Luke Munn on Thu, 21 Mar 2019 19:48:20 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> Fwd: are you on nettime?


(sent this a couple days ago but got stuck somehow, mods have fixed
problem I believe)


Hey Francis,

Nice to hear from you. Some good points there.
>
>
>
> This kind of description ascribes a lot of power/agency to the technical
> medium and does in my opinion not fully grasp the agency of individuals
> who have to actively seek this content (they have to go online,
> subscribe to certain streams, pick their phones and read messages, click
> on more extreme content and so on). I mean, "audience members" or
> individuals have to actively engage with certain political positions.
> I'm not sure if this kind of argument "the user get's lured into" not
> even depoliticizes the whole situation as it argues mainly "the user is
> the victim".
>
> It wasn't me – it was the actor-network.


I wouldn't go so far as to say the user is the victim - and certainly
wouldn't want to be misread as saying that T was a victim. But I do
stand by the idea of the dark social web incrementally nudging users
towards a more extremist position. I've been recommended some pretty
disturbing (politically) videos on YT, based on some seemingly banal
choices. And this is what Tufekci also picked up on last year - which
I stumbled across at the tail end of this essay.

So I don't want to nix agency, choice, freedom altogether. But it
seems to me that the incessant quest of digital architectures through
UX/UI/coding etc to eliminate the "pain points" of interaction is
precisely the attempt to reduce that threshold of the decision. The
auto-recommended feed negates the search bar and its manual typing,
infinite scroll kills off pagination and makes it effortless to keep
going, autocomplete steers us towards a preselected query etc. We
actively consume content, but increasingly that content is not chosen
from some unconstrained totality, but preselected and privileged in
platform-specific ways.

This content, and indeed the whole process of a user moving along a
trajectory of the dark social web towards a more extremist position I
see as political, so maybe we're using the word depoliticizes in
different ways.

>
>
> The decision for instance to actively engage within let's say the KKK or
> Blood and Honor and similar groups to me seems similar to the decision
> of engaging in todays online hate-groups, which may be spread more
> globally, but nethertheless these are not "algorithms" acting by
> themselves (what motivation should they have?) but humans who interact
> with each other trough global communication platforms.


Not sure if this was some strange phrasing on my part but never meant
to imply that hate-groups are some kind of algorithm.

I guess what's interesting to me, again, is how the former "leap" to a
hate-group becomes diminished to a set of slow, incremental steps.
What I tried to show in the essay was the smooth gradation I see
occurring online. Starting with the anti-feminist kickback in
GamerGate, moving through to more alt-right positions, then perhaps
the sly wink of Nazi dog-whistles through YouTube channels, before
clicking across one day to 4chan, etc.

>
>
> Luke further, after describing Pewdiepies influence says: "One of the
> strengths of the dark social web is that is highly individualized, an
> environment algorithmically optimized to reflect its inhabitant. … Yet
> in an operational sense, T.'s environment of platforms, sites and
> services is exactly the same as ours—it is designed in the same way,
> with the same architectures and affordances."
>
> So I wonder, why does the discussion want to look into the
> "sociotechnical properties of that environment" instead of looking into
> the political dimension which forms and enables humans who wish to kill
> other humans.


Perhaps I should have said socio-politico-technical properties, if
that was a word. :-) IMHO political maybe gets too narrowly or too
reservedly used, whereas I see political broadly in a ranciere sense
as the decision over what is visible, what invisible, who gets to
speak, who is silenced, etc. In that sense, as mentioned above, T's
environment and ours are highly political, though often subliminally
or imperceptibly so, which makes them all the more powerful.

Anyway thanks for the questions.

-best, Luke

>
>
> warm greetings,
>
> Francis
>
> --
> http://databasecultures.irmielin.org
>
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