Pub Date : 2022-03-21DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042576
Alison Hearn
ABSTRACT This paper explores the force of automation and its contradictions and resistances within (and beyond) the financial sector, with a specific focus on computational practices of credit-scoring and lending. It examines the operations and promotional discourses of fintech start-ups LendUp.com and Elevate.com that offer small loans to the sub-prime consumers in exchange for access to their online social media and mobile data, and Zest AI and LenddoEFL that sell automated decision-making tools to verify identity and assess risk. Reviewing their disciplinary reputational demands and impacts on users and communities, especially women and people of colour, the paper argues that the automated reimagination of credit and creditability disavows the formative design of its AI and redefines moral imperatives about character to align with the interests of digital capitalism. The economic, social and cultural crises precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic have only underscored the internal contradictions of these developments, and a variety of debt resistance initiatives have emerged, aligned with broader movements for social, economic, and climate justice around the globe. Cooperative lending circles such as the Mission Asset Fund, activist groups like #NotMyDebt, and Debt Collective, a radical debt abolition movement, are examples of collective attempts to rehumanize credit and debt and resist the appropriative practices of contemporary digital finance capitalism in general. Running the gamut from accommodationist to entirely radical, these experiments in mutual aid, debt refusal, and community-building provide us with roadmaps for challenging capitalism and re-thinking credit, debt, power, and personhood within and beyond the current crises.
{"title":"The collateralized personality: creditability and resistance in the age of automated credit-scoring and lending","authors":"Alison Hearn","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2042576","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042576","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper explores the force of automation and its contradictions and resistances within (and beyond) the financial sector, with a specific focus on computational practices of credit-scoring and lending. It examines the operations and promotional discourses of fintech start-ups LendUp.com and Elevate.com that offer small loans to the sub-prime consumers in exchange for access to their online social media and mobile data, and Zest AI and LenddoEFL that sell automated decision-making tools to verify identity and assess risk. Reviewing their disciplinary reputational demands and impacts on users and communities, especially women and people of colour, the paper argues that the automated reimagination of credit and creditability disavows the formative design of its AI and redefines moral imperatives about character to align with the interests of digital capitalism. The economic, social and cultural crises precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic have only underscored the internal contradictions of these developments, and a variety of debt resistance initiatives have emerged, aligned with broader movements for social, economic, and climate justice around the globe. Cooperative lending circles such as the Mission Asset Fund, activist groups like #NotMyDebt, and Debt Collective, a radical debt abolition movement, are examples of collective attempts to rehumanize credit and debt and resist the appropriative practices of contemporary digital finance capitalism in general. Running the gamut from accommodationist to entirely radical, these experiments in mutual aid, debt refusal, and community-building provide us with roadmaps for challenging capitalism and re-thinking credit, debt, power, and personhood within and beyond the current crises.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"123 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43658757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-20DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2108865
F. Mami
What if the basic emotions of colonized/decolonized subjects, including rage, jealousy
如果被殖民/非殖民化对象的基本情绪，包括愤怒，嫉妒
{"title":"The decolonization that could have been but never was","authors":"F. Mami","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2108865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2108865","url":null,"abstract":"What if the basic emotions of colonized/decolonized subjects, including rage, jealousy","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"536 - 539"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45104795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-17DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042582
Jake Goldenfein, Monique Mann
ABSTRACT This article explores philanthropic interactions between ‘Big Tech’ and digital rights civil society organizations (DRCSOs) to enhance understanding of the alignment and misalignment of interests between these groups. ‘Big Tech’ wields political influence by distributing cash to research and policy organizations. Academic research supporting ‘Big Tech’ business practices is marshalled to support their political lobbying efforts, while civil society policy work shapes the narrative what dimensions of these businesses should be regulated (or not). While academic work is typically presented as a cool analysis of the relevant issues, DRCSOs purport to represent the interests of individuals and groups negatively affected by those business practices. Through empirical tracking of direct financial flows, as well as an analysis of cash distributions via class action litigation settlements, we show that certain DRCSOs have long-term financial relationships with ‘Big Tech’ that trouble our understanding of the alignments or misalignments of their interests. Through that analysis, we question where and how civil society fits into automated and algorithmic cultural production and perpetuation, and the way that Big Tech uses and guards the economic capital generated through its dominance over ‘automated culture’.
{"title":"Tech money in civil society: whose interests do digital rights organisations represent?","authors":"Jake Goldenfein, Monique Mann","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2042582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042582","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores philanthropic interactions between ‘Big Tech’ and digital rights civil society organizations (DRCSOs) to enhance understanding of the alignment and misalignment of interests between these groups. ‘Big Tech’ wields political influence by distributing cash to research and policy organizations. Academic research supporting ‘Big Tech’ business practices is marshalled to support their political lobbying efforts, while civil society policy work shapes the narrative what dimensions of these businesses should be regulated (or not). While academic work is typically presented as a cool analysis of the relevant issues, DRCSOs purport to represent the interests of individuals and groups negatively affected by those business practices. Through empirical tracking of direct financial flows, as well as an analysis of cash distributions via class action litigation settlements, we show that certain DRCSOs have long-term financial relationships with ‘Big Tech’ that trouble our understanding of the alignments or misalignments of their interests. Through that analysis, we question where and how civil society fits into automated and algorithmic cultural production and perpetuation, and the way that Big Tech uses and guards the economic capital generated through its dominance over ‘automated culture’.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"88 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45716495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-08DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042580
Elizabeth Stephens
ABSTRACT This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton known as Mechanical Turk and the Amazon microwork platform of the same name. The original Mechanical Turk was a life-sized automaton made in 1770 and publicly exhibited until the mid-1800s, and which played games of chess with the audience. Its movements were fully mechanical, but even more remarkably, it was promoted as the world’s first ‘thinking machine,’ deciding each move of the chess pieces for itself. From the outset, it was widely assumed that the Mechanical Turk was a hoax, and that a human must be hidden inside the machine, directing the game. But it was a clever hoax whose trick was never discovered, and widely admired as such. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job platform functions in a similarly open way, this paper argues, as a sort of open technological hoax. Mechanical Turk provides a source of human cognitive labour that can be used to invisibly operate digital systems and programs that are widely assumed to be fully automated. Artificial intelligence is a twenty-first century thinking machine, it requires a human brain to make it work. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a marketplace in which companies can hire piecemeal cognitive labour to patch gaps and train programs to keep those systems functioning. Providing what Jeff Bezos has called ‘artificial artificial intelligence,’ Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, like Kempelen’s automaton, both draws attention to and obfuscates the limits of automation and artificial intelligence. Taking the two iterations of the Mechanical Turk as rich cultural figures of automation for their respective periods, this paper will argue that the open secret of their artificial artificial intelligence is itself a form of misdirection that hides other, more successfully guarded secrets: the true extent of that labour, and the conditions in which it is performed.
{"title":"The mechanical Turk: a short history of ‘artificial artificial intelligence’","authors":"Elizabeth Stephens","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2042580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042580","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton known as Mechanical Turk and the Amazon microwork platform of the same name. The original Mechanical Turk was a life-sized automaton made in 1770 and publicly exhibited until the mid-1800s, and which played games of chess with the audience. Its movements were fully mechanical, but even more remarkably, it was promoted as the world’s first ‘thinking machine,’ deciding each move of the chess pieces for itself. From the outset, it was widely assumed that the Mechanical Turk was a hoax, and that a human must be hidden inside the machine, directing the game. But it was a clever hoax whose trick was never discovered, and widely admired as such. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job platform functions in a similarly open way, this paper argues, as a sort of open technological hoax. Mechanical Turk provides a source of human cognitive labour that can be used to invisibly operate digital systems and programs that are widely assumed to be fully automated. Artificial intelligence is a twenty-first century thinking machine, it requires a human brain to make it work. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a marketplace in which companies can hire piecemeal cognitive labour to patch gaps and train programs to keep those systems functioning. Providing what Jeff Bezos has called ‘artificial artificial intelligence,’ Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, like Kempelen’s automaton, both draws attention to and obfuscates the limits of automation and artificial intelligence. Taking the two iterations of the Mechanical Turk as rich cultural figures of automation for their respective periods, this paper will argue that the open secret of their artificial artificial intelligence is itself a form of misdirection that hides other, more successfully guarded secrets: the true extent of that labour, and the conditions in which it is performed.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"65 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43583907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-08DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042581
Zala Volcic, M. Andrejevic
ABSTRACT This article considers the link between the increasingly important role of automated information curation online and the rise of what we call ‘commercial populism’. We invoke the term to refer to the convergence of populism as a marketing tool – a way of selling, for example, nutritional supplements or survivalist merchandise – with political strategies that cater to the citizen as consumer (whose freedoms are framed in the individual register of personal taste unfettered from civic concerns or constraints). Perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, we draw on the example of Donald Trump's political rise, which while not unrelated to his particular idiosyncrasies, demonstrates how the automated curation of social media aligns itself with what the aggressive rise of commercial populism. The goal of such an analysis is to consider how the combination of hyper-commercialism with the formal attributes of social media contributes to inter-related political pathologies of polarization and conspiracy theory. The consumer-oriented model of personal taste catered to by algorithmic curation highlights the paradox of ‘social’ media: they promise to enhance the social by displacing or reframing it fundamental a-social. The offloading of social decisions and formation onto commercial, automated systems for curating news and information reinforces this version of individualism, contributing to the forms of misrecognition that enable it.
{"title":"Automated media and commercial populism","authors":"Zala Volcic, M. Andrejevic","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2042581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042581","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers the link between the increasingly important role of automated information curation online and the rise of what we call ‘commercial populism’. We invoke the term to refer to the convergence of populism as a marketing tool – a way of selling, for example, nutritional supplements or survivalist merchandise – with political strategies that cater to the citizen as consumer (whose freedoms are framed in the individual register of personal taste unfettered from civic concerns or constraints). Perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, we draw on the example of Donald Trump's political rise, which while not unrelated to his particular idiosyncrasies, demonstrates how the automated curation of social media aligns itself with what the aggressive rise of commercial populism. The goal of such an analysis is to consider how the combination of hyper-commercialism with the formal attributes of social media contributes to inter-related political pathologies of polarization and conspiracy theory. The consumer-oriented model of personal taste catered to by algorithmic curation highlights the paradox of ‘social’ media: they promise to enhance the social by displacing or reframing it fundamental a-social. The offloading of social decisions and formation onto commercial, automated systems for curating news and information reinforces this version of individualism, contributing to the forms of misrecognition that enable it.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"149 - 167"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48765762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-08DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2045333
P. Deshingkar
ABSTRACT Debt-migration is endemic in construction work in India, where exploitative social relations are an integral part of businesses’ capital accumulation model that can entrap migrants in forced labour and perpetual indebtedness. Drawing on concepts of cultural capital, ‘constrained agency’, and qualitative interviews with migrants and their wives, this study examines the embodied and material practices that migrants in Telangana use to challenge power hierarchies and embark on different life trajectories. The paper draws out the gendered differences in cultural capital and agential strategies that migrants use to place themselves and their families on an upwardly mobile path. Although still in debt, many migrants had succeeded in buying land, investing in farming, marrying their daughters, releasing themselves from moneylenders, and educating their children privately. A few had transitioned to working and living more permanently in the city of Hyderabad. This research sheds new light on how constrained agency and the use of cultural capital intersects with gender, ethnicity, and caste. It also shows that while the situations of both those who continue to circulate and those who settle in the city remain precarious, small incremental changes can add up to a significant shift in social and economic circumstances.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-08DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042579
M. Andrejevic, R. Fordyce, Lüzhou Li, V. Trott
ABSTRACT Automation has a long history in cultural production, but the contemporary moment presents a range of new possibilities and demands for the deployment of automated and autonomous systems in the shaping of our cultural and social worlds. The cultural implications of the deployment of automated systems for producing, curating, and distributing a growing range of cultural texts and artifacts extend beyond the realm of content to encompass their pace, rhythm, and scale. Understanding the significance of these shifts remains a central task for cultural studies research that builds on the field’s historical engagement with the entwinement of cultural practices, social relations, and power. This theme issue builds on the historical and recent concerns of cultural studies to provide a range of approaches to the cultural significance of automation. Given the scope of the transformations, the coverage of possible topics is indicative rather than exhaustive. The articles in this collection range across the realms of automated news curation, credit scoring, image curation, deep fakes, data science, the gig economy, and content moderation. They engage with possible responses to the real and potential pathologies of automation in the cultural realm – while highlighting the links between culture, politics, and economics. Taken together they develop a range of critical approaches to the sometimes creeping, sometimes galloping automation of cultural production, curation, and distribution. While stressing the moments of historical continuity with earlier forms of bureaucratic and administrative rationality, they simultaneously indicate that we are, in many ways, still in the very early stages of a process that is likely to encompass an expanding range of cultural practices and texts.
{"title":"Automated culture: introduction","authors":"M. Andrejevic, R. Fordyce, Lüzhou Li, V. Trott","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2042579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042579","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Automation has a long history in cultural production, but the contemporary moment presents a range of new possibilities and demands for the deployment of automated and autonomous systems in the shaping of our cultural and social worlds. The cultural implications of the deployment of automated systems for producing, curating, and distributing a growing range of cultural texts and artifacts extend beyond the realm of content to encompass their pace, rhythm, and scale. Understanding the significance of these shifts remains a central task for cultural studies research that builds on the field’s historical engagement with the entwinement of cultural practices, social relations, and power. This theme issue builds on the historical and recent concerns of cultural studies to provide a range of approaches to the cultural significance of automation. Given the scope of the transformations, the coverage of possible topics is indicative rather than exhaustive. The articles in this collection range across the realms of automated news curation, credit scoring, image curation, deep fakes, data science, the gig economy, and content moderation. They engage with possible responses to the real and potential pathologies of automation in the cultural realm – while highlighting the links between culture, politics, and economics. Taken together they develop a range of critical approaches to the sometimes creeping, sometimes galloping automation of cultural production, curation, and distribution. While stressing the moments of historical continuity with earlier forms of bureaucratic and administrative rationality, they simultaneously indicate that we are, in many ways, still in the very early stages of a process that is likely to encompass an expanding range of cultural practices and texts.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"1 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44994972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-24DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042575
Thao Phan
ABSTRACT This article examines the 2015 film Ex Machina as a cultural text that exemplifies the technologization of gender within algorithmic culture. Analysing different textual elements — the narrative diegesis, the marketing material, and the digital techniques used in the VFX post-production process—I argue that gender is consistently figured as a kind of technology. That is, gender is systematised, codified, and reduced to a programmed set of instructions that can be used by machines to manipulate and deceive. I argue that understanding gender through its figuration with the technological, specifically through code and algorithms, raises pertinent issues concerning surveillance, race, and bias. This is reflected in the film through a problematic representation of racialised figures, particularly techno-Orientalist tropes of labouring Asian bodies.
{"title":"Programming gender: surveillance, identity, and paranoia in Ex Machina","authors":"Thao Phan","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2042575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042575","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the 2015 film Ex Machina as a cultural text that exemplifies the technologization of gender within algorithmic culture. Analysing different textual elements — the narrative diegesis, the marketing material, and the digital techniques used in the VFX post-production process—I argue that gender is consistently figured as a kind of technology. That is, gender is systematised, codified, and reduced to a programmed set of instructions that can be used by machines to manipulate and deceive. I argue that understanding gender through its figuration with the technological, specifically through code and algorithms, raises pertinent issues concerning surveillance, race, and bias. This is reflected in the film through a problematic representation of racialised figures, particularly techno-Orientalist tropes of labouring Asian bodies.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"46 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42386154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-23DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042578
Nicholas Carah, Daniel Angus, J. Burgess
ABSTRACT The work of training machine vision systems is diffused into the participatory cultures of social media. As we use social media platforms to express ourselves we assemble databases and train algorithms; and these algorithms in turn shape our everyday cultural practices. In this article, we describe a machine vision system that we built to undertake an unsupervised classification of 13,000 images posted to Instagram from Splendour in the Grass, a large Australian multi-day music festival with over 40,000 attendees featuring international musical acts and arts performances. We demonstrate how unsupervised approaches operate as open-ended queries, rather than definitive classifications. Once a machine vision system has ‘learned’ the unique numerical feature vector associated with an art object, brand activation or gendered pose, it can be used to search for other similar users and moments. We critically explore how the capacity of machines to cluster and classify these Instagram images is interdependent with the mediatized enclosures of popular cultural events and their participatory cultures, and hence represents continuities with the longer history of experience capitalism. Where unsupervised machine vision is used on an advertiser-funded platform like Instagram it points us to the prospective nature of digital advertising, driven not only by specified targeting of pre-labelled consumer preferences, but also by continuous pattern-mining and prediction, sometimes of patterns that seem impervious to symbolic labels. We argue for the importance of critical approaches that explore the open-ended and prospective interplay between culture and machine vision. We need to investigate the feedback loops between the design and use of our cultural spaces, the creativity of participants and users, and the development of platforms’ technologies and business models.
{"title":"Tuning machines: an approach to exploring how Instagram’s machine vision operates on and through digital media’s participatory visual cultures","authors":"Nicholas Carah, Daniel Angus, J. Burgess","doi":"10.1080/09502386.2022.2042578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2042578","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The work of training machine vision systems is diffused into the participatory cultures of social media. As we use social media platforms to express ourselves we assemble databases and train algorithms; and these algorithms in turn shape our everyday cultural practices. In this article, we describe a machine vision system that we built to undertake an unsupervised classification of 13,000 images posted to Instagram from Splendour in the Grass, a large Australian multi-day music festival with over 40,000 attendees featuring international musical acts and arts performances. We demonstrate how unsupervised approaches operate as open-ended queries, rather than definitive classifications. Once a machine vision system has ‘learned’ the unique numerical feature vector associated with an art object, brand activation or gendered pose, it can be used to search for other similar users and moments. We critically explore how the capacity of machines to cluster and classify these Instagram images is interdependent with the mediatized enclosures of popular cultural events and their participatory cultures, and hence represents continuities with the longer history of experience capitalism. Where unsupervised machine vision is used on an advertiser-funded platform like Instagram it points us to the prospective nature of digital advertising, driven not only by specified targeting of pre-labelled consumer preferences, but also by continuous pattern-mining and prediction, sometimes of patterns that seem impervious to symbolic labels. We argue for the importance of critical approaches that explore the open-ended and prospective interplay between culture and machine vision. We need to investigate the feedback loops between the design and use of our cultural spaces, the creativity of participants and users, and the development of platforms’ technologies and business models.","PeriodicalId":47907,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"20 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46533005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-23DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2042577
Kate Mannell, R. Fordyce, Suneel Jethani
ABSTRACT This paper argues that the proposal for a ‘Hippocratic oath for data science’ is a severely limited form of data ethics for automated culture. Drawing on the oath used within medical professionalism, proponents as diverse as Wired and the European Data Protection Supervisor have argued for a Hippocratic oath for data science as a way of introducing a soft regulatory environment. In this paper, we analyse the history of the Hippocratic oath and the professions of medicine and data science to suggest that this proposal offers an individualized solution to systemic problems and, as such, is unlikely to be effective. We further argue that the proposal of the Hippocratic oath ignores the degree to which the profession of the physician is different from the profession of the data scientist in ways that limit the transfer of an ethical framework between them. In particular, we note that automated data access leads to a lack of clear professional identity among those who act as data stewards which, unlike in a medical context, makes it unclear how breaches of an oath would be adequately sanctioned. We also argue that, unlike in a medical context, harms can be difficult to define and have historically been poorly acknowledged, making it difficult to meaningfully take an oath to ‘do no harm’. We propose that in the context of data science, a Hippocratic oath would provide little substantial protection for users and largely penalize workers over companies while deferring responsibility away from those profiting from data extraction. The paper concludes by suggesting that the limits of the Hippocratic oath are significant to the point that other regulations should also be sought, although proposals for oaths have value as catalysts for cultural change within the technology industry.
本文认为，“数据科学的希波克拉底誓言”的提议是自动化文化的数据伦理的一种严重有限的形式。《连线》杂志(Wired)和欧洲数据保护监管机构(European Data Protection Supervisor)等各种各样的支持者都在借鉴医疗专业精神中使用的希波克拉底誓言，为数据科学提出希波克拉底誓言，作为引入软监管环境的一种方式。在本文中，我们分析了希波克拉底誓言的历史，以及医学和数据科学专业的历史，表明这一提议为系统性问题提供了个性化的解决方案，因此，不太可能有效。我们进一步认为，希波克拉底誓言的提议忽略了医生职业与数据科学家职业的不同程度，这限制了两者之间伦理框架的转移。特别是，我们注意到，自动数据访问导致作为数据管理员的人员缺乏明确的职业身份，这与在医疗环境中不同，使得如何对违反誓言的行为进行充分制裁变得不清楚。我们还认为，与医学背景不同，危害很难定义，而且在历史上也没有得到充分承认，因此很难有意义地宣誓“不造成伤害”。我们认为，在数据科学的背景下，希波克拉底誓言不会为用户提供实质性的保护，而且在很大程度上惩罚的是工人而不是公司，同时把责任从那些从数据提取中获利的人身上推开。论文的结论是，希波克拉底誓言的局限性是重要的，因此也应该寻求其他法规，尽管誓言提案作为技术行业文化变革的催化剂具有价值。
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