Rubinstein, Daniel and Sluis, Katrina (2013) Notes on the Margins of Metadata; Concerning the Undecidability of the Digital Image. Photographies, 6 (1), 151-158. ISSN 1754-0763 (Print), 1754-0771 (Online). See →. Also see Katrina Sluis’s writings and interviews on this notion.
On the politics embedded into the defintion of noise and information pls see Tiziana Terranova: Network Cultures, p. “Corollary Ib: The cultural politics of information involves a return to the minimum conditions of communication (the relation of signal to noise and the problem of making contact).”
This is actually the question that sparked information theory as such, in a seminal paper by Claude Shannon published in 1948. And of course it also features in trying to design how to network and modulate these parameters across a lot of different platforms. See Shannon, C.E. (1948), A Mathematical Theory of Communication," Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379–423, 623–656, July & October, 1948. →.
Adrian Chen, "Inside Facebook's Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where 'Camel Toes' are More Offensive Than 'Crushed Heads." →.
Ibid.
They work from home in 4-hour shifts and earn $1 per hour plus commissions (which, according to the job listing, should add up to a "target" rate of around $4 per hour).”
Brad Stone, "In Airtime Video Chat Reboot, Nudists Need Not Apply." June 5, 2012. →.
See →.
See →.
This one, for instance. → a. If the percentage of skin pixels relative to the image size is less than 15 percent, the image is not nude. Otherwise, go to the next step. b. If the number of skin pixels in the largest skin region is less than 35% of the total skin count, the number of skin pixels in the second largest region is less than 30% of the total skin count and the number of skin pixels in the third largest region is less than 30 % of the total skin count, the image is not nude. c. If the number of skin pixels in the largest skin region is less than 45% of the total skin count, the image is not nude. d. If the total skin count is less than 30% of the total number of pixels in the image and the number of skin pixels within the bounding polygon is less than 55 percent of the size of the polygon, the image is not nude. e. If the number of skin regions is more than 60 and the average intensity within the polygon is less than 0.25, the image is not nude. f. Otherwise, the image is nude.
Porn-Detection Software for Videos & Images at Yang's Scientific Research Institute, LLC., USA (YangSky) →.
See →.
For friends of orderly grammar, the full list: 1. Missionary, Side entry missionary, 2. Squashing of the deckchair, 2. Peace Sign, 2. Butterfly position, 2. Coital alignment technique, 2. The stopperage, 2. The Yawning Position, 2. Octopus Position, 2. Feet-on-his-shoulders, 2. Doggy, Leapfrog, Froggy, Upright doggy, Spread-eagle, Spoons position, Reverse peace sign, Chambers Fuck, Fraser Mackenzie, Inverted Missionary, 2. Cowgirl sex position/Amazon position, Reverse Cowgirl/Reverse Amazon, Reverse Cowgirl Horizontal, Asian Cowgirl →, 2. Horizontal reverse, Armchair, Black bee, Persuading of the debtor, Playing of the cello, Proposal, Split level, Watching the game, Reverse piggy-back, Stand and carry, Standing, Wheelbarrow, etc.
This is Girish Shambu reading Roland Barthes: Sade Fourier Loyola: “Sades system (according to Barthes), like a language, has its own grammar (“a porno-grammar”), consisting of some basic elements. Sexual posture is the main one, and the others are: sex, male or female; social position; location, e.g. convent, dungeon, even bedroom!, etc. Sade then combines these elements together in all manner of exhaustive permutations to elaborate a fully-fleshed out (sorry) set of possibilities. (Girish Shambu).
Dialectics of Enlighenment
Jacques Rancière. "Ten Thesis on Politics." in: Theory & Event. Vol. 5, No. 3, 2001. (English). “In order to refuse the title of political subjects to a category -- workers, women, etc… -- it has traditionally been sufficient to assert that they belong to a 'domestic' space, to a space separated from public life; one from which only groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger, or anger could emerge, but not actual speeches demonstrating a shared aisthesis. And the politics of these categories (...) has consisted in making what was unseen visible; in getting what was only audible as noise to be heard as speech →.
And all sorts of other hierarchies, obviously.
Ranciere first articulated this idea in “La mesentente” in 1995. Since then the politics of sound and image have shifted quite dramatically with web based and social media.
In Donna Haraways legendary description: A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), 149-181.
Tiziana Terranova distinguishes between representational and informational space Network Cultures, 36.
The use of bots in influencing public opinion is called “astroturfing”. ““If socialbots could be created in large numbers, they can potentially be used to bias public opinion, for example, by writing large amounts of fake messages and dishonestly improve or damage the public perception about a topic,” the paper notes.” The US DOD has co funded research on the distinction between bot and non-bot on a publicly accessible online platform called BotOrNot.
Elcin Poyrazlar: Turkey’s Leader Bans His Own Twitter Bot Army Posted: 03/26/14 13:25 EDT. The following examples are based on research by Peter Nut and Dieter Leder on Turkish Twitter bot armies, quoted among other places here: Elcin Poyrazlar: Turkey’s Leader Bans His Own Twitter Bot Army Posted: 03/26/14 13:25 See →.
The day is not far when you will be an AK bot too, if you are young and somewhat white, and if you aren’t already.
Unsurprisingly Western secret services seem to have followed suit in programming bot armies to autotune affect on fb. →.
Brett Scott, Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain. See , June 1, 2014. →.
See →.
Ibid, 25.
As already predicted by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.
See →.
See David Riff’s fantastic text about Russian bot armies Cheburashka Fascism?
The Etymology of "Agent" and "Proxy" in Computer Networking Discourse, September 18, 1998. Joseph Reagle. Revised: January 15, 1999.
The same seems to have been the case for some of the Assad government servers.
As Tiziana Terranova writes: “A cultural politics of information is crucially concerned with questioning the relationship between the probable, the possible and the real. the cultural politics of information involves a stab at the fabric of possibility, an undoing of the coincidence of the real with the given.” (Network Culture 2004). Also see p 20: “The relation between the real and the probable, however, also evokes the spectre of the improbable, the fluctuation and hence the virtual. As such, a cultural politics of information somehow resists the confinement of social change to a closed set of mutually excluding and predetermined alternatives; and deploys an active engagement with the transformative potential of the virtual (that which is beyond measure).”
This essay originated as a lecture given in May 2014 for Circulationism, a discussion between Josephine Bosma, Metahaven, David Riff, and Hito Steyerl as part of Steyerl’s mid-career retrospective at Van Abbemuseum, curated by Annie Fletcher.