Vom Wahr- und Wahnsprechen des technologisch Unbewussten

In 'Modes of Existence', Bruno Latour criticizes psychology for having drawn an untenable line between the inside and the outside, between the soul and the world. However, psychoanalysis is not concerned with describing the psyche as a purely internal phenomenon, but rather with adopting a fundamentally relational point of view that makes not only relations between people, but also their relationship to the technical world describable and therefore discussable. By taking into account Freud's idea of a psychic apparatus, this article depicts, from a theoretical perspective, the "technological unconscious" as a source of truth-telling in order to unveil current developments in digital cultures. It is precisely here that psychoanalysis, or a psychoanalytically inspired media theory, has a lot to offer: beyond Latour's "ontological pluralism," it takes up the question posed by Michel Foucault about the indissoluble linkage of the human subject to language and thus positions itself as a "counter science" to any anthropology

...und natürlich kann geschlachtet werden!

Wie die Geiselnahme einer Kuh als kritische Intervention in biopolitische Zeichensysteme zu verstehen ist, und was das alles mit einer Neuformulierung aktivistischer Mediennutzung zu tun hat

Learning machine learning:On the political economy of big tech's online AI courses

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are still a novel research object in the field of media studies. While existing research focuses on concrete software on the one hand and the socio-economic context of the development and use of these systems on the other, this paper studies online ML courses as a research object that has received little attention so far. By pursuing a walkthrough and critical discourse analysis of Google's Machine Learning Crash Course and IBM's introductory course to Machine Learning with Python, we not only shed light on the technical knowledge, assumptions, and dominant infrastructures of ML as a field of practice, but also on the economic interests of the companies providing the courses. We demonstrate how the online courses further support Google and IBM to consolidate and even expand their position of power by recruiting new AI talent and by securing their infrastructures and models to become the dominant ones. Further, we show how the companies not only influence greatly how ML is represented, but also how these representations in turn influence and direct current ML research and development, as well as the societal effects of their products. Here, they boast an image of fair and democratic artificial intelligence, which stands in stark contrast to the ubiquity of their corporate products and the advertised directives of efficiency and performativity the companies strive for. This underlines the need for alternative infrastructures and perspectives

Pattern Discrimination

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation - in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs