Theoriesample

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Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

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A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, 1993

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Certeau's investigations into the realm of routine practices, or the "arts of doing" such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling, and cooking, were guided by his belief that despite repressive aspects of modern society, there exists an element of creative resistance to these strictures enacted by ordinary people. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau outlines an important critical distinction between strategies and tactics in this battle of repression and expression. According to him, strategies are used by those within organizational power structures, whether small or large, such as the state or municipality, the corporation or the proprietor, a scientific enterprise or the scientist. Strategies are deployed against some external entity to institute a set of relations for official or proper ends, whether adversaries, competitors, clients, customers, or simply subjects. Tactics, on the other hand, are employed by those who are subjugated. By their very nature tactics are defensive and opportunistic, used in more limited ways and seized momentarily within spaces, both physical and psychological, produced and governed by more powerful strategic relations.

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Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, edited by Andrew Blauvelt, Walker Art Center. 2003.

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stuxnet

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In a brief interview, Clarke expands on his vision of the time we’re living in now, with a focus on communication. He nails almost everything, from the Internet and email to smartphones, Google and even smartwatches.

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Arthur C. Clarke accurately describes the 21st century…in 1976

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The point here is to emphasize that more and more of our interactions in digital “environments” are programmed to produce data at unprecedented scales and speeds. This refers to the three central handling stages—distinguished here for analytical purposes, but empirically much more blurry—of “algorithmic governmentality,” put forth by Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns. The first step is data warehousing, whereby massive quantities of data are systematically collected from a plethora of practices and interactions and stored, regardless of their utility or significance; after which comes data mining, effectively extracting correlations and patterns through algorithmic calculations, the inductive self-evidence of which lies in the sheer quantity of data that is handled; and finally there is profiling, which aims not so much at identifying specific persons, but at correlating scattered occurrences together so as to reduce behaviors themselves to necessary and temporally successive algorithms.

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Reigeluth, Tyler Butler (2014): Why data is not enough: Digital traces as control of self and self-control. In: Surveillance & Society 12 (2), S. 243–254.

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First, they are made visible to one another; Katie can see her friend Judy, and vice versa. Second, individuals are made visible to marketing interests, to those corporations and data warehouses that collect and aggregate data from social networks and use them for consumer research or targeted marketing. Third, there is the prospect of regulatory visibility, given that online social networks are increasingly the focus of law enforcement investigations and security dragnets. And finally, the fourth level of visibility produced in online social networks relates to ‘function creep’, or the open ended potential for the data to be used in a number of unforeseen ways down the line.

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Ellerbrok, Ariane (2010): Empowerment: Analyzing Technologies of Multiple Variable Visibility. In: Surveillance & Society 8 (2), S. 200–220.

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First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be video.

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Pat Cadigan, Pretty Boy Crossover

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Nokiasierung

Wenn die deutsche Autoindustrie die digitale Vernetzung weiter so stiefmütterlich behandelt, droht ihr die Nokiasierung.

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Sascha Lobo zu Darauf müssen sich deutsche Autohersteller einstellen

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Computer technologies make the traditional hierarchy of art forms, of representation, of acting and the patterns of dramaturgy collapse. The architectural spacetime-integration and its situational narration are transformed. The art of designing/‘mettre en scene’ is confronted with (technology supported) possibilities for diachronization and space-time-manipulation, as well as the challenges that open up when the observer becomes part of the observed, part of the computer mediated or amplified complex orchestration of the scenic space (which itself is a tailorable and variable composite of real space, imaginary space and the simulation space).

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Manfred Faßler und lna Wagner: The Dramaturgy of Space. Developing Multimedia Theatre and Exhibition, Wien 1997, S. 6.

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A magnificent piece on cyborgs. 

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What else to do? Check On the Media

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How will we interact with computers in the future? - The Verge

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Zu Friedrich Kittler:

The culminating points within the tradition of literary studies – such as, for example, the rationalized project of universal characteristics (characteristica universalis) that speak to the eye, or the modern conception of nature as a book with mathematical letters, or the structuralist notion of the world as text – are transformed into the absurd with the binary code that cannot be expressed by humans, and with modern data processing as a textile that cannot be read by human eyes. This ‘absurdity’ can be understood in the sense of Kierkegaard as a paradox of the historical, which stands in stark opposition to human logic and sensibility, or in the sense of Camus, who counter-intuitively lets the world remain mute to human questions. Does a type of ‘digitalized existentialism’ speak out from Kittler’s texts?

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Sybille Krämer: The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media. In: Theory, Culture & Society 23 (7-8), 2006, S. 93–109.

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Brilliant: Der Random Darknet Shopper (2014)

The Random Darknet Shopper is an automated online shopping bot which we provide with a budget of $100 in Bitcoins per week. Once a week the bot goes on shopping spree in the deep web where it randomly choses and purchases one item and has it mailed to us. The items are shown in the exhibition «The Darknet. From Memes to Onionland» at Kunst Halle St. Gallen. Each new object ads to a landscape of traded goods from the Darknet.

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The barrier between the internet and the rest of the world is weakened by wearables, and their technology is no longer a personal matter. Using them might prove to be -- in circumstances of extrospection, or of massive--augmentation of personal ability -- considered socially unacceptable, unfair or just uncool. How that social progress plays out will be just as interesting as the technology itself. Personal computing is no longer personal. We will wear it like we wear our heart: on our sleeve.

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Read more: Wearables: the third wave of computing by Ben Hammersly

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Like the pre-industrial farmer, the digital native learns through ritual, myth, and societal pressure. There is little to indicate that these users—or any users—deeply understand the technology of smartphones or could apply their understanding of it in other cases or that it would result in their making good policy decisions.

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See more: The Social History of the Smartphone by Steven Hoober (UX Designer)

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Donna Haraway and Sharon Traweek teach us that when we tell stories these are performative. This is because they also make a difference, or at any rate might make a difference, or hope to make a difference. Applied in technoscience, the argument goes further; in fact, it is quite radical. It is that there is no important difference between stories and materials. Or, to put it a little differently: stories, effective stories, perform themselves into the material world—yes, in the form of social relations, but also in the form of machines, architectural arrangements, bodies, and all the rest. This means that one way of imagining the world is that it is a set of (pretty disorderly) stories that intersect and interfere with one another. It means also that these are, however, not simply narrations in the standard linguistic sense of the term.

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John Law: On the Subject of the Object, in: Configurations, 8, 2000, S. 2.

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The subjects think that they treat a certain person as a king because he is in himself already a king, while in reality this person is a king only insofar as the subjects treat him as one [...] the king’s charisma [is] a performative effect of their symbolic ritual [...] The moment the subjects take cognisance of the fact that the king’s charisma is a performative effect, the effect is aborted.

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Slavoj Žižek: Looking Awry. Cambridge, Mass. 1991, S. 33.