June Stack
A round up of some of the things we're reading (and watching) this month.
image by Scopio
Like a Mushroom Expelling Its Spores, by Vanessa Taylor
Recommended by: Dominique, Design Researcher
I really appreciated this article by Vanessa Taylor in Nazar, their newsletter on Afrofuturism and surveillance. Taylor explains some of the limits of a hyper-focus on "watching" as the central critique in mainstream surveillance studies and how this results in some of the broader violences of surveillance technologies being overlooked. They posit that the logic of anti-Black Islamophobia undergirds surveillance technologies even when Black/Muslim communities are not the specific targets of the technology. This means that even when attempting "tech for good", tech companies often reproduce the same violences they claim to be countering. For example, "Facebook's partnership with Moonshot in response to an Islamophobic massacre [in Christchurch in 2019] provided legitimacy to counter-extremism logics built on the ongoing surveillance and traumatization of Muslim communities". We're not currently working on any projects specific to surveillance at the moment but I think it is important for us as researchers focused on the social impacts of technologies to consider the foundational logics that shape the digital world and whose impacts may not be so visible or easy to understand on the surface.
"When tech companies address white supremacy online as a disinformation problem, they use counter-extremism frameworks that function through anti-Black Islamophobia."
Rachel Coldicutt, Research Director — I’ve got a few things to recommend this week, and am going to bundle them all up together.
Firstly, things about the future.
I am incredibly late to the Netflix series Russian Doll, which everyone else has probably already seen, but this line from Series 1, episode 7, has stayed with me all week. The character Nadia Vulvokov, while persuading someone that another life is possible, says, “Life is like a box of timelines”, which, in retrospect, would have been an excellent title for our Civil Society Foresight Observatory report.
On the topic of people who see the future, The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight is a wonderful read that tells the true story of the formation of a network of people who felt they could do just that. Initiated in the 1960s by a British psychologist named John Barker, the Premonitions Bureau (which was a real thing) was intended to be “a data bank of the nation’s dreams and visions”, and there was some suggestion it might form the basis of an early-warning network that could predict significant events. This weaves history with science, philosophy and human intuition and sent a shiver down my spine several times.
In a rather different bit of the futures forest, I was lucky enough to see a screening of a documentary about Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth catalog and (as my v smart friend Sarah Drinkwater described him) “Internet hype man”. The film paints a very clear picture of how much Brand’s early career profited from the Native American people he started out by photographing, and how the Whole Earth catalog got off the ground because of the labour of his ex-wife, Ottawa Native American mathematician Lois Jennings. This part of the story isn’t always front and centre of the “Stewart Brand is a genius” story, and really it should be.
Lastly, focussing less on the future and more on the now, thanks to a tweet from Abeba Birhane I found this open-access open ACM paper, “Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development” by Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Emily Denton, and Alex Hanna. The paper documents the author’s analysis of documentation related to 113 computer-vision data sets, and contains many useful articulations of a problem we’ve been grappling with in a client project this week. I’ll leave you with a quote from it, outlining which values tended to dominate in these data sets, and which tend to be “silenced”:
“For each present value, we identify a contrasting silenced value — values that are overlooked or implicitly devalued in favor of the embraced values. Efficiency is valued over care, a slow and more thoughtful approach to dataset curation. Universality is valued over contextuality, a focus on more specific tasks, locations, or audiences. Impartiality is valued over positionality, an embracing of the social and political influences on understanding the world. And model work is valued over data work… For each silence, we recommend steps towards actively valuing them in dataset curation.”
Inside ID.me’s torrid pandemic growth by Caroline Haskins
Recommended by: Anna Dent, Head of Research
Another rather depressing article about the ever-increasing encroachment of digitised and automated systems into social security, and how they just don’t work very well. ID.me, a verification company, grew its client list massively during the pandemic, when it won lots of contracts to help US state and national government check eligibility for social security payments, and to combat fraud.
The article discusses some shocking failures of data security, and a digital verification system that struggled to cope with the realities and complexities of people’s lives. Workers at ID.me told stories of sharing customers’ personal data over Slack, which made it vulnerable to hackers, worries over the ease with which someone could steal personal information, and staff feeling under enormous pressure to process claims quickly rather than accurately.
The article also presents evidence that when the system didn’t work, for example for people without a fixed home address due to homelessness, or who couldn’t access a decent internet connection or camera, workers couldn’t help them. Sometimes this resulted in claimants being cut off from financial support, and also in workers receiving threats of violence.
“With a company laptop, email representatives and video chat agents can see any piece of information about any ID.me user — even people they never talk to.”
Shopping in Jail, Ideas, Essays and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-First Century, by Douglas Coupland
Recommended by: Aurelie, Research Project Coordinator
I’m just getting started with this collection of Essays and Stories by Canadian visual artist Douglas Coupland. It’s sharp, Coupland is a good spinner of tales and the tone reminds me of Dave Hickey’s in Air Guitar, in that it’s weaving together some of the cultural prisms that have made us, but with a canny eye and refreshing lightheartedness, because Coupland does not take himself too seriously — and so the ramble is really quite merry, for me even whip-smart at times.
“The internet has taken something that was once inside of us and put it outside of us, has made it searchable, mashable, stealable, and tinkerable.”
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing
Recommended by: Craig Grady, Design Lab Facilitator
Not long after I joined Careful Industries I was sent this by Rachel as a gift. Something to think about when thinking about how we change, and through what lens we understand how this happens. Despite some of the themes and challenges, the book has a positive message of the possibility of environmental renewal. I found it hard to get into at first, but coming back to it has always given me lots to reflect on in relation to change, culture and growth.
“Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others.”