Jameson Nathan Jones + Jeremy Cunningham + Moodymann + Red Axes.

The six declarations laid the foundation for the wider project of surveillance capitalism and its original sin of dispossession. They must be defended at any cost because each declaration builds on the one before it. If one falls, they all fall:

• We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. On the basis of this claim, we can ignore considerations of individuals’ rights, interests, awareness, or comprehension.
• On the basis of our claim, we assert the right to take an individual’s experience for translation into behavioral data.
• Our right to take, based on our claim of free raw material, confers the right to own the behavioral data derived from human experience.
• Our rights to take and to own confer the right to know what the data disclose.
• Our rights to take, to own, and to know confer the right to decide how we use our knowledge.
• Our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide confer our rights to the conditions that preserve our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide. Thus, the age of surveillance capitalism was inaugurated with six declarations that defined it as an age of conquest.

S.Z.

Erikas Perl, Vilnius, Lithuania.

“Its central idea, it was noted, is the production of life through the tieing or union of spirit and matter.”

A.B.K.

An introductory sequence for the annual Motion Design conference we hold at Ringling College, built upon the theme of illumination. Let’s shed some light on the subject.

Vesky + Low + aLone + GRXGVR.

Imagine you have a hammer. That’s machine learning. It helped you climb a grueling mountain to reach the summit. That’s machine learning’s dominance of online data. On the mountaintop you find a vast pile of nails, cheaper than anything previously imaginable.

That’s the new smart sensor tech. An unbroken vista of virgin board stretches before you as far as you can see. That’s the whole dumb world. Then you learn that any time you plant a nail in a board with your machine learning hammer, you can extract value from that formerly dumb plank. That’s data monetization.
What do you do? You start hammering like crazy and you never stop, unless somebody makes you stop. But there is nobody up here to make us stop. This is why the “internet of everything” is inevitable.

S.Z.

“I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.”

E. J.

Thomas Dubois, Montpellier, France.

What would hold society together in the absence of the rules and rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s answer was the division of labor.

S.Z.