Internet-based communications, services, devices, and architectures have become integrated increasingly into the experience of everyday life for billions of human beings. At the same time, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and logic learning machines have been tasked with an ever greater role in the production of cultural knowledge, the arbitration of social relations, and the regulation of the human body itself. The confluence of these two trends requires us to address core questions at the nexus of human experience and machinic logic: namely, how are human subjectivities (re)shaped in relation to these automated processes, and what are the resulting implications for identity, cultural expression, and social justice?
The four papers on this panel apply different methods, theoretical approaches, and sites of research to address this set of questions from radically different, but intersecting, perspectives.
The first paper draws on cyborg theory and disability studies to investigate the role of biometric medical implants in the lives of disabled users, and to critique the design and development processes that exclude the participation of disabled individuals. As this author demonstrates through a performative investigation of their own device’s alert logs, the resulting user interfaces can contribute to exhaustion, confusion, and fear at the cost of the very health outcomes these devices are intended to promote.
Through its novel approach to “data physicalization,” using the tools of the art world to communicate the cyborgean subjectivities of disabled users of medical devices, this paper and the performative work it describes helps non-disabled users to understand better and more immediately how “technological fixes, innovations and imagined futures around disability require incredibly intensive regimes labor, maintenance and repair.”
The second paper focuses on travel reviews and the colonialist gaze. Using an empirical discourse analysis of thousands of TripAdvisor reviews centered on the historically African American, rapidly gentrifying community of Harlem, New York, the article demonstrates how Black and White reviewers occupy separate subjectivities regarding place and identity. Specifically, the author demonstrates how the role of digital databases in mediating discourse surrounding this neighborhood feeds back into sociocultural processes in ways that challenge human autonomy and cultural diversity.
In their words, “the collapsing effect of recursive discourse may threaten race’s habit of being fluidly formed through ‘sociohistorical processes’—with differing definitions and regimes across time and place—and instead help to create a more fixed set of racial- economic categories.”
The third paper uses the theoretical language of critical cultural studies to argue that there is a fundamental incompatibility between data practices and architectures and the human discursive practices immanent to cultural innovation and production. The author synthesizes perspectives such as Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” Keats’ “negative capability,” and Han’s “psychopolitics” to argue that the process of counterfactual reasoning is a crucial component of human subjectivity, and inherent to the shaping of human identity.
The author argues that these modalities of thought can’t be reproduced via current AI or ML models, because their architecture is purely synthetic, using training data sets to extrapolate affirmative cultural associations, rather than engaging in negative or lateral “thinking.” By contrast, the author points to the “psychedelic renaissance” and the integral role of negative dialectics in creative perspectives like surrealism as evidence that the inherent human negative capability is distinctly at odds with machinic intelligence. In their assessment, the digital cannot yield that which is truly novel.”
The fourth and final paper theorizes a new facet of human subjectivity informed by algorithmic logics, which the authors refer to as “algo-vision.” The authors argue that this subjectivity is formed dialectically in relation to the semi-obscure but nearly ubiquitous role that data surveillance and algorithmic decision-making processes play throughout networked society. As individuals and communities work to internalize the logic of these social arbiters, the resulting shifts in self-perception, lived experience, and communal identity can have negative consequences for health and justice, but can also provide new opportunities as a “super-power” to exercise organized resistance against the hegemonic forces encoded into these automated processes.
