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doorsclosingslowlyThe Metafilter tag for OuLiPo
I know, I'm linking a site for linking sites in a linkspam, but I'd never heard of OuLiPo before and so this is more about the breadth of the concept instead of a specific example, if that makes sense. OuLiPo is short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), seeking to create and incorporate restrictive techniques and methods into their writing, and I fucking love restrictive techniques in writing. (Actually I've been meaning to read Georges Perec's La Disparition, a novel without words that have the letter 'e', for years now, and apparently he was a member of Oulipo, which just goes to show I should stop piling ever more books onto my 'to read' pile....) The restrictions I'm most used to are the easy ones, length rules like 100 words or 3 sentences, but I'm excited to see what else is out there.
Kate Crawford: Can an Algorithm Be Agonistic? Ten Scenes about Living in Calculated Publics
Social science buzzwords galore, but that is what I'm studying. I was at a talk by Annelie Pentenrieder about social practices when using navigation software, and the aspect I found most fascinating was the concept of 'data doubles' ("the conversion of human bodies and minds into data flows that can be figuratively reassembled for the purposes of personal reflection and interaction"[1]. One example would be Amazon recommendations: when you look at them you can guess at the assumptions about you their algorithm makes), and linked to the concept of data doubles, users trying to observe their data double, guessing the behaviours that influence it and changing them for their own ends, 'gaming' the algorithm. Her example was a Deliveroo food delivery biker who used to ride fast, noticed he was offered the less lucrative long-distance deliveries, and then decided to drive much slower. In a similar vein, there used to be this tip of copying the job advert in tiny white text onto your resumee when applying for jobs online, or having a bot automatically search random stuff so you obscure your 'true' self with garbage data.
When researching, I came across Crawford's talk, which is a pretty good framework for looking at the process, and 'agonistic' is one of my favourite political science concepts because I'm deeply suspicious of consensus and technocracy. (A non-jargon introduction to Mouffe's agonistic pluralism is the Guardian Longreads article The death of consensus: how conflict came back to politics).
I know, I'm linking a site for linking sites in a linkspam, but I'd never heard of OuLiPo before and so this is more about the breadth of the concept instead of a specific example, if that makes sense. OuLiPo is short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), seeking to create and incorporate restrictive techniques and methods into their writing, and I fucking love restrictive techniques in writing. (Actually I've been meaning to read Georges Perec's La Disparition, a novel without words that have the letter 'e', for years now, and apparently he was a member of Oulipo, which just goes to show I should stop piling ever more books onto my 'to read' pile....) The restrictions I'm most used to are the easy ones, length rules like 100 words or 3 sentences, but I'm excited to see what else is out there.
Kate Crawford: Can an Algorithm Be Agonistic? Ten Scenes about Living in Calculated Publics
Social science buzzwords galore, but that is what I'm studying. I was at a talk by Annelie Pentenrieder about social practices when using navigation software, and the aspect I found most fascinating was the concept of 'data doubles' ("the conversion of human bodies and minds into data flows that can be figuratively reassembled for the purposes of personal reflection and interaction"[1]. One example would be Amazon recommendations: when you look at them you can guess at the assumptions about you their algorithm makes), and linked to the concept of data doubles, users trying to observe their data double, guessing the behaviours that influence it and changing them for their own ends, 'gaming' the algorithm. Her example was a Deliveroo food delivery biker who used to ride fast, noticed he was offered the less lucrative long-distance deliveries, and then decided to drive much slower. In a similar vein, there used to be this tip of copying the job advert in tiny white text onto your resumee when applying for jobs online, or having a bot automatically search random stuff so you obscure your 'true' self with garbage data.
When researching, I came across Crawford's talk, which is a pretty good framework for looking at the process, and 'agonistic' is one of my favourite political science concepts because I'm deeply suspicious of consensus and technocracy. (A non-jargon introduction to Mouffe's agonistic pluralism is the Guardian Longreads article The death of consensus: how conflict came back to politics).
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