We're all familiar with smart TVs making suggestions on our future watching, real-world exercise data being transferred into stats and infographics on our workout apps and turning up our home heating before we start our commute – but how does this world of technological interfaces affect our actions and perceptions of self?When society relies on computer models and their interfaces to explain and predict everything from love to geopolitical conflicts, our own behaviour and choices are artificially changed. Zachary Kaiser explores the harmful social consequences of this idea - balanced against speed and ease for the user - and how design practice and education can respond positively.
- Concepts of freedom vs convenience
- Smart objects and manipulation
- Real world information transformed into data
- Technology's decisions made on our behalf
Author(s): Zachary Kaiser
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 197
City: London
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
Laws of Love
The Historical and Conceptual Underpinnings of the Computable Subjectivity
Are We and Our World Nothing but Data?
Fragmentation, Prediction, and Identity
New Normals and New Morals
Is the Computable Subjectivity Actually the Problem? If So, What Do We Do?
Concluding by Way of Beginning
The Co-Constitutive Nature of Design, Design Scholarship, and Design Education
Notes
1 Historical and Conceptual Roots of the Computable Subjectivity
Introduction: Disrupting the Insurance Industry—“Convenience” and “Freedom”
Producing and Looping, or, Biopolitics and Biopower
The Value of Convenience
Freedom and Countercultural Technocracy
The Selfish System: Cybernetics and Rational Choice Theory
Markets as Information Processors: Cybernetics and Economics
The Neoliberal Governmentality
Conclusion: Foundations and Ramifications
Notes
2 Data=World
Introduction: Can You “See” Your Dream Data?
Data and World: An Origin Story
Computational Instrumentation: Templates and Translations
How Computational Instruments Disappear
Conclusion: The Great Inversion, or, Operationalism’s Legacy
Notes
3 Prediction and the Stabilization of Identity
Introduction: The Scrambling of Algorithmic Anticipation
The Digital Production of Fragmentation and Alienation
Ontological Insecurity: One Consequence of Fragmentation and Alienation
The Digital Mirror Self: Soothing Ontological Insecurity with Computation
The Role of UX in Producing, then Soothing, Ontological Insecurity
Consequences: Soft Biopower and the Proscription of Potential
Conclusion: Becoming Cyborgs
Notes
4 The Moral Imperative of Normality through Computational Optimization
Introduction: The Optimized Professor and the Pressures of Optimization
Measurement, Normality, and Morality: Two Origin Stories
The Moral Imperative of Self-Optimizing Technologies: The Case of the Amazon Halo
Consequences: Anxiety, Superfluity, and the Instrumentalization of Interpersonal Interaction
Datafied Superfluity: Bullshit Jobs, Bullshit People, and Teaching from beyond the Grave
Conclusion: Fighting for Servitude as if It Were Salvation
Notes
5 The Questions of Political Economy and the Role of Design Education
Introduction
Question 1: The Issue of Political Economy and Chile’s Socialist Cybernetics
Question 2: The Role of Design Education in Resisting the “Reality” of the Computable Subjectivity
Conclusion: Returning to Political Economy and the Limits of the Reformist Approach
Notes
Conclusion: Toward a Luddite Design Education
The Politics of UX and the Computable Subject as the Ideal Political Subject
The Lingering Problem: The Computable Subjectivity and Political Economy
The Revolutionary Approach: Luddite Design Education
A Provisional Program of Luddite Design Education
A Luddite Design Education, Now
Notes
Bibliography
Index
