together, they launched a research project to interview imprisoned serial killers to understand their psychology with the hope of applying this knowledge to solve ongoing cases.
The second season takes place between 1980 and 1981, with Ford and Tench investigating the Atlanta murders of 1979 to 1981, which included at least 28 deaths, mostly children. This is based on the real case of Wayne Williams, who was charged and convicted for the murder of two adult men but was never tried for the killing of the children and adolescents, causing mass outrage and questions over Williams’s guilt as the children’s cases went cold. The second season also features other infamous murderers, such as David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam, played by Oliver Cooper, William Pierce Jr. played by Michael Filipowich, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. played by Robert Aramayo, and Charles Manson, played by Damon Harriman. (wiki)
“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.
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.
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 