Critical Theory B | Fall 2018
Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://digitaldemocracydigitalantidemocracy.blogspot.com/2018/08/our-syllabus-digital-democratization.html
Meetings: Mondays, 4.15-7pm, August 27-December 3, 2018, 16A Chestnut Street Campus
Week One | August 27 | Introductions
Week Two | September 3 | Labor Day Holiday
Week Three | September 10 | Declarations of Independence
Week Eleven | November 5 | Final Paper In-Class Workshop
Week Twelve | November 12 | Meet Your Robot God
Screen film, Colossus: The Forbin Project
Week Thirteen | November 19 | Symposium (First Sessions)
Week Fifteen | December 3 | The Language of the Future
Poetry Reading, Concluding Remarks (Hand in Final 10pp. Paper and Reading Notebooks)
Jenny Anderson, The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World
Laurie Anderson, "The Language of the Future"
Course Objectives:
One -- Introduce students to Science and Technology Studies, New Media Studies, Network Theory, Digital Humanities and situate these in respect to broader critical theoretical discourses: Marx on fetishized commodities, Benjamin on auratic media-artifacts, Adorno on the Culture Industry, Barthes on naturalizing myth, Debord on the Spectacle, Klein on the logo, and so on.
Two -- Discuss "science" as one among many forms of differently warranted belief (others: moral, legal, familial, instrumental, religious, ethical, political, subcultural, aesthetic); discuss "technoscience" as a particular and usually at once reductive and imperializing figuration and narrativization of the scientific; discuss "technology" as the collective elaboration of agency, not so much as a constellation of artifacts and techniques but as familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing investments in artifacts, techniques, and events with significance in the service of particular ends.
Three -- Discuss access-to-knowledge (a2k), end-to-end (e2e), many-to-many, peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, formations, ethoi as occasions for democratizing and anti-democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle; discuss "democracy" not as an eidos we approach but as ongoing interminable experimental implementations of the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them; discuss "democratization" as the struggle through which ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
Four -- Discuss the connection of a2k/p2p-formations and media/network theories grappling with these to relational, social, participatory aesthetic and curatorial practices and theories.
Five -- This course takes as its point of departure the insight that the novelties and perplexities of our experience of emerging p2p-formations are, on the one hand, clarified when understood in light of the unique formulations of Hannah Arendt's political thinking but also that these novelties and perplexities provide, on the other hand, illustrations through which to better understand Hannah Arendt's political thinking in its own right: Discussions will include her delineation of the political (as a site other than the private, the social, the violent, the cultural), her notion of the peer (as someone other than the citizen, the intimate, the colleague, the subject, the celebrity), and her accounts of civitas, revolution, public happiness, futurological think-tanks and AI, and totalitarianism both as manifested historically in Nazism and potentially in neoliberalism.
DIGITAL DEMOCRATIZATION, DIGITAL ANTI-DEMOCRATIZATION
Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://digitaldemocracydigitalantidemocracy.blogspot.com/2018/08/our-syllabus-digital-democratization.html
Meetings: Mondays, 4.15-7pm, August 27-December 3, 2018, 16A Chestnut Street Campus
Rough Basis for Final Grade (subject to contingencies): Participation/Attendance, 10%; Reading
Notebook, 10%; Co-Facilitation, 10%; Toulmin/Precis, 10%; Symposium Presentation, 10%; Final
Paper, 10pp. 50%
Course Description
How did the promise of peer-to-peer participatory democracy devolve into twitter harassment, doxxing, toxic comment sections, and zero comments? Is techno-progressive "disruption" merely reactionary deregulation, venture capitalist "innovation" merely marketing hyperbole, futurological "acceleration" merely social precarization, tech's vaunted "sharing economy" merely a digital sharecropping society, its "openness" vacuity, its "participation" another form of television? How did early legal and political squabbles over privacy and property online set the stage for our current distress? How might the "end-to-end principle" defining internet architecture across its many layers comport with the ideologically reactionary figure of "negative liberty" playing out in generations of anarchic, spontaneist, populist online activism? What are the politics of a digitality figured as an immaterial spirit realm, when digital networks abet financial fraud and military surveillance via an "internet" powered by coal smoke, accessed on toxic landfill-destined devices manufactured by wage slaves in overexploited regions of the real world? Setting aside the logical possibility and engineering plausibility of "artificial intelligence" does AI as a rhetorical trope in legal and cultural discourse facilitate and rationalize unaccountable algorithmic mediation and muddy our thinking about "autonomous" weapons systems? How does social media facilitate the transformation of factual disputes over climate change, harm reduction, and the macroeconomics of public investment into polarizing culture wars? Are there appropriate and appropriable techniques at hand through which democratizations might resist these degradations? Might "The Future" still be more evenly distributed? Can we still count on the street finding its own uses for things?
Course Description
How did the promise of peer-to-peer participatory democracy devolve into twitter harassment, doxxing, toxic comment sections, and zero comments? Is techno-progressive "disruption" merely reactionary deregulation, venture capitalist "innovation" merely marketing hyperbole, futurological "acceleration" merely social precarization, tech's vaunted "sharing economy" merely a digital sharecropping society, its "openness" vacuity, its "participation" another form of television? How did early legal and political squabbles over privacy and property online set the stage for our current distress? How might the "end-to-end principle" defining internet architecture across its many layers comport with the ideologically reactionary figure of "negative liberty" playing out in generations of anarchic, spontaneist, populist online activism? What are the politics of a digitality figured as an immaterial spirit realm, when digital networks abet financial fraud and military surveillance via an "internet" powered by coal smoke, accessed on toxic landfill-destined devices manufactured by wage slaves in overexploited regions of the real world? Setting aside the logical possibility and engineering plausibility of "artificial intelligence" does AI as a rhetorical trope in legal and cultural discourse facilitate and rationalize unaccountable algorithmic mediation and muddy our thinking about "autonomous" weapons systems? How does social media facilitate the transformation of factual disputes over climate change, harm reduction, and the macroeconomics of public investment into polarizing culture wars? Are there appropriate and appropriable techniques at hand through which democratizations might resist these degradations? Might "The Future" still be more evenly distributed? Can we still count on the street finding its own uses for things?
Week One | August 27 | Introductions
Week Two | September 3 | Labor Day Holiday
Week Three | September 10 | Declarations of Independence
John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
-- Short Trip to the Library
Week Four | September 17 | Histories of the Internet
John Maynard Keynes, from "Europe Before the War" (a snippet will be posted on our blog)
Tom Standage on his book The Victorian Internet
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, Chapter Three: Commons on the Wires
Flavia Dzoden, When White Fears Become Big Data
Emily Drabinski, Ideologies of Boring Things: The Internet and Infrastructures of Race
Maggie Fox, Drug Giant Glaxo Teams Up With DNA Testing Company 23andMe
Saskia Sassen, Interactions of the Technical and the Social: Digital Formations of the Powerful and the Powerless
Week Five | September 24 | Tech/Net "Neutrality"
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Race And/As Technology
John Oliver, Net Neutrality Explainer
Malkia A. Cyril, The Antidote to Authoritarianism
Ian Bogost, Net Neutrality Was Never Enough
Zeynap Tufekci, How Social Media Took Us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
Week Six | October 1 | Cyberlibertarianism
Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Chapter 12: Conclusion
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, California Ideology
Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish
Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Tim May, The Cryptoanarchist Manifesto
Shannon Mattern, Databodies in Codespace
David Golumbia, Zealots of the Blockchain
Week Seven | October 8 | Privacy and Privation
David Golumbia and Chris Gilliard, There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia
David Brin, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society!
James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement
Corey Doctorow, You Can't Own Knowledge
Week Eight | October 15 | Publicity and Publication
Dan Gillmour, We The Media, Chapter One: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond
Clay Shirky, Blogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing
Alex Kaplan, Shorenstein Report Identifies Steps for Stemming the Spread of Fake News
Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko
Week Nine | October 22 | Revolution, Acceleration, Singularity, Seduction
Jaron Lanier, One Half of a Manifesto
Jason Sadowski, Potemkin AI
Jedediah Purdy, God of the Digirati
Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity
Nathan Pensky, Ray Kurzweil Is Wrong: The Singularity Is Not Near
Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, #ACCELERATE Manifesto
Yuk Hui, On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries
Marc Steigler, The Gentle Seduction
Week Ten | October 29 | Regulation, Reform, Regret
Frank Pasquale, from The Black Box Society
K. Sabeel Rahman, The New Octopus
The Economist, The World's Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil But Data: The Data Economy Demands a New Approach To Antitrust Rules
Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism
Karen Gregory, From Sharing to Cooperation: Lessons from Mondragon
Audrey Watters, The Regrets Industry
L.M. Sacasas, The Tech Backlash We Really Need
John Maynard Keynes, from "Europe Before the War" (a snippet will be posted on our blog)
Tom Standage on his book The Victorian Internet
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, Chapter Three: Commons on the Wires
Flavia Dzoden, When White Fears Become Big Data
Emily Drabinski, Ideologies of Boring Things: The Internet and Infrastructures of Race
Maggie Fox, Drug Giant Glaxo Teams Up With DNA Testing Company 23andMe
Saskia Sassen, Interactions of the Technical and the Social: Digital Formations of the Powerful and the Powerless
Week Five | September 24 | Tech/Net "Neutrality"
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Race And/As Technology
John Oliver, Net Neutrality Explainer
Malkia A. Cyril, The Antidote to Authoritarianism
Ian Bogost, Net Neutrality Was Never Enough
Zeynap Tufekci, How Social Media Took Us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
Week Six | October 1 | Cyberlibertarianism
Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Chapter 12: Conclusion
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, California Ideology
Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish
Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Tim May, The Cryptoanarchist Manifesto
Shannon Mattern, Databodies in Codespace
David Golumbia, Zealots of the Blockchain
Landon Winner, The Cult of Innovation
Katherine Hayles, Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Weiner and Cybernetic AnxietyWeek Seven | October 8 | Privacy and Privation
David Golumbia and Chris Gilliard, There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia
David Brin, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society!
James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement
Corey Doctorow, You Can't Own Knowledge
Alicia Garza, A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
Tom Slee, The Sharing Economy's Dirty Laundry
Evgeny Morozov, The Perils of PerfectionismTom Slee, The Sharing Economy's Dirty Laundry
Week Eight | October 15 | Publicity and Publication
Dan Gillmour, We The Media, Chapter One: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond
Clay Shirky, Blogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing
Noah Berlatsky Interviews DeRay Mckesson, Hashtag Activism Isn't A Cop-Out
Aaron Bady, Julian Assange and the Conspiracy to "Destroy the Invisible Government"Alex Kaplan, Shorenstein Report Identifies Steps for Stemming the Spread of Fake News
Tressie McMillan Cottom, "Who Do You Think You Are?": When Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity
Week Nine | October 22 | Revolution, Acceleration, Singularity, Seduction
Jaron Lanier, One Half of a Manifesto
Jason Sadowski, Potemkin AI
Jedediah Purdy, God of the Digirati
Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity
Nathan Pensky, Ray Kurzweil Is Wrong: The Singularity Is Not Near
Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, #ACCELERATE Manifesto
Yuk Hui, On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries
Marc Steigler, The Gentle Seduction
Week Ten | October 29 | Regulation, Reform, Regret
Frank Pasquale, from The Black Box Society
K. Sabeel Rahman, The New Octopus
The Economist, The World's Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil But Data: The Data Economy Demands a New Approach To Antitrust Rules
Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism
Karen Gregory, From Sharing to Cooperation: Lessons from Mondragon
Audrey Watters, The Regrets Industry
L.M. Sacasas, The Tech Backlash We Really Need
Week Eleven | November 5 | Final Paper In-Class Workshop
Week Twelve | November 12 | Meet Your Robot God
Screen film, Colossus: The Forbin Project
Frank Pasquale, Bittersweet Memories of Machine Learning, A Provocation
Week Fourteen | November 26 | Symposium (Second Sessions)
Week Fifteen | December 3 | The Language of the Future
Poetry Reading, Concluding Remarks (Hand in Final 10pp. Paper and Reading Notebooks)
Jenny Anderson, The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World
Laurie Anderson, "The Language of the Future"
Course Objectives:
One -- Introduce students to Science and Technology Studies, New Media Studies, Network Theory, Digital Humanities and situate these in respect to broader critical theoretical discourses: Marx on fetishized commodities, Benjamin on auratic media-artifacts, Adorno on the Culture Industry, Barthes on naturalizing myth, Debord on the Spectacle, Klein on the logo, and so on.
Two -- Discuss "science" as one among many forms of differently warranted belief (others: moral, legal, familial, instrumental, religious, ethical, political, subcultural, aesthetic); discuss "technoscience" as a particular and usually at once reductive and imperializing figuration and narrativization of the scientific; discuss "technology" as the collective elaboration of agency, not so much as a constellation of artifacts and techniques but as familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing investments in artifacts, techniques, and events with significance in the service of particular ends.
Three -- Discuss access-to-knowledge (a2k), end-to-end (e2e), many-to-many, peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, formations, ethoi as occasions for democratizing and anti-democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle; discuss "democracy" not as an eidos we approach but as ongoing interminable experimental implementations of the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them; discuss "democratization" as the struggle through which ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
Four -- Discuss the connection of a2k/p2p-formations and media/network theories grappling with these to relational, social, participatory aesthetic and curatorial practices and theories.
Five -- This course takes as its point of departure the insight that the novelties and perplexities of our experience of emerging p2p-formations are, on the one hand, clarified when understood in light of the unique formulations of Hannah Arendt's political thinking but also that these novelties and perplexities provide, on the other hand, illustrations through which to better understand Hannah Arendt's political thinking in its own right: Discussions will include her delineation of the political (as a site other than the private, the social, the violent, the cultural), her notion of the peer (as someone other than the citizen, the intimate, the colleague, the subject, the celebrity), and her accounts of civitas, revolution, public happiness, futurological think-tanks and AI, and totalitarianism both as manifested historically in Nazism and potentially in neoliberalism.
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