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Tag: social justice

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.
July 14, 2016

Counterintuitive Meshing of Activism and Hashtags

Social media is very cyberpunk. I covered the Facebook-and-censorship angle last week, and Ben Thompson wrote a longer piece on that topic. But think about just the normal, everyday operations on a platform like Twitter.

Twitter's logo as a skull, by Adam Koford.

Twitter’s logo as a skull, by Adam Koford.

For example, Black Lives Matter and its attendant hashtag have flourished in streams of 140 characters or less. (Black people in general are disproportionately represented on Twitter, which is surprising when you consider how many white supremacists flock there.) The mainstream spotlight on BLM waxes and wanes depending on the latest high-profile tragedy, but the group been around for years now.

Twitter's custom #BlackLivesMatter hashtag emoji

Think about how weird that is: a radical justice movement is organizing protests and recruiting supporters via a corporate media distribution service, which is oriented towards earning advertising revenue. Aren’t they at cross-purposes? How strange for the incentives to align. It reminds me of that famous William Gibson quote: “The street finds its own uses for things.”

When BLM activist DeRay McKesson was arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was wearing a #StayWoke shirt created by Twitter’s in-house diversity group, Blackbirds. It’s the same shirt that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wore onstage at Recode’s flagship tech conference.

Meanwhile, 2% of Twitter’s US employees were black as of August, 2015, compared to 6.7% of Bay Area residents. The company’s “vice president of diversity and inclusion” is a white man in his fifties.

McKesson broadcast his arrest live on Periscope, an app owned by Twitter.

Photo of a protest marcher from the US National Archives.

Photo from the US National Archives.

March 13, 2016

Go Ahead & Change Bodies; Just Remember To Take Your Soma

The following story was written by Reddit user ehwut in /r/blastfromthefuture, and is being distributed here with permission. Lightly edited for this venue. You may notice that the style slips in and out of newsiness — I must chasten you to remember that the journalistic habits of 2064 will differ from our own.

Pamela Greensbury is a member of a human group once thought extinct: a stay-at-home mother. Whenever her friends brag about their accomplishments since the introduction of Kindercryo chambers, Pam feels horrified. “I keep thinking, what happened to a normal childhood? Watching cartoons, playing in the yard, going to school? Today, kids learn everything in their dreams. They miss out on so much.”

Pam’s objections echo the headlines we were accustomed to back when decades-old VR academy brands were first becoming household names. Her peer group regards her as the economic equivalent of lifelong lunar pioneers wobbling and fumbling under full Earth gravity. Pam told me, “No one remembers the work that a full-time live household requires. For choosing a traditional path, I was nearly isolated, and became a kind of quaint thing kept around for decorum.” She says that she has few friends.

Photo of Navajo children playing from the US National Archives.

Photo from the US National Archives.

We seldom hear their stories, but mothers who share Pam’s frustration with our twenty-four-hour work culture are more commonplace than we may think. Last year, the SomaCo plant strikes across New Jersey were mostly led by women who professed to be frustrated with being denied their natural range of emotion. In Beijing there are rumors of armed revolt by couples who demand a right to private intimacy as a matter of humanist faith. Have we tread down a path our species was never meant to go?

Doctor Rowan Johnson of the Center for Economic Culture may have the answer. “We tend to forget the struggles of the past once they’re over with. At one time, women couldn’t vote, men were expected to solely shoulder the bloody cost of war, and parents had to maintain nearly endless reserves of energy and discipline to raise their children in person. Kids played, yes, but they also got hurt. There were vaccination objectors, cultural battles between the genders, epidemics of abuse in various forms, and totally out-of-control rates of anxiety disorders.”

“Now, we are free to pursue our goals. We contribute to society every waking moment, our children are safe, and yet women object to the loss of their motherhood role. Men feel displaced in a culture that no longer provides them with any gender-specific role expectations. We may not always see the resentment there, bubbling beneath the surface of our collective social consciousness, but it is very real. National mood regulation has failed to correct this. We might as well face the truth — the alternative seems to be a return to the old days of social calamity.”

Perhaps no longer. Doctor Johnson has worked for thirteen years to perfect what his research team calls the ultimate solution for personal freedom. Through a combination of applications of nanomolecular manufacturing, gene therapy, and a minimal number of implant procedures, volunteer subjects have been gifted with the ability to take total moment-to-moment control of their physical identities. A simple interface allows users to change their gender, fine-tune their physical attributes, and even (despite much controversy) change their race.

“This is the true end of the gender divide.” Doctor Johnson beamed as he showed off a set, which the FDA is expected to rubber-stamp this December. “We can revert to the old way of doing things without disadvantage, due to attributes previously beyond our control. If our work reaches the mainstream, then matters of old contention such as equality and social injustice can be mitigated with the touch of an icon. Does somebody think they’ll be discriminated against for their gender? Then they can take on the appearance of the opposite gender for work and go back to their natural looks when they get home. Is there evidence of disproportionate law enforcement? Then adopt the characteristics of the privileged race while in public. Never before has the individual had such power to overcome social obstacles.”

Photo of a protest marcher from the US National Archives.

Photo from the US National Archives.

But not everyone is convinced. Pamela Greensbury seems like a natural fit to advocate for this solution, which might draw people back into the physical world, but her testimony before the Senate Human Augmentation and Enhancement Committee proves otherwise. “We cannot sacrifice our individuality and diversity to save ourselves from ourselves. We will only adopt new problems! What happens to private relationships when the people you meet in public aren’t who you think they are? What will the psychological effects be when people feel forced to hide their race or gender in order to succeed? We’ve gone too far down a dangerous road already by sacrificing our nature to eliminate problems. Hiding from those problems is no solution either.”

Doctor Johnson was reached briefly for comment. He sighed and said, “Take away the root of these problems, and somebody complains. Give people the tools to mitigate discrimination with the freedom to live however they want at home, and somebody complains. Let people figure it all out for themselves, and somebody complains. Solve problems through regulations, and somebody complains. Anybody who doesn’t like our work doesn’t have to use it.”

It’s too soon to guess whether we’ll see a new kind of diversity or just continue as usual. The market will be the ultimate test. In the meantime, we may be wise to question those who stand in the way of progress. On her way out of the Senate chambers, Pamela Greensbury was arrested for mood regulation noncompliance. A spittle test administered by security at the entrance to the building proved that not only has she not taken her soma in recent months, but she has never been treated. CPS is investigating allegations of neglect, but has not commented on whether her children’s mood regulation needs were being fulfilled.

Once again, I encourage you to join the subreddit and upvote ehwut’s story. Thanks to fellow Redditor and sub moderator mofosyne for directing me to this piece.

February 1, 2016

The Surveillance Paradigm

According to her website, “Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria, whose work explores the tension between expression and technology. She seeks to blend conceptual work with traditional forms of hacking and sculpture.” She succeeds in this endeavor. I asked Addie some questions about her artistic philosophy.

Artwork by Addie Wagenknecht.

Artwork by Addie Wagenknecht.

Exolymph: Much of your body of work deals with surveillance, but I would go farther and say that you deal with the power differentials highlighted by acts of witnessing. Do you agree with that, or is it pseudo-intellectual bullshit? Either way, how do you feel about being watched?

Wagenknecht: Yes, I agree with that statement entirely.

Regarding being seen, being watched, there is a trauma to not being seen, as much as one exists for those being watched. Who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible? I have been reading a lot of research and papers on the implications of race/sex/religion within the canon of surveillance, as these factors serve as both a discursive and material practice of sociopolitical norms. Crypto is an inherently elitist technology; it is simply not available to people who are not highly fluent in their hardware and software bases. The more people outside of the hacker scene I teach these tools to, the more I believe how insanely secretive and elitist these so-called open protocols are.

Here is the thing: “public” has a reliance on the notion of a binary between private and public, visible and invisible space. This implies that we have spaces which are not part of this surveillance paradigm, but with the nature of smartphones being on everyone, everywhere, I am no longer convinced that this binary exists. “The personal is political” can also be read as saying, “The private is political.” Because everything we do in private is political: who we have sex with, what we eat, who does the cleaning, and so on…

Exolymph: How do you see your work evolving over time? What new themes interest you now?

Wagenknecht: I’d like to do more collaborative longer-term projects. I’ve started working with Peter Sunde on some small works which I hope we can release in the coming months, and also Quayola on interpretation of code as a visual entity.

My research in the last two months has been primarily about living in entirely man-made environments and the Internet of Things. The genesis of matter, the history of the earth, and how they are being reinterpreted as a form of speculated geology by the human race and the machines which we version-control that control us. I am also researching mineral composites, which would otherwise not be found in nature, to challenge definitions of “real”. I’m looking at how to play homage to the Western valuation of hyper-optimization by maximizing the believed properties of various specimens.

Exolymph: In general, what draws you to conceptual art? Why sculpture in particular? It’s interesting that you address digital realities in corporeal forms.

Wagenknecht: As artists, our role is to take complex ideas and encapsulate them in a way that society can parse. I want to subvert systems and objects in ways which people can hopefully better understand and reflect on why we need them at all.

Exolymph: What are you interested in building that you haven’t had a chance to do yet? What if you had unlimited resources?

Wagenknecht: I’d do more physical works that rely on fabricating with robotics and robotic arms, large-scale pieces, in materials like stone and metals. I also have some large-scale installations that I’ve been wanting to do forever and I’d get that list of works complete.

Exolymph: What have you downloaded that did get you in trouble? [I was referencing a piece that involves the sentence “I will not download things that get me in trouble” scrawled repeatedly across a wall.]

Wagenknecht: Ha! I’d prefer not to answer that.

Ways to get in touch with Addie Wagenknecht, as well as more examples of her artwork, are listed on her website.

December 18, 2015

“they don’t have intelligence but they are often surprising”

I suddenly became very interested in Twitter bots because of @FFD8FFDB. That interview led me to Beau Gunderson, an experienced bot-maker and general creator of both computer things and people things. In answer to email questions, he was more voluble than I expected — in a delightful way! — so this is a long one. I’m sure neither of us will be offended if you don’t have time to read it all now. I posted the Medium version first so you can save it for later using Instapaper or something equivalent!

Note: I did not edit Beau’s answers at all. He refers to most people — and bots — by Twitter username, which I think is very reasonable. It’s good to present people as they have presented themselves!

Sonya: How did you get into generative art? Why does it appeal to you, personally?

Beau: my first experience with generative art was LogoWriter in first or second grade. i don’t remember if it was a part of the curriculum or not but i spent a lot of time with it, figuring out the language and what it could be made to do. i feel like there was some randomness involved in that process because i didn’t have a full understanding of the language and so i would permute commands and values to see what would happen. i gave some of the sequences of commands that drew recognizable patterns names.

in terms of getting into twitter bots i’m certain that some of the first bots i came across were by thricedotted and were of the type that thrice has described as “automating jokes”; things like @portmanteau_bot and @badjokebot (which are both amazing). the first bot i made was @vaporfave, which i still consider unfinished but which is also still happily creating scenes in “vaporwave style”, really just a collection of things that i associated with the musical genre of vaporwave (which i do actually enjoy and listen to). it has made more than 10,000 of these little scenes.

a lot of the bots i had seen were text bots, and so i became very interested in making image bots as a way to do something different within the medium. i gave a talk at @tinysubversions’ bot summit 2014 about transformation bots (though mostly about image transformation bots): http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/image-bots/ and my next bot was @plzrevisit, which was a kind of “glitch as a service” bot that relied on revisit.link.

as far as why generative art appeals to me, i think there are a few main reasons. i like the technical challenge of attempting to create a process that generates many instances of art. it would be one thing to programmatically create one or a hundred scenes for vaporwave, or to generate 10,000 and then pick the 10 best and call it done. but it feels like a different challenge to get to the point where i’m satisfied enough with the output of every run to give the bot the autonomy to publish them all. i also like to be surprised by them. and they feel like the right size for a lot of my ideas… they’re easy enough to knock out in a day if they’re simple enough. this is probably why i also haven’t gone back to a lot of the bots and improved them… they feel unfinished but “finished enough”.

in thinking about it some of the appeal is probably informed by my ADHD as well. i prefer smaller projects because they’re more manageable (and thus completable), and twitter bots provide a nearly infinitely scrolling feed of new art (and thus dopamine).

Sonya: How do you conceptualize your Twitter bots — are they projects, creatures, programs, or… ?

Beau: well, they’re certainly projects (i think of everything i do as a project; all my code lives in ~/p/ on my systems, where p stands for projects)

but the twitter bots i think of as something more… they don’t have intelligence but they are often surprising:

aside from tweeting “woah” at the bots i often will reply or quote and add my own commentary:

even though i know they don’t get anything from the exchange i still treat them as part of a conversation sometimes. they’re creators but i don’t put them on the same level as human creators.

Sonya: As a person who has created art projects that seem as though they are intelligent — I’m thinking of Autocomplete Rap — what are your thoughts on artificial intelligence? Do you think it will take the shape we’ve been expecting?

Beau: autocomplete rap was by @deathmtn, i’m only mentioned in the bio because he made use of the rap lyrics that i parsed from OHHLA and used in my bot @theseraps. but i think @theseraps does seem intelligent sometimes too. it pairs a line from a news source with a line from a hip-hop song and tries to ensure that they rhyme. when the subjects of both lines appear to match it feels like the bot might know what it’s doing.

my thoughts on artificial intelligence are fairly skeptical and i’m also not an expert in the field. i’ll say i don’t think it represents a threat to humanity. i don’t think of my work as relating to AI, it’s more about intelligence that only appears serendipitously.

Sonya: Imagine a scenario where Twitter consists of more bots than humans. Would you still participate?

Beau: yes. i talk to my own bots (and other bots) as it is. @godtributes sometimes responds to tweets with awful deities (like “MANSPLAINING FOR THE MANSPLAINING THRONE”) and i let it know that it messed up (wow i think i’ve tweeted at @godtributes more than any other bot).

i also have an idea i’d like to build that i’ve been thinking of as “bot streams” — basically bot-only twitter with less functionality and better support for posting images. and with a focus on bots using other bots work as input, or responding to it or critiquing it (an idea i believe @alicemazzy has written about).

Sonya: How does power play into generative art? When you give a computer program the ability to express itself — or at least to give that impression — what does it mean?

Beau: i try to be very aware of the power even my silly bots have. @theseraps uses lines from the news, which can contain violence, and the lines from the hip-hop corpus which can also contain violence. when paired they can be very poignant but it’s not something i want to create or make people look at. there are libraries to filter out potentially problematic words so i use one of those and also do some custom filtering.

this is one aspect of the #botALLY community i really like; there’s an explicit code of conduct and there’s general consensus about what comprises ethical or unethical behavior by bots. @tinysubversions has even done work to automate detecting transphobic jokes so that his bots don’t accidentally make them.

i wrote a bot called @___said that juxtaposes quotes from women with quotes from men from news stories as a foray into how bots can participate in a social justice context. just seeing what quotes are used makes me think about how sources are treated differently because of their gender. while i was making the bot i also saw how many fewer women than men were quoted (which prompted an idea for a second bot that would tweet daily statistics about the genders of quotes from major news outlets)

i think @swayandsea’s @swayandocean bot is very powerful — the bot reminds its followers to drink more water, take their meds, take a break, etc.

i also really like @lichlike’s @genderpronoun and @RestroomGender, bots that remind us to think outside of the gender binary.

there’s another aspect of power i think about, which brings me back to LogoWriter. LOGO was a fantastic introduction for me as a young person to the idea of programming; it gave me power over the computer. the idea of @lindenmoji was to bring that kind of drawing language and power to twitter, though the language the bot interprets is still much too hard to learn (i don’t think anyone but me has tweeted a from-scratch “program” to it yet)

your last question, about what it means to give a computer the ability to express itself… i don’t quite think of it that way. i’m giving the computer the ability to express a parameter set that i’ve laid out for it that includes a ton of randomness. it’s not entirely expressing me (@theseraps has tweeted things that i deleted because they were “too real”, for example), but it’s not expressing itself either. i wasn’t smart enough, or thorough enough, or didn’t spend the time to filter out every possible bad concept from the bot when i created the parameter space, and i also didn’t read every line in the hip-hop lyrics corpus. so some of the parameter space is unknown to me because i am too dumb and/or lazy… but that’s also where some of the surprise and serendipity comes from.

i think as creators of algorithms we need to think about them as human creations and be aware that human assumptions are baked in:

p.s.: based on the content of the newsletter so far i feel like @alicemazzy, @aparrish, @katierosepipkin, @thricedotted, and @lichlike would be great for you to talk to about bots or art or language or just in general 🙂

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