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networks

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FCJ-187 The Droning of Experience

By ⋅ October 8, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Mark Andrejevic Pomona College Recent debates over the fate of automated weaponry raise the question of pre-empting pre-emption: might it be possible to thwart the seeming ineluctable development of so-called ‘killer robots,’ that can respond to perceived threats more efficiently and rapidly than humans? The processes of disarmament and pre-emption collided in the ‘bold action’ of a top United Nations official who issued a call to ban the ominously-acronymed Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs). ‘You have the opportunity to take pre-emptive action and ensure that the ultimate decision to end life remains firmly under human control,’ UN Director-General Michael Moller told the participants in a 2014 conferenced on killer robots (Agence France Presse, 2014). The difference between LAWs and other lethal weapons lies in the command decision – that is, the final determination regarding whether to fire (bomb, destroy, etc.). If the command decision always incorporates a human at some point […]

FCJ-185 An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic Regulation

By ⋅ October 8, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Western University, Canada Let us begin with indefinition (the indefinite): specifically the question of information —proceeding from there to the myriad methods and mechanisms used to capture and control (or ‘net’) it. There is no single, unified mechanism governing the definition and distribution of information today, and this may account for some of the major tensions and tendencies in the so-called ‘information era’. The concept of ‘information’ itself has no single, unified definition, even though there are various theories that have been put forward to conceptualise it — as some ‘thing’ akin to a commodity-cum-object that can be possessed (indeed purchased), traded and legislated, or alternatively (for example) as a ‘process’ akin to signal-transmission, feedback- and/or stimulus-response circuits (‘information transfer’ and ‘information flow’). Hence, although information may be a useful and much-used idea, there is as yet no agreement on its basic definition and […]

FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway

By ⋅ September 30, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Svitlana Matviyenko University of Western Ontario Patricia Ticineto Clough Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Alexander R. Galloway New York University Introduction The work of these two authors is well known to anyone whose research concerns matters of affect and biopolitics, software, networks and gaming, interface culture and communication, political economy of media and information, the systems of measure and control addressed in the contexts of French theory, feminist and speculative thought, Marxism or psychoanalysis. We were lucky to have them among the keynotes for our Apps and Affect conference, where their talks sparked an interesting exchange that impacted a number of the conference conversations. Afterwards, I suggested to Patricia and Alex that they elaborate on aspects of their discussion; this invitation resulted in the following conversation, which took place via email between April and December 2014. Patricia Ticineto Clough is a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Queens College and the […]

Issue 25: Apps and Affect

By ⋅ September 29, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Introduction [1] In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue. This issue […]

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