outpost

Last year (uh, 2014; read on) this thing in The Atlantic – culled, apparently, from an episode of Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible, which itself leans on this thing in the Smithsonian magazine by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie – happened across my desk on the same day as this thing (h/t Ingrid Burrington), and I thought that, to respond to the coincidence, I should dust off something apropos from a decade ago...

but before I got around to it (half a year flits past) FOLD was rolled out (h/t Ethan Zuckerman)...

and now, months and months and months after that (it's not called belated for nothing, folks!), the dusting-off has happened as a FOLD experiment:

the dusting-off has been completely abandoned, and you will not be invited to read "'Reach out and touch someone,' 1868-69," my 2005 essay on spiritualism, Planchette, the Ouija Board, and the telephone. But here are the epigraphs:

Ghost: Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
Hamlet: Speak; I am bound to hear.

On errands of life, these letters speed to death. –Melville, “Bartleby”

Strange, that my first passionate love letter should
have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I
wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?
Sibyl! Can she feel, or know, or listen? –Dorian Gray

A tangent on agency:

One claim (I’m tempted to say “myth,” and I’m tempted to use the adjective “ontological”) for big data is that, given a behavioral dataset of sufficient size, agency in the classical liberal sense gives way to agency in the sense of emergence, in which the subject is no longer in control of her truth; her truth is produced through a predictive analytics. The data show me better than I know myself. It strikes me that these competing notions of agency (liberal subject versus emergent subject) will themselves be applied in discriminatory ways. Privilege will permit some people to derive power from the revelations of big data, to mix and optimize these two kinds of agency, while disadvantaged people will end up having the emergence model applied to them — and be further disempowered as a result. </tangent>

tweet #∞

algorithmic really has become the new cyber-

— Seth Young (@autresy) June 3, 2015

Denkplatz D-503

This post was drafted practically at the dawn of time. April 27, 2013. Even then already it was belated. Not sure why I'm moved to hit Publish today. Perhaps a response to the new job. You know, the one I've had since September 2013. Which is to say, not a new job. So. Belated, ladies and gentlemen, belated through and through.

§


Theo A. Nusyg, untitled (1997), ink on bar napkin. Used by permission.

A year ago I was reading a post by Jeffrey Schnapp, (Icy) cold spots, with great interest:

Or might it [the library cold spot] instead be imagined as a portable ice-cube shaped, battery equipped, signal jamming device that an authorized patron or librarian could introduce into a given space to reprogram it, as it were, on the fly? Or might it assume the form of an enclosure structure or booth, a kind of phone booth in reverse?

I decided to tweet a question in response: "as libr's jamming cube would also interrupt surveillance, would it become a criminal space? or is contemplation already criminal?"

"Not sure why it would interrupt surveillance, since surveillance systems are usually running on a hard wire," came Professor Schnapp's reply, which suggested that, unsurprisingly, Twitter had not served me well in speaking clearly. (OTOH, the poor workman blames his tools, the poor abstractician blames his concrete.)

And then I forgot all about the exchange until the DPLA launch last week got me to thinking about libraries. Thus, a belated note, not so much of clarification as of dilation.

SNS SOS

The following originally appeared on Google+, Oct 12, 2012.


It's worth carefully thinking through the question of natural monopoly in relation to the so-called social graph (is there really only one, i.e. the social graph?). What makes the question interesting, I think, is that the users of Facebook are not its customers in the sense that monopolizing the social graph is not monopolizing social networking -- but rather a certain kind of advertising. Unless I am mistaken, people don't open a Facebook account in order to be advertised to...

bit of contagion

Jeff Hancock was our guest at today's "Databite." His spiel concerned the Facebook emotional contagion study, about which, justly, many people continue to write. A tidbit fell out of Jeff's talk and caught my attention.

The Facebook study grew from prior work that challenged the contention that emotional contagion, observable in face to face interactions, doesn't happen in text-only situations. You know: no one can tell you're being sarcastic in email! The prior work was undertaken in a lab setting. Subjects would communicate through a text-based chat program. One subject would be manipulated so as to be in a negative emotional state, and then the researchers would measure whether that negative feeling spread to the interlocutor. But! In order to overcome the therapeutic effect wherein simply communicating with someone else helps you feel better, researchers had to devise a means of maintaining half the dyad in a persistent negative state.

tweet #14

rational imperatives of pancapitalism: production http://t.co/YZxUxyk75P consumption http://t.co/r7lACh5N3z order https://t.co/67mUV4wmpJ

— Seth Young (@autresy) December 3, 2013

seasickness

This post first appeared on cranky dilettante, February 17th, 2009.

In futile symbolic protest of the new Facebook TOS, I’m deleting my one “Note” in Facebook and reposting it here.

March 15, 2008

Yesterday morning I read — mostly sympathetically — an opinion piece on Salon about youth and the Internet (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/03/14/kids_and_internet). One bit of diction pricked me: “Teenagers today read and write for fun; it’s part of their social lives. We need to start celebrating this unprecedented surge, incorporating it as an educational tool instead of meeting it with punishing pop quizzes and suspicion” (emphasis added).

For the last year, since the so-called surge of occupation forces in Iraq, I’ve been taking note of the use of “surge” in the press, on- and off-line, and I believe that its use has increased. Admittedly it’s possible that endless prattle about the surge in Iraq has sensitized me to the word, permitting me to take note, whereas before the word would have slipped past, invisibly, as it were. But I don’t think so. I would contend that, now, everything can be a surge, is capable of surging: profits, hospital admissions, inflation, companies, support for presidential candidates, market demand, unemployment claims, liabilities, interest in an issue, crime, sports teams, prices, emotions, and so on; support for the troop surge itself, if there is any, can be said to surge. Now, “surge” has become so current as to be able to describe the increase in its use: a surge of writers using “surge.”

This is not to say that “surge,” deployed figuratively, cannot accommodate this broad range of uses. Rather, reflecting on the current context of this range, I want to ask to what extent the militarization of the U.S. is accompanied by, or bound up with, a rhetorical militarization. After all, I’ve just written “deployed” in connection with the use of a word.

A friend commented nearly a year later, writing:

Very astute. And not to have elicited a comment. Pearls before swine. I’d like to suggest “seiche” as a possible antidote to the overuse of “surge.” A seiche, I learned today, is a standing wave in an enclosed body of water that, due to its long wavelength, is often imperceptible to the eye  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche).

I’m thinking that “seiche” could be used to describe long, subtle trends, that go unnoticed to “observers in boats on the surface.” Say, ramping up of law enforcement surveillance after 9/11, or rising rents in NYC.

It is not a sexy, militarized word. The other problem is one of pronunciation. “Pronounced “/seɪʃ/, or approximately saysh)”, it does not rhyme with quiche. Please advise.