the future

“How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism”

Posted by Christian

Cory Doctorow’s answer to Shoshana Zuboff’s thesis. A long read, but well worth it.

What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us — conspiracies among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as “corruption”) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/26/destroy-surveillance-capitalism/#surveillance-monopolism

Postscript:
What I miss from the discussion about conspiracy myths is an acknowledgment that people usually have a fairly good “gut feeling” about what’s wrong. To quote Kurt Tucholsky: “Das Volk versteht das meiste falsch; aber es fühlt das meiste richtig.” *

So when Covidiots smell (in Corona-measures) a conspiracy to abolish freedom for ever, they’re obviously wrong. But I see it as an indication that many people know that for the last 20 years (!) fundamental rights in the “Democratic West” have been gradually abolished in the name of “security”. Or, as Cory Doctorow argues in that piece, it’s the trauma of the big financial crisis of 2007-2009 that still reverberates. The ongoing corruption that you get with big monopolies. Something is badly, fundamentally wrong, and everybody knows.

  • yes, that Tucholsky quote is from 1931 Germany, using a whole different idea of who “the people” are (for one, it was a lot more homogenous demographic, and the public sphere hadn’t yet dissolved into a million bubbles). But the quote has always stuck with me as a reminder not to fall into easy sarcasm, or snarkyness, about a “the people”.

Canary

Posted by Christian

“the deep strangeness of the present moment: everybody knows what’s going on, and nobody can do anything about it.”
James Bridle

Using CCTV to bring down fascists

Posted by Christian

The Forensic Architecture team has release another masterful media investigation: THE MURDER OF PAVLOS FYSSAS

Here’s the quick summary. Full video linked below

 

In 2013, members of the Greek Nazi movement “Golden Dawn” murdered the antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas on the streets of Athens, a murder that was covered up by members of the Greek police, known to be riddled with Golden Dawn infiltrators, and abetted by Members of Parliament from Golden Dawn.

As the case works its way through the Greek courts, the University of London’s “Forensic Architecture” group has been called in to make sense of a welter of evidence about the crime and the cover-up, deploying their system of using “architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world.”

The result is a 37 minute video that Talos on Metafilter a masterpiece of analytic exposition and impressively recreates the events surrounding the murder based on available data sources — it is.

The Fyssas trial has the potential to bring down Golden Dawn, to bring its true nature as an organized crime group into the open, to eliminate it from the Greek Parliament and to trigger a purge of Nazi elements from the Greek police. It is nothing short of seismic.

But even if you don’t care about any of that, this video is remarkable, a stitching-together of disparate and flawed evidence sources in a way that uses the strengths of one to overlap and fix the weaknesses of the other, creating a coherent and devastating story that is as well-told as any crime drama. It is truly virtuoso work.

Much of the original audio and video material was without an accurate timestamp, and it became apparent that attempts by the Greek police investigators to address this problem were insufficient. As a result, our researchers had to assess the material from scratch, and deduce the correct time and location of each piece of footage.

Audio recordings were assembled into a timed sequence through a process of sound analysis. CCTV footage from various locations around the scene was synchronised and given an accurate timestamp by reference to the sequence of audio recordings.

(via BoingBoing)

the vulnerable, saved

Posted by Christian

I’m just going to let this sit there and wait for your comments.

Here’s the video archived in case of depublication

Simon Denny: Tech and Distributed Governance?

Posted by Christian

the 2nd  Medienkatastrophe-lecture of the summer term

Simon Denny: Tech and Distributed Governance?
lecture in English

From the rise of blockchain (the distributed ledger behind Bitcoin) to the development of management methodology ‘Holacracy’ at Zappos in Las Vegas and the intelligence agencies of the UK, the lecture will map some of the technology industry’s disruptive forces as they alter the conditions of governance.

From dreams of alternatives to hyper-liberalism, and more recently affinities with the far right, the discussion and presentation will touch on various interconnected case studies and unpack the changes being rolled out between the state and extra-state forces extending the tech community’s infrastructure, culture and influence today. As the Silicon Valley community builds and maintains what has become the interfaces for global communications, the tensions between politically nationalist governing systems and global financial and information streams continue to intensify.

Drawing on his work over the last 5 years Denny will unpack moments in this trajectory.

https://www.khm.de/termine/news.4185.simon-denny-tech-and-distributed-governance/

 

image: SD_BlockchainRiskBoardGamePrototype-Tech_Venture21IncEdition _Photo: Joerg Von Bruchhausen
poster by Nikolai

Geert Lovink / Medienkatastrophe talk

Posted by Christian

A State of the Platform Address

By Geert Lovink

20 April 2017, 18h, KHM Aula
This lecture deals with the changes over the years from media, via networks to platforms. What does it mean that the internet has become infrastructure, penetrating society, from taxis to hotels to agriculture and healthcare, going well beyond the media and communication realm? What do we mean when we talk about ‘platform capitalism’? What is aggregation and does it play out in different contexts? We all know how social media operate in daily life, but what’s the next step, and how can the art world, start to play a role in these massive changes in society?

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he is researcher in the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts) and a project on the future of art criticism.

Network Cultures Critique! Buzzwords: Era of Social Media Monopolies / Platform Capitalism / Cryptocurrencies / the end of the “free” services business model /  etc etc. He’s meeting us at 16h to look at some of your projects. There are a million talks on Youtube. From a short interview about Social Media:

“I sincerely hope that we can still break it open and have space for more experimentation. Because what we see is the reverse development. And that’s got to do with the fact that people are more and more familiarizing themselves. It’s all slipping into this new level of mass subconsciousness, where the social media become part of the everyday life. We all know that, when you walk into the elevator, very very likely he or she is going to get out the smartphone and check it before they arrive at the 6th floor. That is a new habit. And it’s this habitual element which is very very dangerous. Because it forbids further experimentation, and kind of solidifies the network architectures and says, this is what it is. If we know what it is, it can then enter the collective subconsciousness. And that is a very dangerous moment. And that is the moment of complete and utter state and corporate control.”

Update: here’s the recording

"How One Man Watches an Entire City"

Posted by Christian

baltimore-Persistent-Surveillance-loop

technology is progressing – now one plane is enough for a constant CCTV stream of every street from above:

“Watch This Surveillance Master Dissect a Murder From the Sky”  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/watch-this-surveillance-master-dissect-a-murder-from-the-sky

“surveillance master” – !?!!!?!!!!
great video effects I’d say. Strong analysis tools looking good.

The background story about the technology and where it’s being used:
“Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move From Above” https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-surveillance/

new words learnt:
“image exploitation”
“circle of persistence”

sales pitch:
“watch here… and here… and here… and here…”

more images provided the company: https://www.google.de/search?tbm=isch&q=site:www.pss-1.com