Antidatamining, or the art of killing financial markets a little every day
All throughout the month of February 2012 the Net artist collective RYBN is in residence at the Gaîté Lyrique, one of the hotbeds of the emerging art & technology scene in Paris. If you are in the French capital, I highly recommend paying them a visit.
I became acquainted with RYBN last year, when I met some of its members at a conference at the French National Library where I was delivering the closing speech, while they had presented their most recent project, Antidatamining VIII. ADMVIII (for short) is a trading bot, i.e. an artificial intelligence making real investments on real stock exchanges, collecting data and impacting financial markets worldwide. The bot monitors and maps data flows to create real-time digital visualizations such as charts, soundscapes, and timelines. It has an online page (where you can see how well it is doing, its net liquidity, the value of its shares, etc.) and a Twitter account providing details about ongoing orders.
Source: Antidataminig – Offshoring map visualization
ADMVIII is not your run-of-the-mill social commentary about market greed and pervasive financial panic in modern life. The goal of the project is to detect economic imbalances and discrepancies introduced by robot trading. As the bot actually executes buy and sell orders online, it represents a détournement of automatic trading technologies. As such it is intended to highlight their social consequences – and their potential disasters.
Assange, corporate conspiracies, and Wikileaks ultimate contradictions
Monday, October 24th, 2011. While facing a crowd of journalists and activists gathered at London’s Frontline Club for a momentous Wikileaks press conference, Julian Assange looks nervous. Today he has to deal with the inner contradictions of his political project. No, I’m not talking about the legal consequences of his extradition case. Nor about the ongoing fratricidal struggle with his former associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Nor about the very polarized reactions to the whole Cablegate undertaking by the global audiences. I’m talking about this…
Yes, Julian Assange has many reasons to be nervous. After the financial blockade, the leak has been reduced to a tickle. « A handful of US finance companies have successfully blocked 95% of worldwide support for WikiLeaks ». Is there, as he implies, a conspiracy against Wikileaks? That would be ironic, as the very implementation of Wikileaks was supposed to single-handedly put an end to conspiracies (according to this seminal 2006 paper, penned by Assange himself). Well, not about as ironic as this: apparently the only way for Wikileaks to counter Bank of America and Paypal is to become as profitable as they are. Open up to « more wealthy donors ». Provide the general public with projections about donations (and, supposedly, tax deductibility). What’s next? Selling shares to new investors via an IPO? Read more
‘Blame it on Black Culture’: Race, Ethnicity, and Bogus Explanations of UK Riots
by Antonio A. Casilli and Paola Tubaro
During the last week several voices of the international blogosphere have been discussing our study on the impact of social media censorship during the August 2011 UK Riots. As you know if you have been reading our blogs, our work was based on computational methods and aimed at showing possible scenarios of civil violence. We were adamant about the fact that our intention is to provide policy-making tools and a theoretical framework, while data collection about the riots and their possible social determinants is pending.
The hunger for data produces spurious correlations
A few of our readers have been particularly concerned with the fact that, for the time being, evidence is lacking. A particularly virulent one dismissed, in the comments section of a US blog reviewing our research, our results as unsubstantiated « opinions cloaked in technology ». In the current climate of ideological polarization, such attacks are to be considered – albeit epistemologically enticing – politically motivated. As is some of the « swift evidence » the Internet is regurgitating these days.
Exhibit A: the HumStats Blog, sprung from nothing on August 15th 2011, with only one post suggestively titled ’2011 England Riots: Statistics of Ethnicity’: a lengthy statistical tirade highlighting a « strong correlation » between the occurrence of riots and black population (unemployed black population, to be precise) while discarding other socio-economic status indicators as not significant. (The blogger’s profile ‘HumStats’ is frugal to say the least. All we know is that this person is somehow statistics-savvy, but we have no indication as to the blogger’s gender or ethnic background).
Now, this kind of exercises in descriptive statistics is simple to grasp for everyone. Just having a look at summaries such as this one, taken from the blog post in question, an inexperienced reader might be drawn to think that the correlation is there, and – as in many a mind correlation implies causation – bang!… the Black and Afro-Caribbean population of England is automatically to blame for the recent wave of civil violence. What’s more, class conflict is nothing and, apparently, matters of social justice count for peanuts.
Le refus de la civilisation du Net engage le cognitariat à un difficile examen de conscience (s01e03)
Nous ne pouvons plus nous dire, en même temps, « natifs » et « barbares » du numérique…
Mark Zuckerberg et la collectivisation de la plus-value numérique (S01E02)
Deuxième épisode de notre grande saga bédé…
La farce du e-G8 et la tragédie du cognitariat (S01E01)
Le premier épisode d’une série BD qui devrait plaire aux grands comme aux petits…
e-G8 : la conscience d’un internaute, combien ça coûte ?
Sur Mediapart, le guru du numérique Nova Spivak a dénoncé l’effort d’embrigadement du Net opéré par l’administration Sarkozy. Invité au forum e-G8 qui s’est ouvert le 24 mai 2011 à Paris, il a mis en ligne « dans un souci de transparence » les documents qui lui ont été envoyés par la Présidence de la République française : invitation, note de cadrage et agenda des deux jours.
Le même souci de transparence et le même esprit rock’n'roll me poussent, chers lecteurs, à mettre en ligne le contenu complet de la sacoche (en polyester, couleur noire, 35 x 40 cm, Made in China) qui m’a été remise à l’accueil dudit forum.
Photo (c) Cyril Attias via Flickr
A vous d’en tirer les leçons politiques qui s’imposent :
- 1 cahier modèle « William Sheller » (16 x 21 cm) spiralé, 180 pages blanches, avec logo eG8 forum, pour prise de notes – prix unitaire 6,69 € ;
Avatar activism and the « survival of the mediated » hypothesis
By now, you’re all way too familiar with the Egyptian Facebook activism. And everybody and his sister has spent the last year-and-a-half discussing how wrong was Malcolm Gladwell in dismissing Moldovan Twitter activism. And millions of you have smiled at Gaddafi’s crazy rant against Tunisian Wikileaks activism. But I’m sure the notion of Avatar activism appeals to a more restricted audience.
In an attempt to fill this gap in your general knowledge, let me point you to a recent article by Mark Deuze.
Mark Deuze (2010). Survival of the mediated Journal of Cultural Science, 3 (2)
One interesting part of the essay deals with protestors around the world appropriating the aesthetic codes and themes of James Cameron’s film Avatar. In the Palestinian village of Bil’in, for instance, activists disguised as blue-skinned Na’vi fight « Israeli imperialism ». The same goes with other community initiatives around the world, such as the Dongria Kondh tribe in eastern India and the Kayapo Indians in the Amazon rainforest.
E-Santé : Résistance, autonomie et environnements apomédiés
La quatrième séance de mon séminaire EHESS Corps et TIC : approches socio-anthropologiques des usages numériques a eu lieu le jeudi 27 janv. 2011. Le sujet traité : e-santé, médecine 2.0, le rôle des professionnels de santé, des collectifs de militants des droits des patients et des pouvoirs étatiques. Voici, comme d’habitude, les slides.
ATTENTION CHANGEMENT DE DATE : La prochaine séance (où il sera question de corps dans les médias sociaux) aura exceptionnellement lieu le VENDREDI 11 février 2011 de 17h à 19h en SALLE 2, EHESS, 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris. Pour s’inscrire, il suffit de m’envoyer un petit mail gentil.
E sante – Résistance, autonomie et environnements apomédiés
Merchandising WikiLeaks
A long lineage of cultural critics, from Guy Debord to Carl Roscoe, have insisted on the unique ability of contemporary societies to ‘merchandise dissent’. Also, one man’s foe is another man’s icon. So, after Saddam Hussein’s card decks and the Osama Bin Laden Russian dolls, US new public enemy n. 1, WikiLeaks, spawns a series of novelty products. Here’s my – so to speak – favourites.
Category: dog clothing
Origin: USA
Price: $ 18.95Let’s say you have a small yappy dog. Which is admittedly already pretty annoying. What would you do to make it into an even more annoying little animal? Well buy a « I heart heart heart WikiLeaks » dog tee-shirt. Please note the Gothic font, which automatically adds a biker tattoo twist to the whole thing.
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What’s this blog about?
I'm an associate professor of Digital Humanities at the Paris Institute of Technology (ParisTech) and a researcher in sociology at the Edgar-Morin Center (EHESS, Paris). Bodyspacesociety offers regular updates about my ongoing research, publications, and teaching. If you want updates on media features and conferences, please click here.
The views presented on this blog are solely mine and do not represent the positions of my institutions of affiliation.
New books out now!
The special issue of the journal 'Communications' Cultures du numérique is out. Also, you might want to check my latest book Les liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociabilité?. Both published by Editions du Seuil, both available in bookshops and online.
» Buy Liaisons numériques
» Visit the companion website
» Buy Cultures du numérique (Communications, n. 88)
All blog content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 France License.
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