This week, we’ll meet on Zoom during our regularly scheduled class time, from 6 to 7:50pm:
Join Zoom Meeting (click the link for online access) — or call in via one-tap mobile: +16465588656,,971588561# US or International Numbers | Meeting ID: 971 588 561
Please note that, when you log in, you’ll be placed in a “Waiting Room” until I manually clear each of you for entry. Why? Because, apparently, some losers are “zoombombing.”
How might individuals or communities — or entire societies — resist surveillance, data capture, planned obsolescence, compulsory connectivity and productivity and other impositions of “surveillance capitalism”? At what scale, or what level of the “network stack,” might they meaningfully intervene? How might their subjectivities inform the politics — and particularly the risks — or their resistant action? What verbs are used to describe these actions — avoidance, non-use, resistance, refusal, “dark sousveillance” (Simone Browne), obfuscation, etc. — and what are their implied politics?
6:00 – 6:10 Establishing Our Zoom Code of Conduct
6:10 – 6:30 Lab: Emily will walk us through Supply Chain and Product Investigations (one of the methods we would have explored last week), along with other cartographic and mediated strategies for resistance. Slides here.
6:30 – 6:50 Artifact Analysis Presentations: Catherine, Orshi, Whit
7:00 – 7:40 Discussion of the Week’s Theme and Readings
7:40 – 7:50 Resistance in the Age of Corona (optional; if you’ve had enough Corona talk, you’re welcome to duck out early)
To be reviewed for today’s class:
- Choose any three of the following:
- Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, “How to Obfuscate,” Nautilus (June 29, 2017).
- Simone Browne, “Surveillance Studies” in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015): 12-23 — especially 18-23.
- Seeta Peña Gangadharan, “Digital Exclusion: A Politics of Refusal,” in Rob Reich, Lucy Bernholz, and Helene Landemore, eds., Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (forthcoming 2020 – please do not circulate!).
- Skim T. Lewis, S. P. Gangadharan, M. Saba, and T. Petty, Digital Defense Playbook: Community Tools for Reclaiming Data (Our Data Bodies, 2018).
- Amit S. Rai, “Introduction” and “Diagramming Affect” in Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Duke University Press, 2019): 1-38, 128-49.
- Gautam Bhan, “Stalling: How to Save the Global City,” Public Books (June 11, 2019).
- See the work of American Artist and Tega Brain’s Unfit Bits.
- There are dozens of other resources on our Are.na Channel on “Resisting Smartness!”
- Please also check out our class’s Shared Resource Repository