One of the relatively little-discussed phenomena in the social critique of AI is the fact that it is not only a centralizing technology, but also one that increases the distance between people and the power of the owners of the coordinating infrastructure. Of course, there is no direct determinism of the infrastructure, but it matters in which way the playing field is tilted.

This is an unoffical translation of "Die Sozialen Medien am Kipppunkt" (Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2022)

The growth of the major social media platforms has been so rapid that it's hard to imagine our daily lives without them. Yet Facebook, with 2.9 billion users, is not yet 20 years old. Twitter, which is used by 330 million people, was created in 2006, and Instagram, which is used by 1.2 billion people and is now part of Facebook's parent company Meta, was created in 2010. However, their spectacular rise makes it easy to forget that the practice of digital community goes back much further. The desire to be in touch with like-minded people, whether they live in the same neighborhood or on another continent, has been one of the drivers of the Internet's civic development from the very beginning.

Even before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, mailing lists, Usenet groups (thematic discussion forums) and bulletin board systems (local computers that could be accessed directly via modem) provided a variety of platforms that enabled technically savvy users to exchange information and to network. The commercial service providers from Silicon Valley merely made this practice socially mainstream by creating user-friendly offerings that were enormously profitable for the investors.

Ich habe in der LeMondeDiplomatique (März 2023, S 3) über die Krise und Chancen der sozialen Medien geschrieben. 

Das Bedürfnis nach horizontaler Kommunikation, das seit den Anfängen des Internets die Entwicklung wesentlich beeinflusst hat, ist ungebrochen. In die Krise geraten ist deshalb auch nur ein ganz bestimmtes – wenn auch in der letzten Dekade extrem einflussreiches – Modell, wie dieses Bedürfnis organisiert wird. Mit Mastodon besteht nun zum ersten Mal seit Langem wieder die Chance auf eine nicht rein kommerzielle Infrastruktur für Alltagskommunikation. Und das ist im Hinblick auf demokratische Kommunikation sehr zu begrüßen

Artikel lesen, oder vorlesen lassen.

Written for Computational Culture (forthcoming, #9, preprint with permission)

Review of Joque, Justin. Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence,  Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 2022.

Datafication has been the hallmark of modern governance, all the way back to the definition of statistics as “science of data about the state” in mid-18th century Prussia. Creating reductionist regularity, abstracting from the infinite complexity of local, embodied experience, enabled a new scale and complexity by which the state could organize the life of its subjects, in pursuit of variable political agendas. In the mid-19th century, the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) introduced a hierarchy of the sciences, with physics at the top for its mathematics-enabled generality, setting off mathematics envy in the social sciences (which he placed at the bottom of the ladder). This was most consequential in economics, but its reverberations are still felt in the recent creation of the “digital humanities”, quantifying the remaining, previously staunchly qualitative fields of knowledge. At the end of the 19th century, rapidly growing corporations, encountering their own need to extend the scale and complexity of governance practices, also turned to large-scale datafication (and automated data processing) to stave off the impending “control crisis” [1].

Ein kurzer Kommentar für die Zeit (48/22), 11/27/2022

Bisher hatten die Europäer den großen (amerikanischen) Anbietern wenig mehr entgegenzusetzen als die nicht besonders erfolgreiche Strategie, sie im Nachhinein zu regulieren. Nun aber wächst schon seit Längerem die Unzufriedenheit der Nutzer. Die Plattformen wurden – auf der Suche nach immer neuen Einnahmequellen – in den letzten Jahren nicht nur mit Werbung überladen, sondern auch so umgebaut, dass die Datensammlung auf Kosten der Benutzerfreundlichkeit geht. Und besonders Twitter-Nutzer sind wegen der aktuellen Turbulenzen in Aufruhr und suchen nach einer Alternative. Das Besondere an der Situation: Eine solche Alternative gibt es tatsächlich. Sie stammt aus Europa und heißt Mastodon.

Mastodon Eating Twitter (Stable Diffusion)

I'm very proud to present:

The seven essays in this book examine the desires and impulses that drive digital culture, focusing on the shift from commons to NFTs, from new forms of sharing to the expansion of private ownership and tradable commodities. They reveal just how much our culture has been transformed in the last 20 years, but also unearth surprising continuities between the commons and some of the truly experimental uses of blockchains.

Written by artists, researchers, curators and technologists from Europe, North America and East Asia, these essays bring much-needed first-hand experience and long-term perspective to the discussion.

You can order it from here. Also check out the conference From Commons to NFTs we held on Nov. 11, in Ljubliana to launch the book and discuss recent developments.

I'm very proud to present a collaboration with Vladan Joler & Gordan Savicic. A map of the anthropogenic ecosystem assembled for the Northern Bald Ibis, with the goal of enabling wilderness in the Anthropocene. Check out the audio tours! Feedback welcome.

This review was originally published at Digicult, 1.11.2022, also in Italian and Chinese.

image source: petra.servus.at

Hagay Dreaming, the most ambitious and radical work presented during Ars Electronica 2022 wasn’t even part of the festival proper. Rather, it was hosted in parallel by Stadtwerkstadt, an independent cultural venue in Linz. This “techno-fantasia guided theater of revival” has been initiated and schemed by Shu Lea Cheang, and written and directed by Dondon Hounwn, an artist working in installation and performance art, and a practicing shaman from the Truku tribe, one of the 16 recognized indigenous tribes in Taiwan.

After 70 years of acceleration, human civilisation has now reached escape velocity, enough energy to move the Earth system out of the steady-state of the Holocene, the relatively stable climate pattern in which human civilisation unfolded over the last 10,000 years, and into the uncharted, and as for now unchartable, territory that is the Anthropocene.

The notion of the “great acceleration” captures the fact that key socio-economic and Earth system indicators all share a common feature: they show a kink, a sharp upward movement from approximately 1950 onwards. These indicators point towards an unprecedented intensification and acceleration of human activity and self-destructive use of resources necessary to sustain this development under capitalism.

Which begs the question: what happened in the early 1950s to enable this process? There is certainly no single answer to this question, my intention is to focus on one cause that has been relatively overlooked in this debate: computing.