Second Semester – Notes: MIT 1020

January 11

Texts:
 Any set of signs which can be read for meaning
o Applies to any form
o Constructed and interpreted with references to the codes and conventions

Codes can be used around the language and the cultures

- Shared set of rules or conventions (codes)
- A text can call upon already coded meaning

Cultural codes
- Accept prejudices
- Stereotypes and values

Commodity fetishism
 The habit of treating a commodity as the thing rather than as the product of social and natural
relations

The oppositional position

- Not share the texts codes and rejects this reading
- Bring to bear an alternative ideology

Negotiated positions
- Binaries against good and bad qualities
- They make “large views” of issues: “national interest”
- Thus, shot through with contradiction

The dominant position

- Uncritical position and shows you how they are to be seen and subvert those
- What you think the meaning will be destabilized
- Viewer tales the connoted meaning full and straight and decodes
- In terms of the references codes in which it has been encoded

Media ages
- Speech, writing, print electric
- The film works though different ages of existence

Industrial vs nonindustrial
Digital or informal

January 18
: The Industrial Economy--Standardization and Mass Production. We'll look at the pre-industrial age and
see how Adam Smith's discussion of the division of labour shaped society for the ensuing industrial
disruption. We'll also look at how Henry Ford was inspired by a slaughterhouse and added the assembly
line to his automated division of labour. Never forget how these technologies shaped societies and
individual states of mind. Then we'll see how early Hollywood was also built on the Fordist model.
Adam smith (pin factory) – regarded as the founder of modern economics
- His book enormously influences the development of western capitalism
- The theory of division of labour – the specialization of work tasks, by means of which different
occupation are combined with a production system
- The division of labour vastly more complex than in any prior type of production system
- Breaking down complex tasks into simple, repetitive operations

Fordism – Henry Ford

1. A model of production
a. The highly automated assembly line mass production of standardized products for a mass
market based in large factories – reducing production costs and prices
b. This model of mass production flourishes in the industrial societies beginning to decline
only in the 1960s
2. Taylorism
a. Associated method of organizing production and improving efficiency based on scientific
management
b. Involved centralized control, a high degree of job specialization and the use of semi-
skilled labour for highly repetitive tasks
3. A social phenomenon characterized by rising and falling commodity prices
a. Increase in productivity to reduce the costs of his cars making them more widely
affordable
b. Matched consumption with production
4. Cinema
a. The coordinated production process, specialized task and standardized output that
characterized the Hollywood studio system from the late 1920s until the late 40s

Ford used division of labour with machines

Selected history of mass production (1770s – 1913)

- “We shape out tools and our tools shape us”

Media reshuffles everything within the environment

Preindustrial (UK up to 1760)

 Generally, people like on farms and raise their substance farming
 All family members worked for this
 Habits were shaped by nature
 Cottage industry was another version of the subsistence living

Thomas Gainsborough painter

- His painting connotes a way of life that is starting to disappear
- The new type of economy (industrialization)
- Denotes and connotes the shift of new kind of industrial class

Social division of labour

- Divide tasks between age, gender, and status
- In the late 18c Adam smith writes about new type of division of labour

New way of doing things using industrialization

 but using division of labour and breaking down each step then assigning each step to a different person
- It costs more but you produce more

 media by altering the environment, evoke is us unique ratios of sense of perceptions

 the extension alters the way we think and act – perceive the world
- When these ratios change, men change

Business effects:
- Speed increases
- Output increases
- Price drop
- Products proliferate
- Others adopt methods

Personal effects
- Worker is de skilled
- Labour becomes physically repetitive
- Labour is mentally repetitive
- Has become a closed system

1. Factory systems (UK 17800- 1900)

Machines intensity social division of labour

- You connect these machines together to the division of labour which speeds up the process
- Although machines are doing the works, they still need to be run my people
- Build machines to mimic human skills. Then automate!

The “message” is change of scale or pattern that is included

Media translated of kind of knowledge into another mode

 this is exactly what machines and factories did

Ex. Spinning Jenny

 Introducing this one device replaced 8 workers
 People would destroy these machines when they were introducing because they put millions od
people out of work
 The spinning jenny does the work of unemployed eight people

It went from environments that included families working together to separating them from working in
different factories

Relationships with the land and animals changed

2. Fordism (US 1913 )

Automated assembly line – standardized products – in large factories

Henry ford Introduced the assembly line

 the product should work its way down the conveyer belt while the workers stay put
 - Inspiration from the slaughterhouse
- With cars being cheaper, this helped the economy
- Suburbs were created into larger cities because when people had cars they could further away
since they had their own type of transportation to get back to work
*The work comes to the worker*
*Everything is done under one roof*

Inflexible assembly 
Ford says “The saving in manufacturing expenses in a factory that centers its efforts on one product is
tremendous, and in it the highest efficiency may be obtained”

Problem with the inflexibility  the factory had a 400% turnover, he need to induce people to stay, it was
very punishing work so employees got paid higher

The ultimate in binary thinking!

Form of interpellation
 the ultimate interpellation

PART 2: Hollywood and mass production (1916 – 1950)

 Factory environment is the message

Factory system is more influential than the individual products it makes

1. Factory approach cinema

Efficient departmentalized of production

The studio ex. Disney  everything is done under one studio and area (like ford)

Stunt double are another form of industrialization

- You don’t want you star actor being hurt

The start system created reliable branding for each studio

- Can create reliable brands for different studios
- Starts are commodities
- Studios are known for certain actors

Specialized tasks were given in the studio

Every department has its distinct function with someone in charge
Centralized management
- The produce chose the director

Fordism: A production model which includes a highly automated assembly-line and mass production of
standardized products for a mass market based in large factories reducing production cost and prices.

Taylorism: Associated method of organizing production and improving efficiency based on 'Scientific
Management' or Taylorism this involved centralized control, a high degree of job specialization and the
use of semi-skilled labour for highly repetitive tasks.

Mass Production: is the productive organization that delivers in quantities a useful commodity of standard
material, workmanship, and design at a minimum cost.

Social Division of Labour: Societies often parcel out work on the basis of gender: men and women may
do different tasks.

Detailed Division of Labour: the process of making a product is broken down into discrete segments and
each worker is assigned to repeat a constituent element of that process.

Construction of Studios for multiple purposes: All of the sets on lots were made to be versatile and easily
manipulated/changed so they could be used in a variety of films without being fundamentally changed.
This also allowed film companies to prevent the need to travel to film scenes.

Changes in script writing practices: the scenario script

• In attempt to be more cost effective, directors started to film scenes not in the order that they would
happen in the movie but rather film all the scenes that would take place on one set and then move on to
the next.

January 25 – industrial efficiency and its iron cage

 We're building on last week's exploration of industrialization, the social division of labour,

the factory system, and Ford's assembly line to look at METHODS of efficiency and IDEOLOGIES of
efficiency in the food industry and in society.  
 We'll use sociologist George Ritzer's book THE MCDONALDIZATION OF SOCIETY to see how
McDonald's perfected--better than anyone--ways to industrialize a restaurant through 'fast food' 

READINGS:

Scientific management: (Taylorism)

- A management theory based on a belief that these is one best way of organizing work
- Time and motion studies to measure work activities to find the optimum method of performance
- Activities can be centrally planned by managers and specialized, simple tasks clearly prescribed
for each employee
The four principles
a. The division of manual and mental labour
 b. Careful selection and training of employees to fit the job
c. Control of employees though close supervision
d. Rewards linked directly to productivity through piece-rate payments

Mcdonaldization: the basic principles

- The process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant efficiency, calculability,
predictability and control are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as
well as of the rest of the world

Efficiency
- Finding and using optimum method of getting from one point to another
- Efficient methods of satisfying many needs
- Mcdonalized system function efficiently by following the streps in a pre-designed often well-
choreographed process

Calculability
- Emphasizes the quantitative aspects of products sold and services offered
- People can quantify things and feel like they are getting a lot of food foe what appears to be a
little sum of money
- The profitability of fast-food chains indicated that the owners not consumers get the better end of
deal

Predictability
- The assurance that products and services will be much the same over time and locations
- Customers take great comfort in knowing that McDonalds will offer no surprises

Control
- Control is exerted over the customers who enter McDonalds
- Lines limited menu, few options and uncomfortable seats all lead diners to do what management
wishes – eat quickly and leave
- Drive through window does this as well

LECTURE

 industrial efficiency

Environments shape us
- To behold use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to
embrace it

Weber – sociologist in the 20th century

- Studied the rise of rationality
- Which is the rise of efficiency
- Rationality is a social innovation
- Rationality makes new environments

Taylor – scientific management

Ritzer – Mcdonaldization
Why to study efficiency
- The world was changing (1800-1900)
- Jobs changed form (industrialised)

1. Technological effects
- Growth and population
o With more people is the rise is Bureaucracy
- Rise in complexity – centralized control
- Rise in complexity – retain and centralized control

How to solve: Bureaucracy

Need to standardize technology

- One piece of tech could fit with others
- Example: train tracks and train

Trains were the fasted method of transportation but ALSO communication

- Although this created issues
- New inventions were created to help
o Ex. Telegraphs

Telegraph (1850)
- Collapse distance
- Speeds up time
- Fasted mode of communicated

2. Weber and formal rationality

- A mass-produced approach to efficiency

“The rots of modern thinking on bureaucracy lie in the work of the turn of the century Germain
sociologist Max Webber. His ideas on Bureaucracy are embedded in his broader theory of rationalization
process”

What is formal rationality: “Major development in the history of the world. Previously people had been
left to discover such mechanisms on their own or with vague and general guidance from larger value
systems (religion for example). After the development of formal rationality, they could use
institutionalized rules that help them even dictate what they do”

Rationality uses four methods:

 Efficiency
o Finding and using the optimum method from getting from one point to another
 Predictability
o Operate in a highly predictable mannor
o Easy to understand stages  if you do this, this will happen
o Establish clear goals – speed = excellence
 Calculability
o Being able to track and calculate to predict outcomes
o A series of quantifiable tasks
 Non-human technology
o Rules, regulations and structures
 o Replace human beings with machines

3. The iron cage of rationalization

“Despite the advantages that Bureaucracy offers, despite the advances that rational and rational and
rationality systems offer”

IRRATIONALITY:
- Where people are dehumanized
- Lots of red tape
- Poor quality of work

*Many bureaucracies suffer from poor quality of work because there is nothing to reward, doing a job
well – paper pushing

For weber: these inefficiencies start to form a web

- Web of rationalized structures
- These start to form and iron cage

The iron cage

 Rational principles would come to dominate an increasing number of sectors of society a
seamless web of rationalized structures

Sarah Water Betcher is really talking about

- “People make a mistake separate design and content”
- People make a mistake and separate design and content
- “If you’re not asking yourself, how could this be used to hurt someone’ in your design and
engineering process you’ve failed”

Don Norman: Affordances, signifiers, feedback and convention

PART 2:

1. Industrial review
1800 – 1900
 division of labour
 reorganized people in space and time
 Link machine to us preform people
 de skilled labour
 environmental effects
 unemployment
 Machines dictate the rhythm now, instead of people

Taylor
 How to rationalize systems!
 Business efficiency
 Scientific management
 Henry Ford adopts this

- Scientific management: finding the one best way

 - Rationality for business and industry
- Taylor focused on time and motion
Aspects of scientific management

2. Additional division of labour

a. Management does the thinking and worker follows orders

How is this achieved?

a. Study the worker and extract their skill
b. Taking that knowledge from them
c. Scale cage

 Loss of human contact and the growth of bureaucratic control

- The “message” - Is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs

Introduction of inflexible rules and technologies

- Workers do one task over and over again
- Loss of human contact

PART 3: Mcdonoalization

1. Fordist
Process by which the principles of fast-food restaurant – efficiency, calculability, predictably and control
are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world
Rationalized approach
- Limit your choice
- Allows workers to prepare much faster

Standardized parts
- Speed
Single purpose machine
- Assembly line

2. Weber’s rationalization
- Like their customers, workers in McDonald’s system function efficiently following the steps in a
pre-designed process
- Training and looked over my managers
- Repetition rationalized tasks

Calculability
- Emphasis on quantitate aspects of products sold (portion size, cost) and services offered (the time
it takes to get the product)
- Quantity has become equivalent to quality

Irrational aspect
- Quality (not the best)
Part One: Hardt & Negri’s Three Economic Eras

1. Economic Era of Agriculture (until about 18c)

 Cottage industry and subsistence farming

 Most of the population is not urban
 Primary economic sector. Relates to agricultures and the extraction of raw materials
 Living off the land
 Work and leisure followed the seasons. You consumed what you made.

2. Economic Era of Industrial Objects

 Durable, material goods

 This is the period of ‘modernization’
 Industrial ideologies, industrial media effects on people and populations
 Representing industrialization through texts
 Involves industry and the manufacturing of goods.
 Fordism and mass production (one best way, binary thinking)
 Materiality and tangible objects
 This is the modern age
 Modernization = Industrialization

3. Economic Era of Information and Services

 Immaterial production of services, information, emotion

 Takes off in 1970
 Era of providing services and manipulating information

3.1. This is the period of ‘postmodernization’

Doesn’t mean we are living in an era where everything is immaterial. Economy is functioning by
delivering immaterial and intangible services. Post-modernization or better yet, informatization

3.2. Mix and match key concepts from throughout the year
The informational revolution is transforming industry Food has become industrialized

Part Two: Hardt and Negri on Production

1. The factory becomes a service (responds to the customer; flexible production; lots of choice)

 Factory becomes seen as a service that responds to a consumer

 Ford: about production of few products, which drops price of products and makes them more
affordable for all. IN this approach the producer sets the agenda. You have to live with the limited
supply. (ended 1950)
 General Motors: They innovated with choice. Offered many different colors and models. More
customization.
  Another Ex – Burger King (1970's): Allowed you to customize your burgers and make
them your way. Made Mcdonalds was made to look inflexable.

Match your Mood Fridge: Allowed you to attach magnets to your fridge to customize it.

• Toyotaism: Using new tech to perform industrial production in a new way. According to this model,
production planning will communicate with markets constatly and immediately. Factories will maintain
zerostock, and commotites will be produced just in time to present demand of existing markets. Supply
chain is watched carefully so that we don’t have too much stock.

2. Informatization: all previous eras become translated -Similar to McLuhan’s ‘translation’.

Computers and digital networks transform everything.

VW automotive cloud: Prediction, connected to smart home, personal assistant, on board media
streaming, in car office, personalization and identification.

3. The iron cage’ of informatization: a web of dehumanizing structures + things ‘just go wrong’ Iron
Cage: Rational principles would come to dominate an increasing number of sectors of society. A
seamless web of rationalized structures. people are trapped and denied basic humanity.

4. Labour has an ‘immaterial’ component

Products can become immaterialized and translated into cyborgs

4.1. We are cyborgs; tracked and managed at work. We work with computers, produce info, are
tracked.

 Labour becomes immaterial – labor that produces an immaterial good such as a service, a cultural
products, knowledge, or communication.
  Ex, robots are delivering shelves in amazon warehouses. Serves as a form of fords assembly line
because the shelves are brought to employees while they stay in one place.
  Amazon workers are tracked by computers, all incumbents are rated on their productivity,
walking speed, etc.

4.2. A Taylorist division of labour between ‘thinking’ (well-paid) and ‘doing’ (not as well-paid) Division
of labor within the realm of immaterial production

The Cloud: Owning, Renting and Engineering Scarcity

PART ONE: FROM OWNING TO RENTING, OR THE SHAPING OF TECHNOLOGY 1. Digital
Technology Upsets Traditional Material Capitalism

Capitalism: economic system in which resources and means of production are privately owned. These
resources have an exchange value.

- Capitalism used to be based on the exchange of private property. However, digital technologies
threaten traditional forms of capitalism (figure, ground).

1.1. Price of material objects is tied to scarcity

Engineered Scarcity: Artificially scarce. You can make industrial produced products and not make many
of them. Thus, consumers believe that the item of scarce.
The idea of engineered scarcity can relate to semiotics. This is because people want to connote

messages by possessing certain "scarce" materials. (EX, Diamonds) 1.2. The material economy was
tied to ownership and exchange

Owning Digital Property

" The 200 movies in my Netflix que are an aspirational list and not a collection of CD's" This threatens
traditional capitalism and the traditional economy we had

1.3. The immaterial economy is tied to renting

Lost: Cloud providers are able to delete you data at their will.
2. The Internet is a gigantic copying machine (Arpanet’s store and forward system)

Review of the could and ubiquitous computing

Mark Wiser (ubiquitous computing = cloud computing)

Cloud computing came from ARPA (governemnt)
There is no center, all of the macheines are important, it is opposite of a mane frame

Legally and Technically Copying

- The idea if infinite copying does not work well without economy because it is based on the sale
of private property.
- We have a new relationship with objects. Which upsets the material economy. This new
technology upsets ratio's.
- Streaming gathers a local copy legally (ex, songs, movies on streaming services) Digital property
is not scarce.

3. Cloud Computing is about renting: the technological reasons (Mark Weiser’s ubiquitous computing)

- Your paying for access. You don’t want ownership via cloud computing.
- Just as writing and electricity become so commonplace, so unremarkable, so will Ubiguitous computing

- Ordinary people who provide value to services need to be able to benefit. Instagram is nothing
without its users, yet, the only people getting paid are the influencers.

Our emotions are commodified.

 Digital technologies can replace Thousands of people. If this replicates over and over, our society
will have a problem.
 It is not about exchange of objects. It do we control using technology.
 We are in the immaterial age where controlling access is Key (netflix, spotify – gatekeeping)

4. The Cloud’s Industrial Qualities (centralization, efficiency, standardization, rationalized, iron cage)

We are not in the age of material objects but we are in the age of Extreme standardization, centralization,
efficiency, rationalization.
Weber talked aboout rational-dominated by efficiency, predictability. Calculability, and non-human
technologies that control people.

Local Control is lost as we step into this new digital system.

IRON CAGE in cloud computing

- People have become tennants.
- Relates to figure ground because we gain something but there are irrational hidden effects.

 Commons: natural resource that benefit members of a community. Ex, fields like pastures.
 Feudalism: hierarchy- peasants use the lords land and pay them for their land.
 Types of commons

2. Industrial Enclosure: The Enclosure Acts of the 18th Century (commodification, eviction, game
laws, vagrancy laws)

 A modernity dawned in europe, land was privatized. Thus, many people moved away from
agriculture and into industry. The land is now commodified. We have to evict people to
enclose the land.
 Representing Commons and Enclosure: Gainsborough’s Art

• Enclosure of Teletubby Land (oil in Iraq)

- Privatized iraq lands to preserve oil

3. The Digital Commons: information access to all, nobody claims ownership

 Information Commons, P2P, WiFi, Creative Commons, Science Commons

 Digital commons: digital information regarded by a community that is collectively known.

We all contribute to these commons. Ex, Wikipedia, redit

• Creative Commons: new tech which allows people to take control of their creative impulses.

• Science Commons: Much of scientific research is gatekept and safeguards information. It will make
research flow more easily.

4. Digital Enclosure (data dispossession?). The rise of renting.

• Cybernetic – digital objects can talk about you behind your back. There is a cybernetic and taylorist
property to this. Taylorist because you info is used to make corporations more efficient (metadata).

Metadata can be commodified. This is the tattle-tale nature of digital technologies.

Examples
- Apple watches

- Recorded phone conversations w institutions like banks

- Copyright as a means of social control of use and access "Don't copy that floppy"
7. Engineering Scarcity Three: Terms of Service and End User License Agreement

• Software and services are rented, not sold. This is a form of social control.
• Licenses like ones you agree to when you purchase a phone is an additional form of social control
Binary nature of user agreements. You agree to it or you don’t.

Western Onecard as a service

Opens doors, parking permit, unlocks doors, non-transferable, duplication not allowed o It is a service.
We benefit because we gain access, and it is efficient.

• Cloud-based services are about renting access, not ownership

The Sublime: Ways of Representing Media Industries. Political Economy: Ways of Analyzing Media
Industries

PART ONE: MEDIA INDUSTRIES

1. Definition: Manufacture Entertainment and Information According to Production Line Techniques

1.1. Production Line: Inherits Taylorism, Rationalization, Fordism and other techniques from the
industrial age

1.2. Information/Services: Inherits immaterial, cybernetic and tracking procedures of the postmodern age

1.3. Two tiers: Large corporations and small. Concerned with ownership and 1.4. Media industries sell to
advertisers and to customers.

- Audience as a commodity. We are being sold to advertisers. 1.5. We are the commodity and buyer!

- Serve a dual market, selling both to audiences and advertisers, which leads to conflicts of interests.

- Television Delivers People (1973) Richard Serra - It is the consumer who is consumed.

We are the commodity.

- There is a conflict because we are the consumer and the commodity

PART TWO: POLITICAL ECONOMY: STUDYING HOW THE STATE AND ECONOMY
INTERACT

1. Definition: Media as product of the political and the economic spheres of society
Political Economy: How the state and the economy interact. Method of analyzing media as a part and
product of the political and economic structures of a society.

2. Media Product—Use and Exchange value

• Commercial media are dominated by the need to raise advertising revenue while public broadcasting is
dominated by the need to favor the middle ground and maintain a consensus.

• Media ownership and control are key issues especially the concentration of ownership in global markets.
The means of producing mass media content are owned and controlled by major corporations such as
apple, google, and media conglomerates.

1. Mosco studies the overlap of the state and the corporation. Studies power and abuse of power.

He claimed - Studies the ways in which the state and the corporation overlap. Studies the
interconnections of a range of institutions around the concept of power.

2. Mosco applies a dialectic approach to study the ways media are sold, represented, contested,
resisted.

  Idea of resistance and struggle over media.

 Political economy emphasizes the dialectical approach which looks not only at power from above
but at power and resistance from below and how contradictions and contentions help us to
accurately map the social field.
 The media have always been contested. This is because we bring out own ideological baggage to
the media.

2.1. Example: New media companies are profitable but aren’t taxed and regulated like other
media

Government is very amenable to business

 Tech has raised productivity, but salaries are stagnant. Corporate profits go up but wages don’t.

2.2. Contradictions are key to our economic system: the example of digital property Capitalism is
conflicted internally.

3. Mosco defines three forces that promote commodification (media producers, the state,
advertising industry)

3.1. Media producers make content

Media producers interact with the sate (Copyright law, ownership of airwaves, etc).

3.2. The state provides the commercial, legal, regulatory framework

State – contributes broadly to mobilizing institutions, laws, and public support for media producers.

3.3. Advertising industry sells audiences to media producers

Work with media producers to ensure that information and entertainment promote commodification.

Commodification refers to taking goods or services valued for their use and turning them into
commodities that are valued for what they can bring in exchange.

4. The commodified self: quantification, use value and exchange value

4.1. (4.1-4.3): Examples of Alexa, Applewatch and Google’s conversion of use value to exchange
value

Alexa

 Ties together many services and databases

 But also takes your into databases and cater to possible future behavior
 Exchange value: It not only activates an audio player it also sends the requested information to a
data center marked to companies. This exchange value is based on metadata and cybernetic.

Use Value: Contained in the request is turned into exchange value. When a company pays for the
knowledge of the music that interests the user.

• When a company pays for the knowledge of the music that interests the user.

PART FOUR: VINCENT MOSCO ON REPRESENTING TECHNOLOGY USING MYTH AND

THE SUBLIME

1. The Natural Sublime: feeling overwhelmed by the beauty and power of nature
"the sublime" was originally associated with natural wonders. When something is sublime it takes your
breath away. You are not able to rationally formulate ideas about it.

Being overwhelmed by something is a binary experience. Because you are feeling one feeling over
everything else.

2. The Technological Sublime: feeling overwhelmed by the power and size of human creations
(railroads, airplanes, dams)

 Technologies can briefly overwhelm reason and come to be associated with the humanly
constructed world.
 Humans become seen as god like, because we are now creating the sublime. 2.1. Example:
Niagara Falls as two types of the sublime!

1. Natural sublime
2. Technological Sublime
I. Hydro power: was one of the most powerful places on the planet. Lots of potential for
factories.
II. The biggest suspension bridge across the falls.

2.2. Example: Representing Niagara Hydro power as sublime, feminine, technologically modern!

• Colonization denied rights to people and then created myths which framed the way people don’t think
of them as a way of denying rights.

  Colonization is the original form of cancel culture. It was used to create myths of progress.
  The figure is a myth (progress) and the ground is cancel culture
  According to Roland Barthes. Myths transform the messy complexities into the pristine gloss of
nature or of the natural. This painting is called American Progress.

2.4.1. Film: ‘Steel’

• Steel is being connoted as something that is represented as sublime through the editing, postproduction,
framing, and scripting of this commercial.

2.4.3. Film: ‘A Car is a Woman'

• Technology is tied into gender

3. The Electronic Sublime: feeling overwhelmed by the power and scope of digital technology (Apple,
Ties into the colonial myth of "we are always moving forward and innovating."

 "All these innovation make our world a better place."

 To upgrade is to be civilized.
 Ideology is there but we cant see it. (figure ground)

4. The Hysterical Sublime: impossible to imagine the power of networks but easy to be afraid (Facebook
is Like Chairs; Silicon Valley)

• The hysterical sublimes intends to put us at ease when we are unable to comprehend the power of a
technology

Facebook as a chair: trying to connote that a very complex and terrifying technology is as unintimidating
as a simple object.

08—March 01--THE SURVEILLANCE ECONOMY, OR THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF

POLITICAL ECONOMY

Part One: Media Ages, Their Effects and Their Representations

1. Agricultural Age

• McLuhan; Hardt/Negri; Mosco

Mosco: talked about advertising industries and use media to enforce commodification

2. Industrial Age

 McLuhan; Media is usually put out before it is thought out (Figure ground)
 Hardt/Negri; Postmodernist and informatization
 Jenkins; talked about media poaching.

3. Information Age

 Weiser and McLuhan and Hardt/Negri and Jenkins and

 Lanier: Cloud computing – seems to overturn personal ownership of old forms. Talks about the
stuff that emerged since packet-switched networks.
Enclosure: enclosure lots people working on land. Land was the first thing to be privatized. This is now
happening with our metadata. It is being farmed, sold and used like the natural materials harvested in
enclosure lots.

 Garfinkel: When he says technologies can talk about us behind our back this is cybernetic.
 For Zuboff and Mosco Metadata is the message

-Mosco says this is problematic because our information is being commodified.

Digital rights management – Very binary. You agree to the terms of service or don’t use the service.

4. Political Economy Studies Commodification, Dialectics, and Power

- Can't have commodification without the industrial age

- Emphasizes the dialectical approach which looks not only at power from about but from power from
below and looks at

Myths: Transform the messy complexities into the pristine gloss of nature. Ties to Colonialism and
Orientalism.

Part Two: Surveillance Capitalism: how technology, ideology and media industries interact in the
digital age

1. Surveillance: the Exchange Value of Metadata

- Technology and unique economic ages: Material and Immaterial

Capitalism takes on different market forms and different eras in the context of different technologies.

1.1. Example: your phone

We are distracted by material objects. We are not recognizing where the value is coming from. The
purpose of the phone is to collect information on us and sell it to corporations. AUDIENCE
COMMODITY.

2.1. Example: OWL

Collects metadata on students so the profs can see how they are responding to their content Tracks
amount of time

2.3.Alan Kay and the importance of awareness

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware

Even though humans are the animals that shape tools it is the nature of tools and man that learning to use
tools reshape us.

3. From Surveillance to Prediction

 You make money by making a person preform intended acts.

 Our behavior is like a raw material and when it is correctly shaped and makes us preform certain
acts.
5.2.Example: Pokémon Go!—from the CIA’s Keyhole to the games that love to shape you!
CIA works closely with google to tailor Keyhole's systems to meet their needs. The finished product
transformed the way intelligence officers interacted with geographic information and earth imagery.

6.1. Instrumentarium Power is camouflaged and medium-driven. Guiding you to predicted

outcomes.

Instrumentarium Power: Modify your behavior but not by choice. Substitutes computation for politics,
so it's post democracy. You can only do this by taking it in a way that is secret, hidden, that’s is
backstage.

"They don’t care what we believe. They don’t care if we’re happy, they don’t care if we’re sad.
They don’t care if we’re in pain, they don’t care if we’re in love. They only care that whatever
we are and whatever we do, we do it in a way that interfaces with their supply chains."

Analyzing Instrumentarian Power

Asymmetries of Knowledge: when two parties don’t share the same amount of information, an
imbalance or asymmetry is created. This power shapes our behavior, but also works outside of our
awareness, keeping us ignorant.

Digital Dispossession: Dispossession of data might be better understood as encompassing loss of

integrity, autonomy, dignity, temporarily and relationally (labels like "digital breadcrumbs"). In other
words, the act of accumulating and extracting personal information for the purpose of making
money.

Introduction
Dialectic: Discussion between different spheres of power

Big Data: Data which can be mined on a large scale and algorithmically analyzed to search for predictive
patterns.

PART ONE: DIALECTICS, DIALOGUE, CONTRADICTIONS and RESISTANCE

Dialectics: Looks at oppositions (binaries) and examines what this means about society. What do the
binaries of men and women mean for society.

1. Mosco on Dialogue and Contradictions

 Dialectics: Political economy emphasizes the dialectical approach which looks not only at power
from above but at power and resistance form below and how contradictions and contentions help
is to accurately map the social field.
 The media have always been contested (kind of like Stuart hall claims)
 Contradictions: Capitalism is conflicted internally

2. Mosco on Resistance
Rationalization: Life in an amazon warehouse: fear and efficiency at 35 orders per second
Dialectics: "Microsoft workers call for cancelling military contract for technology that could turn warfare
into videogames"

3. Other Thinkers: McLuhan, Hall, Haraway, Zuboff...

PART TWO: DIALECTICS and COMMODIFICATION: From selling Attention, to

Instrumentarium Power

- From selling attention to instrumentation power

o Quinn Norton (women)

Writer who adopted many positions

1. Norton on Banner Ads and the Attention Economy (the 1990s)

The internet takes what has come before and uses it in a different way.

 Banner ads functioned like billboards. Fostered a kind of attention economy. It delivered
audiences to advertisers.

 Google did not just profit off banner ads like other companies. They innovated.

Google bought double click.

2. Norton on Social Media, Cookies, and the Tracking Economy (early 2000s)

Cookies: allows the organization to place something on your computer that remembers you. Allows org to
build profiles on you so they could make a profit on you.

 Myth of Anonymity: Even if the data they collect is anonymous it is easy to well who the user
is.
 Problem: Third Party Doctrine: when you use something you are agreeing to its terms and
conditions. And you are agreeing to your data being used. So many companies are selling our
data.
 When you use something, you're opting in.
 Ex. Digital speech is considered property online.

2.2.Contestation and Innovation

 Noscript and Ghostery are among many VPN innovations that have been created to be less
invasive
 1 Password – auto generates passwords
 BLUR, Express VPN

All of these services cost money. Only privileged people are able to afford these systems

Norton on Shaping and Prediction

- Silicon Valley tech giants don’t want their children to use the technologies they create. Why?
- These companies make money when you behave in the way they wanted you to behave in.
 - We are a part of a vast cybernetic system of surveillance and tracking.
- These technologies allow organizations to "know us better than our family does, or perhaps even
than we know ourselves"
- "big data knows when youre going to quit your job before you do"
- We give away our freedom so easily while using social networking or even online technologies
- But we don’t nessassarily have to give up all of this information

PART THREE: REPRESENTING INSTRUMENTARIAN POWER

1. Ad: ‘The Boy Who Beeps’ (2015)

 General Electric Commercial

 Humanizing the Hysterical Sublime

2. Ad: ‘Alexa, Ellen and Portia’ (2020)

 Who they selected to cast connotes open-mindedness

 Ad itself is an affective product
 Tries to ground hysterical sublime in historical ways to make it more digestible for audiences

• Instead of talking about how efficient Alexa is, they talk about how inefficient other technologies were.

3. Ad: ‘I’m Big Data’ (2020)

 Gave a transparent view into what they do. They data mine and they sell it.
 Digital Subline – It is scary to data mine but they are humanizing data mining.

PART FOUR: THE VIDEO ‘THE SOCIAL DILEMMA’ —DIALECTICS, RESISTANCE &
INNOVATION (last fifteen minutes)

1. How can you apply course readings to the documentary?

2. How can you apply Mosco, Norton and Zuboff?
3. What does it mean for democracy if we all think of ourselves as commodities?
4. What does it mean for democracy if all behaviour is being enclosed, shaped, and commodified?

AI, IDEOLOGY AND INSTRUMENTARIAN POWER: WHEN ALGORITHMS WORSEN OR

CREATE INEQUALITY

PART ONE: AI AND INSTRUMENTARIAN POWER

Wachter-Boettcher on ‘stress testing’ rather than ‘edge cases’;

- We allow problems from the past to reinscribe themselves into todays technology.
- The input affects the outcome for users. (racism goes in -> racist technology goes out. Interface define
output

W-B on ways we ‘embed culture into technology’

PART TWO: CATHY O’NEIL—AI and IDEOLOGY

1. Algorithm: ‘a set of rules for sorting data?’ Or ‘an opinion embedded in math.’
 - Cathy O'Neil says an algorithm is an opinion embedded in math. Algorithms are not objective
math. They make things work for the builders of the algorithms – often a homogeneous group of
people.
- We have to inject ethics into the construction of algorithms. What do we need to create an
algorithm

• 2.3. WMD is Destructive – The scoring systems ruin peoples lives. They create a reality and distorts the
reality around it.

3. WMDs use Biased Data Sets

 Data cannot be decontextualized from our historical practices

 Algorithms - "I always wonder who is benefitting from that system, and who is suffering"

3.1. Redlining and city real estate racism – Racist Housing Policies

 Discrimination by design
 Architects and real estate developers also play a role in discriminatory design.
 Gov said people living in certain zones get certain percentage rates on bank loans. It was meant to
be rationalized and efficient but turned into an iron cage mess.
 Was based on the theory that marginalized groups would decrease property value.
 98% of home mortgages were allotted mortgages but marginalized groups. This perpetuated
generational poverty. White families had more equity.
 Schools are more segregated now than they have ever been. There is disproportionate funding
between white and black schools.

Redlining in Face book

- Wanted to use algorithms to profile you and who you interacted with
- People can be served faster if they have certain qualities. Customer service may help a loyal customer
over a new customer. They want to maximize profit.

3.2. TikTok and automatic stereotypes

• TikTok tries to filter out videos form ugly, poor, and disables users. Everyone has some control and
power over how technology works. It is obvious that algorithms are influenced by people and are not
objective math.

3.3. Facial Recognition and ‘Coded Bias’

3.4. Machine Learning reproduces social bias

• We are reproducing stereotypes. You don’t have to be a programmer to be involved in fixing these
issues.

Power shadows: we reproduce pre-existing inequalities. (very much related to Sarah water betcher). We
have to be intentional about fighting for inclusivity.

Algorithms replicate the world as it exists and doesn’t think of ways to fix the issues we are currently
facing.
3.6. Filter Bubbles and Ads

 Segment and segregate people into categories so that rich people can be given opportunities and
poor people can be preyed upon.
 This is a from of Instrumentarium power
 Facebook Lets advertisers exclude users by race
 Googles ad system has become too bug to control

- Tailored advertisement is an auction system so the person who's willing to pay the most gets the
opportunity to put an ad in front of you.

PART THREE: SAFIYA NOBLE—THE BIAS OF COMMODIFIED LANGUAGE

1. Bias is strengthened by AI when algorithms do the coding

 Google is about ranking popularity

 Algorithms are coding macheines, invisible coding machines
 Denied ability to discuss
 Denied the dialectic

2. Commodification and Search: commodified language skews the results

 Search engines harbour biases. Commodification skews results.

 Popular news commodities rank high (photos of criminals)
 Also: Lack of structural siversity in ad agencies and newsrooms.

PART FOUR: THE DIALECTIC AND INNOVATION

2. Zuboff: Push back against myths and interrupt commodification of future prediction. • If we have
marekts for behavioural futures than we cannot have democracy.

3. Zeynep Tufekci: Pushing back against Instrumental Rationality.

4. Mosco: Doubling down on democracy: Indigenous AI Project; Algorithmic Justice League

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, TRANSHUMANISM AND MYTHS OF EXTREME

2.2. Inspiration for the computer: the Jacquard Loom of 1801! The first machine to used punched cards.
- Computing before computers

Jacquard Loom of 1801 – Programable textile look. It was a punch card machine. The card contained the
algorithm.

• Same idea of program and output.

2.2. Turing in 1950: How will know when machines can think? A Turing test!

The Turing test - If the machine fools a human it passes the test Foundations of cybernetics
3. Ray Kurzweil on AI: Top-down programming builds a ‘giant brain’

•Checkers (1959); Eliza (1966); Siri and Alexa

Top Down
- One approach to creating software is o painstakingly program the rules of complex processes. o It has
extremely limited and narrow knowledge.

Bottom-up (chaos theory)

- Self organizing algorithms gradually learn patters of information in a manner analogous to human
learning

4. Ray Kurzweil on AI: Bottom-up programming allows for simple things to evolve into complex
outcomes. Emergence!

•The Game of Life (1970); Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994); Swarming Robots Drag a Child Away! o
Von Neumann's Cellular Automata (1940)

• Talked about connotations attributed to AI

PART TWO: KURZWEIL and the SINGULARITY (when AI outpaces humanity)

1. Positive Feedback: builds on all previous growth. Result: the singularity. Technological Determinist?
We need negative feedback (death) to keep things balanced
- Without negative feedback balance is disrupted
- Technology is advancing exponentially

- The law of accelerated returns

2. Myths of sublime progress: oppositional readings.

Singularity: 2045 when every aspect of your life is astonishingly affected by technology. We will
integrate technology into our bodies.

 Replace traditional techniques of indutrial machines with the cybernetic intelligence of

information and communication technologies
 Ludacris Binarism – Lets look at technology as text connoting progress. •O’Neil: AI is an opinion
embedded in math!

•Mosco: Myths simplify complex issues to seem ‘natural’ and without discussion! •Zuboff: Resist
these simplified narratives!
3. A political economy critique. Who sets the norm?

•Jaron Lanier: This reproduces the problems around digital Feudalism.

 Data controlled centrally sharecroppers who must pay periodic fees.

 Exchange Value: the data devices generate the valuable information that makes up the
commodified self.

Mosco: The exchange value of thought? Enclosure of ‘the body’ by large companies? 4. Myths of
Rationalization. More tech determinism? Or is it Instrumental rationality?
•Hardt & Negri: Continuing the process of ‘informatization’.

•Sarah Wachter-Boettcher: ‘What about the stress cases?’

• If your not asking how your technology could hurt someone you're not asking the right questions.
•Zeynep Tufeki, ‘The dangers of rationalization and Instrumental Rationality.’

• If everything is automated and does what it is supposed to do we can have very inhuman results.

PART THREE: Max More’s Transhumanist Myths

•The idea that humanity will transcend its biological status and become fully technological. •Sublime,
rationalized, binary myths!

• In this essay there is a disgust with mother nature for not making us efficient enough. •The Blade
Runner scenario: colonies? Colonies! JRR: Redlining of life itself!

 Floating Silicon Valley for those who can't get a visa

 The interconnections of a range of institutions around the concept of power

- Instrumental rationality views the natural and social world in terms of how they can be exploited,
and has no regard for human values.

PUSHING MEDIA THEORY TO ITS LIMIT: TWO VIEWS

PART ONE: TRANSHUMANIST THEORIES OF MEDIA

1. A Sublime Analysis: Turing’s simulation to AI’s evolution to self-healing chairs to Kurzweil’s sub-
optimal biology!

The singularity
- A hypothetical point in history when artificial intelligence exceeds grows more powerful exponentially,
outdistancing even out capacity to measure and evaluate it.

2. A Messy Analysis: From stress cases to power outages to sunspots to red-lining to 6 Californias to
More more more!

McLuhan says we only pay attention to things when they fail.

Global Digital Divide – Technology is not equitably distributed around the world. Is has a concentration
within the western world.

3. Instrumental Rationality and Facebook, Max More, Zynep Tufekci, and Ted Kaczynski.
- The goal is what matters in instruemntal rationality. Not how we got there. o Facebook

PART TWO: KACZYNSKI’S THEORY OF MEDIA

1. Smash the machines. Blow it all up.

This is a binary approach

 Within his manifesto he talks about the singularity.

  "People wont be able to turn the macheines off because doing so will lead to suicide"
 "It would be better to dump the whole system and take the consequences"
 "the fate of the human race will be in the hands of macheines"
 "we need to go back to 'Wild' nature"
 He produced terror within the public

2. The ultimate in binary thinking: the Unabomber.

PART THREE: DELEUZE & GUATTARI’S RHIZOMATIC THEORY OF MEDIA

1. It’s often about the ‘in-between’. It’s where we started this course!
Nature has the lessons for us. Within tech we often reflect nature and the structures it presents.

Rhizome – A botanical metaphor developed Deleuze and Guattari for a non-hierarchical organizing
structure based on a horiz root that grows through the soil sprouting new plants. It is an alternative to tree-
like structures, because its asymmetry, random distribution, and interconnectedness means that it cannot
be understood in terms of binary oppositions.

It is without beginning or end. It is co-shaping. Impossible to predict. Constantly changing.

 Very unlike a tree which is centralized.

 Rhizome is likes a decentralized network.
 Rhizome is not the opposition of traditional western thinking because that is binary.

2. It’s often about the process of fluidity, not fixity. Think states of matter: solid, liquid, gas!

- Things have always had changing states.

- They are trying to push back on the traditional way of thinking which claims we have a determined
state.
- People accept infinite change but not all kinds of change. We don’t realize the amount of infinite change
we accept.

THIS REPRESENTS THE ORDER. THE FAMILY TREE.

3. Western Philosophy is structured around binary hierarchies and rhizomatic thought is not.

 We think of ourselves as being in control but this is not the case. o A binary environment
separates us from others.

4. The rhizome is an assemblage of different interacting parts (and so are media, tech, you...)

 In the forest – No single truth, no singular cause and effect. Nature is about complexity.
The forest is a process. We cannot ask where was the first tree that started this
environment.
 The rhizome is non standardized. It unites us. o Error! Filename not specified.

5. Assemblages are fluid, changeable, and in-between (and so are media, technology you..)
  We are part of the environment, but philosophy tends to try to enforce order. But nature is
complex and subject to change.
 Any one tree is the product of an assemblage – water, soil, etc. It is giving back and taking in.

  We are all part of an assemblage

 You are the imputes that shape you. But you also output and shape the world.
 The concept of the in-between should be familiar to us.
 Ratios are constantly being re-shufflesd

Quotes from Donna Haraway which apply

We are living in a world of connection, and it matters which ones get made and unmade.
- It is possible to construct your identity, your sexuality, even your gender if you please.
1. What is a medium? It’s always ‘in between’. It’s where we started this course!

A MEDIUM IS SOMETHING THAT IS INTERMEDIATE

2. Question rationalization, commodification, simplification, standardization, fixity. o Stagnation – when

the flow of

Complexity leads to evolution. Yet, there are still aspects of stability that you can cling to. There is
strength through complexity.