PopCulture as an entry point: Where surveillance capitalism and the rise of populism meet...

Research Network Horizon
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I came across an interesting episode of a series called the Good Fight in which a red thread weaves through some of the core topics of both of our ongoing research projects ( Season 2 Episode 8).

IMHO it suceeds at one of the most difficult challenges when it comes to drawing attention to interdependencies between tech, populism and social justice issues. Without putting laypersons to sleep or being patronising as the characters themselves are in a similar position as the viewer…

"This week, Diane, Adrian, and Julius represent a black undercover police officer named Rashid Clarkson, who was shot and crippled by another cop during a drug sting. This pits them up against supposedly legendary lawyer Solomon Waltzer (Alan Alda), who is representing Det. Whitehead, the officer who shot Rashid, and the Chicago Police Department. But Diane and Adrian aren’t too impressed by him because they’re easily winning the case, especially after Kurt walks the jury through the ballistic evidence at the scene of the crime, and for some odd reason, Solomon doesn’t raise any objections. They take it as a sign that he’s going senile, but if you’ve watched The Good Fight, you probably spent the entire episode waiting for the shoe to drop, and it does.

Instead of objecting in court, Solomon questions Rashid about dogfighting, pointing to an article that claimed he was being investigated for holding such fights in his backyard. Rashid maintains that isn’t true, even though Solomon has an article stating it is. Of course, Marissa is the one who figures out what’s going on after she struggles to find more than one article with those claims. She goes back to the jury research, creates a Facebook profile with all the jurors’ characteristics, and discovers that someone paid to target people with the same characteristics as the jurors with that fake news article — in other words, microtargeting. Solomon is obviously the one behind this fake news article, and it’s not the only one he’s sent out into the world." - Source The Good Fight recap: Season 2, Episode 8

If you come across/ remember other pieces of popculture/media content please feel free to post them as comments below so we get a nice compilation…

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Another fun project is James Bridles:

“Captioned simply, “Autonomous Trap 001,” the scene evokes a world of narratives involving the much-hyped technology of self-driving cars. It could be mischievous hackers disrupting a friend’s self-driving ride home; the police seizing a dissident’s getaway vehicle; highway robbers trapping their prey; witches exorcizing a demon from their hatchback.”

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@nadia, this is really disturbing. So much, in fact, that I wonder whether we are getting paranoid here… but you are right, these things make for great “seeds” for the discussion. Again, we need to be balanced as to what we seed the convo with. If we have only deeply scary seeds, we will get a scared, paranoid conversation. I know @robvank wants to highlight the opportunities of the NGI too…

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Rob’s Internet of Things site (theinternetofthings.eu) had lots of examples of both: caution and opportunity.

One of the news references there reminds that self-driving cars have lots of cameras and their data, like so much of such IoT data, is read and interpreted by machines before a human sees it, if a human ever sees it. And what happens to that data and how does it effect us when it gets interpreted along with other data? Are we prevented or enabled by this interpreted data?

None of us really much know, which to me is the basis of the problem. Life is all trade offs, we know that. But what happens when we don’t know what it is we are trading off? Facebook of course gets very low marks along these lines. But what about Tesla?

Absent a reasonable way to know, I would expect installations along those lines. Is it paranoia if someone is really out to get you?