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Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-bds-10.1177_20539517231153806 for Learning machine learning: On the political economy of big tech's online AI courses by Inga Luchs, Clemens Apprich and Marcel Broersma in Big Data & Society

kritische berichte - Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Bd. 44 Nr. 1 (2016): kritische berichte

Special issue of the journal, "Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures". This special issue of spheres contributes to a critical engagement with the politics of reproduction, and as this relates to digital cultures in particular. Job losses, foreclosures, homelessness and dispossession, indebtedness, and rising precarity have shaped the realities of many in the wake of the Great Recession of the late-2000s. Although for many of course, an economic crisis—a crisis in the capacity to meet needs and desires in the context of scarce resources—long predates this point. It is these crises of social reproduction, and the emergence of social movements and struggles from within them, that provides the context in which much recent scholarship on the politics of reproduction has been produced and has circulated. It is also what has given it much of its urgency.

CLEMENS APPRICH, DAPHNE DRAGONA, GEERT LOVINK, AND FLORIAN WÜST - CONVERSATION MODERATED BY KRISTOFFER GANSING On August 6, 2019, the curatorial advisors of the transmediale 2020 exhibition, ‘The Eternal Network’, gathered at the festival’s offices in Berlin for a conversation on the status of network culture and theory today. Starting from the question ‘What was the network?’, the conversation explored the multiple trajectories of networks within cybernetics, art and philosophy, also taking the limits of networks into account. This included a reconsideration of the role of alternative and critical networks in today’s widespread digitalization, with its data-centric platform economy and the techno-cultural changes wrought by artificial intelligence.

In the following article I want to propose the idea of a paranoid machine, in order to reflect on some of today’s developments in digital cultures. Starting from the assumption that we experience a shift from mass media to social media, I will show how paranoia can provide a diagnostic tool to analyze such a transformation. Paranoia as a method helps to shed light on the epistemological, technological, ethical, political, and aesthetical implications of a (post-)digital world. The paranoid machine exposes hidden assumptions in computer code and calls for intervention in the narcissist and homophilic disposition of digital cultures.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is arguably the new spectre of digital cultures. By filtering information out of existing data, it determines the way we see the world and how the world sees us. Yet the vision algorithms have of our future is built on our past. What we teach these algorithms ultimately reflects back on us and it is therefore no surprise when artificial intelligence starts to classify on the basis of race, class and gender. This odd ‘hauntology’ is at the core of what is currently discussed under the labels of algorithmic bias or pattern discrimination. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter, that is to discriminate signals from noise, machine learning algorithms invoke a ghost story that works at two levels. First, it proposes that there is a reality that is not this one, and that is beyond our reach; to consider this reality can be unnerving. Second, the ghost story is about the horror of the past – its ambitions, materiality and promises – returning compulsively and taking on a present form because of something that went terribly wrong in the passage between one conception of reality and the next. The spectre does not exist, we claim, and yet here it is in our midst, creating fear, and re-shaping our grip on reality.

Die Ausrichtung künstlicher Intelligenz an der Geschichte der Gehirnforschung, wie sie nicht zuletzt in aktuellen medienwissenschaftlichen Debatten erfolgt, ist zutiefst problematisch. Der in der Neurowissenschaft verankerte Konnektionismus, also die Annahme, dass sich Intelligenz auf ihre hirnphysiologische Verdrahtung reduzieren ließe, erfreut sich mit der Wiederentdeckung künstlich neuronaler Netzwerke großer Beliebtheit. Der Artikel folgt den Spuren einer solch kybernetischen Bestimmung von Intelligenz und stellt ihr zwei Fallstudien aus dem Bereich der computerbasierten Psychotherapie (ELIZA und PARRY) gegenüber. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Frage, inwieweit das mechanistische Weltbild des Konnektionismus zu einer biologistisch verkürzten Vorstellung von Intelligenz führt und wie diese Vorstellung durch eine psychoanalytische Kritik aufgebrochen werden kann., The alignment of artificial intelligence with the history of brain research, as can be seen in current debates in media studies, is deeply problematic. The connectionist approach (anchored in neuroscience) – i.e., the assumption that intelligence can be reduced to its physiological wiring in the brain – has gained significant popularity with the rediscovery of artificial neural networks. This article follows the traces of such a cybernetic definition of intelligence and contrasts it with two case studies from the field of computer-based psychotherapy (ELIZA and PARRY). The central question is to what extent the mechanistic world view of connectionism leads to a reductively biologistic idea of intelligence, and how this idea might be reversed by a psychoanalytical critique?

Der Übergang von Massenmedien zu sozialen Medien führte in den letzten Jahren zur Diskussion um einen «decline of symbolic efficiency» (Jodi Dean). Allerdings bleibt die Frage offen, ob es sich hier um einen unumkehrbaren Niedergang, oder aber um eine notwendige Begleiterscheinung in der Konstitution einer neuen symbolischen Ordnung handelt. So werden heute Informationen aus einem immer größer werdenden Datenstrom gefiltert, wobei die hierfür benötigten Algorithmen weitgehend versteckt bleiben. Der für die Datenfilterung zentrale Mechanismus des algorithmischen Ein- und Ausschlusses soll in diesem Beitrag mithilfe einer psychoanalytisch informierten Medientheorie untersucht werden, um nach dem Sinn hinter unserer «high-tech paranoia» (Fredric Jameson) zu fragen. The transition from mass media to social media has led to a discussion about a «decline of symbolic efficiency» (Jodi Dean) in recent years. However, the question remains open as to whether this is an irreversible decline, or a necessary accompaniment to the constitution of a new symbolic order. Today, information is filtered out of an ever-increasing data stream, whereby the algorithms required for this remain largely hidden. Based on a psychoanalytically-informed media theory, this article will investigate the mechanism of algorithmic inclusion and exclusion, which is central to data filtering, in order to ask about the meaning behind our current «high-tech paranoia» (Fredric Jameson).

Many technologies and practices that define the Internet today date back to the 1990s – such as user-generated content, participatory platforms and social media. Indeed, many early ideas about the future of the Internet have been implemented, albeit without fulfilling the envisioned political utopias. By tracing back the technotopian vision, Clemens Apprich develops a media genealogical perspecive that helps us to better understand how digital networks have transformed over the last 30 years and therefore to think beyond the current state of our socio-technical reality.This highly original book informs our understanding of new forms of media and social practices, such that have become part of our everyday culture. Apprich revisits a critical time when the Internet was not yet an everyday reality, but when its potential was already understood and fiercely debated. The historical context of net cultures provides the basis from which the author critically engages with current debates about the weal and woe of the Internet and challenges today’s predominant network model.

The central metaphor for research is the branching family tree: media genealogy looks for past divergent lines and hidden relationships that point towards the present in critical ways; this includes the dead ends lost to the present. The genealogical method itself becomes a component part of the truth games being examined: it brings into focus not only the history and present of digital cultures but also the positions of the person investigating these cultures. This chapter identifies three basic traits of media genealogy: the use of multilinear tree structures that branch off towards the top and the bottom with a view to alternative, the collection of multifaceted and reciprocal relationships of influence with the aid of an eclectic theoretical and methodical toolbox; and an intuitive 'swimming' (Turner) in complex contexts of the past, and from there back into the present.

Paranoia ist nicht nur in der Psychologie ein viel diskutierter Begriff. Auch in der Medientheorie übt sie eine ungebrochene Faszination aus, zumal der mediale Raum durch Misstrauen und Verdacht gekennzeichnet ist. Ausgehend vom Fall Schreber wird die Paranoiaforschung grob umrissen, um Rückschlüsse auf den heutigen Medienalltag zu ziehen. Eine paranoide Erkenntnisweise kann dabei helfen, implizite Vorstellungen in unserer soziotechnischen Realität offenzulegen und so das Menschliche in einer zunehmend technifizierten Welt besser in den Blick zu bekommen

In the 1990s the controversy about the dangers but also possibilities of data networks was influenced by a concern about the spatial transformation they cause. As a consequence, the alleged decline of cities began to overlap with the emerging discourse about network technologies. The following paper examines this debate using the example of Info-Cities as a spatial metaphor to describe data space. Retracing this technotopia back to the early stage of network building should help us to better understand current discussions on ubiquitous computing in urban environments, and, finally, allow us to re-imagine digital networks as complex, heterogeneous and transversal structures.

No digital cultures without infrastructures! This issue will look into the theoretical as well as practical explorations of infrastructures as operational backbone of digital cultures. We deem infrastructures, understood as an ensemble of human, social and technological individuals, important for yielding new forms of knowledge, which are able to challenge and transform the current architecture of infrastructural systems, software protocols, and network media, represented by corporate Internet-platforms like Amazon, Facebook or Google. Even though we have been witnessing an ‘explosion’ of the discourse around digital cultures and its infrastructures in the last years, most of the research and critique in this field is still based on the model of a predefined network, thereby repeating the epistemological presuppositions of nodes and links, rather than thinking about alternative perspectives for our technocultural future. Beyond commercial media platforms, where the individual remains a clearly identifiable point within the network, in order to address him or her with personalized ads, network technologies contain the potential to foster new forms of subjectivity, where the individual becomes a network itself – from the networked individual to the individual as network.

With this first issue dedicated to exploring Politics after Networks welaunch spheres: journal for digital cultures. The journal is run by an editorialcollective based at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana Universityof Lüneburg, and is supported by an international advisory board. Itengages in contemporary, historical and emerging discussionsconcerning digital cultures and explores the social, cultural and politicalstakes at play by reassembling key concepts such as public spheres,media spheres and atmospheres. The journal invites exchanges betweenscholars, policy makers, media artists, activist and hackers, and offers aspace where solicited contributions (after a first peer review) are openlyreviewed through invited comments.