Within loops of non-belongings, the alien is damned to migrate between nowhere and elsewhere, as a homeless hybrid. A stateless wanderer of endless exercises, of too many stretches, never enough to fit the repressive grammars of fictional categories. A forever stranger, deeply desiring to return to an unknown home far away in another galaxy. Lonely, yet sometimes floating in-between, boundlessly fluid. An outlandish gaze looking beyond earthly matters glimpsing into the future.
See also: Deserts of the Unreal
The original idea behind artificial intelligence is humanizing machines. Towards this end, an intelligent system that usually consists of stimulus perception, stimulus processing (classification), and learnability (pattern recognition) is implemented in a machine to enable independent decision-making. The foundation for this decision-making is taken from algorithms that can derive correlations by comparing large quantities of data. To do this, science uses various methods and techniques towards, such as the modelling of neuronal processes in the human brain, so-called deep learning. With this frequently-used method, more complex content can be grasped by linear and non-linear artificial neurons, as in face or character recognition. But machines are not capable of recognizing solutions that are general and not based on problem solving. The quality of the data sets used also represents a weakness, since they are developed primarily by white developers and hence foster the exclusion of marginalized, non-white positions and prejudice-laden solutions.
See also: The Maw Of
Artificial reproduction includes all techniques that are medically possible to fulfil the wish to have a child that cannot be conceived by sexual intercourse. In so doing, sperm is prepared with the eggs either outside the body in a test tube or within the body, if necessary from sperm and/or eggs from a donor (heterologous artificial insemination). Hormone therapies help to stimulate the fertility of the body to thus achieve a pregnancy. The birth rate of artificial reproductive technology is at a maximum of 20 percent. In Germany, insurance only covers only heterosexual couples who can fulfill the medical and financial requirements.
See also: Womb Walk
Augmented Reality (AR) is located on Paul Milgram’s reality-virtuality continuum in the intermediate realm of mixed reality. This realm refers to the overlap of virtual and real worlds. AR refers to the world perceived as reality by people that is expanded by digital additions such as music, graphic design elements, videos, haptic aspects, smell, or 3D animations. Technically speaking, this means that the perception of reality has to be provided by a smartphone or special AR glasses that is able to integrate the virtual elements. The interaction of reality and digital expansion takes place in real time; all digital objects integrated in reality adapt three-dimensionally to it. Possible areas of application could include functional assistance for the provision of additional information or the sensory expansion of art works that can be experienced.
See also: Black Box AR
In computer science, a Black Box is a unit of software or hardware that interacts (with the system that it is embedded in) entirely through its interface. The details of its implementation are obscure. More broadly, a black box is a device that can be viewed in terms of input and output, without any knowledge of its conversion mechanism. What happens inside it is opaque; veiled in shadow. Nevertheless, imperfect or partial understanding of a black box may not affect one’s ability to make some use of it, or to observe its effects in the real world. Alienation obtains where such a gap in comprehension is identified and then accepted as the cost of doing business. When agency and social space (tangible life goods) are premised upon traffic with the mysterious functionality of black boxes, trust is at issue.
A bot – the word is derived from robot –is an automated computer program that can carry out repetitive tasks on its own. In recent years, the “social bots” that are used on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have made headlines. Taking the form of human actors and disguised behind fake profiles, social bots are programmed to respond automatically to particular keywords by liking, commenting on and sharing posts or even publishing content themselves. They are increasingly being used as part of election campaigns and to spread misinformation. “Chat bots”, meanwhile, are designed to communicate interactively with users by means of a text-based dialogue system, and search engine bots, or “web crawlers”, automatically trawl the internet looking for websites that they can then index and make findable via the Google search function. Bots thus encroach significantly on our everyday lives and play a major part in how information circulates online.
See also: The Bots
Computational imaging systems, based on software and algorithms, have become an important part of today’s digital and smartphone cameras. One simple example is the common panorama function available on smartphone apps and digital cameras, where an algorithm calculates and puts together multiple images into a seamless continuous picture. More complex use of computation in photography can be found in so-called machine vision and machine learning algorithms. These are programs that analyse the image data and draw out specific information. Think of current software that recognises faces or detects objects, auto- editing tools or (face) filters that modify the live camera feed of one’s smartphone on apps like Snapchat and Instagram. Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and computer-generated images are all examples of how computation and software extend and transform photography and our understanding of it.
See also: The Bots
Computer-generated imagery, or CGI for short, is a term drawn from the world of film production. CGI is not recorded with a (film or photo) camera but computer-generated as two- or three-dimensional graphic images (computer graphics) and set in motion (computer animation). CGI is used in films, video games, art and advertising – it is also deployed in other areas, such as medical imaging, simulations or 3D-architectural models. The first developments in photorealistic CGI – and thus the computer’s evolution as a visual medium modelled onphotography – date back to advances made in the 1970s that were largely driven by the film industry, especially in the area of special effects.
See also: The Bots
A condividual is the body of reconnected of data, a hybrid cluster of information.
See also: New Extractivism
Conspiracy theories refer to ideologies that offer a monocausal explanation for a threat that is subjectively felt. According to political scientist Michael Barkun, they are based on three assumptions: nothing happens by chance, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected. The foundation of the argumentation is a normative understanding of values and the dualism of “good” and “evil.” The threat is largely seen in (covert) illegal and long-term activities of several individuals or influential, exclusive networks who are accused of evil intentions like the destruction of humanity. There have been conspiracy theories ever since ancient times. Currently popular conspiracy theories include the purported threat from chemtrails or the claim that Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates implanted microchips in vaccines against the coronavirus. Fake news can be an indication of conspiracy theories, but does not alone constitute a conspiracy theory. The term “conspiracy theory” has a negative connotation and is never used by those who believe in these theories themselves.
See also: Open Secret, A Certain Kind of Doom Scroll
The content moderator cleans up verbal barf. They are a gatekeeper, an online filter. They are responsible for regulating user-generated content making certain that users respect the rules and guidelines for interaction set up by a specific online platform. If content offends with the code (e.g. spam, harassment, fake news, or hate speech—racist, homophobic etc.), the moderator removes it from the platform and informs the user in question of his/her/their misdeeds and possible suspension. Very few online platforms only operate with human content moderators, and many employ machine learning systems—AI moderators— as a first filter to catch most of the bile.
See also: The Bots
Cryptoart consists of digital, non-physical artworks like paintings, music, or videos that can be authenticated with NFTs. As a rule, they can be easily reproduced. With this recent technology, many until now unknown artists have been able to attain high prices for their works through speculation. Until now, the discourse of cryptoart has largely focused on value generation and less the art itself. Over the long term, cryptoart could have a greater influence on the standard concept of art, especially on issues of the access to the market and relations of ownership.
See also: Nº6092
Capture agents can take many forms and sizes. From the tiny pieces of code, crawlers that wander the web collecting information about each web page, over the sensors catching heartbeats and surveillance cameras capturing our faces, to the complex network of satellites orbiting Earth and locating devices. They can see reality through a full range of the electromagnetic spectrum: from gamma rays and x-rays, through infrared and visible light, to micro and radio waves. They can be invisible like a Facebook pixel or massive like a 500m wide radio telescope.
See also: New Extractivism
Consciousness slipping away
Surfing surveilled surfaces
Swimming, drifting, draining
Forgetting the bodies following me
Bodies following
On limited public space
Controlling dark shadows
Fixed coordinates
Of traces
Left behind
Revealed location
Unclear to me
Travelling online
Getting lost
Within commodified tales
Between thirsty digital drylands
No hiding place
In content
Yet there is more
Never went beyond
What possibilities?
Vaste and daring
Future possibilities
Maybe
See also: Losing Yourself in the Dark
The forest, one of the last remaining post-industrial idylls, hence turned popular refuge by day. Keeper of a thousand and more gnarled silhouettes and secrets after dark. If anything, a subjective observation of perceived universal validity: seems like the majority seeks for safeguard in the noise of the sun, nevertheless someone or something ensconces themselves behind the not yet tangible, thick (radio) silence. For only those, who dare to move towards the counterpart, may decipher this silence.
See also: Losing Yourself in the Dark
A photographic image shot with a smartphone or a modern-day camera or captured as a screenshot is digital. It consists of electronic data stored in the form of a binary code made up of zeros and ones, which appear on the screen as a photograph thanks to algorithms – a precisely defined series of instructions on the basis of which a computer program will carry out specific tasks step by step. An image file also stores additional data that is invisible to the eye, so-called metadata. Metadata provides information, for example, about the date and time a photograph was taken and the geographical coordinates of where it was shot. This means that when we circulate images, we give away more information about ourselves than we are usually aware of. It is common for massive amounts of image data to accumulate on our digital devices over a period of decades. Although this may seem immaterial, the storage depends on space and material objects like hardware and infrastructure, in turn having a major ecological impact on the environment.
See also: The Bots
Contrary to white imaginations of a vast no man’s lands, deserts are culturally vivid areas. Still, waves of (neo-) colonialism keep flooding these drylands, destroying local communities, the soil nurturing them, sucking it dry, and forcing them to migrate. Desertification is a devastating consequence of human caused climate change. As Frantz Fanon reminds us, the wretched earth could drown in Colonialism, Racism, and Violence. This is no metaphor. Neither is desertification.
See also: Choose Your Future
By digital colonialism, I understand the deployment of imperial power in the form of new rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems serving the interests of the dominant power. Traditional colonial practices of control over critical assets, trade routes, natural resources and exploitation of human labor are still deeply embedded in the contemporary supply chains, logistics and assembly lines of digital content, products and infrastructure.
See also: New Extractivism
Freelancers, self-employed, unemployed and all those grey areas in between that now constitute the world of labor need to spend more and more hours maintaining their profiles and offering in(directly) their expertise, experience, success stories, opinions and documentation of their works and activities, in a similar fashion to sex workers in the windows of red-light districts. Digital identity labor is the forced labor of the 21st century and opting out is essentially a fantasy.
See also: New Extractivism
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze coined the term in his essay “Societies of Control”, an expansion of Michel Foucault’s theory on the disciplinary society. The dividual is a reckoning with the Western idea of community, which is based on the interactions between the two entities of individual and society. Dividuals cannot, like the individual, be understood as separate autonomous bodies co-existing within the abstract framework of society. Instead, dividuals should be seen as the mass—a great collective hive mind—divided from within. Dividuals are thus (re-)connected and move as samples of data, e.g. through common denominators like affect, clicks and likes.
See also: New Extractivism
Data Healing is an overarching concept referring to various practices and methods to reverse the consequences of algorithmic violence: a productive transformation of the trauma into new technologies, practices, and care work for self and others. These include unlearning own ways of using social media and technologies, learning new approaches, the active protection of personal data online, and enlightenment about harmful digital practices and technologies.
See also: Open Secret, New Extractivism
Data trauma results from various forms of algorithmic violence and describes the psychological and physical impacts of navigation through digital infrastructures that are constructed so that they exploit, categorize, extract, and monetarize individuals. The user is subjected to these practices, usually capitalist in nature, and not perceived as a person, but as a series of habits and a commodity with a certain value (or no value at all). In this way, individuals’ potential to develop and grow is negated and power relations are established based on these technologies. For the users, traumatic experiences take place in their digitalized and algorithmized everyday life by way of interaction with algorithmic systems and decisions.
See also: Open Secret, New Extractivism
Extractivism refers to the process of removing large quantities of raw or natural materials, particularly for export. Most extracted resources are exported abroad because there is a lack of demand for these raw materials in their country of origin.
See also: New Extractivism
Face filters like the ones provided by Snapchat are Augmented Reality (AR) applications that allow us to insert virtual filters onto our face in real time when taking a selfie. AR is a technology that enables users to visually connect the real world with virtual objects, either by superimposing computer- generated objects on a real space or conflating the two in a process of fusion. For this reason, AR is also known as Enhanced Reality or Mixed Reality. The hybrid nature of AR distinguishes it from Virtual Reality (VR). While AR supplements reality, VR is a complete simulation of the visible environment, immersing users in the feeling of being in another world. AR has become a familiar feature of modern life in the form of theNintendo mobile game Pokémon Go, which became a global craze in 2016, or smart glasses such as Google Glass, a product that was released on the US market as a beta version in 2014. AR is also used in engineering, medicine, advertising, art and entertainment as well as in the military industry.
See also: The Bots
Fake News is a term used to refer to false information spread by groups or individuals for political, personal, economic, or satirical intentions that often goes viral in social media like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. The spread of fake news is supported not just by real users, but also by social bots. Content can include fake death notices, false claims, or bizarre conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. Their narratives reflect doubt on given facts. They create a “factual situation” that cannot be backed up at all or only in part by using standard, ethical-moral journalistic practice or science. Fake news can lead to very concrete actions that can sometimes endanger democracy, like the storm on the Capitol Building in Washington in January 2021. Fun fact: multipliers of fake news use the expression themselves to articulate their mistrust of the established media.
See also: A Certain Kind of Doom Scroll
Generation Z (also referred to as GEN Z, Generation Greta or Generation TikTok) is the sociocultural term used for young people who grew up from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, sandwiched between Generation Y and Generation α. This generation is particularly characterized by a self-evident approach to digital media and apps (Digital Natives 2.0), an increased need for safety and leisure, and a focus on sustainability and health. They are politically involved, but have a critical relationship to established parties. In the social media, they like to communicate humorously and critically with memes that play with pop-culture and political references.
See also: Choose Your Future
The wide depths of water harbor divine eternities. Sirens, Mermaids and Mami-Wata, almost and yet not quite the same eternity in half human-feminine dress. Mami-Wata, the dreaded Vodun Spirit of the Continent and its diaspora, for on her too adheres the human fear of the nurturing, watering force that is the female truth. A fear soaked in bitter yearning.
See also: Choose Your Future
The hyperreal is found within gloss coated simulations masking its sticky insides and within feverish dreams hallucinating the mirages of hyperreality aka efficient marketing. Nothing real to hold onto. No clear distinctions between the real and the depicted real—from local screens to ever multiplying digital oceans, diving through the clearnet, crossing high seas to the abundance of open space. An imitation of real desires, rooted in the real, turning hyperreal. Is there realness within the hyperreal?
See also: Deserts of the Unreal
The first face most people see in the morning is the personalized screen of their digital devices. The display forms the surface, a common physical boundary, between their bodies, their operating systems; its user interface becomes a portal to a common language. An operating system (OS) interface is the term used to describe the programming structure that groups information in order to support the flow of information provided by digital technology, e.g. a Java-Script, while an user interface is the design that makes it possible for the user to interact with the OS.
See also: New Extractivism
Keynesian economics (sometimes Keynesianism, named after the economist John Maynard Keynes) are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. Instead, it is influenced by a host of factors [… like] production, employment, and inflation […] Fiscal policy actions (taken by the government) and monetary policy actions (taken by the central bank) can help stabilize economic output, inflation, and unemployment over the business cycle.
See also: Choose Your Future
A machine learning system, or MLS, is an algorithmic tool, which lends computer systems the ability to learn from and speculate about data. It is a division within artificial intelligence technology which believes that computing systems are independently (and preferably entirely without any human inference) able to navigate through and learn from collected data.
See also: New Extractivism
Social media is used to circulate short user-generated videos that serve as tutorials providing a step-by-step explanation of a particular topic or operation. Make-up tutorials represent a popular format for introducing cosmetic products and techniques and have now established themselves as a discrete genre with a specific community on a wide range of platforms. Owing to its uncontroversial, nondescript content, this popular online format is increasingly being used to put out veiled political messages whose content would otherwise become subject to censorship and be deleted. The users thus provide information not only about lip gloss and eyeshadow but also about government abuses and political impropriety: an example here is a make-up tutorial in summer 2020 by US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that was distributed by Vogue and contained a feminist, political message.
Memes are mostly humorous images and videos that are shared and edited by users of social media. In most cases, they are humorous, ironic or caustic comments on social, political and cultural issues or current affairs. They can be made with the help of a meme generator, which can crop the images (mostly sourced from the internet) into a rectangular form and overlay them with a short text, usually written in the Impact typeface. The most popular animal used for memes is the cat. The furry feline appears, for example, as lolcat (derived from the abbreviation LOL, or “laugh out loud”, and the word cat) or as ceiling cat.The term meme is derived from the Greek word mimēma (“imitate”) and was coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene in 1976. In the wake of digitisation, this definition was eventually used to describe the viral internet phenomena of image-text creations.
See also: Losing Yourself in the Dark
Perspective: The European continent of the 21st century
Prod: expansive empires and colonization – exhaustive industrialization – exploitation of territories overseas – nation statehood – capitalism – mechanization – digitalization
Pursuit: The self-righteous occupation of material and immaterial goods and forces on a national level, as means of assurance of continuity during increasing globalization
Prospect: Collapse (if insufficient interpersonal solidarity persists)
See also: Choose Your Future
In the information age, everything becomes a potential frontier for expansion and extraction—from the depth of DNA code in every single cell of the human organism, to vast frontiers of human emotions, behavior and social relations, to nature as a whole. At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: thousands of corporate and government actors compete to win the territories of our behavioral, emotional and cognitive landscapes. Once the territory is invaded, the process of enclosure and exploitation is established.
See also: New Extractivism
Nonhuman labor is the production happening outside the human/anthropocentric realm. We can zoom out into deep time and consider the labor of prehistoric plants and animals embedded in the formation of carbon that is being burned as a fuel for the data centers, infrastructure and our devices. Nevertheless, we do not need to go so far into the past, and we can try to observe all the labor existing within the microbiome of our bodies.
See also: New Extractivism
Neuralink is the name of a U.S. company cofounded by Elon Musk in 2016. The core of the business is focused on developing an implant that with very fine electrodes could be plugged into the tissue of the human brain to create a link between neurons and computers. The goal is not only to heal diseases and physical handicaps due to brain damage by way of electric stimulation, but also to transfer information about the body to technical devices (key terms: telepathic control, memory storage). Until now, this application has only been tested on pigs, and there is no foreseeable future date for use on humans. Neuroscientists view Neuralink with skepticism.
See also: The Maw Of
NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens, also known as “Nifties”) is the certification of an object only available in the digital world that has a certain value or function that cannot be exchanged. To protect this value, the object’s relations of ownership need to made understandable in order to verify their uniqueness. Transaction details, that is information on the sellers, purchasers, and the transaction sum are stored in the distributed public data bank-blockchain and can be inspected over the long term. Since most digital artworks are easily faked, the value is based primarily on the certificate of genuineness. But the linkage of physical artworks with NFT also represents a possibility, as the project initiated by Damien Hirst The Currency shows. NFTs, in contrast to crypto currencies, like bitcoins, are not randomly exchangeable, but can be exchanged for other NFTs due to their value stability. Due to the complex computing and storage requirements involved in the blockchain and its processes, NFTs use a great deal of energy and are thus anything but climate neutral.
See also: Understanding NFTs
Ocean storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) is a method of carbon sequestration. The concept of storing carbon dioxide in the ocean was first proposed by Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti in his 1976 paper “On Geoengineering and the carbon dioxide problem.” Since then, the concept of sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans has been investigated by scientists, engineers, and environmental activists. 39,000 GtC (gigatonnes of carbon) currently reside in the oceans while only 750 GtC are in the atmosphere.
See also: Choose Your Future
What possibilities does a workless future behold within rapidly shifting digital coordinates? Could a Postwork society be a utopian dream of leisurely freedom, radical change, daring to dream of hopeful future visions towards practices of social equality, eradicating capitalism? Or could a Postwork society reveal itself as the embodiment of a dystopian sleep paralysis, petrifying our bodies by a great automation increasing systematic exploitation?
See also: Choose Your Future
Posthumanism is a philosophical perspective of how change is enacted in the world. As a conceptualization and historicization of both agency and the “human,” it is different from those conceived through humanism. Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does not completely intend or control.
See also: Choose Your Future
In the age of total digitalization, immaterial attention, such as streams and views and likes, functions as the most powerful currency. The more the public is invested in a topic, an issue, or a person, the more likely said subject is to receive material funding, here public sponsorship. Thus, first and foremost, visibility, coupled with attention, coupled with public interest, leads to longer-term visibility. Simultaneously, the expiry date of relevance and currency shifts into fragile uncertainty.
See also: Choose Your Future
Paranoia is a psychotic disturbance that is a frequent component of personality disorder. It can range in strength between a paranoid personality disorder and schizophrenia. As a state, it includes feelings, thoughts, and perceptions that are shaped by a strong mistrust of other individuals and institutions. Among those affected, it is expressed in the emotional form of fear, doubt, and rage, and results in the misinterpretation of facts, delusions of persecution, and hearing voices. In addition, they interpret positive or neutral behavior as negative and react strongly emotionally wo rejection or the sense of feeling insulted. Paranoid behavior can apply to individuals, but also to larger groups or organizations.
A reaction video is typically posted online on social media. Instead of showing the actual event, it consists of a series of different people reacting to what has been filmed. While these videos have their origins in the Japanese TV shows of the 1970s, they mainly circulate today on the popular video platform YouTube. The emotions of the people on camera, which may range from laughter to disgust, pity and fear, are relayed to the viewers, making the videos part of the attention economy and an apt expression of it, as attention is turned into a good that can be exploited within a value-added chain. Converted into a lucrative resource, an economic asset and form of social currency, spectatorship is thus integrated more strongly than ever into capitalist cycles. Our likes, clicks and shares fuel this system and ultimately make us complicit in it.
See also: The Daemonic & the Aspirational Self
By the 1980s the Roswell incident, that transpired in the year of 1947, had put forth two strong, opposing camps: Believers and Non-believers.
The camp of believers continues to stick with the lore according to which remnants of an unidentified flying object covered in hieroglyphs were supposedly sighted at a ranch near Corona not far from Roswell, New Mexico.
Fact-oriented Non-believers of the scientific-community however postulate those remnants were scraps of Flight No. 4‘s research balloons.
The unifying reality: the crash.
Whether today’s followers correlate the incident to the presently ongoing global pandemic, remains to be verified
See also: Deserts of the Unreal
RAND (Research AND Development) Corporation is an American non-profit thinktank founded in 1948 that has helped advise the political decision making and strategy of the American government in particular from a scientific point of view. The RAND Corporation relies on scientific research to react to military, economic, and social developments. As one of the largest and most influential agents in the scientific community, it grows constantly, but the core team never increases over fifty. Outstanding research papers include subjects such as the environment, transportation, public safety, or obesity.
See also: Choose Your Future
Stack means the interplay of coordinated data sets, coded language systems, structuring frameworks, and digital tools that form a tangible and accessible whole. On the surface, plurality thus culminates in singularity. And, ideally, transforms the idea into the clickbait. A stack may additionally be read as an idiom with a materialistic character–it refers to a solid quantity with an estimated value of 1,000 simple yet comprehensible dreams.
See also: NM Webdex
I understand generating ‘technoheritage’ as a way of practicing resistance: taking back and re-possessing cultural data and its built-in narratives.
I started to use the term technoheritage many years ago when museums began to digitize their collections and create what they described as ‘digital assets’ or ‘digital artefacts’. The law researcher Sonia K. Katyal had then named an article about 3D printing and intellectual copyrights “technoheritage”. I pondered the term: whether it was just a legal formulation or something independent of the physical object, which could be translated, mediated, used and remixed. For me, it was a separate entity, and I used technoheritage to describe it. Heritage is a term that looks to the past but for me, technoheritage looks towards another scenario of the future. Rather than preserving information, it can contribute with new material and be used as a starting point for artistic research, remixing, and even updating objects.
See also: The Post-truth Museum