One-day Workshop, Hamilton Seminar Room (317), Eolas Building, North Campus, Maynooth University, Ireland, December 14th, 2017
Hosted by the Programmable City project at Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and the Department of Geography
Places are strictly limited so please register by December 1st Register Now
In line with the parallel concepts of slow food (e.g. Miele & Murdoch 2002) or slow scholarship (Mountz et al 2015), ‘slow computing’ (Fraser 2017) is a provocation to resist. In this case, the idea of ‘slow computing’ prompts users of contemporary technologies to consider ways of refusing the invitation to enroll in data grabbing architectures – constituted in complex overlapping ways by today’s technology services and devices – and by accepting greater levels of inconvenience while also pursuing data security, privacy, and even a degree of isolation from the online worlds of social networks.
The case for slow computing arises from the emerging form and nature of ‘the algorithmic age.’ As is widely noted across the sciences today (e.g. see Boyd & Crawford 2012; Kitchin 2014), the algorithmic age is propelled forward by a wide range of firms and government agencies pursuing the roll-out of data-driven and data-demanding technologies. The effects are varied, differentiated, and heavily debated. However, one obvious effect entails the re-formatting of consumers into data producers who (knowingly or unwittingly) generate millions of data points that technology firms can crunch and manipulate to understand specific markets and society as a whole, not to mention the public and private lives of everyday users. Once these users are dispossessed of the value they help create (Thatcher et al 2016), and then conceivably targeted in nefarious ways by advertisers and political campaigners (e.g. see Winston 2016), the subsequent implications for economic and democratic life are potentially far-reaching.
As such, as we move further into a world of ‘big data’ and the so-called ‘digital economy,’ there is a need to ask how individuals – as well as civil society organizations, small firms, small-scale farmers, and many others – might continue to make appropriate and fruitful use of today’s technologies, but while also trying to avoid becoming another data point in the new data-aggregating market. Does slow computing offer a way to navigate the algorithmic age while taking justice seriously? Can slow computing become a part of diverse strategies or tactics of resistance today? Just what are the possibilities and limitations of slow computing?
This one-day workshop will discuss these and other questions about slow computing.
For further information, please contact mussi@mu.ie
Programme
10.00-10.15 Welcome: Rob Kitchin & Alistair Fraser
10.15-11.30 Keynote address: Stefania Milan, Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor of Media Innovation (II) at the University of Oslo.
Paper session 1: Problematising the algorithmic age
11.30-11.45 Nancy Ettlinger, Algorithmic affordances for resistance
11.45-12.00 Jess Hoare, Slippery people: Technologization and technoratization of cities and bodies
12.00-12.15 Pip Thornton, Language in the age of algorithmic reproduction: a critique of linguistic capitalism and an artistic intervention
12.15-12.30 Chris Pinchen, Dance Like Your Microwave Isn’t Watching: (From CryptoParty to Teen Vogue via Emma Goldman and reverse engineered sex toys)
12.30-13.10 Discussion
13.10-14.00 Lunch
Paper Session 2: Rights and resistance in the algorithmic age
14.00-14.15 Aphra Kerr, Bringing the citizen back into the Algorithmic Age
14.15-14.30 Gabriela Avram, Community networks as a form of resistance
14.30-14.45 Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake, Digital disengagement as a right and a privilege: challenges and socio-political possibilities of refusal in dataised times
14.45-15.00 Marguerite Barry, Kalpana Shankar, Aphra Kerr, Slowcalisation – towards an ethic of care for human-data interactions
15.00-15.40 Discussion
15.40-16.00 Coffee
Paper Session 3: Practising slow computing
16.00-16.15 Paul O’Neill, Practice what we preach: Tactical media art as a form of political resistance
16.15-16.30 Rachel O’Dwyer, Coined Liberty: Cash as Resistance to Transactional Dataveillance
16.30-16.45 Lindsay Ems, Global Resistance through Technology Non-Use: An Amish Case Study
16.45-17.00 Kate Symons, OxChain – Reshaping development donors and recipients
17.00-17.40 Discussion