Terms of Use for Handling of Solid Waste and Prevention of Illegal Dumping
“…[I]n general, we, as humans, have less and less understanding of our machines—we are compartmentalized, looking at a tiny corner of a very complex system beyond our individual comprehension. Increasing numbers of our systems—from finance to electricity to cybersecurity to medical systems, are going in this direction. We are losing control and understanding which seems fine—until it’s not. We will certainly, and unfortunately, find out what this really means because sooner or later, one of these systems will fail in a way we don’t understand.”
– Zeynep Tufecki, Failing the Third Machine Age: When Robots Come for Grandma
–
Terms of Use for Handling of Solid Waste and Prevention of Illegal Dumping is a book masquerading as a municipal handbook of the future. Inside its bland cover is a confusing and, at times, comedic work of “cut-up” style poetry created by software that combines the Detroit municipal codes for refuse disposal with the iTunes Terms of Use and Google’s Terms of Service.
Already illegible to many individuals, municipal codes regarding refuse or water are also computational codes, situated in the databases of government agencies. As municipalities strive for more efficiency and cost-savings, a turn towards computation is intuitive. Our municipal services become automated and privatized, and another layer of illegibility further obscures the way in which basic services are delivered to us. Much in the way that we allow computation to mediate other aspects of our lives, we accept this illegibility in exchange for convenience. Terms of Use for Handling of Solid Waste and Prevention of Illegal Dumping is a meditation on the potential for privatization and automation of municipal services in cities like Detroit, which, in difficult financial times, turn towards private companies as well as computation to enhance efficiency. The book is a linguistic metaphor for the melding of municipal services with privatization and automation.
A reading of the book was recently completed by “Alex.” Below is a short selection, from pp. 1-3.
Each line or couplet was also turned into data matrices, images that function as stark reminders of the hegemony of machine readability. These data matrices were incorporated into a video paired with selected text from the book.
Legibly Illegible Municipal Services from Terra Preta Lost Cities on Vimeo.
The book will be on display as part of the DesignInquiry residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). For this iteration, I selected lines from the book and installed them on the floor of the gallery space and will be projecting the video on a nearby wall.
It’s Official: AIs are now re-writing history | Robert Elliott Smith
The other day I created a Google+ album of photos from our holiday in France. Google’s AutoAwesome algorithms applied some nice Instagram-like filters to some of them, and sent me emails to let me have a look at the results. But there was one AutoAwesome that I found peculiar. It was this one, labeled with the word “Smile!” in the corner, surrounded by little sparkle symbols.
It’s a nice picture, a sweet moment with my wife, taken by my father-in-law, in a Normandy bistro. There’s only one problem with it. This moment never happened. […]
Note the position of my hands, the fellow in the background, and my wife’s smile. Actually, these photos were a part of a “burst” or twelve that my iPhone created when my father-in-law accidentally held down the button too long. I only uploaded two photos from this burst to see which one my wife liked better.
So, Google’s algorithms took the two similar photos and created a moment in history that never existed, one where my wife and I smiled our best (or what the algorithm determined was our best) at the exact same microsecond, in a restaurant in Normandy.
via Dan W.
Its been suggested that this is a Google translate error message but I’ve tracked it down to a free app which is currently broken - maybe it relied on the free Google Translate API which was deprecated in May 2011. One user didn’t get the message.
T.O.U.R.E.A.M.
In a world—both physical and digital—governed by software and algorithms, terms-of-use agreements permeate every aspect of daily life. T.O.U.R.E.A.M. updates Wu Tang’s iconic “C.R.E.A.M.” for our algorithmically-tailored contemporary reality. Sometimes, wearing a t-shirt in acknowledgement of such pervasive phenomena is about all we feel as though we can do. In wearing this shirt, the wearer acknowledges and foregrounds the power that algorithms wield over us, and the systemic effects of a decreasingly human-readable, and increasingly machine-readable world.
Scoop up some wearable criTicism, y'all
A SXSW panel investigating the instances of our algorithmic selves: Free to be 23andMe
Check it out on the PanelPicker and toss a vote our way if you’re into this idea:
In 1972, Marlo Thomas sought to enable a new generation to combat gender norms in our country by teaching us that we are all “free” to be ourselves, regardless of how that self might be defined by others. She and her many collaborators encouraged us to think about from whence the definitions of who we are and who we should be are coming—in particular, she was concerned with the media: books, magazines, television shows at the time. Forty+ years later, who is defining us as individuals and why? Services like 23andMe encourage us to “Find out what your DNA says about you,” but they leave out the part between your DNA and what it says: the algorithms, biases, motives, and business plans that drive your “results.” In this session, we seek to raise questions about what defines us as individuals today, what’s beneficial, what’s dangerous, and what we might be able to do about it (like art!). We invite skeptics and believers alike.
"Uber, like Amazon, has allowed a small number of people to become extremely rich by evading regulations and/or taxes that apply to their middle class competitors. Amazon and other Internet-based retailers have used their tax advantage to put tens of thousands brick and mortar stores out of business"
Dean Baker | The Sharing Economy and the Mystery of the Mystery of Inequality
current technolibertarianism:
taxes, regulation, government, institutions themselves as merely a momentary impediment, “middlemen” heavy and solid with history to be inevitably washed away by the fast, fluid efficiency of “high tech”
(via nathanjurgenson)
(Source: truthout.com)
Reblogged from barelyconcealednuance with 119 notes
Whisper by Zachary Kaiser and Gabi Schaffzin
Whisper is a networked device that uses an “associative data transformation algorithm” to interpret (or misinterpret) how you say you feel into a query fed to Amazon which subsequently returns a recommended product. The intention is to scramble your data before algorithms use it to provide recommendations. It can facilitate surprise and serendipity.
You said disappointed.
Whisper ordered Power Words: Igniting Your Life with Lightning Force, $14.27.
The project is documented on an ongoing tumblr and on this video.
The project is designed to fulfil the algorithmic subversion manifesto of Terra Preta Lost Cities that works to SUBVERT THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF ALGORITHMIC INFERENCE IN EVERY ASPECT OF HUMAN EXISTENCE. TPLC REJECTS THE NOTION THAT HUMAN LIFE IS ENRICHED THROUGH INFERENCES MADE BY EMERGING AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGIES.
Reblogged from barelyconcealednuance with 40 notes
You said keyboard.
Whisper ordered Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics, $38.95.
good one, whisper.
Reblogged from whisperthoughtof with 2 notes
"Personality has become short-hand for a probabilistic model of consumption habits, a speculative commodity bought and sold out the back door of every social media platform."
A.E. Benenson, The New Inquiry (via barelyconcealednuance)
Reblogged from barelyconcealednuance with 1 note