Disrupting surveillance: critical software design-led practice to obfuscate and reveal surveillance economies and knowledge monopolies

Big data collection, behavioural economics and targeted advertisement are changing the dynamics and notions of our individuality and societies. By mobilising critical design methods, I made a series of critical design works to reveal and disrupt surveillance and knowledge monopolies. The aim of this practice-led investigation is to challenge surveillance and knowledge practices within internet search and advertising industries and through this contribute to surveillance debates and critical design practice. The four critical design practices that I developed during the course of this investigation namely Zaytoun, Philodox, Maladox and Open Bubble all interrogate humans’ relations to technology and more specifically their transformations as objects and subjects of surveillance capitalism. Zaytoun challenges notions of data consumption, quantification and distancing. Philodox reveals and critiques some trust issues and algorithmic biases of internet search engines. Maladox, is an anatomical engine of fictional speculative cyborg dis-eases, creating a critical space to reconsider our relationship to technology. Finally, Open Bubble is a counter surveillance browser extension that obfuscates and challenges knowledge enclosures imposed by search engines. Based on a review of philosophy of technology and especially as it relates to Science and Technology Studies (STS), I reflect on some of the underlying conditions that made possible the existence of modern technology in its current form. I analyse the contextual background of this body of work and its take on technology as a central lever for governance and for shaping of human subjects. This thesis investigates the taken for granted ways our interactions with surveillance capitalism infrastructures are transforming our individual and collective beings and in turn the new cyborg ontologies that we are being integrated into. The four critical design works included in this investigation offer alternative possibilities for critical engagement with, and interpretation of, big data and the algorithmic manipulations we are subjected to. This thesis attempts to take the below contributions to the theoretical developments around governmentality, surveillance capitalism, but also to critical design and design informatics. I develop ideas aiming at moving from humans and subjectivity as the nexus for governance towards attention to the cyborg as the emerging central site for both governance and resistance. Furthermore, through my practices I illustrate the importance of non-visual relations to audiences be it through touch or hearing in opening up spaces for questioning and resistance. I believe attention to the sensory dynamics of the experience and resistance have strong potentials for contributing to the debates around resistance within governance regimes. Furthermore, this thesis brings attention to the micro processes & software codes and algorithms that enable surveillance capitalism and engages in exercises aiming at disrupting them. I believe such detailed work focused on the ways humans interact with internet-based regimes of surveillance is a much-needed complement to the already well-developed critiques of institutions and structures of surveillance capitalism. Concerning critical design, my works bring attention to the role of spatial configuration of the works in conditioning the users’ rhythm, intensity and span of engagement with the work. In addition, I believe my practices and my theoretical developments around them open possibilities for new reflections on different forms of satire and laughter and how they can be situated in users’ experiences with critical design work

Post mortem: death-related media rituals

The purpose of this thesis is to study whether and how death-related media rituals construct and reconstruct a global cosmopolitan community. The performance of the media at the occurrence of mass death events, may cultivate expressions of grief aimed at reinforcing a certain understanding of the social order. These rituals facilitate a sense of unity and solidarity between members of an imagined community. What kind of community does the enactment of death-related media rituals construct? What is the sense of solidarity they foster? By focusing on the performance of transnational media organisations following mass death events, the thesis studies the ways in which these ritualistic performances function as a social mechanism that informs the audience of the boundaries of care and belonging to an imagined community. Drawing on theories from sociology, media anthropology and moral philosophy, the thesis develops the analytics of mediatised grievability as an analytical tool. It aims to capture the ways in which news about death construct grievable death, and articulate the relational ties between spectators and sufferers. The thesis puts the analytics of mediatised grievability in play and employs it in a comparative manner to study and analyse the coverage of three different case studies by two transnational news networks. This comparative research design captures the complexity of the mediatisation of death in terms of geopolitics, cultural proximity, legitimacy of violence and the morality of witnessing death. The analysis of the three case studies by the two transnational news networks enables to account for different propositions that two of the networks make for their audiences in comprehending remote mass death. These propositions contain different ethical solicitations, each articulating a different understanding of the relational ties between spectators and distant others – some promote a cosmopolitan outlook, and others maintain a communitarian outlook

The entrepreneurial self: food cultures and young people's transition to adulthood

The study conducts an ethnographic examination of the meanings which food has for young people, in their performance of becoming adult. It uses Giddens’ understanding of self-identity as a theoretical lens with which to inspect their performances. A social semiotic multimodal analysis is made of young people’s visual artifacts, about an aspect of food which mattered to them, and interviews with them. The study provides a view of their engagement with adult food culture that is about their learning to manage more independent lives, and learning to adapt to a future, in which a ‘self-entrepreneurial’ disposition - that is a commitment to perpetual self-improvement - is required of adults in a rapidly changing, globalized, and increasingly neo-liberalised world. We see how this engagement frames a moral repertoire for them; but also produces contradictions with the desire for social belonging which they must deal with. The analysis identifies, first, how young women dissociate themselves from dysfunctional relationships with food, including eating disorders, by construing a version of themselves that is self-improving. Second, the analysis shows how healthy eating is an important framework for young men and young women with which they measure their self-entrepreneurial selves, and dissociate themselves from the popular conflation of unhealthy eating, social dependence and unsuccessful lives. Third, the analysis shows their appropriation of ideal values for food’s social function as another driver of young people’s self-entrepreneurial narratives: re-centring the basis of future self-development within the self. Fourth, the analysis shows that in addressing consumer taste, young people cooperate in constructing a meritocratic legitimacy for social differentiation, focused upon the possession of a self-entrepreneurial disposition: the commitment to self-improvement and social aspiration. The study disentangles the representation of young people’s relation to food as problematic from their actual, subjective lives and cultural work