Hito Steyerl Response

Governments and corporations collect data and profile people. In the United States, there’s little you can do without a credit score, an obscurely-calculated number based on your income and credit-related “behavior” that ends up rewarding debt and punishing responsible spending. If you don’t use credit and instead use the money you already have, your score will go down or disappear. “Just use credit whenever possible” is an acceptable piece of advice bank workers will give to someone who’s just started to work in this country.

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Noise can be subversive. There might be no other way to equate your identity among disparate databases besides matching up the data, so if the intention is to, for any reason, subvert the system, inserting noise into one’s profile-able information would be a way to do so. But then, if an observing entity might still be able to match up those profiles to the same original person, the added noise might be a red flag, a signal of suspicion.

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It’s always interesting to me how there is no unique identifier for people in the United States. Sure, there’s the Social Security Number, but not everyone has that, and unique identification is not the reason why that number exists in the first place. It makes me think that this is one of the reasons why this country has developed such sophisticated signal-based identification and profiling systems. When identification is explicit, there’s a better chance of attaining control of it, when it’s implicit, you cannot escape it.

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Our collective eagerness to embrace new technology has given us the rise and fall of VR as a “game-changing” technology 4 times now. This last iteration might prove to be slightly more successful than the previous ones, maybe cementing it as a widely accepted technology for gaming. Maybe. The same is happening to AR, and more to the point, AI. Our collective eagerness to believe AI is now fully baked or in the fast-track to become intelligent beyond our imagination or control has led to a lot of paranoia. But the fact is, it’s still pretty dumb, and even though the inner workings are mind-boggling, conceptually, what it can currently do is fairly concrete: pattern recognition.

So it’s a tool that helps with the ‘data plumbing’. A sorter, a categorizer. Whatever ‘evil’ might come from the technology is not actually coming from it—technology is not inherently evil or good. Questioning technology for what it’s used for is as dumb as questioning pens for allowing Donald Trump to sign unfair and divisive legislation.

Tools are neutral. People are not. Question people.

Human person

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