From policing to news, how algorithms are changing our lives


Carl Miller at The National: “First, write out the numbers one to 100 in 10 rows. Cross out the one. Then circle the two, and cross out all of the multiples of two. Circle the three, and do likewise. Follow those instructions, and you’ve just completed the first three steps of an algorithm, and an incredibly ancient one. Twenty-three centuries ago, Eratosthenes was sat in the great library of Alexandria, using this process (it is called Eratosthenes’ Sieve) to find and separate prime numbers. Algorithms are nothing new, indeed even the word itself is old. Fifteen centuries after Eratosthenes, Algoritmi de numero Indorum appeared on the bookshelves of European monks, and with it, the word to describe something very simple in essence: follow a series of fixed steps, in order, to achieve a given answer to a given problem. That’s it, that’s an algorithm. Simple.

 Apart from, of course, the story of algorithms is not so simple, nor so humble. In the shocked wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the United States presidential election, a culprit needed to be found to explain what had happened. What had, against the odds, and in the face of thousands of polls, caused this tectonic shift in US political opinion? Soon the finger was pointed. On social media, and especially on Facebook, it was alleged that pro-Trump stories, based on inaccurate information, had spread like wildfire, often eclipsing real news and honestly-checked facts.
But no human editor was thrust into the spotlight. What took centre stage was an algorithm; Facebook’s news algorithm. It was this, critics said, that was responsible for allowing the “fake news” to circulate. This algorithm wasn’t humbly finding prime numbers; it was responsible for the news that you saw (and of course didn’t see) on the largest source of news in the world. This algorithm had somehow risen to become more powerful than any newspaper editor in the world, powerful enough to possibly throw an election.
So why all the fuss? Something is now happening in society that is throwing algorithms into the spotlight. They have taken on a new significance, even an allure and mystique. Algorithms are simply tools but a web of new technologies are vastly increasing the power that these tools have over our lives. The startling leaps forward in artificial intelligence have meant that algorithms have learned how to learn, and to become capable of accomplishing tasks and tackling problems that they were never been able to achieve before. Their learning is fuelled with more data than ever before, collected, stored and connected with the constellations of sensors, data farms and services that have ushered in the age of big data.

Algorithms are also doing more things; whether welding, driving or cooking, thanks to robotics. Wherever there is some kind of exciting innovation happening, algorithms are rarely far away. They are being used in more fields, for more things, than ever before and are incomparably, incomprehensibly more capable than the algorithms recognisable to Eratosthenes….(More)”

OpenStreetMap in Israel and Palestine – ‘Game changer’ or reproducer of contested cartographies?


Christian Bittner in Political Geography: “In Israel and Palestine, map-making practices were always entangled with contradictive spatial identities and imbalanced power resources. Although an Israeli narrative has largely dominated the ‘cartographic battlefield’, the latest chapter of this story has not been written yet: collaborative forms of web 2.0 cartographies have restructured power relations in mapping practices and challenged traditional monopolies on map and spatial data production. Thus, we can expect web 2.0 cartographies to be a ‘game changer’ for cartography in Palestine and Israel.

In this paper, I review this assumption with the popular example of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Following a mixed methods approach, I comparatively analyze the genesis of OSM in Israel and Palestine. Although nationalist motives do not play a significant role on either side, it turns out that the project is dominated by Israeli and international mappers, whereas Palestinians have hardly contributed to OSM. As a result, social fragmentations and imbalances between Israel and Palestine are largely reproduced through OSM data. Discussing the low involvement of Palestinians, I argue that OSM’s ground truth paradigm might be a watershed for participation. Presumably, the project’s data are less meaningful in some local contexts than in others. Moreover, the seemingly apolitical approach to map only ‘facts on the ground’ reaffirms present spatio-social order and thus the power relations behind it. Within a Palestinian narrative, however, many aspects of the factual material space might appear not as neutral physical objects but as results of suppression, in which case, any ‘accurate’ spatial representation, such as OSM, becomes objectionable….(More)”

Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State


Book by Parag Khanna: “American democracy just isn’t good enough anymore. A costly election has done more to divide American society than unite it, while trust in government—and democracy itself—is plummeting. But there are better systems out there, and America would be wise to learn from them. In this provocative manifesto, globalization scholar Parag Khanna tours cutting-edge nations from Switzerland to Singapore to reveal the inner workings that allow them that lead the way in managing the volatility of a fast-changing world while delivering superior welfare and prosperity for their citizens.

The ideal form of government for the complex 21st century is what Khanna calls a “direct technocracy,” one led by experts but perpetually consulting the people through a combination of democracy and data. From a seven-member presidency and a restructured cabinet to replacing the Senate with an Assembly of Governors, Technocracy in America is full of sensible proposals that have been proven to work in the world’s most successful societies. Americans have a choice for whom they elect president, but they should not wait any longer to redesign their political system following Khanna’s pragmatic vision….(More)”

A Better Reykjavik and a stronger community: The benefits of crowdsourcing and e-democracy


Dyfrig Williams at Medium: “2008 was a difficult time in Iceland. All three of the country’s major privately owned banks went under, which prompted a financial crisis that enveloped the country and even reached local authorities in Wales.

The Better Reykjavik website was launched before the municipal elections and became a hub for online participation.

  • 70,000 people participated out of a population of 120,000
  • 12,000 registered users submitted over 3,300 ideas and5,500 points for and against
  • 257 ideas were formally reviewed, and 165 have been accepted since 2011

As an external not-for-profit website, Better Reykjavik was better able to involve people because it wasn’t perceived to be part of pre-existing political structures.

Elected members

In the run up to the elections, the soon to be Mayor Jón Gnarr championed the platform at every opportunity. This buy-in from a prominent figure was key, as it publicised the site and showed that there was buy-in for the work at the highest level.

How does it work?

The website enables people to have a direct say in the democratic process. The website gives the space for people to propose, debate and rate ways that their community can be improved. Every month the council is obliged to discuss the 10–15 highest rated ideas from the website….(More)

New Data Portal to analyze governance in Africa


Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power


…Over much of the last decade, we have seen progressive social movementspowered by the web spring up across the world. There was the Green Revolution in Iran and the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa. In the United States, we saw the Occupy Wall Street movement andthe #BlackLivesMatter protests.

Social networks also played a role in electoral politics — first in the ultimately unsuccessful candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003, and then in the election of the first African-American president in 2008.

Yet now those movements look like the prelude to a wider, tech-powered crack up in the global order. In Britain this year, organizing on Facebook played a major role in the once-unthinkable push to get the country to leave the European Union. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, a firebrand mayor who was vastly outspent by opponents, managed to marshal a huge army of online supporters to help him win the presidency.

The Islamic State has used social networks to recruit jihadists from around the world to fight in Iraq and Syria, as well as to inspire terrorist attacks overseas.

And in the United States, both Bernie Sanders, a socialist who ran for president as a Democrat, and Mr. Trump, who was once reviled by most members of the party he now leads, relied on online movements to shatter the political status quo.

Why is this all happening now? Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who has studied the effects of social networks, suggested a few reasons.

One is the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic scale. Last month the company reported that about 1.8 billion people now log on to the service every month. Because social networks feed off the various permutations of interactions among people, they become strikingly more powerful as they grow. With about a quarter of the world’s population now on Facebook, the possibilities are staggering.

“When the technology gets boring, that’s when the crazy social effects get interesting,” Mr. Shirky said.

One of those social effects is what Mr. Shirky calls the “shifting of the Overton Window,” a term coined by the researcher Joseph P. Overton to describe the range of subjects that the mainstream media deems publicly acceptable to discuss.

From about the early 1980s until the very recent past, it was usually considered unwise for politicians to court views deemed by most of society to be out of the mainstream, things like overt calls to racial bias (there were exceptions, of course, like the Willie Horton ad). But the internet shifted that window.

“White ethno nationalism was kept at bay because of pluralistic ignorance,”Mr. Shirky said. “Every person who was sitting in their basement yelling at the TV about immigrants or was willing to say white Christians were more American than other kinds of Americans — they didn’t know how many others shared their views.”

Thanks to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can see that he’s not alone. And when these people find one another, they can do things — create memes, publications and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream. The groups also become ready targets for political figures like Mr. Trump, who recognize their energy and enthusiasm and tap into it for real-world victories.

Mr. Shirky notes that the Overton Window isn’t just shifting on the right. We see it happening on the left, too. Mr. Sanders campaigned on an anti-Wall Street platform that would have been unthinkable for a Democrat just a decade ago….(More)”

Shareveillance: Subjectivity between open and closed data


Clare Birchall in Big Data and Society: “This article attempts to question modes of sharing and watching to rethink political subjectivity beyond that which is enabled and enforced by the current data regime. It identifies and examines a ‘shareveillant’ subjectivity: a form configured by the sharing and watching that subjects have to withstand and enact in the contemporary data assemblage. Looking at government open and closed data as case studies, this article demonstrates how ‘shareveillance’ produces an anti-political role for the public. In describing shareveillance as, after Jacques Rancière, a distribution of the (digital) sensible, this article posits a politico-ethical injunction to cut into the share and flow of data in order to arrange a more enabling assemblage of data and its affects. In order to interrupt shareveillance, this article borrows a concept from Édouard Glissant and his concern with raced otherness to imagine what a ‘right to opacity’ might mean in the digital context. To assert this right is not to endorse the individual subject in her sovereignty and solitude, but rather to imagine a collective political subjectivity and relationality according to the important question of what it means to ‘share well’ beyond the veillant expectations of the state.

Two questions dominate current debates at the intersection of privacy, governance, security, and transparency: How much, and what kind of data should citizens have to share with surveillant states? And: How much data from government departments should states share with citizens? Yet, these issues are rarely expressed in terms of ‘sharing’ in the way that I will be doing in this article. More often, when thought in tandem with the digital, ‘sharing’ is used in reference to either free trials of software (‘shareware’); the practice of peer-to-peer file sharing; platforms that facilitate the pooling, borrowing, swapping, renting, or selling of resources, skills, and assets that have come to be known as the ‘sharing economy’; or the business of linking and liking on social media, which invites us to share our feelings, preferences, thoughts, interests, photographs, articles, and web links. Sharing in the digital context has been framed as a form of exchange, then, but also communication and distribution (see John, 2013; Wittel, 2011).

In order to understand the politics of open and opaque government data practices, which either share with citizens or ask citizens to share, I will extend existing commentaries on the distributive qualities of sharing by drawing on Jacques Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (2004a) – a settlement that determines what is visible, audible, sayable, knowable and what share or role we each have within it. In the process, I articulate ‘sharing’ with ‘veillance’ (veiller ‘to watch’ is from the Latin vigilare, from vigil, ‘watchful’) to turn the focus from prevalent ways of understanding digital sharing towards a form of contemporary subjectivity. What I call ‘shareveillance’ – a state in which we are always already sharing; indeed, in which any relationship with data is only made possible through a conditional idea of sharing – produces an anti-politicised public caught between different data practices.

I will argue that both open and opaque government data initiatives involve, albeit differently pitched, forms of sharing and veillance. Government practices that share data with citizens involve veillance because they call on citizens to monitor and act upon that data – we are envisioned (‘veiled’ and hailed) as auditing and entrepreneurial subjects. Citizens have to monitor the state’s data, that is, or they are expected to innovate with it and make it profitable. Data sharing therefore apportions responsibility without power. It watches citizens watching the state, delimiting the ways in which citizens can engage with that data and, therefore, the scope of the political per se….(More)”.

Special issue on “the behavioural turn in public policy: new evidence from experiments”


Introduction to the special issue in Economia Politica by Francesco Bogliacino, Cristiano Codagnone and Giuseppe A. Veltri: “Since the publication of the best seller Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein 2008), the growth in the relevance of ‘Behavioural Economics’ (BE) and ‘Nudging’ has been exponential, both in terms of the adoption of behavioural perspectives in policy making and of ongoing academic research. With some simplification three strands can be singled out. First, the widespread application and institutionalisation of behaviourally inspired policy-making beyond the two initial cases of the US and the UK (Lunn 2014; Sousa Lourenço et al. 2016). Second, a discussion within the field of economics as to the place and contribution of BE toward ‘Evidence Based Economics’ (Chetty 2015; Thaler 2016). Third, the explosion between 2010 and 2016 of a multidisciplinary and multi-domain meta-literature of commentaries and essays for and against ‘Nudging’ that deal with its conceptual, theoretical, and philosophical underpinnings, as well as with its political and ethical implications…

In this editorial we briefly consider the three trends outlined above (diffusion of behavioural policy-making, evidence-based economics, and the meta-literature on nudging) and argue in favour of a fruitful dialogue, which is currently missing. In doing this, we sketch the policy triangle of politics, value and evidence as a potential guidance…(More).

Harass Map


Crowdsourced effort  to “Mapping Harassment and Help in the US …in the wake of the 2016 US elections reports of harassment and hate crimes directed at minority groups of all kinds have been widespread. The purpose of this multi-team effort is to collect and map reports of harassment and hate crimes against minority communities. We also seek to collect and map reports of minority communities being helped….This project is a collaboration between CrisisMappers, Harvard University, MIT and UCLA.

Once you submit a report, volunteers will review it to make sure the incident has not already been reported. Volunteers will also seek to verify the incident when and where possible….(More)”

Playing politics: exposing the flaws of nudge thinking


Book Review by Pat Kane in The New Scientist: “The cover of this book echoes its core anxiety. A giant foot presses down on a sullen, Michael Jackson-like figure – a besuited citizen coolly holding off its massive weight. This is a sinister image to associate with a volume (and its author, Cass Sunstein) that should be able to proclaim a decade of success in the government’s use of “behavioural science”, or nudge theory. But doubts are brewing about its long-term effectiveness in changing public behaviour – as well as about its selective account of evolved human nature.

influence

Nudging has had a strong and illustrious run at the highest level. Outgoing US President Barack Obama and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron both set up behavioural science units at the heart of their administrations (Sunstein was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012).

Sunstein insists that the powers that be cannot avoid nudging us. Every shop floor plan, every new office design, every commercial marketing campaign, every public information campaign, is an “architecting of choices”. As anyone who ever tried to leave IKEA quickly will suspect, that endless, furniture-strewn path to the exit is no accident.

Nudges “steer people in particular directions, but also allow them to go their own way”. They are entreaties to change our habits, to accept old or new norms, but they presume thatwe are ultimately free to refuse the request.

However, our freedom is easily constrained by “cognitive biases”. Our brains, say the nudgers, are lazy, energy-conserving mechanisms, often overwhelmed by information. So a good way to ensure that people pay into their pensions, for example, is to set payment as a “default” in employment contracts, so the employee has to actively untick the box. Defaults of all kinds exploit our preference for inertia and the status quo in order to increase future security….

Sunstein makes useful distinctions between nudges and the other things governments and enterprises can do. Nudges are not “mandates” (laws, regulations, punishments). A mandate would be, for example, a rigorous and well-administered carbon tax, secured through a democratic or representative process. A “nudge” puts smiley faces on your energy bill, and compares your usage to that of the eco-efficient Joneses next door (nudgers like to game our herd-like social impulses).

In a fascinating survey section, which asks Americans and others what they actually think about being the subjects of the “architecting” of their choices, Sunstein discovers that “if people are told that they are being nudged, they will react adversely and resist”.

This is why nudge thinking may be faltering – its understanding of human nature unnecessarily (and perhaps expediently) downgrades our powers of conscious thought….(More)

See The Ethics of Influence: Government in the age of behavioral science Cass R. Sunstein, Cambridge University Press