I am a recent PhD of Information Science & Technology at Syracuse University’s iSchool currently working at the National Science Foundation as a STEM Analyst within CISE/CPI: the Cyber, Physical, and Intelligent Systems division of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate.
\n\nMy primary research is closely tied to a relatively novel theoretical program of memetics: the study of memes. I am approaching memes in a unique direction as a cultural heritage informatician with applications to memory institutions such as libraries, archives, and museumms. Within digital media, this work intersects with cyber-infrastructures and has overlaps with internet cultural research, social media studies, and cultural analytics. Previous research on the subject either aligns with Richard Dawkins’ original conception of them as being the cultural analogy to genes or with Limor Shifman’s internet meme. My work, by contrast provides a synthesis of these two perspectives with theoretical updates for contemporary information, media, and cybernetic theory.
\n\nI have published a set of interrellated papers in prestegious information-centric journals such as Journal of Documentation, Social Media & Society, and Convergence and conferences such as ASIS&T, iConference, and CSCW. Also some of these papers develop what I have called “the methodology of difference.” This is an ongoing project, which I hope develops into a full book manuscript in the near future that combines recent Deleuzian Ontological philosophy with Laruellian “non-philosophy” in order to produce an applicable “science of philosophy” with memes as a foundational object of study.
\n\nI am also currently an independent research affiliate of the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS), focused primarily on the Gravity Spy citizen science project managed by Dr. Kevin Crowston and Dr. Carsten Østerlund. My work for Gravity Spy over the last two years has been related to updating their information system, and developing AI agents for summarizing highly specialized discourse across relevant knowledge groups to lower the knowledge gaps between them. Developing these tools provides more accessibility for laboratory scientists, engineers, and citizen scientists to communicate across boundaries of their relevant specializations.
\n\nI also have prior work affiliated with Metadata Lab with Dr. Jian Qin and NIIC Lab with Dr. Jeff Hemsley. This work spans developments in science of science, social media analytics, multimodal media research, and cross-platform research.
\n\nTo learn more about me personally or to see my full list of academic contributions, please take a look at my “About” page or academic vitae below!
\n\n\n", "image": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/images/profile_PaigesPhoto_crop1.png", "date_published": "2026-10-25T09:13:18-04:00", "tags": ["aos","about"] }, { "id": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/AboutAlexander", "url": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/AboutAlexander/", "title": "About Alexander", "summary": "Academic Life", "content_html": "My life has been fairly eclectic for someone who made a career out of being a professional student. A direct explanation of my bookishness is that I’m the progeny of an academic economist and a high school librarian. From this alone, it seems all too obvious that I would become an academic. Yet, from the outside, my career path might seem relatively direct, as is often the case, it has felt to me more like chaos.
\n\nLike my father, my first job was working for his father—or as my sister and I call him, “Pawpaw”—as cattle farmhand for a 100 some odd acre farm in rural Georgia, just south of Appalachia in a place that didn’t get broadband internet until nearly 2010. This rural spit of land he worked upon is called Corinth—pronounced KARR-inth by the locals—where Pawpaw swears it never rains enough because of what he calls “the KARR-inth split”: where atmospheric pressure and land elevation seems to split the rain clouds right before it reaches his farm. Despite primarily focusing on digital technologies and their relationship to culture, my first job was about as disconnected from that world as it could be.
\n\nMy second job was a brief moment as an assembly line worker for Sony Packaging before I fell in love with barista/bartender work. I worked within coffee industry on and off from 2011 until 2017 in my hometown and then Atlanta. Then became a research assistant for my PhD until the PhD money ran out. At that point, I started working as a bartender at Harvey’s Garden and barback at Alto Cinco in Syracuse between 2022 and 2026 while still being funded by the Gravity Spy Lab at Syracuse University for part time work and working as a temp employee for Cornell’s Legal Information Institute very breifly.
\n\nI spent about three years trying to get a research professorship position, but the job market was pretty different from the way it worked when I got into my PhD. Grant money within my related research areas had dried up due to changes in funding interests and areas having been increasingly concentrated on AI, Quantum Information, and related research areas. So, I decided that if there were no grants for researchers in my area due to changes in funding amounts and interets, I should perhaps consider working where people look for those sorts of funds and figure that out. I managed to get a position with the National Science Foundation as a STEM Analyst.
\n\nWhile looking back, I could construct a story that would make all this make sense, but the closest I can come up with that actually is somewhat true is that I’ve always taken jobs that to some degree fund my reading habit most effectively. Otherwise, it isn’t an exceptionally rational “hero’s journey” type situation. Although, I will say that there are some uncannily interesting through-lines in my decisions. For one, I have almost always had a connection to effective methods of informing the public. In my Bachelors, I was fascinated by the economics of the internet and economics of information. In my masters, my focus was in Economics of Science, and in my PhD, I initially was training to be a Science of Science scholar but opted back into internet research for a variety of reasons. However, science studies never seem that far away from what I’m really getting at with my work. I am effectively working on a science of ontology and epistemology that has a lot to do with developing a new kind of science that challenges the current post-war quasi-positivism that everyone seems to fund.
\n\nIn academia, a good chunk of my time is unsurprisingly spent writing, so I’ve developed a fascination with the tools of writing. During my M.A., I got sucked into the common mathematics undergrad debate over which pens are best for mathematics notes. My two-cents? A good solid choice for lefties like myself are the Pilot Precise V5s although many of my right-handed friends continue to insist upon Pilot G-2s. They are wrong. Lefties know better than to choose a gel pen. With continued frustration with gel smears, paper pulp clogging roller balls, and lefty-angular tension destroying felt tips prematurely, I found myself in the frustratingly expensive hobby of fountain pens. Counter to what many fountain pen enthusiasts argue, fine and extra-fine nibbed fountain pens are an excellent writing solution for lefties who carry around brass book darts. Those things can clean the nib of a fountain pen in less than second. With a well-designed nib and good writing form, a fountain pen is the simplest solution to every handwriting problem I’ve had (except for architectural drafting and occasionally losing them).
\n\nMy pickiness with writing tools has extended to keyboards, their encodings/decodings, their firmware, word processors, and typesetters also! While hobbies, I sometimes feel the pull to write something about the overlaps of these spaces and memes. ASCII art, video game hacking/modding – originally called “phreaking” in the Computer Demoscene in adoption from what the landline phone hackers called themselves – and emoji/emoticons occasionally appear to carry a uniquely connected techno-political history of what digital humanities scholars call “cultural techniques.” Occasionally, you might see me blog about some of these topics because I find them to be immediately practical ways to learn things about the technologies right below your fingertips, but also because I find them fascinating to think about in relation to the history of inscription and documentation. The history and technological aspects of these tools are highly interesting subjects that almost never get discussed in detail anymore outside of niche discussions in cultural heritage, digital humanities, and specialized online forums.
\n\nSpeaking of, while being involved in memes and their relation to information science and technology research, I’ve developed a strong interest in niche online cultures, tinkering with computer hardware, and open source operating systems. My peers have noticed I have an endearing relationship with half-functioning technologies and reuse of these technologies. My YouTube recommendations today are mostly people talking about ChipTune and black midi music and people using the game Line Rider to produce fan-made music videos.
\n\nCurrently, I have a growing interest in home labbing, cyberdecks, and music-by-code projects like Strudel. I’ve always had a hacker-adjacent attitude. Many varieties of academic subjects related to hacker culture, open source development, development of networking technologies, technological reuse, simulation/emulation studies, video game studies, and even networked art that extends to histories before the internet have always fascinated me.
\n\nI also have a love of fiction despite not having as much time for it as I did from K-12. I have a special affinity for all things TRON, Blade Runner, Star Wars, and animation. Speculative fiction is a special interest for me for lots of reasons. As a technological extension to that interest, I also love studying digital art, data art, and art pushing the boundaries between analogue and digital media. Although, it’s not all “sci-fi” and “technology.” I have spent a little time writing comedic fantasy fiction. While I have not been able to spend as much time doing so, I occasionally get the itch to write comedic fantasy: subtly blending the banal of existential reality into mystically exaggerated absurdities.
\n\nI also spend a good bit of time reading philosophy and research outside of my immediate area of work and updating Wikipedia about these and all of the previous subjects mentioned.
\n\n\n", "image": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/images/profile.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-25T01:00:00-04:00", "tags": ["About","AOS"] }, { "id": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/ReviewFeed-Forward", "url": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/ReviewFeed-Forward/", "title": "Feed-Forward", "summary": "Book Review: Feed-Forward by Mark B.N. Hansen", "content_html": "Feed-Forward1 is a bold and promising text that offers probably the most novel media theoretic reading of Whitehead since Without Criteria by Steven Shaviro2, but comes about through a critical view of Shaviro’s interpretation. At the core of this work is a renouncement of what Hansen sees as a marginalization of human agency in 21st century interpretations of Whiteheadian scholarship, especially those of the contemporary so-called movement of “Speculative Realism/Materialism”. However, as Hansen points out, this is not so much a correction of interpretation so much as a revision of Whitehead’s metaphysics from the start. As Hansen argues, he believes that while this is a revisionist reading of Whitehead, he thinks Whitehead would agree with his changes. Hansen maintains that in his readings, Whitehead likely intended the conclusions of his arguments rather than the more canonical interpretations of the Speculative Realist and Deleuzian readings of Whitehead. As such, without question, if a contemporary scholar wishes to run the gambit of a Whiteheadian theoretical interpretation of media, the two authors one immediately must respond to are either Shaviro’s interpretation or Hansen’s.
\n\nIn reviewing Hansen’s work, however, one faces a particularly difficult dilemma: making sense of Whitehead in a brief few paragraphs, and then interpreting Hansen. This is no easy feat, but I think it is worth a try. However, I hope the reader can be forgiving as there is significantly more behind the arguements here than there is space for a simple blog post review to state before even the most patient and curious reader will give up on making sense of the entirety of the point.
\n\nIn my reading, Hansen’s introduction and first chapter are mostly a primer, motivating why he wishes to make a metaphysical distinction. Namely, he wants to refute what he sees as the contemporary “antihumanism” of speculative realists. While he does this first, his argument against them does not truly begin in earnest until later. His primary metaphysical distinction from contemporary Whitehead, in my read, truly begins by arguing that there should be a distinction between those scholars who interpret Whitehead from the perspective of the Whiteheadian “speculative” relative to the Whiteheadian “experiential”. He argues a confusion about Whitehead’s intentions occurs when one does not separate these two. This, I think, is a very agreeable and obvious point; however the development of this through Whitehead becomes particularly tricky. So from here I will unpack the distinction:
\n\nAccording to Hansen, “The conception that the entirety of the universe is implicated in any new becoming constitutes the most important speculative element in Whitehead’s ontology: without being directly accessible to experience–no perspectival entity can grasp the total situation from which it precedes–this speculative conception explains how activity, and thus experience, arises on the basis of ‘real potentiality’ of the universe at every moment of its development,” (p. 61, emphasis in original text). And thus, it is critical within Whitehead’s own work (not just those who interpret him) that a speculative analysis of datum remain prior to the datum of experience. It is from this point, that Hansen levies a particular interpretation, and even what he sees as a correction, of Whitehead. Hansen insists of what he calls The Speculative Ban: “the prohibition against invoking or appealing directly to actual entities to explain experiential events and societal processes” (pg. 86).
\n\nWhat has been said prior can be unpacked rather simply with Whitehead’s3 terminology. That is, there are “actual entities” which are experientially known and have their own subjective growths (i.e. “becomings”) through datum occurring through interactions with other entities. However, the datum are merely “speculative” so long as the entity which produces it are not referred to in the actual. Referring to such datum appropriately is considered a “prehension” of the datum. However, if one refers to an actual entity to explain the world, it is no longer merely “speculative” but rather “experiential.” He maintains that this is what Whitehead intended to say. That is, for Hansen, Whitehead was a speculative philosopher, not an empirical philosopher as Deleuze and his followers often refer to themselves. That is, if one can attribute the causality of process to the entities producing the data, then it is experiential philosophy, not speculative. He argues that much of speculative realism fails the Speculative Ban in precisely this way. And in fact, it seems this is the way in which the entirety of the critique offered in the introduction and first chapter are analytically predicated.
\n\nAs a cautionary note, Hansen is making a critically important point. We should not mistake the speculative for the experiential objectification of entities. However, it would seem that Hansen is getting bogged down by a linguistic limitation more so than a philosophical one. Read philosophically, Hansen appears to be erring on the side of a some sort of Positivism. While he might be correct in arguing these distinctions in argument should be made, read as he argues, this means we can simply throw out philosophies which linguistically argue about actual entities of experience as non-speculative (i.e. in a non-Whiteheadian spirit). However, he could have just as simply argued something akin to “we should not take the entities of prehension as actual entities.” Instead, he seems to think we can falsify statements about speculation.
\n\nHis most strong case for why this falsification of statements is needed is because the things the “antihumanism” of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) speaks of actual objects without humanness, despite our human awareness of them being crucial to their object-ness in Whitehead. That is, OOO rejects phenomenological access of humans to experience that of Graham Harmon’s objects. Instead they have individuated cognitions which are ontological to us rather than phenomenological. This, indeed, is a problem. It ironically anthropomorphizes existances of non-human minds without genuine access. This is in line with a lot of feminist criticism of OOO: OOO puts non-human objects on equal phenomenological footing as humans, despite its lack of ability to access the phenomenology of marginalized people. As such, it perpetuates asymmetry and inequities of society. However even beyond that, for Hansen, it is artificially speculative. This is because one can never refer to “actual entities (real objects)” as being disjoint from our “sensual (experiential) objectifications”.
\n\nWhile one might see Hansen’s Speculative Ban a success in the case of OOO and perhaps even in his own exemplifications (pgs. 97-99), it seems that this lends itself to a particularly odd analysis of secondary Whiteheadian literature. For example, if one takes critiquing “correlationism” to be a central concern in speculative realism/materialism as Harmon and others suggest, the argument is that there’s a vitalist consciousness within subjects. As a vital phenomenology, we cannot directly refer to these subjects without objectifying them. While consciousness is one of the things in these beings, we don’t have access to explain most of their phenomenology. This is the central point of using Whitehead for contemporary speculative philosophy. Any reference to the phenomenologies of sensory subjects (of which all actual entities are) are speculations, delegated to the realm of virtual potentiality. As such, we should always provide our most charitable interpretation of speculative philosophies of experiential entities as speaking to aspects in which language cannot but objectify, but we nevertheless wish to prehend as subjective in a speculative fashion. Proper speculative realism does not confuse experience with prehension. It speculates incomplete, virtual, and vitalist experiences of subjects that we objectify through experienced datum. Over-applying the “Speculative Ban” becomes a procedure where-in linguistic analysis determines a subject of speculation, and then rejects the argument as being non-speculative because the subject is objectified within an experience. This overly determines speculative philosophies within linguistic rules, not philosophical ones.
\n\nInstead, if we interpret such speculative analyses to be about prehending the virtual via our experience of perceived objects, we are within the realm of properly analyzing the speculation. That is, we are fully within the critique of correlationism: the rejection that our only access to thinking (that which is delegated to phenomenology) and being (that which is delegated to ontology) through their correlation. Speculative realism argues that for an analysis of cognition one does not need to analyze being (or vice versa). We can speak of our experience of actual entities, for example, without implying a particular phenomenology, and still implying a speculation of virtual entities through this. However, the Speculative Ban suggests we cannot, simply because it overly determines language of experience to undermine real speculative philosophy.
\n\nThe Speculative Ban can be used to undermine much of the philosophy depending upon developments of new concepts. It does not give us access to speak of the becomings via the virtual except in abstract. One cannot refer to an experience of film to speak of Deleuze’s metaphysics of cinema45 within Whiteheadian speculative philosophy for example. Yet such work has been productive and pragmatic without implying the motivating reasons that Hansen claims for “antihumanism” even among those he points to.
\n\nThis brings me to a second criticism where Hansen implies contemporary antihumanism is about rejecting humans. That is, he argues that contemporary antihumanist media theory/philosophies tend to “dispense of human experience”. From my readings in several of these texts of which he refers, this is not their intention. Instead, they are arguing something very similar to the “indirect modality” that Hansen subscribes to. However, they do distinguish themselves from some of Hansen’s implications. In particular these antihumanists are not ridding themselves of “human experience”, “phenomenology”, “being”. Rather they are disconnecting and reorienting these terms such that more general aspects of “phenomenology” and “being” can be developed independently from the dominantly human-oriented connections of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy requirements. Hansen’s perspective of Speculative Realism and antihumanism seems reactionary to their projects. While in some special cases, he might be right, I think this is not a charitable way to read these theorists. The idea is not to rid the world of humanness, but rather to suggest that humanness (1) is not central or need to be named within a generalized study of phenomenology nor ontology, (2) is not hierarchically or exclusively privileged in experiencing phenomenology or ontology, (3) that it is not necessary for cognition to be observed for there to be a subject of experience. None of these deny “humanness” exists or has cognition, nor does it imply that humans cannot experience or speculate about the datum of cognitions or existances of other subjective entities. Yet, Hansen maintains it does imply that. While certainly there are examples in which Hansen is right, he overstates the problem of antihumanism and speculative realism/materialism by misstating the underlying argument. The idea is to speculate what subjectiveness is without appealing to what we philosophized as essential to humans; it is not to rid the world of humanness or to exclude humans from experiencing the non-human. Humans still exist and cognize. Further our actualization is not under threat because of these philosophies. Rather the centrality of our subjectiveness is under threat.
\n\nAs such, at the end of Hansen’s book, I’m more convinced that Hansen is an antihumanist of this sort and does agree with Galloway, Thacker6, and Shivaro despite his contestation. He simply argues that humans are connected to these media. As such, he explicitly denies the claim that “humans do not exist”, and as such he is only a humanist in that sense. However, I think he is warning us to not forget that we do exist in our language about these non-human things, which is an admirable point to make.
\n\nImage Attribution: Alexander O. Smith
\nHansen, M.B.N. (2015). Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. The University of Chicago Press. ↩
\nShaviro, S. (2009). Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. MIT press. ↩
\nWhitehead, A.N. (1978). Process and Reality. Free Press. ↩
\nDeleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 1: The Movement Image. University of Minnesota Press. ↩
\nDeleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time Image. University of Minnesota Press. ↩
\nGalloway, A.; Thacker, E. (2007) The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. University of Minnesota Press. ↩
\nIt’s rare to find a book that’s as clear about the metaphysics of a technically dense field as this book is about Information Theory and Cybernetics as a whole. Based on Malaspina’s dissertation work under the supervision of Iain Hamilton and a committee of Emmanuel Picavet, Matthieu Saladin, and Ray Brassier, this book already promises big things from the start. In recent days, it seems like the so-called ‘Speculative Realism’ movement is no longer in vogue, with topics such as Object Oriented Ontology and Thing studies generating lots of side-eyes from the greater community of critical theory. Yet books such as this show that its influences are still relevant to post-continental philosophy. While perhaps the directions of Harmon and others on dealing with subject-object and ontological dilemmas have caused some backlash, books such as this one provide new directions for theoretical connections within philosophy and cybernetic theory.
\n\nMalaspina doesn’t start with a common-place or classical understanding of information, but rather the ‘‘information’’ of cybernetic discourse. In pointing to Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication 1, she introduces a theoretically constructed and rhetorical dialectic about information. She leans into this dialectic in order to reach a valuable conclusion: while Shannon’s information and Wiener’s 2 information are mathematically identical, a dialectic exists in their explanations about the origins of entropy and noise. For Shannon, noise is that which is not information, and entropy is in part information. For Wiener, entropy is what is to be avoided, and it is accounted for by noise. As Malaspina so aptly puts it, for Shannon, information is the unexpected (the entropy). For Wiener it’s the predictable part of the channel, the non-entropy. Yet, functionally they are saying the same thing about Shannon’s information channel. How is this true?
\n\nShannon is considering the channel itself and the way information can be observed without semantic necessity. That is, Shannon does not consider information to be a priori to the channel. It is only once the communication channel is designed (one router to another, or a phone line, or some other telecommunication technology) that information is known for Shannon. For Wiener on the other hand, he is thinking about what can be presumed about our interpretation of information at the other end of the channel. He takes information and the channel to be co-constructed, and thus, simultaneously a priori. Thus, he presumes that for information to exist, latent semantic content exists outside of the noise. While Wiener takes for granted that every communication system requires Shannon’s technological foundations of information, Shannon resists this interpretation. Instead he presumes that for every analytically determined message to exist, a well-designed channel must exist. That is, Wiener was being a technological determinist about information by presuming that the channel is a priori to the communication. Shannon was merely showing what a “good” communication channel technologically does. Of course, as Malaspina points out, often information exists traveling across channels that are not well-designed to dissect information from noise a priori.
\n\nIn her outlining this dialectic, Malaspina cuts to the core of cybernetic foundations. That is, she justifies that if we stick to Shannon’s perspective of knowledge about information without semantic assumptions, then in many (if not most) cases, the dissection of noise from information is a subjective analytic and synthetic separation, and not at all an objective observation. She makes this even more clear by reinserting the caloric (K) part of entropy that Shannon left out from thermodynamic models of entropy. In doing so, she shows there should always be a material cost to determining information and that we should never have assumed the distinction of information from the material degradation of the channel itself. As such, knowledge can occur by interpreting noise from a subjective position. This is where her epistemology originates.
\n\nHaving outlined where analytically noise becomes a priority for knowledge, she dives into several interesting places in which noise is empirically a valid study. Most clearly, she points to noise in relation to finance and technical trading. In making the point that tech trading depends on pre-existing synthetic dissections of noise and information, she puts her thumb on the throat of a particular kind of resistance trading: “noise trading”. This is precisely the kind of trading that occur through GameStop, WallStreetBets, etc. That is, these are people who look for “glitches” in tech trading and exploit them. These are people who experience the design of the channel and experience their weaknesses even before they know the meaning of the noise.
\n\nMalaspina goes about redefining and synthesizing the meaning of noise across a series of different spaces, such as that of aesthetics, statistics, and psychopathy. In each case, she is speaking to the impacts in which cybernetic determinism has had a say on constructing our contemporary world, calling back to critical points made by earlier new materialist thinkers which questioned, debated, and reshaped cybernetics. In relation to understanding the political moment from the perspective of ‘the state’ this book takes the 10,000 foot view that one from a Hegelian view might see, and brings it crashing back to Earth by agreeing that ultimately its those who frustrate the dissection of noise and information who regain power. This work puts her squarely in the same theoretical camp as Eugene Thacker, Alexander Galloway, Laura U. Marks, and many other contemporary new materialist theorists adjacent to these issues.
\n\nThere is so much in this book worth looking at and considering. This is a book that I am going to have to return to multiple times and it might be the book that has impressed me the most in this past year. If you’re invested at all in epistemology, metaphysics, or history of information or cybernetics, this book is a requirement text.
\n\nImage Attribution: Alexander O. Smith
\nThis book is a sobering view into a very real dilemma for every human alive today. In particular, Couldry and Mejias extend a particularly thoughtful interpretation of Karl Marx’s critical view of social, cultural, and economic life to how data is used to colonize in so-called “information economies.” At this point, I think it is important to point out this is one of many books on a similar subject, e.g. We Are Data takes a more loosely post-Marxist stance that I appreciated. However, The Costs of Connection holds a unique position in the data colonialism argument in that it uses theory with a lot more care and consistency than many of the other books I have read on the subject. It was only through this delicacy in theory that my critiques below could be made with clarity. Some books are so negligent with theory it is hard to know where and how to critique them, and this gives the reader a false sense of importance through perceived “novelty” that does not really exist. So for that alone, this book should be praised as theoretically significant to existing debates.
\n\nThis book is also crucially of value not just because of its theoretical consistancy, but also because it connects debates about the social use of data to some theoretical lenses that academia holds dear. In doing so, this book makes itself indispensably placed to impact one facet or another of how critical data research views its own study. There are some ideas here which, at times, made me uncomfortable with some of my own chosen professional goals. In that sense, it would be reactionary if I said this book didn’t do its job. I finished the book reflecting on my own approaches to information studies with a critical lens. This book, I think, has made me a better person and a better theorist.
\n\nGiven this praise, as I stated, there are some things I would critique about this book. I think at its core, it overstates how broad its criticisms can reach with ideological consistency. There are limits in application, while difficult to account for in a single review, are necessary to develop or else this argument could run rampant and become self-defeating in application. But first, allow me to outline the main contributions of this book, and then I will discuss some points that I believe suggest theoretical flaws in need of work.
\n\nAs the book suggests, this is a modest but well-argued extension of Karl Marx’s critical approach to studying the exploitation of labor, but in this case, in relation to the labor of data production. Further, it argues that such exploitation is not new, but it is an expected cultural output of capitalistic tendencies towards exploitation which have gone farther back to capitalism’s historical roots in colonialism.
\n\nThe book does an excellent job of outlining clear historical connections between colonialism and the current information economy of data production and related uses to predict and manage people. It also does a great job of outlining important moments exemplifying these points, and why they must be avoided.
\n\nThis book also goes a step further and attempts to show that undoing this, a decolonialist project, will be difficult but necessary unless data colonialism is to “hollow out” all social life. That is, the developments of platform technologies have always been an extension of trying to datafy people and to use that data to gain profits they otherwise could not extract from people who are individually losing purchasing power. That is, data extraction is argued to be “raw” data extracted from people. The fact that individual subjectivities are not respected and the value of this data are never really negotiated under the “social contract” of capitalism, means saying “no” to data extraction is necessary, and projects need development to redeem individual power over these kinds of extraction. The book argues that many post-human projects have attempted this, but risk the deterioration of the individual. Therefore, we need to return to respecting the agency of individuals as full subjective actors in data economy. How this will occur is not clear, however this book moves towards providing a meta-schema of how to do this within a somewhat traditional Marxist lens that has been updated to include telecommunications technology.
\n\nIn doing so this book suggests a few things of crucial importance:
\nI have framed this points to tell them in the way that I tend to interpret them as accurate critical approach to considering the use of data and theories surrounding them, however they are not exactly presented as such. Some ideas here are presented in ways that I find some places to grumble. Of course, to some degree this might be a stylistic choice in how I produce my research, and of course my biases on this topic might be leading me to grumble more than I should, but I hope I avoid coming across as reactionary, but instead offer a genuine response to some limitations with this sort of social analysis. Without further ado…
\n\nMy main opposition to this book, and many others like it, is that it falls for a particular error in understanding computational sciences. In particular, this book makes the argument that computational description or prediction is or is causally connected to data colonialist projects. While, certainly, data colonialism as described here requires computational description or prediction to exist, the other direction is not necessarily a fair criticism. Works like Data Feminism 1 are uniquely positioned to provide actionable counterarguments. This does not undermine the point of the book, however. It simply means that more nuance is required to explain what kinds of computation actively or potentially provide tools for data colonialism. There are some very clear examples of what does actively harm the social in respect to this book’s arguments. Civility research, an area of digital communication, is actively attempting to provide tools for social policing. Platform moderation techniques are an area of social management, and also are tools formed to provide capitalists with data which conforms to these platforms’ view of good and bad. However, that does not convince me that social network analysis which describes, for example, a structural understanding of communicative flows across Twitter are actively harming or “hollowing out” the social so much as the social metaphysics implied in computational interpretation might. That is, often it is not the computation itself that is actively contributing to developing tools of colonialism.
\n\nThat said, the data which the scientist uses arguably was in some way accessed through data extraction technics well within the critics of the authors, and should be a concern of consideration. However, I would argue the same thing is true of qualitative technics of interpreting history in the way that this book does. If data extraction is fundamentally problematic in that it steals society of its essential mechanisms for action outside of capital, qualitative data extraction which provides us with histories do precisely the same. The distinction between the qualitative and quantitative in this respect seems to me to be a false dichotomy. Predicting or describing people outside of the systems of culture in which they live is still data extraction regardless. In order to escape this counterpoint, I think this book has to concede that it is not data construction itself which is the problem but the systemic arrangements in which capitalism provides for the labor of producing data. I do not see this book as inconsistent with this counterpoint in many of its main points, but it does suggest otherwise in order to maintain a critical Marxist perspective.
\n\nThis brings me to another point, the insistence that ethical data production is a return to the subjective point of the individual, and that its necessarily the centralization of this data which is capitalist is a point which I strongly contest. It was, in fact, the Utopian Socialism which suggested the centralization of data as a process which solves all inequities in labor production. It was F.A. Hayek who argued against Utopian Socialists to provide why an economy based on such ideas was doomed to failure.2 This omission in history seems to undermine some of the methodological practices of the authors. That is, their history has a bias in interpreting what is real anti-capitalism which omits the point that it was the Austrian School economic perspective which was largely pro-capitalist which argued this point against utopianism in the Socialist Calculation Debate in the 1940s. In this way, the authors are actually coming full-circle. They are arguing against a more socialist strain of economics which exists more closely aligned with Mechanism Design. This is why conservatism to Marxist approaches to solving these problems often never truly escape the “utopian” capitalism the authors describe as the complete hollowing out of the social.
\n\n“Utopian” capitalism and utopian socialism/Marxism absolutely agree with each other in the mechanisms of data production and management. They fundamentally exercise the same metaphysical claims about information and data: i.e. cybernetic utopias. It is the ideologies of what to do with that data once they have it which makes them historically different. In this sense, this carefully chosen historical omission constructs an ideological consistency in their critical analysis which is inaccurate. In particular, data colonialism does not diminish simply because capitalists aren’t doing the extracting. Marxists, Communists, Socialists, and many other ideologies are fully capable of this themselves and have shown so. I can hear the “Real Communism has never existed!” response here. I hear you, but that undermines the historically material analysis of the book, so the comment stands. Merely holding and acting within the virtues of an ideology which opposes capitalism historically does not stop data colonialism.
\n\nSome alternative to traditional Marxism is necessary, contrary to the authors’ arguments is indeed necessary to move to decolonize us from data extraction. In this way, I don’t find it necessary to remain conservative to humanist (as opposed to post-humanist) ontologies of agency and power. In this book, the authors suggest that moving to use Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (and by extension Tarde’s ontology) are problematic because they “risk” dehumanizing individuals. However, as I pointed out, this has already been done within historical sociological arguments which are not too far away from the authors’ ideological position. If this assessment is fair, every ideological position in question “risks” the loss of agency of the individual. I do not entirely buy the argument that there are no other ontological positions of describing and critiquing the datafication of people. This seems to be more of an stylistic choice in academic preference than an appeal to a theoretically cogent point. While we all make choices such as these in writing or bounding our writing, this could have been more tactfully either with more clear justification, or with acknowledged limitations in knowing what post-Marxist ontologies do to the status of “human”.
\n\nAll of my critiques, however, are minimal points which should serve more as warnings for the limits of such a theoretically dedicated perspective of human being. There is definitely a bit of importance to each of the points the authors have made of which I have critiqued here. For example, it truly isn’t entirely clear how post-Marxist ontologies risk dehumanizing. This should be considered a serious and significant warning! That said, I am not as convinced that they are any more serious than other critiques (including my own here) of the ideologies the authors have chosen.
\n\nFor example, while Hayek might be considered taboo by those untrained in (post-)Marxist traditions of economics, looking at history of economic theory developed by Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah2 3 on the subject would prove insightful. While these authors are not within the school of thought as the authors here, they are “heterodox” economic theorists and historians which would suggest a possible synthesis that develops the authors’ critique more completely. In particular, their work outlines an interesting history of how Hayek is fundamental to modern socialist movements taken seriously in economic sciences, their limitations, and their lessons about economics as a science. Even if these Mirowski and Nik-Khah are ignored in their analysis of Hayek by those who chose to stay with different academic traditions, these arguments will never be resolved unless the criticisms of Hayek, Mirowski, and Nik-Khah are answered, and therefore, the economic motivation for data colonialism will remain stable.
\n\nUsing such Mirowski and Nik-Khah might extend these arguments towards a more clear notion of how data and information fundamentally are connected in similar ways to both neoclassical economics and these socialist traditions, and how they can be escaped more clearly without appealing to dogmatic ideologies and metaphysical claims. Such a synthesis could help respond to the authors’ point that there are genuine decolonialist criticisms of postcolonialism focusing too much on culture and not enough on economics. Mirowski and Nik-Khah published a chapter on the limits of accepted economic science and media theory, because they have a mutual blind spot in explaining each other.4 Making such a blind spot visible would perhaps prove fruitful. If one finds the arguments of Couldry and Mejias compelling, Mirowski and Nik-Khah will offer points of inspiration outside of the ideological traditions here, and so I recommend them as a comparative reading on the subject.
\n\nImage Attribution: Alexander O. Smith
\nD’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data Feminism. MIT Press. ↩
\nMirowski, P., & Nik-Khah, E. (2017). The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics. Oxford University Press. ↩ ↩2
\nMirowski, P. (2002). Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Cambridge University Press. ↩
\nBeverungen, A., Mirowski, P., & Nik-Khah, E. (Eds.). (2019). Markets. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.14619/1471 ↩
\nJenkins says you can read these chapters independently as if they were articles to themselves. That’s only sort of true. Further, that could have been true and I think should have been. Each chapter builds on the last, so there is an arch of the book that is a close textual analysis driven around-about various graphic novel oriented representations of “stuff.”
\n\nIn particular, the book begins with the obvious: “stuff” here is comic oriented account of materialism of daily life. Then he points to the fact that comics use “stuff” to curate and invest in memories. In doing so, a narrative becomes more interactive and allows for (dis)continuities that are subjective across readers. That is, comics account for authors’ literal collecting habits of stuff as a semiotic reflexivity of memory itself which creates the comic based narrative. As such, this book offers some hot takes about affective investments in between the reader and the artist.
\n\nBecause of this hinge of using media to explain the connections between the semiotic collections of iconic “stuff” and the affective/emotional quality of media in how we (the comic book reader) connect the dots, there is a way in which this book attempts to be an organic progression from Deleuze’s work on media and memory. However, Jenkins appears to gloss over this by merely covering secondary scholarship on Deleuze without investing at all in the metaphysics he is pulling from, and it costs him dearly.
\n\nJenkins takes a lot of delicate time to insist that there is an aesthetic of comics which requires our own memories entangled with the stuff of comics that gives a comic a subjectivity that is unique between every reader and comic. That said, I think this was a very inefficient way to express these thoughts. I think that Jenkins could have condensed a lot of these thoughts by taking from the visual rhetorical tactics of comic book designers in the way that Scott McCloud does and the way others have done, and condensed a lot of ideas very quickly. This could have been a 120 page book, and not lost a bit of (the important) information. (Let me be blunt about what’s not important: Jenkins’ history of comics to graphic novels, the consumerism related collecting, the masculinity of comics, and the way they include marginalized communities and interact with countercultural movements are merely token gestures to intersectional feminism without actually investing in these political interests or giving any substance to them. A simple Google search can show he clearly doesn’t reference these histories properly.)
\n\nTo return to my main critique however: this book opens with a set of theories, but does not carry through in using those theories directly throughout the book. I’m not sure I understand this tactic unless it is to give us the false impression that we aren’t dealing with Deleuze’s cinematic planes and Deleuzian (rather than Bergsonian) memory. Clearly we are dealing with these theories! Jenkins frames the book as such when he cites Deleuzian scholars such as Laura U. Marks and other new materialist media scholars, but he never uses these scholars’ language. He mentions them briefly only to bury them quickly after without real investment. It tarnished this read for me that I was being teased with new theory. Really I was getting watered-down Deleuzian metaphysics lectured to me like a child by a communication theorist.
\n\nIn summary, I think that it is in spite of the ethical disservice of so clearly pretending to be feminist and an anticapitalist in this book that he still manages to tie this book together is a (post-?)Deleuzian notion of mediated memory that extends Cinema to comics. And yet, for some reason, Jenkins decided to bury this argument after the first couple of chapters!
\n\nHowever, as a positive concept that he provides more clearly to me by way of analogy, he briefly ties the stuff in the comic panels to digital hypertext and explains how this is a somewhat useful analogy for practical consideration. With that, he teases us with arguably the most novel part of the book, and then doesn’t explore it any further. He almost explained Boys Club! He almost explained the development of Pepe as a radically anti-author, post-human comic-based memory! He almost extended comics to the new media of Internet Memes! BUT HE DIDN’T! WHY?!?! Of all things, should not this have been the absolute finale in the present moment?! For shame! What a squandered moment!
\n\nThis wasn’t the only time he teased new ideas like this, but in order to make use of these teasings, it is up to the reader to know they are there as they too will have to know what he’s implicitly citing, because he doesn’t hyperlink it for you. He forces you to do the extra work… seemingly just because he can. And that’s annoying. In a sense, I can only imagine this book is going to come across as more confusing to many, and for those that think they know, Jenkins doesn’t offer enough reference to older media theory for us to really ever know without reading between the lines subjectively. This book makes itself difficult to use either just to make our lives harder or because he is hiding which bits of this book that give away that the vast majority of his conclusive arguments are recontextualized summaries of other people’s work.
\n\nFrom what I can tell, the main takeaway that I hadn’t really figured out how to do for myself before this book was to more organically (rather than structurally) map connections across media formats such as Cinema, Still Life, and Comics. The most valuable part of this book to me aren’t even about comics. It’s about a methodology of synthesis in analysis across media that, frankly, should have naturally followed from the materialist psychology of James Gibson’s “affordance theory” but of course Jenkins never cites that in order to make me make that connection myself. He’s being difficult for no good reason.
\n\nSeriously, authors like Jenkins need to stop acting as if they’re “anti-theory” theory. They’re hiding behind mediocre attempts at practicing empiricism in order to pretend their personal theories are disjoint from “theory.” This kind of theorizing is exactly the kind of theory anti-theorists hate, and they produce it themselves as if they’re doing something else. It’s very self-indulgent academia, and only makes the work of understanding harder for other people. It’s a dangerous academic game. You will be misinterpreted if you do this… probably on purpose… and probably in a way you can’t refute. Don’t write this way. This book had such potential and lost itself to its own fetish with glorifying comics half-heartedly.
\n\n(NOTE: this review is an update of my Goodreads review of the book from February 10th 2021.)
\n\nImage Attribution: Alexander O. Smith
\n", "image": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/images/theplayground2.jpg", "date_published": "2023-01-09T00:00:00-05:00", "tags": ["Blog","Book Review"] }, { "id": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/Reviews", "url": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/Reviews/", "title": "Reviews", "summary": "Reviews: A Theme and a Hobby", "content_html": "In the academic space, critical reflection is a valuable tool. While perhaps considered of lesser importance, a good book review is a core part of academic development and reflection. A review can lend balance to the rosy lenses or the overtly pessimistic perspectives that other academics or the greater public might view a work with. A carefully organized set of thoughts about an academic development provides reflection about the theoretical development, usefulness, and ethnical considerations about scholarly work of peers’ publications.
\n\nIn the past, I had developed a regular habit of casually reviewing most academic books I found noteworthy for better or worse. For the vast majority of these I had posted them on Goodreads, not really considering them to be of significant value to anyone. Although, I will boast that some of them have gotten dozens (DOZENS! [insert Arrested Development’s Tobias Fünke gif here]) of likes. While I cannot speak to the economic value of these reviews, I have found them useful for myself, and on occasion they have proven useful in framing how I think as a researcher for my potential collaborators. As such, I feel it is time that I develop a regularized framework for my reviews both in so-called academic “seriousness” and in editorial affordances. It would be nice to be able to embed links, and reference other works more carefully. Doing this on my own site enables this in a way that I can control. That is I am not “publishing” an academic review, so much as talking to myself in public, you know, like a totally sane person. Also it allows me to escape the framework of Amazon’s commodification of reviews.
\n\nThat is, I will begin putting my reviews here for several reasons:
\nIf you have the misfortune of having to read these reviews, I am doing this out of the love of reading and thinking. I am perhaps being a little self-indulgent in doing so. Apologies. This was an accidental hobby that somehow convinced me that I genuinely liked dense academic reading. The writing I provide in the form of a review gives me a little bit of space to say that I was influenced by these readings, and that I can give a first draft of how I was moved. It provides me some self-assurance that I’m not wasting my time.
\n\nAlso, it is possible there are some pretty candid claims in these reviews. I am in no position to claim to be an expert in everything I review here or to claim that I am writing with the tone or credibility required of that sort of publication. That is part of the reason these are not all “academic reviews” but rather thoughts more for my own reflection. Tonally, these reviews will not read like an academic review. They at times may have an obvious bias that would be sanitized or edited out of a peer-reviewed book review. While I am an academic, my goal is not to make “academic reviews.” Each of these should be read more in the spirit of me trying to find my place within the excessively trans-disciplinary world I have found my own academic work to reside. This is a long-term struggle of my own making, and this is just a small part of how I make sense of it. That said, I do somewhat take pride being able to make sense of a wide range of arguments and synthesizing them.
\n\nOn occasion, I imagine what an author might say to one of my reviews (especially for the particularly negative reviews). I have given some negative reviews for books that later on proved to be hugely valuable to me. A bad review here does not mean the book is not worth reading. For example, I am highly critical of Benjamin Bratton’s writing style, and considering some of his statements in YouTube videos, he seems very aware of this critic of him. He comes across as pompous, needlessly inaccessible, and righteous. Although, he might have earned a little bit of a right to be. The Stack is a constant reference for me. I consider it to be a significant and irreplaceable update to Empire addressing a vast space of how we have redesigned the planet for computation. If given a chance to have a serious academic discussion with Bratton, I would consider that a highlight of my life. I still don’t like his writing style.
\n\nGoing farther than stylistic differences, I have given some particularly nasty reviews of books before. While the tone of these reviews would likely be sanitized in a typical publication setting, at times I think a harsh tone is necessary. This is not necessarily to shake a finger at a writer so much as it is to give those who read the review a sense of the weight of how important it is to think critically at times about what academics are saying. This sort of tone usually does not make it past a risk adverse editor’s desk. Academics are a particularly fragile bunch, often taking slights towards our work as slights to our own identity and person. Regardless, the traumas of fighting for our ideas, and the power that the academic process provides speech does not exclude one from being gravely mistaken. The professional academic tone often exists to hide the real dilemmas academic work can cause. Some of the most unethical work to ever occur on earth began by someone with a PhD wielding the power of academic publishing and professionalism to hide serious errors in thinking.
\n\nOn a more positive note, I hope that these reviews provide something valuable to anyone who reads them. I count myself as the first in this even if I am the only. But in hopes that I am giving something of use to someone, I hope that someone sees a refreshing lens that helps suggest how reading academic work can be fun and fulfilling. It is not often that people leave their PhDs thinking reading is anything other than homework. But on occasion it is fun, and reflecting on it, and seeing my take, I hope gives some poor soul out there a chance to know they do have the ability to be thoughtfully independent of the burden of having to agree with every work they’ve been told to cite. We can play with ideas with varying levels of seriousness. Academia needs both at once: seriousness and play. These reviews are a chance to thoughtfully play with what academia considers sacred: big, scary, educated ideas.
\n\nImage Attribution: Alexander O. Smith
\n", "image": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/images/theplayground2.jpg", "date_published": "2023-01-06T00:00:00-05:00", "tags": ["Review"] }, { "id": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/MemeticsAndApplications", "url": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/MemeticsAndApplications/", "title": "Memetics and Applications: A Brainstorm Exercise", "summary": "Memetics as It Stands", "content_html": "Presently, memetics is arguably merely a proposed science, not actively a research field. Although, inarguably, memetics now has a large (and disconnected) body of empirical work. Memes provide a datafied discussion across areas of communication, linguistics, cognition, education, data science, and so on. This also includes their inspiration to existing sciences, humanities, and philosophies. Yet for some reason, the two main theories of memetics, the neo-Darwinian paradigm developed in line with Dawkins and the communication and media theory of Internet Memetics, have yet to convince many outside of their research area that memetics provides an adequately predictive or descriptive science of culture. Rather, often the theoretical results remain fodder and development in digital humanities.
\n\nHowever, there are some ways in which this could move towards being something of a science with a little ingenuity. In particular, memetics research would need to take a leap into discourse which is a little more intellectually risky than describing one-off media events as being descriptive of some construction of digital platforms or wonders and nightmares of humanity.
\n\nWhile I may need to ask forgiveness from my fellow experts, memetics needs to develop more pragmatic applications. Many would perhaps argue that investigating alt-right rhetoric developed under the study of Pepe memes is a worthy ethical development, and it is, it does not pragmatic. Any survey of the policy suggestions of this literature or related interest suggests a lack of agreed upon solutions. Instead they offer critiques and developments of rhetoric around these concerns. That is, we have created more academic jargon that might one day go viral by being mentioned on CNN, but having learned of these terms has yet to develop real actions to stop the theft of otherwise harmless iconography by right wing nationalism. It is rhetorically descriptive, but it offers no acceptable solutions or mechanisms of response except reactionary and ambiguous policing of rhetoric and the ambivalent technologies of internet protocols.
\n\nSo okay, Alex, what can we do since memetics is supposedly so impractical?
\n\nWell, if I am allowed a response, I will give it a shot. Namely I will point in two directions which might seem counter-intuitive at first. The first is a restructuring of theory to answer different questions. This is the program that I have been developing within information science. The other direction is to point towards existing empirical areas which offer material justification to strengthen the pragmatic development of theory. These material applications are not yet possible as almost all of them mean stepping into material research areas that so far have been delegated to non-culture oriented theory spaces, but never the less are cultural.
\n\nNotice, these two spaces are not distinct, but rather they speak to each other with more pragmatic honesty. Doing this, I believe, offers memetics its best shot of gaining a genuine status of descriptive or predictive science. So what are some examples of these. I will start with some spaces which speculatively could gain from a memetic perspective.
\n\nMaybe, let us start with some more obvious points. Internet memetics, mostly, is the study of connected images. How they are connected are not precisely clear. Shifman suggests rather loosely that they are a collection of images across the internet which share content, form, and stance. While elsewhere I have suggested nuance and redevelopment of what these terms mean, they are not without their value. I might say in the spirit of these terms, images have meaning qualities that are dependent upon how people use them. Upon having decided a group of images belong together as a meme, we are then tempted to define what their meaning is, for example by giving the meme a name, or investigating how it is used in communication.
\n\nHowever, a critical issue with this approach is that these are all from the perspective of researchers. To say otherwise, the researcher must suggest that their data, a collection of images, represents an obvious clustering describing a cultural idea. That is, it presumes some nature of how similar ideas organize together. I have suggested elsewhere that this is assuming the conclusion, and I think this is fairly obvious in how memetics has come to describe arbitrary cultural criticisms that do not tend to agree with each other.
\n\nThat is, agreement in application often means application to an ideology rather than a materially agreeable solution. So what would make something a materially agreeable solution? Well, convincing someone to act in some capacity other than as a rhetorically ideological way, I suppose. It requires scientific impact outside of citation to put it bluntly. It needs to show application to technological development or provide solutions to policy concerns that move in the directions we expect.
\n\nSo, let us return to our common form of data: collections of digital images. Given these images, as I have argued, so far most have only made rhetorically descriptive arguments about normative claims. What if instead memetics focused on something like the impact of specific icons in their dispersion across the internet. If this could be done with some level of precision, then we could practically speak about the level of impact of an icon in social networks.
\n\nSo far, however, this proves difficult. There is a reason for this. Consider the technologies required in a simple way. An easy way to find a collection of images with a particular icon might be to search for them on Google Images. So say we look up images of Jesus, brand logos, or the face of Pete Davidson. Obviously, we are not going to get images that look identical, but rather images with distinctions. We will see different colors, different facial angles, different geometric layouts, and so on. We have moved from a unitary problem a particular image, to that of icons within an image. While Google might have figured this out for themselves to some degree, our problem is that in each of these searches, many of the results might need disambiguation. For example, searching for Jesus will likely provide images with something as simple as a cross which does not include Jesus at all. While in some cases, these might be valuable, they are not for our case.
\n\nThus, first we must parse each image for what is in it, get those icons out of them, and then find out where they are online. Fortunately, Google does provide this information. All images found through Google search do include the indexed location, that is the webpage which contains that image. Then let us say we could use that to hyperlink to that page. Now we are faced with another problem. This problem is the context of use. That is, what is the icon of Jesus used for? When was it used? Perhaps I could do this quickly for one, two, or even a dozen images. But is this systematic or statistically relevant? No, it is not. This is where I lose many of the close textual researchers, but again, it is not that this work is meant to undermine what they have done. This work is meant to decide which of their theorizing claims are pragmatically more appropriate. However, every webpage can be scraped in the raw so long as it does not overwhelm the website infrastructure or trigger protocols that block us from getting that data, so getting data can be done more effectively to explain the contexts of a meme in a variety of ways that would prove useful, and perhaps would explain more broadly what policies could be considered for specific kinds of speech without such a myopic view from a particular platform. Alternatively, it might provide a more predictive trajectory for specific kinds of cultural usages of icons that could be understood through replication that does not yet exist in memetics.
\n\nThe previous example is decidedly more in line with the interests of current Internet Memetic research. Perhaps most of the iconographic studies of icons vaguely gesture towards a policy concern or content management for platforms broadly. So far these claims have been so weakly predictive or descriptive that it would be unrealistic to see these studies as providing systematically useful solutions for platforms. However the method I just offered does, for better or worse.
\n\nThat is to say, I just suggested a pretty strongly cybernetic approach to manage public actions which is very often an attempt to control cognitive frames which might be considered viral through the use of symbolic speech acts. However, some, reasonably may have serious ethical concerns with this application. Those who have these concerns, I empathize. I have mostly avoided the communications approach to memetics, for exactly this reason. Whether or not the authors of Internet Memetic studies would agree, the body of research there appears to sum to a greater goal of policing the public instead of understanding bodies and boundaries of cultural lineages. So, let us consider a different example, one that is outside of the realm of the usual kinds of policy and platform management. That is, let us look at an example of a generative memetics.
\n\nLet us, this time, consider the metadata surrounding searches instead. Let us say, I perform a search, but the response is not so great. I receive almost no images which answer my interest. This is a fairly common response with some searches, images or not. I almost never get precisely the answer I want when I am searching Stackoverflow for example. This is an example of how recommender systems fail technologically. Frequently, when this occurs a librarian or an educator might suggest I learn to use the platform better. If the data are there, and I simply did not find it, it is easier for me to learn to search better. Yet, if I am a developer for Stackoverflow, I might see systematic failures in search to be something which needs generative development.
\n\nAs a developer, I might create more documentation suggesting how to do searches. For example, clarify how to use logical operators, key terms in programming languages, and so on. That is, I can make instruction manuals more bulky. Of course, as we know, people are terrible at following instructions. So instead the developer might realize value in memetic failures in search. Common search failures might simply be a failure in design, not cultural information.
\n\nThat is, a developer might recognize that the systematic failure of search is a memetic search behavior that is harder to fix than predicting the memetic search behavior through cues. For example, I frequently will search for something like how to perform a specific for loop. But let us say I have never learned of for loops. Instead, I am likely to use language that is synonymous to my own pre-programming literate speech. In fact, whenever I am learning any new programming terminology, I often find myself being told to learn the language before I can even learn what I am asking for. This reminds me of a relatively simple analogy to dictionaries. My mom, an English teacher and high school librarian often used to refer me to a dictionary if I could not spell a word. But I frequently griped that looking up a word in the dictionary implies I already know how to spell it. While this is not entirely true, sometimes not being able to spell a word made looking up how to spell the word hilariously difficult.
\n\nImagine how long it would take a child to learn to spell gnat without knowing if it started with a g. At some point, upon realizing that culturally, many people would perhaps look through all of the N words, then if they knew the word knight, they may go to the Ks before someone their mothers would laugh at them and tell them the error. Instead of being a laughing stock, imagine if the dictionary could respond to this issue by seeing where I stopped looking in the Ns and giving me suggestions. Certainly, some websites do this to some degree. However, I forever feel this difficulty with Stackoverflow. Furthermore, especially with visual media, I find searching is near impossible more than half the time. Have you ever tried looking up a video with almost no text description? It is a foolish game. Tiktok is incredibly difficult to to text searches for. Meme names on Know Your Meme equally so. Google attempts to resolve this with reverse image searches, but it also can be infuriating. Understanding the connectedness of the materially mediated world and our culturally internal cognitions about these recommender systems would offer us a much more fluid method of communicating with technology that often communication and education scholars consider to be a lack of literacy. Really, to my mind, this is less a lack of literacy, and more a power struggle for what things culturally mean. Proclaiming we must teach literacy is often the polite way to say that you must become acclimated to the culture of the educator in order to make sense of the world. Development of tools to approach this differently would likely provide us with a much less patronizing digital culture, and a more generative than repressive culture.
\n\nWith this second development, a person in memetics currently might suggest that this is not memetics, but rather a different field. To this I would answer, yes, but only because we have made memetic theory impractical almost with intention to remain abstractly ideological despite what its researchers might proclaim. To move forward, we must restructure theory.
\n\nFrequently, when I mention systematic cultural disconnects from technology, people will point to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), or applications of psychology, or horrendously literacy studies to solve the problem. While certainly, these are connecting spaces which can do something about this problem in varieties of highly applied practices, it is a pragmatic theory of replicated culture which addresses systematic issues more quickly. That is, a somewhat better development of memetic theory would perhaps be more practical at pointing out errors in technological design than stretching existing theories to attempt to explain thoughts and behaviors totally outside of their domain.
\n\nPerhaps the closest space to how I have been describing memetics is HCI. HCI, when done well, attempts to close the gap between diverse human cultures and technologies by developing technology for those cultures. However, HCI when it does this, is less science focused, and more design focused. Further, it is a fast-paced, conference oriented publishing culture. That is, it solves minor problems relatively quickly in the short run, but it has no clear long-run development of theory, and it seems opposed to doing so. It was developed as an engineering and design approach, not a theory of culture. Memetics, on the contrary, was and continues to be a theory of culture which contains within it the ability to explain how those cultures evolve for new contexts.
\n\nMemetics, however, could pick up a couple of core ideas from HCI despite the distinction on theory interests. Firstly, picking up on materially clear problems. Starting from an obvious technological issue rather than an abstract rhetorical issue would be more fundamentally impactful. Secondly, as I have been saying, using pragmatic approaches as opposed to the naturalistic of the neo-Darwinian approach, or the post-modernist, ideological, or constructionist approach that Internet Memetics pursues. That is, borrowing from the way design fields recognize cultural icons, symbols, and signs as carrying inherent material meanings in design would help memetics to know how memes are used as opposed to what researchers idealize their meaning to be. Memetics are relational, differentiating semiotic objects when interpreted this way. They are not loose ideological dog whistles or inaccessible secret codes all the time as Internet Memetics would have us believe. They have material connections to pragmatic interpretations that have affordances that can be seen in use rather than in abstractly interpreted ideologies.
\n\nIn summary, memetics could gain from Pragmatism and looking to material frameworks to develop a datafiable empirical study. Eventually memetic structures which can be relational between technology and culture will systematically be found by doing this which are not specifically naturalistic or as abstract or scientifically elusive as design constructions of platform policies and software. In order to see the value of such an approach will likely happen in seeing better technology designs as well as more ethical approaches to managing digital policies and culturally contextual platform updates. And furthermore, the ethics of these ideas will not merely be delegated to abstractions of ideological frameworks of a select few disconnected researchers and their personal ethical interests.
\n\nImage Attribution: Know Your Meme
\n", "image": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/images/IsThisIlluminati.png", "date_published": "2022-12-13T00:00:00-05:00", "tags": ["Blog","Memes"] }, { "id": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/TheGutterRiverandEndlessHoop", "url": "https://www.alexanderosmith.com/TheGutterRiverandEndlessHoop/", "title": "The Gutter, the River, and an Endless Hoop", "summary": "Memes and Movements", "content_html": "Memes move through time. If they are these bits of culture that spread, across experiences, they certainly move through time. I could also reference to digital space, as Shifman does definitionally 1, when referring to memes traversing through platform to platform. While one might see this spatially, it is somewhat of an abstraction of our senses of memes. For simplicity here, let’s focus on the time-scale of memetics which is more grounded in our cognition.
\n\nWhen scrolling through the internet or moving from one platform to another, this is more interpretable as time passing than movements through space. It is fair to ultimately argue that the internet and the physical infrastructures which build them are specialized across servers and screen pixels’ distances from each other. However, putting this aside for the moment, enables me to say something somewhat interesting about how memes become culturally embodied, and how this is somewhat joined to and differentiated from particularly spacial media: comics.
\n\nSo for now, memetic “movements” here are time oriented more so than spacial.
\n\nIntuitively, visual internet memes are not too far away from existing like comics do. By comparison much of the same language Scott McCloud applies to comics can be applied to visual memes almost directly.2 Visual memes are collections of images, much as comics are. Between these images there are connections which signify the passage of time, a movement needed to get from one moment to the next. Across them, we imagine the action. Between them, the stitches of a narrative or a meaning are pulled together. In comics, when we see the stitch, it’s called a “panel,” but when the narrative seam disappears behind the page, it leaves a gap between panels called a “gutter.”
\n\nThe “gutter” is where the invisible can be seen in two ways. The first way is within the page itself. As a seam, the thread must be there by physical necessity or else one image following from the next would be too much to assume. Since they clearly do, the seam exists inside the medium of the page itself. The page itself enables a connection from one moment to the next. The second way is by the narrative power of the viewer. As McCloud says, “Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.” (2 p. 66). The viewer must make the cinema, the potentials of time, themselves. We make the virtuality of the gutter real. It is in these two ways, the seam is a multiplexed informational channel which is visible to us as a “gutter.”
\n\nFor the comic strip, of course, this is modern, mechanical information flow. The system is a well glossed, illustrated, and stabled together contractual narrative agreement between the authors and the reader. The seam leaves little space by pulling the gutter taught and neat. The narrative is just as tight or loose as the author designed for the page. This leaves an intentionally limiting gutter offering the reader just enough material to play with. Information flows in parallel with the seam by the author. However it also flows parallel with the gutter and orthogonal to the narrative seam. Where those two flows meet, an idea forms at the cross.
\n\nBut what happens when there is no mechanic to draw the contract for the viewer? The medium is no longer industrial production between the printed narrative and limited “human imagination.” The gutter becomes the virtual itself, a flowing river in all directions. No longer is the gutter designed between two images, but rather it is a river which erodes and builds its own two banks of the past and the future. The images are no longer authored and sewn together by the modernly contracted individuals who supply and demand a narrative. The narrative is joined together by the river of potential itself connecting the banks it finds itself between.
\n\nIt is here that memetics is different from comics. Agency is no longer contractual designs of media and human. Agency is post-human. Memetics individuates information for us. It puts life into mechanistic communication and controlled mediation. In memetics the gutter becomes a river with a life of its own. As Dawkins3 and Wilkins4 put it, memes demand to be seen as akin to organisms themselves.
\n\nWhile such extended metaphors are poetic, in this case, it is not simply theoretical pandering. Such an informational flood is one which can be empirically seen despite being understudied. However, it is understudied because of its difficulty in being seen by all people in decidedly systematically analogous ways. Consider the informational “flood” that James Gleick attributes to the meme: “[A]n object is not a meme. The hula hoop is not a meme; it is made of plastic, not of bits. When this species of toy spread worldwide in a mad epidemic in 1958, it was the product, the physical manifestation of a meme, or memes: the craving for hula hoops; the swaying, swinging, twirling skill set of hula-hooping. The hula hoop itself is a meme vehicle,” (5 p. 313). For Gleick, the meme is not objective and lifeless. Upon having a hula hoop, a human is enabled to become some cyborg-ish connection between the two which is afforded by the human and hoop joining together, becoming “hula-hooping.”
\n\nHowever, what “hula-hooping” is, requires potentials of action which are not defined by some modernist “gutter.” Albeit, a hula hoop is, in fact, a product with a supposed contract for consumption in a similar way that comics are a contract between writer and reader. However, because the hula hoop is nothing more or less than a plastic ring of a specific size, the way in which it does its “swinging, twirling” and even bending or flipping is defined more by the action made possible between it and the body which uses it. The action between the hula hoop and the body which uses it creates the banks in which information’s river can flood and reshape the banks of the river. And this, most certainly, is not entirely within the agency of the “author” of the hula hoop if we could even find a specific person to attribute its design to.
\n\nWhen the hoop was popularized in the “epidemic” of 1958 that Gleick mentions, this hoop was passed on to Wham-O. Joan Anderson introduced it to a opportunist profiteer at Wham-O, and this profiteer decided to cut her out of the business deal. To some degree a hula hoop was capitalized on as an toy object derived from the activities of indigenous peoples. Among Anderson and those at Wham-O, likely they had no idea the history of the banks which the hula hoop connected. They just saw an opportunity for profit through limited uses as a toy or exercise equipment. To suggest that any or all of these people fully understood every possible use case of a hula hoop would be assuming they understood every case of its use and the creative developments that arise from such uses. Such an assumption is absurd and “contractually” limited to the capitalistic notion of patents supposed by Wham-O. This also does not address the cultural appropriation necessary to dissect the “hula hoop” from its original cultural usage for indigenous peoples and put a patent on it.
\n\nDespite all of this, hula-hooping is a legitimate expression of self and often is raised to the status of a skilled performance which has different meanings when contextualized in different material ways. It is different seeing someone perform with a “hula hoop” at a circus than at an indigenous dance for example. These actions are contextually intended for different purposes. The indigenous dance is often considered about an expression of spirituality and connection to life suggesting an intentional metaphysical worldview. A circus performance with a “hula hoop” is more a show of skill in of itself or a part of a collage of circus entertainment, suggesting a different worldview dependent upon the circus’s collage and story.
\n\nAs such, hula-hooping is performed between and among different actors which all play a part in deciding the “idea(s)” that the hula hoop carries: its “meme(s)” as Gleick suggests. These memes are materially expressed and interpreted through those connections in performance.
\n\nHowever, now, one person’s experience with a hula hoop might be years to the next one, in a totally different moment, with totally different connections. As such, how we individually interpret what the “idea” of hula-hooping is happens to be very time oriented for every individual. The gutter can suddenly be made excessively wide with room for interpretation that is less decided upon by anyone except that individual. If being fascinated by hula-hooping, I could make my next experience with a hula hoop buying one, I could go watch hours of YouTube videos of hula-hooping, or I could feel the inspired to express my own best skills and never intentionally come across a hula hoop again. This sort of flexibility of the gutter does not occur for the comic. Upon being impressed with one panel, I move to the next almost immediately. With memes, connections between the “panels” is where the magic happens. It is there that our cognition of the “idea” of a meme germinates into the next panel of the narrative. The idea is how cultural time happens differently than other sorts of time, and with memes, the idea is more faceted and potentially more intense than any designed “gutter” in a comic because no one is contractually designated to be in control of that idea, by patent, by authorship, or otherwise. The “gutter” is free to be a river of thought even if a patent intentionally tries to steady its banks and direct its current.
\n\nThere are some who suggest caution here with good reason. Dawkins’s “selfish” origins of cultural units have a tendency to rhetorically align with adversity of culture and capitalistic competition. That is, memes initially appear to align evolutionary principles with capitalistic production and cybernetic control of information channels. As information theorist Kane X. Faucher puts it, “reducing cultural information to meme-units does seem to suggest that experience and memory are simply mechanistic,” (6 p. 31). While Faucher does not go as far as to say memetics is mechanistic, much of the Darwinian analogies developing out of Dawkins’s theory is. Even Daniel Dennett’s theory of cognition, including his use of selfish genes and meme, comes across as overly determined machines.
\n\nIn contrast to this, Faucher forwards and evolutionary account of information which derives from philosophers Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. In this setting, post-cybernetic information is developed by giving cognition to the information itself. Information is not entirely defined by the matter or energy in the world (physicalism) nor is it defined by pure forms (idealism), and further it is not defined by some functional connection between the two positions. Rather, information is something between and connecting matter/energy and form, but also connecting the virtual to the actual. That is, information carries potential outcomes which can never be said to exist in an a priori sample space: i.e. a bag of options where all options are known. In this way information can always carry the ability to express some virtual possibility that is unknown presently.
\n\nThe memetic river is this kind of information. Memes can actualize in new things in culture in this way. And thus, novelty can exist which is not mechanistic, but depends on the way in which actions are embodied in the flow of things. For example, a hula hoop can happen across a new context where, unknown to the actors in the context, time gives the context meaning that was previously distant from the hula hoop. Such a differentiating expression enables us to know more about the meme connected to the hula hoop, but we can never fully know the hula hoop meme without having all of time connecting all the contexts of hula-hooping. It is in this way that the hoop is a closed circuit, but we can never claim every point connected to the hoop will be actualized. It is this way that memetics circumvents Faucher’s warnings of mechanistic determinism. It is in this way that the meme has an agency and a semantic unto itself.
\n\nCover Image Attribution: Scott McCloud, Blood in the Gutter. Understanding Comics, p. 67, 1993
\nShifman, L. (2013). Memes in Digital Culture. The MIT Press. ↩
\nMcCloud, S. (1993). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins. ↩ ↩2
\nDawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press. ↩
\nWilkins, J. S. (1998). What’s in a Meme? Reflections from the Perspective of the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology. Journal of Memetics, 2(1), 2–33. Scopus. http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/wilkins_js.html ↩
\nGleick, J. (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Vintage. ↩
\nFaucher, K.X. (2013). Metastasis and Metastability: A Deleuzian Approach to Information.Sense Publishers. ↩
\nI really had high hopes for this book considering the reviews and awards, but even the way the book is framed is a red flag.
\n\nA brief abstract of my complaints are as follows:
\nI will walk through this book linearly:
\n\nLet’s define the entirety of AI as stupid, dumb, and mean calculations.
\n\nNot only does Crawford never attempt to give a sufficient definition of what an Artificial Intelligence is, she mostly just calls it names. Granted, she loosely ties it to common usages and popular interpretations of how AI has been used, but she never gives it a clear definition or explain broadly how it is different from other kinds of computation. She only uses these straw-person positions of what AI are in order to say we don’t need one. This is intentional. It enables a particular perspective of AI that does not have to be very nuanced, and it allows her to make all sorts of arguments without justification. It essentially makes it really easy to read this book and think you learned something about AI when really what you are about to learn is the history of basically every technology invented since the 1800s. This book was praised as being the book of the moment and an instant classic. This book might as well be about the printing press. The arguments of its devastation to society would hold just the same at the time of its industrialization.
\n\nMining is bad. Computers use parts that are mined.
\n\nYes, Crawford initiates with an ethnographic style that she had a paid field trip to visit a mining site, yet she never seems to use any ethical ethnographic practices. “I’m here to learn what AI is made from.” Okay, but she doesn’t use any of the information she got there that she couldn’t have gotten from a Google map search and literal hundreds of years of news reports about the hazards and labor issues in mining. As best as I can tell, she doesn’t quote a single person from the site, she doesn’t help anybody there, and most of her arguments aren’t about AI specifically but are about computers we all use everyday. It’s almost like this chapter intends to say AI did this when literally the entire world of computing plays a part. Your smartphone is a part of this; heck, ordinary linear regreesion is a part of this.
\n\nThe entire chapter (and the book as a whole) is riddled with narrative holes such as connecting all of statistics with eugenics without further explanation or motivation for reason in a chapter about mineral mines. Am I to believe that anyone who computes a t-statistic is connected to a goal of eugenics oriented computation? The author is not clear on this but she certainly wants the reader to uncritically follow that narrative.
\n\nThere’s a history of labor exploitation in computation.
\n\nYes. There’s a history of labor exploitation. Is this unique to AI? No, it isn’t. Why is this a book about AI again? Why are we ignoring more than 200 years of labor literature on this exact subject? However, at least this chapter does give a half-hearted attempt to describe the invisible labor behind so-called “automated” algorithmic work.
\n\nModels often use data abstracted from their origins which carry information we should address.
\n\nThis is likely the best chapter in the book. For the first time, the author addresses something interesting about machine learning and AI. The authors argument that we use data that are deeply personal to some people (specifically in the use of mug shots used for crime prediction or facial recognition), because it strips those people of their humanity through abstraction and sets a norm of being able to use people’s image data without asking them.
\n\nWhile this argument is obvious, the way in which she makes it doesn’t address data itself as the chapter proclaims. Initially it addresses computational models. Otherwise, why not critique the Census while we’re at it? Is that not basically the same? No, because according to the author it’s not about the data itself (except that the image data make her feel more strongly about this particular case) but it’s about dehumanizing modeling techniques. But later, it’s not about modeling techniques because it’s about the fact that these data contain histories of which models don’t account.
\n\nThis story is not well unpacked. She cannot argue both models and data are steps after each other in dehumanizing people simultaneously. This argument has two left feet. Crawford’s refusal to directly explain how AI is defined and works mechanistically hurts her the most here. Without nuance distinguising how AI is different from other kinds of computation, it’s not clear where the problem is. Thus, for the remainder of the book, we talk about government programs without clarity of what was built at a datafied level or at a modelled level, and so a casual reader would have to already know how AI works to actually learn the ethics here.
\n\nThis book does not provide the mechanisms for a genuine reflection of our relationship to computation. What practical ethical consideration should I take away from this? Despite critiquing induction/deduction in computation, the implication is to induct that all things about social data trace back to unnecessary and dehumanizing abstractions. Is not this precisely what is being argued against? Automating arguments within an assumed logic and model to the determined ends of that model? Was this book written by an AI?
\n\nJokes aside, all a data scientist can do is say, “Yes, this case is sad,” and be educated enough to know that this history isn’t determinantly true. But Crawford implies again and again that this determinantly the history of AI and datafication.
\n\nOntologies have implications.
\n\nNow Crawford turns on the laborer she earlier claimed was exploited, saying that when we use cheap labor to classify stuff, we produce racist outcomes and the degradation of linguistic principles. The author remains conservative to following an epistemology that she doesn’t explain about language and classification. This is nothing but an elitist trope that classification experts should do classification since data scientists aren’t willing to ethically clean their own datasets.
\n\nWhile there are good points here about the harms of classification, just read Bowker and Star instead. In direct opposition to Crawford’s interpretation, it seems more reasonable to argue,
\n\nInstead, Crawford’s policy here is to oppose letting pedestrian people datafy things because they will muddy up your data. This feels elitist about interpreting how MTurkers work, and unfair to researchers who cannot meet publication requirements on their own. It also doesn’t account for the argument that researchers muddy their own data all the time, computational data or not. “Expert” checking doesn’t solve this on its own.
\n\nThat is, Crawford rejects her own labor chapter. Researchers can’t work in isolation for most of academia in order to answer the questions posed to them, and the use of crowdsourced data (while problematic and should be addressed more by the standards of the Labor chapter) is not necessarily lesser quality data just because they are unaware of the academic training. If anything, an oppositional reading of this section teaches us that researchers can get better at cleaning crowdsourced data with experience of what to look for or can use that same data for a different purpose related to the biases it contains. Unfortunately, instead of actively looking for ways to continue valuing the labor of our peers, she suggests we induct that all datafication processes using classification are problematic necessities of AI because nobody is looking at datasets they use, which is laughable. While its been described this way, clearly somebody eventually looked at all the datasets Crawford claims weren’t looked at because it’s those researchers trying to correct these problems that gave her the historical data to write the chapter.
\n\nReading people’s emotions from their faces is not a science.
\n\nWhile the simple argument here is true: we can’t look at a person’s face and know their feelings, this chapter badly butchers its theory. Firstly, while her main antagonist, Elkman, actually did attempt to do this and its still used in computational research, the way she frames Tomkins is horrendous. He argues that every body has an affective interpretation, not necessarily that all bodies essentially are the same in how we interpret their affects. Secondly, Tomkins does not fixate on singular human affects as the only individuals of interest. Tomkins is a post-human psychologist. Crawford reduces Affect theory to simple emotions of individuals (as do most communication scholars actually; it’s kind of a meme at this point.) In total, this is probably one of the worst readings of Tomkins I’ve ever seen. There’s no “affect theory” here in this interpretation. This is just badly interpreted psychology theory. For anyone who wants to check this out, look up Eve Sedgewick’s Tomkins reader Shame and its Sisters. For affect theory more broadly, Spinoza’s Ethics and Deleuze’s work developing Spinoza’s affect theory make great starting points also. Even a brief overview from experts in affect should convince you of how badly Crawford misunderstands affect theory.
\n\nThis chapter should have stopped after describing Elkman’s empirical failure to model emotion, and then written a different chapter which had nothing to do with affect theory. This could have been a literature review about the failure to computationally see emotion, and that would have made a significantly better than pretending to understand affect theory. This chapter actively hurts other areas of academia that have almost nothing to do with the computational arguments here, and those areas, contrary to this argument, are way more thoughtful about computation than this. In fact, consider reading Elizabeth Wilson’s Affect and Artificial Intelligence instead of this book. It both critiques computational models as they exist today, and attempts to re-read vitalism into early discussions of AI which would improve most of our understanding of what computation can and cannot do. While it might not be quite as accessible as this book, at least it doesn’t overtly misuse theory to fear monger. Wilson provides a more ethical and considerate academic work on the subject of affect than this chapter.
\n\nLots of computational tools used to police and track people online are AI tools that create logics to hurt “others” as a part of datafied “precision.”
\n\nAgain, we knew this. She briefly discusses Benjamin Bratton’s book, The Stack (which this chapter is merely a summary of), but also We Are Data describes this very carefully. Crawford supposedly, in hacker-like style, had access to all of Snowden’s data release and still the best she could do with it was repeat the same arguments others did. Yes, AI is used to track people and occasionally decide to kill them. Yes, this is dehumanizing to reduce humans to numbers. Yes, this is what new nationalist racism looks like. But more could have been said that summarizing the work of others as a part of having pulled a couple of slides from Snowden’s files and putting them in a book.
\n\nThis book is simple to interpret because it’s written to be devastating and have the sense of absolute completion. While I would like to say that I agree with most of it, half of the stuff that I do agree with isn’t new here even though it’s written stylistically to look like she’s uncovering conspiracies like some Jason Borne-level academic. The other half of stuff that I agree with ties itself to framings that might be more problematic to academic standards and labor ethics. This does not even include that I think that most of this felt really disingenuous.
\n\nThe narrative turns from the ethnographic writing style to carefully selected historical tangents you can find on Wikipedia that have nothing to do with the immediate ethnographic framing give me the feeling that I’m not being told the whole truth… and I know I’m not. It’s too simple. It’s too easy to consume. It makes too many hidden and contradictory assumptions that can be teased out quickly if someone is looking. While I wanted to like this book, its a case of how stuff with AI in the name sells, and it cheapens a lot of the work that others have worked towards on this subject. While someone who isn’t trained in this might walk away with a sense of gained knowledge, it doesn’t well introduce how critical AI research is being done well. This book seems to shut down interest more than raise it and leave open questions. This is a book that only someone trained in critical communication studies could agree with in summary, but it is condescending to everyone else that it’s written for.
\n\nThis is a book that required a lot more nuance and should have trusted its audience to understand more than the consumable drama and oversimplifications this book narrates. While good things are here, they can only be interpreted with clarity by someone who already knew those things. This is a common problem I’ve seen in “accessible academia”: don’t trust the public with the clear and fair investigated truth-claims; trust them instead with patchworked, token truths sewn together with drama.
\n\n(NOTE: this review is an update of my Goodreads review of the book.)
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