Re: <nettime> We are what we tweet: The Problem with a Big Data World when Everything You Say is Data

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Here's something interesting:

On 06/03/2013 07:04 PM, Fenwick Mckelvey wrote:

> ... we must come to terms with our own online activities
> feeding the appetites of algorithmically-driven machines designed to
> facilitate the expansion of profit and power by quantifying and
> modulating our desires.

This is a great text, particularly for the literary references and 
fundamentally because it recognizes how data-gathering feeds back into 
what the artist Sze Tsung Leong once called "control space": an urban 
environment outfitted with both sensors and screens, and designed in 
order to wrap itself around the constantly shifting parameters of 
publicly expressed affect and interest, until one of its seductive 
interfaces succeeds in capturing *you*.

On Sunday, as I drove by the croporate offices of the sinister 
data-aggregating and direct-marketing company Acxiom, in Aurora, 
Illinois - which itself is a statistical artifact that Thoman Pynchon or 
maybe William Gibson should have written about - I found myself thinking 
back to the evanescent and yet terribly concrete world of control space, 
which I had explored in 2007 in the text "Future Map: Or How the Cyborgs 
Learned to Sop Worrying and Love Surveillance." At that time I had some 
conclusions, which are close to, but still not quite the same as those 
presented in the paper by Fenwick Mckelvey and friends:

"One thing we could do is to create more precise images and more 
evocative metaphors of the neoliberal art of government, in order to 
heighten awareness of the ways that intimate desire is predicted and 
manipulated. Such images and metaphors are desperately lacking, along 
with a Karl Marx of cybercapitalism. But another, more important thing 
we can do is to dig into the existential present and transform the 
everyday machines, by hacking them into unexpected shapes and 
configurations that can provide collaborative answers to the spaces of 
control. Critical communities of deviant subjectivity, forming at the 
site of the eviscerated private/public divide, are not subcultural 
frivolities but attempts to reinvent the very basis of the political. 
What’s at stake is the elaboration of different functional rules for our 
collective games, which in today’s society cannot be put into effect 
without the language of technology."

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/future-map

In the conclusion to their paper, Mckelvey, Tiessen and Simcoe turn to a 
discussion of exploits and pranks, which they conceive as momentary 
subversive interruptions of the data-flow. The most suggestive example 
is a faked AP tweet saying that president Obama had been attacked, which 
caused a momentary 0.9% decline in the value of the S&P 500, amounting 
(for a few minutes) to the disappearance of $130 billion of stock-market 
value. While I have an irrespressible fondness for these kinds of hacks, 
I think they are ultimately trivial. In fact, much high-frequency 
trading (in the strict sense of the term) operates on a similar 
principle, to the extent that the algorithms offer false purchase 
orders, then retract them while simultaneously taking advantage of the 
perturbation of the information environment already effected by the 
false orders. At best, the prank cannot compete with the characteristic 
internal errors of the system itself: nothing on the scale of the 2010 
"flash crash" of the stock market has ever been carried out by a hacker.

What I meant by "critical communities of deviant subjectivity, forming 
at the site of the eviscerated private/public divide" has since been 
exemplified by the events of 2010-11, when the vast operation of 
information piracy and social hacking carried out by Wikileaks 
contributed to the unleashing of the Arab Spring, and when protesters 
around the world massively appropriated Facebook and Twitter, not to 
create perturbations within the control network, but to radically shift 
the rules of the attention economy away from screenic fascination and 
toward the embodied spaces of occupation. The result of this experience, 
among many groups of politicized hackers and Internet aficionados, has 
been the realization that there is a huge, simmering and at times 
explosive social conflict over the uses of the all-pervasive net, which 
can be twisted away from its dominant functions of 
simulation/stimulation and used instead as a tool for the 
direct-democratic and revolutionary investment of urban space with 
living, feeling, speaking bodies-on-the-ground. In Spain these events 
have been subjected to a vast and searching quantitative examination by 
the group DataAnalysis 15-M (http://datanalysis15m.wordpress.com). This 
study reveals that the participants of the Indignado movement were able 
to collectively generate affects, subjects of critical attention and 
emancipatory concepts in real time, within and against the flow of 
events on the ground (notably police repression) and events in the media 
sphere (disdain and disinformation from the established political 
parties and the punditocracy).

The idea that a simple blip in the information flow is the pinnacle of 
postmodern subversion dates back precisely to the days of Baudrillard 
and the conceit of hyperreality. The world we live in is different. 
Threatened by economic breakdown, civil war and climate change, it is a 
world whose miserable, and yet to be sure, tremendously powerful 
capacities of simulation are constantly cracking open to reveal their 
inadequacies, lies and abject failures on the ground. Critical 
intellectuals should not think inside the box of surveillance and 
informational modeling. They should light up and also follow the 
pathways that lead through it and outside it, to embodied conflicts over 
the life-and-death issues of the present.

best, Brian


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