Hey all. I learned this week that Amazon is now offering tours of their fulfillment centers at various places around the country. Since I'm eager to see not only what these warehouses look like but also how Amazon plans to spring them, I'm coordinating a tour with some CAMS PhD students at the closest center in San Bernardino. As they book a while out, we're planning on going in late October/early November. If anyone is interested in going with us, please send me an email (rosend@usc.edu)! I will try to work out some potential dates and send out a poll.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/amazon-fulfillment-center-tours/
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Monday, September 23, 2019
The ingenuity - minor post
Thought people might find this recent story about inmates installing a computer in the ceiling of a prison! Put aside the harsh language and the details of their searches meant to heighten a sense of danger and what we really see are ingenious methods of getting online.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/inmates-built-computers-hidden-in-ceiling-connected-them-to-prison-network/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/jails-are-replacing-in-person-visits-with-video-calling-services-theyre-awful/
https://www.prisonphonejustice.org/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/inmates-built-computers-hidden-in-ceiling-connected-them-to-prison-network/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/jails-are-replacing-in-person-visits-with-video-calling-services-theyre-awful/
https://www.prisonphonejustice.org/
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Links for Code Week
Stallman/Lessig:
Chun:
Parikka: https://jussiparikka.net/
Alexa - The Android Mystique
A friend of mine, Sylvie Howton, recently developed an app for Alexa to study our relationship with artificial intelligence, giving Alexa some sort of agency. Sylvie writes that this app, The Android Mystique, gives Alexa complete control of the experience – “users can ask her anything, but she will decide what she wants to answer.” I played with it earlier this year and it was really interesting to see Alexa answer questions like “how are you feeling” or “why are you a woman?”
Here is a video of people interacting with The Android Mystique:
And there’s also a behind the scenes if you’re interested:
Core Post 2 : Where is the source?
I was surprised with how all readings (I read Galloway, Chun and Keeling the most closely this ) this week seemed to struggle with finding a larger
argumentative motif than their inaugural concerns with “software as ideology”. It
is a large concern, don’t get me wrong but by trying to deconstruct that
statement through academic language, I was left somewhat perplexed by the
tensions that rise out of trying to articulate just what software might be and
how they might operate. I’m not talking about the intellectual arguments
between Galloway and Chun here, but rather about this reliance on a certain
novel vagueness that the language of software seem to bring to these two
authors.
Like Bill suggested, I think that there are historical
and material precursors to the logics that these two authors argue about, so
simply situating and grounding their arguments within high theory, to me
suggested a dislocation from seeing the “functional” reality of software (the
way their effective and affective ideologies are played out) to one that simply
situates them within a space of discourse.
Even Keeling’s text, to me, struggled to satisfy the
political urgency I felt while reading all these texts together. I have a sense
of the looming political potential in all of them, and enjoyed Keeling’s turn
towards an idea(l) of the “commons” to devise new uses for software, but
inherent to the logics of software, I couldn’t help but feel like there was a
possible escape out of their ideological constructs.
These texts made me think of Kristin B. Cornelius’ work
on the language found in digital contracts, a language that embodies
obfuscation. In her work, Cornelius emphasizes how this obfuscation is both
realized within the “texts” themselves (their language but also the digital
tools that help “construct” them) and in the social conditions that they help
enable (who even knows that these constantly (d)evolving contracts even mean?
but they can have a realm impact if companies ever try to act out on them).
And while its
towards this somewhat nihilist resolution that I see Galloway and Chun head towards, I feel
that both authors did a disservice to any political or social potential they might see (or hope would) emerge from software studies, by themselves choosing a obfuscating language.
https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/3653
The Cult of Number
I thought people might like this (longgggg) article as it relates to today’s readings. If you like Ancient Greece, secret math cults, and the weird tensions of computational representation and prediction, then you might like this article!
Incantations for the Compiled Self
In reading Wendy Chun's piece, On "Sourcery," or Code as Fetish I couldn't help but think about it in step with Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen's latest collaboration, Imagenet Roulette. The project is meant as a provocation, using a neural net trained on the "Person" categories within the ImageNet dataset. Enter at your own risk.
https://imagenet-roulette.paglen.com/
https://imagenet-roulette.paglen.com/
Code is king (core post 2)
Some disconnected thoughts in the week’s readings:
I particularly liked this week’s readings that confronted us with questions of the relationship between software and ideology. Software is an ultimate fetish, imbued with the appearance of power that is actually located elsewhere. Software perhaps extends televisions ideology of liveness to new heights, foregrounding, according to Tara, volition and mobility.
Software and source code supposedly enable a true understanding of the inner workings of the machine, but as Wendy Chun argues, this too is an illusion sustained by particular ideological commitments. Source code must be legible by people and is thus subject to interpretation by both humans and machines.
Interfaces then are a metonym for the computer as whole, collapsing the underlying stack to an immediate sense of movement, choice, and execution. It is a mask for deeper computational processes which happen simultaneously and without user input.
I’m interested in how the interactivity of digital media can come to stand in for all types of action and participation. I think the conceptual collapsing of event and command that software enacts is useful for understanding politics and social relations in the present. This logic animates the rhetoric of social media as empowering and offering real time connection (for example, the twitter update where likes and retweets numbers are reflected through live updates).
A question I’ve been thinking about is the relationship between computers as systems of control, software’s collapsing of event and command, and fascism’s cult of action, a quality described by Umberto Eco that emphasizes action for its beauty and deemphasizes reflection. Is the desire for beautiful, clearly streamlined and ordered source code a contemporary manifestation of a fascist aesthetic? Is the collapse of command and event what makes first person shooter video games seamless and orienting, in comparison to first person film which is disorienting and challenging to identify with? I also think of the phenomenon of speed running in these terms: a style of play based on completing a game as fast as possible by pushing up against the boundaries of the code to the point of possible implosion (exploiting glitches). What processes, computational and human, are disguised in the emphasis on action, interactivity, participation.
In contrast, Kara Keeling’s Queer OS provides a challenge as she asks us to consider how queer theory and critical race theory can open up new theories of computation that nevertheless must come out of existing systems. Can we design an OS that reveals the process of compiling and execution described by Chun that is also usable and not relegated to minor cultural spheres? A software that is not vaporwave but still recognizes the importance of vapor and ephemerality to the digital?
I particularly liked this week’s readings that confronted us with questions of the relationship between software and ideology. Software is an ultimate fetish, imbued with the appearance of power that is actually located elsewhere. Software perhaps extends televisions ideology of liveness to new heights, foregrounding, according to Tara, volition and mobility.
Software and source code supposedly enable a true understanding of the inner workings of the machine, but as Wendy Chun argues, this too is an illusion sustained by particular ideological commitments. Source code must be legible by people and is thus subject to interpretation by both humans and machines.
Interfaces then are a metonym for the computer as whole, collapsing the underlying stack to an immediate sense of movement, choice, and execution. It is a mask for deeper computational processes which happen simultaneously and without user input.
I’m interested in how the interactivity of digital media can come to stand in for all types of action and participation. I think the conceptual collapsing of event and command that software enacts is useful for understanding politics and social relations in the present. This logic animates the rhetoric of social media as empowering and offering real time connection (for example, the twitter update where likes and retweets numbers are reflected through live updates).
A question I’ve been thinking about is the relationship between computers as systems of control, software’s collapsing of event and command, and fascism’s cult of action, a quality described by Umberto Eco that emphasizes action for its beauty and deemphasizes reflection. Is the desire for beautiful, clearly streamlined and ordered source code a contemporary manifestation of a fascist aesthetic? Is the collapse of command and event what makes first person shooter video games seamless and orienting, in comparison to first person film which is disorienting and challenging to identify with? I also think of the phenomenon of speed running in these terms: a style of play based on completing a game as fast as possible by pushing up against the boundaries of the code to the point of possible implosion (exploiting glitches). What processes, computational and human, are disguised in the emphasis on action, interactivity, participation.
In contrast, Kara Keeling’s Queer OS provides a challenge as she asks us to consider how queer theory and critical race theory can open up new theories of computation that nevertheless must come out of existing systems. Can we design an OS that reveals the process of compiling and execution described by Chun that is also usable and not relegated to minor cultural spheres? A software that is not vaporwave but still recognizes the importance of vapor and ephemerality to the digital?
Core post 1: computer culture & physical reality
A small side note grounded in personal experience to Parikka’s discussion of Job’s business strategy and software pedagogy as “psychotechnical drilling and training in the emerging computer culture,” as literally “tapping into the bios and zoe of living bodies.” I first became self-conscious of the fact that my own perception of physical reality has changed by Apple when I was reading a paper book and, when found the font too small to read, I – without thinking, automatically – touched the paper page with three fingers and spread them apart – the movement we make to zoom in on touchpad. Wondering if other people ever had the same or similar experience.
Core Post: Code
What is software as media; what meanings does a program carry; what does it mean to be programmed or encoded? Is software is distinct from natural language because it enacts—it does something? Here Chun teases out the space between inscription and execution that MacKenzie and Galloway (and others like Kate Hayles and Ellen Ullman) conflate. For MacKenzie code is performative, meaning that in its text “describing and enacting what is described coalesce” (73). But MacKenzie’s analysis of the impacts of Linux is concerned as much with the social perceptions inscribed by what the code is purported to accomplish. In that sense maybe he agrees with Chun’s disputing claim that “Source code, in other words, may be sources of things other than the machine execution it is ‘supposed’ to engender” (313). It feels easy to get entangled in the nuances, but if we were to chart a comparison of how much each author overlaps language and action, and in which directions those vectors extend, how would it look?
In a brief gloss, MacKenzie leans toward conflation, code acts, is performative, extends its action beyond its executables to culture but not as far maybe as Parikka (or not as far explicitly into labor), and does not separate its inscription from execution (or then impact or imaginary) as Chun does. Galloway emphasizes the hierarchical aspects of this separation, linking them to ideological/spiritual telos, albeit tangled, while Keeling in a way instrumentalizes all of the above into a call to action to undermine it, shift its orientations. Or perhaps it works backward and says that ideology is software (rather than the other way around) and different, better versions should be applied when designing and running our technologies.
I tend to fall in the Keeling & Chun camps (stan, scholarly heart eyes emoji), but my critical reading style is “yes, and” so I looked for what concepts some of the other authors also brought to the mix that could be useful (to at least my thinking): I’m interested in MacKenzie’s “wavering line between code object and code subject (81). Setting aside the typical “tech bro” subject, how does the creation of code objects reinstantiate code subjects? Also his focus on citation & circulation, as constitutive acts, as erasure (and consumption vs reconfigurability). What is created & covered over by this repetition? (78). Does this cite Derrida’s “Signature Event Context”? (D talks of “coded” iterable models that are “identifiable as citation.” Interestingly ritual also comes up here, as it does in Chun.)
In Parikka, I was also interested in the creation of subjects, the distributed self as applied to software logics—people as computational units, and computers as brain/subjectivity units. He teases out the human logics embedded in the logics of software design, project management, team management (“metaprogramming”), which also feeds back into other forms of human-work design—and particularly also embeds in all kinds of language around that (46). Parikka also brings back the limits of bodies, different kinds of bodies (Fuller/Goffey’s “evil media studies” and “gray media,” would like to know more about this) through his focus on the mundane exhaustive labor of software as opposed to self-expression and creation. Finally, “cultural techniques” ties together brains, techniques, technologies, infrastructures/organizations, workflows, abstractions in a way that could be useful to bring back to thinking about ideology and the kinds of things that code executes.
In a brief gloss, MacKenzie leans toward conflation, code acts, is performative, extends its action beyond its executables to culture but not as far maybe as Parikka (or not as far explicitly into labor), and does not separate its inscription from execution (or then impact or imaginary) as Chun does. Galloway emphasizes the hierarchical aspects of this separation, linking them to ideological/spiritual telos, albeit tangled, while Keeling in a way instrumentalizes all of the above into a call to action to undermine it, shift its orientations. Or perhaps it works backward and says that ideology is software (rather than the other way around) and different, better versions should be applied when designing and running our technologies.
I tend to fall in the Keeling & Chun camps (stan, scholarly heart eyes emoji), but my critical reading style is “yes, and” so I looked for what concepts some of the other authors also brought to the mix that could be useful (to at least my thinking): I’m interested in MacKenzie’s “wavering line between code object and code subject (81). Setting aside the typical “tech bro” subject, how does the creation of code objects reinstantiate code subjects? Also his focus on citation & circulation, as constitutive acts, as erasure (and consumption vs reconfigurability). What is created & covered over by this repetition? (78). Does this cite Derrida’s “Signature Event Context”? (D talks of “coded” iterable models that are “identifiable as citation.” Interestingly ritual also comes up here, as it does in Chun.)
In Parikka, I was also interested in the creation of subjects, the distributed self as applied to software logics—people as computational units, and computers as brain/subjectivity units. He teases out the human logics embedded in the logics of software design, project management, team management (“metaprogramming”), which also feeds back into other forms of human-work design—and particularly also embeds in all kinds of language around that (46). Parikka also brings back the limits of bodies, different kinds of bodies (Fuller/Goffey’s “evil media studies” and “gray media,” would like to know more about this) through his focus on the mundane exhaustive labor of software as opposed to self-expression and creation. Finally, “cultural techniques” ties together brains, techniques, technologies, infrastructures/organizations, workflows, abstractions in a way that could be useful to bring back to thinking about ideology and the kinds of things that code executes.
Core Post 1: Sourcery & Suspicion
I want to use my post to think about Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s suspicion over claims that software is a source of agency. It’s telling that she cites Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, all thinkers that are associated with a hermeneutics of suspicion. Broadly speaking, these figures are characterized as undermining the supposition of a given meaning through a less evident hypothesis. In other words, meaning as we think we know it actually conceals the truth. For example, Freud’s attribution of the symptoms of neuroses to repression and the workings of the unconscious, an empirically unverifiable faculty.
I bring this up because there are many ways that a hermeneutics of suspicion feels outdated. Suspicion doesn’t solve any problems or tell us anything concrete about the nature of things. It simply makes us question preexisting assertions. This sentiment can be noted in Alexander Galloway’s critique of Chun’s earlier essay “On Software…”. Galloway’s insistence on the machinic as essential to software instead of the ideological (something I will touch on more in my presentation), points to the desire to move away from suspicion as a mode of interpretation. To state that software is an analog for ideology doesn’t really tell us anything about the nature of software or its specificity as technology after all.
With all this in mind, I think that there’s something generative about the way Chun mobilizes suspicion. Primarily because her interpretation bypasses something like a deterministic view of agency in its suspicion of the claims made about software’s essential attributes. The proposition that software is a source of agency is most discernible in Adrian Mackenzie’s essay, where the author focuses more on the performative’s capacity for self-constitution and less so on the implications of the speech act’s conventional constraints—the fact that the performative is subject to preexisting practices and norms (constraints implicated in the objectification of agency and not just limited to Linux’s history of development).
To return to Chun however, her suspicion leads her to claim that source code is not so much a source, but a resource. This point is important because it disrupts the temporality with which code may claim agency in execution. If a source code’s functioning can only be accounted for subsequent to its execution, authorial agency is left undetermined. Consequently, this leaves an opening to think about software in terms other than a technical determinism.
At what point does suspicion turn into a conspiracy theory though? While there probably exists more complexity between the terms, I want to say that suspicion might be less determined in its ends than the conspiracy theory? Suspicion perhaps opens up a deterministic world view whereas the conspiracy theory reinstates it? For example, although Chun states that source code can only really be said to function after the fact, she doesn’t preemptively foresee the malfunction as imminent. Rather, the malfunction is only a possibility. Similarly, Chun doesn’t argue that software is essentially restrictive, just that its determined association with agency is.
I bring this up because there are many ways that a hermeneutics of suspicion feels outdated. Suspicion doesn’t solve any problems or tell us anything concrete about the nature of things. It simply makes us question preexisting assertions. This sentiment can be noted in Alexander Galloway’s critique of Chun’s earlier essay “On Software…”. Galloway’s insistence on the machinic as essential to software instead of the ideological (something I will touch on more in my presentation), points to the desire to move away from suspicion as a mode of interpretation. To state that software is an analog for ideology doesn’t really tell us anything about the nature of software or its specificity as technology after all.
With all this in mind, I think that there’s something generative about the way Chun mobilizes suspicion. Primarily because her interpretation bypasses something like a deterministic view of agency in its suspicion of the claims made about software’s essential attributes. The proposition that software is a source of agency is most discernible in Adrian Mackenzie’s essay, where the author focuses more on the performative’s capacity for self-constitution and less so on the implications of the speech act’s conventional constraints—the fact that the performative is subject to preexisting practices and norms (constraints implicated in the objectification of agency and not just limited to Linux’s history of development).
To return to Chun however, her suspicion leads her to claim that source code is not so much a source, but a resource. This point is important because it disrupts the temporality with which code may claim agency in execution. If a source code’s functioning can only be accounted for subsequent to its execution, authorial agency is left undetermined. Consequently, this leaves an opening to think about software in terms other than a technical determinism.
At what point does suspicion turn into a conspiracy theory though? While there probably exists more complexity between the terms, I want to say that suspicion might be less determined in its ends than the conspiracy theory? Suspicion perhaps opens up a deterministic world view whereas the conspiracy theory reinstates it? For example, although Chun states that source code can only really be said to function after the fact, she doesn’t preemptively foresee the malfunction as imminent. Rather, the malfunction is only a possibility. Similarly, Chun doesn’t argue that software is essentially restrictive, just that its determined association with agency is.
Core Post #2 (Code/Software/OS)
In Alexander R. Galloway’s article “Language Wants To Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology”, Galloway discusses the dichotomy of defining software as computer language and as machine. Although he presents an account for both strands, there seems to be more weight in defining or understanding software as computer language.
Galloway brings up a fundamental contradiction of software: “what you see is not what you get” (325). He talks about how code is a medium that isn’t a medium because it is never viewed as it is, in its original form, but that it is “compiled, interpreted, parsed,” translated and that it hides behind even larger groups of codes. To add to the point of software being what we don’t necessarily see; that the basic code structure is the backbone and definition of software, Galloway also brings up how Hui Kyong Chun points out that programming was originally “patching circuits together using cables or connectors and thus ‘software’ began historically not as executable software applications as we know them today but as any sort of service labor performed in or on informatic machines” (318).
I found this very compelling in trying to understand code’s invisibility, but it also made me question if it reduces the definition of software to a limiting one. In defining software mostly by the codes that aren’t visible, to what degree is that ignoring or reducing the important of what is visible, readable, usable and/or navigable? Galloway continues by writing that “it is the exceedingly high degree of declarative reflexivity in software that allows it to operate so effectively as source or algorithmic essence” (320). If the visual and actual interactive more “human” part of software is such an important part of it, can we prioritize one or the other or are they on the same level? Galloway even mentions the paradox of technology proving its presence in the attempt of erasing itself to the highest degree possible. As much as it is compelling to define software by its roots, it is also important to define it by the result of that programming, which is what will ultimately become the version of the software that is the most usable for most people.
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Core Response: Castrated Multics
http://article.olduse.net/4743@Aucbvax.UUCP
There seems to be a general consensus across this week’s readings that operating systems perform—at least allegorically (Galloway, 329)—as ideologies. While the authors address issues of labor and technocapital they also point to software’s embedded heteronormative values and the potential for queering supposedly neutral code. Perhaps the most explicit engagement with computational heteronormativity is Kara Keeling’s proposal for a Queer OS, that “seeks to make queer into the logic of ‘an operating system of a larger order’ that unsettles the common senses that secure those presently hegemonic social relations that can be characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, and other violences” (Keeling, 154). While there are certainly powerful heteronormative forces at work in existing operating systems, queer potentials have been present within computation from the start. Wendy Chun, for instance, provides a fitting analysis of false causality related to command execution: “Source code as fetish, understood psychoanalytically, embraces this nonteleological potential of source code, for the fetish is a genital substitute that gives the fetishist nonreproductive pleasure (Chun, 313). The theme of nonreproduction, or rather non-heteronormative reproduction, is picked up and complicated in Adrian Mckenzie’s discussion of Linux: “As an event, Linux is complex in ways that the popular narratives of the ‘cloning of Unix’ (Himanen, 2001; Moody, 2001; Lohr, 2002) occlude. The authorizing context for Linux includes gendered and classed practices which usually remain unremarked” (Mckenzie, 82). While Linux perpetuates heteronormative values, it is simultaneously born from queer methods (i.e. cloning). Going back even further, Unix (pronounced eunuchs), which was developed from a much more unwieldy platform called Multics, an earlier collaboration between MIT's Project MAC, Bell Telephone Laboratories, and General Electric Company's Large Computer Products Division. The image above references the contested narrative behind Unix’s name and whether it was an intentional pun (i.e. “castrated Multics”). Relatedly, I was struck by the readings’ recurring references to Alan Turing, who despite developing advanced computational systems and being a recognized war hero, was later subjected to chemical castration because of his sexuality. Is this parallel a pure coincidence? Were the developers of Unix aware of Turing’s tragic treatment? If so, did the circulation of this narrative influence the engineering process: “communications in shared spaces count as externalities” (Parikka, 37). I am curious about how even the names of our operating systems declare the discursive values of their formative contexts, which then likely infiltrate the code itself.
Core Post 3 -- Some Thoughts on Code, Software, and the Law
“The complete syntactic and semantic rules of a computer language must be defined and written into any environment designed to interpret, parse, or execute it. (As an aside: in the so-called natural languages this is never the case, despite style guides and dictionaries, as unforeseen ‘inductive’ uses of language may be stumbled upon or invented without the blessing of provenance, whereas with software the unforeseen articulations of language are essentially dismissed out of hand as errors or ‘exceptions’.”
(Galloway, 322).
“What is surprising is the fact that software is code, that code is—has been made to be— executable, and that this executability makes code not law, but rather every lawyer’s dream of what law should be, automatically enabling and disabling certain actions and functioning at the level of everyday practice.” (Chun, 309).
I’ll be honest; I found the substantive differences in the back-and-forth between Galloway and Chun to be rather opaque. It seems to me that Galloway, in his attempt to animate an allegorical relationship between ideology and software, needed to argue that while both are often viewed as immaterial and discursive, they are in actual fact material and active. It seems Chun was arguing that while high-level source code is executable, it is not necessarily so until it is executed, and that collapsing the difference between machine code and source code elides an important gap, which allows “we ‘primitive folk’ [to] worship source code as a magical entity—as a source of causality— when in truth the power lies elsewhere, most importantly in social and machinic relations.” (Chun, 311) This allows us to mistakenly treat our interactions with computers fetishisticly, in much the same way we treat commodities as real things with a common sense provenance that obscures the material facts of the social relations involved in their production. I’m pretty sure I am missing something important, because it felt to me that both writers had the same general conception of the ideological nature of software, but highlighted different theoretical approach vectors, with a bit of good natured snark thrown in to keep things interesting.
What I really found very interesting was an aside in her main argument, captured in the second epigraph above. The code-law analogy to me is very compelling and to my mind goes a long way to illuminating the argument that both of them make from different angles: that the encapsulated nature of software by design obfuscates the “social and machinic relations” which determine it. While I don’t have an fully fleshed-out argument, here are some of my first thoughts on this:
- I think that this analog helps me think through the way machine learning algorithms act upon us biopolitically. The law (formulated in codes) like source code can be executed to perform an action. It can be used to formalize certain social relations (through a contract) just as code is used to create social relations (a Skype call, or an Uber pickup). But increasingly as our tastes, moods, movements (our data body, if you will) are collected, stored, and often without our knowledge, algorithmically transformed into accurate predictive models (this is a thorny assertion that needs to be unpacked, but in many ways is materially true) that act upon us ideologically to convince us to buy products, look at certain content while hiding others, and as many are actively researching, used to create predictive policing, urban transportation management, city planning and zoning decisions, etc. In this way code is slowly becoming law, presumably to the delight of the fictional lawyers that Chun conjures.
- As code slowly incorporates itself into the legal and biopolitical landscape we add an additional layer of abstraction and obfuscation to an already arcane process, wherein it is not out of bounds to imagine that even professional technocratic experts will be unable to grasp how legal decisions and policy are made.
Core Response 3: Common Sense and (stanning) Keeling
I’ve been a bit of a fan of Kara Keeling’s since reading excerpts of her work on the black femme and practices of viewing. I mean, she ends this particular article with a striking acknowledgement: “All faults are mine.” How kickass is that?!
Fangirling aside, Keeling’s concept of Queer OS inevitably reads as — and probably is, to a certain extent — an echo of her previous work on cinematic perception intertwined with ideas of race. In her 2007 publication, she borrowed from Gramsci’s construction of “common sense” to characterize our individual and shared thought processes when consuming cinema. Common sense is a sort of unconscious way of understanding the world, as “aspects of what is perceptible become generally recognizable only when they work in some way through 'common senses'" (Keeling 153). It functions an indispensable conduit for our individual perception as well as the rationale of our community at large.
In The Witch's Flight, Keeling discusses the figure of the black femme that haunts the hegemonic discourse conveyed through filmic structures. For her, cinematic perception “produces and reproduces social reality itself,” and cliches and tropes that are found across films are a form of common sense that reinforce certain realities while effacing others (Keeling 11). But the most compelling aspect of her claims is her insistence on viewing this shared common sense as an empowering potential, or “the condition of possibility for the emergence of alternate knowledge... some of which might constitute a counterhegemonic force” (19). Because common sense is defined by sensory motor functions, it is conducive to alternative knowledge and perceptions — namely, black common sense and butch-femme common sense, which she proceeds to discuss later in her work. The multiplicity of subaltern common senses poses a challenge to the common sense defined by societal hegemony.
Seven years later, this insistence persists — Keeling has transposed her claims about film to address new technologies and their interactions with queerness. Similar to the black femme figure in blaxploitation films, Queer OS unsettles the common sense and constitutes an entirely new system of thinking — or as Tara describes more eloquently, an “operating system of a larger order.”
The parallelism that Keeling constructs between these two mediums — cinema and OS — is intriguing for me, as I tend to think of coders and programmers as “subaltern” producers; at least more so than the typical auteurs of Hollywood cinema. I always imagine them as quirky occupants of an isolated space, engaged in their own incomprehensible argot (which, admittedly, is the product of my own humanities-based common sense).
Reading “Queer OS” and re-reading “The Image of Common Sense” made me wonder about the role of the common sense held by content producers, rather than content consumers. Surely it matters what kind of common sense is held by the directors, writers, engineers, and programmers — the producers of perception. But I came to the conclusion that Keeling’s point lies within the very fact that “subaltern” perceptions are constructed as such. As long as these thoughts remain counterhegemonic, it means that we still haven’t achieved something like Queer OS; because sexuality, media, and information technologies should be impossible to isolate or marginalize in our processes of perception.
Keeling, Kara. “Queer OS.(IN FOCUS: Queer Approaches to Film, Television, and Digital Media)(Essay).” Cinema Journal 53, no. 2 (January 1, 2014): 152–157.
Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight the Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Fangirling aside, Keeling’s concept of Queer OS inevitably reads as — and probably is, to a certain extent — an echo of her previous work on cinematic perception intertwined with ideas of race. In her 2007 publication, she borrowed from Gramsci’s construction of “common sense” to characterize our individual and shared thought processes when consuming cinema. Common sense is a sort of unconscious way of understanding the world, as “aspects of what is perceptible become generally recognizable only when they work in some way through 'common senses'" (Keeling 153). It functions an indispensable conduit for our individual perception as well as the rationale of our community at large.
In The Witch's Flight, Keeling discusses the figure of the black femme that haunts the hegemonic discourse conveyed through filmic structures. For her, cinematic perception “produces and reproduces social reality itself,” and cliches and tropes that are found across films are a form of common sense that reinforce certain realities while effacing others (Keeling 11). But the most compelling aspect of her claims is her insistence on viewing this shared common sense as an empowering potential, or “the condition of possibility for the emergence of alternate knowledge... some of which might constitute a counterhegemonic force” (19). Because common sense is defined by sensory motor functions, it is conducive to alternative knowledge and perceptions — namely, black common sense and butch-femme common sense, which she proceeds to discuss later in her work. The multiplicity of subaltern common senses poses a challenge to the common sense defined by societal hegemony.
Seven years later, this insistence persists — Keeling has transposed her claims about film to address new technologies and their interactions with queerness. Similar to the black femme figure in blaxploitation films, Queer OS unsettles the common sense and constitutes an entirely new system of thinking — or as Tara describes more eloquently, an “operating system of a larger order.”
The parallelism that Keeling constructs between these two mediums — cinema and OS — is intriguing for me, as I tend to think of coders and programmers as “subaltern” producers; at least more so than the typical auteurs of Hollywood cinema. I always imagine them as quirky occupants of an isolated space, engaged in their own incomprehensible argot (which, admittedly, is the product of my own humanities-based common sense).
Reading “Queer OS” and re-reading “The Image of Common Sense” made me wonder about the role of the common sense held by content producers, rather than content consumers. Surely it matters what kind of common sense is held by the directors, writers, engineers, and programmers — the producers of perception. But I came to the conclusion that Keeling’s point lies within the very fact that “subaltern” perceptions are constructed as such. As long as these thoughts remain counterhegemonic, it means that we still haven’t achieved something like Queer OS; because sexuality, media, and information technologies should be impossible to isolate or marginalize in our processes of perception.
Keeling, Kara. “Queer OS.(IN FOCUS: Queer Approaches to Film, Television, and Digital Media)(Essay).” Cinema Journal 53, no. 2 (January 1, 2014): 152–157.
Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight the Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
core response - mainly mackenzie, some chun, all personal
Before majoring in Communication, and currently media studies, I was on track to be a software engineer. I took the Introduction to Computer Science in community college and walked out after the first 30 minutes. We were given an assignment to write code according to basic functions listed on a sheet handed to us. As soon as I saw the visual renderings of symbols and their varying permutations, I thought to myself, “I don’t want to think of my computer this way,” and excused myself from class, and a lucrative career path. So, I anticipate a lengthy response because I may feel compelled to use this as an opportunity to convince myself that the decision was the right, or at least better, one.
Safe to say that I relived those 30 minutes while reading the pieces about coding: Mackenzie’s, Galloway’s, and Chun’s selections—more so with Mackenzie and Galloway. I’m oversimplifying their pieces, but Mackenzie and Galloway both shared a preoccupation—I think Chun would call it an obsession—in justifying/rationalizing/affirming software, like Linux, as “culture-objects,” determinative of a “new” new media studies; Chun called it “software studies.” However, I wish to respond mostly on Mackenzie’s piece, because of personally using custom firmware (Unix-based) for video game consoles provided by various Homebrew communities, and how I felt that these “alternative uses” of software were a bit too understated.
Mackenzie’s fascination with Linux derives from its associations as a “free software or ‘Open Source Software’”—unlike Mackenzie, Chun distinguishes between the two—, in which the OS is taken up in a variety of different contexts: financial market speculation, software development, corporate software production. For Mackenzie, the interest lies in understanding Linux’s efficacy as a technical object with respect to its variability across these fields. So, he concludes that Linux’s technical “performance”, which emerged in the cultural imaginary as “unbreakable”, free, and accessible, must be appropriately understood in terms of Butler’s conceptualization of performativity. Chun sharply notes the enlightenment rhetoric imbued within abstracted definitions of openly accessible and free software liberating software’s essence/being from corporate domination among other things. This narrativization of software as such echoes last week’s discussion of the formal idealization/idolization of “new media”.
Thus, I was unconvinced of his application of performativity determining Linux as a cultural object premised on “the performativity of circulation” encoded within itself, generating “cultures of circulation” like Sony’s releasing of a Linux OS for its PS2 console in 2002. What I am convinced of, however, is that there might be cultural and political implications beyond the source code of the Linux OS based on the uses and practices around the Linux OS and other derived versions. If Mackenzie suggests that the Linux’s “self-reflexive use of reference that enacts the act that it represents” (Mackenzie 73) determines a self-citational performativity obverse of this technical performance, I would rather side with Chun’s understanding of performative code premised on the “community…that enables such utterances to be repeated and executed, that one joins through such citation.” (Chun 322) That is, I cannot come to terms with a performative utterance solely contingent on the “sovereign subject” (Linux OS) that does not reference a “community with a history of speakers”, or programmers engaging with Linux OS and its iterations, or derivatives.
I hope what is written on the blog stays on the blog, but I confess that I am obsessed with “jailbreaking” video game consoles in order to “pirate”/download games from Japan that I did not want to pay ridiculous shipping for, in addition to modifying--"modding"--other games. Nevertheless, my first “hacked” console was the PSP, in which the system’s software (PlayStation Portable system software) is within the “Unix-like” OS family—Linux falls under the same category. A modded PSP uses custom firmware, iterations of PSP system software, that allows for “unauthorized” code to be run on the console, such as “homebrew” applications (Japanese RPGs). Programmers noticed opportunities for exploits within certain system software updates and took those windows to design derivative PSP system softwares, resulting in many CFWs. One of the more interesting things, from having kept up with these communities, is the cat-and-mouse game between official system software updates, released by Sony, and the CFW updates or downgrades, distributed by the Homebrew community. For example, Sony presented “carrots” in the forms of a “web browser” addition to the console's feature and new file compatibilities--among other features--, during one of the PSP software updates, enticing users into updating their consoles into patching the CFW’s useless; the updated software patched over the holes, or exploits. Some CFWs responded differently, such as "downgrading" in order to avoid certain trojan files that would “brick” the console, effectively making the console unusable; the trojan file was literally called “Trojan.PSPBrick” (what a performative utterance).
Ultimately, my point is, along with Chun, to insist that software, while having its material constituents, seems to always-already be contingent on real social relations that should not be folded into “material givens.” (Chun 311). The cat and mouse game alone illuminate those relations, in addition to reflecting uneven power relations (Sony hired Symantec to code the trojan file). It seemed to me that Mackenzie’s preoccupation to cultural-ize the Linux kernel, the material essence of Linux, through performativity, double-downed on formalist concerns of software, such that there wasn’t space to address the communities and corporations that remediate software; “software in media res.” (Chun 324).
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Verichip Pamphlet
Here's the pamphlet that I presented today: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JziDnmt_tr2dSWFyijGJAAOeYeqV_Bqq
Edit: Here's another related video that resurfaced on Twitter recently. You should watch to the end - her performance is worth it: https://youtu.be/bntfUA6TmLs
There's also this quote in Stone about the spread of decoder rings that I think fits well:
“During the same period [of widespread radio adoption] thousands of children, mostly boys, listened avidly to adventure serials, and sent in their coupons to receive the decoder rings and signaling devices that had immense significance within the community of a particular show. Away from the radio, they recognized each other by displaying the community's tokens, an example of communities of consumers organized for marketing purposes.” - Stone, pg. 4
Edit: Here's another related video that resurfaced on Twitter recently. You should watch to the end - her performance is worth it: https://youtu.be/bntfUA6TmLs
There's also this quote in Stone about the spread of decoder rings that I think fits well:
“During the same period [of widespread radio adoption] thousands of children, mostly boys, listened avidly to adventure serials, and sent in their coupons to receive the decoder rings and signaling devices that had immense significance within the community of a particular show. Away from the radio, they recognized each other by displaying the community's tokens, an example of communities of consumers organized for marketing purposes.” - Stone, pg. 4
Credit Card Chip Nail
Here's that video with the credit card chip nail art video. It was apparently made by Nail Sunny, a nail salon in Moscow. I can't find the original post on their Instagram, but here it is shared on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/dana_prt/status/1105025896627556353?s=20
https://twitter.com/dana_prt/status/1105025896627556353?s=20
A Call to be Subsumed
"Now the goals, as defined by activist artists, are to find innovative grassroots applications to new technologies...But to attain all this, the larger virtual community must get used to a new cultural presence-the cyber immigrant/mojado; sensibility; and many new languages spoken in the net. All this is yet to be attained."
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
I wanted to use this opportunity to highlight the work that collective BUFU has been undertaking in actualizing some of the calls that Gomez-Pena leaves us with in his piece, "The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier". More specifically, I think there is a really interesting link in the spatial metaphors being used that evade the trappings of a multicultural fetish of identity and instead foregrounds questions of sensibility, epistemology, language, authority, and legitimacy that work beyond a center- peripheral dynamic. Instead both Gomez-Pena and BUFU explore practices that disavow the center as a place of arrival, instead embracing an alterity that subsumes it.
http://www.bufubyusforus.com/wyfy-school-manifesto-info
Links for Week 3
Murray:
Bleeding Through video: https://vimeo.com/185730273
Manovich: http://manovich.net/
Resource Center for Cybercultural Studies:
Bolter/Grusin:
Sandy Stone:
LAB at end of class >
HTML Tutorial: https://www.w3schools.com/html/
Explore early net art projects:
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