Interface and Data Biopolitics in the Age of Hyperconnectivity
Design for Next 12th EAD Conference Sapienza University of Rome 12-‐14 April 2017
Copyright © 2016. The copyright of each paper in this conference proceedings is the property of the author(s). Permission is granted to reproduce copies of these works for purposes relevant to the above conference, provided that the author(s), source and copyright notice are included on each copy. For other uses please contact the author(s).
Interface and Data Biopolitics in the Age of Hyperconnectivity.
Implications for Design
Salvatore Iaconesi a a ISIA Design Florence *Corresponding author e-‐mail: [email protected]
Abstract:
This article describes their biopolitical implications for design from psychological, cultural, legal, functional and aesthetic/perceptive ways, in the framework of Hyperconnectivity: the condition according to which person-‐to-‐person, person-‐to-‐machine and machine-‐to-‐machine communication progressively shift to networked and digital means. A definition is given for the terms of "interface biopolitics" and "data biopolitics", as well as evidence supporting these definitions and a description of the technological, theoretical and practice-‐based innovations bringing them into meaningful existence. Interfaces, algorithms, artificial intelligences of various types, the tendency in quantified self and the concept of "information bubbles" will be examined in terms of interface and data biopolitics, from the point of view of design, and for their implications in terms of freedoms, transparency, justice and accessibility to human rights. A working hypothesis is described for technologically relevant design practices and education processes, in order to confront with these issues in critical, ethical and inclusive ways.
Keywords:
Hyperconnectivity, Algorithms, Biopolitics, Ethics, Data
In her “Hymn of Acxiom” folk singer Vienna Teng (2013) starts off with lyrics “Somebody hears you, you know that…”, in what seems to be a church choir. After listening for a bit, the real topic the artist is discussing about becomes clear: Acxiom is not a benevolent divinity somewhere in the cosmo-‐sphere caringly waiting to hear the troubles of his beloved human beings, but, rather, a high-‐powered data broker which has been described as “the Private NSA” (Tom’s Guide, 2013), as the silent, largest consumer data processor in the world (Fortune Magazine, 2004) and as “Big Brother in Arkansas” (NY Times, 2012). The topic of the song is data-‐surveillance. The idea for the song came while the author was pursuing an MBA at the University of Michigan: a colleague working with
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This scenario also describes a progressive asymmetry in the distribution of power, rights, freedoms and opportunities (Tufekci, 2014; boyd, 2012). As a matter of fact, it is practically and psychologically impossible for human beings to understand which and how much data is captured about them, how and why it is used, and what effects it has about their lives. The complex interplay among users; organisation; algorithms; national, international and global regulations and agreements, or lack of them; data and information flows within user experiences in the physical and online domains cause grey areas to emerge, at levels which are legal, cultural, psychological, ethical and philosophical (White, 2016). "Code is Law", Lawrence Lessig (2006) once said. And this is really the case nowadays. With thousands of updates and modifications to the interfaces, algorithms, data capture and usage profiles which are performed each month to the systems of popular services, potentially provoking radical changes to the implications for privacy, control and accountability, it is practically impossible for legal and cultural systems not only to adapt and react, but also and more importantly to perceive such changes and the effects they have on our freedoms, rights and expectations. If a national government needs to pass through a whole legislative process to approve a new privacy law, an operator like Facebook can change a few lines of code and yield substantial impact on users’ privacy profiles. With hundreds of thousands of modifications on platforms like these each year, it is easy to nterface and Data Biopolitics in the Age of Hyperconnectivity comprehend the reach of this kind of issue. Moreover, many of these changes are temporary, beta versions, running in parallel for different users for A/B testing purposes, making the situation even more complex. Things get even more radical in the case of algorithmic governance of processes, where technological entities assume progressively higher degrees of agency (and opacity). The Flash Crashes of the stock markets in 2010 are a demonstration: autonomous algorithmic agents gone berserk causing losses for billions of dollars, outside of any legal or cultural or perceptive framework (Menkveld, 2013). As a result, the levels of power and control exercised on human beings and their societies by the systems that they use are augmenting at exponential levels, and there are progressively fewer and less effective ways for people to perceive and comprehend such processes. On top of all of this, the dissemination of interfaces ubiquitously across devices, applications, websites and other products and services for which today everything can represent a front-‐end for digital and data based systems, further augments the incapability to understand the data and information which is captured from our behaviour and its flows and uses (Weber, 2010). Sharing a picture of our holidays at the beach on social networking sites does not imply the fact that it is clear, for us, that we are producing marketing relevant data about our tastes, consumption levels and geographical locations. And neither is the fact that while using wearable technologies or smart IoT appliances in our daily lives the data that gets captured can be used for marketing, health, insurance, financial and even job purposes. Furthermore, the rise of the Stacks (Madrigal, 2012) and, more in general, of “walled gardens”, or those situations in which applications, services and products pertain to closed, proprietary ecosystems which are not open source and for which both the front-‐ends and back-‐ends of the systems are opaque and inaccessible for inspection and understanding further aggravate this problem. Both those applications directly and, indirectly, the service levels they provide (for example through APIs, social logins, application frameworks) on the one hand make applications and services easy and rapid to develop and deploy, but, on the other hand, subject them to the concentration of power which these large operators represent. It is very convenient to design and develop anything from online services to network-‐connected physical products using, for example, Google’s, Apple’s, or Facebook’s platforms and services. But, by doing this, it is automatic that our products and services start producing data and information for these large operators, allowing them to interconnect these across a rich variety of domains: if I develop application A and someone else develops application B which is completely different, and we both use, for example, Facebook’s social login to implement access services, Facebook will benefit from the data generated from both applications, from the analytics which it desires to capture without even sharing them with A or B, and will be also able to interconnect both data flows with their own. For example, if application A captures, for example, my geographic location (it is, for example, an application which allows me to find where I parked my car) and I have configured my Facebook account so that Facebook is not allowed to know my geographic location, Facebook will have my position anyway, through application A. This kind of reasoning can be applied to all the applications, products and services that use these frameworks. These facts are valid and relevant for the users of these platforms, but also for the people conceiving and creating these systems, including designers, engineers, managers, administrators, public and private, who progressively lose the possibility (culturally and technically) to understand the implications of their designs. ALVATORE IACONESI An evidence of this occurrence is the emergence of knowledge and information "bubbles". In the age of Hyperconnectivity (Wellman, 2001) information abundance quickly turns into information overload (O’Reilly, 1980). Therefore, relevance becomes an invaluable competitive advantage and attention a precious currency (Davenport, Beck, 2013). This is why large operators (from social media services, to search engines, to news and media operators, all the way up to the ones which extract information from devices, appliances and other services) use specific algorithms to try to interpret users’ behaviors to try to understand which content might be more relevant for them, filtering out all the rest (or giving it minor priority, visually or hierarchically) and, at the same time, ensuring that the content which generates more revenue for them is granted higher shares of our attention space, to maximize earnings. These algorithms and software agents also have the effect of tendentially excluding all the rest, closing us in "bubbles", in which what is outside is not even perceived, or very hard to perceive (Pariser, 2011). Information spectacularization (for example through data and information visualization) further weights down on these processes. Bratton (2008) describes how spectacularized information visualizations (also called “data smog”) “distance people—now ‘audiences’ for data—even further from their abilities and responsibilities to understand relationships between the multiple ecologies in which they live, and the possibilities for action that they have.” These elements – bubbles, algorithmic governance of information and information spectacularization –, thus, may bear the possibility that individuals progressively inhabit a controlled infosphere, in which a limited number of subjects is able to determine what is accessible, usable and, most important of all, knowable. This power asymmetry also implies the fact that users can systematically be unknowingly exposed to experiments intended to influence their sphere of perception to drive them to adopt certain behaviors over other ones. This is exactly what happened with Facebook in 2014 (Rushe, 2014; Booth 2014). In an experiment (Kramer et al, 2014), Facebook manipulated information appearing on 689 thousand users’ homepages to study the phenomenon of “emotional contagion” answering the question: how to users’ emotional expression change when they are exposed to content which is emotionally characterized in specific ways. By algorithmically filtering in or out content with specific characteristics they were able to induce particular expressions. The study (Kramer et al, 2014) concluded: “Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-‐scale emotional contagion via social networks.” This is not the first case: dozens of other experiments (Hill, 2014) dealing with hundreds of thousands of unknowing users included analyses of A/B tests, content filtering for specific purposes, comment and interaction analysis for predictions, spreading of rumors and manufactured information, self-‐censorship, social influence in advertising, and more. In 2014, Jonathan Zittrain described an experiment in which Facebook attempted a civic-‐engineering feat to answer the question: “Could a social network get otherwise-‐indolent people to cast a ballot in that day’s congressional midterm elections?” (Zittrain, 2014). The answer was positive. And the past nterface and Data Biopolitics in the Age of Hyperconnectivity The scenario described in the previous sections has important impacts on the “knowability”, “readability”, accessibility and usability of the world, both in how people use it and interact with it, and in how they are able to design it. The implications, together with the systematicity and opaqueness of the scenario, calls for the emergence of new areas of scientific, technological and humanistic investigation which can be defined as Interface and Data Biopolitics. There are multiple definitions for the term “biopolitics”: Kjellén's organicist view and his description of the “civil war between social groups” (Lemke, 2011); the political application of bioethics (Hughes, 2004); the interplay between biology and political science (Blank, 2001); Hardt and Negri’s (2005) anti-‐capitalist insurrection through daily life and the body; Foucault’s (1997) “biopower”, through governments and organizations applying political power to all aspects of human life; and many more. We refer here mainly to Foucault’s definition, which described biopolitics as “a new technology of power...[that] exists at a different level, on a different scale, and [that] has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments”. (Foucault, 1997, p. 242) In his analysis Foucault mainly referred to national states and institutions. Therefore his observations need adaptations to be considered in today’s globalized, financial, digital economies and political apparatuses of power. For example the rise of large corporations, which match the power, influence, and reach of national states, the different role of money, its virtualization, and the “finacialization of life” (Lapavitsas, 2013) are things that need to be integrated in such frameworks. Fundamentally, Biopolitics can be defined as the study of systems as they leverage as many manifestations as possible of our daily lives, activities, relations and bodies to exercise power and control over their users and participants, in explicit and implicit ways. As demonstrated in the previous sections, today’s scenarios of Hyperconnectivity bring about multiple forms of biopolitically relevant contexts. Online and application interfaces, biometrics,
ALVATORE IACONESI nterface and Data Biopolitics in the Age of Hyperconnectivity the letter ‘f’ in their messages. If certain users, by complete chance, created messages using the same ‘f’ frequency, they would be classified as “potential terrorists”. They would know nothing about it, and this could have implications on their freedoms and rights. Of course this is a paradoxical example, just to make clear the dynamics of this phenomenon. Moreover, all this data capturing and processing is designed, as stated in the previous section, to confront with relevance and attention, thus resulting in information, knowledge and relations bubbles. While these processes are useful in the scenario of information overload, they also progressively lock out difference from users’ perception: the more we are exposed to content which we “potentially like” and to “people we potentially agree with”, the more “otherness” disappears from our reach. This brings on a series of negative effects, such as the diminished sensibility to and acceptance of diversity (Bozdag, van den Hoven, 2015), rising levels of cognitive biases (Bozdag, 2013), diminished tolerance, social separation (Ford, 2012), and more. The scenarios described in this article pose great challenges for Designers and, most important of all, for Design Education. On a first level of inspection, it is simple to verify how all of these situations and configurations of power schemes, practices and behaviors are at the border of what is assessed by laws, regulations, habits and customs. They are at the same time familiar and new, unexpected, unforeseen, unsought. To confront with these issues, approaches which are trans-‐disciplinary are needed, because no single discipline alone is able to cover all of the knowledge, attitude, perspective which are needed to grasp and understand them. The possibilities and opportunities to meaningfully deal with the issues presented in the article emerge only at the intersections between law, psychology, culture, philosophy, sociology, ethics and other sciences, humanities and practices. This fact represents an important opportunity for design, which can act as a convenient, practical and methodologically sound interconnector among disciplines and approaches. For this, it is of utmost importance that Design curricula natively host such trans-‐disciplinary approaches, not only combining disciplines as it is common practice in multi-‐disciplinariety, but traversing them, generating not only contaminations, but also methodological boundary shifts. The same state of necessity can be detected also for the topics of openness, transparency and access. As seen in the previous sections of the article, most of the times power asymmetries manifest themselves through lack of openness, transparency and access. Interoperability, data openness and accessibility, usage of open licensing schemes, use of open formats, open access to APIs: these are all types of practices that enable to confront with these problems. These topics should be standard part of any form of design education, highlighting not only the fact that they enable the emergence of the ethical approaches necessary to resolve the issues described in the article, but, also, represent potential competitive advantages for any organization, as well as the opportunity to create meaningful actions. The necessity of openness, transparency and access pave the way to another necessary axis for innovation in Design Education, represented by the necessary evolution in which Design needs to confront with Public, Private and Intimate Spheres.
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