“A form of domination in which information and its processing by algorithms and artificial intelligence have a decisive influence on social, economic and political processes. Under such a regime, what is exploited is information and data rather than bodies and energies (....).”
“Power depends not on the possession of the means of production but on access to information that is used for psychopolitical surveillance and the control and prediction of behaviour.”
Byung-Chul Han (2022). “Infrocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy”.
2. internet profilling.
“Given sufficient data, it is even possible to generate information that goes beyond what we believe we know about ourselves.”
Byung-Chul Han (2022). “Infrocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy”.
“(...) facebook can manipulate emotion and this affect decision-making. Individual psychology can be altered merely by sending Facebook users positive or negative messages.”
Adrian Shaughnessy (2018). “Weightless Data: The New Heavy Freight”.
3. consumer cattle.
“The more data we generate and the more intensely we communicate, the more efficient surveillance becomes. (...) big data and artificial intelligence enable the information regime to influence our behaviour at a level that lies below the threshold of consciousness.”
“People expose themselves out of an inner need – without any external compulsion. (...) the information regime relies on the fact that people seek to be visible.”
Byung-Chul Han (2022). “Infrocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy”.
lives on discount
1. human lab rats.
“AI systems are built to see and intervene in the world in ways that primarily benefit the states, institutions, and corporations that they serve.”
“It has become so normalized across the industry to take and use whatever is available that few stop to question the underlying politics. (...) the meaning or care that might be given to the image of an individual person, or the context behind a scene, is presumed to be erased at the moment it becomes part of an aggregate mass that will drive a broader system.”
Kate Crawford (2013). “Atlas of AI”.
2. ai=manipulation.
“With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user’s desires more accurately.”
“Put simply: each small moment of convenience (...) requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch.”
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2018). “Anatomy of an AI System”.
weightless data.
1. exoticized minorities.
“Exoticisation dispossess the oppressed of their dignity and humanity, reducing both to commodities to be bought and sold.”
“(...) silence is as much internal as external. This is also the case for colonised peoples in general. (...) the trauma inflicted on indigenous people, which is passed on from generation to generation.”
Susan Hawthorne (2018). “Bibliodiversity: The Politics of Knowledge and the Distribution of Ideas”.
2. digital colonization.
“Access is more than simply having and using existing technology, rather it is having an infrastructure that is content neutral.”
“The rise of importance of algorithms that perform a gatekeeper role for information online in effect continues to build the same barriers to access that have plagued these communities under colonial structures.”
Melissa Gasparotto (2016). “Digital Colonization and Virtual Indigeneity: Indigenous Knowledge and Algorithm Bias”.
3. the data gap.
“When it comes to women of colour, disabled women, working-class women, the data is practically non-existent.”
“(...) the gender data gap is (...) not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all.”
Caroline Criado Perez (2019). “Invisible Woman: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”.
new communication era.
1. distribution is power.
“Instead of control resting with cultural producers, it now rests with the new immaterial distributors. (...) lt seems that we have meekly exchanged one set of gatekeepers for another.”
“The Internet is the first system to challenge the traditional distribution networks that control so much of our lives. And although it has been largely taken over by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, every system, every regime, has within it the seeds of its own subversion and its own corruption.”
Adrian Shaughnessy (2018). “Weightless Data: The New Heavy Freight”.
2. imaginary property.
“Postmodern economies have often been perceived as a funhouse where you can bet on anything, for, like in a hall of mirrors, reality is just the image of an image.”
“One has to forget that one can own things only by assigning or providing them with a self. (…) Property therefore is the appropriation of that activity as the self of the thing and not as the thing itself.”
Florian Schneider (2013). “Imaginary Property”.
3. we amuse ourselves to death.
“(...) the business of distraction represents a clear threat: it makes people immature, or keeps them in a state of immaturity. and it corrodes the social foundation of democracy.”
“The smartphone is the new medium of domination. Under the information regime, people are no longer passive spectators who surrender to amusement. They are all active transmitters. They constantly produce and consume information. Communication has become a form of addiction and compulsion (...).”
Byung-Chul Han (2022). “Infrocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy”.