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 ...

How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia? This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers in The Black Chamber, an exhibition, a symposium, an urban intervention and a publication. The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks. Not just an exhibition ...

Every time you connect to the internet, you pass through time, space, and law. Information is sent out from your computer all over the world, and sent back from there. This information is stored and tracked in multiple locations, and used to make decisions about you, and determine your rights. These decisions are made by people, companies, countries and machines, in many countries and legal jurisdictions. Citizen Ex shows you where those places are. Your Algorithmic Citizenship is how you appear to the internet, as a collection of data extending across many nations, with a different citizenship and different rights in ...

Decentralised Information Black Market ================================================================== "Darkleaks: Decentralised Cryptographic Information Black Market" Scheme by Peter Todd Code by Amir Taaki *Trustless provably fair information marketplace ############################### # WORK IN PROGRESS # ############################### * Distribute an encrypted file to the world. * Reveal some random section of the contents to prove the legitimacy of its contents using an algorithm for provably fair random selection to all parties. * People bid on the remaining parts. * Leaker redeeming funds automatically releases the ...

AI ethics has never been far from the industries it sought to critique. While originally designed to bring values such as fairness, accountability and transparency to Big Tech and its products, the lines between Big Tech’s PR initiatives and AI ethics funding has never been clear. In practice, AI ethics now operates as a means for the co-option of critics and to enable regulatory capture. It is used by corporations to create legitimacy and to further accumulate value. The result is that ‘ethics’ has now become a high-valued industrial commodity, and AI ethics its foundry. This anthology is a collective response ...

In the words of its designer, artist Benjamin Grosser, Go Rando “is a browser extension that obfuscates your feelings on Facebook. Every time you click ‘Like’, Go Rando randomly chooses one of the six ‘reactions’ for you. Over time, you appear to Facebook’s algorithms as someone whose feelings are emotionally ‘balanced’ “ — that is, your profile becomes obscured by false emotional noise, rendered less useful to Facebook’s algorithms. Grosser notes that Facebook’s “reactions” capacity enables and abets its expanding role in surveillance, government profiling, micro-targeting of advertisements, and emotional manipulation across the platform. Short of leaving the service entirely, ...

The works of US-based artist and programmer Ben Grosser have defined, revealed and defused how software activates the desire for more, as it follows the growth-obsessed corporate culture of Silicon Valley. His most recent project – presented at Aksioma Project Space – is the outcome of a new experiment that aims to generate “Software for Less”: less profit, less data and fewer users. It provides users with new tools to resist these tendencies and keep their agency in the digital era: a time where automated software systems increasingly take over every aspect of human existence, pushing the users to develop new ...

Between false hopes and facile critique, there is an emancipatory view of emerging technologies like blockchain. Jaya Klara Brekke reclaims this space for building the world that she wants to see. Her critical engagement with blockchain coincided with its rise to mainstream prominence, and she has remained a vital voice of critique ever since. From her perspective as a researcher, strategist and artist, she talks about the token economy, the impact of crypto on the wider monetary system, and the frequent futility of “good intentions” in the face of powerful social forces. Jaya’s research has focused on the political relevance of ...

This second November conversation in London about disobedience takes a conceptual approach to this legal notion with Elena Loizidou. Through her personal research, as well as the work she curated around this notion in a 2010 symposium and a 2013 book, we attempt to consider disobedience for the political subjectivity it involves vis-a-vis the law. We do so not solely through the canonical figure of the civil objection (Rosa Parks), but also through more complex examples involving notions of selfishness, privacy and apolitics in the work of Hannah Arendt, William Burroughs, Emma Goldman and Walter Benjamin. We also look at how ...

Within ethical design practices, informed user consent is a key requirement in the effort to invert the power imbalances fostered by the digital platforms that enable platform owners (organizations, governments, etc.) to build data profiles and make decisions about people. Much work has been completed by designers, activists, and aligned policymakers to translate data governance policies into plain-language and comprehensible consent. But the question remains: How well do these efforts account for the broader socio-technical power structures inherent in all personal data collection? Through a series of interviews with advocates for individuals and communities whose lives are often dramatically affected ...

In this episode, Noah and Vivian discuss privacy in the world of NFTs and web3, a space that is inherently transparent. Is it uncomfortable to be publicly yourself online all the time? What if you could escape yourself? How do artists create work that speaks to privacy or invert the transparency of the blockchain? They collect a piece from a project called Everything I Own by anonymous artist Stardrop, as well as a piece from blind auction project Mars Maiers. Stardrop photographs all 1026 items that they own (including love letters, vaccination card, tax returns, drivers license), and the project is intended ...

Project Seen is a typeface that is concerned with privacy and the interception of our communications by the NSA. It automatically strikes through so called “spook words” as they are written. Try typing anywhere on this website. “Seen” is a font that has a preloaded set of sensitive “spook words” that the NSA and other agencies are using to scan through our documents. The typeface can be used in any popular software such as Illustrator, Indesign, Word or in a browser. It can be used normally to write text as any other font does, but once one of these trigger words is ...