Something I wrote for Virginia Tech’s Institute for Policy and Governance. It’s about why a computational definition of “data” is necessary to understand the relationship between new media/digital technology and political economy — drawing mostly from Wendy Chun, also McKenzie Wark, Joanna Zylinska and Sarah Kember. Link here.
My favorite essay from the k-punk book is online! (Exclamation point because it’s so good!) http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005622.html A brief, dumb interpretation: goth exhibitionism denies interiority to the nth degree. Goth is interchangeable with signs and machines — it’s pure surface, sign value exchange and spectacle. Goth is an aesthetics based on the rejection of false illumination. […]
I will be at the Western Political Science Association Conference in San Diego, 18-20 April 2019. Here’s the abstract for my talk: Machine Learning and the Algorithmic Cancellation of the Future In this paper I explore the impact of machine learning algorithms on the data they process. I make a two-part argument. First, that the […]
I want to tell people why they should read Peli Grietzer, but instead of doing that, I’m going to post this image from Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts In High School which was used to accompany his recent article. Theories of vibe, Blood and Guts, read and then get off the internet.
On the “theory/data” problem, the notion that more data diminishes the need for theorization. Let’s assume this is true for a second: now, instead of developing hypotheses and testing them à la the scientific method, we simply subject our curiosities to computational operations. Feeding more data into better algorithms equals better living (through science!). This vision […]
Here’s a little video I made. It’s a coda to a paper I’m working on titled Vita Obscura: Obfuscating Biopower. In the paper I talk about how obfuscation as an anti-surveillance strategy can be used to resist biopower (Michel Foucault’s formula for how command and control works in modern societies). The video has some imaginative examples of how this could […]
An NGO or nonprofit that works with governments to provide a blockchain-based conduit for transmitting and (most importantly) authenticating documents/communications of public interest.
Since I’m not fond of WordPress (or using a CMS at all for that matter), I’m considering just killing this website and making www.realyou.me my sole portfolio / blog site. For now, to anybody who might be visiting here, I would say realyou.me is a better place to go… o-culus is a bit of a mess, and […]
Thinking a lot about the lack of endings, of resolution and closure in digital worlds. There are the infinite scrolls and timelines of social media, of course, but also the punishing productivity norms of web development. Lots of beginnings and few endings, except in the case of unambiguous failure —a breakup, a parting with a particular platform […]
Turns out, a lot of people have been thinking, writing, and preaching (!) about the connections between spirituality and surveillance for some time now. I found a podcast of a sermon given by Unitarian Universalist Reverend M. Lara Hoke a few years ago. She’s asking people of faith to use their belief system as the basis for questioning government […]
