Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What’s not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it’s hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It’s becoming clear that the tech industry’s promised “innovation” is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond ...

For The Download’s first free and open project, Deanna Havas offers a solution to earn back your membership donation once required to access The Download. By participating in Havas’s Affiliate Program (2013) the user can set up their own affiliate website to generate traffic to its host site, deannahavas.com. As an affiliate publisher, you will be reimbursed relative to how much traffic you drive to the site, which is calculated via metrics like pay per click and cost per impression. The package includes a small website, banner ads, and media ready to use for your microsite as well as step by step ...

For most people publishing creative work online, there is a growing sense of anxiety. While we have more online tools than ever to help operationalize and monetize creative businesses, the available options often feel mismatched with how we naturally create. We want work to be financially valued without compromising our integrity. We want to make meaningful work that we’re proud of, not please an algorithm. We want to share work in ways that feel right to us, not compete for attention on a feed. We want to feel seen without our creativity and identities being exploited. The broad industry of sharing ...

AI plays a crucial role in the global cultural ecosystem. It recommends what we should see, listen to, read, and buy. It determines how many people will see our shared content. It helps us make aesthetic decisions when we create media. In professional cultural production, AI has already been adapted to produce movie trailers, music albums, fashion items, product and web designs, architecture, etc. In this short book, Lev Manovich offers a systematic framework to help us think about cultural uses of AI today and in the future. He challenges existing ideas and gives us new concepts for understanding media, ...

Despite their ubiquity and relevance, data collection practices remain opaque and their carbon footprint has rarely been investigated. What is more, data collection is a key resource in the global supply chain of AdTech, the primary business model of the data economy system. The Carbolytics project, developed by artist and researcher Joana Moll in collaboration with researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, is a way of understanding the collective existence of cookies and their role in the outsourced production of carbon dioxide. The interactive web-based installation shows the average global volume of cookie traffic in real time and demonstrates how cookies parasitize ...

The notion of artificial intelligence may seem distant and abstract, but AI is already pervasive in our daily lives. Anatomy of an AI System analyzes the vast networks that underpin the “birth, life, and death” of a single Amazon Echo smart speaker, painstakingly compiling and condensing this huge volume of information into a detailed high-resolution diagram. This data visualization provides insights into the massive quantity of resources involved in the production, distribution, and disposal of the speaker.

At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions of human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Nonetheless, they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed. We offer up this exploded view map and essay as one way to begin seeing across a ...

Angela Nagle discusses Millennial values, Silicon Valley ideology, NGOs and moral fanaticism.

Research is everywhere. Architects incite action, design materials and archive cities. They capitalize upon the excess energy of practice to launch unsolicited experiments into the world, or sidestep clients by joining forces with government think tanks. Discussions from classrooms have found currency at town halls, and findings from construction sites have migrated into basement laboratories. Yet for all of its vitality, research eludes definition. The term describes everything and nothing, leaving its assumptions–the drive towards innovation, certainty, and influence, for example–unexamined. ARPA Journal is a forum for debates on what is applied research in architecture. We scrutinize techniques of inquiry to ...

The idea of being online is in danger of extinction from redundancy. The Internet has become the principal site of construction, defense, storage and dissemination of new knowledge and social identity alike. Facebook’s population will soon eclipse that of China, and its holdouts nonetheless have well-formed electric selves in the servers of the NSA. As our physical world is increasingly tapped, scanned, streamed, imaged and mapped in realtime, the province of offline is a shrinking territory. In each wave of digitization—the archival, the social, the physical—the evidence of its arrival and its path to maturity are the same: search. For David Joselit, ...

Since their previous episode about AI (episode 2), the conversation around AI has exploded and gone viral. Dall-e mini memes proliferated everywhere utilizing Dall-E mini now known as Craiyon, a text prompt AI image generator. An artist utilizing AI won first place in an art context, and the New York Times wrote about it. With that has also come skepticism, criticism, and fear regarding AI. William Wiebe is an artist and researcher whose work deals with machine perception, and created a project called SMPLverse which utilizes a synthetic data set created by Microsoft to train face tracking algorithms to translate facial ...

Within mediated conditions, at some level everything becomes reduced to data. How do art practices collect data, circulate it, and themselves become data? How do artists and organizations reckon with the production and circulation of knowledge in increasingly online media environments? Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition examined how forms of digital storytelling, ethics, access, governance, and data sovereignty are being practiced in other disciplines. By looking at how media-makers across diverse fields are engaging with new technological tools and practices, The Mediatic Edition considered how these paradigms map onto artistic practice. In Back Up Your Data!, respondents to Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition reflect on new ...