Linda Kronman, Andreas Zingerle (eds.): The Internet of Other People’s Things (2018)

“The Internet of Things (IoT), smart city initiatives, and smart home technology are marketed to us as sleek and glamorous 3D renderings promising a convenient and sustainable technology that will save us and our planet from a future of environmental distress. Yet the buzzword bingo of smart city rhetoric, the polished advertisements for networked devices, and the glossy packaging of smart home devices are in stark contrast to the news and research which investigates the vulnerabilities of our connected lives. The expansion of the IoT and the proliferation of virtually-connected data points are providing ever increasing amounts of information for those keen on use or abuse. The massive implementation of IoT in hyper-connected urban environments, paths the way to technocratic governance and urban development, corporatizing our living spaces into lock-in, hack-able, “pan optic” smart cities. The IoT seems to develop towards an Internet of Other People’s Things (IoOPT), where users do not own their data, agree to Terms of services that mean their data are then shared by default to third parties, and the risks that citizens rights are managed by technocratic governance or cyber criminals attacking critical infrastructures are always present.

In this cyberwar of ideas, an asymmetric battle for power and influence, systems will have to be more robust and people will have to be more vigilant. Therefore we turned to the community of artists, designers, activists, hackers and researchers with an open call for new critical perspectives on ubiquitous technology and its impact on our lifestyle. We were looking for projects that abuse to expose; artistic research and tacit knowledge that is produced through cultures of making, hacking, and reverse engineering. Our aim was to collect artworks, projects, essays, and interviews discussing questions such as: What does privacy look like in a smart home of connected objects? How are citizens involved in co-design collaborations with private corporations and the public sector to build better cities? How can we enable a secure and trustworthy Internet communication so that business, personal, and machine-to-machine interactions can be conducted safely and without interference?”

Publisher servus.at, Linz, 2018
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9783950420012
235 pages

Editors

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Clare Birchall: Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data (2017)

“In an era of open data and ubiquitous dataveillance, what does it mean to “share”? This book argues that we are all ‘shareveillant’ subjects, called upon to be transparent and render data open at the same time as the security state invests in practices to keep data closed. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’, Clare Birchall reimagines sharing in terms of a collective political relationality beyond the veillant expectations of the state.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2017
Forerunners: Ideas First series, 20
Creative Commons BY 4.0 License
ISBN 1517904250, 9781517904258
xii+72 pages

Reviews: Kevin Walby (Surveillance & Society, 2018), Clare Southerton (Media Theory, 2018).
Interview with author (Francien Broekhuizen et al., MeCCSA, 2016).

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WorldCat

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Culture Machine, 18: The Nature of Data Centers (2019)

“This special issue of Culture Machine brings together scholars from a broad range of disciplines such as anthropology, architecture, media and communication studies, and fine arts, who have engaged with data and cloud infrastructures in their academic or artistic work. Taking data centers as technological apparatus as a starting point, this issue aims to discuss the cloud’s philosophical, political, social, and environmental impacts and maps the diverse sociotechnical assemblages which emerge in the course of cloud infrastructuring processes. How do the infrastructures of the cloud integrate into local political contexts and industrial landscapes? How do the cloud’s technologies relate to the emergence of specific forms of subjectivity, sociality, and urbanity? How can the barely visible and secret industrial spaces of the cloud be made visible and opened up for public engagement? And what does the study of data centers tell us about our current social moment?”

Contributions by Adam Fish and Bradley L. Garrett, Alix Johnson, Anthony M Levenda and Dillon Mahmoudi, Vicki Mayer, Matt Parker, Anne Pasek, A.R.E Taylor, Julia Velkova, Asta Vonderau, Sean RM Willett.

Edited by Mél Hogan and Asta Vonderau
Publisher Open Humanities Press, March 2019
Open access

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