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At the start of 2021, Twitter launched a closed US pilot of Birdwatch, a new system for content moderation that seeks to aid in promoting credible information online by giving users the opportunity to add context to misleading tweets. The pilot shows awareness of the importance of context, and the challenges the system will face. But the mitigations against these vulnerabilities of Birdwatch can exacerbate wider societal vulnerabilities created by Birdwatch. This article examines how Twitter presents the Birdwatch system, outlines a taxonomy of potential sociotechnical vulnerabilities, and situates these risks within broader social issues. We highlight the importance of watching the watchers, not only in terms of those using and potentially manipulating Birdwatch, but also the way Twitter is developing the system and their wider decision-making processes that impact on public discourse.

The Web browser has offered a development of the comic beyond the page into expansive spaces of the infinite canvas, removing the limits of the printed page. Simultaneously, hypermedia has provided opportunities to generate ever more complex links to supplement or even remove the limits of a linear narrative. However, the borders of conventional comics persist, and some of the most successful webcomics have thrived within the self-imposed constraints of limited panels, limited images or limited resolution. This article will ask how these different forms of experimentation interact and propagate in webcomics, across their content and context, their narrative structures, and the medium as a whole. Considering the experimental modes of creating and reading in the infinite canvas, hypermedia or other forms of webcomics, the article will outline a fractal dimensionality to webcomics.

Le Web nous offre un développement de la bande dessinée au-delà de la page, dans les espaces vastes de la toile « infinie », en supprimant les limites de la page imprimée. En même temps, l’hypermédia nous fournit des opportunités de générer des liens plus complexes pour compléter ou même supprimer les limites du récit linéaire. Cependant, les frontières de la bande dessinée traditionnelle persistent, et certains des webcomics les plus réussis ont prospéré dans les contraintes auto-imposées en termes de panneaux, et d’images de résolution limitée. Cet article étudie comment ces différentes formes d’expérimentation interagissent et se propagent dans les webcomics, à travers leur contenu et leur contexte, leurs structures narratives, ainsi que le médium en général. Tout en se penchant sur les modes expérimentaux de création et de lecture d’hypermédias ou d’autres formes que prennent les comics sur le Web, l’article souligne leur dimensionnalité fractale.

This article addresses the problematic perspectives of drone culture. In critiquing focus on the drone’s apparent ‘autonomy’, it argues that such devices function as part of a socio-technical network. They are relational parts of human-machine interaction that, in our changing geopolitical realities, have a powerful influence on politics, reputation and warfare. Drawing on Žižek’s conception of parallax, the article stresses the importance of culture and perception in forming the role of the drone in widening power asymmetries. It examines how perceptions of autonomy are evoked by drones, to claim that this misperception is a smokescreen that obscures the relational socio-technical realities of the drone. The article therefore argues that a more critical culture of the drone emerges by shifting the focus and perception from autonomy to anonymity. This allows us to engage more fully with the distributed agency and decision-making that define how drones are developed and deployed. Rather than focusing on the drone as a singular, fetishised, technical object, a relational approach to the drone assemblage is proposed that highlights the competing human interests that define and resist drones in global politics and culture.

Gamification has entrenched constant monitoring throughout society. From education to work to shopping, our activities are tracked, our progress is monitored, and rewards are meted out. But this enforced acceptance of constant surveillance constructs a social narrative in which privacy ceases to exist, and the technological tools at work can easily be shifted from reward to control. This is furthered through the shift from a Bentham–Foucault model of power and the threat of surveillance to the actualisation of complete protocological surveillance enabled by cloud computing, data centres, and machine learning. It is no longer the case that anything we do might be surveilled; we can be fairly certain that everything we do probably is being monitored, judged, and recorded. How can we negotiate these changing narratives? Of what fictions do we convince ourselves when we play the “game” called digital society? This article uses the work of Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, Dave Eggers, and Ernest Cline to assess how fictionality can act as thought experiments for the social conditions of surveillance technologies. Through stories such as Halting State and Walkaway, we explore the collisions between the control-based society of tech companies and the disciplinary structures of traditional states—the points of tension between illusions of freedom, guided game paths, and the exercise of power over users’ data and behaviours. The article argues for expanding our perspectives on the reach of game analysis to the broader connected networks of cultural and political systems, to assess ways of responding to the idea that we are being played with, turned into characters in the gamified narratives of control-based surveillance societies.

The scars of humanity can be seen across the Earth. However, observing such ecological violence and their implications often requires finding the right perspective, moving beyond the spatial and temporal limits of individual humans. This article builds on discussion of the Anthropocene as a term and the anthropocentrism it implies to critique the relations between humanity, technology and ecology through posthuman perspectives. Focusing on Google's widely available tools, its problematic relation to the environment as a company and critical interventions by media artists Mishka Henner, Paolo Cirio and Geraldine Juárez, the article examines technologies that enable a 'posthuman' position from which to view the fractal activities of humanity: Google Maps and Earth; Street View; and the Google search engines. Fractals are offered as a mode of assessing the self-similar processes of mediation that define not only humanity's scalar expansion but also its shift into informational dimensions and the virtualization of ecology.

I will start with probably my only real complaint about Clare Birchall’s Shareveillance – it is too short. The text should be considered essential as a teaching resource for anyone running classes ...

The term magic has long been associated with both technology and art. Whether an illusion performed on stage or the search for the supernatural, magic is concerned with changing either reality itself or our perception of it. Each new technology takes on a magical role by increasing humans' power to manipulate the world around them. Similarly, magical practices are often labeled arts, and the manipulation of our perceptions by artists often creates quasi-magical experiences. Four approaches to magic in relation to digital art practice—illusionist, alchemist, necromancer and sorcerer—offer a mode of understanding the manipulation of perceptual reality by artists using digital technologies. The framework will then be applied to five such practitioners—Pascal Dombis, Anne-Sarah Le Meur, Antoine Schmitt, Dmitry Morozov and Zaven Paré—who demonstrate the quest for the unknown and the manipulation of knowledge to create a new reality.

Quantum reality remains an unknown realm of impenetrable uncertainty, a constant flux brought into our experience only as decoherence, the necessary destruction of infinite possible realities into a single fixed reality. This unknowable rupture within reality can be the source of great fear. Quantum mechanics emphasizes the active role of consciousness and insists that we take the observer into account. This place of consciousness features in both the ‘consciousness-causes-collapse’ and the ‘many-worlds’ theories as a simultaneously creative and destructive gesture in which existence itself is called into question.This article will assess the approaches of two writers to the horrors that potentially lurk behind the curtain of reality. Greg Egan's work suggests the possibility of humanity's control over collapse, and the negative fantasy of a psychologically unprepared public gaining access to these abilities. Charles Stross, however, speculates that our fear of monsters is founded entirely in abstract external terrors originating beyond the confines of our universe. Between these challenges to the consciousness-causes-collapse and many-worlds theories, this article will explore the terrifying power which consciousness wields in constructing fictional and real worlds, in order to question the notion of impending doom in our quantum future, and its relevance in critiquing our perspectives on the present.

This chapter explores the nature of the subject in itself, the void at the heart of cybernetic parallax. In approaching the subject as this void, the poststructural decentred subject is developed from a constant displacement between symbolic realms towards a desubstantialised subject existing in neither physical nor digital worlds. This is the ‘nowhere’ of the subject amidst the Virtuality of consciousness. The chapter assesses the passage from void to Virtual through the analysis of digital art works that confront the emergence of Virtual surfaces and attempt to make contact with the Real of digital subjectivity. This focuses on a case study of the postdigital work of Pascal Dombis and a confrontation with the void of the subject between physical and digital modes of expression.

Extending the discussion of the void of subjectivity, this chapter focuses on the displacement of the void in the Real in relation to the antagonism between physical and digital worlds. The inherent loss of the subject in the Virtual functioning of consciousness is expanded into the privileged position of the physical within the structures of the subject: the persistence of the human over the cyborg. An analysis of the position of avatars in culture, used in cyberworlds, films and art practices, focusing on a case study of Second Life, informs a challenge to the primacy of the physical body. The prevailing physical nostalgia is confronted, leading towards new phenomenal perspectives on the world(s) amid the cyborg development of consciousness in ever-expanding digital spaces.

The final chapter moves past the structures of fantasy to question the possibility of a unity of Virtual and Real. This entails a reconceiving of the cyborg subject detached from the structures of humanity in the possibility of posthuman subjectivities, inserting a rupture from our present understanding of cybernetics. Jameson’s critique of the present through a literary staging of a utopian future is used to construct a critical distance towards the subject. The analysis of the role of digital technology and consciousness in science fiction opens this discussion, before a case study of Hannu Rajaniemi’s literary practices offers a fully posthuman framework. This stages an alternative consciousness that inserts a parallax rupture of self-awareness between the present subject and modes of rethinking its future possibilities.

This chapter establishes the defining shift in the functions of consciousness that differentiates physical and digital modes of reality: the inversion of Existence and Meaning. The shift in alignment of these with the Virtual and the Real is shown to control the fundamental forces at play in each reality and the self-mediation of the subject. The control of this inversion of function is analysed in online media that challenge conventional mediation by technology, focusing on a case study of Maurice Benayoun’s digital art practice. Concerns over mediation by digital technology are shown to be secondary to the internal functioning of consciousness in concealing its own machinic processes and the illusion of separate realities in the parallax of physical and digital worlds.

This chapter sets forward the context, conceptual framework and cultural application of a new mode of viewing the contemporary subject as a cyborg. Emphasising the engaged role of consciousness, the cyborg is defined as the expansion of the human mind by digital technology. The split between physical and digital worlds that constitutes the hybrid nature of the cyborg is outlined as a parallax shift between two modes of thought and two realities. The nature of this shift is constructed by the relative alignments of four functions of consciousness: Existence, Meaning, Real and Virtual. This functional framework is applied to cultural depictions of the parallax split between physical and digital worlds as modes of thought, as a means of expressing the technologically mediated experience of the contemporary subject.

This chapter expands on the relation between the Virtual and the Real, examining the structures of fantasy that sustain their interaction within cybernetic consciousness. The Real is explored as the death drive, while the Virtual is positioned as the desire for life, an interplay that opens a space for symbolic death and a critique of the objective-based structures of desire in the computer gaming medium. The analysis of art games that disrupt the life-death convention offers a new mode of viewing the fantasy of the medium, and a case study of the Portal series’ antagonist GLaDOS furthers the discussion of immortality as monstrous torment. Expressing impossible perceptions and experiences of life and death expose the fantasy between cyborg player and digital medium.