Session Chair: Sarah T. Roberts
Presentation 1
Algorithms, resistance, and the global information crisis: prefiguring alternative data futures in the tech industry?
Thomas Wright
The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
As both a field and concept, algorithmic resistance has emerged out of critical data studies to reintroduce explorations of human agency and autonomy into research concerning the deleterious impact of automated governance systems in society. Whilst this growing body of literature has invaluably illustrated how different communities work with algorithms through gaming and manipulation to resist automated governance, its focus has generally been delimited to investigating employment and labour conditions primarly experienced by the ‘precariat’ class (Standing, 2011). This specific focus has hitherto foreclosed opportunities to explore what can be learned from nascent practices of engagement with algorithmic technologies across a wider range of contexts, and specifically how these new practices can shape the ways that we live and work with data in the future (Kennedy, 2018; Velkova and Kaun, 2021).
This paper extends the critical focus of algorithmic resistance studies towards organisations that understand themselves as prefiguring more egalitarian futures within the tech industry. This is achieved by drawing from interview data and supporting document analysis of grey papers conducted with an activist organisation that has developed an alternative, democratic data governance system, together with a database of human judgments intended for use in future transparent artificial intelligence projects. Through exploring this primary data, this paper outlines how these nascent data practices can be conceptualised as a mode of cultural resistance that draws from historical conceptions of subjectivity, data and the internet to work towards more egalitarian and just data futures.
Presentation 2
REPELLENT MUSK? RETHINKING SOCIAL MEDIA MIGRATION
Nathaniel Tkacz(1), Carlos Cámara-Menoyo(2), Fangzhou Zhang(2)
1: Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom; 2: The University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Users sit at the heart of the global platform economy. Their movements, from one destination to another, can therefore have major economic, political, and cultural consequences. Using the 2022 Twitter to Mastodon migration as a case study, this presentation aims to rethink social media migration (SMM). The Mastodon migration was a significant social media event – as reflected in news coverage (see Chan, 2022; Hoover, 2022; Huang, 2022; Kiderlin, 2022) – but what kind of event was it and how should we understand its significance? While there is a small interdisciplinary literature on SMM, our presentation offers the first theory of social media migration as a distinct, general phenomenon, and argues SMM can be understood as a form of user-power. That is, SMM is one way users consciously act as political collectives in response to the perceived “decline” (Hirschman, 1990) of a platform or related social media form.
We begin with a brief overview of existing studies of SMM to show how movements of large user populations across sites, forums and platforms have been conceptualised in the past. We then offer an empirical study of the Twitter-Mastodon migration, combining a survey of 820-odd Mastodon users with a quantitative study of 1,286 user accounts who self-identified as migrating. We use this empirical study to reinterpret the pre-existing literature and propose a theory of social media migration that includes six elements: a triggering event; a dynamic of decline; collective introspection; platform/site consciousness; migration as user-power; and inward/outward transformation.
Presentation 3
#YourSlipisShowing: Afroskepticism and Black Resistance to Digtial Disinformation
Kevin Winstead
University of Florida, United States of America
The debates between Afro-optimism and pessimism are among the most energetic and robust conversations happening in Black online intellectual communities. Yet, the binary formation of Afro-optimism and Afro-pessimism obfuscates the ways that Black folks have engaged with given narratives and technologies of the West. In this essay, I offer Afro-Skepticism as a possible affective substrate of the relationship between Blackness and information technologies that lies in the long-standing debate between Black-optimism and Afro-pessimism. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to engage the multitude of social media interfaces, their uses, and significant cultural practices, along with an analysis of Black activists’ online discussion, hashtag campaign #YourSlipIsShowing, an initiative started by Black feminists Shafiqah Hudson and I’Nasah Crockett during the height of the Black Lives Matter zeitgeist and the years leading into the 2016 presidential campaign. The women of #YourSlipisShowing demanded a pause in the marching drum, which framed the utility of social media as a salve for the issues of diversity and inclusion in the public sphere. However, discarding digital platforms as hellspaces discards the platforms' usefulness for creating joy, community, and organizing found on the platforms. The framing of Afro-skepticism has value because it provides a space for refusal that allows for paced vetting of emergent technologies, such as AI and other computational technologies to come, and a clear-eyed acknowledgment of past inventions’ exploitative impact on Black life and the anxiety that this causes. This work contributes to discussions of Black technoculture and disinformation studies.
