Digital media, technology and the future of politics post-COVID-19

hello there and uh welcome to the latest bristol university press webinar uh this one on digital media technology and the future of politics post covid 19. my name is martin parker i'm professor in the school of management at the university of bristol and lead for the inclusive economy initiative i'm also one of the editors of the bristol university press series organizations and activism that two of the books that we'll be talking about today are in we've got four speakers who are going to be entertaining us today unfortunately each of them only has seven minutes so i'll be um i'm going to be a ruthless chair so apologies to the audience if you're enjoying it and apologies to the speakers but i'm just going to be unpleasant so we've got mickey lee who's professor of media studies at suffolk university in boston um scott timka i'm not sure if i i should have asked you how your name was pronounced guys is timka reasonably yeah that's that's close enough it's tim key but it works or works okay that's fine scott timke studied the politics of race class social inequality as they're mediated by digital infrastructures and has joint positions at johannesburg and leeds uh peter bloom who's professor of management at the university of essex and thomas swann who's a lecturer in political theory at loughborough university so really pleased that you can all make it and there's obvious obvious cross-fertilization between the various themes in your books in terms of housekeeping if participants could type questions in the in the question answer function at the bottom of the screen and i'll put them to the participants towards the end of the session any technical issues use the chat somebody's monitoring that we've got closed captions enabled on the webinar there's a button at the bottom of your screen cc live transcript please use this to show or hide text as you prefer details of how to order any one of the four books at 50 discount will be available here too use the code digital 50 at checkout and recording of the webinar will be available after the event so thanks very much let's uh without further ado crack on so my our first victim is mickey lee professor of media studies mickey you have your seven minutes um thank you very much uh so hello from boston just to let everyone know uh we're actually having a thunderstorm um so in case the entertaining show stops somewhere you know um yeah it's good this could end with the bang making well let's hope so um so um i'm going to kind of uh relate um the book to the tokyo olympics um so our book look at media technologies and how they blur work and play in east asia so as we all know um the tokyo olympics 2020 was the first ever game that did not have a public audience um and you know for journalists athletes volunteers alike they were um you know bus in destinated vehicles from one venue to another um they were a lot not allowed to see and local residents they actually did not really want the olympics to happen because um you know of the fear of kovak infection now uh despite all this the olympics is actually extremely um alive and active and interesting on social media one of the reasons is because this was the first olympics that um athletes were allowed to post their own social media posts so tech talk instagram um youtube they all became um channels in which that you know some people um you know enjoy the olympics so um some became instant stars so for instance on the right hand side here the stars are actually the you know fingernails of sunnini um and on the left-hand side here i know you know he's already sort of a household name in britain but not so much out of the country but you know the festive you know tom daley was leading um you know during the olympics you know uh became a um you know became an international sensation um some athletes also use social media for um you know classes that they believe in such as gay rights and this is a very um you know heartwarming um image that during the last game in women's basketball super actually kiss um you know her wife on live television so in the um us you know some of the olympian if they um you know went back to college they could actually cash in for the first time um so in the past you know they either decided to not go to college or they decided to go professional but you know this was the first year that they could be you know college athletes and also you know to um you know get sponsorship so um on my screen you will see two basketball players they're not olympians but you know they definitely use social media to keep um you know make a point that they adhere it for the money now uh what does that all that mean you know so it was an interesting game in a way that um the human body embodies the virus because um you know like well the virus transmits through you know human contact so restraining human movement around the globe and also in a city has been used as a way to contain the virus on the other hand if we think about the tokyo olympics there was definitely more freedom for athletes and fans that like to make and share meanings um and also there are much more opportunities to make um money because you know now you are drawing people in not only because of your athletics abilities but also because of your images so this is you know the um you know central question we asked in a book um so we want to understand um the blurry boundary between work and play even through media technologies you know we can basically use three approaches so um on the top right you know we ask questions from a political economic perspective we want to look at questions such as sponsorship endorsement deals advertisement broadcasting rate about the game on your top left um you know we can ask questions from a cultural study perspective such as you know who owns the bodies and also the meanings of the athletes and lastly um where we can ask questions from a socials and technology um you know study standpoint so this was the first game that uh people would watch on social media in opposed to on a television set um so what does the game mean when you can watch bits and pieces of it um in one minute 30 seconds or you can pick and choose you know the athlete that you actually want to watch so i'm way below my seven minutes but i'm going to stop to keep it short and sweet so thanks everyone that's marvelous you surprised me there mickey i was assuming i was gonna have to make everybody abbreviate what they were talking about but thank you very much that was that was really stimulating and opens up all sorts of ideas let's pass on next then to uh scott timki who's gonna tell us why algorithms are the end of politics in no more than seven minutes thanks scott oh great i always love a challenge we can you know not only talk about how politics is foreclosed but how our voices are foreclosed but don't worry i'm not not criticizing units um i want to talk today about the factors of motivated algorithms and politics and sort of what's coming next in my research agenda um my work to date has mostly been about investigating the ongoing dynamics of capital and constraints and how these things uh characterize american life and specifically i'm interested in the states the security states encroachment on digital civil liberties giving attention to how the state has historical impulse to weaponize communication technologies and sort of forms part what i call uh the operation of digital coercion and this sort of helps preserve an oppressive labor regime that comes with sort of american capitalism this regime has long interceded into institutional intercedents in genocide enslavements dispossession but has now added mechanisms like dragnet digital surveillance drone in cyber warfare and protracted conflicts abroad and one can see these securitization dynamics in the united states domestically as well sort of the protests uh by black lives matters and other organizations against police brutality demonstrate you know push back towards you know the real militarized policing of the most vulnerable and sort of you know push back against data profiling and the like um algorithms indiana politics expands upon those themes but also adds sort of new areas like how social inequalities in late 20th century and early 21st century have been echoed amplified or introduced by algorithmic life my approach to this topic is through the lens of politics identification and the social question as i understand it dedification is a process that converts human practices into computational artifacts it transforms human life into quantifiable bits right for profit seeking activities and ultimately this shores up and freedom and class rule in the contemporary united states we see this in its value struggles that capitalism has a code that constitutes society shaping the character of politics society and everything else when adhering to this code identification replaces a social question with social problems whereas social problems presume a degree of reasonable reconciliation through measurements and management the social question is much more fundamental it talks about modernity and the consequences of commodification and how commodification shapes social relationships the institutions that manage and organize and set emotion social relationships and the current history of the political economy that organizes all of that to me the social question is very much set aside in capitalist politics and the thing that i deeply worry about when it comes to algorithmic capitalism is how this that question will forever be beyond the realm of being opened up for exploration so there may just be technocratic management about efficiency and effectivity around the current agenda but very but very little opportunity to question that agenda at all so let me provide a concrete example sort of using uber's business practices in the united states while relying upon us government-funded gps systems when courts ruled that uber must comply with national labor laws around employment rights and duties for the drivers in 2019 the company threatens us to suspend operations in california effectively it's a capital strike furthermore they created an amplified deceptive ballot initiative for the california 2020 election cycle that would suspend employment rights for gig economy workers through leveraging net wealth and power and using surrogates in the media and politics uber lyft and other sort of gig economy employers spend upwards of 200 million us dollars to help proposition 22 that was a particular proposition at hand it was the most expensive ballot measure in california history and ultimately it was successful the result is that a single economic sector has effectively rewritten labor law at their discretion and this is sort of telling about the coming recon recalibration of the burdens of risk between capital and labor and in sort of my estimation i think it's likely the label will lose more ground and will be relegated to permanent precarity ultimately all work is all workers sit in this precarious position but that that this precarity is going to be even more intensified effectively what i'm trying to sort of claim over here is the exercise of venture capital is undermining the quality of democracy and this sort of brings me to my next project and where i'm sort of trying to take the themes and topics and the research agenda that i'm speaking about today and we'll speak about in the question time sort of forward [Music] my next case study is looking at how platform lending apps uh you know and cell phone account in africa may ultimately uh perpetuate neo-colonial tendencies within the relations between the north and the south of course helped with southern mediators too i'm interested in how fintech you know is seen and is proposed as to be this magnificent uh savior for the continent and now allowing more financial inclusivity allowing more people to become banked allowing more people to become involved in market transactions or for more week market transactions but how ultimately this may set them up on a debt treadmill one of the things about lending apps and sort of we'll just sort of cover it very very quickly over here is that they allow loans to be advanced even in sort of very small nominal amounts but the repayment rates the terms of repayment rates are so atrocious and sometimes the interest rates can be 400 annualized which very much sort of puts people who are in precarious positions and particularly the african working class on a debt treadmill ensuring that whatever work they do do they're now sort of systematically or structurally working simply to to pay loans uh set a motion by venture capitalists in silicon valley or paris or the like so i'm sort of very wary of you know financial inclusion for all what they say may mean and the type of technological machinery that is set in motion and ultimately celebrated as something as good in and of itself for itself so to sort of end and i get a sort of pause over here the the thing that i'm most concerned about going forward is the rise of a digital debit credit divide as these things map to north-south relations and the type of intermediaries that play a role in sustaining that those divisions i think i get a pause over there and hand off to the next person that's great thank you very much scott that was that was again really interesting and opens up all sorts of uh all sorts of questions which we can return to if people want questions could they uh stick something in the chat and uh and they'll get fed through to us next uh the next person in the seven minutes of spotlight is uh peter bloom uh who's going to tell us about guerrilla democracy which is a book i'm really pleased to say was published in a series that i edit on organizations and activism so pete all yours oh thank you martin and uh i feel a bit embarrassed because i i'm not sure that um i i mean those are two really fantastic presentations so now i am in the inevitable position of trying to follow up from you know quite detailed analysis um but i wanted to uh just first present the main thesis of our book which is really around questions of mobile power and how that relates to a radical politics of rural democracy and then um if i can in seven minutes i want to relate that then to questions of what this means for copic 19 and the types of possibilities and alternatives that can occur afterwards i think a clear starting place for my book and i should say i wrote it with um two fantastic co-authors of the wines smiling jones and jamie woodcock um was that we had a real concern with contemporary understandings of power ones that i think can be very uh still rooted in modernist notions of stagnant forms of homogeneous domination and this simply was neither empirically true so to speak nor did it really make strong theoretical sense and what we meant by that was the fact that empirically we were increasingly seeing that there was a viral character to power right that idea spread very quickly and that certain dominant values could be easily made adaptable to local context theoretically what we really wanted to focus on was this idea how this represented a fundamental feature of power which was the fact that it was insatiable right that at its core and ironically its strength was its flexibility and adaptability its ability to as we used in kind of metaphorical terms and i think it was unfortunately quite timely it's able to adapt itself and transform a quote-unquote host context right and and you could see this on all sorts of different ways so marketization is a really interesting example in the sense that on the one hand it has very strong core principles of exploitation and surplus value and often wage labor that it's trying to uh gain through profit on the other it can assert itself in any number of different national institutional contexts right and it can do so in ways that are both transformative of them but also are transformed by them so we wanted to ask a really important question of to what extent can we also start beginning to employ mobile power for a more revolutionary politics and i think this was a key part then of what we were trying to say is how do we make revolution and alternatives to capitalism as insatiable innovative flexible and adaptable as what you see capitalism itself to be so that led us to guerrilla democracy and we call it democracy because we're very interested in three aspects of this one we were interested in the ways in which periphery movements can combine in order to transform fundamentally and overthrow what seems to be hegemonic or regimes and values i mean and i think you see this a lot now in discourse of lo of localities vs centralism etc the second is we were quite interested in ways in which very particularized localized experiments could be upscaled right and so there was a kind of idea of globalism and we wanted to better understand how that connection was made and i think the third part is that we wanted to view things in terms of processes of what we call re-materialization will be situated how could local communities so to speak or local institutions or local movements re-materialize their reality so quite honestly transform the material social relations and how could that be a process then for a form of what we call contagious um revolutionary reimagining so researching the very conditions of the political and i think scott's point that he made earlier was very well taken which is that aggro of the government has all sorts of problemations in the flucodian sense but these problemations proliferate precisely because of the fact that they avoid the more fundamental social question of what's actually at stake in this process right so re-situating is about actually bringing to four again this social question through of transforming a materialist relations so i thought with the pandemic some things that i could begin to uh speak about um and i know i have about three minutes so i apologize um is the fact that one i think that there's been massive dislocations you know and that's that's clear um and you know you can look at martin's uh recent edited collaborative book on this um but it affects everything from work to play to capitalism itself i think though there's also a lot of dangers um i think the big movement around this discourse of life ignores a lot of biopower right so actually um the question of let's have an economy that's based on health and life has not necessarily always led to good results and it's easily exploitable um and again i mean i think scott's uh point out it's work that i'm doing right now on financial inclusion is a great example of this right um and when they have had embedded subjects one of the first things that places like kansai and amgesa did they started noticing oh this can help your health right um i would say though that what you can see is the movement between ideas of mutual aid turns into really radical experimentations with things like potentials for user-led democratic forms of planned economies which i i think are things that really challenge and bring again to four what is the point of an economy what are our material relations and what's our relationship between what i think some have called placeless and place-based radicalism i think the other really important ideas here that we can see around a kind of things is this idea of cooperative advantage in commons values right so we talk about a common sense which is about how do you bring in ideas of commons ownership and cooperation and turn them into actual processes of local rematerialization so that you could then have forms of global re-situating and i think these are really important questions that we're trying to engage with but it's really about if you look at and if you work with um at a local level so to speak increasingly you see questions of cooperative advantage for no other reason then capitalism is broken it's not working so the question is how do you not just upscale this but how do you do so in a way that's local insatiable and radically transformative lovely that was a that was a really nice way to finish and i think that that idea about the social question which which scott raised is one that will almost certainly come back to in question so if you do have questions stick them in the q a please so last up then thomas swann from loughborough university uh the second book from our lovely organization's activism series uh and his book was called anarchist cybernetics thomas thank you um you just switched your camera off thomas yeah it's going off by itself sorry somebody somebody's tracking this conversation right no idea what's happening so i'm going to start without the cameras you know what's happening okay we can still hear you just fine yeah always completely come back on there yeah yeah okay um okay so and i want to talk a little bit about how we've sort of shifted from kind of optimism around social media just like digital digital technologies to uh and pessimism and actually quite pessimistic paid we're in now um so if we look back a decade you know in the midst of the arab spring and the occupy movement some of us might might you know be old enough to remember those and you know social media was seen as a democratizing force we fast forward to the present day um instead of enabling radically democratic forms of organization one of the dominant political stories of social media that i think sort of encapsulates how social media functions um politically at the moment is the cambridge analytical cambridge analytica scandal so social media has gone from seemingly having the potential to revolutionize politics to the opposite with political elites and established power structures reinforced by the use of big data what i want to suggest today is that there's something about the mechanics of how we interact on social media and the way information is curated for us by complex algorithms and the kind of thing and scott was mentioning um that actually turns um our interactions into a very specific it's a form of a very kind of um augmented reality game so augmented reality games are games in which the real world is filtered through a game platform and our interactions with the world are channeled through the architecture of the game and pokemon go is a sort of famous example of this kind of game where players had to travel around the real world and to collect and train their in-game characters and where through their phone screens and the visible reality of the world was augmented by superimposing um characters onto it the q anon conspiracy theory that centered around trump and led to the storming of the the us capital in january can also be seen as an application of this sort of approach to politics and so what qnon did was take the reality of us politics and augment it with a conspiracy theory about an elite pedophile ring involving the clintons and trump was seen as the hero in this narrative trying to take them down from the inside and his tweets and tweets of others were analyzed to find hidden meaning within them so while much of the q anon activities took place on message boards away from mainstream social media platforms i think there is something in how individual behavior is molded by the rules of the game that is also a feature of social media and as an example here um i want to look at you know so-called cancel culture and before i say anything more i want to point out that there is obviously a lot of right-wing hysteria around you know this so-called practice of um of them uh cancelling and when often what it amounts to is people being held accountable for abhorrent and harmful behavior and ultimately this is this is nothing new okay you know ostracism has always been a part of human society it seems um as as a regulatory measure and there might be better ways of dealing with conflict um but as an ultimate sanction something like ostracizing or or canceling might be unavoidable okay however we actually realize it in practice but what i'm really interested in here is um the particular phenomenon of cancelling on social media and how it too can be seen as a kind of augmented reality game and so for examples of what kind of the kind of thing i'm talking about here you could look at um recent um episodes involving so left wine youtubers for example natalie nguyen and lindsay ellis what happens often in these sort of these these um periods of organic examples of people being cancelled is your tweets forum posts and other statements a person has made are scrutinized for offending content so reality is filtered through the rules of the game and the response to this defending content involves making you know forceful pronouncements about the person's guild so the rules of the game determine a certain behavior that individual players should take and these individuals will cease their involvement in this you know what often ends up being a sort of mob like social media pylon only when the person in question apologizes or in a specific way or is removed from a certain position so there are certain victory conditions in place that need to be met for for the game to be won at the root of it this this might might not actually be anything particularly wrong with this um so a recent episode of the um acfm podcast um which looked at the cosmic right and q anon and one of the hosts commented that a lot of what we see here um is actually mirrored in radical left circles so you know we build communities and our engagement with the world is channeled and filtered through those communities and through the solidarity we have in those communities we develop rules for things like decision making or ensuring that spaces we inhabit are as safe as they possibly can be and an augmented reality can actually you know pushes towards democratic and inclusive um self-organization rather than just the nefarious ends of something like q and on i think something is often missing from discussions of cancer culture is the role that social media plays in enabling this specific form of augmented reality game so the rules that govern our behavior here and it filters through which reality is augmented are actually you know completely taken out of our control they're decided by corporations and they're decided by algorithms that we have no control over and often no knowledge of what's actually happening so in a sense then our behavior is actually shaped and molded by the decisions of of corporations and of these mainstream social media platforms the game is something where the rules are set up for us and we we play it through the the limited actions that are open to us on social media platforms i think what we need to do then is try and focus on a new kind of social media architecture one that would facilitate an augmented reality and that privileges collective and consensual processes rather than corrosive behavior and how individual and collective behavior is shaped the architecture of the platforms we use has to be at the forefront of our efforts and do we need to then look at alternative platforms you know build new platforms from the ground up with this in mind and i want to suggest to conclude that if we do want to try and return to an optimism of the early days of social media we need to start to think about how we can take control of the platforms through which our reality is augmented thank you terrific thank you very much thomas that's grand and thank you to all the other all the other speakers too we've now got uh about 25 minutes for uh questions i've got some of my own we've got a couple in the chat um if you've got a question to ask just type it into the the q a function at the bottom of your screen can i start off by just sort of framing this in terms of that optimism pessimism thing because that's a fairly a fairly sort of obvious dynamic in in lots of what the the four of you were saying um mickey can i just start with you first of all that that in in a sense your your account was was quite a playful one in the sense i mean it's certainly about the commodification of bodies and so on but i had a sense that you didn't feel that um work and play was quite as um as commodified as perhaps the other speakers did um well if we think about the olympic games alone um you know like olympic games have always been very commercialized you know so i'm not saying that you know now at least uh people have a chance to kind of rebel against the system like definitely not you know in fact i feel nowadays if you think about athletes who could um you know make money in the market they need to maintain their own images in addition to being extraordinary athletes you know that if you are just good at your sport you know that is not enough you know you know you need to know how to use social media so i'm not saying that i'm much more optimistic than others you know but we are just talking about you know olympic games so in the book um since this is an edited book you know we did talk about you know different um changes between work and play so you know for instance um well especially for workers in high tech industry there is definitely a high demand for them to put in as many hours as you know humanly possible you know but they are not framing it as you know exploitation their framing is as because you love your work you know because you know this is how you um you know find meanings in life um so on the one hand you know we can say oh yeah you know that's you know ideology you know this is what the companies tell them but it is also true that um especially in kobe when a lot of people want to have a reboot of their career per se there is a lot of um kind of discord just about well thinking about your own worth you know thinking about your own values and how that will you know fit into a much more flexible economy um so i i don't really think you know i'm optimistic about the entire thing um but i do see that especially under coverage you know the idea of branding you know rethinking about your own values you know even self-care at the beginning that seems to be such a wonderful word you know nowadays self-care just becomes another like you know digital economy um so i just i just feel you know the entire social media digital economy they have been changing so fast that if you're not looking you know in two months time you know there is this like new phenomenon that you really struggle to understand you know what it exactly is okay yeah yeah okay now that's helpful i mean it's something about the kind of the paradox in a sense isn't it is that clearly people many athletes for example are articulating themselves as a particular kind of commodity that might be sold or sponsored or whatever but at the same time you know that image of tom daley knitting or you know a lesbian couple kick kissing is you know quite quite quite sort of radical image in a way can i turn to scott and i'm going to pick on you scott because you came across as probably the most the darkest and most pessimistic about speakers there's a question in the chat i want to aim at you which was really about uh the sort of progressive forms of digital activism um i think pete will probably pick up on this in a bit but other examples of what you think are impressive and progressive ways in which the digital the algorithmic can be used to um to recenter power let's say i mean that's quite a quite a tough question i don't really have any sort of definitive answers on it so whatever connects a sort of provisional and speculative so don't don't hold me to it is what i'm trying to say okay um i think that if we look sort of at american politics they're formal american politics we see sort of how sort of the progressive left of the democratic party have been very good at using social media to present their talking points make them part of the discourse at least make them more competitive uh discourses in the united states i think that's sort of a very positive development you know these are sort of ideas that were sort of very much banished to the wilderness in the 80s and 90s and they you know fluttered around in the 2000s but they very much have come to the fall in a wake of 2008. for me i think it's less about any one particular type of platform or any one particular type of strategy or the type of tactical engagement of digital marketers or organizers and alike but rather sort of the type of policy framework and regulatory framework that organizes these platforms i sometimes think that we miss that picture when it comes to you know how to sort of do the policy work of of progressivism if you will i think you know and again i don't want to sort of talk too broadly over here but i think sort of the left as sort of a movement to the extent that there is a movement is a very very good theoretical work extraordinarily you know you can see the books that have come out in the last 10 years are extraordinary and probably some of the best work that's been produced in the the academia lost in in in modernity right i also think our activism is sort of very very good too you see particularly in a game like because united states black lives matter the movement for black lives ancillary movements extraordinary strong very very powerful able to generate and put people into the streets and you know because the types of injustices that they're talking about are very difficult to overturn and take time you know we are starting to see results and so more results may be forthcoming but they also countervailing powers i think the thing that we're missing in the middle though is sort of the policy work i don't think that we're very very good at writing policy in order to regulate businesses well so to me i think that's something that that needs a bit more work on i know that doesn't quite answer your question but those are the thoughts that your question sort of brought to my mind yeah yeah now that that that's really helpful scott and particularly in the context of the uh uber decision and so on um that you know presents all sorts of problems for thinking about the relationship between labor and the state doesn't it in in which in in many ways the you know the these these big platform corporations are much much more effective at um at answering the social question to their own um to their own advantage yeah then they have the money i mean so i mean all types of sort of policy programs to redistribute must be sort of pushed forward very very aggressively whether they be pre-distribution things like basic income or post uh post uh distribution like sort of uh wealth uh wealth policy uh wealth taxes or you know the type of targeted things in between all those things need to be on the board to sort of just simply reduce the the capital that capital has right yeah yeah yeah let me pitch the same question at pete because it's very opposite in terms of the topic of your book uh pete so you know just just to rehearse the question again what do you think's the most effective form of digital activism in the aftermath of covid um i mean i personally think that the most effective is one that is very much based on and i'm going to be very boring here so i apologize and presented but on three points i think one is recognizing the ways in which global and local power dynamics are placed against each other i think it's very interesting like we're speaking in a university setting but universities are a in many ways strong setting for the how each university is exploited in their own way based on universal principles of exploitation that they've been able to utilize and better being able to discern some universal principles of domination i think we have to have digital activism be one that is about collaborative knowledge sharing of what's actually at stake in our local context in terms of power dynamics how these relate to global principles of domination and what are different ways in which we can innovate and resist around that i think the second uh point that i i think is the move away from social media as merely a coping mechanism or resilience and i and i think that there was a question in chat about authenticity here and i think there has been an individuation that you've seen around copenhagen about making a more resilient subject that's very much related to making a more resilient capitalism and people like brad evans have spoken about this for instance um but i mean if you look at the the the two most recent uh kind of book one book was uh obama's book on um his presidency and the other uh was a movie that was on um that won the oscar nomad land right in their own ways these are completely about the movement from capitalist realism that there's no alternative to capitalist resiliency right there's a sense which obama is saying oh i wanted to change things but you know i couldn't and anyone who does should just kind of you know stop being so idealist and then there's another way in which we think about look how resilient this person is heroic someone is like that so i would say a huge part is as scott said from a macro point of regulated regulation on a point of revolutionary culture to actually begin to see ourselves as parts of a class for ourselves that goes beyond just becoming resilient subjects in a world in which i saw a great meme where it's like i never thought that i'd be in the middle of apocalypse and still have to come to work right i mean and there's a reason that something like walking dead such a popular show because even in the midst of zombies there's a sense of escapism that wouldn't be great if i if everything fell apart and i didn't have to wake up at 9 o'clock tomorrow and here we are in the kind of most you know lenient apocalypse i mean we're in a pandemic in which you know it's horrible but it has death rates under five percent and you know to look across and yet we're still going to work right i think the third thing i would say is that we really need to combine localized user-led cybernetics as thomas would work on right and bringing in old 1970s notions of centralized plannings with radical democratic forms of user-led horizontal governance with processes of public envisioning and innovative urban planning and for instance one of the dangers that you see and i talked about earlier is mutual aid which is all of a sudden now become a an interesting contradiction because it's a radical social practice that's also now a disciplining capitalist discourse right and the question then would be well how can we actually bring communities together so they could really publicly understand how their preferences and their data is being used they could use that as a democratic planning technology for things like we like sustainable supply chains and more than that they could bring in two actual questions that they have and problems different types of cooperative anarchists and socialist alternatives yeah so those are three things so when you talk about rematerializing there's a sense you know in which there's a uh there's a fairly marxist analysis underneath this right it's about you know making the conditions of ownership and control much clearer oh absolutely i mean i i think that in a certain sense um our book was contributing to new materialism but also directly questioning it because in a sense their their critique of historical materialism and one that has done it has was at a very macro level and ultimately had a strong mental class reductionism but what's really at stake is what are the ways in which a material is not conditions of our lives that are based around the ways in which we are made as exploitable subjects of value hope to organize our social existence and if we have the possibility of experimenting with new ones how could they combine together for a more strong concrete reimagining of our realities yeah yeah okay that's that's nice let me let me just just segue to thomas here but use uh danny dodge's question about authenticity because that's quite an interesting idea and it kind of connects to some of the things that the other speakers have been saying thomas do you think it's possible to be authentic on social media or are you just becoming the product and no nothing i think one of the interesting things is there's there's you know in any sort of um control system always you know there's also the ingredients there for subverting it and it never sort of completely con you can completely defines you as a person and completely controls you as a person there's always something that's outside of that and i think there's probably a very complicated lacanian um analysis of what's happening there that i couldn't begin to um nice to explain and but so this i think there there's possibilities for subversion and possibilities of resistance within within these certain mainstream social media platforms even the way they work right now and you can see that you know they do they do you know people you know use use twitter to help or you know to help them mobilize for strikes and things like that so there's there is clearly a possibility for other subjectivities and within these platforms and the real question is like and then this goes back to the sort of the earlier question i think is how do you identify what functions of social media are allowing us to do these things there's clearly good things on social media right it allows us to you know do things like this it allows us to stay in contact with people around the world share huge amount of information learn a lot um you know get a much wider array of um diversity of perspectives on on the world and so there are all these positive things i think we need to do is sort of think about what what the functionalities of the platforms that allow us to do that how can we replicate those useful functions and how can we jettison the the functions that are that are less useful you used that phrase new media architecture didn't you sort of you know architecture is quite an interesting metaphor because you know in in its material sense it defines where we can go and what walls we can get through you know and how high things are and all the rest of it so so presumably the implication there is that questions of the design of new digital technologies then become ones that could encourage let me simplify enormously but could encourage uh the demons in us or the angels in us depending on how we uh how we articulate them yeah absolutely and i think and that's that's the exact intention of using that sort of idea of um architecture there um i mean just just certain parts are parallel one of the um cybernetics scientists that i've studied um uh gordon pasque and one of the things he he does a lot of stuff are in conversation and how conversation functions and and what it means to have a sort of equal you know non-hierarchical conversation but one of the things he worked on was a thing called the fun palace where it was a literal physical architecture that um could be moved around and shaped and changed um depending on what the people living and actually wanted so don't think this was ever ever actually built it was just sort of idea and but it was you you could move walls move floors around you know change everything excuse everything about the physical space depending on the life that you want to live with the other people who are living there i think that's what we need for social media something something that makes it possible for people without you know advanced degrees and programming um and coding to actually engage in the design process so that we can sort of build or alter platforms um depending on exactly what it is we want from and what we think is productive in terms of the kind of kind of kind of um democratic lives that we want to lead that's quite nice so your answer to scott's social question could be the fun palace which sounds yes that sounds like a lovely answer scott what do you think about that sort of idea of almost like a kind of yeah moving the walls on the floors you know the kind of the the architecture of of algorithms could you could you comment on how you think that might be made um well less less problematic should we say yeah i mean i think one of the things that's sort of the book that i'm trying to that that i wrote tries to sort of speak about is some of those options are sort of pathways in front of those avenues as it were between sort of you know you know as thomas was saying sort of more uh horizontal more inclusive more participatory decision making about sort of the politics societies and technologies that sort of organize our lives and the exact opposite of that where it's sort of it's very more opaque it's top down it forecloses opportunities to even appeal to discover what's organizing it you know sort of property rights sort of foreclose that to me i think that that sort of becomes the key point is how do we how do we develop a property rights regime i mean we have sort of the answers i think is sort of making him operational how do we have a proper property rights regime that allows that architecture to come about in the first place you know one of the things we i sort of see too so often is sort of a lot of cooperative ventures that have very good agendas and very good track records getting one or two board members in making one or two choice hires and then suddenly the cooperative venture is one in name only only and it just simply perpetuates other sort of capitalist modes of transaction and workplaces and so on and so forth so you see how often sort of you know cooperative ventures can sort of fall to the gyms that they sort of set out to avoid and so i think that if there's more you know a workaround actually implementing a property rights regime that is conducive to that fun palace i think that has a greater chance of succeeding yeah yeah yeah no i think that's really interesting and just to say uh pete bloom's had to leave us now because his partner's teaching and they've only got one place to teach so it's very good example of the interrelationship between digital technologies and um and his office um so i just wanted to kind of spin um another question because we've still got um still got five minutes or so but to to aim this one at mickey because there's quite an interesting one here about the difference between two very um familiar social media platforms uh facebook and twitter um the the sort of behind it is the idea that facebook is somehow a more accountable platform i suppose because your friends inverted comments are mostly kind of people you know you've accepted an apprenticeship well twitter is the kind of the the sort of the anonymous pylon yeah mickey do you think there is a character a sort of a difference in the how can we say in the in the sort of the flavor of different media platforms depending on their architecture because this is an architectural question isn't it um well i would say um i do agree with let me see who wrote that question it was an anonymous attendance oh you're right yeah maybe their name yeah you know in a way i i agree because you still need to have your network of friends you know like on facebook um and also you know i you know people always say that you know like twitter actually harms democracy in a way because you know like you only allow x number of characters and you can never express your idea you know it is so instant that people do not like you know pause and think so you know i think this point of view is valid but you know at the same time when i'm hearing um you know previous conversation i always you know want to go back to a point of um at one point you know facebook was really seen as um kind of you know an alternative you know so um when you used to need to be a harvard student and then you need to have a you know edu address you know at that point people thought it is still authentic my question is like at what points do we begin to see a social media platform being evil you know like the same thing as google you know google used to be seen as um kind of a good force um against microsoft because well and also you know yahoo because it doesn't take in advertising money but of course you know google now is seen as a an evil force you know as much as you know any other big companies so to me there is always a question of yes you know we can change the architect you always have people coming out from silicon valley um coming up with like good ideas ideas that you know they believe will change the world or they are not going to be commercialized but at what points they will change it is just about money is it about where bad people begin to use it is it when it becomes popular um so you know i mean i always want to identify the particular moment you know not that i have come to a conclusion about that but you know i just you know want to throw it out what moment can we identify these technologies become less authentic um and become something that is more evil than uh you know that doing good in society yeah i think that's right i mean so to two comments as we're sort of moving to something of a close and one is that in a way and i suppose this was part of scott's scots presentation really these technologies are so ubiquitous it's almost difficult to imagine our lives without them isn't it so they kind of they've become so much part of the everyday fabric of of most people's experience in the global north the second thing is it's to me still quite remarkable the extent to which astonishing corporate concentration and privilege has been naturalized now you know to the extent that we have these um uh billionaires who are probably the richest people who ever lived i would imagine that they make the gilded age of the 1920s in america look you know look relatively paltry by comparison in terms of the piles of cash that these people now have access to and consequently the ways in which they can shape public discourse um sorry that was me jumping on my soapbox apologies but uh with that we are reaching a conclusion so could i thank uh scott mickey thomas and pete very much for their brief presentations um and for i think a very interesting and engaging discussion thanks very much to the audience for uh pitching up um and apologies to those people who did put questions in the chat but we just didn't have time to get around to them just to remind you that details of how to order any of these books at 50 discount are available in the chat and will be sent to you after the event if you're registered along with details of the next bristol university press seminar um cop26 and new strategies for climate action on the 19th of october so thanks ever so much for listening and thanks to our speakers for talking and we will say goodbye thank you bye

2021-10-04 01:51

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