Digital-Culture

Surveillance capitalism is the idea that we have entered a new phase in how capitalism works. Mining doesn’t focus on natural resources anymore, but on data. Our labour is less valuable than our use of services and devices that can extract value from us. Google is one of the biggest players in surveillance capitalism. Almost everyone uses their products, yet almost nobody pays for them. Google makes money by giving away their products and selling what they learn about their users. ...

The Google memo assumes that computing is naturally suited to men. But is it? After writing this post I made an updated, interactive version of this text. If you want to dive deeper, take a look at Gendered Computing. The discussion on the Google Memo has been lively, especially after Google decided to fire the author. There have been many responses to the events, but many still seem confused about whether the contents of the memo were correct. It correctly identifies that our thinking is often rife with bias, and then suggests corrections to what it identifies as the current Google approach to gender diversity. In short, it states that ...

Surveillance capitalism is the new default way of doing business on the internet. Even businesses that don’t need to collect data do so because it’s so easy. Surveillance capitalism doesn’t require you to consume, it just requires you to exist within digital networks. You are more valuable as a source of data than as a potential customer. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for Google and Facebook to give away all their products. They don’t require you to pay anything in order to grow rich – together they make more money on online advertising than everyone else combined. ...

I attempt to review Revolution in the Age of Social Media (2014) and Twitter and Tear Gas (2017) side-by-side. When the Egyptian revolution of 2011 happened, it was – among with a few other revolutions – framed as a “Twitter revolution” or a “Facebook uprising.” Especially Western media focused on the role of technology in these revolutions, conveying the narrative of new technology ousting old autocrats and ushering in democracy. Critics like Evgeny Morozov soon countered, pointing out the obvious simplicity of this explanation. Terms like “slacktivism” or “clicktivism” were coined to explain the new forms of digital resistance, showing its supposed futility. ...

I spent last Friday at a seminar about algorithms. We discussed everything from health technology and citizenship in the digital era to the structure of neural nets. I got the sense that talk about algorithms is both too hyperbolic and not serious enough at the same time. Technology is not magic, it has very specific ways it works or doesn’t work and knowing the difference helps in avoiding the kind of superstition often related to the power of algorithms. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are no neutral pieces of software, separated from our everyday lives. Algorithms will affect how societies work – that is the whole point of using algorithms in problem-solving. ...

I gave a talk at National Meeting of English Students about the political use of memes. In case you missed it, here is what I intended to say. It might not be exactly what I said, so consider this the updated and slightly condensed version. First, to understand the political context of memes and how they are used, it helps to know some background. Originally, meme didn’t refer to things like funny pictures on the internet. The concept was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), where he described it as a “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”. He conceived it in broad terms, so that included practices like holidays, ideas like God(s) and texts like The Selfish Gene itself. His way of thinking about memes is problematic in many ways, but the concept itself was less sticky than the word associated with it. ...