Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

THE PARADOXICAL AND THE REVERSIBLE: TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF PERVASIVE COMPUTING AND THE INTELLIGENT NATION 2015 (IN2015) MASTERPLAN IN SINGAPORE

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Agency in the Internet of Things

This report summarises and extends the work done for the task force on IoT terminated in 2012. In response to DG CNECT request, the JRC studied this emergent technology following the methodologies pertaining to the Science and Technology Studies field. The aim of this document is therefore to present and to explore, on the basis of present day conceptions of relevant values, rights and norms, some of the “ethical issues” arising from the research, development and deployment of IoT, focusing on agency, autonomy and social justice. We start by exploring the types of imaginaries that seem to be entrenched and inspiring the developments of IoT and how they become portrayed in “normal” communication from corporations and promoters to the ordinary citizen (chapter 2). We report the empirical work we have conducted, namely the JRC contribution to the limited public debate initiated by the European Commission via the Your Voice portal during the Spring of 2012 (chapter 3) and an empirical exercise involving participants of two IoT conferences (chapter 4). This latter exercise sought to illustrate how our notions of goodness, trust, relationships, agency and autonomy are negotiated through the appropriation of unnoticed ordinary objects; this contributes to the discussion about ethical issues at stake with the emerging IoT vision beyond the right to privacy, data protection and security. Furthermore, based on literature review the report reflects on two of the main ethical issues that arise with the IoT vision: agency (and autonomy) and social justice (chapter 5), examining eventually governance alternatives of the challenged ethical issues (chapter 6).JRC.G.7-Digital Citizen Securit

Materialist Circuitry: Digital Writing Technology, Planned Obsolescence, and Ecological Impact

This dissertation claims that planned obsolescence of digital writing equipment is a problem for composition—one that we should take up and challenge. Obsolescence causes practical difficulties for digital writing teachers and researchers because keeping up with the interfaces that are available and in use in public contexts can be troublesome and time consuming when those devices are so quickly changed, updated, and obsolesced. The project develops obsolescence as a heuristic and then uses obsolescence as a lens for analyzing the design of digital tools, ecological writing theory, and university digital initiatives. Through this analysis, I show that by studying obsolescence, we can see more clearly the forces shaping and reshaping writing practices. Bringing obsolescence into focus also helps us to consider the broader contexts in which writing tools circulate when they are not in our hands, and thus makes evident how our work is complicit with broader and sometimes geographically distant social issues

Digital ecologies: materialities, encounters, governance

Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans and nonhumans in a range of contexts including environmental governance, surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-than-human and digital geographies, we proffer ‘digital ecologies’ as an analytical framework for examining digitally-mediated human–nonhuman entanglement. We identify entanglement as a compelling basis from which to articulate and critique digitally-mediated relations in diverse situated contexts. Three questions guide this approach: What digital technologies and infrastructures give rise to digital entanglement, and with what material consequences? What is at stake socially, politically, and economically when encounters with nonhumans are digitised? And how are digital technologies enrolled in programmes of environmental governance? We develop our digital ecologies framework across three core conceptual themes of wider interest to environmental geographers: (i) materialities, considering the infrastructures which enable digitally-mediated more-than-human connections and their socioenvironmental impacts; (ii) encounters, examining the political economic consequences and convivial potentials of digitising contact zones; (iii) governance, questioning how digital technologies produce novel forms of more-than-human governance. We affirm that digital mediations of more-than-human worlds can potentially cultivate environmentally progressive communities, convivial human–nonhuman encounters, and just forms of environmental governance, and as such note the urgency of these conversations

Geopolitics of Digital Literacies: Accounting for Myths and Realities

This dissertation interrogates the global material consequences of the rhetorics of digital literacies in the One-Third World. Building on the work of literacy studies and computers and writing scholarship, I define and critique the digital literacy myth -a public discourse wherein digital literacies and their technologies are portrayed as inherently democratic for individuals and nations, and are promised to deliver economic competitiveness to those who can attain and best leverage them. I follow the consequences of the digital literacy myth, showing how the myth shapes One-Third World responses to transnational moments of struggle in the case of the 2009 Iranian election protests and the recent decades of rape related to conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using a transnational feminist analytic to trace transnational networks of literacy and materiality, I argue that the digital literacy myth frames how One-Third World citizens are likely to read and participate in global events. And, I note the ways in which US neoliberal interests have historically invested in the digital literacy myth in order to serve their economic agenda. Lastly, I address how, as ethical writing teachers, we might balance teaching our students the digital literacies of today\u27s economy while remaining aware of the costs of those literacies in the global era

Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science, and the Philosophy of Mind

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind

The haunted university: academic subjectivity in the time of communicative capitalism

In the last thirty years there have been significant changes in the governmentality and culture of higher education in the UK; concurrently, day-to-day practice has been transformed by networked computers. This political and technical double-act may be understood as a specific articulation of what Jodi Dean has termed communicative capitalism (2010, p.2-9). This thesis investigates how such political and technocultural changes condition the subjectivity of academic staff across a range of academic activities and contexts. The theoretical model I develop draws notably on a combination of the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan, using Freud’s conception of the ‘uncanny’ (1919) and Althusser’s theory of ideology (1970), to consider how the academic subject of technoculture is constituted by the particular domain of communicative capitalism I term the Haunted University. To develop this argument the thesis firstly establishes the ‘nature’ of the contemporary university – distinguishing it from earlier models and earlier moments of reform. This is developed using cultural history sources and theoretical work from social, cultural and critical higher education studies. Secondly, I use a series of cultural studies methods to identify and explore elements of the new university formation. These include the selection and analysis of relevant digital materials (e.g. academic homepages and blogs) and small qualitative surveys of academic staff. Thirdly, the broadly Lacanian thrust of my argument is developed through leveraging theoretical work from the fields of cultural studies, philosophy, critical labour studies and higher education policy. I conclude that the series of developments and changes enacted by communicative capitalism has tended to transform academic subjectivity, bringing about what may be a permanent change in the ontology and epistemology of the academy. However, despite neoliberalism’s attempt to foreclose discursive dissent, there are resistances to its project. My original contribution to knowledge is to theorise how and why the shift in academic subjectivity is being enacted, demonstrating how the technocultural, neoliberal university is beginning to haunt the academy not only from the outside, but from the inside, too

Performing Identity: The Literary, Technological and Digital Evolution of the American Self

This research aims to analyze how the concept of the American Self has changed starting with technological advancements in the 1880s, and then demonstrating how literature and identity have been challenged by technology and the New Media today. The research will specifically focus on the evolution of American Identity, altered by technological interaction, and the consequent redefinition of concepts such as individualism, privacy, freedom and selfhood. As such, the project will look at those novels in American literature that illustrate the evolution and consequent redefinition of identity through technological and digital change. As literary analysis demonstrates, this thesis will examine the complex alteration of identity through technological advancements, ranging from one of the first means of communication, the telegraph, to the Internet. The novels that will be analyzed are: Wired Love- A Romance of Dots and Dashes (1879) by Ella Cheever Thayer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court (1889) by Mark Twain, The Broom of the System (1987) by David Foster Wallace, Chronic City (2009) by Jonathan Lethem and Jennifer Egan\u2019s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). The trajectory of this project, from the late 19th century to our contemporary age, will trace an arc from the origin of communication technologies to modern digitalization. Examining technology and identity through the lens of literature, this research will attempt to demonstrate how communication technologies have shaped a new concept of American identity, rewritten in front of the screen and repositioned in the dense network of virtual interactions