Cryptocurrency and the Affective Experience

The Missing Cryptoqueen is a BBC Sounds production podcast, which tells the story of OneCoin, an alleged cryptocurrency which is under investigation for fraud. One of the co-founders has already been arrested by the FBI and the founder is missing since 2017. However the company has not ceased trading and people globally continue to invest. (Bartlett, 2019)

OneCoin claims more than 3million investors worldwide, however the currency is still not tradeable. I was struck by the way members-investors have responded to the scandal and I wondered what is that “force” that makes them behave in this irrational and affective way.

Apart from the fact that the company used Multi Level Marketing and practices which resemble rituals of a cult, there was something else that made the members to develop a strong sense of denial towards the scandal.

I believe is the affective relationship that we have with money. We are emotionally connected to monetary transactions and financial status – we may feel pride and embarrassment or a sense of power and value. Trust is a foundational value in this relationship.

Blockchain technologies developed as a “decentralized  peer-to-peer transaction network” with no creditors or central management and appealed to a wider audience.The radical ideas of Satoshi Nakamoto, towards non restricted participation, expanded access and a sense of community in banking, formed in a political manifesto and were a response to “political struggles” (Campbell-Verduyn, p.90).

“The emergent technology is confronting power structures in manners that have significant socioeconomic and political implications” (Campbell-Verduyn, p.90).

Cryptocurrency can be considered a “a social movement” or “the currency of the future” (Betz, 2018). The inclusivity, creates this feeling of “we”, the collective – in other words it carries an affective force of a collective experience towards a system change.

The possibilities of “banking the unbanked” create a resonance of hope in countries where the economies and currencies are devalued. Seigworth and Gregg, locate affect in those moments of resonance in “…worldings and diffusions, of feeling/ passions – often including atmospheres of sociality, crowd behaviours, contacions of feeling, matters of belonging…” (p.8 ).

On the other hand, cryptocurrency’s promises: “…no need to prove value, identity, or worth…individuals freely trade with others they cannot see and do not know” (Thomas, 2018). Thus, trust is no longer a principal in this relationship – however Betz argues, “it is not a trustless currency”. It requires trust towards the system, its algorithm and its community (Betz, 2018).

With the new contemporary banking technologies and the cryptocurrency ethos,  the emotional qualities that accompanied the traditional centralised finance system, transform into a collective experience of empowerment, hope, enthusiasm and autonomy.

But perhaps the implications of those socio-technical processes may far be more complicated and intertwined in many ways. Lauren Berlant underlines the caution in regards to these “propitious moments” :  “‘… shifts in affective atmosphere are not equal to changing the world’ …” (Berlant in Seigworth and Gregg, p.12-13). As somehow is manifested in the case of the OneCoin story.

References:

Seigworth, G and Gregg, M. (2010). An Inventory of Shimmers. Introduction to the Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2003) ‘`Life is dead here’: Sensing the political in `no man’s land’’, Anthropological Theory, 3(1), pp. 107–125.

Massumi, B (2009) ‘The future birth of the affective fact. The Political Ontology of Fear’ Chapter 2 in Gregg, M and Seigworth, G The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Robbins, B. (2002). The Sweatship Sublime. PMLA, 117 (1), pp. 84-97.

Campbell-Verduyn, M., 2017. Bitcoin and Beyond : Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Global Governance, Milton: Routledge.

Online Resources:

Jamie Bartlett, BBC (2019), The Missing Cryptoqueen [Podcast]. 17 September 2019.   Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p07nkd84 (Accessed: 28 December 2019).

OneCoin, Available at:  https://www.onecoin.eu/en/ (site not accessible on the 13/01/20).

Thomas, D.A. (2018), Money and Its Effects. American Anthropologist, 120: 7-10. doi:10.1111/aman.13024. Available at: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.13024 (Accessed: 3 January 2020).

Betz, S.  (2018) Encoding Value: What is cryptocurrency, and what does it mean for society? Available at: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/10/04/what-is-cryptocurrency/  (Accessed: 4 January 2020).

Cerald, S. (2018) Can Cryptocurrency Revolutionize the Rituals of Money? Available at: https://www.sapiens.org/technology/cryptocurrency-money-ritual/  (Accessed: 5 January 2020).

When Goffman meet fitness apps: Self-presentation and performance in online fitness

In recent years, people have paid more attention to health issues due to increasingly decreased immunity and promotion of the importance of health. Therefore, an increasing number of people have joined in the health industry, and more online fitness products or apps have been designed to cater to this trend. The percentage of fitness app addicts is very high: more than 25% of users visit their fitness app more than 10 times a week (figure 1).

Firgure 1
Source: Flurry Analytics, All Devices, 08/2017

However, how many people follow the exercising program regularly? According to Tencent news, in China, 400 million residences participate in exercise activities on a daily basis, but 100 million people pretend to keep fit as well. Some people who join in the membership in the gym and purchase expensive activewear spend more time on posting their working out photos or record on social media rather than real exercise. From a sociological perspective, according to Goffman’s Dramaturgical theory, “Frontstage” is a standard expressive equipment used by individuals intentionally or unintentionally during their performance. Conversely, “backstage” is actions that may undermine the impression that people are trying to create. Then，how people manipulate the front stage and backstage is called impression management. 

In the field of health social media, “front stage”may refer to beautified or retouched photos or videos, while the real figure and bad eating habits are hidden behind computers and mobile phones. By sharing fitness photos and records, numbers of users meet their need to be adored and recognised in those positive comments of others. To gain more self-satisfaction, some indulge in finding the perfect selfie angle and ignore the exercise of defective body parts. There are even posts on social media that teach you how to take better pictures in the gym (figure 2). Such posts are very popular, so it can be seen that many people go to the gym for symbolic check-in, not to actually exercise.

Figure 2

Those carefully designed ideal-selves are criticized by scholars such as Sherry Turkle. Nevertheless, performing bodies by fake photos cannot last for the long-term. According to Goffman, unexpected break-in of a few uninvited audiences may destroy performers’ well-designed stages. It is difficult for people to calculate exactly how many potential viewers they have. For example, a Chinese singer has been hotly debated by netizens because of the difference between the figure in the official promotional photo and the audience ’s real viewing (figure 3). 

Figure 3

The concept of ‘poetics of infrastructure’ emphasizes its aesthetic significance, evoking people’s affect of keeping fit through the self-presentation on the social platforms. Similarly, the discipline theory of Foucault’s highlights the role of individual bodies in the diffusion of power across society. Shaping better side on social platforms to create and interact with the network that promotes the flow of value is also an optimization of the infrastructure to some extent.

References:

Goffman, E. (1978). The presentation of self in everyday life (p. 56). London: Harmondsworth.

Turkle, S. (2017). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Hachette UK.

Chenyu Dong,Yiran Ding. (2018). When Goffman Meets the Internet-Self Presentation and Performance in Social Media. Journalism and Writing, (1), 13. (in Chinese)

Lupton, D. (2013). Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies. Critical Public Health, 23(4), 393-403. 

Larkin, B. (2013). The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42(1), 327-343.

Online Resources:

Jiwu. (2020). Modern people pretend to be confused by fitness at a glance: as long as you apply for a card, you will soon lose weight. Retrived from: https://new.qq.com/omn/20200102/20200102A07ZB400.html

Netimperative. (2017). Health and fitness app usage “grew 330% in just 3 years” Retrived from: http://www.netimperative.com/2017/09/health-fitness-app-usage-grew-330-just-3-years/

Jessica Lockrem and Adonia Lugo. (2012). Infrastructure. Retrived from: https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/catalog/category/infrastructure

How does “filter bubble” happen in Netflix?

As of 3rd quarter 2019, Netflix had more than 158 million worldwide streaming subscribers. In addition to distribution, Netflix remains the world’s largest producer of original SVOD series. How does Netflix make it? Would its strategies cause problems for users?  

Statistic source: Parrot Analytics

Recommendation System: “Your Netflix is not my Netflix”

Olivia De Carlo, a director on Netflix’s originals product team once mentioned:“Your Netflix is not my Netflix”. By collecting the data of viewing habits and rating system, Netflix identifies users into different groups by their tastes and interests. Thus, Netflix accurately recommends them what they might be most interested in watching next, attracting them to keep watching and thus continue monthly subscription. 

According to Netflix’s report, over 80% of what members watch on Netflix comes from recommendations, which are driven by machine learning algorithms. Everything on a user’s homepage is tailor-made, where the titles and the rankings, the selection of the rows and even the image thumbnails are personalized.

Strategy: Original content producer

To enhance the core competitiveness and subscriptions, Netflix has been ramping up its own original content spend to replace the licensed content. 

Statistic source: Parrot Analytics

Netflix has put Netflix Originals front and center and uses multiple strategies to make prudent decisions. It gathers mass data of users’ engagement such as watching time, browsing and scrolling behavior as one of the basis for deciding what to renew or cancel. Netflix also uses recommendation system to highlight the original content. According to one’s experiment, once a new user without any apparent preferences uses Netflix for the first time, the “Netflix Originals” row would be played at the top of the homepage.

Netflix’s “filter bubble”

Though the big data has brought Netflix’s users personalized viewing experience, we should be alert to the attendant monotonous experience. In the digital age, prediction and control have become more possible, which made it possible for Internet companies to steer users’ ways through the Internet, even though for the users who are strong-willed and self-conscious. In this sense, Netflix could be considered as a potential knowledge oligarchy which could handle users’ data at its will.

When Netflix’s subscribers choose what to watch according to the algorithm-based recommendations, they are affected by what Eli Pariser called as “filter bubble”, a state of intellectual isolation caused by website algorithm that would effectively isolate people in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. As Pariser suggests, personalization could lead people to informational determinism in which what you have seen the past determines what you see next. 

The accurate recommendation system has created a curated Netflix for users, which has made them stuck in an infinite loop of their own tastes. Moreover, because of its limited search options, identifying quality programs from Netflix’s mass content could be difficult. The emphasis on Netflix Originals could also lead to another “bubble” as it actually streams less and less content. However, when more companies like Disney has launched its own streaming service, another question would be raised is, would people be trapped by isolated “filter bubble” because of the various SVOD platforms? Or could these platforms disrupt existing media oligopolies? 

References

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin UK.

Pietsch, W. (2013). Data and Control a Digital Manifesto. Public Culture, 25(270), pp.307-310.

Hallinan, B., & Striphas, T. (2016). Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture. New media & society, 18(1), pp.117-137.

Online Resources

Watson.A.(2019).Netflix. Statistics&Facts. Retrived from:https://www.statista.com/topics/842/netflix/

Trainer, D.(2019).Netflix’s Original Content Strategy Is Failing. Retrived from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/07/19/netflixs-original-content-strategy-is-failing/#39c112b43607

Pang. C.(2018). I Forced Myself To Watch Netflix Original Movies For A Month. Here’s What I Learned. Retrived from: https://digg.com/2018/what-netflix-wants-you-to-watch-algorithm

Adalian.J.(2018).Inside the Binge factory.Retrived from:https://www.vulture.com/2018/06/how-netflix-swallowed-tv-industry.html

Vohra. A.(2019).The danger of the filter bubble. Retrived from: https://uxplanet.org/burst-your-bubble-1f3b1273601b

Lukerson. V.(2014). 8 Netflix Tricks You Just Can’t Live Without. Retrived from: https://time.com/3600677/netflix-tips-hacks-tricks/

Technopedia. (2017). Definition. What does Filter Bubble mean. Retrieved from:https://www.techopedia.com/definition/28556/filter-bubble

Metro: Rebuilding Time and Space

The metro system, as a modern infrastructure, rebuilds the relationship of time to space in human experience. When I take the subway every weekday, I should take elevator or lift deep down to the underground, where segregates from the surrounding architectures and landscape. Inside of a single line station, there is only two directions. And the metro will take you to the station you want without knowing how you cross the space. Paul Edwards articulates that infrastructures allow us to control time and space by travelling at speeds beyond human body’s pace (Edwards, 2003). At the same time, the speed deprives human’s sensibility of space and brings orderly and dependable expectation over time, as one characteristic of infrastructure’s modernity is the speed.

A good example for my own experience is when I went to any unfamiliar stations, it seems like I have never been to this city before, even when I was back to the city I lived for ten years. The surrounding disappears, which is mentioned by an anthropologist, Xiangbiao, in an interview. Due to the well-established infrastructures, one of which is the high-speed metro system, the connections between human and surroundings are reduced: people are no longer familiar with the small shops and pitches around, and the actions of exploring remote but famous restaurant are based on the online information. Another point worthy to be mentioned is that the convergence of online information, at least in certain territories, reduces people’s ability to perceive the detailed difference in each district. Even when people travel around similar modern cities with similar transportation system, people cannot see the landscape over the ground.

References:

Brey, P. (2003). Modernity and technology. Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems. p185-227.Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

项飙：用人类学家的眼光洞察社会（Biao Xiang: Observe the Society from Anthropologists’ perspective). (2020). Retrieved 5 January 2020, from https://www.jianshu.com/p/ded9cf81811b

Underground Tube London Metro Railway

VPN and Copyright

I began to use the VPN to visit Chinese websites when I studies abroad for the first year in 2015. At first, it is only a natural action for me to turn on my music applications I used in China, but it turns out that my whole list of more than 500 songs cannot be listened. The application says: “sorry, due to the limitation of copyright, the country or territory you are in cannot provide the service of the music.” (see the photo) The same situation happened when I tried to watch videos, the Chinese video websites told me that the videos are only available to Chinese mainland.

A screenshot from Kugou music application

From my personal experience, there are two questions lead my thinking. The first one is why Chinese overseas have the needs to use the same applications, and the second one is about why the copyright limit to territory.

When the need of using VPN to avoid Chinese firewall is to gain uncensored information, especially from Google search engine, the demand of using VPN in reverse direction is the embodiment of people’s habitus (Bourdieu & Nice, 2013). At the same time, the different composition of internet social platforms, resulted from Chinese firewall, segregates the internet into two worlds for Chinese citizens: China and outside of China. Thus, the isolated cyber world lead Chinese counting on the indigenous platforms.

The second question mentions the regulation of copyright, that copyright laws are territorial. Lessig criticized on the over-strictness of copyright’s regime and time span. On the one side, the copyright protects both economic and moral rights for the creator; on the other side, the copyright becomes a burden, more than expanse over artists (Lessig, 2001). The existence of intellectual copyright also becomes the instrument of press and publisher. An interesting event is that Lessig (2001) announced the Future of Ideas has been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, and the book can be downloaded the book for free. From the pdf version, the sentence of reserved copyright has been crossed. On the contrary, China is still at beginning level of protecting copyright of music and videos. While Chinese netizens are highly recommending the awareness of copyright, finding the balance of suitable scope of copyrights will be the next topic of discussion and research.

A screenshot of the electronic version of Future of Ideas

Reference:

Lessig, L. (2001). The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (1st ed., pp. 3-17). New York: Random House, Inc.

WIPO. (2020). Frequently Asked Questions: Copyright. Retrieved 5 January 2020, from https://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/faq_copyright.html

Bourdieu, P., & Nice, R. (2013). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

(Bourdieu & Nice, 2013)

Keywords: VPN, borders, habitus, copyright, de-copyright, China

Forensic Architecture: Affect and Insecurity

Forensic Architecture is a research agency and eponymous academic field, developed at Goldsmith University London, which performs advanced spatial and media investigation into human rights violation cases, and the “production and presentation of architectural evidence—relating to buildings, urban environments—within legal and political processes” (Forensic Architecture, 2020).

The practice developed in response to an emerging assemblage of phenomena and infrastructural relations – namely urbanisation of warfare, state insecurity, and proliferation of digital technology such as open source media and smart phone documentation. Using advanced computational modelling and reconstruction techniques (including digital models, virtual reality environments and animations), layered over analysis of spatial information captured by photographic, audio and testimonial evidence, Forensic Architecture works with citizens, journalists and NGOs to investigate and reanimate events of human rights violations.

This work is typically located in contexts of state insecurity, for example Israel-Palestine conflicts, where the official channels of justice and enquiry are mediated by forms political violence and corruption. In this way, Forensic Architecture’s work serves to reproduce and uncover new details of cases using objective modes of evidential enquiry.

Omar Bin Abdul Aziz Hospital (Aleppo, Syria) was struck 14 times by munitions fired by the Syrian army, including cluster and barrel bombs. Within a digital model, Forensic Architecture corroborated multiple sources of CCTV footage to support claims that Syria and its allies were intentionally targeting civilian hospitals.
Source: Forensic Architecture

Regarding the production of evidence using the techniques of Forensic Architecture, we might consider the existence of ‘affect’ – “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing…” – in the reproduction and computation of evidence (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Forensic Architecture’s strengths are in their advanced skills and networks of investigation, layering information (i.e. time sequencing audio recordings over video footage, then modelling the composite environment) to find new paths to evidence. In this, we could perhaps identify an element of affect ‘mediating’ their actions and ability to interpret certain data (Latour, n.d.)[1].

Interestingly, the adoption of new forms of digital evidentiary presentation has been slow in the West[2], specifically regarding its admissibility in court, with a leading argument being that presenting evidence digitally ascribes a higher level of objectivity to the information presented (Moore). In this way we might also understand this as concern about affect. This is not to say that affect is not at play when a jury is given verbal and diagrammatic accounts of bullet trajectories – that their ability to interpret the information is not ‘mediated’ (Latour, n.d.) by their embodied predispositions or dispositif’ (Foucault, cited by Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). However, Digital evidence by contrast presents as a kind of high resolution information – the aesthetics and modes of visualisation might appear to reference a greater depth of knowledge, when the source material is the same (a 3D model is reads differently to a hand drawing over a photo) (Hauser, 2014). In this argument, the jury may be swayed by affect, mediated by the mode presentation.

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• [1] I say this lightly though, as the cycled argument against the validity of Forensic Architecture work (by the regimes they inherently expose) is that it is coloured by activism, discrediting the legitimacy of the evidence their work produces.
• [2] Where it might be argued that political violence isn’t perceived at same scale as in states of active conflict.

References:

• Forensic Architecture. (2020, 01 04). About. Retrieved from Forensic Architecture: https://forensic-architecture.org/about/agency
• Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. J. (2010) The affect theory reader. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.
• Houser, H. (2014) ‘The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations: More than Information Ecstasy?’, Public Culture. Duke University Press, 26(2 73), pp. 319–337. doi: 10.1215/08992363-2392084
• Latour, B., n.d. On Technical Mediation, s.l.: bruno-latour.fr.
• Moore, L. (2019) [first-hand: this comes from experience working for the Ministry of Justice].
• Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. J. (2010) The affect theory reader. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.

Get “Chained up”: Blockchain as a Way to Encourage Better and Safer UGC?

Are we living in a time where trust in the news is at an all-time low? Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report ^[1] revealed that 33% of the respondents trust the news from search engines; less than a quarter trust the news from social media.

Do we trust the news enough? Do we feel safe enough when speak up about sensitive issues? How to improve?

In the trend of blockchain-inspired industry, Matters has gained momentum during the Chinese #MeToo movement. This distributed-network^[2]-based, cryptocurrency-generated public discussion and news platform attempts to reshape the ecosystem of the Chinese-language (and beyond) online communities. It’s also where a large amount of reports, evidence ^[3] formatted #MeToo news and testimonies are safely stored.

Why blockchain can be served as an approach to diminish content centralisation? What does Matters do to encourage original contents?

1. Feeling Rewarded? Then Maybe More Writing.

LikeCoin is the digital cryptocurrency that readers use on Matters to pay the authors. No intermediary needed; the authors get the reward directly. Transaction made without the limitation of geographic borders instantly, with its records tracked in transparency (Kshetri, N. 2018)^[4].

2. Security: Key to Trust-building.

All information on the blockchain system is immutable, unrevisable. Once “chained up”, users’ intellectual property will be protected, discussions and comments can be checked even if deleted (Shatkovskaya, T.V. et al., 2018)^[5]. New information will all be uploaded to InterPlanetary File System ^[6] nodes to finalise distributed-network storage, then bring the data back to the author. This feature largely reduces the possibility of uncivil hacking and other unforeseen disasters. #MeToo in China has been facing massive censorship, which concerns and unfortunately stopped citizens to freely discuss it, whereas on Matters, the safer and friendlier the environment is, the more communicative and more openminded people are. As a result, many who find it insecure of involving in political and feminism topics from mainland China have turned to Matters to continue broader conversations.

3. Decentralisation: Core of the Community.

At its core, blockchain is built on decentralisation principles and utilises crowd-sourcing to achieve tasks, as opposed to relying on a central authority or entity (Sompolinsky, Y. & Zohar, A., 2018)^[7]. This feature allows intellectuals, opinion leaders to join the community and become the creators of more users generated contents (UGC), which is also the common vision and sense of the solidarity on the platform.

image source: Blockchain & Centralization SlideShare

Image source: “How The Bitcoin Blockchain Is Impacting The eLearning Industry”

Blockchain has become somewhat a buzzword. Many hold high expectations for this revolutionary technology. But is blockchain the ultimate solution to establishing a truly secure open online community?

Since blockchain is built on the concept of decentralisation, it’s evident that this power dynamic will come sooner or later. Rather than simply following the trend and apply more proprietary solutions, it’s crucial to know that it’s the decentralisation as core that we need, rather than the infrastructural package on the surface level.

Therefore, blockchain may not be the paradigm shift, it’s simply a medium to convey these principles to the masses. The future is looking bright, but doesn’t necessarily include blockchain technology in any capacity. To get “chained up” or not to get “chained up”, that’s a long-term question.

Hashtags: #Blockchain #UGC #Decentralisation #MeToo #News #Bitcoin

References

[1] Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019, Digital News Report 2019. Available from <https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/digital-news-report-2019-out-now>. [4^th Jan, 2020].

[2] “Distributed Network”, (Techopedia page), Available from: <https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27788/distributed-network>. [4th Jan, 2020].

[3] Matters, 2019. A Brief History of Chinese Youth Feminist Movement. Available from<https://matters.news/@Nikko/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E9%9D%92%E5%B9%B4%E5%A5%B3%E6%9D%83%E8%BF%90%E5%8A%A8%E7%AE%80%E5%8F%B2-%E4%B8%8B%E9%83%A82014-2019-zdpuB1gxMNs1Le8ftVURuq5Uf9y82gow1MWeuBeUpwqaGJ9Ac>. [4th Jan, 2020].

[4] Kshetri, N., 2018. Cryptocurrencies: Transparency Versus Privacy [Cybertrust]. Computer, 51(11), pp.99–111.

[5] Shatkovskaya, T.V. et al., 2018. Impact of Technological Blockchain Paradigm on the Movement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Space. European Research Studies, 21, p.397.

[6] “ InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)”, (wiki article), 2019, Available from: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System>. [4th Jan, 2020].

[7] Sompolinsky, Y. & Zohar, A., 2018. Bitcoin’s underlying incentives. Communications of the ACM, 61(3), pp.46–53.

Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Precariat, and the Assembly Line 2.0

Artificially intelligent (AI) systems uphold the digital infrastructures which sustain much of our contemporary world: from smart appliances in our homes, to facial recognition in our CCTV networks, to the self-driving cars creeping onto our roads. The AI which informs these infrastructures does not emerge in a vacuum: machine-learning means machines must be trained by someone to mimic intelligent processing, through what the World Economic Forum (WEF) term ‘supervised learning’.

As Star asserts: “one person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty,” (Star, 1999: 380). A neo-Marxist framing of society, using the existing framework of infrastructure (the economic and material ‘base’ of society) and superstructure (the social and cultural relations which emerge from it) is useful in revealing the social relations embedded in and produced by digital infrastructures (Marx, 1848). Within this neo-Marxist framing, I add to Star’s assertion: that one person’s infrastructure is another person’s labour.

The division of labour which Marx identified, in which profit is extracted from the unpaid labour of the working class, labouring below the managerial class (appointed by the factory owners) has not disappeared. Proponents of world-systems ‘dependency theory’ argue that instead, Marxist labour relations mutated with globalisation, and inequality shifted from a local to a global scale (Rodney, 1974).

In this rough metaphor, the technocrats of the Global North are the new factory owners, and the managerial class of Silicon Valley workers profit off the algorithms which are trained by the new, precarious proletariat: often, the exploited workers of the Global South.

Video source: BBC Click

Whilst some of this labour is undertaken by a global ‘freelance’ workforce through ‘crowdworking’ platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, much of it is performed by data labellers across Africa and China, for companies like Beijing’s AInnovation and Basic Finder. Working in ‘data factories’ – often located in repurposed former warehouses – the, “construction workers of the digital world,” label objects in repetitive visual datasets, in order to inform AI systems’ ability to identify objects (Yuan, 2018).

Unlike the ‘unskilled’ manual labour of Marx’s industrial proletariat, data labelling demands distinct skills. Tasks like labelling bodies can, “require the tagger to draw as many as 15 dots per figure with up to 40 people in a single picture,” (Dai, 2018). Working conditions can be unsatisfactory: Kenyan workers were found without, “acceptable ergonomic support, often crouching over, clicking away furiously, for hours on end,” (Lee, 2018). Companies like Kenya’s Samasource provide, “a living wage of around $9 a day,” for workers, whilst the WEF suggests wages, “can go as low as $1 per hour, or even less,” (Lee, 2018; Croce & Musa, 2019). Though some workers identify positive social impacts from their work (eg. greater gender parity), it is clear that through the outsourcing of supervised learning, tech companies profit from unequal global labour valuation.

Digital infrastructures are intrinsically entwined with social structures. A practice-based approach to digital infrastructures like AI reveals the superstructure of social and political relations embedded in them. This approach highlights that ‘artificial’ intelligence often emerges from workers’ very real, underpaid labour.

References

Marx, K., & Engels, F. ([1848] 2015). The Communist Manifesto. Pluto Press.

Star, S.L. (1999). The ethnography of infrastructure: PROD. The American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), pp. 377-391.

Rodney, W. ([1972] 2012). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Black Classic Press.

Lee, Dave. (2018, November 3). Why Big Tech pays poor Kenyans to teach self-driving cars. BBC News: Technology. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46055595

Yuan, Li. (2018, November 25). How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions. The New York Times: Business. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/business/china-artificial-intelligence-labeling.html

Dai, Sarah. (2018, October 8). AI promises jobs revolution but first it needs old-fashioned manual labour – from China. South China Morning Post: Tech. Retrieved from: https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2166655/ai-promises-jobs-revolution-first-it-needs-old-fashioned-manual-labour-china

Linked resources

Ghantz, Maximillian. (2018, December 12). The invisible workers of the AI era. Towards Data Science. Retrieved from: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-invisible-workers-of-the-ai-era-c83735481ba

Croce, Nicola and Musa, Moh. (2019, August 12). The new assembly lines: Why AI needs low-skilled workers too. World Economic Forum. Retrieved from: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/ai-low-skilled-workers/

Building Library of Alexandria in the Digital Age: How 1000-year-old Data Longevity Can Be Made Possible for Future Generations

2300 years ago, the rulers of Alexandria set out to fulfill one of humanity’s most audacious goals: to collect all the knowledge in the world under one roof. In its prime, the Library of Alexandria [1]housed an unprecedented number of scrolls yet vanished in a catastrophic fire.

Information is valuable. Modern humans always seek for permanent approaches to preserve it, yet facing some obstacles:

• The internet is constantly evolving, data is mutable, which are not ideal for storing information in a fixed way.
• A worrying amount of knowledge is stored on ephemeral media: hard drives, CDs, backup tapes who’s notional 30-year lifespans assume strictly controlled heat and humidity. Data longevity ^[2] is greatly dependent on the materiality of the medium (Dolgin, E., 2018)^[3].

Nobody wants to witness another catastrophe like the vanish of Library of Alexandria. With the mission of preserving open source software in a fixed offline format and keep it secure for future generations, GitHub Arctic World Archive (AWA) is launched.

GitHub Arctic Code Vault introduction video (source: GitHub official Youtube Channel)
The AWA is located in a decommissioned coal mine in the Svalbard, Norway. GitHub will capture a snapshot of every active public repository on 02/02/2020 and preserve that data in the Arctic Code Vault.

What is GitHub?

Open source was seen as a fringe idea. Big companies kept their code secret, only hippies shared code and give it away for free. Today, over 40 million people use GitHub to create applications with open source. It’s essential to protect it from terrorist hackers, electromagnetic pulses, and other unforeseen disasters.

How is 1000-year Storage Possible?

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Image souce: the official GitHub Arctic Program website

The AWA, “modern-day Library of Alexandria”, located in the world’s northernmost town Svalbard, is a very-long-term archive 250 metres deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain. Global warming is not expected to threaten the stability of its structure.

Where to Store & Retrieve Information?

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  Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, checking information film reels catagorized by nationalities

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  Slogan on the wall inside the AWA

Images ource: Bloomberg Businessweek

Information is stored on high-resolution film. The film allows you to encode information in machine-readable formats. When retrieving, you are required to send a request. Once authorised, AWA will set up an online machine that sends you a link to what you requested, or ship the data on physical medium.

Pace Layers (Brand, S 2018)^[4]: the Flexible, Durable Three-tier Storage Solution

Image souce: the official GitHub Arctic Program website

Imagine 30 years ago, people might think it insane if you tell them that in 2020, human civilisation will depend and run on open source code. But here we are, in the age of Anthropocene where we are about to hit the ceiling of the biophysical capacity of planet earth, making sure we restore our ways of digital life. Besides constantly thinking of the endgame of Anthropocene, it is worth looking at the pathways to prevent human digital civilisation from extinction.

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Image source: Beyond the Anthropocene by Johan Rockström

Data Resiliency^[5] as an Instance:

The journey from recovery management to resilience management, is not only about technological change, but also cultural change: the goal is to deliver resilient services that are not just available, but also mitigates the impacts of cyberattacks, that can sustain a level of data integrity and continuity over a massive ecosystem infrastructure, and can also become agile, in terms of a just-in-time provisioning model (Anon, 2017)^[6].

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Image souce: the official GitHub Arctic Program website

With an optimistic nihilism^[7] mindset, let’s hope the AWA remains a time capsule, that our kids will never have to access.

Hashtags: #Materiality #Digital Archive #Data Restore #Data Protection #Data Resiliency #Data Longevity #Open Source #Anthropocene

References

[1] Library of Alexandria, 2019. Available from <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Library-of-Alexandria>. [3^rd Jan, 2020].

[2] Data storage lifespans: How long will media really last? 2019. Available from <https://blog.storagecraft.com/data-storage-lifespan/>. [3rd Jan, 2020].

[3] Dolgin, E., 2018. Longevity data hint at no natural limit on lifespan. Nature, 559(7712), pp.14–15.

[4] Brand, S. 2018. Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/7f2e5f08

[5] Balancing Data Resiliency with Data Recovery. Available from <https://www.flexential.com/knowledge-center/balancing-data-resiliency-data-recovery>. [3rd Jan, 2020].

[6] Anon, 2017. US Patent Issued to Parallel Machines on Jan. 17 for “Data resiliency in a shared memory pool” (Israeli Inventor). US Fed News Service, Including US State News, pp.US Fed News Service, Including US State News, Jan 19, 2017.

[7] Optimistic Nihilism. 2017 (video file). Available from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14&app=desktop>. [3rd Jan, 2020].

Copyright, Copyleft, and the Public Domain

Image by Christopher Dombres licensed under CC-0

Copyright laws originally came about in the United States around 1790, the thought being to create laws that would protect original content created by giving rights of ownership to their creators. These laws originally saw the sole rights over a work transferred to its creator for a term of fourteen years, and this could be extended for another fourteen years if the creator were still alive. While originally mainly covering books and maps, over time the formats of media included and the length of time they were covered for ballooned. The last change to US copyright was the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act (Also known as the Sonny Bono Act), saw the length of copyright go to life of the author plus 70 years, except in the case of corporations who can claim ownership for 95 years after publication.¹ While the idea of protecting authorship and the ability for creators to protect their way of life is a noble cause, the law now extends far past what could be seen as a natural lifetime. This in turn has stymied the public domain, and what new works fall into it, creating a gap from 1999 to 2019 where no new works were added.

  In January 2019, Ars Technica reported on the first new content entering the public domain in twenty years. It was expected that another extension would be proposed by corporate media giants such as Disney, whose own Mickey Mouse will fall out of copyright in 2024. With many major characters from Warner Brothers, DC, and Disney set to fall to public domain in the next fifteen years, will we see another legislative push in the U.S. to protect the creative works of multi-billion dollar companies?² The likely bet is yes.

Image by Christopher Dombres licensed under CC-0

While these fights are mainly those of large corporations, there is a battle being waged by the people, one of open sourcing projects and locking copyright up into the copyleft, a way of turning copyright law on its head to make sure that works are guaranteed to be free for all to use and see.³ Projects like the Creative Commons  and the GNU GPL/LGPL have created licenses that can be adopted for use in order to make things easier to share, or completely public domain depending on the license chosen. These licenses are generally provided free of charge and have been making major headway in allowing for content to reenter the public sphere. There are still issues of access; content has to be stored somewhere, and requires funding. With companies that supported copyleft such as the photo sharing site Flickr being purchased by media conglomerates such as Oath⁴ (A subsidiary of Verizon that owns AOL and Yahoo among others), there will likely be future fights on different media to protect content rights. Overbearing copyright laws are damaging to the sharing and development of culture, and need to be pared down.

Image from wikipedia users seriton and Zscout370. Image licensed under CC-0

Check out the Creative Commons Video on how a CC license works here.

¹https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/s505.pdf

²https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-worth-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/

³Coleman, E.G., 2013. Coding freedom : the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

⁴https://www.dpreview.com/news/8750021028/verizon-acquires-yahoo-including-flickr