Reports to the President

A compilation of annual reports for the 1981-1982 academic year, including a report from the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as reports from the academic and administrative units of the Institute. The reports outline the year's goals, accomplishments, honors and awards, and future plans

The Politicization of Art on the Internet: From net.art to post-internet art

Este estudo tem como objetivo apresentar uma breve perspetiva sobre as manifestações socioculturais que se propagaram a partir do surgimento da Web; tendo como principal foco de análise o desenvolvimento da produção de Internet Arte na Europa e na América do Norte ao longo dos últimos 30 anos. Estruturado como um estudo de caso, três conceitos-chave fundamentam a base desta pesquisa: uma breve história da Internet, o desenvolvimento do termo hacker e a produção de arte web-based; da net.art até a Arte Pós-Internet. Em abordagem cronológica, estes campos serão descritos e posteriormente utilizados como guias para um final encadeamento comparativo que visa sustentar a hipótese da gradual dissolução de um ciberespaço utópico até o distópico cenário corporativo que constitui a Internet dos dias atuais.This study aims to present a brief perspective of the sociocultural manifestations that emerged after the Web birth, focusing on the development of Internet Art and the countercultural movements that emerged inside Europe and North America over the last 30 years. Under a case study structure, three fundamental subjects will be firstly explained: Internet history, the development of hacker concept and the web-based Art transformations: from net.art till Post-Internet Art. Chronologically described, these fields will lead to a final comparison of chained events that aim to sustain the hypothesis of the gradual dissolution of the early cyberspace utopias till the dystopic scene existent in nowadays Internet

EU Data Governance: Preserving Global Privacy in the Age of Surveillance

The thesis explores the EU’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), its human rights approach to data privacy, and its diffusion around the world. It asks the question: why would any nation, authoritarian or democratic, adopt Europe’s data privacy framework as a model for their country’s data governance? Accessing the theoretical frameworks of the Brussels Effect and the New Interde-pendence Approach, the research considers country case studies on China, Japan, and the US, comparing the different motivations and structural conditions that dictate how these three countries have adopted and adapted the GDPR framework. It finds a vastly different set of conditions for adopting the GDPR data privacy framework, none of which can be explained fully by either the Brussels Effect or the New Interdependence Approach. It also finds that none of the three countries embrace the language of human rights in their data privacy legislation. Of all the three countries, Japan has converged most closely with the GDPR in letter and spirit over time. While China’s legislation bears all the key features of the GDPR, the de facto reality is that data privacy regulation is a tool of state control. The United States case shows how a changing global environment forced the U.S. legislators to retreat from their market-driven approach to data governance in the direction of GDPR-like regulation

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

On Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower, and the Collateralization of Milliatry Violence

This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of counterinsurgency warfare with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. The project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs in relation to discourses of adaptation, complexity, and systemic design, and to the repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a counterinsurgency laboratory, and the experiments will shape the conduct of future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them. Using work from Michel Foucault and liberal war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force with different speeds, doses, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in recursively influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, fashion biopoweras custodial power to conduct the conduct of lifeto shape different interventions into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic of counterinsurgency is used to frame counterinsurgency as a type of warfare that is comparatively low-intensity and less harmful, and this justification actually lowers the threshold for violence by making increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages and envelops populations and communities, thereby allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain occupations. Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations

The Counter-testimony of the Maker

The chapter begins with the question of critique, mainly how and why does one critique but more importantly why does no one critique effectively anymore. Such is a sentiment echoed by Bruno Latour in the paper Why has Critique Run out of Steam? He states: “It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them?”(Latour, 2004:225). According to Latour, the absence of principles is to blame. As he puts it, critique has battered through all claims to a ground and the lack of a sure ground argument has backfired. The result is that there isn’t even a sure ground for criticism. Without a ground, it’s hard to differentiate a rigorous critical claim from a conspiracy theory. That’s why conspiracy theory books are best sellers. Latour mourns the death of critique. In its remnants lies a whole industry denying the Apollo program. My claim is that the absence of principles transforms critique into an issue around the strength of evidence and the credibility of the testimony. Effective critique is synonymous with a counter-testimony of a reliable witness. A witness is someone who is present at the time of an event, often a crime, and is able to testify before the law. They are able to give direct evidence in relation to the events. However, they often rely on foggy memories and blurred vision. It is not too difficult for the defence or prosecution to put the reliability or credibility of the witness in doubt. Here is where the role of making comes into play. More often than not, in the post-critical age, a testimony, or counter-testimony, is not simply uttered but is rather constructed. Latour is the first to admit that a critique has to be made. As such the eyewitness is no longer a person but a photograph, a video or other forms of surveillance. Juries are more decisive when they are presented with the facts, the evidence, more often submitted as objects as opposed to a fuzzy testimony of a witness. Critique, or counter-testimony, is a material process enabled by infrastructure. Is a practice-based question of physics, chemistry and the material forms of agency. Given all this this chapter explores further the role of critical making as counter-testimony. From aesthetic practices of forensics, counter-forensics to the role of labs in media archaeology and investigative practices, I will tell the story of makers that present their objects as a counter-narrative to pressing socio-political issues. More importantly, however, I will address the issue of how critical making practices can establish credibility in a world of fakes and loss of belief

Moral panics and newspaper reporting in Britain: between sceptical and realistic discourses of climate change

This thesis provides the first attempt to empirically apply the moral panic framework to study British newspaper reporting on climate change by drawing upon a unique dataset of 958 news articles over three decades (1988-2016). It is original in the sense that it illuminates the "missing link" between media reporting on climate change and think tanks' denial strategies. By adopting mixed approaches, this work explores both news articles and think tanks' documents and shows how moral panics can help explore rival discourses, and the strategies adopted by powerful actors to "defend" their interests by inflaming confusion. The main implications can be identified in the use of moral panics as a valuable tool for exploring conflicts in which powerful interests are involved, and in better understanding how the "denial machine" works. I argue that in the British context, the politicisation of newspapers' narratives around climate change causes a fracture between two groups characterised by specific dominant traits, which in turn correspond to moral panic attributes. However, even in the context of "conflicted moral panics", one direction prevails, which in this case is the more conservative narrative. This can only be understood by simultaneously observing the processes of construction of each single narrative and their comparison. Therefore, simultaneously considering the two narratives, the overall "confusing image" resulting from both conflicted panics ("centre-left vs centre-right"), and the multidimensionality within the same politicised narrative, might favour a "status quo instance", which reflects the economic, political and social status quo. The interconnections between conservative think tanks and the oil industry, and in turn their influence on dictating the sceptical "story line", suggest that the media "voluntarily" reflect elite power conflicts. These results inform on those elements that inflame hostility and resistance to climate change acceptance. Policy-making that aims to promote "intervention-oriented" approaches should take into account these results, especially in relation to the dialectics between the forces at play