02/04/2025
The conference, Crafting a More Democratic Digital Sphere, takes place on February 21st at the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
Registration link in the comments.
Details:
Session I: Friday, February 21st, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Location: Franke Institute for the Humanities
The betrayal of the internet’s democratic promise as a forum for communication is cause for dismay. Although on-line communication at its best allows virtual communities to form and to advance their interests, the obstacles to effective action are numerous. Corporate interests design and control on-line media to maximize profit through surveillance and big data, while reactionary groups mobilize online to cancel female voices, harass politicians, and disturb open communication. Social media algorithms designed to capture users’ attention and escalate emotion promote engagement in a perpetual feedback loop to the detriment of democratic association.
The threat to political agency and autonomy passes under the radar, since it is hard to recognize what we are losing through small choices about where and how to spend our leisure time. The smallest unit of democracy is individual agency. Instead of producing an informed democratic populace, exposure to endless social media feeds and even well-researched news sites, all saturated with eye-catching advertising, fragments our attention and numbs us into passivity. Liking, commenting, insulting or even supporting strangers, and reposting create volatile attachments. These nudge out participation in fraying institutions in favor of an engagement whose only tangible public effect is occasionally steering the ever-churning news cycle or organizing protests with little staying power.
With the erosion of citizens’ ability to act in the world as free agents, it is not only individuals who are affected. The online sphere has become the environment in which technologically advanced societies live. Although we may argue whether Habermas’s vision of a robust public sphere was ever realized in history, the current dominance of big tech companies redirects the flow of power away from institutions that organize political deliberation and participation. Realizing that big tech makes their products not for us, but to serve their own ends should be a wake-up call to throw off their domination.
The digital revolution is here to stay. The question is how to recreate the internet’s democratic potential. We propose to explore methods of intervening in these new, sometimes overlapping, sometimes siloed environments to shift agency back to users and create networks of communication that may serve democratic ends. The digital techniques of “tactical media”—such as hacking algorithmic feeds—can rectify imbalances in knowledge and power. Digital art and community-building, independent gaming, and strategic code-rewriting have created spaces for alternative expression. One challenge is to make digital audiences aware that they have the agency to make changes that will maintain freedom and individuality. Another is to achieve these results at a scale.
Keywords: Agency, Algorithm, Attachment, Attention, Autonomy, Craft, Democracy, Domination, Emotion, Resistance
Session II: Saturday, February 22nd, 12:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Location: MADD Center (915 E 60th St)
In this workshop we’ll survey a collection of creative and experimental ways of using our web browsers to engage with online platforms in a manner that “undermines the exploitative algorithms + dark patterns designed by the data barons of surveillance capitalism.” Led by a group of international tactical media artists, participants will learn how they can use hidden features in their web browser to modify the UI/UX behind a number of big tech platforms. Along the way we’ll learn how big tech companies collect our data, which data they collect, and how they use that data and other methods to manipulate and exploit their users. We’ll learn techniques developed by internet artists and hacktivists for hacking and remixing these platforms in ways that that enable us to reclaim our agency in these online spaces. Bringing your own laptop is recommended.
Program schedule:
Friday, February 21: Conference
9:00 am: Coffee and pastries
9:30 am - 10:00 am: Introduction to series and conference: Michèle Lowrie, Nick Briz, and Jim Sparrow
10:00 am -12:00 pm: Moderator, Nick Feamster
- Anton Barba-Kay, “Can Democracy Be Digital (or Must It Be by the Book)?”
- Hoyt Long, “Watching Television in a Time of Political Polarization”
12:00 pm -1:00 pm: Catered lunch
1:00 pm -3:00 pm: Moderator, Chanhao Tan
- Emily Martinez, Tropical Subversions: Artistic Strategies for Reclaiming Digital Archives
- Sarah Grant, Radical Networks, Normalized
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm: Coffee break
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm: Moderator, Genevieve Lakier
- Joan Donovan, “Consumed by Content: Chaos and Carnage in the Zero Trust Society,”
4:30 pm -6 pm: Round table with Marc Downie, Patrick Jagoda, Molly Offer-Westort
Saturday, February 22: Student workshop/practicum:
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm: Catered lunch
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Nick Briz, Sarah Grant, and Emily Martinez
