User:Jonas Lund/notesfuller

notes

Advisable Techniques for Super-Hubs

attempts to lay out a set of strategies, which can be turned operational, for how to relate and deal with ‘evil media’ in database driven systems, such as social formations, management, network analyses, by looking at for example workflow algorithms, recommendation systems, and decision support system.

be everything but available (1)

‘to be everything, to saturate the lover's universe’ “Every experience of the world, every waking state, turns into an anticipation of and hunger for the beloved.” Using an example of man, who’s in love with a woman, who won’t pick up the phone, and but only reply to letters.

“Shklovsky's problem is that the loved one may not feel reducible to this point of convergence or feel it slightly to the side of her, missing the point. In this condensation of these two figures of the loved one, the one who will not answer the ringing mechanism, who will not become a node, and the one who connects to everything, who recomposes the universe by simply being in it, we can see that network analysis is staged and prefigured in a geometry of affect: the loved one is the super-hub of reality.”

“The abundance of pretenders to super-hub status can tend to obliterate the possibility of choosing rather than submitting to the spatiality of absence.”

“In matters of networked connectivity then, the saturation of affective possibilities explored by the lover not only presages the simple techniques of attention management adopted in the information economy. It also discloses the affinities of familiar network topology with intimate emotional state, confirming in advance the view (usually attributed to Deleuze and Guattari (1987)) that social production and desiring production are linked so intimately that they converge, becoming indeed two descriptors for the same scale-free movement.”

Stir Faith in small numbers (2)

“But, given the emphasis on the power of small numbers in the contemporary imaginary, it is a question yet to be answered whether the media systems that arise during the period of its popularity are configured in such a manner as to accentuate the effectiveness of the small.”

“The yearning for the significance of small gestures comes in part from dismay at the effects of the large or monolithic.”

“It is [the believe in the innocuous acts], however, a mode of belief that is – as is suggested shortly - deeply suited to the naturally quantitative environments of networked and computational digital media”

“One root of the awareness of the power of extremely small numbers comes in turn from the power to process many numbers which is endowed by computation.” “inspires the possibility that any slight modification of behaviour may yield spectacular results.”

Invoke Recursion (3)

“Recursion is one of the special pleasures of programmers, the use of a procedure that involves a series of discrete steps, one of which is the relaunch of the procedure.”

“The recursiveness of control mechanisms in evil media creates a situation in which no upper layer exists that would be required to use its merely moral strength to fight the seductions of corruption, since it is always topped out by another cycle of recursion.”

“The answer to the question of who controls control is, then, that when control controls controlling, control is formally dextrous enough to conjugate itself, endlessly.”

“As a stratagem, recursion is immediately distinguishable from one that aims all too simply at domination, and it highlights the importance of continuation through processual iteration. But it is a stratagem the very formal, algorithmic qualities of which also compel its use in a moderate manner, with due attention to the conditions under which termination is achieved. “

“The efficacy of recursion as a stratagematic technique derives from the way in which it draws on particular kinds of patterning that already exist in things, people, processes, organisations themselves. Yet the risks that it poses derive from the inevitably incomplete characterisation that a recursive function provides: extending a process through recursion can generate arbitrary forms of continuity that rapidly diverge and loop off in directions initially unforeseen. The formal and the empirical do not mesh: poorly implemented recursion may even have the propensity to rapidly generate extreme phenomena”

Look after your relations (4)

“Relational databases have become such a crucial part of the conceptual and material infrastructure of the present that it is difficult to imagine many contemporary media systems without their existence as a foundation”

“Because of their high degree of abstraction as structure-building devices, relational databases are immensely useful and work as a critically generative part of what we can understand as the abstract infrastructure of flexibilisation and of the increasingly interpretable nature of processes and resources.”

“in the normalised ontology of the database, every predicate is presumed alienated from the outset.”

“Data-mining allows for the identification of unforeseen relations and factors – hidden variables, new patterns between existing variables, an ‘evidence base’.”

“most databases are best understood as describing sets, operating through the working methods of predicate logic (Kuhns, 1967) They allow the selection, differentiation, union, analysis and possible projection of the attributes of a relation.”

“a relational database is a topological machine, a device for the engineering of connections between things.”

“One way in which they can encourage us to develop an understanding of other formations and modes of exercise of power is through a quality that is inherent to such databases themselves: the production of relations and of disassociations.”

“In the extensively surveilled transparency of database nations, opacities that yield malice and misfortune - but perhaps also the scope for black humour - offer the starting point for the empirical investigation of the arbitrary topologies of the laboratory of the world.”