FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Emotional risk work during the pandemic:Healthcare professionals’ perceptions from a COVID-19 ward

In March 2020, COVID-19 wards were established in hospitals in Denmark. Healthcare professionals from a variety of specialities and wards were transferred to these new wards to care for patients admitted with severe COVID-19 infections. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a COVID-19 ward at a hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, including focus group interviews with nursing staff, we intended to explore practices in a COVID-19 ward by seeking insight into the relation between the work carried out and the professionals’ ways of talking about it. We used a performative approach of studying how the institutional ways of handling pandemic risk work comes into being and relates to the health professionals’ emerging responses. The empirical analysis pointed at emotional responses by the nursing staff providing COVID-19 care as central. To explore these emotional responses we draw on the work of Mary Douglas and Deborah Lupton’s concept of the ‘emotion-risk-assemblage’. Our analysis provides insight into how emotions are contextually produced and linked to institutional risk understandings. We show that work in the COVID-19 ward was based on an institutional order that was disrupted during the pandemic, producing significant emotions of insecurity. Although these emotions are structurally produced, they are simultaneously internalised as feelings of incompetence and shame.In March 2020, COVID-19 wards were established in hospitals in Denmark. Healthcare professionals from a variety of specialities and wards were transferred to these new wards to care for patients admitted with severe COVID-19 infections. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a COVID-19 ward at a hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, including focus group interviews with nursing staff, we intended to explore practices in a COVID-19 ward by seeking insight into the relation between the work carried out and the professionals’ ways of talking about it. We used a performative approach of studying how the institutional ways of handling pandemic risk work comes into being and relates to the health professionals’ emerging responses. The empirical analysis pointed at emotional responses by the nursing staff providing COVID-19 care as central. To explore these emotional responses we draw on the work of Mary Douglas and Deborah Lupton’s concept of the ‘emotion-risk-assemblage’. Our analysis provides insight into how emotions are contextually produced and linked to institutional risk understandings. We show that work in the COVID-19 ward was based on an institutional order that was disrupted during the pandemic, producing significant emotions of insecurity. Although these emotions are structurally produced, they are simultaneously internalised as feelings of incompetence and shame

Mobile Technologies and Boundaryless Spaces: Slavish Lifestyles, Seductive Meanderings, or Creative Empowerment?

According to the instrumental theory of technology, mobile technologies - what McLuhan\u27s refers to as electronic prostheses - promise opportunities for greater freedom, creativity, leisure, and productivity by enhancing organic bodily functions. Correspondingly, as (Cavallaro, 2000) would argue, objects such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable physiotherapy units, laptops, and portable stereos - to name just a few - seem to impart a sense of solidity to consumers\u27 lives. Just like prostheses, they are inserted into our everyday lives, helping our inadequate bodies along in fulfilling practical tasks. Phenomenologically, these kinds of mobile technologies supposedly support the subject\u27s sense of ontological completeness and security. On the other hand the substantial theory of technology draws together less optimistic commentators. Among a host of other things, they stress the panoptic nature of new information and communication technologies (Clarke, 1994; Marx, 1999; Poster, 1995; Webster, 1995). The emphasis in these accounts is on the potential for surveillance and monitoring that these technologies place in the hands of the powerful. Mobile technologies according to this view is but the latest incarnation of capitalist (the Marxist view) or state (the libertarian view) power and control fantasies. Far from empowered and freed, the subject becomes captured and enslaved by these mobile communication devices. Phenomenologically, the networked worker and consumer subject is the disciplined and docile slave of the information matrix

Geography, Ontological Politics and the Resilient Future

Applications of ‘resilience’ have stretched it to the point of breaking, yet it still maintains a remarkable capacity to organise relations in diverse fields of geographical concern such as ecological management, development, security, psychology, and urban preparedness. Critical takes on resilience have emphasised its neoliberal roots and utility. While we do not disagree with this stance, our critical intervention argues that there are multiple resiliences invoking differing spatialities, temporalities and political implications and that this multiplicity is an important part of the work that ‘resilience’ can do. We explore diverse mobilizations of resilience thinking across a wide array of empirical domains drawing out the differing ontological bases of resiliences and the interventions meant to promote them, particularly given the tension between a desire for open, non-linearity on the one hand and a mission to control and manage on the other. Rather than take resilience to be a determinedly new shift in policy-making, we explore how the post-political qualities of ‘resilience multiple’ can enable changes in behaviours and practices that slide between conflicting and contestable visions of the good life and desirable futures. We argue that the only way to critically interrogate resilience is to force the question of particulars in its diverse articulations, and, thus, geographers should engage in debating the ontological politics of resilience multiple

A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to build the PNS upon the three mentioned pillars, beyond the limitations of their respective state-of-art. Social sensing is aimed at developing better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social ecosystem and make them available for mining, learning and analysis at a properly high abstraction level. Social mining is the problem of discovering patterns and models of human behaviour from the sensed data across the various social dimensions by data mining, machine learning and social network analysis. Trusted networks and privacy-aware social mining is aimed at creating a new deal around the questions of privacy and data ownership empowering individual persons with full awareness and control on own personal data, so that users may allow access and use of their data for their own good and the common good. The PNS will provide a goal-oriented knowledge discovery framework, made of technology and people, able to configure itself to the aim of answering questions about the pulse of global society. Given an analytical request, the PNS activates a process composed by a variety of interconnected tasks exploiting the social sensing and mining methods within the transparent ecosystem provided by the trusted network. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. We need such a tool for everyone to become fully aware of how powerful is the knowledge of our society we can achieve by leveraging our wisdom as a crowd, and how important is that everybody participates both as a consumer and as a producer of the social knowledge, for it to become a trustable, accessible, safe and useful public good.Seventh Framework Programme (European Commission) (grant agreement No. 284709

Monitored

This book explores a central contradiction of 21st century economy and society: the more morally and politically unaccountable capitalism and capitalists are, the more accountable the mass majority of its subjects must become. The technocratic ideology and surveillance culture of our modern marketized societies hides a deeper reality of a free market that is unmanageable and a corporate elite whose actions cannot be traced let alone regulated. This work highlights the paradoxical way an often disjointed and unjustifiable modern neoliberalism persists through subjecting individuals and communities to a wide range of technical and ethical 'accounting' in all areas of contemporary life. These pervasive practices of monitoring and codifying everything and everyone mask how at its heart this system and its elites remain socially uncontrollable and ethically out of control

Platformization of Urban Life: Towards a Technocapitalist Transformation of European Cities

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange