MC433: Technology and Justice
These are my notes for MC433 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.
Taught by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
Essay
A 3,000 word essay on a topic mostly of your choice. I wrote about the dangers of algorithmic advertising (mark: Distinction)
Lecture notes
- Communication Technologies and Justice (September 28)
- Civil Rights and the Press (October 05)
- Human Rights, Communication Rights, and Media Literacies (October 12)
- Media Justice (October 19)
- Inclusion and Access (October 26)
- Reading week (November 02)
- Content Production, Human Development, and Participation (November 09)
- Internet Infrastructure and Presence (November 16)
- Prediction, Accuracy, and (Un)fairness (November 23)
- Automated Technologies and Autonomy (November 30)
- Communication Futures (December 07)
Communication Technologies and Justice - week 1
Readings
Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig (chapters 1-3)
He believes in a sort of constitutional approach to regulating the Internet—not necessarily a top-down one, but he thinks we need to find a flexible way of governing things otherwise it will all devolve into either anarchy or totalitarianism. So we need sort of government regulation, but we also have to be careful about letting governments regulate too much, because they can’t be trusted in their current context.
A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (chapter 1)
He builds on the idea of the social contract (as in Locke, Rousseau, Kant) and primarily focuses on the idea of justice as fairness, in contrast to utilitarianism, which he criticises as teleological (that’s one of my favourite words, incidentally) and unable to “take seriously the distinction between persons”.
Inclusion and Democracy by Iris Marion Young (chapter 1)
She differentiates between two models of democracy. The aggregative model (which treats democracy is a matter of aggregating self-interested preferences in a fair and reliable way) is, partly problematic because it treats all preferences as equal no matter their origin or level of rationality. The deliberative model, on the other hand, is about communication and reason: more weight is given to preferences that stand up to dialogic examination. She also talks about structural inequality, and has a wonderfully pithy line on it: “For democracy to promote justice it must already be just.” My personal opinion on this book so far is that it’s pretty great (much more considered than Rawls’) and you should probably just read it.
Lecture
(What follows is my own account of the general thrust of the lecture, which may or may not align with what was actually said by the lecturer. Use at your own risk.)
In the age of mass communication, it’s hard to deny the power of a photograph. The right photograph or, a fortiori, video, can open up a world hitherto unknown to the public and consequently change public sentiment on a scale that would previously have been unimaginable. The implications of this for social justice are massive. In the US, during the civil rights era, mass broadcasting played a transformative role in showing a glimpse of the injustices faced by black Americans in a way that couldn’t be easily ignored by the rest, thus opening the floodgates to widespread social change.
Now, of course, we live in a networked age. With the ascendence of social media and the technologies that made it possible, access to the media is much less gated, and so it’s not only journalists who have the power to shape discourse. Contemporary injustice can be captured on video by a passerby and, from there, quickly ignite the fury of the world—like when Walter Scott was killed by a policeman in 2015.
(Tangentially, as I type these notes, it’s Sunday, October 1 and I’m watching an absolutely mindblowing video showing Spanish military police going up against Catalonian citizens during the Catalan referendum. I’d heard about what was happening, but hearing about it and seeing what it actually looks like on the ground are two very different things. A good example of the power of imagery.)
Looming on the horizon is the next great age of communication: the intelligent age. Rather than humans networked with other humans, we now have machines networked with other machines. At this point, the class is shown a startup promo video, whose casual tone and cutesy animations completely belie the terrifyingly misguided (not to mention harmful) nature of what this startup does: predictive policing. See if you can guess the racial composition of its executives before you click the link. The reasons why this sort of approach to policing is so dangerous were beyond the scope of the lecture (and hence this post), but you can probably guess. What happens when the existing biases of society are codified in data and thus used to direct future actions? What sort of chthonic vicious cycle do we create then?
Course overview
The split between mass, networked, and intelligent communications in the paragraphs above roughly parallels the division of topics over the course of this module: over the next nine weeks, we’ll spend three weeks on each topic. The focus will be on the US, because the lecturer is American, but we’ll look at some examples from the Global South.
We’ll be focusing on the intersection of history, governance, and theories of justice, and how that relates to technology. When we consider the governance of technology, we should remember that it’s not just about governments; in fact, we can break down the primary forces for regulation as law, code (as in software), norms, and markets. These can interact with each other in unexpected ways—markets can produce the ascendence of corporations that change our behaviour and thus our norms (for example, by conditioning us give up our data).
Theories of justice
In accordance with the readings, we’ll be looking at two competing theories of justice: John Rawls’ view, from his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, and that of Iris Marion Young, from her 1990 book Justice and the Politics of Difference.
For comparison, here’s a quote from Rawls that was shown in the slides:
A conception of social justice … is to be regarded as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed.
And here’s a quote from Young:
Justice should refer not only to distribution, but also to the institutional conditions necessary for the development and exercise of individual capacities and collective communication and cooperation.
(she’s really on her consonance game there)
Their theories are almost polar opposites. Rawls is in favour of a liberal democratic society and believes that to get there, we individuals must come together from our “original positions”, detached from our own personal identity and history, and rationally figure out how to distribute goods in a fair way. Everyone should be considered an equal, and we should accordingly distribute things equally, with inequalities only justifiable if they benefit the least-advantaged members of society (the “difference principle”). His approach seems fairly proceduralist & based on the idea that humans are intrinsically capable of reason and rationality.
Young, on the other hand, does not (and I agree with her) buy into the whole “original position” theory. History and context do matter; we can no more shed the cognitive baggage associated with the specific lives we have led than we can shed our corporeal selves to float free in an ether of bodiless rationality. A self is not something you just have, but rather something you build, and as such it is inextricably bound up with identity and other worldly matters. I could write about this all day but instead I’ll just refer you to David Foster Wallace’s essay on Kafka and move on. Young is partial to a communicative democracy, not a liberal democracy, and believes that we have to consider non-quantifiable inequalities in addition to quantifiable ones like wealth (think culture or access to speech). She’s interested in justice from a collective, as opposed to an individual, perspective and emphasises the role that institutions can play in silently maintaining oppression.
(My summaries above are bound to be tendentious because of my personal views on the topic, so you should check out the original texts if you want a better understanding of the difference between these two philosophers.)
Anyway, the whole point of understanding these theories of justice is to start with some sort of normative framework that will ground us in the weeks to come, as we take a closer look at the interplay of communication technologies and justice.
Seminar
(I’m in seminar group 1, led by the professor.)
Icebreaker
As an icebreaker, we were asked to introduce ourselves to each other (in pairs) and tell the other person where our maternal great-grandmother was born. This was a very geographically diverse group so we had a ton of different answers, from those who were very well acquainted with their personal family histories to those who had absolutely no clue. Personally, I was uncertain, but I would guess somewhere in Shandong, simply because all of my grandparents are from Shandong and I don’t know where else she would have migrated from. Part of the reason I’m so uncertain has to do with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, under which certain members of my family suffered more than most; sadly, lots of family history was lost or buried in the process. Others had similar reasons for uncertainty due to, for instance, the chaos of WWII, or the legacy of colonialism. This was an interesting exercise that highlighted just how intimately our personal family histories can be bound up with geopolitical events.
The summative essay
A 3000-word essay is due at the beginning of the seminar in week 7. Details (including potential topics, though we are encouraged to choose our own) can be found in the “Coursework Questions” document on Moodle.
I asked, given that the essay would be due the beginning of week 7, if we should limit ourselves to pre-week 7 content (i.e., omitting intelligent communication). The answer was no—we should feel free to address any topics that were or will be mentioned in class—although it was acknowledged that we would be at a slight advantage if we chose to address something that hadn’t yet been covered.
Someone else asked if we should take a specific approach to the essay (policy proposal? literature review?), to which the answer was also no: we should feel free to take whatever approach we want (within reason).
What is justice?
At the beginning of the lecture, we were all given post-its on which we were to write, anonymously, what we each thought “justice” meant. My own personal definition was very much inspired by having recently read Philosophy and Social Hope by the neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, and it had to do with it being a way of trying to make life better for actually existing human beings, not backed by an absolute moral force but still an asymptote we should push toward. Something like that, I can’t really remember. You should read Rorty if you want a better definition (he has some good ones).
At the end of the seminar, we were each given 3 randomly-chosen post-its (there are 3 seminar groups, and I assume the other groups did the same later) from earlier and asked to collectively group them by subject on the whiteboard. It was tricky because a lot of the definitions blended into each other, and it was hard to prescriptively delineate where one subject should end and the other begin. (It was also physically tricky because a few mavericks inexplicably chose to write on the wrong side of their post-it.) In the end, we had the following groupings (I’m paraphrasing):
- Fairness (the largest subject)
- Equality (which kind of blurred into the fairness one—some of the judgments were fairly arbitrary, to be honest)
- Subjective (mine went in here)
- Rule of law (defined in terms of processes and institutions and very much in line with Rawls’ arguments)
- some others that I have unfortunately forgotten
Another student mentioned that there seemed to be a clear split between those who thought justice had to do with already existing rules and institutions, and those who defined in a more subjective or goal-oriented or immanent way. This is especially notable in light of the theory (alluded to in the lecture) that institutions are always indelibly shaped by the personal beliefs of the individuals and groups that create them, and thus are never neutral, never fully unbiased; the degree to which they reinforce or counter existing ideology depends heavily on the balance of social forces. So the fact that a sizable chunk of students seem to implicitly trust existing institutions and the rule of the law (at least when trying to define “justice”) says something about the extent to which they subscribe to that theory, which may itself be due to personal experiences (or lack thereof) with these institutions. It would be fascinating to conduct this experiment again at the end of the semester to see if the definitions have changed.
Civil Rights and the Press - week 2
Readings
Rethinking the public sphere by Nancy Fraser
This is a wonderful paper found in the book Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig J. Calhoun. (You can download a PDF of the paper here.) I was pretty stoked to see something on Habermas in the reading list (I haven’t actually read any of his work yet, but it’s been high up on my list ever since I read Grand Hotel Abyss), and this paper lived up to that promise.
Fraser’s goal here is to dissect Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere” (introduced in his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and assess its blind spots and limitations. In Habermas’s definition, the (bourgeois) public sphere is a place where “private people can come together as a public”, thus opening a space for citizens that is not part of the state apparatus (and potentially serving as a means of checking authoritarian state behaviour). It should also be separate from the economy, and thus guided by discursive instead of market relations.
- originally a utopian concept, idealised by Habermas: a place where citizens can talk as equals and hold the state accountable (never fully realised in practice)
- these days, with the intertwining of state & society (not to mention the market), it’s hard to conceive of such a sphere
- obvious criticisms: exclusion by gender (Joan Landes) and class (Geoff Eley)
- simply declaring that “extant status distinctions are bracketed and neutralized” does not make it true
- Habermas failed to study anything other than the liberal public sphere (according to Mary Ryan, who herself looked at other public spheres, such as those created by North American women)
- he underestimates the significance of exclusion—it was foundational, not simply an accident or coincidence; it’s in fact a method of ensuring institutional hegemonic domination over the excluded groups
The idea of a public sphere in itself may be good, but it comes with lots of assumptions that we need to unpack:
This idea that it’s possible to shed status distinctions within this sphere (with the corollary that inequality in the real world is acceptable for the purposes of the public sphere—i.e., that you don’t need real-world status equiality for a functioning democracy). Rebuttal: of course you can never fully bracket differences, especially when the protocols themselves serve as class distinctions. Bracketing always works to the advantage of the dominant groups. Think all this “I don’t see gender/race” discourse coming from members of the dominant class as a way of dismissing the (very valid) concerns from marginalised people.
That a single sphere is better than multiple. Rebuttal: in a stratified society, with rampant inequality and groups that are dominated by others, you need what Fraser calls subaltern counterpublics. This is true when a society is not stratified, as long as it is heterogeneous—public spheres are important for the forming and enacting of social identities, and so you need multiple such sphers to accommodate different norms (otherwise you end up privileging the dominant group over the others).
The focus on topics relevant to the common good, and not private matters. Rebuttal: what counts as “public” is itself a contentious topic, and different groups will have different opinions on the matter. There are ideas that are initially seen as private concerns (think domestic violence) and are only later seen as public/common concerns, after they’ve been first developed in subaltern communities. There may not be a universal “common” good in a society consisting of groups that dominate/exploit others, and the designation of particular ideas as private has a tendency to benefit the dominant groups (though not always: think Roe v. Wade or Bowers v. Hardwick).
The assumed separation of civil society and the state, which seems to imply the necessity of laissez-faire capitalism and a limited form of government. Rebuttal: Habermas’ definition assumes that participants in the public sphere are not government employees, but this only results in a weak public (i.e., one with no civil servants and thus no civic decision-making power). Distinguished from a strong public (e.g., a sovereign parliament). Having such a sharp division between public/private citizens can be deleterious because then you miss out on potentially important forms of accountability.
Fraser’s conclusion is that we need a postbourgeois conception of the public sphere.
A Free And Responsible Press (pages 79-95)
Also known as the Hutchins report. Published in 1947 by The Commission On Freedom Of The Press. This report is extremely historically significant, and can be seen as partly responsible for the unique role of the American press. The main goal of the report was to clarify the commission’s ideal level of government involvement in the functioning of the press (spoiler: very little). Their whole idea was that the press should find a way to self-regulate, and that it could do that even despite the exigencies of the profit motive.
Proposals for the govt:
- include radio & film in freedom of the press
- fund more technology and maintain competition via antitrust laws if necessary (but preserve concentration where it’s beneficial to consumers)
- alternative to libel (civil action for damage)—we should have a better way for libel victims to get a correction/retraction. I think they’re arguing for more voluntary corrections? not really sure
- this is a weird one addressing some technicality w/ freedom of speech and urging the overthrow of the government by force (I think they’re saying: don’t prosecute this unless it’s actually likely to result in violence)
- govt should inform the public of policies through existing or new channels if necessary (not entirely sure that their goal with this one is)
Basically they’re saying that the communications industry should remain private, but with the knowledge that it serves the public interest. The Commission hopes that the press will recognise its own responsibility and uphold it so as to avoid the need for government regulation. Optimistically thinks that the profit motive and a good press can coexist (which I tentatively disagree with, because you can get a vicious/virtuous cycle, depending on reception by the public … there’s an aleatory element as well, of course).
Proposals for the press:
- Large companies should be responsible but not broken up
- Companies should fund new experimental technologies/ventures even if they’re (initially) unprofitable, as long as they serve the public better
- Members of the press need to engage in mutual criticism
- Improve staff effectiveness (better pay, conditions, education)
- Radio: don’t let programming be dictated by advertisers (should be like newspapers in this regard)
The Race Beat by Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff (chapters 1-3)
On the role of the press in the civil rights era. Very accessible read & highly engrossing (more journalistic than academic). Seems to be focused on the stories of the white southern editors who helped pave the way for public acceptance of the civil rights movement (partly riding on the work of black journalists who would have otherwise been ignored by white America).
- Gunnar Myrdal: Swede who idealised the role of the press in America (context:
Sweden was in the process of trying to appease Hitler), while trying to
report on race relations in the US
- the problem: while reporting on racial issues was technically permitted (first amendment), most of the press just didn’t recognise it as a story (exceptions: black newspapers, obviously, and a few liberal southern editors)
- Myrdal’s solution: get the northern newspapers to start talking about it (when usually they just ignore the topic)
- he released his book An American Dilemma in 1944—had a huge impact on the civil rights movement by influencing select journalists, academics, judges, etc
- his insight was that a black press was developing & would be important, but first the white press would need to start writing about racism enough that white Americans would no longer be able to look away
- after having read Fraser above, it’s easy to think of these black newspapers as subaltern counterpublics—the only places where racism was actually being talked about directly (and bitterly), the only sites of protest
- WWI was an unintentional boon for these black newspapers, as circulation/emploment went up (even as they sometimes criticised the US govt for its involvement in the war)
- during WWII, black newspapers launched a “double VV” campaign (to symbolise
the two victories black Americans needed to win in the war: one against the
Axis Powers, and one against racism in the United States)
- started pushing for the end of segregation, among other proposals
- this obviously rankled the FBI, but even some liberal white southern editors who thought that they were asking for too much
- October 1947: Truman govt published a report called “To Secure These Rights”
which urged the immediate ending of segregation and discrimination
- Feb 1948: a significantly watered-down version of the report was submitted to Congress; still, lots of public opposition to it (even among some of these supposedly liberal editors)
Lecture
- definition of marginalised group, from Iris Marion Young: systemic exclusion, etc
- last week: different perspectives on justice (Rawls’ distributive vs Young’s deliberative)
- this week: markets as regulators of technology, with a focus on the postwar
newspaper era (especially the civil rights movement)
- Q: what is the role of professional ethics in covering injustice?
- on the Hutchins report
- mass communication technologies (one-to-many) have high initial operating costs, thus there is a tendency to consolidate to get a larger audience (and thus recover the initial costs more quickly)
- this report was heavily influenced by the idea of American exceptionalism, and was responsible for launching the idea/identity of a free American press
- main idea was that the press should self-regulate, and social responsibility was left up to private actors rather than the govt
- context: after the carnage of fascism/WWII, and consolidation of media companies in the US
- on the Fraser paper
- Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere basically consisted of salons, cafes, etc where rich white men with spectacular wigs would discuss things with each other
- counter public spheres: a way to establish minority groups as social actors, a bridge to get them into the mainstream, a space to extend their political claims, a means of achieving representation and contestation
- to consider: relationship between counter public spheres & this idea of self-regulation?
- we should be critical of the idea that the press can regulate itself via the
market, as the Hutchins report likes to suggest
- Q: is the civil rights story an example of successful self-regulation?
- my A: if it’s the government itself that’s broken—that’s unjust—how else can you regulate except via the remaining avenues (norms and market)? in this case, things did work out eventually (at least from my vantage point) but there was a lot of interplay between markets/norms
Seminar
We continued our discussion of the last question from the lecture. No real answer was proposed—I think we all the dangers of relying on self-regulation while at the same time acknowledging that you can’t always rely on the government, either.
Some points raised:
- this idea that we’re linearly moving toward a just society, which doesn’t really seem to hold up to scrutiny in our day and age
- qualms with the way the white southern editors were portrayed in the third
reading:
- the book ignores the context of why these people had a platform in the first place, and takes away the autonomy of the black activists on the ground in favour of another story centering white people
- seems like progress can only be defined by what white people accomplish
- some interesting connections to colonialism, and this idea that “civilisation” can only be defined by white people (the ones who “bring civilisation” to the colonised countries)
- counterexamples where govt regulation can be good?
- I brought up Germany’s regulations concerning Holocaust denial, and
restrictions on pro-Nazi content (Twitter currently has to prevent certain
pro-Nazi accounts from showing up for German users, though of course no
such process occurs for American users, where it might actually be useful
right now)
- in this case Germany, is recognising the importance of controlling historical narratives to prevent future sociopolitical disasters
- counter-counterexample: Chinese govt over-regulating news/Internet
- I brought up Germany’s regulations concerning Holocaust denial, and
restrictions on pro-Nazi content (Twitter currently has to prevent certain
pro-Nazi accounts from showing up for German users, though of course no
such process occurs for American users, where it might actually be useful
right now)
We then got into pairs to summarise key readings to each other (Rawls, Young, Fraser, etc). It then transpired that the point of this exercise was to encourage us to, in the future, better ground our seminar discussions in the texts we’re reading.
Human Rights, Communication Rights, and Media Literacies - week 3
Readings
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (chapter 1)
Published in 1970 in English (originally published in Portuguese 2 years earlier). This is a lovely & quite philosophical work that draws heavily on critical theory, though its practicality may be limited (and it may be used as a way of shifting the burden away from the oppressor and onto the oppressed). I have some rough notes below, but if you’re into Hegel or Lukács or just beautiful prose, you might as well read the original.
- the oppressed cannot (should not) oppress their oppressors
- their only option is to liberate, both themselves and their oppressors
- only the oppressed are capable of doing this—only they can be the revolutionary subject
- if the oppressors are ever generous, it’s on the back of an unjust social order
- there’s a natural tendency for the oppressed to, eventually, become sub-oppressors in turn
- the reason: their whole image of humanity is defined by the image of the oppressor
- selfhood inextricably shaped by their concrete existential situation
- e.g., worker who becomes a manager then tends to oppress other workers (because it’s the most prominent social relation they’ve known)
- the shadow of the former oppressor is cast over them still and they cannot escape
- duality of the oppressed: they are both themselves + the internalised consciousness of their oppressor
- here he cites Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (“Mind” in the book’s translation) & his master-slave dialectic
- incidentally, I thought it was funny that Lukács’ book on Lenin was cited via its French translation, when it was originally published in German (maybe Freire could read French but not German)
- “the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for redemption”
- the oppressed themselves must develop a pedagogy—it cannot simply be handed to them by their oppressor
- we need a humanist, not a humanitarian, approach—without humanist sentiment, humanitarianism becomes dehumanising
- the oppressed are not capable of initiating violence
- their very existence as the oppressed, and the prior subjugation that entails, is itself violence
- only the oppressed can free their oppressors by taking away their power to oppress & therefore returning their humanity to them
- we can’t just broadcast propaganda to the oppressed; they must enter the struggles as fully empowered humans, whatever that means in practice
MacBride report (pages V-1-18)
A UNESCO publication entitled “Many Voices One World” from 1981. A fairly radical take on the key role of communication in the world, and how we need national media/education/etc to try to alleviate the effects of the market. Moving away from the right to free speech and toward the right to communicate.
Lecture
- today: looking at the power of law (as enforced by the state) to regulate technology (as opposed to markets, which we looked at last week)
- tension between the right to free speech & having an orderly society
- in the postwar context (decolonisation, post-Holocaust, etc), ideas on communication starting to shift
- right to communicate starting to supplant the idea of right to information
- burgeoning satellite communications industry, which is being carved out in a very inegalitarian, first-come first-served way (mostly by US)
- shifting away from a one-way, free-speech centered model to a bidirectional, discourse-driven one (monologic -> dialogic)
- Non-Aligned Movement during Cold War, which consisted of countries that explicitly did not want to take sides
- challenging US domination & imperialism
- founded in 1956 with India, Indonesia, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Ghana
- one goal was to reorganise existing communication channels (which were often a legacy of a colonial past)
- they introduced a resolution at UNESCO to move away from monologic order and toward a dialogic one (at the time, UNESCO was a fairly authoritarian institution for technology/knowledge transfer)
- in order to establish & maintain a new economic order, we need to also establish a new information order, one based on communication
- need to address lack of respect for Third World countries
- concern about information news flows & monopoly power of some existing communication agencies
- noted an unequal distribution of communication ability around the world
- as a result, UNESCO established the MacBride Commission, which authored the MacBride report from the readings
- main goal of the report: to set norms for state policy in influencing the media
- very different from the self-regulating, American-exceptionalism approach of the Hutchins report
- criticised the supposed “right of free speech”, elevated alternative rights
- end goal is to make Third World countries self-reliant & recognised as truly independent
- recommended better quality international news, partly through better conditions for journalists
- saw communication rights as a prerequisite for human rights
- to be achieved through a state-regulated paradigm, NOT a laissez-faire one
- incidentally, the aftermath of this report was that the US soon pulled out of UNESCO (in 1984) and only rejoined in 2002, and ofc now we know UNESCO as a very different body—UNESCO’s mission was thus transformed from establishing communications policy to, what, designating World Heritage sites?
- now onto the pedagogy (Freire) approach
- roughly contemporaneous w/ MacBride report, but very different in terms of its approach
- it’s naive to expect the dominant classes to develop education to transform the oppressed
- the pedagogy must be immanent, must come from within—you need a critical & liberating dialogue
- contrast/compare with Fraser’s idea of a counter public sphere?
- but ofc this approach doesn’t talk about the state at all—it’s focused on norms (self-development)
Seminar
- interesting tension: the possibility that the MacBride report used anti-American sentiment as a sort of cover for justifying state-run monopolies
- on Freire’s pedagogical approach:
- putting all the responsibility/burden on the oppressed
- definitely more on the abstract rather than the realistic side
- kind of paternalistic in some ways
- my worry with his sub-oppression thing (which I find compelling on a philosophical level) is that it sort of feeds into this whole “reverse discrimination” narrative that’s been, unfortunately, dominating the airwaves lately
- he never really defines “oppressed” or gives examples (beyond worker/manager I guess), probably with the intention of making his text universally applicable
- linking this to last week’s seminar on Southern press & the “false generosity” of the white Southern editors—in that case, the burden of responsibility being on the oppressed may not necessarily be a bad thing
- comparing with Fraser:
- for Freire, there’s a moment when the oppression stops, and the oppressed can begin to build a pedagogy in peace
- Fraser’s approach is more realistic, recognises the real barriers that the oppressed can face in public spheres
- Freire focuses on a much smaller piece and thus abstracts away such barriers
- Q to think about: what does Freire’s theory imply for the right to communicate & the ideal role of the state?
Media Justice - week 4
Readings
Media and Morality by Roger Silverstone (chapter 6)
On hospitality and justice. I thought this was quite a good read . Incidentally, Silverstone was a founder of the Media and Communications at LSE!
- hospitality should be a key virtue of the mediapolis
- basically means an obligation to listen
- you need this if you want true media justice
- quoting Derrida on ethics: hospitality as an ethic, not a right
- it’s about welcoming the other without demanding reciprocity
- not quite the same as tolerance, which is really just protective, scrutinised hospitality
- dangerous but necessary part of cosmopolitanism
- existing media is based on conditional hospitality (contingent on good behaviour)
- the internet: hospitality without a host; open, but no one takes responsibility for the welcome (cool way of thinking about it)
- how to prevent abuse of hospitality: one forfeits the right to hospitality if one denies it to others
- how this should be implemented is left deliberately vague
- on Rawls
- media justice requires no distortion (as that leads to systematic exclusion)
- we have to go beyond Rawls, toward responsibility over justice
- justice in Rawls’ formulation is procedural, with an emphasis on the means
- which can undermine individuals’ own sense of responsibility
- references Zygmunt Bauman’s book Postmodern Ethics
- morality can only emerge from an existing social order
- by taking individual responsibility we can transcend societal norms and thus redefine justice
- society and collective thinking seduce us away from morality
- thus we need to frame moral responsibility as individual, not collective/procedural
- Hans Jonas on the spatial concerns of moral responsibility
- formal: taking responsibility for our own acts
- substantive: taking responsibility even for the acts of others (like politicians being responsible for citizens or parents being responsible for their children)—non-reciprocal
- distinction between obligations (with the provider being the agent) and rights (with the claimant being the agent)
- obligations-based approach better than rights-based approach because it preserves responsibility?
- every right has a corresponding obligation
- but there are “imperfect obligations” that don’t have corresponding rights
- to sum up: a procedural approach is insufficient
- institutions become reified, with unforeseen consequences
- individuals put faith in institutions at the cost of ceding their own personal responsibility
- the media is key for shaping citizens’ view of world (think about the etymology of “mediated”)
- my thoughts on this: it’s a complicated balance between trying to be hospitable and knowing when not to be hospitable
- you do need a platform that is welcoming to unheard voices if you want a shot at correcting injustice
- on the other hand, we’re in a situation today where some voices are being given a platform when they perhaps shouldn’t be (think: Nazis)
Media Concentration and Democracy by C. Edwin Baker (chapter 1)
Published in 2006. On the need for a less concentrated media landscape. I agree with a lot of his points about media concentration but I worry that his solution isn’t radical enough …
- the term “fourth estate” (which refers to the press/journalism) derives from a historical European concept of the three estates of the realm (clergy, nobility, commoners)—not formally part of the political system, but with the potential to shape it
- the main argument: more concentrated media ownership is bad for democracy
- normative view of democracy as an end in itself (equality, autonomy), not merely a means
- the media as the most important institutional structure of the public sphere, influences ideology and thus voting behaviour (mediates relationship between public & govt)
- thus a country’s level of democracy depends on the extent to which the media is egalitarian
- it’s not that we should try to have complete equality of views/opinions (we can’t)—having specialists is a good thing
- the FCC used to disperse media ownership but they’ve recently relaxed rulings
- Baker believes that ownership dispersal should be a basic constitutional process, separate from the actual content of the media (his is a proceduralist approach)
- Berlusconi effect: referring to Silvio Berlusconi, who controlled much of the media in Italy and managed to get elected as PM twice
- the main reason you’d want more independent media players:
- less decentralised = less chance of corruption (theoretically—it’s easier to buy off one person than many)
- market failures that arise when media is too concentrated
- even non-readers benefit from investigative journalism (since one result is injustices that are more accountable, less corrupt) but they may not be paying the newspaper
- thus inadequate profit-based incentive to do important work
- Baker mentions that newspapers tend to have high operating profits (since the goods they sell have low marginal costs, and the value of their brand is protected by IP law)—this was published before the rise of Facebook, though, and things have changed quite a bit since then
- the ideal scenario: newspapers reinvest more of their profits into producing high-quality journalism
- in fact, newspapers that are controlled by journalists tend to do exactly this whereas publicly-traded ones tend to cave into shareholder pressure
- less focus on short term profits -> positive externalities in the long term
- dispersal should reduce the incidence of conflicts of interest with advertisers (as each individual paper should have fewer advertisers to care about)
- cross-ownership might save money in the short term but deleterious effects: repetition, reducing competition
- basically he’s saying that capitalism is bad for the media and thus for democracy/society (as there is a divergence between “profitable” and “public interest” yeah no shit)
- even non-readers benefit from investigative journalism (since one result is injustices that are more accountable, less corrupt) but they may not be paying the newspaper
Speaking for Ourselves in The Nation
By Makani Themba and Nan Rubin. A short article on media portrayal during the civil rights era & its impact on racism in real life.
Lecture
- today: understanding Rawls’ influence in ideas on media dispersal / media justice movement
- some staggering stats on media concentration in the US (not sure of the source)
- in 1983, 30 corporations controlled 90% of the media
- in 2012, it was just 6 corporations (Viacom, News Corporation, Comcast, CBS, Time Warner, Disney)
- Baker’s approach w/ maximum dispersal is wholly procedural (à la Rawls)
- he’s concerned about: democratic distribution / structural risk / quality control
- in his view, media markets are a special kind of market and tend towards market failure
- basically they under-produce high-quality goods (positive externalities)
- (I would argue that they are a fairly standard kind of market but otherwise sure)
- this is a normative framework: he’s establishing a benchmark to aspire to, not necessarily based on empirical evidence
- he assumes that dispersal will automatically lead to less homogenous content
- also doesn’t really address the degree to which even a dispersed media landscape will still be corrupted by the profit motive (sorta abstracts it away)
- Silverstone’s approach is very different—instead of Baker’s state-run media justice approach, he’s all about hospitality, responsibility, and individual moral obligation
- he has a great quote on regulation being like grammar: it’s not enough to rely on that in order to truly flourish, you need norms as well
- context of his writing: post-9/11 and Iraq war, when representation of non-Western cultures in the media was a hot topic
- the Media Justice Movement: telling the stories of underrepresented people within a commercial framework
- relates to Young’s ideas on how to challenge the proceduralist vision
Seminar
- comparing/contrasting different approaches
- the Hutchins report seemed to assume that the morality piece was already in journalism as a collective
- whereas Silverstone wary of collective morality (since that can be used as an excuse) and more focused on the individual
- neither really addresses what to do about the overarching profit motive & its effects on journalism
- Silverstone also ignores the oppressed/oppressor distinction, whereas Freire puts the burden on the oppressed
- also Silverstone mostly neglects to discuss larger structural forces that can dampen an individual’s desire to do good (THE PROFIT MOTIVE I know I’m a broken record)
Inclusion and Access - week 5
Readings
Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (chapter 3)
Context: written in 1999, seems like he’s trying to sway a fairly libertarian/right-leaning audience into caring about inequality and justice. He starts from a Rawlsian POV but then modifies/builds on it, saying that if we truly care about equality, we can’t just be satisfied by “income” equality—we have to ask if people have different needs. Basically a long-winded way of saying “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” but in a more libertarian-friendly way. I wasn’t really into this reading though I’m sure it was important at the time, and probably had some impact on his intended audience (i.e., people who aren’t me).
Report from Chilean Presidential Commission, 1999
On best practices for how to move toward an information society. Acknowledging the technological revolution (the rising importance of the Internet, non-material assets, and computerisation). The state will have to play a role in modernising—there has already been some push toward greater access to digital resources, but it’s been uneven. Summary of suggested landscape: public-private partnerships, transparent/competitive markets, new legal frameworks for fostering spread of e-commerce, flexible regulations to encourage investment by private corporations. A fairly neoliberal agenda overall.
Technologies of Choice? by Dorothea Kleine (chapter 6)
On digital procurement services in Chile and the problem with them (not really designed for citizens and thus allowed corporate interests to proliferate at the expense of local microentrepreneurs).
Lecture
(First week of our look at the networked era of communication technologies.)
- previous weeks: focus on self-regulating via professional ethics (kinda market, kinda norms)
- focus today: getting people digitally included in networks (esp in the transition from analog to digital)
- on the early history of the Internet (DARPA) & code as a structuring factor that determines the architecture and thus the behaviour of users
- the limits of the democratic framework when it comes to justice
- following Sen’s “capabilities” framework
- Sen’s contribution is an understanding of the value of economic development (in this case, communications infrastruture) not as an end, but as a means for empowering individuals
- in this vein, he builds on a Rawlsian foundation but then moves away from it
- says Rawls is important for identifying necessary goods, but doesn’t explain the purpose of these goods (Sen expounds on this in his 1970 essay, Equality for What?)
- Sen’s crucial idea is that of a “conversion point”, for converting from a good to a capability
- you can have an equal distribution of a good (in this case, access to communication) but inequality in well-being because of differing needs
- this framework is more flexible and doesn’t necessarily need to be paired with a liberal democratic state
- it’s about positive, or substantial, freedom/liberty as opposed to rights; iterative over linear
- economic growth is seen as a means for increasing the human freedom to choose, not as an end
- contrast this view with that of people like Al Gore, who saw the Internet as a boon for business—first and foremost, a driver for econ growth
- on Dorothea Kleine’s framework for understanding rights in the Internet age, esp in Chile (the context of the last 2 readings)
- the 1999 report came out at a time of high social and regional inequality
- in the 90s, following the transition from Allende to neoliberalism, Chile saw lots of growth & wanted to become an “emerging economy” not just a developing country
- one of the things the state did was try to bring its procurement system online, allowing microentrepreneurs to access a new market
- ofc there was a gap between the ideal & the reality … the project wasn’t very successful, and policy makers blamed digital illiteracy
- a better analysis would have concluded that the system was just not designed to accommodate microentrepeneurs
- the system was confusingly designed, plus microentrepreneurs found that they had to compete with outsiders (large foreign corps)
- their profits fell as a result, which negatively affected local community
Seminar
- we have to recall the context of Sen: he was addressing a tradition of neoclassical, libertarian, utilitarian arguments (not really written for people like me, hence why it fell so flat with me)
- Sen, Freire, Young: they all build on Rawls in terms of ideas but also diverge somewhat (Sen/Young responding to Rawls directly; Freire writing contemporaneously withe Rawls)
- on Chile: the document is all about econ growth as opposed to justice; citizens feel like an afterthought
- Sen’s framework would have been useful here (they should have involved the public more)
- seems like a case where the market was reified, at the expense of actually serving small businesses
- system wasn’t designed to consider existing inequalities, and thus ended up catering to transnational corps
- Sen’s views on technocracy v democracy: I thought there was an interesting tension in Sen’s work here
- because he recognises that structural forces condition people’s views and thus true “democracy” is not always desirable
- but at the same time, a fully technocratic approach doesn’t work either because then it becomes detached from what people really want, thus impeding justice
- so he advocates a balance between the top-down and bottom-up approach
- whereas Freire is more about trusting the bottom-up approach
- plus Sen mostly neglects the role of communication in all this (which is Young’s thing)
- week 6
Content Production, Human Development, and Participation - week 7
Readings
The wealth of networks (PDF) by Yochai Benkler (introduction)
A fairly breathless (but, unfortunately, foundational) 2006 text on the promises of peer production. I think he’s on the right side of things ethically, but he’s waaay too optimistic about the potential of technology to resist capitalism (and fairly naive about the totalising abilities of the latter). See week 4 of 4AAVC101 for more notes on Benkler’s theories.
- “networked information economy” means more people will have access to information production & communication
- he mentions open source software, Wikipedia, SETI@home (though the latter isn’t exactly an obvious instance of production)
- he believes in the sustainability of non-market production even within a larger market-dominated economy
- which i personally disagree with
- esp with when it comes to open source software—so much of it is developed (directly or indirectly) by corporations who recognise that it helps their bottom line
- plus there’s the whole “human capital” element, where people who contribute are (at least partly) developing their own skills + “personal brand”, which we can’t separate entirely from more altruistic motivations
- instead of a mass-mediated public sphere, we now have a networked public sphere
- ideas can develop in one subcommunity and then percolate up to a broader public (would be interesting to connect this with Fraser’s critiques of Habermas)
- because these subcommunities are smaller—more niche—ideas no longer have to have mass appeal to proliferate; they can instead be interesting to a small number of highly engaged people
- as people participate in production of culture, they become more critical consumers of it as well (more self-reflective), at least theoretically
- on technology determinism: he at least acknowledges that it’s “neither deterministic nor wholly malleable”
- on political economy: he’s a self-professed liberal, not communitarian nor critical
- he’s okay with markets, but recognises the role of the state in regulating
- same with private property, which he considers foundational to a market economy
- my problem with a lot of what he says is that he doesn’t anticipate that the Internet would become just another industry to dominate
- think Verizon buying AOL for $4.4 billion (owns publications like HuffPo & TechCrunch as well as a bunch of adtech crap)
- “technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice” (p.31) which is an interesting way to put it
- he thought non-market production would lead to a commons, and would be a viable alternative to the market
- but really, the peer production occurring today—on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc—is controlled & owned by corporations that use it to attract our attention and show us ads while they have us engaged
From Goods to a Good Life by Madhavi Sunder (chapter 3)
Starts with an anecdote about Solomon Linda, who created the song that later became “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” but didn’t receive any royalties from it and died poor (even though he theoretically would have been entitled to at least something, under IP law at the time). As someone who is very opposed to IP law in its current form, I felt like this anecdote completely backfired on me—the problem is not that he should have received $$ as a result of creating this song, the problem is that he shouldn’t have had to create a song in order to maintain a livelihood. Her claim that intellectual property law incentivised his creation is, imo, absolute crap. Using an instance of IP law failing someone in need as a justification for greater IP protections is absolutely inane and an excellent example of undialectical thinking. The problem is a structurally unfair distribution of resources, and extending the reach of intellectual property law will not get us any closer to fixing that.
On the other hand, her approach is at least better than the narrow economic-centred, utilitarian one, given that she does look at the effects of law on “structuring cultural and social relations”, and recognises that IP law doesn’t apply to everyone equally (fairly). She criticises Lawrence Lessig’s seminal 2004 book Free Culture (PDF) (which, incidentally, I fell in love with as a teenager), noting his failure to address real-world inequalities in the ability to exploit common resources. Which is a good point, but her solution doesn’t exactly address that failure, either. Her position is inspired by Sen/Nussbaum whereas Lessig’s is more in the rms mold (quasi-libertarian).
My biggest point of contention with her take is on economic grounds. At one point, she says that “cultural participation secures livelihood” (p.90); my counter would be that it shouldn’t, and any proposal that tacitly accepts that statement as valid is immanently flawed. She also proposes microfinance as a solution to capital deficits in developing countries & educating local “innovators” on how to commercialise their inventions which is just UGH because we need LESS commodification not more :’( Basically this seems like it was written in an attempt to convince classic libs/libertarians that fairness matters, so while I agree with her qualms with the moral implications of the current economic order, I find her proposed solutions to be extremely insufficient (not nearly radical enough).
Later on, she talks about the “politics of recognition”, which is about who has the ability to shape or be represented in cultural production. This stems from the recognition that media representation affects our collective imagination of the realm of possibility—like Obama’s election being influenced by Hollywood previous depictions of black presidents. This concept stems from Charles Taylor (of Hegel fame). She admits that you can’t elevate this concept (which one might call “identity politics”) above that of social/economic power (i.e., class), but, with Young, affirms that recognition can sometimes be a problem independent of other socioeconomic elements. Kind of a counter to Fraser, who thought identity politics was a distraction that would lead to ignoring material inqualities.
Summary: she sees IP as a tool, not a right; it should incentivise cultural production and sharing on “fair terms”. Defines “maximalist” IP law regimes as too totalising/restrictive (not enough fair use or public domain allowances). She does briefly consider tax redistribution but then quickly dismisses it, saying there’s a difference between giving people a “handout” and recognising their contributions by paying them. Which is true, but only under capitalism … Her heart is in the right place imo, but she has so deeply internalised capitalist ideology that she can’t see beyond it and into a better world. Her desired closure for the Solomon Linda case would have involved Linda’s descendents getting royalties in order to stave off poverty, which is fucked up on multiple levels—for one, the idea of inheriting IP rights is repugnant, and for another, how is this a good substitute for global economic redistribution (which she never really mentions)??? She focuses on a tiny symptom of the problem and thus misses the big picture, as current IP law is just an emergent phenomenon of Western economic hegemony.
Lecture
Much shorter than usual (the first 25 minutes were spent discussing the formative essay).
- historical context of Benkler’s writing:
- the beginning of the networked age, which was started to disrupt the existing one-to-many paradigm of the mass communication era
- combination of the distributed nature of these technologies (allowing consumers to also become producers) + cheaper cloud computing
- he thinks free expression is good and necessary for a thriving society
- he believes that too-heavy state regulation (which he sees as inherently conservative) during the mass comm era has resulted in an oligopoly, which he sees as bad
- thus he thinks we need less state regulation for the networked age, bizarrely
- you’re looking at the wrong culprit, my buddy
- on the three layers of network tech: logical (protocols, software); physical (hardware); content (user-generated)
- we can look at regulation at each point on the stack
- so IP law could damage freedom in the content layer (a little bit on the logical layer too, re: software)
- and on the physical layer, regs can, say, prevent newcomers from accessing new parts of the EM spectrum
- Benkler thinks that the only way to allow all layers to thrive is via a commons-based approach
- i.e., a non-market means of peer production that improves autonomy, and results in a better networked public sphere (also justice, freedom, productivity, etc)
- now on Sunder, which we can see as a response to Lessig (though kinda of a response to Benkler too, indirectly)
- supports non-market based production
- concerned with inequality (not just of free speech, or old vs new media, but of historically marginalised groups)
- focuses on structures, and access
Seminar
The question: can commons-based peer production (as proposed by Benkler) help us get to Baker’s goal of a more decentralised media landscape?
No.
- recall that Benkler was writing in 2006 … the Internet landscape has changed a lot since then
- intersection with other inequalities like time, communication ability, etc
- even more profoundly, Benkler totally ignores the degree to which peer production can be co-opted by the profit motive
- you can never reach Baker’s goal when the motive to consolidate for financial gain wins out
- the inequalities that we see in the commons are structured by inequalities present in society as a whole
- also, the rise of media gatekeepers (Facebook/Google/etc), which Benkler never really predicted (and which Baker didn’t have a plan for dealing with)
- Open question from the prof: how would we amend Benkler’s argument to account for political economy?
- I mean my response would be that we have to (inter)nationalise these companies and/or make them into protocols which is basically extreme tech socialism but idk what else is viable, tbh
Internet Infrastructure and Presence - week 8
Readings
Redistribution or Recognition? by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (chapter 1)
Only the first Fraser section was assigned, but the book seemed interesting so I just read the whole thing. I thought Fraser’s sections were stronger overall (Honneth’s sections kind of meandered in a way that made my eyes glaze over) but the book as a whole just felt a lot longer than it had to be. My notes are all on Bookmarker.
Main takeaways from this first chapter:
- we have to combine identity politics (recognition) and class politics (redistribution)
- the goal should be participatory parity, which requires both respect from peers & material resources
- a distinction between solutions to injustice that are purely affirmative vs those that are transformative (it’s a spectrum)
Barbara Van Schewick on network neutrality (YouTube video)
Takeaway: ISPs should be regulated as common carriers! Nationalise em all (my words, not hers)
Prohibition of discriminatory tariffs for data services (PDF)
Released by the telecom regulatory authority of India in 2016. Relates to the whole Facebook Free Basics debacle.
Lecture
- on Fraser: we have to pair recog & redist; neither approach is individually sufficient
- we can think of recognition as referring to: status/identity politics/institutionalised patterns of cultural value/making note of differences
- whereas redistribution has to do with: class/socioeconomic disparity/abolishing differences
- on code as a way of regulating (when it comes to network neutrality)
- Van Schewick is relevant here, though her approach (to code for regulatory) is different from Lessig’s
- in the original plans for the Internet (back when it was just a bunch of researchers using ARPAnet), there was no way to encode discriminating based on the type of data traveling
- arguments for an open Internet:
- optimal way of fostering innovation
- permissionless (no gatekeepers in the form of ISPs)
- limits on overbearing powers of owners
- arguments against:
- too absolutist (?)
- prevents naturally-occurring corrective market behaviour
- too much focus on content layer (instead of lower layer)
- eradicates possibility of vertical integration and all the benefits that might bring (makes it harder for providers to move into emerging markets on the basis of efficiency gains)
- on India rejecting Facebook’s Free Basics program
- there’s an excellent quote from egghead extraordinaire Marc Andreessen criticising the Indian govt for their decision
- in response to a characterisation of the program as a technological extension of colonialism, he tweeted this:
- “Anti-Colonialism has been economically catastrophic for India for decades. Why stop now?”
- gonna let that speak for itself
- there’s an excellent quote from egghead extraordinaire Marc Andreessen criticising the Indian govt for their decision
- conclusion: we should think of the architecture of the Internet not just in terms of access, but in terms of the production of innovation/justice
- open Q: is an open architecture enough to get participatory parity? what else do we need to change?
- (me: capitalism)
Seminar
- I went on a bit of a tirade about diversity in tech as a very affirmative, identity-politics-limited strategy
- this whole idea of representation might be a start, but it’s NOT ENOUGH and you can’t limit your focus to that
- otherwise you just get Lean In Feminism
- someone asked how we can accomplish Fraser’s suggestion of both affirmative and transformative solutions in a limited amount of time
- (to which myself and another student both quietly said, “revolution”)
- someone mentioned a proposal similar to Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns The Future? (for which I wrote an extremely negative review) that boiled down to micropayments from the tech giants to users
- and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to deliver another, almost Leninesque diatribe about the dangers of that path
- if anyone from my seminar is reading this, im sorry i just feel very strongly about this issue
- question about whether regulating the concentration of capital in the industry is the right approach
- me: the concentration of capital isn’t the issue here—you can’t just try to break up Google/FB etc and think 1) they’ll acquiesce and 2) the problems won’t occur again—the issue is the existence of capital at all
- an important point someone brought up: who’s doing the regulating? will they take into account the concerns of marginalised groups?
Prediction, Accuracy, and (Un)fairness - week 9
Readings
Data mining and the discourse on discrimination (PDF) by Solon Barocas
A short paper from 2014 surveying the literature on how data mining can be used for discrimination:
- different forms of discrimination:
- inferring protected attributes (race, gender, etc) as a way of implicitly flouting anti-discrimination laws
- statistical bias based on who is contributing the data (as a way of exacerbating existing inequality)
- decisions based on erroneous inferences
- ability to segregate shared risk pools based on individual data
- predictive policing (vicious cycle etc)
- different manifestions (not sure how this differs ontologically from the first)
- deliberate attempts to discriminate against protected classes in a way that is hard to detect
- errors in the data mining process
- when data mining gives decision-makers too much power (fair procedures -> unfair outcomes)
Data justice (PDF) by Nathan Newman
On data being the bedrock of the new digital economy and so it becomes a matter of economic justice, not just personal privacy. Due to network effects etc etc, the companies are ossifying and the possibility of serious competition is declining. Suggests a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches: greater consumer awareness and agency, but also better regulation. Some problems outlined: differential pricing; algorithmic profiling; using private data to enforce the will of employers; predatory debt (more than usual, anyway); the death of local journalism as advertiser money flees. Basically these companies are undermining all the presumed benefits of capitalism (which are at least semiotically important to keep people believing in the system) while accelerating all the rapacious elements. My favourite takeaway: Nicholas Carr’s term “digital sharecropping”, in which these companies take advantage of an “incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few”.
Could have used some more editing (like what is meetu.com, for instance) and it’s a little naive about taking corporate claims at face value. Could have also gone into the attention economy aspects, or how the “value” these companies generate actually fits in to the broader economic picture (imo they’re really just parasitic on commodity production). I have this hypothesis that the ad tech industry is just concentrated capitalism (the combination of its death drive & the technology necessary to fulfill it) which this report doesn’t really address at all, but I guess that just means there is a gap in the metaphorical market of ideas which I now have a duty to fill.
Worth reading, though.
Opening data zine by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition
A (beginner’s) guide to data justice.
Lecture
- We’ve done one-to-many and many-to-many communication paradigms
- Now, onto communication involving machines (machine-human, human-machine, machine-machine) making decisions to nudge people to behave in a certain way
- of course, this can intersect with (and exacerbate) existing inequalities or create new ones
- some terminology defined in the slides
- predictive analytics: using techniques (machine learning, statistical modeling, etc) to make predictions
- data mining: a form of machine learning using large datasets (kinda vaguely delimited)
- we’re shown this YouTube video from “in-store data analytics firm” RetailNext
- depicts a fairly dystopian world where the process of buying things from a physical store becomes more and more about data & prediction
- which makes sense in light of brick-and-mortar fears of irrelevance in the age of ecommerce—RetailNext is just capitalising on those fears
- for example, their app will suggest to managers when to schedule staff breaks, based on predicted customer activity
- she mentions Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction & Frank Pasquale’s The Black Box Society
- algorithms need to be something of a black box in order to work effectively and at scale
- we need to differentiate between discrimination that is intentional, and that which is not
- example of intentional discrimination: redlining in Detroit to prevent ethnic minorities from getting mortgages (using geography as a cover)
- example of perhaps less intentional discrimination: stop & frisk via predictive policing (feedback loop)
- two axes we should consider: whether the data is accurate, and whether the outcome is beneficial
- information asymmetry is exploited by companies that have data on you -> becomes ecoomic inequality
Seminar
Question under discussion (which we didn’t have much time to cover, due to student presentations):
To what extent does the idea of representation differ across the three communication eras studied in this course?
My take: in the intelligent communication age, what matters is representation both among who designs the algorithms and in the data used. Very different from the one-to-many and many-to-many eras.
Automated Technologies and Autonomy - week 10
Readings
Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law by Mireille Hildebrandt (chapter 2)
- defines “smartness” in terms of agency
- deterministic agency (which she defines kind of weirdly, in order to contrast with “machine learning” which she considers not deterministic?)
- agents that involve machine learning
- multi-agent systems
- complete agents, which can control their material world (don’t really exist yet)
The Definitive Guide to Do Data Science for Good on the DataLook blog
Extremely naive imo but at least it’s a start
Doing good in the cognitive era on the IBM website
literally just corporate propaganda
Lecture
- on Iris Marion Young: injustice isn’t just Habermasian oppression/rule, but occurs in everyday life, through the outcomes of institutional rules
- for every oppressed group there is its dialectical opposite (the privileged group)
- 5 faces: systematic violence / marginalisation / exploitation / cultural imperialism / powerlessness (diminish agency of individuals in intersectional ways)
- Hildebrandt defines automated tech as a mindless, distributed form of technology
- something is changing in this new automated era
- technology is an artefact of design, not due to legislation; it’s not enacted
- technology can prevent its overruling and prevent disobediece (e.g., accepting TOS in order to use a site or product)
- no court to dispute problems of regulation due to hostility
- agent: something that can autonomously adapt to changes in environment over time
- even if deterministic, can still adapt in unpredictable/unforeseen ways
- produces emergent behaviour
- decisions produced based on inferred patterns from analysis of data, not cognitive reasoning the way humans would make decisions
- can find patterns in data that humans might not find (or agree with)
- we can use these systems to extend our own cognitive resources, but in another sense, they use our cognitive resources to extend their own capabilities
- translating human agency into a distributed digital form -> amplifies inequalities
- we’ve cordoned ourselves off from a universe of other possibilities (path dependency, just like with politics)
- we end up limiting our own agency
- by abdicating our responsibility to algorithms/intelligent systems, society can maintain or even deepen oppression while claiming a neutral shield
- how to fight back against algorithm-mediated discrimination in the intelligent era?
- strengthening consumer privacy laws
- upholding anti-discrimiation laws (e.g., fair housing, fair credit)
- Hildebrandt’s point is that law is not adequate for intervening in these processes due to the opacity of their design
- on the data science for good thing
- based on the ethics of care
- representation issues when designing the tech
- this is essentially forced to be a self-regulating system since the law can’t keep up
- should we, as consumers and producers of data, have a say in how this industry behaves?
- where is the accountability in this self-regulatory model?
- (cus imo there is no real accountability unless there is someone specific to guillotine; any individual can just hide behind the data/algo)
Seminar
- if self-regulation and legal regulation don’t work, what alternative is there?
- grassroots movement to raise awareness?
- question is: what level of awareness is needed? do we all need to understand how algorithms work?
- or is it just that the people in positions of power need to understand the ethical implications
- (they need to understand the materialist implications too imo)
Communication Futures - week 11
Readings
Inclusion and Democracy by Iris Marion Young (chapter 2)
- external exclusion from democratic deliberation (when outside interests dominate political discourse, due to inequalities of power/resources)
- internal inclusion: when certain groups (putatively part of the deliberation process) are just not respected as much
- mentions Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition
- didn’t really take away that much tbh
Lecture
- an excellent overview of the challenges posed by the economic dominance of the contemporary tech giants
- big 5 of tech (Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Facebook)
- their dominance isnt just evident in the services they provide, but in the way they control capital flows
- remember that when Microsoft acquired Linkedin for $26b, it did so primarily via a debt instrument to avoid a 35% repatriation tax
- any attempts to regulate them in terms of privacy or data protection are inadequate because they miss the more fundamental, structural aspects of their dominance (affirmative, not transformative)
- pace those in tech who stress that it’s not about the money, we must take a materialist approach to understand motives/paths
- on digital exclusion
- could it be a resource, a way of buying time to deliberate on how to reconstruct infrastructure?
- open Q: are algorithmic platforms like Google/Facebook inevitable?
- or are they just the result of technology being deployed in a world reliant on ad-fueled cosumption
- note to self: think about the Marxian idea of advertising as being part of the cost of circulation in the market (and not itself a source of value), and how that would fit in with modern-day ad-tech
Seminar
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