Hello! I know you - I am you

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Hello! I know you – I am you

Modern corporations claims human experience as a free raw material that can be exploited without restrictions. As a result of this robbery exploitation, they are threat to human nature as industrial capitalism was to the natural world.

The exhibition has become an online experience available from a smartphone at www.ZnamCie.com. In the guide, you will find additional materials that only complement the online experience that is the main part of the exhibition. Techno-human hybrid. Inhuman beings, funny, tempting by interactivity, using our image, feeding on our experience. Autonomous programs-machines weaving pieces of us into their structure, interwoven human with inhuman in mechanical gestures, evolve, arousing ambivalent feelings.

ATTENTION! It's kind of fun, but something is wrong. Technology replaces and devalues our humanity. Undermining our respect for one another and ourselves. This is how it was designed, so we can redesign that. Engineers at our leading tech firms and universities tend to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. Since being human is seen as a weakness, we run away from our humanness, from what is tangible and imperfect in its physicality. A journey out of body, beyond matter, began. It's time to move into a new better substrate, a body in VR, a mind in AI, or whatever else we fetishize at that moment.

ATTENTION! The first stage of the journey is behind us. Modern corporations claims human experience as a free raw material that can be exploited without restrictions. As a result of this robbery exploitation, they are threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth. Technology divides us and separates us from each other. Breaks down the social fabric. Our current shift may be more profound and permanent, because this time we are empowering our antihuman technologies with the ability to retool themselves. Our smart devices iterate and evolve faster than our biology can.

Time to ask the question: what not to automate? Technology brings the values of its creators. Nobody asks us if we want these values. Do we really want to fuse with the code-driven devices that surround us? We hear it’s inevitable, it’s permanent feature of technology, it’s develops exponentially, it’s the next stage of evolution.

ATTENTION! It doesn't have to be this way. This has been by design, so we can redesign that!

Due to the transfer of the festival to the network, the exhibition will become an online experience. Get ready to meet the algorithms and models of artificial neural networks of learning machines.

#tech#data#capitalism#bigdata#safety#artificialintelligence#robotization#dystopia#surveillance#attention#ecology

Psychological insights

platform

“Facebook Targets ‘Insecure’ to Sell Ads”

Facebook uses behavioural analysis to pinpoint the exact moment at which a young person needs a confidence boost and is therefore most vulnerable to a specific configuration of advertising cues and nudges.

A document acquired by the Australian press in May 2017 would eventually reveal this fact. Three years after the publication of the contagion study, the Australian broke the story on a confidential twenty-three-page Facebook document written by two Facebook executives in 2017 and aimed at the company’s Australian and New Zealand advertisers. The report depicted the corporation’s systems for gathering psychological insights on 6.4 million high school and tertiary students as well as young Australians and New Zealanders already in the workforce. The Facebook document detailed the many ways in which the corporation uses its stores of behavioural surplus to pinpoint the exact moment at which a young person needs a confidence boost and is therefore most vulnerable to a specific configuration of advertising cues and nudges: “By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions, and Internet activity, Facebook can work out when young people feel stressed, defeated, overwhelmed, anxious, nervous,  stupid,  silly, useless, and a failure.” At these moments, they are able to do something they would not do otherwise and most importantly, you can make money by selling this moment to the advertiser increasing the chance that his message will work.

 

Sources:

  1. Darren Davidson, “Facebook Targets ‘Insecure’ to Sell Ads”, 2017
  2. Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, 2019

 

#data#capitalism#bigdata#robotization#dystopia

Google Street View

service

Zespół Googla

In 2010 the German Federal Commission for Data Protection announced that Google’s Street View operation actually camouflaged a covert data sweep; Street View cars were secretly collecting personal data from private Wi-Fi networks. Google denied the charge, insisting that it was gathering only publicly broadcast Wi-Fi network names and the identifying addresses of Wi-Fi routers, but not personal information sent over the network. Within days, an independent analysis by German security experts proved decisively that Street View’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes. Google was forced to concede that it had intercepted and stored payload data, personal information grabbed from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. As its apologetic blog post noted, “In some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.” Technical experts in Canada, France, and the Netherlands discovered that the payload data included names, telephone numbers, credit information, passwords, messages, e-mails, and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behavior, medical information, location data, photos, and video and audio files. They concluded that such data packets could be stitched together for a detailed profile of an identifiable person.

 

Sources:

  1. Federal Communications Commission, Raport z 13.04.2012
  2. Peter Fleischer, “Data collected by Google cars”, 2010
  3. Germany’s Complicated Relationship With Google Street View”, 2013
  4. Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, 2019
  5. Thousands of Germans opt out of Google Street View”, 2010

#data#capitalism#bigdata#robotization#dystopia

Roomba

vacuum cleaner

iRobot

The vacuum cleaner can send data to third parties about our behavior, about the plan of the rooms in our house and much more. 

In July 2017, the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner appeared on the headlines when iRobot CEO Colin Angle told Reuters about a new data-driven business strategy. After this information, the company's shares jumped 300%. And it is not about the fact that the vacuum cleaner equipped with cameras will send our naked pics to the iRobot company. This is completely irrelevant data. What is valuable is data on our behaviour and the shape of our surroundings. Combining this data with the digital footprints we leave online gives a more complete picture and allows us to better predict our behaviour. Not surprisingly, Google and many other companies became interested in purchasing such data, and iRobot stocks soared. And all thanks to one software update in existing vacuum cleaners present in every second home in America. And of course, you could not agree to the new terms of the contract. But everyone clicked OK, not even reading, because no one wanted to have a stupid vacuum cleaner. Thanks to the software update, the vacuum cleaner became extremely intelligent, learned where is the kitchen, and where the hallway. Where and when not to ride, so as not to fall under our feet. And where to clean more intensively, because it's usually dirtier there. He even began to respond to commands such as clean up in the kitchen. And all for free, because the upgrade cost nothing! Apart from a small detail in the new contract, which comes with the new software, which states that the vacuum cleaner can send data to third parties about our behaviour, about the floor plan of our house and much more.

 

Sources:

  1. Melissa Wen, “iRobot Shares Surge on Strong Sales of Roomba Vacuum Cleaners,” 2017
  2. Jan Wolfe, “Roomba Vacuum Maker iRobot Betting Big on the ‘Smart’ Home,” 2017

#tech#data#capitalism#bigdata#artificialintelligence#dystopia

Pokémon Go

game

Niantic

Pokémon Go can tell a lot of things about you based on your movement as you play.

Just six days after the game’s release in July 2016, BuzzFeed reporter Joseph Bernstein advised Pokémon users to check how much data the app was collecting from their phones. According to his analysis, “Like most apps that work with the GPS in your smartphone, Pokémon Go can tell a lot of things about you based on your movement as you play: where you go, when you went there, how you got there, how long you stayed, and who else was there. And, like many developers who build those apps, Niantic keeps that information.” Whereas other location-based apps might collect similar data, Bernstein concluded that “Pokémon Go’s incredibly granular, block-by-block map data, combined with its surging popularity, may soon make it one of, if not the most, detailed location-based social graphs ever compiled.” Niantic – The company was formed as Niantic Labs in 2010 as an internal startup within Google.

 

Sources:

  1. Joseph Bernstein, "You Should Probably Check Your Pokémon Go Privacy Settings", 2016
  2. Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, 2019

#data#capitalism#bigdata#dystopia

PRISM

service

US National Security Agency (NSA)

Since September 11th, 2001, the USA government has dramatically increased the ability of its intelligence agencies to collect and investigate information on both foreign subjects and US citizens. Secret surveillance program called PRISM, capture the private data of citizens who are not suspected of any connection to terrorism or any wrongdoing.

PRISM is a tool used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to collect private electronic data belonging to users of major internet services like Gmail, Facebook, Outlook, and others. It’s the latest evolution of the US government’s post-9/11 electronic surveillance efforts, which began under President Bush with the Patriot Act, and expanded to include the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) enacted in 2006 and 2007.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about how PRISM works, but the basic idea is that it allows the NSA to request data on specific people from major technology companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and others. The US government insists that it is only allowed to collect data when given permission by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

 

Sources:

  1. T.C. Sottek, Janus Kopfstein, "Everything you need to know about PRISM", 2013

#data#capitalism#dystopia

Windows 10

operating system

Microsoft

Widows 10 system pushed users toward the express install function, in which every default setting enabled the maximum flow of personal information to the corporation’s servers

Microsoft had an ambitious goal with the launch of Windows 10: a billion devices running the software by the end of 2018. In its quest to reach that goal, the company aggressively pushed Windows 10 on its users and went so far as to offer free upgrades for a whole year. However, the company’s strategy for user adoption has trampled on essential aspects of modern computing: user choice and privacy. One software engineer writing in Slate described it as “a privacy morass in dire need of reform” as he detailed how the system “gives itself the right to pass loads of your data to Microsoft’s servers, use your bandwidth for Microsoft’s own purposes, and profile your Windows usage.”

As many analysts quickly discovered, the system pushed users toward the express install function, in which every default setting enabled the maximum flow of personal information to the corporation’s servers. An investigation by tech website Ars Technica revealed that even when those default settings were reversed and key services such as Cortana disabled, the system continued to access the internet and transmit information to Microsoft. In some instances, those transmissions appeared to contain personal information, including a machine ID, user content, and location data.

 

Sources:

  1. David Auerbach, "Broken Windows Theory", 2015

  2. Amul Kalia, "With Windows 10, Microsoft Blatantly Disregards User Choice and Privacy: A Deep Dive", 2016

  3. Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, 2019

#data#capitalism#bigdata#dystopia