#commodification

“The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present. In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.”

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), p.10

What’s the yams?

The First-Person Industrial Complex by Laura Bennett
The Internet prizes the harrowing personal essay. But sometimes telling your story comes with a price.

This is a key problem with the new first-person economy: the way it incentivizes knee-jerk, ideally topical self-exposure, the hot take’s more intimate sibling. The mandate at xoJane, according to Carroll, was: the more “shameless” an essay, the better. Carroll describes how “internally crushing” it became to watch her inbox get flooded every day with the darkest moments in strangers’ lives: “eating disorders, sexual assault, harassment, ‘My boyfriend’s a racist and I just realized it.’ ” After a while, Carroll said, the pitches began to sound as if they were all written in the same voice: “immature, sort of boastful.” Tolentino, who worked as an editor at the HairpinbeforeJezebel, characterizes the typical Jezebel pitch as the “microaggression personal essay” or “My bikini waxer looked at me funny and here’s what it says about women’s shame,” and the typical Hairpin pitch as “I just moved to the big city and had a beautiful coffee shop encounter, and here’s what it says about urban life.”

It’s harder than ever to weigh the ethics of publishing these pieces against the market forces that demand them, especially as new traffic analytics make it easy to write and edit with metrics in mind. “I’ve always loved unvarnished, almost performative, extemporaneous bloggy writing,” Gould says. “But now an editor will be like, can you take this trending topic and make it be about you?” Sarah Hepola, who edits Salon’s personal essays, says that the question “What am I doing to these writers?” is always in the back of her mind: “I try to warn them that their Internet trail will be ‘I was a BDSM person,’ and they did it for $150.” But editors’ best efforts aside, this is, more than anything, a labor problem—writers toiling at the whims of a system with hazardous working conditions that involve being paid next to nothing and guaranteed a lifetime of SEO infamy. The first-person boom, Tolentino says, has helped create “a situation in which writers feel like the best thing they have to offer is the worst thing that ever happened to them.”

I really enjoyed reading the reddit comments on this piece. /u/walker6168 criticized the article, writing, “I felt like the author didn’t want to go the extra mile. It doesn’t quite condemn the practice for being exploitative and taking advantage of people who have had terrible experiences. It doesn’t address the huge risk that comes with the format: verifying the story, like with the Rolling Stones UVA article. Nor does it really engage with the format’s desire to distort every tragedy into a politically correct format.” /u/smeethu countered, “I agree that the author didn’t go all the way and condemn the practice, but she still went into enough depth to make me explore its nuances. What I find is that these people are being exploited, but they are also exploiting themselves. If you are a starving freelance writer who is behind on rent, you know you need to get paid. Writing a shocking personal essay is one way to guarantee that. And it sells for the same reason people tune in to reality TV: we enjoy exploring the dark parts of our lives and it’s entertaining.” I feel like that argument is also used for other exploitive practices, like factories and sweatshops (i.e. the people who work there are happy to have found work at all). I think the way our society is structured encourages exploitation through commodification. We’re commodifying people’s experiences and are meant to feel okay about it because they’re supposed to speak to some universally relatable theme.

On a similar note, /u/DevFRus wrote, “At what point do such first-person essays stop being empowering and become a circus side-show? It seems to me like it is becoming less and less about giving people who had no voice before a voice, and more and more about exploiting those people for clicks. I wish the author engaged more critically with these aspects of the industry.” I think the question of when things stop being empowering is really important. It may feel empowering for someone to bare their heart in the moment, but does that mean true consent when the underlying system is exploitive? It may feel empowering for a woman to dress in provocative clothing, but is that truly making a statement in a culture steeped in compulsory sexuality and the sexual objectification of female bodies? When does the individual need to step back and consider the system rather than individual empowerment?

How big data is unfair by Moritz Hardt
Understanding sources of unfairness in data driven decision making

As we’re on the cusp of using machine learning for rendering basically all kinds of consequential decisions about human beings in domains such as education, employment, advertising, health care and policing, it is important to understand why machine learning is not, by default, fair or just in any meaningful way.

This runs counter to the widespread misbelief that algorithmic decisions tend to be fair, because, y’know, math is about equations and not skin color. […] I’d like to refute the claim that “machine learning is fair by default”. I don’t mean to suggest that machine learning is inevitably unfair, but rather that there are powerful forces that can render decision making that depends on learning algorithms unfair.

[…] a learning algorithm is designed to pick up statistical patterns in training data. If the training data reflect existing social biases against a minority, the algorithm is likely to incorporate these biases. This can lead to less advantageous decisions for members of these minority groups. Some might object that the classifier couldn’t possibly be biased if nothing in the feature space speaks of the protected attributed, e.g., race. This argument is invalid. After all, the whole appeal of machine learning is that we can infer absent attributes from those that are present. Race and gender, for example, are typically redundantly encoded in any sufficiently rich feature space whether they are explicitly present or not. They are latent in the observed attributes and nothing prevents the learning algorithm from discovering these encodings. In fact, when the protected attribute is correlated with a particular classification outcome, this is precisely what we should expect. There is no principled way to tell at which point such a correlation is worrisome and in what cases it is acceptable.

My knee-jerk reaction when reading the article title was, “What? How can an algorithm be unfair?” It’s interesting to have forgotten about the inherent biases in the data itself.

Verge Fiction: The Date by Emily Yoshida
The kid couldn’t have been older than 24, but there was a deep, distant fatigue to his face, and dark shadows lined his eyes. As he stared down at the tablet his face went slack, as if momentarily hypnotized by its glow. He took a sip of Red Bull Yellow Edition and handed the tablet back to me, this time with a new document labeled STUDY OUTLINE.

“So if you read through that, you’ll get the basic gist of it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Basically, you’re going to be contacted by a number of brands over the duration of the test period, and you’re to react as you normally would; you’re free to ignore them, or take advantage of whatever offers or promotions they have going on. Totally up to you. These may show up on email, Facebook, any social network you’ve provided us with — and as you’ll see in the release form in a second, you do get compensated more for every account you sign over to us. At the end of the study you’ll be asked to report how many brands contacted you, and we’ll check it against our own records. There is also a possibility that you will be a placebo subject — that no brands will contact you.”

[…] By the time I walked out the door I had had enough Pinot Grigio in me to feel sufficiently light on my feet about this whole adventure. All right, this is what you are doing now, I kept repeating in my head. You are in the world and you are letting yourself be changed by it, and that is normal and fun. The Jam Cellar was walking distance to my apartment, and as I made my way down there I listened to a playlist I had made for myself on Apple Music on my new fancy wireless headphones.

Every fifth step I felt my heart wobble a little as I remembered the picture of Marcus and that corgi. He had two other photos that I had stared at in between our chats — one of him sitting at a brunch spot drinking some kind of complicated looking cocktail out of a hammered copper mug, the other of him at the beach during sunset, in silhouette from behind as he ran toward the water. You couldn’t even see his face. He was willing to use a whole picture slot for something that didn’t even show his face. I liked that.

A terrifying, if a bit hokey, glimpse at the role of brands in our lives.

The photograph above, used for shitty attempts at click baiting  an article on Billboard.com about the singing competition show THE VOICE, displays the three female judges who have been a part of the show at different times. Two of the artists, Shakira and Christina Aguilera, are Latina, yet the show has managed to eerily morph all three of these stars images into what is virtually the same…

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