Tero Karppi

Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self- tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device

The recent proliferation of wearable self-tracking devices intended to regulate and measure the body has brought contingent questions of controlling, accessing and interpreting personal data. Given a socio-technical context in which individuals are no longer the most authoritative source on data about themselves, wearable self-tracking technologies reflect the simultaneous commodification and knowledge-making that occurs between data and bodies. In this article, we look specifically at wearable, self-tracking devices in order to set up an analytical comparison with a key historical predecessor, the weight scale. By taking two distinct cases of self-tracking – wearables and the weight scale – we can situate current discourses of big data within a historical framing of self-measurement and human subjectivity. While the advertising promises of both the weight scale and the wearable device emphasize self-knowledge and control through external measurement, the use of wearable data by multiple agents and institutions results in a lack of control over data by the user. In the production of self-knowledge, the wearable device is also making the user known to others, in a range of ways that can be both skewed and inaccurate. We look at the tensions surrounding these devices for questions of agency, practices of the body, and the use of wearable data by courtrooms and data science to enforce particular kinds of social and individual discipline.

Social Media, Financial Algorithms and the Hack Crash

‘@AP: Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured’. So read a tweet sent from a hacked Associated Press Twitter account @AP, which affected financial markets, wiping out

Rethinking Playing Research: DJ HERO and Methodological Observations in the Mix

136.5 billion of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s value. While the speed of the Associated Press hack crash event and the proprietary nature of the algorithms involved make it difficult to make causal claims about the relationship between social media and trading algorithms, we argue that it helps us to critically examine the volatile connections between social media, financial markets, and third parties offering human and algorithmic analysis. By analyzing the commentaries of this event, we highlight two particular currents: one formed by computational processes that mine and analyze Twitter data, and the other being financial algorithms that make automated trades and steer the stock market. We build on sociology of finance together with media theory and focus on the work of Christian Marazzi, Gabriel Tarde and Tony Sampson to analyze the relationship between social media and financial markets. We argue that Twitter and social media are becoming more powerful forces, not just because they connect people or generate new modes of participation, but because they are connecting human communicative spaces to automated computational spaces in ways that are affectively contagious and highly volatile.

“The Computer Said So”: On the Ethics, Effectiveness, and Cultural Techniques of Predictive Policing:

Playing games has a crucial methodological role within the study of games. At the same time, detailed overviews of how academic playing is conducted are difficult to find. In this article, the authors begin with Espen Aarseth’s outline of playing research and offer some updates to it in order to build a more context-aware approach. To exemplify the elaborated methodology, the authors apply it to the rhythm game DJ HERO. They emphasize in this article that a game not only creates a world of its own, but also is in many ways connected to the traditions directed by real-world culture and economics. Thus, playing research needs to go beyond the limits of gameworld and normative gameplay, and move toward a concept or assemblage of play that takes into account games as singular and multifaceted technocultural entities.

Killer Robots as cultural techniques

In this paper, I use The New York Times’ debate titled, “Can predictive policing be ethical and effective?” to examine what are seen as the key operations of predictive policing and what impacts they might have in our current culture and society. The debate is substantially focused on the ethics and effectiveness of the computational aspects of predictive policing including the use of data and algorithms to predict individual behaviour or to identify hot spots where crimes might happen. The debate illustrates both the benefits and the problems of using these techniques, and makes a strong stance in favor of human control and governance over predictive policing. Cultural techniques in the paper is used as a framework to discuss human agency and further elaborate how predictive policing is based on operations which have ethical, epistemological, and social consequences.

Tony D. Sampson: The Assemblage Brain. Sense Making in Neuroculture

In October 2012 a group of non-governmental organizations formed a Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. The aim of this campaign was to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. The campaign gained momentum swiftly, leading to different legal and political discussions and decision-makings. In this article, we use the framework of cultural techniques to analyze the different operational processes, tactics, and ethics underlying the debates surrounding developments of autonomous weapon systems. From reading the materials of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and focusing on current robotic research in the military context we argue that, instead of demonizing Killer Robots as such, we need to understand the tools, processes and operating procedures that create, support and validate these objects. The framework of cultural techniques help us to analyze how autonomous technologies draw distinctions between life and death, human and machine, culture and technology, and what it means to be in control of these systems in the 21st century.

Book Review: Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites

In The Assemblage Brain. Sense Making in Neuroculture, Tony D. Sampson draws out a model for a dystopian media theory, where corporations have a soul and a brain but hardly any conscience. Following Deleuze (1992), the soul is defined as the soul of marketing aiming at rapid short-term turnovers without limits and functioning as an instrument of social control. What Sampson argues throughout his book, is that the soul of Deleuze’s post-script on the societies of control is now coupled with the manipulation and exploitation of the brain for example in “the shape of the practices of neuromarketing” (75). The brain is the main figure of Sampson’s book, and what he is interested in is how the brain’s potential is harnessed in our contemporary culture of capitalism. Neuromarketing, neuropower, neuropharmacy, neurolabor and neurocapitalism, for Sampson, are answers to the historical, political and theoretical question of, what can be done to the brain. Tracing phenomena such as brain wave research, ADHD medication and Facebook’s manipulation of the emotions of 689,003 individual users, Sampson shows how deeply different fields and areas of everyday life are tuning into and finding ways to re-configure our brain. What is important is that we subject ourselves to this control voluntarily. We subscribe to different medicines that help us to focus better; we choose to use the innovations developed in the field of Human–Computer-Interaction (HCI), which for Sampson connects with Taylorism turning subjects into efficient cognitive labor who are both always online and at work. While the first half of the book focuses on the dystopias of the brain, the second half formulates ways to resist them. Interestingly and also quite paradoxically, for Sampson (105), the only way for resistance is to know what a brain can do. In this context, Sampson’s thinking intersects with Catherine Malabou’s attempts to theorize how brains are made and subsequently from this understanding the ways of liberation also emerge. What is central in Sampson’s book is the conceptual notion of “the assemblage brain”, where the brain is fundamentally social and subjectivity is not located inside the brain. Sampson (116) notes that the “assemblage brain establishes a radical relationality between the individual and the sensory environment, wherein sense making does not proceed on a journey from the inside to the outside, or vice versa. The inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside.” In the formulation of the assemblage brain, Sampson is returning to some of the theories and themes developed in his previous book Virality: Contagion Theory at the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and especially the work of Gabriel Tarde, the sociologist and crowd theorist of the early 1900s. An important figure, for both Tarde and Sampson (2017, 113) is the somnambulist, which for them describes a particular mode of subjectivity “caught in an intersection between a culture of attraction and biologically hardwired inclination to imitate.” This subject constantly affects and is affected by the people and the environment it encounters (Sampson 2012, 90–91). This description of subjectivity, when it emerges in the context of crowd theory of the early 1900s is of course not far away from the ideas of mass hypnosis and the rise of fascism in the 1930s. While Sampson deals with this subject in Virality, what is brought to the fore in the Assemblage Brain is the rise of Right-Wing populism of the 2010s. For Sampson, the subject is always simultaneously asleep and awake, caught in between these two states and * Tero Karppi tero.karppi@utoronto.ca

Games as Services - Final Report

approach employed in this book. Given the unique case study approach adopted, it would have been fascinating to have learnt of some of the methodological and epistemological challenges that were encountered when researching and writing this book. The concluding section of this book, Part Three, explores ‘Artful practices and making sense’ (p. 105), using the perception of ‘practical magic’ as an example to illustrate how realities can be understood as virtually real (p. xxvi). Paraphrasing from the Thomas theorem (p. 31), DeNora presents what she believes to be the most important lesson learnt from the book, that is, ‘realities are virtually real but nonetheless real in their consequence’ (p. xxvi). Overall, the author of this book provides an impressive and wide breadth of rich and varied examples in a bid to ‘work-out’ how we make sense of reality (p. xv). However, at times the book can be overly convoluted and difficult to navigate. This is largely due to the absence of a clearly specified epistemological framework and, as a consequence, the book reads as experimental by design. At times, the author fails to reference influential scholars when discussing their key sociological concepts or to provide a detailed discussion of her methodological and epistemological approach, and hence, provides a less convincing position than could have been the case.