hi all,
reading trebor's and geert's notes on the proposed conference
(freecooperation.org), i found a question that i am especially
interested in:
"How can we re-define a critical network based practice that takes
account of its social context...?"
phoebe sengers keeps a list of us who discuss our work as "critical
technical practices"
(http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~phoebe/work/critical-technical-practices.html).
many of us are former escapees from university or industry artificial
intelligence labs that have ended up in the arts and/or the field of
science studies. the label "critical technical practitioner" comes from
an essay that phil agre wrote in dialog with some of us about ten years
ago: "Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Try to
Reform Artificial Intelligence"
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/critical.html
at the time the basic issue, for me, was simply this: most artificial
intelligence (ai) and computer science (cs) labs are largely sponsored
by defense departments, intelligence agencies and large corporate
interests. but, many of us working at such places had left-leaning or
radical politics and we were rather at a loss to explain the political
agency of our work. i think richard stallman's own narrative -- on
launching the free software movement from within the mit ai lab --
contains similar paradoxes. some of us -- this was in the 1980s --
began to ask whether it was possible to do critical work within an ai or
cs lab. personally, i ended up leaving the yale ai lab to become an
unofficial grad student here at the university of california, santa cruz
to learn the critical perspective of donna haraway and her students of
the time (late-80s/early-90s).
these questions are still ripe -- even for those of us no longer working
within military or corporate dominated labs. some of the focal terms
chosen by trebor and geert -- e.g., "social networks" and "smart mobs"
-- are under intense investigation by the military, intelligence
agencies and corporate researchers. to articulate a critical practice
with -- even against -- such a lexicon is challenging since critical
findings are often easily convertable for "administrative" purposes.
("critical/administrative" is the dichotomy introduced by paul
lazarsfeld in the 1940s to distinguish his work (administrative, largely
for corporate and military interests) from the work of his colleagues --
e.g., adorno -- in the frankfurt school (critical).)
compared to my understanding of 15 years ago, i have a different
perspective on these issues having spent the majority of the '90s as a
grad student and research scientist at the mit media laboratory, a
largely corporate -- but not military -- sponsored laboratory (thus
implying a different -- not necessarily better! -- set of research
priorities).
i think it is possible to create, for example, a critical, web-based
artistic practice, but to do so it is necessary to simultaneous
design/create/implement alternative software and also articulate
alternative means for evaluating or critiquing how/whether the software
works well or poorly. for example, "social networks" is a field of
inquiry largely dominated by quantitively-oriented sociologists and,
increasingly, mathematically-oriented physicists and engineers. thus,
there is a quantitative means for evaluating social networks, but is
this the sort of evaluation/critique that we are interested in here, in
this discussion? if not, then how else might such work be critiqued or
evaluated? if we are to use "social networks" to discuss and evaluate
our own work, then what's the alternative to employing -- for instance
-- quantitative, graph theoretical measurements of centrality and
connectivity to articulate what is meant by a phrase like "good
community"? does the work of manual castells or robert putnam offer a
suitable answer?
sorry to be so long-winded about this. i am at a loss as to how to
describe the issue more concisely.
-warren