10th November 2020
Notes: 10
How can we create digital products and services that people can—and do—trust? It’s a question that’s integral to our work at IF. It’s becoming increasingly important as people become more aware of the possible consequences of data being recorded, joined up and used by organisations.
(Re)narrating the societal cyborg: a definition of infrastructure, an interrogation of integration
The call for this special issue invites us to consider “integrated infrastructure as a response to climate change”. In doing so, it recapitulates a normative narrative wherein human beings play the protagonist in a struggle against climate change in the antagonistic role, and where infrastructure – integrated or otherwise – is the instrument of human action against it.
This narrative raises important questions, some of which are definitive: what exactly do we mean when we say “infrastructure”? What does it mean for an infrastructure to be “integrated”? And is the integration of infrastructure so defined desirable, or even achievable? It also begs a further question, namely: to what extent is infrastructure, integrated or otherwise, already complicit in anthropogenic climate change?
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Nvidia has a vision for the city of the future, and it takes the always-on surveillance we’re becoming accustomed to and pushes it to whole new levels. The company’s Metropolis intelligent video analytics platform applies deep learning to constantly process and contextualize the masses of data streaming from the ever-increasing number of cameras watching us every day.
It’s one thing to have cameras watching at all times, but another altogether to do something useful with the giant stack of data they’re producing day and night. Manpower costs make sitting and watching it all unfeasible, but computers taking advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence could. And this perfectly lines up with the new direction Nvidia has been pushing in for the last few years.
(via Nvidia’s slightly terrifying Metropolis platform paves the way for smarter cities)
“Smarter” Cities
Water unaffordable for millions of Americans
“If water rates continue rising at projected amounts, the number of US households unable to afford water could triple in five years, to nearly 36 percent.” That’s the conclusion from a study by Elizabeth Mack, an assistant geography professor at Michigan State University, which looked at water consumption, pricing, and demographic, and socioeconomic data.
This map includes “high-risk tracts” (in black), which are areas with high concentrations of families with incomes below $32,000 that currently cannot afford water bills. The “at-risk tracts” (in gray) are areas with high concentrations of families with incomes between $32,000 and $45,120 that are at-risk of being unable to afford rising water rates in the near future.
(via Water unaffordable for millions of Americans / Boing Boing)
(via The New Normal. Presentation of the Education Year at Strelka - YouTube)
looks like a fantastic course and what a line up of tutors and collaborators. Best of luck to all the students starting in Feb // Jay
Introducing AWS Snowmobile: Exabyte-Scale Data Transport - yes. That is a truck! #AWS #reInvent
Google Is Transforming NYC’s Payphones Into a ‘Personalized Propaganda Engine’
But LinkNYC marks a radical step even for Google. It is an effort to establish a permanent presence across our city, block by block, and to extend its online model to the physical landscape we humans occupy on a daily basis. The company then intends to clone that system and start selling it around the world, government by government, to as many as will buy. And every place that signs on will become another profit center in Google’s advertising business, even as it extends its near-monopoly on information about our online behavior to include our behavior in physical space as well.
“It’s a real-time, personalized propaganda engine,” Douglas Rushkoff, a New York–based media theorist and author of the bestselling Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, told the Voice, “a multibillion-dollar manipulation apparatus, customized not to meet our consumer desires, but to overcome our psychic defense mechanisms. And now you want to unleash that on the entire city of New York as a public service? I’m sorry, that’s a deal with the devil we really don’t need.”
Read more :: Google Is Transforming NYC’s Payphones Into a ‘Personalized Propaganda Engine’
Who owns the stack? /// JAY
Reblogged From thejaymo
These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries
Going stateless to maximize profits, multinational companies are vying with governments for global power. Who is winning?“Welcome to the age of metanationals”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/15/these-25-companies-are-more-powerful-than-many-countries-multinational-corporate-wealth-power/
Interesting seeing that term in FP Mag. I gave a talk in Jan 2015 shortly before transmediale kinda on this called ‘Towards a new corporate taxonomy -> multinational, transnational, metanational, stack’ Unfortunatly it wasnt recorded // Jay
The extensive focus on material modes of transmitting ideology in Mr. Robot suggests that the contradictions that frustrate Eliot — and by extension the majority of scholars, activists, and people interested in revolution—come from misunderstanding how the various capacities of The Stack are able to transmit contradictory signals that nevertheless mutually reinforce platform sovereignty. Who are we? Why do we not only accept, but desire oppression? Mr. Robot suggests that there is no one answer to either of these questions — but by tracing the various signals encoded on the many layers ofThe Stack, we can start to envision how desire and belief are transmitted, sensed, understood, acted-upon, codified, and performed. We can also engage in targeted disruptions of these signals, but may have a much harder time destroying the entire system. Ideology must not only be understood as semiotic (“why do we desire our own oppression”), it must also be understood in terms of its material mechanisms (“how are we oppressed”). As Bratton argues, no one person controls the mechanisms of The Stack. Rather, like so many signals on a switchboard, ideologies move along path dependencies, exist for a specific duration, are caught in feedback loops and interference patterns and perhaps mistaken for noise.
The Platform Sovereignties of Mr. Robot // https://medium.com/@RogerWhitson/the-platform-sovereignties-of-mr-robot-e41b05f17ebc#.riro7vjgr
Slightly behind posting this but relevant: Who owns the means of not dying? - Jay
Palestine has decried Israel’s practice of siphoning off water supplies from large areas of the occupied West Bank.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the office of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah said that Israel was “waging a water war against the Palestinians.
“Israel wants to prevent Palestinians from leading a dignified life and uses its control over our water resources to this end; while illegal Israeli settlements enjoy uninterrupted water service, Palestinians are forced to spend great sums of money to buy water that is theirs in the first place,” Hamdallah said in the statement.
Rami Hamdallah: Israel waging water war on Palestinians // http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/06/israel-cuts-water-supplies-west-bank-ramadan-160614205022059.html
Maybe we have mistaken The Cloud’s fiction of infinite storage capacity for history itself. It is a misunderstanding that hinges on a weird, sad, very human hope that history might actually end, or at least reach some kind of perfect equipoise in which nothing terrible could ever happen again. As though if we could only collate and collect and process and store enough data points, the world’s infinite vaporware of real-time data dashboards would align into some kind of ultimate sand mandala of total world knowledge, a proprietary data nirvana without terror or heartbreak or bankruptcy or death, heretofore only gestured towards in terrifying wall-to-wall Accenture and IBM advertisements at airports.
But databases alone are not archives any more than data centers are libraries, and the rhetorical promise of The Cloud is as fragile as the strands of fiber-optic cable upon which its physical infrastructure rests. The Internet is a beautiful, terrible, fraught project of human civilization.
"Ingrid Burrington, “Why Amazon’s Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country” (via frankfurtschooldropout)
New piece by the off mentioned, and generally fantastic Ingrid Burrington
“With every receding seam, from cable to code, comes a techno-political risk. Without edges we cannot know where we are nor through whom we speak” Julian Oliver writes while discussing stealth infrastructures in the urban environment. [1] Similarly, his colleague Danja Vasiliev remarks, “we hardly know what our device does behind our back.” [2] The network of networks within which we communicate and interact today is, to a great extent, based on infrastructures and devices that are increasingly disappearing, becoming invisible. And with such a disappearance, the user, if we follow the thought of the artist Olia Lialina, is “silently becoming invisible” too, losing his or her rights over the technology being employed. [3] Therefore, it seems that we have entered the era of “stacktivism,” a term which derives from Benjamin Bratton’s “Black Stack” and describes the invisibility of the infrastructures, the fact that we might have no understanding or access to them. The “stack” according to Bratton “staged the death of the user” while other kinds of nonhuman users, like the sensors and the algorithms, were at the same time empowered. [4] And as the “stack” reflects a new nomos for the relationship among technology, nature and human, it is also made clear that this non-transparency, opacity and invisibility concerns the functioning of the networked environment in its entirety, and the capturing of users’ interactions throughout their daily life. [5]….
Counter-Infrastructures: Critical Empowerment and Emancipation in a Networked World :: Daphne Dragona // Independent Curator and PhD Candidate, Department of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Absolutely fascinating essay that someone told me about last night at transmediale. More amazing references than you can shake a stick at :: Highly recommend reading the whole thing // JAY