Mapping the Sneakernet
...in northern Uganda. These forms of data transfer and access, though quite common, are invisible to traditional measures of connectivity and Big Data research methods. Like millions around the world...
People Sorters
...to groups as large as five hundred, combined various different kinds of arithmetical and verbal exercises in an attempt to measure overall intelligence. (The Beta tests were a nonverbal version...
The Collection and the Cloud
...easy to leave these platforms alone and forget those versions of yourself ever existed, along with the troves of data associated with them. In the early 2000s, on breaks between...
Google Alert for the Soul
...into social-media platforms. By letting social media capture and process everything, a more reliable, socially authenticated version of the self is produced, better than what our memory can give. Facebook...
Against Students
...Complaining, censorious, and over-sensitive, university students are destroying their own institutions. Wait, seriously? People think that? An earlier version of this essay was posted at the blog feministkilljoy What...
Blue Dream
PrEP allows gay men of color to feel cared for but also managed and made into data
Redefining the Right Wing
...power. But post-Revolution, that tradition will come to see egalitarian or revolutionary democracy as the driver of centralized state power. And you see this in the slaveholder, the capitalist, and...
A Predictive Policing Syllabus
How the past becomes the future
Media Matters
...way to work with traces themselves. Faced with the obscene techno-solutionist theories of data without its underground, of media without a sense of complex materiality or medianature, this other trajectory...
Data Streams
...then, of solidarity across sectors, across difference, feels so powerful because it feels so unattainable. Maybe that’s its power--that it seems outside of these models of data capture and social...
The Silence of the Masses Could Be Social Media
...are supposed to be "the social" — i.e. the "reality" of what the data measures, the population on which power can be exercised by what he tends to call the...
Permanent Recorder
...that the algorithms turn out results that no one can explain may be the defining point at which data becomes Big Data, as Mike Pepi explains here. And if the...
Notes on the "data self"
...incoherent and "inauthentic". By imposing a single persistent identity on users, social media companies inevitably confront them with their own inconsistencies. The data history inevitably makes us inauthentic in our...
Trust in Instinct
Sarah Schulman embeds shame within the emotional landscape of Conflict Is Not Abuse.
Accounting for Beauty
...prepare for battle against men, using sexuality as bait. It’s a grim version of male-female relations — and of sex itself, one in which women over the age of 30...
Total Information Awareness
...detecting sensors will be scattered around the center’s perimeter, backed up by armed guards and K-9 units. Originally called the Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, the NSA claims...