Explanatory Publics: Explainability and Democratic Thought

In order to legitimate and defend democratic politics under conditions of computational capital, my aim is to contribute a notion of what I am calling explanatory publics. I will explore what is at stake when we question the social and political effects of the disruptive technologies, networks and values that are hidden within the "black boxes" of computational systems. By "explanatory publics", I am gesturing to the need for frameworks of knowledge - whether social, political, technical, economic, or cultural - to be justified through a social right to explanation. That is, for a polity to be considered democratic, it must ensure that its citizens are able to develop a capacity for explanatory thought (in addition to other capacities), and, thereby, able to question ideas, practices, and institutions in society. This is to extend the notion of a public sphere where citizens are able to question ideas, practices, and institutions in society more generally. But it also adds the corollary that citizens can demand explanatory accounts from institutions and, crucially, the digital technologies that they use.Comment: 22 page

Post-Truth Imaginations

This book engages with post-truth as a problem of societal order and for scholarly analysis. It claims that post-truth discourse is more deeply entangled with main Western imaginations of knowledge societies than commonly recognised. Scholarly responses to post-truth have not fully addressed these entanglements, treating them either as something to be morally condemned or as accusations against which scholars have to defend themselves (for having somehow contributed to it). Aiming for wider problematisations, the authors of this book use post-truth to open scholarly and societal assumptions to critical scrutiny. Contributions are both conceptual and empirical, dealing with topics such as: the role of truth in public; deep penetrations of ICTs into main societal institutions; the politics of time in neoliberalism; shifting boundaries between fact – value, politics – science, nature – culture; and the importance of critique for public truth-telling. Case studies range from the politics of nuclear power and election meddling in the UK, over smart technologies and techno-regulation in Europe, to renewables in Australia. The book ends where the Corona story begins: as intensifications of Modernity’s complex dynamics, requiring new starting points for critique

Staging Neoliberalism

While the by now popular term "posttruth" remains, as Jayson Harsin and others argue, a contested and problematic concept, as a periodizing term it is useful in that it encapsulates collective anxieties and cognitive effects brought on by the increased commodification of knowledge, the marketization of political discourse, and the emergence of new economies and technologies of attention that fragment and destabilize relations of trust and authority across fields of inquiry (e.g. science and medicine), knowledge institutions (e.g. news and universities), and media technologies (e.g. video and photography) traditionally seen as arbiters of truth and facticity within the hegemony of Anglo-American liberalism. This paper considers the role of neoliberalism in the emergence of posttruth performance by reflecting on the work of public relations companies deployed in 2017 to promote the construction of a new power plant in New Orleans, as well as the work of the pro-Brexit campaign group Leave.EU in the run up to the 2016 referendum. Through these case studies the article demonstrates ways in which theater and performance studies can offer important critical tools with which to understand and dissect the structural conditions of posttruth in the twenty-first century

Algorithmic Reason

Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism to investigate these transformations as more mundane and fraught. Aradau and Blanke develop conceptual and methodological tools to understand how algorithmic operations shape the government of self and other. While disperse and messy, these operations are held together by an ascendant algorithmic reason. Through a global perspective on algorithmic operations, the book helps us understand how algorithmic reason redraws boundaries and reconfigures differences. The book explores the emergence of algorithmic reason through rationalities, materializations, and interventions. It traces how algorithmic rationalities of decomposition, recomposition, and partitioning are materialized in the construction of dangerous others, the power of platforms, and the production of economic value. The book shows how political interventions to make algorithms governable encounter friction, refusal, and resistance. The theoretical perspective on algorithmic reason is developed through qualitative and digital methods to investigate scenes and controversies that range from mass surveillance and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the UK to predictive policing in the US, and from the use of facial recognition in China and drone targeting in Pakistan to the regulation of hate speech in Germany. Algorithmic Reason offers an alternative to dystopia and despair through a transdisciplinary approach made possible by the authors’ backgrounds, which span the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences

Ethics of Coding: A Report on the Algorithmic Condition [EoC]

This project responds to the ICT-35-2016 Enabling responsible ICT-related research and innovation, topic B, and will "reflect and challenge the way ICT-related research and innovation is currently approached." The computerization of society in the late 1970s has now reached a point where the global economy works through an algorithmic networked environment. This situation is addressed in this research as an algorithmic condition. Any form of ICT operates within this condition. The question is, what are the ethical codes and guidelines that guide research within this condition? The Ethics of Coding prepares research that will provide an indexical report on the conceptual and thematic issues of ICT- related research and innovation, which will suggest what an ethics for ICT related issues could be, and how that might be implemented in relation to actualized and possible ICT projects. In addition, the research addresses the extent to which the coding of the social, ethical, and pedagogic, is always already invested in the maintenance of power relations that control the economic conditions for knowledge (which regulate the global markets) with what Wendy Chun (2011) describes as a ""code logos."" Working with the Philosopher of the human condition of the twentieth century; Hannah Arendt (1958; 1978), an inter-disciplinary think-tank research team brings Arendtian ethical philosophy into dialogue with SSH experts from a number of disciplinary fields, including thinkers of technologies and their effects on societies, philosophers of mathematics, gender and humanities experts, educational philosophy specialists, digital media thinkers, to produce a report that reflects the expression of the human algorithmic condition

The Data Journalism Handbook

The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice provides a rich and panoramic introduction to data journalism, combining both critical reflection and practical insight. It offers a diverse collection of perspectives on how data journalism is done around the world and the broader consequences of datafication in the news, serving as both a textbook and a sourcebook for this emerging field. With more than 50 chapters from leading researchers and practitioners of data journalism, it explores the work needed to render technologies and data productive for journalistic purposes. It also gives a “behind the scenes” look at the social lives of data sets, data infrastructures, and data stories in newsrooms, media organizations, start-ups, civil society organizations and beyond. The book includes sections on “doing issues with data,” “assembling data,” “working with data,” “experiencing data,” “investigating data, platforms and algorithms,” “organizing data journalism,” “learning data journalism together” and “situating data journalism.

GREAT AWAKENING 2020: THE NEOLIBERAL WELLNESS JOURNEY DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

2020 was a good year for conspiracy theory. From COVID denialism to QAnon, the usual cast of conspiracy influencers was joined by mommy bloggers, yoga teachers, and social media opportunists to spread disinformation and sow doubt in the American psyche across the vast network of the internet. While the news media and popular entertainment often portrays the conspiracy theorist as a paranoid quack, the reality is far more conventional. We are all conspiracy theorists, in one way or another. Each of us arrive at a conspiracy theory with unique worldviews which include our political and spiritual belief systems. We are influenced, and not always in the ways we imagine, by every stimulus around us. These influences range from our upbringing, the media we consume, the education we’ve had, the people we follow on social media, the way we worship, and how we take care of our health. Perhaps most influential of all are the systemic realities we exist within, our country of birth, global capitalism, race, class, gender identity, and so much more. Not to mention that the whole of human history is littered with very real conspiracy. Individuals lie, proximity to power can corrode ethical responsibility, the media reports on novelty, and our institutional systems are rife with racial and economic injustice. People aren’t crazy to be suspicious or believe in conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorist can better be understood as occupying a wide spectrum. On the far end of the spectrum one finds grand conspiracy narratives, or all-encompassing alternate explanations for observable reality. Many conspiracy theories are folded into alternate histories and explanation for current events in which society is ruled by a small cohort of “they,” powerful conspirators bent on global domination. The grand conspiracy narrative, which is often conveyed as a battle between dark and light, leaves no common ground for productive, nuanced discourse. Grand conspiracists craft a new impenetrable black and white, good and bad binary. Adopters of the grand conspiracy narrative get to be forever and always firmly on the side of right, light, and love, while the rest of us are brainwashed by delusion fed to us by “the mainstream media,” science, and academia. These grand conspiracy narratives became popular during the COVID-19 global pandemic with many groups including supporters of Donald Trump as well as those within spiritual wellness communities. My central curiosity became “why wellness?” What about mainstream wellness culture could lead many within that space to adopt and widely disseminate grand conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 global pandemic? It is my hypothesis that the emphasis on individual responsibility to one’s health and spiritual wellbeing embedded in the neoliberal wellness project creates the conditions for conspiracist ideation within the wellness space. Wellness entrepreneurs are encouraged to “heal the self,” “speak their truth,” and manifest their reality. All of these erode collective bonds including shared reality and personal responsibility to systemic struggles. Conspiracy wellness influencers occupy the extreme both of wellness and conspiracist ideation. A grand conspiracy narrative serves as reinforcement to the health and spiritual orthodoxy created by a wellness entrepreneur and social media influencer. The conspiracy theories expressed on their platform become a marketing tool, attracting those suspicious of institutions in an age of decaying trust in establishment authority. In another ironic twist, when the conspiracy influencer is criticized for their wellness protocols or extreme politics, the conspiracy theories themselves act as a shield from wrongdoing and ultimately allow the influencer to position themselves as the marginalized one for simply “speaking their truth,” regardless of their position within society. The branded messaging of self-responsibility for personal health and spiritual freedom that the grand conspiracy narrative buttresses perpetuate the neoliberal social project in real time

“Why Can’t We?” Disinformation and Right to Self-Determination. The Catalan Conflict on Twitter

Disinformation does not always take the form of a fake news item, it also appears in much less evident formats which are subtly filtered into public opinion, thus making its detection more difficult. A method is proposed in this paper to address the study of “widespread” disinformation by combining social science methods with artificial intelligence and text mining. The case study chosen was the expression “right of self-determination” as a generator of disinformation within the context of the Catalan independence process. The main work hypothesis was that the (intentional or unintentional) confusion around the meaning and scope of this right has become widely extended within the population, generating negative emotions which favour social polarisation. The method utilised had three stages: (1) Description of the disinformation elements surrounding the term with the help of experts; (2) Detection of these elements within a corpus of tweets; (3) Identification of the emotions expressed in the corpus. The results show that the disinformation described by experts clearly dominates the conversation about “self-determination” on Twitter and is associated with a highly negative emotional load in which contempt, hatred, and frustration prevail.This research was financed with the grant of the deputy vice-chancellor’s office Program for Research and Knowledge Transfer, for the promotion of R&D&I, at the University of Alicante, Modality B: Aids for the financing of R&D&I projects which give rise to a doctoral thesis with an “Industrial Doctorate” mention

Algorithmic Reason

Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism to investigate these transformations as more mundane and fraught. Aradau and Blanke develop conceptual and methodological tools to understand how algorithmic operations shape the government of self and other. While disperse and messy, these operations are held together by an ascendant algorithmic reason. Through a global perspective on algorithmic operations, the book helps us understand how algorithmic reason redraws boundaries and reconfigures differences. The book explores the emergence of algorithmic reason through rationalities, materializations, and interventions. It traces how algorithmic rationalities of decomposition, recomposition, and partitioning are materialized in the construction of dangerous others, the power of platforms, and the production of economic value. The book shows how political interventions to make algorithms governable encounter friction, refusal, and resistance. The theoretical perspective on algorithmic reason is developed through qualitative and digital methods to investigate scenes and controversies that range from mass surveillance and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the UK to predictive policing in the US, and from the use of facial recognition in China and drone targeting in Pakistan to the regulation of hate speech in Germany. Algorithmic Reason offers an alternative to dystopia and despair through a transdisciplinary approach made possible by the authors’ backgrounds, which span the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences