Yearly Archives: 2014

Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Doubt Factory”

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By Cory Doctorow

Source: BoingBoing.net

Paolo Bacigalupi is one of science fiction’s most versatile writers. From his justly lauded dystopian debut novel The Windup Girl to his environmental YA thriller Ship Breaker to his ha-ha-only-serious zombies-apocalypse-as-allegory-for-race-in-America Zombie Baseball Beatdown, he’s never been shy about switching modes and moods. All his books have a two things in common: technical brilliance and nuanced, important treatments of social issues. It’s a killer combination.

His latest novel, a YA thriller called The Doubt Factory, is right in the Bacigalupi pocket in that its storytelling is utterly different from anything else he’s published, deals with a vital social issue, and is a technical marvel of the form. Specifically, it’s a thriller about corporate distortion of communications whose third act is so tense, so taut, and so fantastically turned that I didn’t move a muscle except to turn the page for an hour while I read straight through about 150 pages’ worth of buildup and climax.

The Doubt Factory‘s protagonist is a girl called Alix who attends an elite prep school that is paid for through her father’s high-flying PR clients. As the book opens, Alix is bored in class, watching out the window, when she spies a young black man who exudes calmness and mastery. When the school’s authoritarian principal comes out to chase the intruder off the school lawn, the guy lays the principal out with one punch, eases him to the ground, and makes his way calmly off campus before the slow-moving rent-a-cops even know what’s going on.

This is Alix’s first encounter with “2.0,” a guerrilla protest group about which almost nothing is known, except that they appear to be attacking her dad’s clients. But as 2.0 grows more audacious in its actions at Alix’s school, it quickly becomes apparent that their real target is Alix’s family — and possibly Alix herself. Alix’s life becomes a benign jail of private bodyguards who shadow her every step, punctuated by ninja-like visits from the young black man, who has the ability to alter his appearance and slip right through even the tightest security cordons. And now, Alix is asking questions about her dad’s line of work — questions she’s never asked before.

In The Doubt Factory, Bacigalupi expertly tells the tale of how FUD-generating “communications consultants” have distorted our public discourse on behalf of their fantastically profitable clients, for whom a little delay in regulatory action is worth billions, and for whom the occasional class-action payout is just part of the cost of doing business, expertly calibrated and factored into the bottom line.

Bacigalupi also explores modern protest tactics, dramatizing an incisive critique of hacktivism and leaking and pointing to ways of stirring up trouble that might have a deeper and longer impact than what has gone before.

But as good as The Doubt Factory is as polemic, it’s even better as a novel. There is just so much nail-biting tension, so many unexpected turns and twists in the caper plots that run throughout the book, and it’s so well done, that it’s certain to find a large and appreciative audience. The combination of a book with a conscience and a set of serious adrenal glands is unlikely and extremely effective.

Cynicism, Recession, and the Resurgence of Cyberpunk

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By Marshall Sandoval

Source: PopMatters

Human nature might be augmented and highly channeled by technology, but human nature stays the same. And that tech might actually amplify all the worst things about us too.

Cyberpunk has seen a recent resurgence in video games. Seemingly every game developer working today has a William Gibson book tucked under their arm or follows @swiftonsecurity (a satirical Twitter account that imagines a Taylor Swift consumed with cyber security). Cyberpunk video games are pervasive, including cyberpunk game jam projects on itch.io, Twine games, indie titles, and major AAA releases. All of these projects embrace cyberpunk themes and aesthetics. Observers credit the current trend to a number of cyclical and cultural factors. After talking to the indie developers behind a number of exciting cyberpunk titles at the center of this resurgence, I believe that the creators of these games are overwhelmingly inspired by the headlines in today’s newspapers.

It seems like no coincidence that these games have all appeared in a short time period following the economic recession. On the most basic level of analysis, it seems that these games may be providing a sense of escape from recent economic events. Last Life developer Sam Farmer notes, “I’m gonna go back to my film school class on Sci-Fi and Fantasy and say that it’s escapism. Horror, in general, and escapism, in particular, is often more popular in times of economic downturn, when you want to be somewhere else.”

Garrett Cooper’s Black Ice is an action game which casts the player as a hacker taking down corporate servers. Promoting the game, he’s found that cyberpunk narratives may be popular for reflecting reality as much as for providing an escape. He says, “I’ve talked to people about my game. I say, ‘All the corporations are evil.’ So they’re like, ‘Oh. So you’re talking about real life?’ I’m like, ‘No. Not exactly.’ That’s what people feel. The fantasy of being the one guy that can take something technological and turn it against the corporation.”

Games writer Austin Walker is an academic and cyberpunk superfan who sees the same throughline in these games and the literary roots of the genre. Walker says, “A key to traditional cyberpunk again and again is that there is economic inequality. We are positioning ourselves somewhere on that scale of how we feel about this stuff. Cyberpunk stories do that too. Usually they position the hero at the bottom of that; they’re usually in or near poverty.” In a time of extreme real-world inequality, cyberpunk stories locate players in a fantasy of rising up to subvert the system and taking down greedy corporations.

David Pittman’s indie project Neon Struct deals with a fictional near-future surveillance state. The game was heavily influenced by the recent leaks about actual domestic surveillance in the present day in the United States. Pittman says, “Edward Snowden’s release of NSA documents in 2013 was an essential part of the inception of Neon Struct (formerly Die Augen der Welt, or ‘The Eyes of the World’). I have strong feelings about the abuse of surveillance by the U.S. government, and I’ve known for close to a year that I wanted to make a game about it.” He’s quick to add, “Despite my own interest and leaning in the real world debate over mass surveillance, I am developing a way to introduce the story, which does not require the player character to actually leak any classified information. I don’t want to assume that the player shares my biases.” Nonetheless, it’s clear that the forthcoming project was informed by recent events.

Other examples of indie games providing commentary on and gaining inspiration from world events abound. Brigador is an isometric cyberpunk shooter with an extremely stylish trailer, and developer Jack Monahan lists a surprising influence. Monahan says, “While I’m not sure if the author would agree with the genre classification {of cyberpunk}, my brother and I both read and enjoyed (and were worried by) a book called Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham. Like William Gibson said, the future caught up to all of his writing, more or less. We basically are living in a dystopic future”. Notably, Monahan made these statements before the recent military-style urban clashes in Ferguson, Missouri. The aforementioned Last Life is shaped by real world advances in medicine and philosophical debates about transhumanism. Matt Conn is seeking to expand LGBT representation in the games space with the cyberpunk RPG R.O.M. He says, “Because I did GaymerX and prior to that I did a startup that was very successful and then crashed. Seeing how all that happened, I feel like I have an interesting perspective of the tech scene and the LGBT rights scene.” These varied examples show the differing events influencing today’s cyberpunk boom.

As strongly as these games are influenced by the socio-political climate, it is reductionist to say this is the only thing bringing cyberpunk back into prominence. Again, Austin Walker says, “It’s tempting to just say, ‘Oh that’s happening again. We’re getting concerned again about things like privatization and inequality.’ I think that’s part of it. I don’t know if I’d be comfortable saying, ‘This is the one reason why’”. Many developers also noted the power of nostalgia as a reason for the influx of cyberpunk games. Alex Preston a developer behind Hyper Light Drifter says, “I think my generation is coming into its own, creatively, and we have a fondness for these themes and ideas. A lot of us grew up with books, films, and games that touched on these themes, and it bleeds through in our creative work. I think nostalgia is a powerful force.”

Likewise, Brendan Chung, creator of ‘90s-influenced hacker game Quadrilateral Cowboy has noticed the cyclical nature of cyberpunk themes. He says, “My guess is that the people who grew up fiddling with old PC tech are now at an age where they now have the skillset and financial means to make their own games. Now that we can make games, we’re making things that harken back to one of the things that got us interested in games in the first place.” Nostalgia for ‘80s and ‘90s cyberpunk is another likely force bringing these kinds of games back to the games market.

Additionally, I kept hearing indie developers suggest their own outlook about the state of the world today is extremely bleak. Conn says, “On a more philosophical note, this is a way of writing about the future we kind of want to see. Even if it’s dystopian or dark. I think that for a lot of us, it’s very scary going into the future.” A similarly grim outlook is shared by Monahan. He says, “I think the dystopic elements of cyberpunk point to a certain cynicism that things aren’t going to get any better. Human nature might be augmented and highly channeled by technology, but human nature stays the same. And that tech might actually amplify all the worst things about us too.” Monahan also sees this cynicism in the nostalgia that drives the cyberpunk resurgence. He adds, “So much great work from the ‘80s was in a similar vein. I think of Snake Plissken’s deadpan response to news that the president’s plane has gone down: ‘President of what?’. There’s a disillusionment from the classic era of cyberpunk that makes a revival now seem fairly natural, I think.” Natural or not, the revival is in full force, and it’s becoming a strong and subversive undercurrent in the indie games space.

Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance

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The same technologists who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students.

By Jessy Irwin

Source: Model View Culture

Since 2011, billions of dollars of venture capital investment have poured into public education through private, for-profit technologies that promise to revolutionize education. Designed for the “21st century” classroom, these tools promise to remedy the many, many societal ills facing public education with artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, and other technological advancements.

They are also being used to track and record every move students make in the classroom, grooming students for a lifetime of surveillance and turning education into one of the most data-intensive industries on the face of the earth. The NSA has nothing on the monitoring tools that education technologists have developed in to “personalize” and “adapt” learning for students in public school districts across the United States.

(Mega)data Collection + Analysis

“Adaptive”, “personalized” learning platforms are one of the most heavily-funded verticals in education technology. By breaking down learning into a series of tasks, and further distilling those tasks down to a series of clicks that can be measured and analyzed, companies like Knewton (which has raised $105 million in venture capital), or the recently shuttered inBloom (which raised over $100 million from the Gates Foundation) gather immense amounts of information about students into a lengthy profile containing personal information, socioeconomic status and other data that is mined for patterns and insights to improve performance. For students, these clickstreams and data trails begin when they are 5 years old, barely able to read much less type in usernames and passwords required to access their online learning portals.

Data collection and number crunching aren’t the only technologies being explored to revolutionize education– technology billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates funded a $1.1 million project to fit middle-school students with biometric sensors to monitor their response and engagement levels during lessons, and advocated a $5 billion program to install video cameras in every classroom to record teachers for evaluation.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a law put in place in 1974 to protect student academic records, does nothing to protect student data when it is in the hands of education technology companies. Instead, FERPA threatens to take federal funding away from schools who are found to have breached student privacy while it fails to mandate bare minimum security standards for the storage and transmission of student data. In fact, a recent revision of FERPA increased the power that companies have to collect and mine student data.  Though lawmakers and privacy advocates are regularly outraged at the immense volume of student data freely floating through the web, the repeated failure to create legislation that protects student data from being used for profit is astounding.

One thing is clear: those who have the power to protect student privacy will not do so as long as they can continue to subsidize the cost of public education with student data.

Internet Censorship in Schools

In most educational institutions, the vast majority of IT operations are focused on monitoring, filtering and blocking web traffic instead of building secure networks that safeguard student records and sensitive behavioral data. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the widespread adoption of web filtering software tools in K-12 schools. Usage of these technologies is required for compliance with programs like E-Rate, which grant federal money to schools to fund internet access for their students.

To be eligible for funding from the E-Rate program, schools are required to comply with federal regulations that ban access to websites displaying pornography, graphic material, or any other that could otherwise be judged as immoral, improper or lewd. More often than not, this subjective criteria is determined by the opinions and belief systems of school administrators under political pressure to deny students access to content on controversial issues about topics like evolution, birth control and sex education. These decisions disproportionately affect young girls and LGBTQ students by denying them access to sites that provide important information about their rights, their developing bodies, their sexuality and their access to contraceptives. In the case of Securly, the first filtering tool designed for schools, the controls set by IT and administration for web access can extend far beyond the walls of the school and determine what content students can access while using school- issued machines from their home internet connections.

Despite the many positive contributions of the internet in the distribution and dissemination of knowledge across the planet, students are regularly denied access to valuable information that could positively impact their learning… all to safeguard a small percentage of federal budget money granted to their schools. The implications of this are particularly severe for low-income students who do not have access to the Internet at home; without the ability to freely access the web on their own terms, their digital literacy skills lag behind those of their affluent peers. Though teachers request better and broader internet access for students in their classrooms, administrator-imposed blocks and filters on school internet leave most students woefully unprepared to navigate the realities of the web. When students do find a way around the tools used to limit their access to the outside world (this happened with a group of students who were given iPads in the Los Angeles United School district last year), they’re labelled as “hackers” or miscreants, and disciplined for using Tor, a tool popular among students for anonymous web browsing and circumventing blacklists that ban websites from school networks.

Social Media Surveillance

Schools are adopting many other surveillance technologies with unprecedented reach into the private communications and lives of students and their families. In Lower Merion, PA, a suburb outside of Philadelphia, educators engaged remote administration tools on students’ laptops to regularly spy on their activities while at home. In a case that made its way into federal courts, one student was punished by administrators who mistook candy pictured through his laptop’s camera for drugs. While the full extent of the spying was never exposed, parents and students have expressed concern about educators having the ability to watch young girls undress in the privacy of their homes, unaware that they were being watched through their school-issued computers.

In 2013, the Glendale Unified School District in Glendale, CA took a move straight from the NSA surveillance handbook by seeking out a $40,000 contract with Geo Listening, a social media monitoring company that charges schools to eavesdrop on student social media chatter. While the company claims to only access posts that are public in the school districts they work with, and says it works closely with school districts to tailor their monitoring programs to prevent cyberbullying, suicide and active shooter incidents, it is very easy— too easy, in fact— to use such technologies to identify and target students who have been labeled deviant or delinquent within their communities, or who are otherwise outspoken and critical of their teachers and schools.

Schools are also demanding access to students’ social media communications in ways that severely harm their constitutionally protected rights to free speech. In Minnewaska, MN, a female student who complained about a hall monitor’s behavior in a Facebook post was questioned and given in-school suspension. Later, when a parent reported the student for “sexting” over Facebook with a classmate, she was removed from class again as a group of educators and a police officer armed with a taser demanded that the student hand over her password. They then read private communications that took place outside of school through her Facebook account. After being pulled from class multiple times, suspended from school, and barred from attending a school field trip (the same punishment was not doled out to the male student involved in the messaging), the ACLU stepped in to defend the student’s right to privacy and free speech in communications outside of school property. Though the ruling in the case upheld students’ protection under the 1st and 4th amendments, school districts around the country continue to demand access to students’ social media accounts and threaten to mark students’ academic records to make it difficult to get into a desired university or to seek other avenues for continued education.

Physical Surveillance

In addition to the online monitoring taking place in schools, there are many surveillance mechanisms in place to enforce physical security in public schools. Since the shootings that took place at Virginia Tech in 2007, and again after those that took place in Sandy Hook, CT in 2012, technology companies have launched myriad tools designed to minimize the potential loss of life in the next active shooting incident at a school. Some of these technologies include:

By preying on the absolute worst fears of administrators and parents across the country, technology companies are earning millions of dollars selling security “solutions” that do not accurately address the threat model these tools claim to dispel. School districts that purchase these systems further perpetuate the farce of security theater and infringe on students’ rights to privacy and individual freedom.

A Lifetime of Surveillance

When we develop and use educational technologies that monitor a student’s every moment in school and online, we groom that student for a lifetime of surveillance from the NSA, from data brokers, from advertisers, marketers, and even CCTV cameras. By watching every move that students make while learning, we model to students that we do not trust them– that ultimately, their every move will be under scrutiny from others. When students recognize that they are being watched, they begin to act differently– and from that very moment they begin to cede one small bit of freedom at a time.

Though the education technology revolution continually promises a silver bullet that will be a great democratizing force for all of society’s ills, it categorically disregards the patriarchal power structures and biases that both legitimate and perpetuate discrimination against minorities and marginalized groups. Despite it being well within the scope of educational technology tools to track, identify and expose biases towards groups of students, technologists avoid implementing small changes that monitor educator performance and correct for unconscious biases that negatively affect student learning. Because the surveillance taking place in schools is typically based on qualitative criteria like morality, appropriateness and good behavior, these technologies extend current practices and prejudices that perpetuate injustices against marginalized groups.

There are few to no safeguards built into the online and offline monitoring systems to protect students from the abuse of these tools. Young female students who are active on social media can be unfairly targeted, slut-shamed and disciplined for suggestive language that takes place outside of school, while their male counterparts are not held equally accountable for participating in sexually charged online conversations. Youth of color, a group that is disproportionately stereotyped as angry, aggressive, and unpredictable by educators, can easily be monitored, disciplined, and entered into the juvenile justice system for any outburst that could vaguely be misinterpreted as a threat to a homogeneous caucasian school culture. Any student grappling with issues of abuse, depression, disability, gender identity or sexuality could easily be discovered by online surveillance tools, stigmatized and outed to their teachers, parents and wider community.

Education technologists also continue to widen the digital divide between affluent and economically oppressed. Despite an industry-wide insistence that technology is not being developed to replace educators in the classroom, many poor school districts faced with massive budget cuts are implementing experimental blended learning programs reliant on “adaptive” and “personalized” software as a way to mitigate the effect of large class sizes on student learning. This means that students who attend costly private schools or live within rich school districts that can afford to employ more educators and maintain smaller class sizes receive much more personalized instruction from their teachers. Instead of receiving much-needed interaction and personalized learning directly from educators, poor students living in disadvantaged communities receive instruction from educational software that collects their data (which is likely to be sold), and have less individual instruction time from teachers than their affluent counterparts.

By developing technologies that collect, track, record, analyze every move a student makes both online and off, technologists and investors and educators are ensuring that today’s students will have less privacy than any other generation that came before them, threatening to make privacy and anonymity unattainable for future generations. Though the surveillance mechanisms at play in education technologies affect the privacy of millions of students who pass through the education system each year, this system is a profound, persistent threat to the privacy and individual liberty of LGBTQ students, low-income students, and students of color who have already been so severely failed by the status quo.

Ironically, the same technologists and investors who protest against the NSA’s metadata collection programs are the ones profiting the most from the widespread surveillance of students across the country, by building educational tools with the same function.

Quantum Strangeness & Becoming Oneself

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By toomajj

Source: NOEMAYA

Our classical world is composed of mutually exclusive alternatives: Everything is either something or something else; it is a this or a that, though we may be unaware of these identities due to ignorance. A color is always either red or not red; two socks in a closed box are either a pair or not a pair whether we look inside or not. There is never a middle case in the classical world.

Quantum world, however, is quite different. Besides the two/many mutually exclusive alternatives everything in between too exists. A color is at once all colors until we pick one color by looking at it! A particle has no particular place until we force it to pick a place by measuring its place!

It turns out that mutually exclusive alternatives, our classical world, is only a small and often filtered portion of the underlying reality. Which reality we pick is determined by which reality we are inclined to pick, namely the reality that we desire.

The mutually exclusive alternatives of the classical world constitute a space of all possibilities existing at once, that is, a state of pure potentiality.

The logical principle that collapses in the quantum world is the principle of identity which says “Everything is itself.” Not anymore: Everything is both itself and not-itself until we make it into something that it is. In the quantum realm this new peculiarity is translated into the indistinguishability of identical particles. Quantum particles don’t have a history any more; they don’t have a memory or identity. They can at once choose to turn out at the other corner of the universe without being subject to Einstein’s principles of relativity. In fact, entanglement is a consequence of particles lacking fixed identities: No two electrons can be distinguished in principle.

Identity is a construct that we ourselves carry on our shoulders; it has no substantial reality; it is just like a name we are attached to. For us to be our ideal person we only need to be it; that is it. Actions don’t make people; it is people who make actions.

Data and census don’t determine people’s behavior; it is people who determine data and census.

You should not think twice about what you want to be, its chances, whether it is possible or not, or what the data or others say. You determine data and others by what and who you choose to be. Then choose to be your own idol and hero.

You are what you consider yourself to be.

Saturday Matinee: Superstar

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Is banned art-film, ‘Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,’ the weirdest music movie ever made?

By Amber Frost

Source: Dangerous Minds

Director Todd Haynes is well-known for his arty, fictionalized depictions of music iconography. Velvet Goldmine was a glam rock epic, with characters modeled after Bowie and Iggy, while I’m Not There features seven different actors portraying “fictional” facets of Bob Dylan’s personality or mystique. Both films blur reality with stylized interpretations, but neither takes even a fraction of the liberties Haynes exercised with his 1987 grad school student film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

The film opens up on Karen’s death, then flashes back to narrate her rise to fame. It’s a spasmodic format—switching between interviews with peripheral music industry people, random footage and fascinatingly elaborate mise-en-scène reenactments staged with Barbie dolls and melodramatic voice-overs. In reference to Karen’s anorexia, Haynes actually whittled down her Barbie effigy with a knife for later scenes, mimicking the progressive emaciation of her body. It’s a dark portrayal of a slow death, Karen and Barbie, both icons of American perfection, wasting away before our eyes.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is technically illegal to exhibit, although since the advent of YouTube, it’s a bit of a moot point (the upload embedded below was posted in 2012). Karen’s brother Richard sued Haynes for copyright infringement. MOMA has a copy but even they aren’t allowed to screen it. Even if Haynes hadn’t used Carpenters songs, there’s a good chance Richard Carpenter would’ve found basis for a lawsuit. Haynes portrays Karen as the victim of her narcissistic and tyrannical family, even suggesting Richard was closeted.

It’s difficult not to be sympathetic to Richard Carpenter who probably viewed the film as mere ghoulish, exploitative sensationalism. It’s a strangely invasive and voyeuristic piece of art, and the argument could be made that it’s totally unethical in its ambiguous, semi-biographical fiction. It’s also totally hypnotic, with a compelling narrative and a pioneering experimentalism that makes it one of the great cult classics.

The Birth of the Time-Motion Human

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By Dale Lately

Source: The Baffler

In a darkened room, a woman lies watched by an infra-red camera as she sleeps. It monitors her breathing, her movements, the flicker of her eyelids. Some hours later it stings her with a painful electric shock. She wakes, tumbles out of bed and into the restroom, whereupon a chip installed in her toothbrush tracks her arm movements. She’s photographed, silently, every thirty seconds. As she sets off in the morning her location is logged and data is streamed on the steps she takes. Her pulse and calorie count are recorded and sent to unseen observers. She has a dog at her side. The dog’s data is logged as well.

Such a tableau would be the envy of any futuristic dictatorship. In fact, the devices outlined above are all available on the consumer market now, for voluntary use. The impetus towards tracking our lives with smartphones, apps and stats represents a massive growth area into which companies like Jawbone, MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Runtastic, MapMyRun, Foodzy, GymPact, and Fitocracy are flooding. Alongside the Nike+ Fuelband, there’s the popular Fitbit Flex, a wristband that counts the steps you take by day and the number of times you stir in your sleep. There are smart cups to track what you drink and wristbands programmed to give you electric shocks for not achieving your goals. There’s even a “Fitbit for your vagina” in the form of the KGoal Smart Kegel Trainer—a Kickstarter project designed to track kegels, exercises for women’s pelvic floor muscles to improve childbirth and continence, and for helping them to achieve a better “clench strength” via Bluetooth.

With all this biofeedback now available on our phones, the act of walking, living and breathing can—at least to the “datasexuals” who embrace it—be an ongoing project with limitless potential for improvement. But might such potential also lead to a kind of “Taylorism within”? Applying scientific management to twentieth century business created a workforce optimized for maximum efficiency. Likewise, life-tracking is encouraging us to internalize this dream by optimizing ourselves. Rather than a tool for liberation, we’re using the tech, in other words, to tune our lives for maximum “productivity.”

Perhaps none of this should seem surprising for a consumer society that drives on anxiety. If bad breath had to be invented as a disease mouthwash would help to cure a century ago, now the Quantified Self movement suggests we must live in permanent beta, to aim not just at maintaining ourselves but to become “better than well.” And so, Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done and websites like Lifehacker help to turn our lives into a series of sanctioned tasks and goals, where one must carry a “Surprise Journal” to find areas for self-improvement in one’s life, and sleep comes in the form of “power” naps. There’s the Lumo Back, a gizmo that monitors the tricky process of sitting in a chair, while the Narrative wearable camera snaps your life twice a minute. Time management lessons are now available for kids, while the iPotty seems to give toddlers the message that they shouldn’t take their eyes off a screen even when satisfying the most basic of human needs.

Silicon Valley, naturally, is more than happy to export the mantra of ongoing product optimization to our bodies: life-hacking fanatics talk of “upgrades” and “body hacks,” with often obsessive results. In a Financial Times article that marked a mainstream recognition of the movement, Tim Ferriss–author of The 4-Hour Body–claimed that he could teach people how to lose weight without exercising, work on two hours’ sleep, and have a fifteen-minute orgasm, while bio-hacker Dave Asprey was adamant that he’s made himself twenty years younger and forty IQ points smarter through life-tracking and smart pills (“I’ve rewired my brain,” he said). All of this task management can become a considerable task in itself, leading to the piling up of Catch 22 ironies—like the fact that developers are now working on smartphone apps to solve the problem of people spending too much time on their smartphones.

Luckily, some are questioning the use of intimate monitoring devices in our lives. The information asymmetry provided by the emergent “Internet of Things” may create a class of uninsurable people, while ”digital Taylorism”—the tracking and tagging of workers like cattle—has been roundly criticized as it has begun to emerge at companies like Amazon. What’s disquieting about the popularization of life-tracking is the voluntary desire to become “time-motion humans,” to subject ourselves to a self-imposed surveillance state. “Track everything. Track your entire day—wherever you go,” says the website for the LumoBack. “VESSYL AUTOMATICALLY KNOWS AND TRACKS EVERYTHING YOU DRINK,” the Vessyl “smart mug” warns us in stark capitals. And once we’ve volunteered for this intimate biological scrutiny, we’re keen to publicize the results—using tools like the Withings scale, which threatens to broadcast our weight gains to our Twitter followers as “encouragement.” Self-Improvement Macht Frei.

Since the invention of the forceps we’ve been introducing machinery into our bodies to improve our lives (the aforementioned KGoal is actually based on a biofeedback device from the 1940s by Dr. Arnold Kegel), and undoubtedly many of these trackers are helping to make people healthier. But life tracking also comes from a certain ideological background, one that denigrates macro-interventions in our lives (nationalized health care) in favor of individual micro-solutionism (becoming our own gym instructors and fitness trainers).

We’re living in an entrepreneurial model of humanity, a vision of human beings as start-ups, where unfitness or obesity are viewed as “bugs” to be fixed rather than as products of an economy based on long hours and precarious work. Daily exercise has always been an individual responsibility, but sharing our biofeedback via social media encourages people to compete like businesses, vying for better health scores with the personal data that makes us special. (Flex boasts that it reflects “your stats, not any average Joe’s.”) Here we can all be Superman—“Join over 141,000 other people who want to discover their inner superhero,” urges website Superheroyou—while, back in the complex, unquantifiable real world, we often struggle to maintain control over the most basic facts of our finances and job prospects.

The Quantified Self literature is full of such fantasizing. It all treats the body as a fun challenge, a puzzle to be solved. We see this in the current trend towards adding game-like features to the process of life tracking, which leads to some quite startlingly intimate results (“Spreadsheets,” an app that promises to gamify your sex life, has the user get on the bed and talk dirty to a computer). Even antenatal workouts aren’t immune: the KGoal promises gamification in forthcoming product updates for those who fancy comparing their pelvic thrust scores to those of their peers.

The friendly rivalry that has always been a part of amateur fitness starts to look less inspiring, and more controlling, when it’s built into the architecture of smartphones and social media. It’s more like a crowd-sourced version of what philosopher Michel Foucault termed “Biopower,” the control over our bodies wielded by states and their institutions. But in this version, it’s not the institutions; we control ourselves, and each other.

As more and more aspects of our lives are seen as legitimate targets for intrusion by technology, the gaze inevitably falls on the newly born. Start-ups like Sproutling, Owlet, and Mimo are springing up to replace old-fashioned baby monitors with comprehensive, round-the-clock surveillance (temperature, pulse, breathing, position, room ambience) as well as all the attendant data crunching. These infants may be the first humans to grow up entirely in the lens of machines, with the process of rearing having been refashioned as a high-tech, high-maintenance project, requiring endless inputs from both parent and child alike. They will be the first “time-motion babies”: faster, happier, more productive, in the words of Radiohead’s Ok Computer.

Will they really be happier, versed as they will be, since birth, in the techniques of maximizing their sleep, optimizing their nutrients, and tracking the number of steps they walk? It seems doubtful, but then, it’s impossible to really tell when we talk about happiness—even Silicon Valley hasn’t worked out how to put a number on that.

 

Dale Lately writes about culture and communications and has contributed to the Guardian, 3:AM Magazine, OpenDemocracy, Litro and Pop Matters. His regular musings can be found at @dalelately and www.dalelately.blogspot.com.

Franco Berardi on the Digital Colonization of Human Experience

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By Franco Berardi

Source: Adbusters

The Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica was essentially a process of symbolic and cultural submission.

The “superiority” 
of the colonizers lay on the operational effectiveness of their technical production. The colonization destroyed the cultural environment in which indigenous communities had been living for centuries: the alphabetic technology, the power of the written word overwhelmed, jeopardized and finally superseded the indigenous cultures. The conquistadors re-coded the cultural universe of nowadays Mexico and Central America.

Before the arrival of the Spanish invaders Malinche (Malinalli in Nahuatl language, Marina for the Spaniards), the daughter
 of a noble Aztec family, was given away as 
a slave to passing traders after her father died and her mother remarried. By the time Cortés arrived, she had learned the Mayan dialects spoken in the Yucatan while still understanding Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. As a youth she was given as tribute again, this time to the invaders.

She became the lover of Cortés and accompanied him as interpreter. She translated the words exchanged by Cortés and Moctezuma, king of the Aztec population of Tenochtitlan, and she translated the conqueror’s words when he met crowds of indigenous persons. She translated for Nahuatl-speaking people the words of Christian conquerors and of Christian priests. The Christian message melted with pre-colonisation mythologies, and the modern Mexican culture emerged. She and Cortés had a child, Martín, the first Mexican. She betrayed her own people by linking with the invaders. By the moral point of view, however, she owed nothing to her own people who had sold her into slavery, and treated her as a servant. She betrayed the conquerors, too, though they did not realize it as such.

Malinche is the ultimate symbol of the end of a world, and also the symbol of the formation of a new semiotic and symbolic space. Only when you are able to see the collapse as the end of a world, can a new world be imagined. Only when you are free from hope (which is the worst enemy of intelligence) can you start seeing a new horizon of possibility. This is the lesson that Malinche is teaching us.

DEMOCRACY

On 31 October 2011, George Papandreou announced his government’s intentions to hold a referendum for the acceptance of the terms of a Eurozone bailout deal. He wanted the Greek people to decide if the diktat of the financial class that was strangling Greek society would be accepted or rejected. Overnight, the elected Prime Minister of Greece was obliged to resign. In the very place where it was invented and named twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was finally cancelled. It will never again come to life. Financial abstraction has swallowed the destiny of billions of people. European workers’ salaries have been halved in the last ten years and unemployment and precariousness are on the rise. Meanwhile, profits skyrocket.

WAR

The Eurasian continent is heading toward a proliferation of fragmentary conflict. At the same time, the infinite war launched by Cheney and Bush has paved the way to the establishment of the Caliphate. In Japan, the Prime Minister travels the world looking for allies against China. In India, a racist mass murderer (neoliberal of course) has been elected Prime Minister. In Europe, a Euro-Russian war is in the making at the Ukrainian border. In Ferguson, Missouri, another racialized killing reveals the American police state and the poverty industrial complex — two million homeless in the US and counting. In Gaza, Israel bombards the world’s largest open air prison and blames the victims, most of them children, for dying while the world looks on. In Northern Africa, Western powers prepare for the next season of Gaddafi blowback. In Liberia, Ebola fans the flames of civil and regional war, one bleeding eyeball at a time. In Mexico, a momentary silence shrouds the bloodiest drug war humanity has ever known, with cartels ranking among the wealthiest corporations.

While capitalism will continue to thrive thanks to massive slavery and eco-catastrophe, the next 20 years will be marked by the clash between financial abstraction and biofascism. A social, cognitive breakdown is estranging the masses from the body, so the decerebrated body is taking the form of aggression. Those who have been lost in the competition react under the banners of aggressive identification. We can even see fascism revived by the vengeful spirit of the dispossessed.

BIO-FINANCIAL POWER

Nation states are over, stripped by the global machine
 of finance, computation and all-pervading behavioral Big Data algorithms. Global corporations are replacing nation states as holders of power. We now embrace the first stages of the automation of mind, language and emotions … the architecture of bio-financial power. Power, in fact, is no longer political or military. It is based more and more on the penetration of techno-linguistic automatisms into the sphere of language. Soon, life will be based on the automation of cognitive activity. Who cares if the US military machine is running on empty because of Bush’s self-defeating strategy — it’s a remnant of geopolitical thinking now dead.

THE CIRCLE

Mediocre as it is, Dave Eggers’s novel 
The Circle is a metaphor for the relation between technology, communication, emotion and power. “The Circle” is the name of the most powerful corporation 
in the world, a sort of conglomerate of Google, Facebook, Paypal and YouTube. Three men lead the company: Stockton 
is a financial shark, Bayley is a utopian and Ty Gospodinov is the project’s hidden mastermind.

The main character of the book is Mae, a young woman hired by The Circle during “the Completion,” the final phase in the implementation of TrueYou, a program intended to enforce the recording of every instant of life for pervasive, ceaseless sharing. Mae becomes the corporation’s spokesperson, the face that appears every day on the infinite channels of The Circle’s television network — the ambassador of the new credo.

The Circle is all about the utter
 capture of human attention: ceaseless communication, mandatory friendliness and creation of a new neediness — the obsessive need to express and share. One may remark that Eggers is simply re-enacting Orwell more than 60 years after the publishing of 1984. That’s true, but in the final pages of the novel, Eggers goes further than Orwell, when Ty exposes the transhuman potency of the totalitarian nightmare.

In the last scene of the novel, the inventor and founder of The Circle manages to covertly meet Mae, the newbie seducing
 the global audience. He has lost control of his own creature, the project he originally conceived, and is deprived of all power in its unstoppable self–deployment.

“I did not intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving so fast. I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network … there used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We are closing the circle around everyone. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

The automaton cannot be stopped, as even the creator himself becomes overpowered by his own invention: the circle of continuous attention, the circle of perfect transparence of everybody to everybody, the circle of total power and of total impotence.

PLEASURE, AFFECTION AND EMPATHY

At the beginning of the 21st century we are in a position that is similar to the position of Malinche: the conqueror is here, peaceful or aggressive, functionally superior, unattainable, incomprehensible. The bio-info automaton is taking shape from the connection between electronic machines, digital languages and minds formatted in such a way to comply with the code. The automaton’s flow of enunciation emanates a connective world that the conjunctive codes cannot interpret, a world that is symbolically incompatible with the social civilization that was the outcome of five centuries of Humanism, Enlightenment and Socialism.

The automaton is the reification of the networked cognitive activity of millions of semio-workers around the globe. Only if they become compatible with the code, the program, can semio-workers enter in the process of networking.

This implies the de-activation of old, subconsciously engrained, modes of communication and perception (compassion, empathy, solidarity, ambiguousness and irony), paving the way to the assimilation of the conscious organism with the digital automaton.

Will the general intellect be able to disentangle itself from the automaton? Can consciousness act on neural evolution? Will pleasure, affection, empathy find a way to re-emerge? Will we translate into human language the connective language of the automated meaning-making machine buzzing and buzzing in our heads?

These are questions that only 
Malinche can answer, opening to the incomprehensible other, betraying her people and reinventing language in order to express what can not be said.

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition. He writes about the condition of media, mental breakdown
 and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. His next book, Heroes, dedicated to the suicidal wave provoked by financial nihilism, will be out in the first months of 2015.