#algorithmic-folkelore — Public Fediverse posts

Psychoanalysis and infrastructure

When reading Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan I was suddenly struck by how interesting it would be to think about infrastructure from a Lacanian perspective. Consider how he talks about the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary on loc 2060:

The imaginary can present an illusion of completeness because it appears to involve just two parties – someone looking and what is seen. The imaginary relationship is a dualistic one that fails to account for the influence of a third party on this dualistic interaction. From within the imaginary perspective, I consider only what’s on my computer screen, not the structure that makes it possible for me to view this screen, including the labor that produced my computer in the first place and the coding that mediates my encounter. Seeing a direct, one-on-one relationship with the image amounts to falling for an imaginary lure. Lacan wants to bring the symbolic and real to light to counter the blinding power of this lure.

What he terms the third party here can equally be framed as infrastructure: “the structure that makes it possible”. I had a conversation with Richard Sandford yesterday about algorithmic folklore which was lingering in my mind as I read this. Could the stories we tell about algorithms be framed as attempts to incorporate the infrastructure into the imaginary? They turn the absent structure into a real presence which evokes stories and ideas in us about what it is and what it wants. It turns the third into a dyadic relationship in which I am directly confronting the algorithm and trying to decipher its desire. In doing so we lose contact with the negativity inherent in grappling with the limits of the Imaginary, as Todd puts it on loc 2078:

Enthralled by the imaginary, we can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t see that we can’t see everything. While the subject allows itself to be captivated by images, absence disappears in the surfeit of presence. The problem with the imaginary is that it is too visible: We see the imaginary as a whole and never see what it’s missing – namely, the symbolic order and the real.

I wonder what happens to the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, which I’ve never liked, if we read it through this frame? The Imaginary is comforting because it forecloses a deeper engagement with a reality which is disorientating and beyond our full comprehension. Rather than sociotechnical imaginaries being essentially a synonym for ‘shared vision’ we can read them as a defence mechanism through which engagements with infrastructure are transposed into a more comforting register. What would sociotechnical Imaginaries (the capital marking the Lacanian spin) look like if we see them as operating in this way? What’s their relationship to, say, moments of breakdown when the infrastructural bursts into conscious awareness through its sudden mode of failure? What would this framing mean for the repair and care work involved in sustaining infrastructure?

Psychoanalysis and infrastructure

When reading Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan I was suddenly struck by how interesting it would be to think about infrastructure from a Lacanian perspective. Consider how he talks about the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary on loc 2060:

The imaginary can present an illusion of completeness because it appears to involve just two parties – someone looking and what is seen. The imaginary relationship is a dualistic one that fails to account for the influence of a third party on this dualistic interaction. From within the imaginary perspective, I consider only what’s on my computer screen, not the structure that makes it possible for me to view this screen, including the labor that produced my computer in the first place and the coding that mediates my encounter. Seeing a direct, one-on-one relationship with the image amounts to falling for an imaginary lure. Lacan wants to bring the symbolic and real to light to counter the blinding power of this lure.

What he terms the third party here can equally be framed as infrastructure: “the structure that makes it possible”. I had a conversation with Richard Sandford yesterday about algorithmic folklore which was lingering in my mind as I read this. Could the stories we tell about algorithms be framed as attempts to incorporate the infrastructure into the imaginary? They turn the absent structure into a real presence which evokes stories and ideas in us about what it is and what it wants. It turns the third into a dyadic relationship in which I am directly confronting the algorithm and trying to decipher its desire. In doing so we lose contact with the negativity inherent in grappling with the limits of the Imaginary, as Todd puts it on loc 2078:

Enthralled by the imaginary, we can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t see that we can’t see everything. While the subject allows itself to be captivated by images, absence disappears in the surfeit of presence. The problem with the imaginary is that it is too visible: We see the imaginary as a whole and never see what it’s missing – namely, the symbolic order and the real.

I wonder what happens to the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, which I’ve never liked, if we read it through this frame? The Imaginary is comforting because it forecloses a deeper engagement with a reality which is disorientating and beyond our full comprehension. Rather than sociotechnical imaginaries being essentially a synonym for ‘shared vision’ we can read them as a defence mechanism through which engagements with infrastructure are transposed into a more comforting register. What would sociotechnical Imaginaries (the capital marking the Lacanian spin) look like if we see them as operating in this way? What’s their relationship to, say, moments of breakdown when the infrastructural bursts into conscious awareness through its sudden mode of failure? What would this framing mean for the repair and care work involved in sustaining infrastructure?

Psychoanalysis and infrastructure

When reading Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan I was suddenly struck by how interesting it would be to think about infrastructure from a Lacanian perspective. Consider how he talks about the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary on loc 2060:

The imaginary can present an illusion of completeness because it appears to involve just two parties – someone looking and what is seen. The imaginary relationship is a dualistic one that fails to account for the influence of a third party on this dualistic interaction. From within the imaginary perspective, I consider only what’s on my computer screen, not the structure that makes it possible for me to view this screen, including the labor that produced my computer in the first place and the coding that mediates my encounter. Seeing a direct, one-on-one relationship with the image amounts to falling for an imaginary lure. Lacan wants to bring the symbolic and real to light to counter the blinding power of this lure.

What he terms the third party here can equally be framed as infrastructure: “the structure that makes it possible”. I had a conversation with Richard Sandford yesterday about algorithmic folklore which was lingering in my mind as I read this. Could the stories we tell about algorithms be framed as attempts to incorporate the infrastructure into the imaginary? They turn the absent structure into a real presence which evokes stories and ideas in us about what it is and what it wants. It turns the third into a dyadic relationship in which I am directly confronting the algorithm and trying to decipher its desire. In doing so we lose contact with the negativity inherent in grappling with the limits of the Imaginary, as Todd puts it on loc 2078:

Enthralled by the imaginary, we can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t see that we can’t see everything. While the subject allows itself to be captivated by images, absence disappears in the surfeit of presence. The problem with the imaginary is that it is too visible: We see the imaginary as a whole and never see what it’s missing – namely, the symbolic order and the real.

I wonder what happens to the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, which I’ve never liked, if we read it through this frame? The Imaginary is comforting because it forecloses a deeper engagement with a reality which is disorientating and beyond our full comprehension. Rather than sociotechnical imaginaries being essentially a synonym for ‘shared vision’ we can read them as a defence mechanism through which engagements with infrastructure are transposed into a more comforting register. What would sociotechnical Imaginaries (the capital marking the Lacanian spin) look like if we see them as operating in this way? What’s their relationship to, say, moments of breakdown when the infrastructural bursts into conscious awareness through its sudden mode of failure? What would this framing mean for the repair and care work involved in sustaining infrastructure?

Psychoanalysis and infrastructure

When reading Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan I was suddenly struck by how interesting it would be to think about infrastructure from a Lacanian perspective. Consider how he talks about the Lacanian notion of the Imaginary on loc 2060:

The imaginary can present an illusion of completeness because it appears to involve just two parties – someone looking and what is seen. The imaginary relationship is a dualistic one that fails to account for the influence of a third party on this dualistic interaction. From within the imaginary perspective, I consider only what’s on my computer screen, not the structure that makes it possible for me to view this screen, including the labor that produced my computer in the first place and the coding that mediates my encounter. Seeing a direct, one-on-one relationship with the image amounts to falling for an imaginary lure. Lacan wants to bring the symbolic and real to light to counter the blinding power of this lure.

What he terms the third party here can equally be framed as infrastructure: “the structure that makes it possible”. I had a conversation with Richard Sandford yesterday about algorithmic folklore which was lingering in my mind as I read this. Could the stories we tell about algorithms be framed as attempts to incorporate the infrastructure into the imaginary? They turn the absent structure into a real presence which evokes stories and ideas in us about what it is and what it wants. It turns the third into a dyadic relationship in which I am directly confronting the algorithm and trying to decipher its desire. In doing so we lose contact with the negativity inherent in grappling with the limits of the Imaginary, as Todd puts it on loc 2078:

Enthralled by the imaginary, we can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t see that we can’t see everything. While the subject allows itself to be captivated by images, absence disappears in the surfeit of presence. The problem with the imaginary is that it is too visible: We see the imaginary as a whole and never see what it’s missing – namely, the symbolic order and the real.

I wonder what happens to the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, which I’ve never liked, if we read it through this frame? The Imaginary is comforting because it forecloses a deeper engagement with a reality which is disorientating and beyond our full comprehension. Rather than sociotechnical imaginaries being essentially a synonym for ‘shared vision’ we can read them as a defence mechanism through which engagements with infrastructure are transposed into a more comforting register. What would sociotechnical Imaginaries (the capital marking the Lacanian spin) look like if we see them as operating in this way? What’s their relationship to, say, moments of breakdown when the infrastructural bursts into conscious awareness through its sudden mode of failure? What would this framing mean for the repair and care work involved in sustaining infrastructure?

You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming

This is a point which seemed so obvious to me I’m surprised to realise it does need to be spelled out. Rather than ‘AI slop’ being some exogenous factor which is now swamping previously functional social media platforms, we need to see it as an outcome of existing practices of engagement farming. The political economy of social platforms has over many year inculcated a strategic orientation towards engagement because of the direct monetary and indirect status rewards which come from maximising it. What it means in practice is using whatever techniques are available to maximise engagement with your content while minimising the cost. In essence it treats other people’s attention as a resource to be farmed, with the ‘farming’ being a matter of strategic action which makes it more likely their attention will be translated into engagement with specific content.

In practice this is almost painfully mundane. It’s a matter of tweaking the content and its framings in ways which are likely to increase engagement. When people say that the algorithm creates certain effects on platforms (e.g. increases the amount of emotive content) this is the missing step through which platform architectures bring about human action. It’s because strategic actors recognise the algorithm rewards certain things (or at least imagine they do, there’s loads of folk theory here) that they take create content intended to exploit that characteristic. There’s also directly preparing content in ways to appeal to individual actors without relying on the mediation of the algorithm. Indeed the most effective engagement farming involves speaking to both ‘audiences’ at the same time: producing content which directly grabs people and feels ‘authentic’ while also being optimised for algorithm distribution.

The flood of AI slop we now see on platforms reflects a shift in engagement farming practices. It’s now possible to do engagement farming effectively at scale because LLMs make content creation so easily. There’s also a disturbing lack of AI literacy sufficient to create attentional markets ripe for exploitation by AI-content which is startlingly obvious if you have any sense of what you’re looking for. The problem is the political economy of the social platform rather than the AI-content per se, even if in practice the two things run together. This matters because we can’t have a meaningful conversation about the problem of ‘AI slop’ without talking about how fundamentally broken social media platforms are.

#AISlop #algorithmicFolkelore #algorithms #engagementFarming #platformEconomics #politicalEconomy #visibility

You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming

This is a point which seemed so obvious to me I’m surprised to realise it does need to be spelled out. Rather than ‘AI slop’ being some exogenous factor which is now swamping previously functional social media platforms, we need to see it as an outcome of existing practices of engagement farming. The political economy of social platforms has over many year inculcated a strategic orientation towards engagement because of the direct monetary and indirect status rewards which come from maximising it. What it means in practice is using whatever techniques are available to maximise engagement with your content while minimising the cost. In essence it treats other people’s attention as a resource to be farmed, with the ‘farming’ being a matter of strategic action which makes it more likely their attention will be translated into engagement with specific content.

In practice this is almost painfully mundane. It’s a matter of tweaking the content and its framings in ways which are likely to increase engagement. When people say that the algorithm creates certain effects on platforms (e.g. increases the amount of emotive content) this is the missing step through which platform architectures bring about human action. It’s because strategic actors recognise the algorithm rewards certain things (or at least imagine they do, there’s loads of folk theory here) that they take create content intended to exploit that characteristic. There’s also directly preparing content in ways to appeal to individual actors without relying on the mediation of the algorithm. Indeed the most effective engagement farming involves speaking to both ‘audiences’ at the same time: producing content which directly grabs people and feels ‘authentic’ while also being optimised for algorithm distribution.

The flood of AI slop we now see on platforms reflects a shift in engagement farming practices. It’s now possible to do engagement farming effectively at scale because LLMs make content creation so easily. There’s also a disturbing lack of AI literacy sufficient to create attentional markets ripe for exploitation by AI-content which is startlingly obvious if you have any sense of what you’re looking for. The problem is the political economy of the social platform rather than the AI-content per se, even if in practice the two things run together. This matters because we can’t have a meaningful conversation about the problem of ‘AI slop’ without talking about how fundamentally broken social media platforms are.

#AI #AISlop #algorithmicFolkelore #algorithms #artificialIntelligence #engagementFarming #platformEconomics #politicalEconomy #SocialMedia #technology #visibility #writing

You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming

This is a point which seemed so obvious to me I’m surprised to realise it does need to be spelled out. Rather than ‘AI slop’ being some exogenous factor which is now swamping previously functional social media platforms, we need to see it as an outcome of existing practices of engagement farming. The political economy of social platforms has over many year inculcated a strategic orientation towards engagement because of the direct monetary and indirect status rewards which come from maximising it. What it means in practice is using whatever techniques are available to maximise engagement with your content while minimising the cost. In essence it treats other people’s attention as a resource to be farmed, with the ‘farming’ being a matter of strategic action which makes it more likely their attention will be translated into engagement with specific content.

In practice this is almost painfully mundane. It’s a matter of tweaking the content and its framings in ways which are likely to increase engagement. When people say that the algorithm creates certain effects on platforms (e.g. increases the amount of emotive content) this is the missing step through which platform architectures bring about human action. It’s because strategic actors recognise the algorithm rewards certain things (or at least imagine they do, there’s loads of folk theory here) that they take create content intended to exploit that characteristic. There’s also directly preparing content in ways to appeal to individual actors without relying on the mediation of the algorithm. Indeed the most effective engagement farming involves speaking to both ‘audiences’ at the same time: producing content which directly grabs people and feels ‘authentic’ while also being optimised for algorithm distribution.

The flood of AI slop we now see on platforms reflects a shift in engagement farming practices. It’s now possible to do engagement farming effectively at scale because LLMs make content creation so easily. There’s also a disturbing lack of AI literacy sufficient to create attentional markets ripe for exploitation by AI-content which is startlingly obvious if you have any sense of what you’re looking for. The problem is the political economy of the social platform rather than the AI-content per se, even if in practice the two things run together. This matters because we can’t have a meaningful conversation about the problem of ‘AI slop’ without talking about how fundamentally broken social media platforms are.

#AI #AISlop #algorithmicFolkelore #algorithms #artificialIntelligence #engagementFarming #platformEconomics #politicalEconomy #SocialMedia #technology #visibility #writing

You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming

This is a point which seemed so obvious to me I’m surprised to realise it does need to be spelled out. Rather than ‘AI slop’ being some exogenous factor which is now swamping previously functional social media platforms, we need to see it as an outcome of existing practices of engagement farming. The political economy of social platforms has over many year inculcated a strategic orientation towards engagement because of the direct monetary and indirect status rewards which come from maximising it. What it means in practice is using whatever techniques are available to maximise engagement with your content while minimising the cost. In essence it treats other people’s attention as a resource to be farmed, with the ‘farming’ being a matter of strategic action which makes it more likely their attention will be translated into engagement with specific content.

In practice this is almost painfully mundane. It’s a matter of tweaking the content and its framings in ways which are likely to increase engagement. When people say that the algorithm creates certain effects on platforms (e.g. increases the amount of emotive content) this is the missing step through which platform architectures bring about human action. It’s because strategic actors recognise the algorithm rewards certain things (or at least imagine they do, there’s loads of folk theory here) that they take create content intended to exploit that characteristic. There’s also directly preparing content in ways to appeal to individual actors without relying on the mediation of the algorithm. Indeed the most effective engagement farming involves speaking to both ‘audiences’ at the same time: producing content which directly grabs people and feels ‘authentic’ while also being optimised for algorithm distribution.

The flood of AI slop we now see on platforms reflects a shift in engagement farming practices. It’s now possible to do engagement farming effectively at scale because LLMs make content creation so easily. There’s also a disturbing lack of AI literacy sufficient to create attentional markets ripe for exploitation by AI-content which is startlingly obvious if you have any sense of what you’re looking for. The problem is the political economy of the social platform rather than the AI-content per se, even if in practice the two things run together. This matters because we can’t have a meaningful conversation about the problem of ‘AI slop’ without talking about how fundamentally broken social media platforms are.

#AISlop #algorithmicFolkelore #algorithms #engagementFarming #platformEconomics #politicalEconomy #visibility

You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming

This is a point which seemed so obvious to me I’m surprised to realise it does need to be spelled out. Rather than ‘AI slop’ being some exogenous factor which is now swamping previously functional social media platforms, we need to see it as an outcome of existing practices of engagement farming. The political economy of social platforms has over many year inculcated a strategic orientation towards engagement because of the direct monetary and indirect status rewards which come from maximising it. What it means in practice is using whatever techniques are available to maximise engagement with your content while minimising the cost. In essence it treats other people’s attention as a resource to be farmed, with the ‘farming’ being a matter of strategic action which makes it more likely their attention will be translated into engagement with specific content.

In practice this is almost painfully mundane. It’s a matter of tweaking the content and its framings in ways which are likely to increase engagement. When people say that the algorithm creates certain effects on platforms (e.g. increases the amount of emotive content) this is the missing step through which platform architectures bring about human action. It’s because strategic actors recognise the algorithm rewards certain things (or at least imagine they do, there’s loads of folk theory here) that they take create content intended to exploit that characteristic. There’s also directly preparing content in ways to appeal to individual actors without relying on the mediation of the algorithm. Indeed the most effective engagement farming involves speaking to both ‘audiences’ at the same time: producing content which directly grabs people and feels ‘authentic’ while also being optimised for algorithm distribution.

The flood of AI slop we now see on platforms reflects a shift in engagement farming practices. It’s now possible to do engagement farming effectively at scale because LLMs make content creation so easily. There’s also a disturbing lack of AI literacy sufficient to create attentional markets ripe for exploitation by AI-content which is startlingly obvious if you have any sense of what you’re looking for. The problem is the political economy of the social platform rather than the AI-content per se, even if in practice the two things run together. This matters because we can’t have a meaningful conversation about the problem of ‘AI slop’ without talking about how fundamentally broken social media platforms are.

#AISlop #algorithmicFolkelore #algorithms #engagementFarming #platformEconomics #politicalEconomy #visibility