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opinion

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from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

The business model of the web primarily relies on ad tech, which trades user attention in the same way that stocks are exchanged in financial markets. Ad tech comprises many different services and products such as analytics, content management systems, etc. It is a complex ecosystem whose main goal is to map and target user behavior. The analogy with financial markets is not obvious nor natural, but rather a set of decisions taken to assimilate networked communication to neoliberal markets. Decisions that were taken during the early 2000s after a migration of Wall Street financial workers to Silicon Valley tech companies. In this context, financial workers applied their working logics to newly-born tech startups. As the 2016 study, “Networks of Control ‘’ shows, every time we do something online a collection of other things are happening - every action is registered and analyzed as classifiable behavioral traits in order to target and predict future user actions. User tracking, or the process of collecting any activity done by users on the internet, is possible because of cookies - a tiny piece of software invented in 1994 by Lou Montulli. opinionAccording to Joana Moll, cookies represented a shift from the internet as a place of anonymity to one where everything is potentially recorded. Montulli didn't create cookies for this purpose, but he acknowledged early on their potential to create a massive surveillance state.
from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

Yet, no matter how much these advertising solutions brag about their accuracy, they deliberately fail to understand the reflexive quality of the interactions between humans and these virtual environments. By understanding action as reactive behavior, they regard interactions with interfaces as a natural given, a necessary relationship, rather than something that has been designed and is contingent to cultural, economic, and political inertias and desires. This probably also works against the commercial interests of these services’ customers: a static analysis wouldn’t take into account that placing a new ad on spots where interaction is concentrated might drastically change how users interact with the website. Moreover, opinionit wouldn't surprise me (the author of this report) that the results visualized in these analyses will probably be painfully obvious. Like many digital visualizations, these strike as a contrived and ineffective way to state the obvious, legitimized by a lack of trust towards non-quantitative forms of thought as well as an avoidance of political and epistemic liability.
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

2000 people subscribed over 60 mailing lists, a maximum of 666 people on the Mastodont instance, 400 external people using Lurk’s chatrooms. “It is small compared to Twitter, but still significant for us”. However, “a lot of work is needed to not have it collapse”, it is not just “magically working” (this phenomenon of relating to technology like if it was working by magic, seems to summarize well the situation Aymeric wants to decry).opinion
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

For Lurk’s free hosting services, they need to find at least 400 euros per month, just to run and maintain it. “How do we invite people to a nightmare of maintaining infrastructure without getting paid?”. Aymeric talks about the frustration in the work done by people involved in alternative servers. A work full of struggles. We need to “go beyond an academic understanding of infrastructure”, and stop the exploitation of people maintaining technology. “The only way around it is the individual contribution of the person”, he believes.opinion
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

With a workflow constantly on the brink of the precipice, to having the infrastructure collapse, “everybody is an entrepreneur, nobody is safe”, as he explains by displaying the book of the same title on-screen. “There is not much talk and writing on the precarity of the cultural sector, the ‘entreprecariat’”. For him, beyond the easier and better-known questions of cultural, political and ecological issues of infrastructure, we need to start paying more attention to its actual technical aspects, in terms of maintenance.opinion
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

Through his “manual”, Lukas wants to make people build their own servers, in order to “stop using dropbox”. Practice is at focus here: “We criticize Big Tech, which is important, but then we use Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, gmail … it is difficult to make the switch”, even for hackers, even for cultural institutions aware of the issues of using Big Tech technologies.opinion
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

When we give data to “the cloud”, we don’t control the terms and conditions of our data – “there is nobody to talk to if something goes wrong” (such as when data disappears). How come it is so seductive to us, then? “People expect things to work immediately, without delays”. This is what Lukas calls the “cloud narrative”: “things should always seem light, easy, and anything that betrays this principle betrays the façade image of a cloud”. From this narrative and its related practices, “we are spoiled, used to have 99,9% constantly smoothly available”.opinion
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Tina proposes that these tactics reinvented the home as ludotopia: inhabitable, multimedial and totally open to public view. opinion TikTok enabled the home to become a meta apparatus for fun and games. The app performs an important kind of work for mass boredom, the TikTok mediated pandemic home.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Agnieszka points out that corecore risks evoking a sense of self-pity for users, not activating them in a meaningful way. The videos highlight struggles and can lead to a collective sense of dissatisfaction. The message can be interpreted as romanticizing loneliness, saying “loneliness is beautiful.” It can create a de-political sense of individual struggle, focusing on the self without recognizing the issues at play. What Agnieszka did not expect while doing her research is how easily someone consuming corecore content can be shown alt-right related content by the algorithm. By making a new TikTok account and watching corecore videos she discovered that videos of or from controversial figures like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson would appear on her FYP, videos focusing on an obsessive self improvement that do not acknowledge the systemic issues at play. opinion
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Referencing Agnieszka Wodzińska’s earlier presentation, Jordi says he was completely illuminated by corecore and its criticisms. opinionHe sees scrolling as a collective practice, not individual. It connects us both to the app and all this other existing infrastructure. There is no power of negotiation because these complex systems are being simplified. We are all made to come together and collectively participate in these systems.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Agnieszka responds that users are attempting to navigate this struggle. The trick is to stay vigilant and think of the wider implications of the decontextualized snippets. The platform intends for us to view them as they all fit together but it is important to think of them individually. The ambiguity makes it interesting but also dangerous. Tina adds that the platform doesn’t recognize the ideological stance. question“Is it the videos or the algorithm that dictate the ideological trend?” opinionAgnieszka answers that it is unclear what role the algorithm plays in the creation of subcultures. She says corecore originally, this being only a few months ago (the audience laughs at the newness of the trend) was anti-capitalist. It then exploded into other hashtag subcultures. The fact that there is no cohesiveness makes it interesting and the platform does not want transparency of their algorithm.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Jordi responds that it is more interesting to create our own ecosystems to use the platform in specific ways. To create our own affordances instead of letting TikTok dictate the way we use it. We can do this by creating workshops, groups of students, friends, reading groups. By having a political purpose and using the media in different ways. The algorithm affords the creation of subcultures, we often end up in very niche sections of TikTok which would very clearly not be what TikTok wants as an image of their own platform. He says it’s as if you end up in this weird dark alleyway of the city and jokingly admits that he may be a defendant of filter bubbles. Jordi doesn’t think that the algorithm has full control of determining these subcultures and the different ways they flourish. opinion
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Agnieszka says that the visual language of trends like #nichetok, #corecore and #philosophytok makes invisible TikTok visible. There is a visual business. She says that “users reflect more consciously on the more embodied, practice and experience of scrolling, consuming and interacting.”opinion There is even more to be said about the comment section, it provides the potential for some sort of exchange which is often meaningless and surface level but maybe not. It is a “new sort of structure for interaction that is more referential to other platforms and other ways of engaging” there may even be ways to get off the platform together somehow and revisit it later.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Geert Lovink is the next audience member to contribute. He sees infinite scroll as “a regressive phenomenon, an end of the social of social media, end of community.” He says it is a subliminal activity, pleasure of braindead activity. It has gone full circle, only one step away from full automation and is another form of zapping of the television channels. “The early internet was presented as a critique of this passivitiy, you can participate, create, take over the media. Do you think scrolling has this almost automated nature?” opinion
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Jordi responds that quote“scrolling in and of itself will not get us anywhere.” Scrolling can be described as a regressive gesture, a machinization of our movements and therefore dangerous politically. The novelty of it comes precisely out of when you do something different. opinion“All of our actions are mediated by technical systems, there is no difference between scrolling and joining a political party” like all the actions we do collectively in the world together. We must convert it into something that is more than machinic and make other actions around it. Not letting the scrolling define itself for us. There is a revolutionary potential of collage, while the collage had been co-opted by corporations for advertisements, scrolling can be considered like passive surfing channel consumption. The key is to use the gestures and affordances differently.
Geert adds that there is a subconscious production of power. Jordi agrees that the embedded automatism is very difficult to fight against, and jokingly says we should make our own psyops. Dunja responds that reconceptualization of scrolling is not subliminal, it is very conscious.