FIRST WORKSHOP ON AGONISTIC ALGORITHMS =============================================================== Participants: Janet Vertesi, Carl DiSalvo, Nick Feamster, Seda Gurses Date: 28./29. March 2016 Princeton faking, manipulating, jamming other than activism, ... challenging etc. being inherently good i had not seen the thing that bots immitating "hispanics" j: there is a scale and visibility issue organizations have been doing this politically for a long time faking the other persons followers isn't this part of how democracy works wouldn't this be part of agonism c: the good citizen variety of civic experience based on the simpsons this idea of the informed citizen is a fairly new construct he is interested in the citizenship in the us and citizenship has always been this fairly laxidaisical participation the bowling alone: we are not doing these things together actually, we never did these things together i actually this is how democracy and diplomacy there always seems to be some underlying what way do you think that this is not politics as usual the connection to advertising since the 2nd half of the 20th century the politician as a brand and using brand style strategies reputation management as a major component of the political work involved that is brand and marketing work all the people i know that make bots we have a number of bot makers out of our program literature/media experience they all do it for advertising how do you drive traffic to articles on the various platforms janet: angele christin chartbeat and slate what happens when you have these metrics programs the clicking and sharing become a metric of success or not there is not an implicit notion that followers are bettter they need to be made and they need to exist in particular context the metricism, and the fetishization of metrics to understand the kinds of games they are playing when they are botifying you want things to be forwarded, but you don't want to flood there must be different mechanisms trying to understand why metrics matter and to whom? [*** MAKE VISIBLE THE POLITICS OF METRICS] why did he say that hillary and trump have 50 percent and bernie 10 percent meaning bernie is worse at it, less so than put some political assumptions c: the documentation of occupy sandy the way they moved money amazon wedding registry you could make wedding lists but it was for recovering response ad hoc stuff on top of existing systems that conflates the message you can't use these systems for bottom up response because they are top down systems at the end, one of the statements DHS says what does it mean to be the state if our citizens our doing such great job, maybe they don't need us we can outsource it our citizens this is called the resilient network it complicates the usual arguments of you are either on this or that side the bernie argument is interesting and those distinctions are the ones that we are trying to trouble j: america has all of these frontier narratives some dude goes to the frontier and survive against all odds canada, we have wilderness narratives you go out and die nobody makes it: they are eaten by the people they are with best canadian folk song: whaler ship you are iced in, and the song is about how you are not going to come back in there would never be a resilience thing: the government takes care of you you don't leave without we would call it a public failure if people had to use amazon [*** RESILIENCE AS A PROJECT TO RESPONSIBILIZE CITIZENS, ONLINE USERS?] c: we had this amazing discussion that would not be the natural conclusion frank was like you are living the end of times that is the absence of staTE and that is true i do think that that is one of the different discussions that one has to have about politics in the us even the state is weak j: i love how the weakness of the state becomes the rational for the continuing weakness off the state c: the weakness of the state makes us innovative that is the smart city discourse there is a political theory discussion here, too why is agonism more popular in europe and why do they look so horrible in the us in europe there are forums for public debate but there are still rules around that we have foregone all rules in political discourse in the current election cycle you have discussions about the size of trump's hands and genitals being a part fo political discussion in a debate trump is acting as a troll he is an amazing troll and in the past week, he has bated people, ted cruz about these affairs what happens affect theory and politics contemporary us politics: the problem is not that it is driven by affect but by emotion instead of passion, people were becoming hateful the problem is that affect somehow exists without a narrative literary reference: a poetic response to something emotion: is something you write a narrative around it and the narrative around is around hatred if you take that as your starting point whether they are bots, iot things that print out hate objects j: the politics of spectacle is really different there is a lot of that going on and none of it is about actual issues the political divides are not about the issues but they become changed by spectacle when you have this move towards the affect of anger and hatred and fear you need to disentangle that from mouffe talking about it agonistic democracy it is about the contestation of ideas agonism is supposed to stop short of violence c: the myth thing challenge with the agonistic discussion it refuses to say that someone ever wins the idea that somehow you win and it is over is a f low there was a women: bonny honig bonny honig - roe v. wade the problem that people had that when roe v wade had passed the issue was settled when years later people try to overturn that is one of the fatal flaws we had the fight, we passed the law, it is settled that is not the case it might have been settled for the moment but it will always be open to some party coming and questioning it the minute such things cannot be questioned is when you have an authoritarian regime c: series called occupied the difference between us and scandinavian narrative house of cards is brutal: it is mean, violent in occupied: norway stops to produce oil because of its affect on climate change the eu and russian gets into cahoots russia occupies norway and forces them to open up their oil production it is interesting to see the way politics get acted out what does it mean for norwegians to resist when they don't want to go to law it is the opposite of the us narrative unlike the characters in house of cards they are able to brutalize their way through the norwegian way is to negotiate and he fails but that is the way to do things j: the natual conclusions is about glossing over what particular actions mean the consensus based stuff i studied a consensus team it is really hard to do it has a lot of merit commonwealth runs as a consensus organization that is a counter balance to the un which doesn't it is not that consensus is really bad you cannot assume consensus went over the slides j: dichotomies flattens things pluralism where things are contested it seems like have multidirectional things is interesting before jumping into the space what happens if we stop thinking about good and bad guys what happens if you think about it as a complicated situation and you have to situate yourself and the actors in relation to each other does this get to agonism? c: networks are good even if you were taking the dichotomous view let's assume these are our bots each bot is driven by something else bots don't spontaneously produce themselves what if all those other htings that make the bots possible are these coming from marketing or from whom i have a feeling that these overlap (the people that make the bots and their networks of production) the trump and hillary bot are all messed up in the middle so series of institutions that are uniquely hillary and trump but in the middle are these institutions that are common j: this is helpful for the discussion with nick how it can be operationalized differently then the diad: which is antagonism that is the thing that nick is trying to get away from he was saying that in the security community they are trying to get away from the bot that is antagonistic looking at agonism looks at these multivalent relationship where affect comes in: in the assumption of us vs. them that is one affective move c: one of the things when you take the agonism seriously is that there is a shared commitment that there is a disagreement and a shared commitment that it is worthwhile to disagree about part of the work of doing an analysis of an agonistic condition is to understand what that shared commitment actually is to it could be things like global free trade for trump and hillary it is america even though they disagree seda: very charged situations like belgium or turkey or black women j: agonism allows you to zoom out of antagonism it may look like middle eastern immigrants against the whole world but if you look at it, there are different political parties and neighborhoods you don't take into account all teh things that they share all the actors they share some of it is historical some may be coming from have nots when you just make it seem like the terrorist or immigrants vs. belgian government you loose the larger associations you can really easily get tunnel visioned the affect maybe creates it so it is really easy if you are the target of a twitter bot attackers but really it is 4chan and a whole series of infrastructures that people may have a recourse to what is horrible about the horrible twitter attacks is that it feels like this antagonistic situation c: is it to far gone or can you stil have agonism? i think agonism, but how do you create a sitaution where the conflicting dialogue plays out and can create conversation the microsoft bot revealed the ways in which i think it was gamed but you could say imagine that there was a bot that was created with interactions with 4chan you could have different bots going at it, similar to the way you would have oreilly and jon stewart go at each other two characters who did the work of summaring the perspective of others ampliyfing and turning them into cartoons as providing a moment that we could share that is partially the interesting bits of work how do we create these bots that let us see the drumpf bot that is to me a worthwhile thing it captures trump's rhetoric and plays it non-stop j: it is also the result of a media personality, c: what is missing about that is that all the candidates have equally cartoonish characters j: i was talking w danah about tay what is interesting about it is that it makes several things visible not the drumpf bot but if you had a 4chan bot what makes 4chan powerful is that it is in a particular corner of the internet most people do not have to lok at 4chan but if 4chan comes after you you don't know where they come from the threats that you received from them are not done publicly it amplifies the antagonism but does not let you see the agonism c: what is a value to nick as a computer scientist? i can imagine, if you had a twitter bot that was trying to talk about climate change coalesce arguments for or against climate change that becomes an interesting contribution in a way in which cs and platforms can contribute to public discourse you can think about that as an automated polling we have had these discussions about computationally generated journalism here is a news story about a little league game based on tweets and you can do something like that for attitudes about climate change and condensing those to wholes that can be examined that is an interesting use what are the ways that people disagree who does this twitter bot fold in and reject, who follows and retweets it then that network reveals itself, and i bet it reveals itself in ways that are strange j: in the antagonistic view it would be bot A against bot B what if you took out pieces of the infrastructure that makes A possible what if you treated the different bots as such and studied them even handedly c: if we believe that politics is made up of different associations that are in conflict with one another that they also have interesting connections pro-environment we should save the environment: scientifically proven and others who think it is gods gift to us by releasing twitter bots to computation prspectieves twitter bots bring people to them could you reveal networks that would otherwise not be seen? can the bots become a social science intervention of research tool that shows us the shape of political associations? j: two party system view trudeau is like a bot!!!! things on the internet meet in other spaces that right and left all kinds of networks that are intersecting and sharing or not sharing diffrent kinds of things c: the other two things you can say about this is it could potentailly allow you to build networks that you would otherwise not be able to build there would have tobe a network analysis part of this to understand who all this is there is a paper by they made some twitterbots that ended up revealing a whole network of people who were engaged in a conversation about energy production in northern england some were for and against and they identified by who followed maybe they could have done this by then by hand and go through followers alex woki??? gave a talk at 4s building twitter bots helped them understand the network they are working in j: that is all the work that sam is going by trying to find these people if you think of it as infrastructurally if you are a cs person interesteed in security what if you saw attackers as larger networks and if you could protect against the source c: or if you are a political agent of any kind activist or political agent who may be people who are reaching out to me can bots express or stregthen networks and associations c: i think the iot thing is more pressing and interesting you see things at defcon or ccc i don't think it is th same as doing something playful that seems too much like a demo the printing of the racist pamphlets is the first threat of iot instantiated in real life c: seda asked the question of how playful we want to be we were again at th qeustione of iot phil has this book on iot the majority of the book is about twitter bots because there are not as many iot examples can we look at what we learn now from bots and when all the appliances becomes platforms where each of the actors is a different kind of thing printere, refrigerator, light bulb j: here is the interesting thing isp, money, where you live some of them share those background assumptions so the lamps become this perspicous things: the visible objects and the thing under is where all the politics happens c: there is a diagram that i want to show there is a diagram on platform studies the different levels at which the humanities look at systems we can look that and say do we want to say these are the levels that we want to look at or across levels j: the actor netowrk theory people will say there are no levels the politically charged person would say that that is independent what is technical or not c: most media studies happens at the level of reception some of it has been about interface but nobody has looked at function, code, and platform j: that is why tarleton's work is so innovative s: the computer scientists are at the bottom c: but they are not reading their objects cultural artifacts j: layer 8, the human layer techopedia physical data link network transport session presentation application and layer 8 is politics outside of the system that will come in and bug it up s: nick would agree he might be talking with people who think layer 8 is a distinct layer we have all of these IoT objects they are being supported by their interconnection but we have to show that they are not distinct and part of the game c: they are hybrid systems where the human is very much in the loop like getting trump to read mussolini can we get someone to retweet mussolini they made a bot that tweeted the tweets at trump it ran for a while and he finally retweeted one of them without know it is a mussolini quote it was a human in the loop endeavor there is a lot of human in the loop seda: algorithms cannot be all open because people would game the system but then kate has this example of the reddit algorithm showing the intestines of algorithms encore... c: a student is looking at data intermediaries open data program three parties involved an advocate that wants to affect some change a person that is able to find and get the data (the data intermediaries) the data intermediaries are not committed, to the political action that is happening here, they are committed to openness of data they will work to collect data so that somebody can use it adn they are not committed to the cause she was looking at the pro-democracy movement in china who was collecting data, who was making it actionable and who was using it they were different groups and they also asked her to burn their irb forms they were concerned about the people she interviewed they have to sign the forms, but afterwards they have to burn it j: don't people game the algorithms regardless of what they do or not this is why i don't have an adblocker because that is the only layer of transparency i have into what a system knows about me to see if soething is traced or recorded so people will play with what is given to them even if it is propriary we have some ideas also about what each algorithms are and what they do danah was saying people don't know how tay works and they had ideas about what the obvious mistake would be c: with that example in particular all of my reading on it is so biased tarleton tweeted something the four best things written on tay i want to know what my brother things and he doesn't know anything about this it is one thing to sit in that room to understand bots but if you just stumble about that j: my in laws are not on social mediea the primary is not being fought in their newsfeeds: they don't have any it is another battleground, with its own rulese it is not a nw media landescape but another battle field c: it is nothing new at all but reputation management that would be handled through a press release but it would be now through a press release and bots... thinking about iot or journalism what does that look like and how does that get combined j: in the gym you have all the different screens c: the orange zone gym physical activity area every screen is a members read outs so you can get competitive with other people i cannot imagine what this looks like j: metricized time, vs. where are you now in time the orange zone: is about being in the metricized time instead of being in your own time and knowing what your body needs i want a watch that builds that for me to have the moment: i need a workoute today, but it needs to be in a slow way it is like the home horoscope c: home horoscope was a critical reflective project that was about data that was happening in the home and would print out horoscope predictions for your based on that data j: we can also be more evocative we have a plant in our house it is called the janet craig it is an office plant that can go without water we forget to water it when things are busy the plant has the record of our relationship on it it is the mood rings this is when we moved and it was neglected we were eaway from xmas c: tom jenkins iot work his question is what happens when the iot home is not a nuclear family home which is about ownership of space and objects what does iot look like here? a lot of the world does not live the way we live where my home is only my home it also breaks down in apartment apartment complexes i have a lot of objects that i share with other people blenders gardening tools it would be very different if i had to think about when my neighbor wants my blender what does the neighbor know about me c: a friend of mine does advertisement work they have an iot product a pare of socks it turns of netflix if you fall asleep i can't believe that netflix paid you money to produce this as a marketing piece they paid you to do critical design that is not critical this is entirely the banal home of the future that is the kind of ridiculousness and now netflix knows my sleeping patterns Nick is now with us!!! j: we discussed agonism and the guiding principles we want to hear what you are doing and interested in n: timely that woolley's talk was today that talk made sense to me it certainly was familiar the paper that i had sent to seda ahead of time what he would call propaganda backing up after the talk i think i understood a little bit after reading the proposal that we had and hearing his talk the two fit togethr a little bit more i had thought about propaganda as a bad thing this is spam and we need to stamp it up after his talk, i was thinking he was much more of the stamp this out kind of thing my reaction after reading your work there is a more nuanced thing and this becomes clear in the types of bots he was showing that was timely his way of studying this was more along the lines of when i saw that there is a huge complement to how we study these problems we were looking at the total twitter stream ande figure out, we were not looking at content he made a quick comment about retweets and this not helpful and superficial but from our analysis of network traffic retweets are juicy they are indicative of superficial activity the way i look at these problems we stop before we get to the content we look at the graph at what rates and volumes very complimentary to what he was saying to me, if his was talking your language my thought was, we could probably add a lot to this discussion we are looking at the complement of things compromised accounts there is a whole field in cs that detects when an account gets compromised those are the kinds of things where the type of thing i work on and have experience in can come into play twitter or forums how do we tell if there is an account compromise rates of posting and other kinds of traffic patterns are thsese people related discovering behavior from traffic patterns is something i am interested in i don't know how to think about it more in a more nuanced way i have been thinking about attack and mitigation this project is really interesting because we have to come up with something else i am not sure what it is i am really interested in your theories it is fascinating!!! not going to stamp them out so, how do we make a participatory dialogue do we label them all 10 people are saying the same thing does it matter that they are human or not? are day paid half a yuan, or are they sheep? c: do we label or coral them do we understand what these clusters are and how they are interacting in some cases you may want to amplify them news media jon stuart and oreilly have a productive act amplify roles in a way that gets people engaged they are clearly in conflict with one another can you imagine a system like that that is not going to get rid of negative commentary but think of the intermedieareis that can transform it does this also tie into iot work? do these bots that now live on twitter, end up living in our fridges and cars and what is that like as a space to engage? n: how do they correspond? c: we don't have good examples yet! pax technica but there is nothing in the book about iot he thinks iot will be similar in the way that these objects are automated another way to approach this project do we maybe look at lessons learned from twitter and apply them in iot n: where do these things translate to physical actuation voter turnout something relating to that j: we did some conceptual work the first thing we wanted to do the problem with that talk was there were good and bad guys we are trying to figure out how you are talking about agonism in computational space a pluralistic version of what the debate looks like the relationship between 2 people can be antagonistic and in reality it is more pluralistic when you see the associations they are sharing that is where thee agonism is n: is there sth cs can bar with to what extent presumably it is not healthy for democracies to be operating in dyads c: you get that filter bubble and it is reinforcing how do you burst that and bring in more perspectives there were two other things J: here is a dyad hillary and trump bot and that is all you see, because it looks like it is traceable but they both come out of larger organizations and they are embedded in a cultural context and they are both acting because they are using advertisement stuff there are things they share and don't from cs perspective if one is your attacker and this is you you are always thinkig of attacks as coming from your attacker but not the bigger picture c: all of this is to say this is no different between these and relationship management the origins are in advertisement the difference between two beer companies are the companies that produced them are there things about bots that we can see from the outside n: it is interesting what you said about influencers if this were a twitter graph you may not have to follow the cirlced, but just the triangles and squares and the attacks come from the square c: part of the question is what are the times you want to amplify and rally things if you think of contemporary politics is not left and right ecology and preservation and climate change protect earth for scientific or religious reasons can you understand the ways in which such associations are being built it is much less a concern about trump and hillary why these associations breaek apart and reform j: this is why we need a cs person in the room one way to think about this is can we use the tools of cs what these actors are where sam talked about tracing back to find the bot networks n: he mentioned sth briefly about tracing money it was quick cs has looked at porblems like that in the underground economy where people looked at spammers and bought the stuff they were paddling and followed the money in fact you are not going to get spam from 50 million people, instead it is three people the closest that cs people talk about this is through botnets in terms of looking at coordinated network attacks c: if a lot of twitter things are about capturing attention the question is whether iot becomes about bandwidth and energy usage become an analogy and attention we usually give other media forms? it is a measurable thing, it is like followers n: we can start to look at network traffic as a way of how users are interacting with the deviec is it used or not and how is it being used that is monitorable j: when we were etalking about th entiteis thy are all embededed in networks here is my iot lamp they are aell esharieng this social infrastructure that is differentially distributed across them n: in the graph that you are talking about you are identifying high degree types of nodes based on say yes that is interesting is this a device that gets a lot of your attention is maybe an interesting nexus point twitter: what ever random thing pops up on my phone iot: my echo starts reading the news out to me chrome casts (audio version) dropcam ubi/echo: voice recognition smart things another way to approach: these are the ways we can participate and what are the ways in which we may not want to participate and what are the ways that people create a work around c: the challenge with iot there is not good examples so much it is the printers that is an example but we don't have a lot of them j: we got better at defining agonism but the connection to iot n: political discourse and online forums for example the printer gts m thinking if i can accses public displays, cars the other can be a monitoring aspect if i want to forment political movements i may want to know things about human movement measuring attention is important c: so, we are part of the metro lab thing ttri is going to deploy sensor pods in atlanta and the big thing they are talking about that they can monitor is use it could be cars or people how many people are in this space and at what times the sensing is fairly rudimentary where is the attention being paid and where should we pay attention to i don't know if this is too orthogonal depending on the type of data that is gathered can affects these dialogues trump: you can imagine the discussions that informed by the data that is collected c: if you take the city is your site they will put them onto intersection: power, wifi intersecteions can dvocate on their own bhalf j: we were talking about affect if you have a dyad and focus on it all of 4chan goes after black women activists it looks like a dyad then an antagonism develops and an emotional response if traffic really increases along a particular node then this is where people concentrate their attention that is the example with the boston potholes because iphone is used only by a well off segment and their part of the city get developer better c: in the city or online forums one way to detect the voices that are not included we know where the traffic is in which case we know who is not there here are a series of voices that have not been included can we bring these other perspectives that are relevant n: so like recognizing when you are myopic recognizing which particular perspectives like climate we can say all the major features in the climate debate and look online and see which of these features are not in ther and bring thm in j: that is what i am trying to do with the critical nws bot you have neglcted where your view is coming from n: wee did work on filtre bubblse diffrnet gographic locations and present it to the user and show what was left out of your research j: you did critical design n: the irony was that because his talk was so good and bad it created this knee jerk as to why he is making normative statements about these bots citp has a bot that tweets about our blog is that good or bad? that is what made me think about advertisement c: that is a good thing the talk missed the idea that you need the good and the bad to have democracy j: imagine you didn't think democracy was a good thing c: i have a friend who works at the atlantic that use bots to get attention to their site i want sb to read my piece the bot serves an important service j: this may be related to internet of things we can also do surfacing you think that these two things are acting as agents if you wrote twitter bot every time hillary or trump tweets you show the associations that come along say you have a map it could be refugees in europe or the muslim communities and brussels or your toast or your fridge if i think of this layer of bojects and there are other actors that are shared differently by this network the understructure that alows them to even look like they are acting like different bots say apply and samsung, they don't share things so you have this other layer of objects and control one of the things about iot, we are talking about these connecetiones but not this undrlayer c: can you trace that? like your colleagues traced the money they worked with a black or grey market if i put a die in my blood to trace things could you, put a marker on data and follow it through n: people have done different things you can certainly, take the postal system address is being shared you can use your middle initial as a trace j: tweets and retweets n: we can look at fast retweets but not real time j: do you know lightbeam it conceptualizes data and where the data moves c: it would be fascinating to take an issue as expressed by a twittr ebeot and do a visualization of that and how we understand politics in clusters that in first moment don't make sense who is rallying around this network and to see how associations change maybe you have an organization that is partnering on one topic but n seda: the multiple layers of censorship tech, bot, troll, legal n: the idea is that censorship may not happen through blocking one of them appears to be take down requests in certain countries, south africe and us the dmca scientology has used this in the past you threaten legal action so basically looking at research question would be like that crosses over into stuff like that brendan and others look at does the wording structure and origination of the take down request affect whether sb pays attention to it or implement it you can go to isp s: start with twitter and bots and move to iot c: it will not be long before we see more examples of iot things j: when the home becomes a consumer product space we bring things from different companies sb said all their stuff was apple and it wasn't these companies are building these closed world models there is no way your devices are working that way and nobody uses their devices that way i visited 16 sites 86 third party sites c: you see the same iot argument the att pitch in atlanta you should also build things on our network tell us the things that you want but we don't want you to use another network don't use the georgia tech network use ours they are looking into what sliceof the pie they can lock in n: trump hillary example i want to figure out this appears to come from hillary but it is coming from some other place i also think of the inverse of that the complement i see the square and triangles and who ever talking they may something like so and so is against free trade and that is some issue i really care about and i follow that particular triangle and not hillary so i am interesting in figuring out the squares and triangles that represent hillary even if she is not saying it, it is her if you think about a candidate it is not just that person it is a colection of ideologies they are pro choice, gun, etc. in the end you are kind of working for a collection of ideas the fact that it comes from hillary's account matters less to me then hillary is bought by these people and this person said something so thinking about it as inside out j: that is alligned what we know about politics with koch brothers and their relationship with the teap party big banks etc. what i like about it is that we could surface ideological relationships but if we could ground them in entities people, institutions and other bots c: that is interestienge to m e what ar the entities that make the networks of associations that make hillary and who is she drawing from being much more open about who the actors are it is people and it could also be bots and it is fair to consider them as actors that is the interesting thing in contemporary discussions about political theory that anything other than humans do politics j: they haven't read lagndon winner c: they haven't read anything if you think of all the networks that make hillary the agonism is by exploring all of that they need to have certain things that are common are technologies and bots part of that s: we can make a game where which political group wins if you have a team of only bots, only humans, or mix... j: people can combine their own teams you want to turn your students into pineapples the goal of the game is to do that it is brilliant it makes the point n: q about agonism can it apply in political discussoin is it mainly related to politics? c: it is mostly about political discussion but has a wide take on what counts as political there was the agon competition and it was done as a way to keep everyone on their toes the notion that there was never a time when the competition doesn't take place when we talk about agonism in us politics we always want to solve something we want to solve censorship and then it is done no it is going tobe this constant state whatever algorithm you create somebody is going to go around it j: roe v. wade we fought hard and people went home activists are surprised n: agonistic tactic: is that a tactic to increase agonism? or a tactic that is used part of an agonistic process? like astroturfing or is it both? c: i think both we need to break out of the dichotomy, the dyad poisition and that is not enough to say here is a way to burst the bubble and here is how the dialogue can be made more complex the first one can be a necessary condition it is more the second one those, what are series ofe tactics j: we might start by saying these are two ways of doing agonistic tactics and to say there are computation and social science ways of doing it and these would all qualify as tactics n: what are the most active i can think of a lot of different places where agonism appears it is all over the places elections policy debate isps and privacy thing you can super small scale do you think that you can focus on one issue? debtceiling how this plays out in congress how do you sort of think about that what is a fruitful place to study right now, given that you can't do them all c: i am thinking about three generic scales municipal local federal and global issue i don't know if the tactics would have to be different depending on the computational ways we go about this i am wroking with a group that is combatting gentrification in a way that may get engaged one of the advantages of a topic that local then you can bring some insight to bear on what is happening but it may not necessarily scale in my ideal world if there was time it would be interesting to look at those three scales to take a case study with each we should look at the national election it is right there with gentrification i was able to go through social media and see a bunch of issues n: law enforcement, racial profiling in princeton maybe there are issues that have a local and national element c: it would be good to look at issues that are active we should not take our time to find the issues and think about how we can do things computationally refug issue is more global gentrification is an issue n: gun laws c: right to discriminate bill you cannot be forced to have none discriminatory policies in your company it is called religious freedom governor of georgia vetoed that today georgia now has the 3rd largest film industry and they threatened to pack the super bowl is supposed to be there and nfl was like it is not happening j: that is the triangles and squares c: the governor is dealing with pro business and religious republicans and pro carry, every single president of every university said do not sign this how will faculty think about responding? j: union? c: no unions... gun control would be an interesting one, too i want to either visualize it or create some bots j: hunting is an issue where left and right converge lefties that go homesteading and hunting natural birth rights right and left converge although they are very diefferent commuenitis c: homeschooling he has kids that are learning greek but he also goes with homeschooling people who say evolution doesn't exist and they are intermingling around this idea of rejecting the educational system diametrically opposed in ideologies j: it is interesting to see that we were learning something related to evluation and we were told some americans do not believe in evolution n: it relates different groups can affect the debate if you can figure out you have these nutty guys talking with these other people now you have film makers and it is now a different kind of discussion and how do you make film makers visible the people making the most noise there is a dyad s: vulnerable communities and mapping c: it would be interesting to bear knowledge that you have both with baby economies with gentrification they are tracking mold they want to use the data with respect to mold to advocate for the neighborhood but they don't want to release the addresese, bcaus thy don't want to city to go after those houses and tear those down how do you map the power of a network and hide the individual? you want to show that there are resources here but you don't want to pinpoint them... n: this is a technical discussion about capacity between large isps net neutrality and all of that this is an agonistic debate as well isps are saying: how much cpacity exist between your and my network no one wants to talk about individual links but point fingers so the isps have come to us, and said you can release data in these aggregate forms we don't want to tell our business relationships or routing but we want to talk about our capacity and how does it slice across region, and all isps in a particular region it is not like tearing down houses but you have people or organizations that are trying to contribute to a debate but exposure of all the data this is proprietary business data that gets xposd thr is data that could tilt th discussion in one way or another but how do they release it i have also seen how data is not released, like under certain auspicees we don't want to release that it is proprietary etc. but it could also cause fingers to point in one way or another j: we think about this a lot in ethnography and that has been really hard fo rme to talk about power relations and people that are subjugated and tries to do that in a way that is respectful n: this is where the iot crossover happen does x effect energy usage well, we have the iot device to measurement the data in aggregate or something can be very informative about does x,y,z result in energy reduction n: arvind may also be interested in talking about how can we think about the data that we can collect what can be learned from this kind of data and how can data be released ethate can contribute to dialogue example: i was paranoid working with isps with the release of this data an easy way to flush it would be you are hiding x,y,z so you must be hiding something so, how can we get some data released so taht we can protect ourselves against that kind of comment if you are contriubting to a debate and show that youa re not biasede j: i do think that when we try to surface these elements of the network, we are making statemens about who we are protecting and who we are not x is a politician there is a way in which we talk about trump and hillary and i know what it means to have someone in your family be a public political person it is horrible what happens so there is still a level of talking about human agents something went viral, being made visible in that way is really horrible if you read alice marwick stuff about twitter it was born out of a specific social context obsessed with status twitter was built by people who did not have to think twice about what they say in public mostly white men these people have never walked down the street thinking they may be assaulted there are communities that are expected to beahve in particular ways online and for others it is not safe c: another thing we can do to look at those factors brought about mapping communities are there strategies that happen in non-computational environments that we can carry over to the computational environment what are those roles and systems in place what are the ways in which these sorts of organizations developed ways of hiding or resisting n: anonymous communication tools is maybe where there is a crossover on that we did this anonymous communication channel that would allow me to send a message to jannet such that you and c can't see it we envisioned this as an activist tool for operatives to exhange information and coordinate protest or to leak information one thing i had not thought of sb. said this kindof thing may be useful in battered women shelter settings deb was in cape town these women they want to go in and say what happened to them but they need to cover that this conversation even eexiste how about tor no, the face to face is important even if we are not directly talking supposedly this is very important coming back to what you said about how do we protect speakers that is not an agonisic one anon tools we commonly think of these as people buying stuff on silk road but if we are talking about posting in online forums or having dialogues on twitter any kind of online discourse tor doesn't solve those problems that is definitely an area,people in my area think about that how do we design systems and communication protocols with different design goals than tor maybe there are differnt kinds of sttings whr peeople need different things and we can make systems for that j: what if we gave some people bot armies without it being traceable to them i don't have a recourse against the bot armies c: it is interesting to think of other nodes that youcan act upon so that you can have the affect you want to have the gamergate situation the best way to stop this is you find out you look at who is doing the harassment but you tweet that persons parents 9 out 10 it is a kid in the basement you find the node that is above that node jus so you know this is what your child is doing in the basement n: zeynep was talking about censorship in turkey to clamp down on activism you don't block whatsapp you go to the parents and tell them they are dating such and such person garry king and molly ... censorship in china it is more effective to let some communication to follow if they were not formenting revolution it was like the safety valve on their frustration even about the goveernmnt as long as you are not going to certain territory it is fine and it clearly relates to agonism how is the government controlling discourse dan wallach rice uni they had a paper that looked at microcensorship basically looking at deleted twets and how china goes and deletes specific tweets governments affecting agonism who is talking what topics DAY II: presentations: design strategy identify tactics of political organizing and action saul alinsky sociologist by training ruckus society: pamphlets for greenpeace on how to do mediatic action beautiful rising: marketing approach to political discourse identifying tactics that are not computational a worthwhile starting point: look at the tactics proposed by these organizations and think of their digital counterparts gentrification: properties become social media entities that are producing a voice you can look at change in terminology e.g., brunch ideas for easter weekend look over time how the description of particular activities change ??? are they geotagged? no, but tweets either have the name of the property or they are an address step back: do we do this? gun debate works better think of possible easy responses that are scripted homes as media entities personalized responses hashtag pla: #whatmatters? national case: getting trump to tweet mussolini why don't all candidates have a bot? have a debate between all the bots! common idea: flipping the story making the invisible visible davidson: inverting and showing something over and over again (but also shows the limit of a quick and clever move) congress edits: anonymous edits to wikipedia form the congress this idea of the smoking gun how do we show that these processes are happening all the ime a bot that tweets to comcast about their internet speed it gets back to the discussion about IoT taking these as starting points code what the tactics are and look for round 2: what is missing round 3: not just one clever person that knows what they are doing pragmatic: what can i do with a student over summer timeline... lofi prototypes june/july work with student to do some experiments get things we have learned in for the election cycle nick: one of the followers of the comcast twitterer is a comcast person i also know somebody who do their social network stuff what is the role of misinformation in agonism? some random comcast user was not able to connect through tor it was a home network problem it wasn't comcast blocking tor but this guy blogged about it it was picked up people in comcast were like: no! it had been picked up in media, retweeted daphne: get people to reflect on the news that they are consuming browser plugin when you are on a news article scrapes content: find article on the same topic from a different perspective NLP: topic model of the article topic model of other articles serve the one that is most dissimilar j: critical news bot news is filtered/bubbled/selectively attuned try to open up to different perspectives and situate your own jailbreak the patriarchy: automatically change the pronouns in the page that you are looking at different ways of seeing the same reporting gym: multiple channels, same news, reported differently n: do you have a fixed set of resources that you pull from? d: in the beginning, but we want to scale up from there google news for the most relevant articles and then hitting links and start from there c: you can easily choose a handful of media outlets that are readily available it would be interesting to return back to the user highlighting those passages where you see the dissimilar sentiment is it as simple as a simple adjective is it an unruly protest or an effective protest? providing a sense to the reader where these distinctions are happening in the journalism itself... j: same article with a couple of adjective changes nobody did any reporting here s: what is the goal, self-reflection or a reflection on journalism n: it is nice to watch time to time and see where people get their ideas d: implicitly you are assuming that there is some center in a way j: it is about where i am when i see all of these different outlets n: fox news and huffingtonpost is now realigning again c: history? n: truthy project sam woolley alluded to it researchers in indiana different news articles outlets and evaluate how they lean in one direction or another it is highly controversial they did something that pissed off congress s: richard rogers issue networks and crawlers may also be an interesting project to look at n: news crawler look at search engines when we query a search term how is that going to return different results farmed it out on a distributed measurement platform and issued it in europe and elsewhere inconsistencies chrome plugin: ukraine riots i get this the plug in shows you things you didn't see that other people are seeing and you can see those results the work was incomplete we didn't get into how user profiles and history effect this that would be a neat area to follow up on we were curious search history effects but also certain kinds of attacks and your search history can get polluted things you never searched for i am a sophisticated a search engine optimization person i want a pair of shoes to show up it is possible to do that, you searcher for nike shoes you never searched for that you just searched for shoes j: can they reuse some of your code? you were planning on looking at one article that is probably a processing and time limitation d: once you have a framework it is extensible once you do it for one article you can do it for more i was thinking in terms of interface level of reflection when you see two next to each other that also could be altered! it would be easier to display links j: if there is an architecture we can use from nick n: an aborted project we started with search and news seemed like an interesting place to go google news aggregator we took a whole bunch of rss feeds and pulled articles and fired that back to google news what sources do i then get in the us: washingtonpost and reuters query inconsistency: these are for some fix number of queries there are a certain number of instances where you query a term you get an article in n-1 countries, but in one country it is missing something is going on there there are cases where there are no news on that particular term j: one of the things you can look at is to use rss feeds it would give you scrapes of titles and summaries c: digital methods the issue crawler the tools that are used for social scientists used to crawl the web c: tom jenkins, pulling tweets on traffic to do sentiment analysis j: this is for class she does NLP she does sentiment analysis this could be as wizard of oz as you wish i just want her to show people a couple of articles at the same time c: he thought this was going to be a joke doing sentiment analysis on social media to feel the pulse of atlanta it worked enough for them to find it appealing n: another person who has thought about that is hans c: it can also be interesting to think of projects that don't fit the agonistic model michael hoffman political scientist: a project that is the opposite of ours argumentation mapping in community decision making if you map the ways in which decision is made how topics are emotionally charged, you can do more rational decision making this is the system that tries to dampen some of the exact things we say should be part of it if you make political decision making logical, the best solution will come to the fore very german j: in the chapter in the second book decisions about space craft is this spacecrafy going to fly past this part of titan i thought it was whether it is about pasing by titan but it is also because there are ice volcanoes in titan the people tat believe there are want them to go there and the others don't so you look at the discussion but it is about who will be able to feed their graduate students for the next 20 years how do you understand all of that n: that is fascinating to me this comes up in networking all the time i recognize: i was at a meeting at the fcc we were talking about measuring speeds clearwire: they were in atlanta let's not measure latency that's not cool users want one number well you guys suck in latency the throughput is ok, but packet loss is horrible i wished somebody would call bs you think you are having a technical discussion and it is something completely different it is a shame that there is only one janet i would love you to sit in this group the broadbant internet tech advisory group they write tech advisory documents for the fcc here is how engineers use prioritization to manage resources the discussions we have in that group, let's not talk about this are we having a technical discussion or is this politics going on it will look like some weird oblique thing as an engineer what i just heard makes half sense i can't totally argue with that i am saying it sounds like bs what just happened there that paragraph just got removed and i am not sure they say it is about readability i don't know what is going on j: there was a guy from brazil ieee decisions about 802.11 wireless standards purely technical decisions that were not purely technical at all mobile broadband access stuff too he figured out what they were saying when they said things i wish i had more of me also i can teach you how to do that j: values framework from shilton may be interesting but you still want to be able to talk about these things you don't want the company to go out of business but still talk about these things j: i really like how the data is made thing homes as entities: tweeting about traffic i like the candidate bots it is funny to watch the donald thing it would be really neat to have all four of those voices talking with each other i like the autobot tweets at the companies craig has a whole theory about bureaucracy utility companies now have extensive bureaucracies you have no recourse there is nothing you can do and they are all regional monopolies we could not get antyhing but comcast here (n: now there is verizon) craig grew up in communist china in china and egypt the service was on the ground but you had recourse if you greased the right palms you could get back service you can't bribe your verizon person you can't bribe them into getting it back infrastructures of basic utility provision are and what is the recourse there is no levers that you can pull if it were flooded with tweets from locations this service is down here n: i showed you a bunch of my slides couple other projects random ideas technology for agonism bobble pollution attacks: people stay logged into these stites you go to website: you can trigger the browser to load any object we triggered it to load a request to google as a result, your search history defense: against cross-origin requests google should not accept query from a third party referrer the defense exists agonism in networking tech policy we are engaged in a particular project debate: comcast, partner would be netflix how much congestion is there between comcast and netflix there will be fingerpointing john oliver got into this the debate is: netflix will say comcast subscribers are paying comcast to reach us they should upgrade their network comcast: netflix you can congest links at will you can choose which link the content will come down on there is a lot of finger pointing and not a ton of data isps said they would like to release some data how congested is link number 2 between netflix and comcast in dc the issue is there is spare capacity on these links in these cities if there is slowshing around of congestion that would be apparent for reasons that i don't understand yet there is a lot of sensitivity about how many links are provisioned in each city between comcast and netflix how much capacity is there in atlanta some of this stuff is competitive in nature maybe they don't want to reveal how much capacity they have for video but some of it is clearly, it doesn't rise ...shnanigans rather than shadiness you can see that netflix traffic carries more value than youtube traffic if you look at: if this youtube or netflix for google youtube is low grade cat videos netflix: paying subscribers netflix and comcast have incentives for reasonable quality these kind of things start to pop out of the data i asked them: i saw some anonymized data why is there high utliziation to comcast in atlanta an chicago that is where the youtube data centers are that is a perfect example of something that on the one hand maybe they don't want to expose how they provisioned youtube on the other hand, there is also info there that is being withheld the fact that we are running youtube at super high utilization, subject to congestion is not something i told you there is a debate about who should pay where is the congestion: are they paying games with where they are sanding traffic or is there negligence with upgrading links they on the one hand want to release data to the public to show that there is spare capacity and utilization and withhold and this is one of these things what kind of discussion am i having here are you concerned about proprietary nature of things in dc or are you trying to hide the fact that you don't have enough capacity in the city i spent many weeks and months trying to figure out am i being smart about this if you are going to basically engage in this debate as an isp or content provider you also have to be concerned about a skeptical public that would say you are hiding and not contributing everything this is a rambling way of saying debate in networking and tech policy where there is opposing side and data economies people are making decisions about what data to release and it could tilt the discussion the reason they are making these decisions is not entirely transparency clearwire example how do we decide what data should we even be collecting what should we release how should we present it? on hourly time scales, 5 min time scales j: where does the agonism come for you? two sides and the data released? n: this epitimizes the existence of citp the discussion primarily involves hobbyist the technologists are part of your agonistic graph i would be the first to say as a technologist it is hard to understand what is going on also crypto these are lawyers making arguments on one side or another historically, these have been only lawyers having these discussions or lobbyists with folks like ed jonathan mayer ashkan soltani you have these technology expertise brought to bear in a discussion that is not taking place on that axis ed summarized this best i said, when i go to dc you enter this other universe you think as an academic and scientist you expect to be taken seriously and at face value and it is the opposite we think about outselves as impartial academics it is more like: who do you represent? who is paying you... oh you are paid by the isp lobby you work for fcc i can plant you in this agonism graph you are on that side of the dyad you are an academic, i cannot place you you are way untrustworthy i have no way to orient you who the heck are you? it is the opposite... you are more trustworty if you are allied with some part of the dyad i find that to be interesting it seems to be in these things the technologists are somewhere in that graph that is not exactly dyad i am not quite sure these don't play out on social media i think that is going to change that is changing j: what if you had censors on each of the db instead of talking about internet traffic to neighborhoods so that the pipes could speak there is a whole sociology of technology the question would be what voices are not in the current conversation and that is the service and concent providers are in the conversation and maybe the two things are combined in the interest to keep those things separate no voice will be unbiased are there voices that you could include that could be from particular kind of pipes even surfacing those pipes may be interesting i hadn't thought about how requesting netflix means comcast in between n; that is directly my real house c: how much can we know about those pipes let's look at the pipes to understand the home if my reasoning is correct, you can do something similar can you get that? what can you know about those pipes with the kind of network measurement n: this is dependent on the isp release you can sense from the ends the analogy is apt the more sensors you have at the edges the better idea you can have there are a bunch of people with verizon if we can figure out who is having trouble if we could automate that kind of thing the comcast tweitter bot is very interesting it would be sweet if we could have something like, that guy tweets, if that could trigger another speed test elsewhere that guy is in dc i tweet, my performance sucks how about for you is it down for everybody people have phantasized about that but there is no such system s: who else should be in the room c: instead of waiting for the centralized authority you have all these parties going to measure and collecting that data and organizing in a way that reports back here is what we are going to do end user reporters data may not be the same but will have an affect in the policy argument if you take the model of how we monitor the environment in ecological issues and think of that in the network environment and project forward and discussions about smart city rollouts not just about netflix, but which neighborhoods are going to get what kind of bandwidth atlanta vs. chicago taking the home and city as different scale j: the google roll out atlanta... c: neighborhood advocates and representatives would be interested in this as they do airpolution monitoring in the smart city world you want to know what are the services we are getting in this vs. this other neighborhood in 12 months, when these things roll out, but these very well be an issue it scales nicely j: students studies utilities regulation of price control, railroads, broadband roll out we see this over and over again this story is converging towards x but if you take the agonistic frame those are two things on a trajectory which wil be mutually beneficial to the two of them there is not going to be any innovation there what are some voices n: another one that pops up in the dyads is in the IoT security area security on these devices: who bears the costs and who bears the liabilit and that is like a dyad, but maybe 2.5 the device manufacturer and the consumer everybody suffers as a result of the insecurity but somebody has to fix it j now it is on the user c: two angles: how are services constructed literature on alternative economies urban foraging and food gleaning models that say you are going to have industrial agriculture you are also going to have alterantive models and coops how do we understand the models and how they interact an alternative economies approach can be taken towards our devices and what are the choices that we make and from a research perspective, how do you document those and understand the models people are building j: google has collapsed the network into a single node there is something neat about that it allows you who is providing the server, the service, the fixing, and that could be exploded into many categories social construction of technology framework flexibility about what the object could be dyadic: the relevant social group is defined by the company user and company those are the only relevant groups if you are doing the isps and media provider and those are the two relevant social group they are being made irrelevant what would happen if we had the relevant social groups classic example is the car automobile: main users in rural environments were female farmwoman they plugged their washing machines into their cars: generators tractors ford: we sell tractors and shut down the repurposing to exclude women out of the equation a lot of people collapsed into a single category and node make them relevant n: who controls how the thing gets collapsed if you think about the comcast netflix thing google or whoever: they have the incentive to make the dyad look like user vs. isp the isp bares the cost for users the first reaction is this is comcast who bares the cost the isp tech support is the front line it is in every one else's interest content providers saying this is not our fault the knee jerk dyad there is that if you look at the performance the graph is much more complicated than that it is a network graph what are the nodes that affect whether or not you get a high quality stream it could be the stuff in your house the whole debate gets collapsed into user vs. isp j: sandstorm.io server administrator tools to manage your own servers make it easier to install your own packages they manage the security and you can either use their server cluster privacy policy: they don't touch or you can pay for an upgraded version: financial model you can buy it and install on your own server they are allowing you to decide who you would like to be your sysadmin tools that would make it straightforward to be your own sysadmin it is even more complicated there is a series of different models that woudl allow you to do that ll that management carl revisits last session things we want to achieve list of papers workshops 1) we start with CACM short position piece 2) longer piece to first monday 3) target symposium at CITP spring 2017 (soon after elections) 4) followup with maybe a CSCW workshop that was paper deliverables we also talked about creating bots actionable objects guidelines for resisting IoT bot guidelines a toolkit to create an agonistic bot design based research alterantive service models for IoT case studies -> to infer tactics is it agonism that is driving us or is there something about bots that we are interested in do we want to zero in on bots? do we want to focus or do we want to give us a capacity to say, we are just as interested in this at the level of network measurement or something else j: situate what we are doing see what agonism gives us that other models dont many other projects about this thing will assume an easy dichotomy the good and bad assume a specific object, bot or algorithm or a platform as if it is itself not connected to anything else n: how does agential gerymandering relates to agonism? j: there is that question of many other projects focusing on bots and algorithms and platforms all of those assume that a bot is an agent and it it is the object that is worth looking at that already does agential gerrymandering focusing on the bot is already doing that as something we can take out of its context, regardless of where it comes from, the data that it is using deciding that certain something has agency when do we decide that something is a bot some of these bots are also humans tweeting as bots n: does gerymandering refer to perimeters that determines who can talk to who? j: it is about what gets to be an agent who gets to act is the bot something that acts in and of itself we do agential gerrymandering as well the policy makers have already drawn the boundaries of a discussion and if you come as someone outside of that you have no agency c: it is question about this drawing lines of inclusion for your benefit and by excluding these other things, it will be for our benefit n: do you view your efforts to disaggregate your data as a agential gerrymandering? j: by drawing boundaries i am doing some gerrymandering so i am deciding which spaces those objects get to act in mars rover, is it a he or a she does it act because of us or because of itself data balkanization at home is a neat way of thinking about it n: i would be interested in talking about that because of our earlier discussion about little control over how devices exchange data and there is some interesting technical problems j: maybe that is more about agnosim rather than thinking about the "smart home" single unified home that is seamless this samsung light, and apple tv, and draw distinctions within and outside of the home n: does it relate to political agonism? c: there is nothing in the technology i think that is the agonism that happens in the process of the set up in creating those boundaries and thinking about the ways in which you as a user are refusing to participate and denying these objects from participating with each other n: there are these relationships that you have with google and someone might not be aware that google and nest are not the same c: so you are resetting the boundaries it also comes back to the discussion of affect and it comes back to your question about your affective desire that is what is driving your decision making j: agential gerrymandering nest is in the box and there is a thing it looks like it is all in the object it is obscuring this whole network of connections and property model n: you wouldn't put a bug in your home but you would put a bug on your thermostat i would be interested in exploring get a bunch of devices and try to figure out how they communicate there is some very early days things about one guy decided he was going to block the dns of his thermostat and it still worked and you are still able to control the heat i think there are these i don't know if this is gerrymandering and can you control the device it is tough are you going to hack into your nest there is limited time for that you might though put a wall in front of it and put a wall around it i think from a network tech perspective that is very interesting to me how do you build this walls j: can we MITM nest so that nest doesn't talk with google n: interesting experiment set up a harsh firewall that blocks everything port 80, dns, maybe dns is too much block it: does it work? what cracks do we have to open to make things actually work are we happen with those cracks? for every device it is going to be different c: in that process of revealing the network what are those networks that we are not aware of there was work done early on one of the things i wrote about was to show the interrelationship of fortune 500 companies what are all the organizations that shell is funding to do climate science how do you understand how what are these technical dependencies and relationships that are happening this is what excites me about the humanities perpsective because we want to show how we can do these things differently j: people are putting echo on raspberry pi why do we call it an internet of things why don't we call it something that shows that it is an extension of a bunch of your databases into your home i am not pessimistic, it offers opportunities what if we changed the script and made it do different things? c: things network in amsterdam it doesn't rely upon commercial service profiders lorawan video we can provide a data connectivity for a city amsterdam covered in one week j: you can do this because you have been working with computers since you are this big i think that the goal of some of this what would it be o build a bot, when you are being attacked by misogynists and you could launch your own attacks can you give people the tool to take control of some of this stuff without much of the skill we have the privilege in the university the profit generation model i don't believe in one profit generation model if one of the things we are interested is in agonism in the increase of opinions and actors we can use the tools that we have to spread that privilege c: phd student on diy infrastructure it doesn't work the whole point of infrastructure is that it holds up they will work for isolated moments but this is what the state is useful for n: going back to the gerrymandering fences thing i am interested in that it is a networking problem there are a couple of other things that make it compelling that it is tough to control a device it comes out of a box the other is coming back to what we are talking about switching costs may be high switch off of facebook or google various elasticities there and with devices that might be harder i bought a 300 dollar thermostat and you want me to remove it for a cheapy thing that i have to monitor so, we are going to put it behind a fence s: i feel like it is a tactic n: people will have the devices and they will have the incentives cooked into those but can you mediate them anyway! it is an arms race and some legal action a firewall: that keeps logs in house but then a firmware update comes and that is gone or you don't do updates j: how do you manage to live wo google? it is surprisingly easy i have done that for four years now it is hard to fence yourself to one option and creating the leaflet here is how you circumvent your nest here is a tech you don't want to use here are your alternatives can you write a guide for how to get off of google? even leaflets for iot configuration is there a device you could reroute your devices to your home take this raspberry pi in front of your network and we will take care of the rest n: this would allow us to not have to configure each device individually j: hack your netflix socks! c: if there is research on this if households are making decisions on services based on i like this company but my partner doesn't we are going to agree that there are certain things that we are not going to support it is much more related either there will be a nest thermo or not j: my husband has google products when apple maps really sucked i would ask him to look for things on his phone and it would also mess up his results n: did you consider swapping acconts with people? something i do cvs the loyalty cards they also have a phone number look up and i enter a different number every time princeton main line major businesses c: it is then interesting to think about how this scales up to the smart city entire buildings or neighborhoods agonistic frame of tech/bot development/design what do we mean when we say agonism algorithms/bits and bots we can turn it into the acm article n: has there been an agonism meets cs seda: governing algorithms n: tussles paper is very relevant it is relevant there is a paper by david clark an old school internet architect kind of guy in tech there are often conflicts and tussles and they often play out in the technical realm are we going to have what is this protocol header going to look like it plays out in the technical space but it is a policy discussion and how we need to design tech to enable these kinds of tussles -janet is taking note of what nick is saying continued To do: - Carl gets in NOTES FROM SEDA'S PRESENTATION Agonistic encounter - what could be the full scope of the agonistic enounter? How do we structure our colleaborative work so that accorss our proejcts we engage a fuller scope of the agonistic encounter with algorithms Cybersecurty approach • attacker drivien reserch • how to dring agonsm and to whome Who else might be included? Designers of Algorithms • think not just of the attacker but other players! • the obsession with "erasing" the attachers • good and bad users • using "good users" and "behviors" as benchmark Users • highlight security paternalims • encourages embracig the autonomy of fdeivces • how to rething algorithms with user paticipation • can we make users aware of their lack of control of the device? Nick particularly distubring proposotions you are going to accept these certificates if you want to use the internet Seda the quetions with regard to security is how far we should be pulling the users into security models how to balance not overwhelming the user with providing the user with choice Nick This is an issue that comes up at places like FTC PrivacyCon Transparency, but not sufficient Choice, being an important factor, how to mediate and provide a range of choices (can I install this thermostat and NOT have ALL of my data go to Google?) Seda What other service models might be possible, could a local person become part of the installation process? Janet What about maintenance? What if I want to control my own devices? Nick Another example is the hotel wifi blocking. Carl We could approach this from a services perspective, from services literature. or we could look to the alterntive economies litera Janet What google has done is collapesed all of theses other (the ISP, the sysamin) into itself to create a dyad with you, so it's only you and google, also SCOT that shows how users are constructed and how users are created as well as written out of history Seda Next step in presentations - how to bring agonism into activist research Longitudinal study in countries where the study is not a dange but censorship is big censorship the blcijing is only one strategy throttling as a way to do soft censorshop trolls: psychologicl warfare • think of what censorship is trying to stop? • speech? • witnessing? • organizing /mobiling? image of the stack of censorship understand the stack but also what is at stake longitudinal studiy • shoe which groups topics are being effectedthroug the stack • trolles exist on all sides? women, kurds hit the worst? allow the performance of that which censorshp tries to stop • I am a witness • Another way of organizing post censorship agonism in the bot • fact, topic comprehension • topic models • learning from social •summarization and explainers will liberate users from having to read every article •emotion understanding •affective computing •contextual and episodic memory they jump between topics, incapable of sustained fliw or conversational rhythm. past conversations in context are hardly reintroduced. •personality agonism bot • play with the different aspects of a bot to make people think critically about bots • how they are configuring us as subjects • what do they make in/visible • speculative work? how the bot transforms our interaction with the IoT space control over our lives rather than objects but really? control over our lives (by whom?) bot is a way into IoT Nick What happens when I plug things into my network. What happens when I plug in some device that I bought on Ebay from China - I'l letting in my house and I don't know what that means or what its doing. DELIVERABLES Papers • CHI / AltCHGi • The Atlantic *** CACM *** First Monday • Computational Culture *** ESTS Workshops • Purpose 1: Bring peope together interested in studying this (practice)(industry) • Purpose 2: Introduce to the idea (seduction) Symposiun • 2 day • Connect to elections (post elections) • CITP • Exploratory / not just conclusive Things Both objects to think with and actionalbe objects Actionable objects Browser plug-ins Bots • Candiate bots in debate • Critical Toolkits • Download, set-up and then execute bots on issue Guidelines for political bots Guidelines for IoT resistance Design based research (things to think wtih) Alternative service models for IoT Case studies --> inferring tactics Conceptual Work Take things seriously in political theory bots not just as proxies for human ideologies prosthesis - take this metaphor to be not just doing human work but human work + bot as complement human action + something lese different kind of extenstion - not just imitating like a rover bots as doing work on behalf of the bot SCOPE agonism explodes the possbility from any dichotomy and insists on a pluralsitic domain these struggles are not taking place in just a bot or platform or algorithm but rather happening all the game through the agonistic game makes explicit the cut / included or not (Strathern, Barad), both analytically and technically agonism already in the creation of the data what objects are acting in / out humans / nonhumans instittutions troubles categories agonism is able to help us more the site of analytic / technical intervetion around the field of engagement (and actors) a design perspective should open up the space of encoutner how is a bot different from any software service? what makes a things agential? bot presents itself bot interacts with us through channels that are primarily human when do people ascribe agency to a robot How do you build these wallls Tussel space often thooug HERE IS WHAT WE THINK THIS WHOLE WORKSHOP HAS BEEN ABOUT: Agonism and computing There is a paper by David Clark who describes how in networking, there are conflicts and tussles that often play out in a technical realm. For instance, what is this protocol header going to look like? It may be a policy conversation but it is playing out in a technical space. We need to design a protocol for these tussles. You have opposing forces, if you will, in a particular conflict or debate or interaction. And often we think about those as dyads - diametric poles in a particular conflict or debate. But in fact that tussle is playing out in a much larger space. We describe many examples where a “tussle” is in fact not just about a dyadic interaction but takes place in a broader space, with more interlocutors. This may show up in the offline world and shows up also in bots, as in “political bots” and it may also be in the design of technology itself. We want to expose the “agon” so that we better understand the debate as it plays out, and also so that we can find levers that change or tip the balance in a different direction. Why should computer scientists be interested? If we can understand the AGON as builders of systems, networks, and protocols, if we have a goal (like a privacy goal) we need to surface the multiple voices involved. And not say, It’s google versus us, or it’s ISP versus … and if you want to protect your data from going over HERE you have to go over THERE - or it’s not Hilary it’s an agglomeration of micro-PACs. Identify new parties to the discussion. Technology FOR agonism and agonism IN technology. (many of us have been doing this work without even realizing it.) CARL: (To DHUM and Media) Humanities gives us a rich understanding of politics and democracy in ways that are multiple. Agonism is one of the ways of understanding democracy. How do ideas drawn from political theory in the humanities and social sciences take form in computational systems, whether in algorithms or platforms, or in bots or other forms of media presentations. What are the ways in which some technical systems are already doing this but haven’t been labeled as agonistic, and what do we gain by seeing these bots as dong the work of agonism? How does this enable us to theorize technologies differently? If as humanities scholars we should be bringing bring political theory to provide richer interpretations of the ways in which technology is doing politics. To HCI colleagues, a little more instrumental. We talk a lot about how social media is used and misused for good or social ends. but we paint it in broad strokes. It’s good, or it’s bad, we have attacks and victims, but it’s more complex. As people who do HCI design and research we have a responsibility to map out this complexity, so that we can make intentional designs of systems that produce different kinds of politics. The other thing that we’re doing, its that we’re taking the technical seriously. It’s not “computers” it’s how the network is actually functioning and how bots work or don’t work. To me that is crucial to the humanities and HCI which too often gloss over “the digital.” Taking those specifics seriously and treating them as the engineering and science topics that they are. Janet: Doing agonistic technology design is a question of exploding the dyad. Take one or two relevant objects that look like the obvious objects -- the user and designer, or the isp and content provider -- and explode that into as many categories, objects and people as possible. By thinking of things as a dyad we obscure the large number of voices that are subsumed and left out. What if we draw these differently? To an extent, this is a form of agential gerrymandering. These objects do what they by associating themselves with other objects. We can map those connections. The goal of design is to inspire this broader network and to intervene in its associations. The critical news bot does that by taking the first step: it says, what you see in the news is the beginning of a puzzle with a lot more people and actors than even just CNN and Fox. The political bots talking at each other imitating candidates, is a way of showing how everyones is sutated in the netowrk and how these bots act in a larger network of things, people and interests. What does a technologist do wen ou are shut out of the conversation because they don't belong to predefined camps, or when it is defined by two opposing sides? Can we make the other objects speak? Can we make the network speak? Agonism it about moving away from antagonism -- the dyad and affective relations between poles, the good and the bad -- and putting into view something multiple, and allowing those new voices to be political. SEDA: To think actively about agonism as a frame through which to understand different technological practices which includes the design of objects, the process of design, research, and tech policy. I think we explored not only the use of technology for agonism but also think about agonism within design and research. Through that we were able to see every technological step as a contestation in and of itself and as a moment of reflection. We explore both methods and tactics that would either bring to th esurface these contestations that technologies enable, or contest the way we do technology. Some of these methods I think encourage us to think more wholistically - the dyad is one where we say where are th other actors who remain invisible, but also what we call Layers enables us to see technical and social effects across different layers. And that allows us to think about alternatives. So agonism is a way o fcreating contestation and thinking about alternatives. in the antagonistic view, emotionally is highly charged. agonism, when you do that explosion of the network of not only dual opposing polls, there are these different voices and alliances, that totally helps manage an affect question. you don't have a predefined category through which emotions are already preconfigured n: the comments to my freedom to tinker blog post was emotional. here is what net neutrality is about. but that is not going to put an end to the comcast netflix conflict, because that is an economic discussion: who is going to pay for this uplink. it is orthogonal. i wrote a blog post explaining this, and people were outraged. the comments are englightening. J: infrastructures remedy some of the problems with ant in ant human and nonhuman are all on the same place in infrastructure studies the decks are stacked the way that the network is laid out has a topology and things are nor symmetrical by surfacing different options we are not making that mistake we are trying to explode an already unequal relationship we are trying to diffuse them we are maybe flattening them a little bit and we are doing it in a highly politicized place c: i don't think we flattened anything if anything we pointed out the importance of keeping the peaks and valleys and whatever the right metaphor is in variations in different people's positions and opnions some may say we have flattened the idea of who can participate in politics by taking bots seriously as political agents this is a matter of lagauge we have been more pluralistic about who counts we didn't say everything is equal we are including more things than we have previously included