Four short links: 24 November 2017
Modern Spam, Communist Cybernetics, Computer Simulation, and Retail Big Data
- Spam is Back — “The bulk of our lives online could be spammy,” Brunton said. “Our whole experience could be monetized. We could just get used—forgive my language—to really shitty content all the time.” Some say this has already happened.
- Communist Cybernetics — “Cybernetics provides the theory of social control with precise quantitative methods for analyzing control processes and especially social information, which is a necessary attribute of control.” So, the effect was to create a discourse in which cybernetics was emptied of its utopian promise and turned into a system for managing data about governance.
- SimH — The Computer History Simulation Project. Source on GitHub.
- Big Data Systems, Labour, Control, and Modern Retail Stores — It was found that retail work involves a continual movement between a governance regime of control reliant on big data systems that seek to regulate and harnesses formal labour and automation into enterprise planning, and a disciplinary regime that deals with the symbolic, interactive labour that workers perform and acts as a reserve mode of governmentality if control fails. This continual movement is caused by new systems of control being open to vertical and horizontal fissures. While retail functions as a coded assemblage of control, systems are too brittle to sustain the code/space and governmentality desired.
