Episode Two explores the benefits and disadvantages of going unseen by surveillance technologies. We examine notions of visibility and invisibility in the context of AI imaging systems with author and professor Simone Browne, artist Sondra Perry, and artist and academic Mimi Onuoha.

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 ...

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.

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 ...

This piece simulates a live performance of computer music at the Google Data Centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The composition takes its inspiration from this image, which was released from Google’s Data Centre in Iowa in 2012, and is a dialogue between algorithmically generated notes, rhythms and melodies, and my formative input in sculpting the emerging sound as it is generated. Using architectural plans extrapolated from photographs of Google’s server room at this site, I use software to simulate the space’s reverb characteristic, feeding the composition into it. I like to think of this as mimetic hacking. Like the Anonymous hacks that create ...

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 ...

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 ...

The American born artist Jennifer Lyn Morone registered herself as a corporation in 2014, founding Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc. As the founder, CEO, owner, shareholder and product of her own company, she sells, leases, rents or invests her personal data for her own profit. She has commercialised her hormones and diamonds made from her hair, advertising them through satirical videos. In the Netopticon, the panopticon in which we live using platforms such as Facebook and Google, our data are vacuumed up to generate profits in an extreme form of capitalism. Artist and curator Marc Garrett (www.furtherfield.org) says that Jennifer Lyn ...