What is AGNES? AGNES is a digital commission by Cécile B. Evans, the first in a series of digital commissions that coincided with the launch of the new Serpentine website and the opening of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. AGNES introduces herself in stages: like a person, she cannot be experienced in totality through a single encounter. Who is AGNES? AGNES lives on the website. She wants to share things with you and learn about your thoughts and feelings. The more you give back, the further AGNES will accompany you on your digital encounter with the Serpentine Galleries. She will introduce you to the ...

Das Kapital bin ich: Schluss mit der Digitalen Leibeigenschaft. Das Manifest für alle Internet-Zweifler und Gegner der virtuellen Manipulation. Für alle, deren Fingerspitzen nur noch Touchscreens berühren, die in YouTube verloren gehen und sich Facebook ausgenommen fühlen. Für alle, die sich den AGBs von Google & Co nicht mehr fügen wollen. Es ist Zeit, sich aus der selbstverschuldeten “Digitalen Leibeigenschaft” zu befreien! Der Ökonom Hannes Grassegger zeigt auf, wie wir zu einem neuen Selbstbewusstsein im Umgang mit unseren Daten finden und auch noch Geld daran verdienen. “Holen wir uns, was uns gehört. Wir sind das Internet.”

There is no doubt that we live in exciting times: Ours is the age of many ‘silent revolutions’ triggered by startups and research labs of big IT companies; revolutions that quietly and profoundly alter the world we live in. Another ten or five years, and self-tracking will be as normal and inevitable as having a Facebook account or a mobile phone. Our bodies, hooked to wearable devices sitting directly at or beneath the skin, will constantly transmit data to the big aggregation in the cloud. Permanent recording and automatic sharing will provide unabridged memory, both shareable and analyzable. The digitization ...

Instagram photos, public transport information, streamed music and Netflix movies seem to appear out of thin air on your phone, don’t they? Well, getting them onto that screen isn’t as light and easy as it feels. There is, in fact, an immense and decidedly heavy infrastructure powering the cloud. More and more architecture is being designed and built to house server space and internet connection hubs. Since these buildings typically use as much energy as a medium-sized city, our digital lives have a direct environmental toll. Minimising this footprint is one of the data centre industry’s main issues. This episode was ...

Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in ...

Moving away from the strong body of critique of pervasive ‘bad data’ practices by both governments and private actors in the globalized digital economy, this book aims to paint an alternative, more optimistic but still pragmatic picture of the datafied future. The authors examine and propose ‘good data’ practices, values and principles from an interdisciplinary, international perspective. From ideas of data sovereignty and justice, to manifestos for change and calls for activism, this collection opens a multifaceted conversation on the kinds of futures we want to see, and presents concrete steps on how we can start realizing good data in ...

A super-computational grid overlaying the earth’s surface, an all-seeing, oating ecosystem, an Uber-planet, an internet of things in which the things are us, is recording and storing our every movement. We subscribe to it—willingly providing it with our data. By the same token, our immersion in the permanence of the informational mayhem is flooding us with fictions. On the one hand, theoretically, the permanent input channel of billions of facts per second—GPS coordinates, heartbeats, selfies, currency fluctuations, etc.— into the super-computational megastructure, is always pushing for a transparent world. In that world “truth” would cease to be a word because there would be ...

Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our times, and its debate takes place across scientific disciplines and into the public realm, traversing platforms, sources, and fields of study. The analysis of such mediated debates has a strong tradition, which started in communication science and has since then been applied across a wide range of academic disciplines. So-called ‘content analysis’ provides a means to study (mass) media content in many media shapes and formats to retrieve signs of the zeitgeist, such as cultural phenomena, representation of certain groups, and the resonance of political viewpoints. In the era of ...

Dubbed the “busiest man on the internet,” polymath TIM HWANG, currently a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University, visits the NM pod to discuss his new book, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG, 2020). We also talk GPT-3, predictive policing, DIY platforms, and founding the first-ever conference on memes.

Making available massive amounts of data that are generated, distributed, and modeled, digital media provide us with the possibility of abundant information and knowledge. This possibility has been attracting various scenarios in which technology either eliminates non-knowledge or plants it deep within contemporary cultures through the universal power and opacity of algorithms. This volume comprises contributions from media studies, literary studies, sociology, ethnography, anthropology, and philosophy to discuss non-knowledge as an important concept for understanding contemporary digital cultures.

Computer mediated interpersonal interactions are defining our daily lives as we know it. Studying this phenomenon with various methodologies, across different cultures and traditions is a crucial component in understanding social ties. This book brings together articles that approach online dating from a range of cultural and critical perspectives. The research decodes the level of engagement and manner of approaching online dating in various countries such as France, India, China, Turkey, Cuba, USA and Portugal. Mapping the history of dating and courtship shows the evolution of these practices even before the introduction of the online medium and traces parallels and differences ...

Today, we live in a world where every time we turn on our smartphones, we are inextricably tied by data, laws and flowing bytes to different countries. A world in which personal expressions are framed and mediated by digital platforms, and where new kinds of currencies, financial exchange and even labor bypass corporations and governments. Simultaneously, the same technologies increase governmental powers of surveillance, allow corporations to extract ever more complex working arrangements and do little to slow the construction of actual walls along actual borders. On the one hand, the agency of individuals and groups is starting to approach ...

As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time, these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a ...

In The Dark Side of Google Italian writers’ collective Ippolita provides a thorough, fresh analysis of what is behind the universe of Google and the metadata industry. In recent years Google has established itself as a major point of Internet access. We have progressively adapted to its sober, reassuring interface and its advertisements (discretely off to the side, yet always present). We have adopted its services and the habit of using it to the degree that ‘googling’ has become a form of behavior: ‘If you don’t know what it is, Google it!’ Google shows mastery in taking advantage of our need for simplicity. ...

The Wages for Facebook manifesto appeared anonymously online in 2014. Its website consists of a single page with the manifesto written in bold letters scrolling automatically, denying visitors the ability to use the patented swipe gesture or the scrollbar. Wages for Facebook refers to a 1975 text “Wages against Housework” by Silvia Federici, the feminist author and activist, which addressed the invisible role played by women’s affective labor as mothers, wives, and housewives (although not exclusively) in sustaining capitalism. In the same vein, Wages for Facebook demands that our time spent online, on social media platforms be recognized for what it is: ...

Sitting somewhere between Minority Report and the OurRevolution PAC, White Collar Crime Risk Zones is a website and app that use “machine learning to predict where financial crimes will happen across the U.S.” The app’s system was trained on financial malfeasance reports going back to 1964, and by referencing events with geotagged cartography it can predict financial crimes at the city-block-level with an accuracy of 90.12%. Typically, the logic of predictive policing is applied to ‘street’ level crime (drugs, assault, etc), and has rarely (if ever) been applied to the financial crimes of white collar criminals. Turning the technology on the ...