algos of resistance
Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power -2024 – via simona ferlini fb share:
notes/quotes from open access edition [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547420/algorithms-of-resistance/]:
1: Living With Algorithms: Power, Agency, Resistance [https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5721/chapter/4604268/Living-With-Algorithms-Power-Agency-Resistance]
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*Digital platforms are now playing an increasingly central role in the sorting, categorizing, and hierarchizing of cultural products and commercial services. The progressively central position acquired by these technological giants in the social, economic, and cultural lives of citizens around the world has prompted many scholars to turn their attention to the consequences and implications of the platformization of everyday life and society..t While media scholars in the twentieth century investigated the effects of mass media on society, more recent studies have focused instead on the effects of digital platforms on society. Platform power is increasingly pervasive, opaque, and asymmetrical and is fueled by data. The Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has coined the term instrumentarian power to capture the specific form of power exercised by the recent mutation of industrial capitalism into surveillance capitalism. This new research trend has represented a key turning point in the advancement of media studies and their neighbouring disciplines.
*need to realize the deeper platform aka: sea world.. unless we get out.. will forever be spinning our wheels in same song
age of surveillance capitalism
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Scholars like Jathan Sadowski and Shoshana Zuboff specifically emphasize the power of digital capitalism and its capacity to strongly determine our lives and automate our taste and consumption decisions. Particularly, Zuboff claims that data collection and the use of predictive algorithms by tech industry corporations represent a means of behavioral modification capable of making human behavior not only completely predictable and manageable but also automated through a “digital order that thrives within things and bodies, transforming volition into reinforcement and action into conditioned response.”
if that’s what we’re focusing on.. makes no diff of algo ness.. already gone.. ie: finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us
It is precisely this kind of description of the power exercised by contemporary media and tech moguls that is at the heart of Sonia Livingstone’s criticism when she articulates that “to theorize recent and
profound changes, media scholars are reasserting monolithic accounts of power that tend to downplay or exclude audiences and the significance of the lifeworld.”
any form of m\a\p does that
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
sonia livingstone – dm&l – equity
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Our gaze is primarily oriented toward people’s practices and encounters with algorithms, including the creativity and imagination mobilized and the challenges and obstacles faced every day by people while coping with algorithms. In this sense, we are following in the wake of studies on data agency
any re ness as cancerous distraction.. sucking all out time/energies
we believe that it is necessary, as media scholars, citizens, and activists, to investigate the power still available to people to assert their autonomy of choice and find their own dance rhythm through the deafening chaos brought by the rise of the platform society..t
it’s not about us being good/bad at decision-making.. it’s that decision-making is already an oppression/control/demand/finite set of choices/algorithm/et-al
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
6 – 6: Frontiers of Resistance In The Automated Society – [https://watermark.silverchair.com/c005200_9780262377485.pdf]
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Critics of the everyday forms of resistance claimed that such acts intrinsically lack revolutionary consequences. Yet, echoing Scott’s words again, “this may often be the case, but it is also the case that there is hardly a modern revolution that can be successfully explained without reference to precisely such acts when they take place on a massive scale.” And even in cases where these resistance practices are limited to daily survival, we can say, as Scott does, that they “prevent the worst and promise something better.
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be you. 