Surveillance capitalism in the context of futurology : an inquiry to the implications of surveillance capitalism on the future of humanity

Tiedekunta/Osasto – Fakultet/Sektion – Faculty Valtiotieteellinen tiedekunta Laitos – Institution – Department Sosiaalitieteiden laitos Tekijä – Författare – Author Sandberg Markus Roy Rikhard Työn nimi – Arbetets titel – Title Valvontakapitalismi tulevaisuudentutkimuksen viitekehyksessä: tutkielma valvontakapitalismin vaikutuksista ihmisyyden tulevaisuuteen Oppiaine – Läroämne – Subject Yhteiskuntapolitiikka Työn laji – Arbetets art – Level Pro gradu-tutkielma Aika – Datum – Month and year 18.5.2020 Sivumäärä – Sidoantal – Number of pages 105 Tiivistelmä – Referat – Abstract Tämä tutkielma ammentaa aiheensa parhaastaan Shoshana Zuboffin The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A fight for a human future at the new frontier of power -teoksesta. Kirja panee pöydälle uuden teorian ajanmukaisimmasta kapitalismista ja esittää vallanvaihdoksen uusliberalismista valvontakapitalismiin. Ilmiön alkujuuret sekä seurannaisvaikutukset tulevat olemaan tämän maisterintyön polttopisteessä. Kirjallisuuskatsauksessa tulevaisuudentutkimuksen tieteenalan taustaa ja sitoumuksia puntaroidaan pintapuolisesti niin akateemisen- kuin kaunokirjallisuudenkin voimin. Rinnakkaisesti raotetaan valvontakapitalismin käsitettä ja tehdään juotos sen ja Yuval Noah Hararin dataismin välillä. Hararin näkemykset ihmiskunnan eilispäivästä ja huomisesta palvelevat piirtoheittimenä työn tulkinnoille valvontakapitalismista. Mielikuvitus, kardinaalivaltti, joka kuuluu tavaramerkkioikeudella ainoastaan Homo Sapiensille koko tunnetussa maailmankaikkeudessa, nostetaan tapetille olennaisimpana sotanäyttämönä, jolla valvontakapitalismi toteuttaa lannistavinta täsmäiskuaan. Tämä tutkielma oikeuttaa olemassaolonsa kertaamalla pääpiirteittäin kansantajuisen futurologian suuntauksia ja pyrkii tekemään selväksi, missä ja miten tieteenala on kulkeutunut kiertoraiteille, vieraantunut kiireellisimmistä kysymyksistä ja langennut kamariteoreettisiin kiistoihin keinoälystä jumaluusopin jalanjäljissä. Tutkielma puolustaa pulmanasettelua, jonka mukaan tämä sumentaa inhimillistä toimijuutta valvontakapitalismin kuliseissa ja toimii täten sen tehosteena. Maisterintyön kolmannessa kappaleessa esitetään kiteytys Sohail Inayatullahin syy-yhteyksien kerrostuneen tarkastelun menetelmästä sekä siitä, miksi se on omiaan tämän tutkimuskysymyksen tarpeisiin. CLA-metodologian vahvuuksia ja vajavuuksia ruoditaan ja lukija vihitään tasoja taaplaavaan tutkimusotteeseen, joka tulee sävyttämään tätä maisterintyötä pitkin matkaa, ennen kuin itse analyysi toteutetaan. Yhteenvedossa edessä on valvontakapitalismin tyhjentävä ruodinta, jota säestetään aprikoimalla ylimalkaisesti sitä, noinkohan valvontakapitalismi alkuunkaan välttää edustavasta markkinatalouden muunnelmasta, vai ilmentääkö se jotakin tyystin toisenlaista. Avainsanat – Nyckelord – Keywords Valvontakapitalismi Tulevaisuudentutkimus DataismiTiedekunta/Osasto – Fakultet/Sektion – Faculty Faculty of Social Sciences Laitos – Institution – Department Department of Social Research Tekijä – Författare – Author Sandberg Markus Roy Rikhard Työn nimi – Arbetets titel – Title Surveillance capitalism in the context of futurology: An inquiry to the implications of surveillance capitalism on the future of humanity Oppiaine – Läroämne – Subject Social and Public Policy Työn laji – Arbetets art – Level Master's Thesis Aika – Datum – Month and year 18.5.2020 Sivumäärä – Sidoantal – Number of pages 105 Tiivistelmä – Referat – Abstract This dissertation owes its research topic largely to Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. The work ushers in a novel theory of the contemporary strain of capitalism and posits a shift from neoliberalism to surveillance capitalism. The origins and ramifications of this phenomenon will be at the focus of this thesis. In the review of relevant literature, the background and the commitments of futures studies as a field are eclectically touched upon by the aid of both scholarly work and science fiction. Concomitantly, the concept of surveillance capitalism is unfurled and welded to Yuval Noah Harari's notion of dataism. Harari's thoughts on humanity's past and future shall also furnish the overhead projector for my interpretation of surveillance capitalism. Imagination, the foremost forte that Homo Sapiens enjoys the monopoly of in the known universe, is singled out as the main theatre of war, as it is the area where surveillance capitalism is carrying out its most crippling strafe. The raison d'etre for this treatise is lent support to by virtue of a once-over of popular futurology, as I seek to sort out, where and why the discipline has gone off at a tangent and detracted from acute matters, divagating into disputes over synthetic intelligence that echo theological dialectics. I propose the problematization that this befuddles the human agency at the core of surveillance capitalism and thus works as an adjuvant to it. In the third compartment a précis of the history of Sohail Inayatullah's causal-layered-analysis method as well as its viability and pertinence to this dissertation is presented. The boon and bane of CLA as an epistemology is audited as the reader is familiarized with the stratum-superpositioning approach which shall inform this thesis passim before the analysis itself is presented. In the summarization surveillance capitalism is sized up from top to bottom, accompanied by a cursory contemplation apropos of the question to what degree surveillance capitalism is equipped to emblematize capitalism in the first place, or perhaps rather something altogether outré. Avainsanat – Nyckelord – Keywords Surveillance capitalism Futurology Datais

Las Vegas Optic, 05-16-1913

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/lvdo_news/2997/thumbnail.jp

The role of friendship in Arthur Miller: A study of friendship in his major dramatic and non-dramatic writing

This study examines the role of friendship in Arthur Miller\u27s work from his book of reportage, Situation Normal to his latest play, The Ride Down Mount Morgan, attempting to show that friendship is a central and recurrent topic in Miller\u27s work, both dramatic and non-dramatic; In chapter 1, the Introduction, I trace Miller\u27s ideas about friendship, which were framed during the Depression and solidified through his study of American training bases in WWII. Miller seems to contend that if all members of society could respond through friendship as the men in the military did, we would eliminate many social ills and parallel Aristotle\u27s polis, which was unified through friendship; Chapter 2, Focus, investigates friendship in Miller\u27s only novel, concluding that the protagonist, Lawrence Newman is isolated from his community until he is motivated through friendship to reach beyond his once complacent and now-threatened existence; Chapter 3 I Don\u27t Need You Any More, traces friendship in Miller\u27s collected short stories, focusing on Monte Sant\u27 Angelo and Fitter\u27s Night, which both indicate that through friendship, one can connect with others and find a place in the community; Chapter 4, Friendship in the Early Drama, looks at friendship in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. In this chapter I consider the ways that friendship dominates Chris Keller\u27s vision for a better world, and analyze Salesman as a play that details the failure of friendship; Chapter 5, After The Fall, examines Quentin\u27s struggle with his past, determining that his journey features the death and resurrection of friendship as a positive social force; Chapter 6, Friendship in the Later Drama, concludes that while Miller\u27s view of friendship is shattered as a result of the McCarthy era, his later drama continues to portray friendship as a means to unify our increasingly individual society

Rise of the Modern Mediatrix: The Feminization of Media and Mediating Labor, 1865-1945

This dissertation uncovers a vast archive of fictional female telegraph, telephone, and typewriter girls, combining rigorous historical research with feminist, psychoanalytic readings of mass cultural texts to show how the global gendering of low-level communication work shaped modern media. It begins in the United States, where women first performed this work, and explores three further national contexts (France, Germany, and Britain) where female operators and typists circulated as media icons of techno-social connection in an increasingly atomized age. The title “modern mediatrix” describes the essential mediating role white-collar woman workers have played in modern media infrastructure, from switchboard to editing bench. This role has been promoted by corporations, nations, and mass media as feminine for over a century. Across four chapters that engage ad campaigns, plays, novels, and films, I reveal the modern mediatrix to be a uniquely flexible character, capable of creating continuity across industrial ruptures and activating new narrative forms. To trace this character’s construction, I tie her unique semiotic tools and social skills to evolving Christian notions of sanctified feminine transmission, weaving as women’s work, and Hollywood’s reliance on an invisible feminized clerical proletariat. Media scholars who point out telegraphs and typewriters still rarely note the girl behind the machine. For too long, my field has clung to the male factory worker as an all-purpose archetype for cinematic labor and depicted female tech users at home, alone, in the thrall of the apparatus. Instead, my project proposes the rise of the modern mediatrix as an essential theoretical and material foundation for film and media studies. Each of my chapters explores a different facet of the modern mediatrix. I begin in the 1860s, when Western Union began recruiting lady telegraphers and the Catholic Church premiered its Blessing of the Telegraph, with Mary cast as a pure channel for man’s natural use of electricity. Framed by this techno-romantic mother-figure, Chapter 1 examines three teenage girls enshrined in US popular history as the first users of the telegraph, telephone, and typewriter. I show how inventors and companies used virginal foremothers to claim paternity over communications technologies and their feminized workforces. Chapter 2 argues Bell’s speech-weaver ad campaigns coded onscreen operators as vernacular translators of transitional cinematic syntax. Highlighting telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of cross-cutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound, it offers women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and patriarchal authorship model typically used to historicize film editing conventions. Chapter 3 traces the secretary’s construction as an automatic audience member in interwar European modernist media. Suggesting that the hypnotic effects of taking dictation stoked Weimar-era anxieties about women workers’ receptivity to media-savvy fascist dictators, it catalogs secretarial symptoms that trouble Frankfurt school divisions of worker-spectators into shocked factory workers and absorbed little shopgirls. Chapter 4 uses the metallic echoes of taps to read Astaire-Rogers musicals as anxious allegories for the Production Code’s reliance on typists, and as encrypted channels to two fleetingly feminized languages, Morse and binary code. A postwar coda draws out the clerical conduit’s transgressive potential, hinted at by her narrative flexibility and explicitly reclaimed in the 1970s and 80s by feminist filmmakers and techno-scientists. With access to the codes of information capitalism, virginal electric muses and hysterical film fans became canny decipherers of mystified techno-cultural matrilineages

The cinepheur: post-cinematic passage, post-perceptual passage

This thesis develops a hermeneutic commensurate with the aesthetic and ontological challenges of what Steven Shaviro describes as a post-cinematic media ecology, and Shane Denson describes as an emergent post-perceptual media ecology. I consider canonicity and cinephilia as frustrated efforts to contain and comprehend this new cinematic media object, offering a third unit of interpretation in their place, which I describe as the cinetopic anecdote. I associate the cinetopic anecdote with a particular way of moving between cinema and cinematic infrastructure, which I label cinetopic passage, and with a subject position that I label the cinepheur. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of the flâneur, I argue that the cinetopic anecdote precludes the extraction of a privileged cinematic moment in the manner characteristic of Christian Keathley’s cinephilic anecdote, but instead compels the cinepheur to instantiate, embody or physically recreate the infrastructural conditions that produced it, dovetailing production and consumption into what Axel Bruns has described as the emergent category of produsage; “unfinished artifacts, continuing process.” Having elaborated the cinetopic anecdote, I apply it to postmodern, post-cinematic and post-perceptual media ecologies, in order to evoke the peculiar forms of attachment and obsession bound up with the Criterion and Netflix platforms. In the process, I draw on Franco Moretti’s conception of distant reading to frame the cinetopic anecdote as a unit of distant viewing, offering distant viewings of Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak’s Cinemania, Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. Just as distant reading takes “the great unread” as its object of enquiry, so the cinetopic anecdote speaks to a media ecology preoccupied by the “great unviewed,” in which cinematic scarcity increasingly ramifies as an elegaic object

The cinepheur: post-cinematic passage, post-perceptual passage

This thesis develops a hermeneutic commensurate with the aesthetic and ontological challenges of what Steven Shaviro describes as a post-cinematic media ecology, and Shane Denson describes as an emergent post-perceptual media ecology. I consider canonicity and cinephilia as frustrated efforts to contain and comprehend this new cinematic media object, offering a third unit of interpretation in their place, which I describe as the cinetopic anecdote. I associate the cinetopic anecdote with a particular way of moving between cinema and cinematic infrastructure, which I label cinetopic passage, and with a subject position that I label the cinepheur. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of the flâneur, I argue that the cinetopic anecdote precludes the extraction of a privileged cinematic moment in the manner characteristic of Christian Keathley’s cinephilic anecdote, but instead compels the cinepheur to instantiate, embody or physically recreate the infrastructural conditions that produced it, dovetailing production and consumption into what Axel Bruns has described as the emergent category of produsage; “unfinished artifacts, continuing process.” Having elaborated the cinetopic anecdote, I apply it to postmodern, post-cinematic and post-perceptual media ecologies, in order to evoke the peculiar forms of attachment and obsession bound up with the Criterion and Netflix platforms. In the process, I draw on Franco Moretti’s conception of distant reading to frame the cinetopic anecdote as a unit of distant viewing, offering distant viewings of Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak’s Cinemania, Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. Just as distant reading takes “the great unread” as its object of enquiry, so the cinetopic anecdote speaks to a media ecology preoccupied by the “great unviewed,” in which cinematic scarcity increasingly ramifies as an elegaic object

The Authorship Question and the Rise of Postmodernist Fiction: From Madness to Agency

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Lonely Sounds: Recorded Popular Music and American Society, 1949-1979

Abstract: Lonely Sounds: Popular Recorded Music and American Society, 1949-1979 Lonely Sounds: Popular Recorded Music and American Society, 1949-1979 examines the relationship between the experience of listening to popular music and social disengagement. It finds that technological innovations, the growth of a youth culture, and market forces in the post-World War II era came together to transform the normal musical experience from a social event grounded in live performance into a consumable recorded commodity that satisfied individual desires. The musical turn inward began in the late 1940s. Prior to the postwar era, the popular music experience was communal, rooted in place, and it contained implicit social obligations between the performer and the audience and among members of the audience. Beginning in the late 1940s, technological, social, and cultural innovations, including new radio formats, automobile radios, and an expanding recording industry liberated popular music from some of the restraints of place and time. Listeners in the 1950s acquired expanded opportunities for enjoying music in ways that were more private, mobile, and intensely personal. Not only did the opportunities to listen alone expand enormously, but so also did the inclination. The postwar youth culture that grew up around the Top 40 radio format and 45-rpm singles stood at the vanguard of this revolutionary change in the musical experience. For many young listeners, rock and roll records represented a singular authentic experience. By the middle 1960s, these listeners believed that correctly listening to rock records not only revealed a unique self but also reintegrated alienated individuals into supportive communities. The isolated nature of the listening experience, however, poignantly frustrated such hopes. The dream of social renewal through rock records collapsed in the early 1970s. In its place came a more aggressive emphasis on self-sufficiency and personal control. In the subsequent decade devices such as the Sony Walkman successfully colonized public space, shielding listeners from other sounds while enclosing them in a private sonic environment of their choosing. This revolution in the musical experience, I contend, reflected and contributed to the pervasive sense of loneliness associated with the postwar era

Exploring the Land of Ooo: An Unofficial Overview and Production History of Cartoon Network's Adventure Time

Exploring the Land of Ooo is a detailed consideration of Adventure Time, the colorful and exuberant animated television series that initially aired from 2010–18 on Cartoon Network. Created by visionary artist Pendleton Ward, the series was groundbreaking and is credited by many with heralding in a new golden age of animation. In this book, author Paul Thomas presents a thorough overview of the series, explicating the nuances of its characters, its production history, its storytelling methods, and its vibrant fandom. Based in part on interviews with dozens of the creative individuals who made the show possible, this book aims to ensure that, when it comes to Adventure Time, the fun truly will never end