Felix Stalder on Fri, 9 Sep 2016 10:35:40 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> living under algorithmic governance |
"Listen, Mark, this is serious. First you create rules that don’t distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs. Then you practice these rules without allowing space for good judgement. Finally you even censor criticism against and a discussion about the decision – and you punish the person who dares to voice criticism. <...> To be honest, I have no illusions that you will read this letter. The reason why I will still make this attempt, is that I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact even afraid [...]." http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/Dear-Mark-I-am-writing-th is-to-inform-you-that-I-shall-not-comply-with-your-requirement-to-remo ve-this-picture-604156b.html This is from a recent open letter to FB's Mark Zuckerberg by Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, Norwegian largest daily newspaper. The context is an article about a chain of events that Hansen describes as follows: "A few weeks ago the Norwegian author Tom Egeland posted an entry on Facebook about, and including, seven photographs that changed the history of warfare. You in turn removed the picture of a naked Kim Phuc, fleeing from the napalm bombs – one of the world’s most famous war photographs. Tom then rendered Kim Phuc’s criticism against Facebook for banning her picture. Facebook reacted by excluding Tom and prevented him from posting a new entry." Aftenpost article about all of this was, naturally, illustrated with said picture. Facebook demanded with standard form-letter than Aftenpost delete the picture and when didn't comply, FB deleted the entire article after less than a day. The point I want make is not how the traditional media have become depended on FB and how this is now going to bite them. That's obvious. What struck me more was the pithy description of the experience of living under algorithmic governance: opaque and arbitrary rules, which produce absurd effects, but, from the point of view of the governing entity, this much less important than the fact that these rules scale well. The absurdity of the results comes from the application of the rules without consideration of the ambiguities and constant negations that make up daily life and that are, in fact, an important basis for freedom. If rules aren't acknowledged as unambiguous there is no legitimate ground for complying with the rules in more than one way. The second point is the experience of the enormity of the distance between those who govern and those who are governed. This open letter is like burning incense in a temple to placate angry gods. And remember, this how it feels to a bona-fide member of the national elite in a wealthy country. I presume the other 99.999% of FB users wouldn't even bother to complain.... -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: