1. Text

• • What is the author/authors' main argument?
    • The author splits the text in four sections. The first section is about an oracle which makes decisions with a feminism algorithm.
    • The second paragraph sums up the view of the author about the evolution of technology. From games to the arrival of the internet and the rise of big tech companys such as Facebook, Apple etc. The third paragraph sums up the last ten years of tech. Scandals, such as the NSA Whistleblower and the deletion of a dancing frog, which was posted as a memorial for the day of lesbian visibility in Brazil. The author assumes that this situation was caused due to a 'very hetero-native' use of Artifical Intelligence (A.I.). The author continues with describing the human body evolves further as a human database and services will be 'mediated by biased algorithms carrying over structural inequalities disguised as neutral mathematical operations.' In the last Paragraph the author states that in terms of data protection the government only offers a binary option between yes and no. If we declare our answer to no, we're not a part of the modern population. In the last sentence, the author asks the reader 'The question that then stands in front of us is this: How can we build technologies based on feminist notions of consent?'which sums up to the main argument. The evolution of tech evolved many people, especially men, who formed data structures, which dont operate gender-neutral. The evolution of the opposite direction leaks a slight direction, what waits in the future of tech.
  • What concepts came up that are new to you? And what do you think they mean? Look them up, please write down the definitions in your pad, after looking them up did you confirm your knowledge or did something change?
  • • The concept of the feminism oracle was new for me but also exciting to come along those ideas on their website, we talked about it a lot so i'm not sure if the explanation of it is needed. But I think the basic concept is a form of tarrio cards which give you a random problem to solve with mordern technology. And as an exercise for brainstorming and group activity I think it's awesome and fun. 
    • The concept of nanobiotechnology was also new to me. It's a part of tech which uses organism to work and optimize processes. The target of nanobiotechnology is to connect biological systems with electricity. The lipstick on the oracle was such an idea. 
  • What references in this text are familiar to you? How does this author pick them up, or not?
    • I've watched the social network and read certain articles about big tech companys, so the beginning of facebook and FaceMash was actually pretty funny to read. I didn't read a lot about feminism so unfortunately there are no references the author didn't pick up in my view. The only thing i remember in terms of big companys is, that the founder of bumble, a rising dating app, is actually a woman and i think many companys are also founded by woman nowadays, which is great and should maybe be communicated.
  • What kind of world do you think this text wishes we lived in? What would be different?
    • I think the perfect scenario would be that the evolution of tech would've been gender-neutral right in the beginning. I think the biasing of people ruined chances to be great at whatever position people wanted to get in. I think everybody derserves a chance to show his best and people, who failed by biasing didn't get the same chances as people who passed the algorithm. The world could be in a very different and more equal place if the tech industry would have noticed the biasing from the beginning and would've acted against it.
  • How do you feel after reading this text? 
    • I feel weird, because from our POV the biasing is something logical but in terms of understanding i think, it's very hard to build these A.I. and feed it with data without discriminating someone. I think it's very hard to convert a personality into a algorithm who sorts out goods and bads, cuz that's not, how humanity should work. I'm not quite sure, how to approach that topic.
• 2. Text
  • What is the author/authors' main argument?
  • Instead of creating a completely new language, the authors have borrowed the language of popular software to present an accessible introduction, a User`s Manual to a new operating system, with each component given a poetic and theoretical description of its features and limitations.
  • It is to engage with the challenge of understanding queerness today as operating on and through digital media and the digital humanities.  Our intervention therefore seeks to address what we perceive as a lack of queer, trans, and racial analysis in the digital humanities, as well as the challenges of imbricating queer/trans/racialized lives and building digital/technical architectures that do not replicate existing systems of oppression. QueerOS seeks to identify digital interactions, both intentional and serendipitous, that lead to new pleasures and possibilities both online and off.  Focusing on computer code and system hardware, performance and production, communities of collaboration and social justice, and practices of desire and transformation within social media, QueerOS updates our current moment while also questioning our impulse to make queer theory productive and connect to the digital humanities and new media studies. QueerOS diverges from the digital network culture, widely accepted today, in which Terms of Service and License Agreements are quietly updated by corporations in order to limit user`s rights to their own data, where agreements are to be scrolled past and clicked through, and consent is not taken seriously.  By agreeing to the QueerOS Terms of Service the user binds themselves in a relational network of queer kinship with and between people and systems, bodies and objects, one and another.  The interface marks the site at which human-machine interaction is situated.  For most users, the interface is the only means of engaging with a given operating system, as all possible actions are mediated by the predetermined interactions built into the system.
  • While our queer impulse may be to explode this box, to lay bare its inner workings in a gesture of radical revelation, this desire to access the truth of the machine in that hardware, those circuits, these gates and switches is rooted in a drive toward depth, essence, and resolution that is antithetical to a QueerOS.

• • What concepts came up that are new to you? And what do you think they mean? Look them up, please write down the definitions in your pad, after 
  • looking them up did you confirm your knowledge or did something change?
  • 'The user’s offer of flesh is irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, and sublicensable' sounded very abstract. I understand that in terms of evolution the humanity might come to the conclusion that our dna might not be the best enviroment to continue living, but I don't have an idea what this section of the text exactly means.
  • What references in this text are familiar to you? How does this author pick them up, or not?
  • In some movies you get the opportunity to see some kind of human-machine interaction, but I dont think that there is anything comparable to QueerOS. The Killer Apps was an entertaining Section of the text, which might catch some attention. I haven't heard it with this title, but the idea of making everything easier for the user is a common phenomena i think.
  • What kind of world do you think this text wishes we lived in? What would be different?
  • I think this text is actually a preview of what our future might look like. We already use out Smartphone as an extension of our memory or tool, so the idea of creating a digital Interface with the help of the human body is in my opinion nothing strange to hear about. The kind of data which this system would be operating with and the implemantation of feelings into it, i a unique way of creating an operating system. But overall I think, that this world is going to be the future. I think the text lives in a world, in which the human body isn't that important anymore and the mind of ours is in some special state in which we can work and live. But this sounds very abstract and futuristic.
  • How do you feel after reading this text? 

• • I'm feeling really happy about this. I started studying cs, because I wanted to be part of the creation of the future and those concepts make me feel great and looking forward to the future. We have so much to discover in this world and I think cs makes it possible.

• • • 5 Sources of QueerOS:
    • 1. Keeling, Kara. “Queer OS.” Cinema Journal 53, no. 2 (2014): 152–57.
    • 2. Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.
    • 3. Shannon, Claude E. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” In The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July, October 1948): 379–23, 623–56.
    • 4. Dean, Tim. Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
    • 5. Galloway, Alexander. The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
  • What is the name of the text you chose? Who are the authors? Who published it? Where? When?
  • I chose The Interface Effect written by Alexander Galloway. The book was published in Cambridge in 2021 by Polity.
  •  
  • How did you get access to this text? What tools did you use? Did you need to ask for help? What pathways did you take? Write about the experience of finding this text.
  • I firstly started to look the title of the book in our university catalogue, german and english, but didn't found anything. Then i decided to use one of the recommended pages and immidiately found the book and a download. Maybe Google would've been even faster. Nowadays it's just incredible, how fast we can access any kind information we crave.
  • What is the author talking about? In what context? What are the concepts they work with?
  • The author talks in this introduction about 'The Language of new Media' written by Lev Manovich. Scattered throughout the book, Manovich advances a number of aesthetic claims that have become commonplace parlance in the discourse on digital interfaces, including the idea of a “logic of selection,” the importance of compositing, the way in which the database itself is a medium, the emphasis on navigation through space, the reversal of the relationship between syntagm and paradigm, the centrality of games and play, the waning of temporal montage (and the rise of spatial montage), and many other observations.  All of these concepts and claims are now taken for granted in the various debates that make up today`s discourse on new media. 
  • How does this text relate to the Queer OS text? What concepts does it bring up that are similar? What concepts does it bring up that are different?
  • The author talks on page 25 (mentioned in the section interface) about the change of technology 'the more a dioptric device erases the traces of its own functioning (in actually delivering the thing represented beyond), the more it succeeds in its functional mandate'. The concept of dioptric devices is refered to the QueerOS text. 
  • How do you feel after reading this text? 
  • I think as I already mentioned in this section of the second text, there is more to discover, as we know and i look forward to.
  • Day 2
  • Youtube Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwWdv_uBGNY&t=271s
  • Moving at the Speed of Trust: Disability Justice and Transformative Justice
  • After engaging with Disability Justice and Transformative Justice through this video what have you learned? Are these concepts familiar to you? What is new?
  • Disability Justice is a movement building framework which was founded in 2005 by poor white, black, queer and trans people, who want to center the desires the issues of all kinds of disabled people. Leah and Elliot concider themselfes (i dont know if that is formulized the right way) as disabled or even mad at some sections of the video. Elliot also states, he was between 12 to 19 in different psychiartric treatments, whre he took up to 13 different meds. I learned about their way of life and the approach of Disability Justice. For example, Disability Justice has a number for suicidal people which isn't going to be tracked and given to 911, because they think that everyone should have the opportunity of expression in every possible way and nobody has to fear getting tracked and their door kicked in by police people who don't want that you're going to kill yourself even tho it's your decision to end your life. Sometimes "no help" is more help than forced help. I think that's the biggest lection I took out of this video.
  • What relationship do you think Disability Justice currently has with technology? What relationship do you think it could have (here is a moment to dream!)?
  • Disability Justice is in my understanding a place people with issues and disabilities come to and be around people with the same struggles. I don't actually know, how much the treatment of the disabilitys goes but I think in terms of physical disability the program might have a bright future. the development of prothesis and exoskeletons will make people in the future able to get rid of their physical struggles. I think the physical disabilities aren't the toughest ones. The treatment and recovery of psychological disabilities is way harder. I don't actually know how to handle psychological trauma but in my opinion the usage of virtual reality and the transformation from memories into virtual reality might help to learn out of certain situations. Otherwise I could also imagine that the medicine and surgery of brains will develop into a such high standard that it will be able to cure those kind of disabilities. The brain is such a complex organ but imagine following: in 1903 we saw the first people on earth on a plane, 60 years later we saw first people on moon. Our speed of development only took first steps and we are going way further.
  • Do any projects that you have worked on or heard about come up for you as references when thinking about these movements?
  • Not especially project but the blacklivesmatter movement took part 2 months i think after the release of the video and Leah and Elliot already talked about people getting murdered by policemen who didn't even said anything about it and never got convicted or something. I think the case of George Floyd was a horrific event which happened in our world but it was also the awakening of a huge problem in the U.S. and in many different countrys in the world and since that a lot of people watch the police closely and see them more criticise them more. 
  • "I don't have time for this shit. I am here to kick ass and take names." - Bryan Vasley, i mean seriously, how is this happening in this world.
  • Reflect: what have you learned in the course so far? What questions are still left unanswered for you? What is emerging as important for you to continue to learn about after these two days together? 

 

• • We definetely learned a lot in those two days. I really like this course so far because I have never done so much about diversity. I'm also a fan of that english talking. Even tho it's needed, because Loren is american (i suppose, sorry if I'm wrong). I think it puts everyone in the same, as germans we would assume uncomfortable situation of talking english, which makes us a group of something similar. I would love to continue to learn about the sight of other people because I think it's a great way to reflect about yourself. 
  • But I also think that there is so much to learn in this amount of time which is a little oppressing. I'm studying full time along and I havent got time to prepare this whole weekend for class because the course was so intense and after that long hours and homework you don't want to continue doing stuff for your classes. I think it would've been also great to split it over a few more weeks but whatever. I think it is worth the time even tho I'm a little scared about finals and the lacking opportunities to prepare and enjoy some free time.
  • As far as I can say, that's it. I hope I managed to fulfill the requirements of your exercises and everything was understandable even tho my english f@*king sucks.
  • See you on February 5th. 

This is also me writing this, just from another device, that is why my writing might be differently highlighted.

Homework: Read Katta Spiel's article: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3461778.3462033 --

Questions:

• I dont use pronouns, because i didn't found any statement of Katta about Katta's gender- That's why I only use Katta. 

    
    What situation does the author move through? 
    

• • • Katta grew up in a small village in lower bavaria. Katta grew up in a village in which "the boys played soccer and the gils joined dancing groups, so Katta had no opportunity to find freedom about gender because of that strict seperation between boys and girls. There was no in between. Katta felt different to the other kids but Katta couldn't express it in the way Katta wanted. Katta studied gender studies and computer science. During studies Katta experienced on one side the diversity of genders and on the other side the building of databases in terms of gender with a boolean function, so there is true and false for each gender instead of a switch function. Katta keeps on studying and besides that Katta awares others about gender complexity. Katta's first success is the usage of a free gender section on research papers of a former mentor of Katta's and the dialogue between the mentor and another researcher about that topic. Katta's would like to celebrate this small success but on the other side the society keeps on going the "binary" way and even on banal topics such as buying cat food on a webpage everybody want's information about the gender but nobody wants to implement a few more available options about it. In the text Katta states in an academic way what genders actually are and how to use gendering in building datastuctures around it in full complexity. 
    • • • In what context? 
          • I understand this as a question, where we should state the personal situation of Katta and her personal development through the time of growing up and studying and living in germany in the late 80s/early 90s. 
• What did you learn new?
• I learned a lot about the differences betweeen the perception of non binary people in our society, i learned about gender separates between sex and gender, gender being the proverbial coat draped on the rack that is the sexed body and I learned about the complexity of people who are non binary and are confronted with an opposide view from the society about this topic. The entire part about Infrastrucutes was new to me, such in terms of usage of genders but also in general.