industryterm:online platform

  • The Quiet Death of the Gig Economy – FutureSin – Medium
    https://medium.com/futuresin/the-quiet-death-of-the-gig-economy-126f62014a4d

    Michael K. SpencerFollow Jan 7

    Disruption, blissfully happy digital nomads, the sharing economy and oh yes — the “Gig Economy” sounded good on paper, but it seems to not be all it was thought it might become.

    As the U.S. economy finally and painfully slowly recovered from the great recession of 2008, the supposed unemployment rate fell to record low levels in 2018.

    Alan Krueger (Princeton University) and Larry Katz (Harvard University) have dialed down their estimates of the gig economy’s growth by 60%-80%.

    According to Guy Berger on LinkedIn, Krueger and Katz published the (at the time) most rigorous analysis of alternative work arrangements. Their conclusion was that such arrangements (of which a minority are online platform gig work) had grown significantly between 2005 and 2015. Their estimate was its share of the US workforce had grown by a whopping 5 percentage points. (7–8 million workers.). Well guess what, that trend now seems to have reversed as the economy recovered.

    With Lyft and Uber set to go public with IPOs this year, that to be part-time drivers with them is somehow desirable or helpful to “make ends meet” has all but dried up, right before supposed autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars start to hit the streets in various ways.

    Indeed there does not seem to be much sharing and caring in the ruthless world of Uber, amid legal battles and drivers who make less than minimum wage and are like grunt contract workers of the worst kind, totally unprotected.

    In a world where Amazon is miserably harsh to its bottom feeder workers, why the heck did we once think the ‘gig economy’ was some glorious alternative workforce? Why the ‘gig’ economy may not be the workforce of the future after all, with rising minimum wages and a small bump in wage growth in 2019. I personally think the American labor force is screwed with a skill-shortage coming the likes of which we’ve rarely seen, but that’s another story for another day.

    From Uber to TaskRabbit to YourMechanic, so-called gig work — task-oriented work offered by online apps — has been promoted as providing the flexibility and independence that traditional jobs don’t offer. But in 2019, if anything they seem like scams for the destitute, desperate and debt-ridden. I feel a bit nervous about how manipulative an Uber driver can be just to earn an extra buck. Maybe it’s not a Gig economy but kind of like another form of slavery given a pretty name.

    Horror stories of what it’s really like to do delivery work also give you a second guess that this Gig Economy isn’t just disruptive to make these companies rich, it’s a sham and harmful to these workers. I feel as if Silicon Valley has duped us, yet again.

    Nobody could have thought or imagined that doing a small gig in exchange for an hourly payment could become someone’s full-time job. It’s a bit like career-death, you get used to the work-lifestyle perks of the so called flexibility until you realize just how little you made the year you side-hustled in the Gig Economy, or became a freelancer or attempted to be self-employed. It’s risky folks, and I don’t recommend it for a minute.

    When you need to bring food to the table you are on the fringe of the labor force, the painful predicament of being a Gig Economy minion is your everyday, until it becomes your new normal. Until you lose hope to up-skill or change your career path. Labor is tiresome, but when the fat cats get rich on the backs of people who need the money, you know American capitalism has invented another scam to profit. That’s precisely why the Gig Economy has to die.

    Crypto and the Gig Economy seem hot in a recession, but the reality is that lovely expansion of alternative work seems a nice response to the weak US labor market, when job seekers didn’t have many options. But now with the labor market in a much healthier state for a few more months, more conventional jobs have rebounded. The implication may be that we’ll see these kinds of jobs proliferate again during the next downturn. Bitcoin and side-hustles, it doesn’t feel very sustainable.

    The “gig” economy was supposed to be an opportunity for entrepreneurs to be their own boss. But if you have to deal with companies like Uber, you might end up getting screwed royally. For the hundreds of people who use services like Uber, TaskRabbit or Turo to earn their livelihood, there’s no thing as benefits, paid leave or basic worker rights. That’s not an ethical solution for people living on the edge.

    Companies like TaskRabbit make a fortune by extracting commission in exchange for connecting consumers across the country with reliable people in their neighborhood who will happily take care of their burdensome chores. But is it even ethical? The app-economy is a feudal use of technology and downright as evil as any capitalistic scheme you might want to devise to imprison people in impossible situations.

    The Gig Economy was a myth and a scam, and Silicon Valley needs to be held more accountable with regulation. Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Larry Katz of Harvard should actually be apologizing, not revising their estimates. As of 2020, universal basic income sounds more reliable than an exploitative Gig Economy.

    The gig economy was supposed to be the future of work, but it ended up hurting more than it helped, and we left it. Just as we should kill Uber.

    #USA économie #droits_sociaux #platform_capitalism

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Bon papier sur les évaluations en ligne.

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

    #E-commerce #Evaluation #Avis_utilisateurs

  • Opinion | Do Not Trust That Stranger’s 5-Star Review - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/five-star-customer-reviews.html

    Stars beget sales. According to an often mentioned Harvard Business School working paper that studied restaurant reviews on Yelp, each added star is associated with a 5 percent to 9 percent increase in revenue. Not surprisingly, then, new businesses have sprung up to exploit the rating system to the seller’s or the platform’s advantage.

    Finally, it’s hard to know what the stars even mean. Often times, whether it’s a mattress or can opener or an Uber driver, a five-star rating means “nothing disastrous happened,” said Nikhil Garg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. A recent study he co-wrote reported that 80 percent of people gave freelancers hired from an online platform five stars. But when he asked people to choose from different words (“terrible,” “mediocre,” “best possible,” etc.), at least half of the freelancers earned the equivalent of a two-, three- or four-star review.

    In the case of hotels, said Dr. Cotte, five stars typically means “everything is what I expected.” I’m assuming this is how the Hampton Inn averaged a five-star rating on my recent search for a hotel in Maine, compared to several luxury resorts that rated only a four.

    The experts confirmed what I knew, but resisted, all along. If you really want to find the best product or service for your needs, you’ll need to exert some effort. But it’s also worth remembering that if you don’t, it’s no big deal.

    As Dr. Salganik explained, even if a system is gamed, the worst product probably won’t end up at the top of your screen for long; assuming there’s a considerable difference in quality among the options, it will eventually be knocked down. But if the products are pretty similar, then yes, it’s possible that the very best one will actually not float to the very top — though that’s no tragedy either. As Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” argues, if everything is essentially the same, then there’s nothing wrong with ending up with a product that’s the second- or third-best of the heap.

  • Exclusive: Google Caught Hosting Hezbollah’s Violent Android Games
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/01/24/exclusive-google-caught-hosting-hezbollahs-violent-android-games

    Holy Defence looks like your typical shoot ’em up. The Android game sees the protagonist running around a carbon copy of the Sayyeda Zeinab mosque in Damascus, defending it from invaders with automatic weapons. More than 10,000 people have downloaded the game from the Google Play store, and it’s received plenty of praise from reviewers.

    Little is disclosed about the game on Google’s site. But Forbes can reveal the developer behind Holy Defence and one other Google-hosted title, in which child characters deflect bombs onto Israeli soldiers, has a hidden motive: to disseminate Hezbollah propaganda.

    Deemed by the U.S. government a terrorist organization, Hezbollah has, ironically, in recent years used American online platforms to spread its message. Holy Defence for Android represents its first foray into the mobile space and the first known case in which a game developed by any listed terror group has been spotted on Google’s marketplace for apps.

    Not only do the smartphone games represent a new weapon in Hezbollah’s information wars against its myriad enemies, they also bring into focus a case where one of the world’s biggest private companies has to decide: Is Hezbollah a terror group or a political body as it claims?

    “Just as they’ve become in business, in war, games are serious," says Pete Singer, senior fellow at think tank New America and author of LikeWar: The Weaponization Of Social Media. And, he says, Google now finds itself as the arbiter of what is and what isn’t acceptable.

  • PALESTINE OPEN MAPS | Dar El-Nimer
    https://www.darelnimer.org/en/events/palestine-open-maps

    This talk will introduce Palestine Open Maps (palopenmaps.org), an online platform for interacting with historic and present-day maps of Palestine. It will include a discussion of how the project came about, the process by which the maps and associated data were digitized and made available, and a preview of some of the future plans for the platform.

    Cartographes, des choses pour vous dans cette excellente fondation culturelle palestinienne à Beyrouth...
    https://www.darelnimer.org/en/exhibitions/a-national-monument

    #liban #cartographie

  • New Report Highlights Discrimination Issues in Online Platforms - National Employment Law Project
    https://www.nelp.org/blog/new-report-highlights-discrimination-issues-online-platforms

    n important new report by Data & Society highlights the employment barriers and discrimination risks created by online labor platforms for non-white, low-income, older, or non-native-English-speaking workers, who may be frozen out of use of the platforms altogether.[1]

    Researchers interviewed in-home child and elder care workers and housecleaners who use online platforms, such as Care.com, Handy, and UrbanSitter, to find work. The researchers found that these platforms required job-seekers to have certain skills—such as self-branding, digital communication fluency, and social media savviness—that do not reflect the skills or experience required for the work. Job-seekers also needed to know how to navigate the unspoken cultural norms that shape activity on these platforms, e.g., presenting a compelling work history while providing an appealing mix of information about one’s private life.

    Job seekers also need resources—such as reliable, high-speed Internet access and the time needed to manage their accounts—so that they can apply to jobs, update their profiles, and respond to messages, all of which can impact their rating and future job offers. Care.com, for example, identifies some platform users as “CarePros,” indicated by a badge next to a user’s profile, based on criteria such as opting in to mobile alerts, maintaining a high-star rating, and responding to 75 percent of messages within 24 hours.[3] And, because platform job openings can receive dozens of applicants in a short amount of time, users need to constantly check their accounts so that they don’t lose out on opportunities. Many caregivers simply can’t afford the resources needed to participate fully in online platforms.[4]

    The authors of the project concluded that the skills needed to navigate online labor platforms exacerbate inequalities in the domestic work industry, because workers need to understand the unspoken cultural norms that shape activity on the platforms.[5] White, U.S.-born caregivers typically have access to higher-paying and higher-status jobs than non-white or foreign-born caregivers because of their perceived cultural matching or fit with employers, which is often based on stereotypes about a worker’s race or ethnicity.

    #Travail #Plateformes #Marché_emploi #Réseaux_sociaux #Inégalités

  • Medium Just Took Down A Post It Says Doxed ICE Employees
    https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/heres-why-medium-and-github-just-took-down-a-post

    Medium, the blogging platform, and GitHub, a code repository, just suspended posts containing the LinkedIn information of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees. Both the post and the database, which was first removed from Medium and then from GitHub, were created by data artist Sam Lavigne.

    Twitter also suspended Russel Neiss’s bot account, @iceHRGov@github.com, that was automatically tweeting information from the database.

    Lavigne scraped and downloaded the names, job titles, and city-level locations of ICE employees, and posted that data to GitHub (a website that hosts code repositories and was recently acquired by Microsoft). He wrote a blog post about the project on Medium, which linked to the database on GitHub.

    Lavigne’s project was in response to the increasingly explosive situation at the US–Mexico border, where news reports are emerging daily about how children who’ve crossed the border into the US are being separated from their parents and detained.

    “Medium’s Rules don’t allow posts that name specific individuals for the purpose of targeted harassment or shaming,” the company wrote in an email to Lavigne, which he provided to BuzzFeed News. Specifically, Medium said the post violated its rule against “doxing,” or the “aggregation of publicly available information to target, shame, blackmail, harass, intimidate, threaten or endanger.”

    GitHub said in an email that it “removed the project because it violates our community guidelines,” which include “policies against use of GitHub for doxxing and harassment, and violating a third party’s privacy.”

    Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

    The data has since been copied to a publicly available Google spreadsheet; Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

    In his original blog post, Lavigne said the dataset he downloaded contains the names of 1,595 people.

    “While I don’t have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set, I leave it here with the hope that researchers, journalists and activists will find it useful,” he wrote. “I find it helpful to remember that as much as internet companies use data to spy on and exploit their users, we can at times reverse the story, and leverage those very same online platforms as a means to investigate or even undermine entrenched power structures.”

    On Twitter, supporters of Lavigne’s project spread the link to the data; one said the list should be used to locate ICE employees and deny them “employment, services, and friendship.”

    But others felt the scraping and downloading of LinkedIn profile data was unfair to the workers.

    LinkedIn, which does not provide an easily accessible API, has sued individuals who’ve scraped its data.

    In a statement regarding the ICE employee data, a spokesperson said, "We do not support or condone what immigration authorities are doing at the border, but we can’t allow the illegal use of our member data. We will take appropriate action to ensure our members’ data is protected and used properly.”

    Previously, a US district judge ordered LinkedIn to allow third parties to scrape publicly shared data from its website.

    LinkedIn, Medium, and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    #censure #GAFA #Twitter #GitHub

  • What is #government stealing from you ?
    https://hackernoon.com/what-is-government-stealing-from-you-a772b8c7df0b?source=rss----3a8144ea

    “Anonymity is just a perception. It’s not that somebody owns it but possess it”If you are fully known to an enemy or naked in your battle, you may not even stand a chance. If you are giving every piece of information about yourself to the enemy, then they have the power to think accordingly and counter our every move with a smarter move before we even attacked them with it. Think about it?By the way, I am the curator of CodesMyth, an online platform for Simplifying code and breaking Myths.But what sense does the above things imply?What is happening to our anonymity?Now, we may or may not know it but the top government agencies from all around the world are spying on us continuously 24 X 7 by recording our call location, tracking our mobile GPS, Facebook & Twitter Update, online payment (...)

    #security

  • Reputation inflation explains why Uber’s five-star driver ratings system became useless — Quartz
    https://qz.com/1244155/good-luck-leaving-your-uber-driver-less-than-five-stars


    Das Bewertungssystem von Uber und anderen Internet-Plattformen funktioniert nicht. Technisch betrachtet ist alles O.K. aber weder "gute"noch „schlechte“ oder „durchschnittliche“ Bewertung haben die nahe liegende Bedeutung. Auf der einen Seite vergeben Kunden systematisch ein Maximum an Punkten, weil sie auch miesen Fahrern nichts Böses antun wollen, auf der anderen Seit wird manipuliert und betrogen, was das Zeug hält, wie die bekannte Geschichte mit dem „besten Restaurant Londons“ zeigt, das in Wirklichkeit nicht existierte.

    In der Praxis ist es wie in einer Schule, wo nur Einsen vergeben werden und jede Zwei zum Nichtbestehen führt.

    Dieser Artikel und die unten verlinkte Studie zeigen genauer, was dahinter steckt und was man für Schlüssen aus den Beobachtungen ziehen kann.

    Have you ever given an Uber driver five stars who didn’t deserve it? If you’ve ever taken any ride-hailing service, the answer is probably yes.

    Uber asks riders to give their drivers a rating of one to five stars at the end of each trip. But very few people make use of this full scale. That’s because it’s common knowledge among Uber’s users that drivers need to maintain a certain minimum rating to work, and that leaving anything less than five stars could jeopardize their status.

    Drivers are so concerned about their ratings that one Lyft driver in California last year posted a translation of the five-star system in his car, to educate less savvy passengers. Next to four stars he wrote: “This driver sucks, fire him slowly; it does not mean ‘average’ or above ‘average.’” In a tacit acknowledgement of this, Uber said in July that it would make riders add an explanation when they awarded a driver less than five stars.

    How did Uber’s ratings become more inflated than grades at Harvard? That’s the topic of a new paper, “Reputation Inflation,” from NYU’s John Horton and Apostolos Filippas, and Collage.com CEO Joseph Golden. The paper argues that online platforms, especially peer-to-peer ones like Uber and Airbnb, are highly susceptible to ratings inflation because, well, it’s uncomfortable for one person to leave another a bad review.

    The somewhat more technical way to say this is that there’s a “cost” to leaving negative feedback. That cost can take different forms: It might be that the reviewer fears retaliation, or that he feels guilty doing something that might harm the underperforming worker. If this “cost” increases over time—i.e., the fear or guilt associated with leaving a bad review increases—then the platform is likely to experience ratings inflation.

    The paper focuses on an unnamed gig economy platform where people (“employers”) can hire other people (“workers”) to do specific tasks. After a job is completed, employers can leave two different kinds of feedback: “public” feedback that the worker sees, and “private” reviews and ratings that aren’t shown to the worker or other people on the platform. Over the history of the platform, 82% of people have chosen to leave reviews, including a numerical rating on a scale from one to five stars.

    In the early days of the platform in 2007, the average worker score was pretty, well, average at 3.74 stars. Over time that changed. The average score rose by 0.53 stars over the course 2007. By May 2016, it had climbed to 4.85 stars.

    People were more candid in private. The platform introduced its option to leave private feedback in April 2013. From June 2014 to May 2016, the period studied in the paper, about 15% of employers left “unambiguously bad private feedback” but only 4% gave a public rating of three stars or less. They were also more candid in written comments, possibly because written comments are less directly harmful to the worker than a low numerical score.

    Then, in March 2015, the platform decided to release private ratings in batches to workers. In other words, a private review wasn’t totally private anymore, and leaving a negative one could cause harm. The result was immediate: Bad feedback became scarce and imperfect scores were reserved for truly poor experiences. If the trend continued, the authors estimated that the average private rating would be the highest possible score in seven years.

    This, again, is similar to what has happened on Uber and other ride-hailing platforms. In the early days, riders left a range of reviews, but it didn’t take long for the default to become five stars, with anything else reserved for extreme cases of hostile conduct or reckless driving. “I took a ride in a car as grimy and musty-smelling as a typical yellow cab,” Jeff Bercovici recalled for Forbes in August 2014. “I only gave the driver three out of five stars. Just kidding. I gave him five stars, of course. What do you think I am, a psychopath?”

    Services are different from products. Someone who feels guilty leaving a bad review for another person probably won’t share those concerns about posting a negative review of a toaster. It’s the personal element that gives us pause. A separate, forthcoming study on online reputations found that the number of users leaving negative feedback on a travel review website decreased after hotels started replying to the critiques, despite no change in hotel quality.

    The problem is particularly acute on “sharing” economy platforms because companies like Uber, which regard their workers as independent contractors instead of employees, use ratings riders provide to manage their workforces at arm’s length. These ratings systems ask customers to make tough decisions about whether workers are fit to be on the platform, and live with the guilt if they’re not. Put another way: On-demand platforms are offloading their guilt onto you. Five stars for all!

    Hintergrund und Details
    http://john-joseph-horton.com/papers/longrun.pdf

    #Uber #ranking #gig_economy #Arbeit

  • Overall Chronology | palestinian journeys
    https://www.paljourneys.org/en/timeline/overallchronology#10796

    About Palestinian Journeys
    Description

    Palestinian Journeys is an online portal into the multiple facets of the Palestinian experience, filled with fact-based historical accounts, biographies, events, and undiscovered stories. Together, they seek to craft an ever-growing comprehensive narrative which highlights the active role of the Palestinian people in crafting their own history. Presently absent from the global Palestinian narrative are stories of resistance, persistence, and hope, which Palestinian Journeys strives to bring forward.

    Palestinian Journeys is a project of the Palestinian Museum, in collaboration with the Institute for Palestine Studies and Visualizing Palestine. Beyond that, Palestinian Journeys strives to tell a comprehensive Palestinian narrative through a growing pool of collaborations and partnerships with kindred projects, institutions, and groups which produce knowledge on Palestine and the Palestinians.

    The online platform is currently divided into two parts: the “Timeline,” and the “Stories.” The Timeline content is an original creation of the Institute for Palestine Studies, while the Stories are original creations of the Palestinian Museum.

    The Timeline is an ever-growing encyclopedic collection of historical events, biographies, themed chronologies, highlights of historical, socio-economic and cultural themes, historical documents, and multimedia. It serves as an indispensable scholarly reference for the breadth of Palestinian history.

    The Stories shed light on hitherto neglected experiences of the Palestinian people. They capture marginalized and forgotten narratives, weaving together the rigorously historical and the intensely personal in a compelling storytelling style.

    As a user, we’re taking you through layers of experience as you surf from one part of the platform to the other, or dive deeply into its content. The journey can be heavily visual or primarily textual, inspiring you to explore that which you know, and that which you never knew existed.

    The platform will continue to be populated with valuable content. If you don’t find the content you’re looking for do visit the platform again or contact us.

    Enjoy the journey!

  • Who’s Afraid of George Soros? – Foreign Policy (10/10/2017) http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/10/whos-afraid-of-george-soros

    BUCHAREST, Romania — Last winter, in the middle of anti-corruption demonstrations, a television broadcaster accused George Soros — the Hungarian-born, Jewish-American billionaire philanthropist — of paying dogs to protest.

    The protests in Bucharest, sparked by dead-of-night legislation aimed at decriminalizing corruption, were the largest the country had seen since the fall of communism in 1989. Romania TV — a channel associated with, if not officially owned by, the government — alleged the protesters were paid.

    “Adults were paid 100 lei [$24], children earned 50 lei [$12.30], and dogs were paid 30 lei [$7.20],” one broadcaster said. 

    Some protesters responded by fitting their dogs with placards; others tucked money into their pets’ coats. One dog stood next to a sign reading, “Can anyone change 30 lei into euro?” Another dog wore one that read: “#George_Soros paid me to be here.”

    “The pro-government television, they lie all the time. In three sentences, they have five lies,” investigative journalist Andrei Astefanesei told Foreign Policy outside a gyro shop in Bucharest. “I told you about that lie, that Soros paid for dogs. ‘If you bring more dogs in the street, you get more money.’” He laughed.

    Romania TV was fined for its false claims about Soros. But the idea — that roughly half a million Romanians, and their dogs, came to the streets because Soros made them do it — struck a responsive chord. It’s similar to the idea that Soros is personally responsible for teaching students about LGBTQ rights in Romanian high schools; that Soros manipulated the teenagers who led this year’s anti-corruption protests in Slovakia; and that civil organizations and what’s left of the independent media in Hungary wouldn’t exist without Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

    The idea that the 87-year-old Soros is single-handedly stirring up discontent isn’t confined to the European side of the Atlantic; Soros conspiracies are a global phenomenon. In March, six U.S. senators signed a letter asking Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s staff to look into U.S. government funding going to Soros-backed organizations.

    “Our skepticism about Soros-funded groups undermining American priorities goes far beyond Eastern Europe,” said a spokesperson for Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who led the initiative, when asked if there was some specific piece of evidence of Soros-funded activity in Eastern Europe that prompted the letter or if concerns were more general.

    Soros has even been linked to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality. “Congrats to Colin Kaepernick for popularizing the hatred of America. Good work, bro,” Tomi Lahren, a conservative commentator, tweeted during the controversy. “Your buddy George Soros is so proud. #istand.”

    On Twitter, Soros has also been held responsible for the recent Catalan independence referendum and the mass shooting in Las Vegas.

    But one of the places in which suspicion of Soros is most obvious is Central and Eastern Europe. There, Soros is not unlike the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, except that while the fictional mirror shows what the viewer most desires, Soros reflects back onto a country what it most hates.

    In Romania, where the head of the ruling party said Soros wants to do evil, the billionaire is not to be trusted because he’s Hungarian. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has reportedly declared that Soros will be a main campaign theme in next year’s general election, he’s a traitor. And everywhere, he is Jewish, his very name a nod to the anti-Semitism that runs deep throughout the region.

    Now, Soros’s effectiveness as a bogeyman for conservative governments will be put to the test, literally. This week, Hungary is holding a “national consultation,” essentially a referendum designed to condemn Soros and his views on immigration. The government-funded questionnaire will be open to the country’s adult citizens and is meant to solicit their views on the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor.

    “George Soros has bought people and organizations, and Brussels is under his influence,” Orban said in a radio interview Friday in the run-up to the consultation. “They want to demolish the fence, allow millions of immigrants into Europe, then distribute them using a mandatory mechanism — and they want to punish those who do not comply.”

    Soros declined an interview for this article, but a spokesperson for the Open Society Foundations, the main conduit for Soros’s philanthropic efforts, chalked up the backlash to his outspokenness. “He’s a man who stands up for his beliefs,” Laura Silber, a spokeswoman for the foundation, told FP. “That’s threatening when you’re speaking out against autocrats and corruption.”

    Blame and hatred of Soros are, to borrow from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a specter haunting Central and Eastern Europe. But how did an 87-year-old billionaire thousands of miles away become the region’s most famous ghost?

    #conspirationnisme

    • George Soros lègue 18 milliards de dollars à sa fondation
      http://www.latribune.fr/economie/international/george-soros-legue-18-milliards-de-dollars-a-sa-fondation-754607.html

      Open Society Foundations (OSF) a reçu 18 milliards de dollars (15,2 milliards d’euros) de ce grand donateur du parti démocrate américain, a indiqué à l’AFP une porte-parole. « Cette somme reflète un processus en cours de transfert des actifs » de M. Soros, « qui prévoit de laisser la vaste majorité de sa fortune à Open Society Foundations », a-t-elle souligné.

      Cette donation fait d’Open Society Foundations la deuxième plus riche ONG aux Etats-Unis après la Fondation Bill et Melinda Gates, qui dispose de 40 milliards de dollars pour promouvoir les problématiques de santé publique et de développement à travers le monde, d’après la National Philanthropic Trust.

      L’OSF est un réseau de 39 entités aux opérations interconnectées à travers le globe et fait la promotion de ses valeurs dans plus de 120 pays. La première a ouvert ses portes en 1984 en Hongrie, pays d’origine de M. Soros. La dernière a vu le jour en 2016 en Birmanie. George Soros en est le président et ses fils Alexander et Jonathan sont membres du conseil d’administration. D’autres de ses enfants sont également impliqués.

      Le milliardaire américain d’origine hongroise, connu pour ses paris financiers risqués, avait donné jusqu’à ce jour 12 milliards de dollars (10,2 milliards d’euros) de sa fortune à des oeuvres caritatives. Depuis des décennies, il donne environ entre 800 et 900 millions de dollars à des associations chaque année d’après des chiffres mentionnés par le New-York Times. C’est en 1979 que le financier avait fait son premier don en attribuant des bourses d’études à des élèves noirs sud-africains en plein Apartheid, rappelle OSF sur son site internet. Selon le président de la Ford Foundation, Darren Walker interrogé par le quotidien américain :

      "il n’y a aucune organisation caritative dans le monde, y compris la Ford Foundation, qui a plus d’impact que l’Open Society Foundations durant ces deux dernières décennies. [...] Parce qu’il n’y a aucun endroit dans le monde où ils ne sont pas présents. Leur empreinte est plus importante et plus conséquente que n’importe qu’elle organisation de justice sociale dans le monde".

      v/ @hadji

    • Soros turns antisocial: Billionaire says Facebook & Google manipulate users like gambling companies
      https://www.rt.com/news/417065-soros-social-media-blame

      Soros, whose investment fund owned over 300,000 shares in #Facebook until last November, said social media platforms are deliberately engineering “addiction to the services they provide.” Facebook and Google deceive their users by “manipulating their #attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes,” he said.

      In this respect, online platforms have become similar to gambling companies, Soros asserted. “#Casinos have developed techniques to hook gamblers to the point where they gamble away all their money, even money they don’t have.

      “Something very harmful and maybe irreversible is happening to human attention in our digital age,” he said. Social media companies “are inducing people to give up their autonomy,” while the power to shape the public’s attention “is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies.”

      The billionaire financier, whom the Hungarian government has labeled a “political puppet master,” then struck an even gloomier tone by offering a full-on dystopian conspiracy theory.

      In future, there could be “an alliance between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich IT monopolies,” in which tech giants’ corporate surveillance would merge with “an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance,” he said.

      That “may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,” he said, referring to the British authors of two famous dystopian novels.

      Last year, some tech corporations fell out of favor with Soros when his investment fund sold 367,262 shares in Facebook, although he chose to keep 109,451 of the network’s shares. Soros’ fund also offloaded 1,700 shares in Apple and 1.55 million in the owners of Snapchat. It also reduced its stake in Twitter by 5,700 shares, while still holding 18,400 shares in the social media service.

      Soros was not the only Davos speaker to launch a verbal attack on Big Tech. American entrepreneur and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday that Facebook should be regulated just like a tobacco company.

      “I think you’d do it exactly the same way you regulate the cigarette industry. Here’s a product, cigarettes, they are addictive, they are not good for you,” Benioff said. “Maybe there is all kinds of different forces trying to get you to do certain things. There are a lot of parallels.”

  • #Moral outrage in the #digital age | Nature Human Behaviour
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0213-3

    Before the #internet existed, gossip served a purpose of spreading news about who could be trusted within local social networks4. By this logic, information should be shared as a function of its ability to reinforce trust and cooperation within the community. But online platforms have profoundly changed the incentives of information sharing. Because they compete for our attention to generate advertising revenue, their algorithms promote content that is most likely to be shared, regardless of whether it benefits those who share it — or is even true.

    Research on virality shows that people are more likely to share content that elicits moral emotions such as outrage5. Because outrageous content generates more revenue through viral sharing, natural selection-like forces may favour ‘supernormal’ stimuli that trigger much stronger outrage responses than do transgressions we typically encounter in everyday life. Supporting this hypothesis, there is evidence that immoral acts encountered online incite stronger moral outrage than immoral acts encountered in person or via traditional forms of media (Fig. 2b).

    [...]

    Digital media might alter the subjective experience of outrage in several ways. By increasing the frequency and extremity of triggering stimuli, one possible long-term consequence of digital media is ‘outrage fatigue’: constant exposure to outrageous news could diminish the overall intensity of outrage experiences, or cause people to experience outrage more selectively to reduce emotional and attentional demands. On the other hand, studies have shown that venting anger begets more anger6. If digital media makes it easier to express outrage, this could intensify subsequent experiences of outrage. Future research is necessary to resolve these possibilities.

    #indignation #numérique

  • [Forum] | Trump : A Resister’s Guide | Harper’s Magazine - Part 11
    https://harpers.org/archive/2017/02/trump-a-resisters-guide/11

    y Kate Crawford

    Dear Technologists:

    For the past decade, you’ve told us that your products will change the world, and indeed they have. We carry tiny networked computers with us everywhere, we control “smart” home appliances at a remove, we communicate with our friends and family over online platforms, and now we are all part of the vast Muslim registry known as Facebook. Almost 80 percent of American internet users belong to the social network, and many of them happily offer up their religious affiliation. The faith of those who don’t, too, can be easily deduced with a little data-science magic; in 2013, a Cambridge University study accurately detected Muslims 82 percent of the time, using only their Facebook likes. The industry has only become better at individual targeting since then.

    You’ve created simple, elegant tools that allow us to disseminate news in real time. Twitter, for example, is very good at this. It’s also a prodigious disinformation machine. Trolls, fake news, and hate speech thrived on the platform during the presidential campaign, and they show few signs of disappearing now. Twitter has likewise made it easier to efficiently map the networks of activists and political dissenters. For every proud hashtag — #BlackLivesMatter, #ShoutYourAbortion, the anti-deportation campaign #Not1More — there are data sets that reveal the identities of the “influencers” and “joiners” and offer a means of tracking, harassing, and silencing them.

    You may intend to resist, but some requests will leave little room for refusal. Last year, the U.S. government forced Yahoo to scan all its customers’ incoming emails, allegedly to find a set of characters that were related to terrorist activity. Tracking emails is just the beginning, of course, and the FBI knows it. The most important encryption case to date hinged on the FBI’s demand that Apple create a bespoke operating system that would allow the government to intentionally undermine user security whenever it impeded an investigation. Apple won the fight, but that was when Obama was in office. Trump’s regime may pressure the technology sector to create back doors in all its products, widen surveillance, and weaken the security of every networked phone, vehicle, and thermostat.

    There is precedent for technology companies assisting authoritarian regimes. In 1880, after watching a train conductor punch tickets, Herman Hollerith, a young employee of the U.S. Census Bureau, was inspired to design a punch-card system to catalogue human traits. The Hollerith Machine was used in the 1890 census to tabulate markers such as race, literacy level, gender, and country of origin. During the 1930s, the Third Reich used the same system, under the direction of a German subsidiary of International Business Machines, to identify Jews and other ethnic groups. Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s first president, received a medal from Hitler for his services. As Edwin Black recounts in IBM and the Holocaust, there was both profit and glory to be had in providing the computational services for rounding up the state’s undesirables. Within the decade, IBM served as the information subcontractor for the U.S. government’s Japanese-internment camps.

    You, the software engineers and leaders of technology companies, face an enormous responsibility. You know better than anyone how best to protect the millions who have entrusted you with their data, and your knowledge gives you real power as civic actors. If you want to transform the world for the better, here is your moment. Inquire about how a platform will be used. Encrypt as much as you can. Oppose the type of data analysis that predicts people’s orientation, religion, and political preferences if they did not willingly offer that information. Reduce the quantity of personal information that is kept. And when the unreasonable demands come, the demands that would put activists, lawyers, journalists, and entire communities at risk, resist wherever you can. History also keeps a file.

    #Silicon_valley #Fichage #Médias_sociaux #Chiffrement #Ethique

  • Julia Reda – When filters fail : These cases show we can’t trust algorithms to clean up the internet
    https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/when-filters-fail

    par Julia Reda

    9 exemples de malfonctionnement des détecteurs de contenu automatique utilisés par YouTube. Le droit, c’est aussi du contexte, ce que les algorithmes ne peuvent pas prendre en compte (et qui mérite un débat contradictoire).

    The Commission now officially “strongly encourages online platforms to […] step up investment in, and use of, automatic detection technologies”. It wants platforms to make decisions about the legality of content uploaded by users without requiring a court order or even any human intervention at all: “online platforms should also be able to take swift decisions […] without being required to do so on the basis of a court order or administrative decision”.

    Installing censorship infrastructure that surveils everything people upload and letting algorithms make judgement calls about what we all can and cannot say online is an attack on our fundamental rights.

    But there’s another key question: Does it even work? The Commission claims that where automatic filters have already been implemented voluntarily – like YouTube’s Content ID system – “these practices have shown good results”.

    Oh, really? Here are examples of filters getting it horribly wrong, ranging from hilarious to deeply worrying:

    #Copyright #YouTube #Filtrage_automatique #Europe #Droit_auteur

  • Call for conceptualizing graphical design proposal for the new version of the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages in Danger
    http://en.unesco.org/news/call-conceptualizing-graphical-design-proposal-new-version-unesco-world-a

    18 May 2017

    UNESCO is looking for a qualified individual/company delivering a conceptual graphic design proposal for the development of a global online platform entitled “UNESCO World Atlas of Languages (UNESCO WAL)”.

    The WAL which will be developed as a new version of the existing UNESCO World Atlas of Languages in Danger aims to contribute to the safeguarding of the world’s diverse linguistic, cultural and documentary heritage, in multiple languages, and reinforce the modalities for implementation of UNESCO’s Recommendation concerning the Promotion of Universal Access and Multilingualism in Cyberspace (2003).

    The final delivery date is 15 November 2017.

    The qualified entity should prepare the proposal in line with UNESCO’s “Roadmap towards UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages”.

    #atlas #cartographie #langues #unesco

  • The Internet Warriors - YouTube

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JyTW4Rg2tE

    Lien original :

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/mar/10/the-internet-warriors-meet-the-trolls-in-their-own-homes-video

    Why do so many people use the internet to harass and threaten people, and stretch the freedom of speech to its limits? Director Kyrre Lien meets a global group of strongly opinionated individuals, who spend their time debating online on the subjects they care most strongly about. Online platforms are their favourite tools to express the opinions that others might find objectionable in language that often offends. Do they behave in the same way when they come offline?

    #racisme #nationalisme #haine #discours_de_haine #internet #réseaux_sociaux

  • Call for Collaborators: “A Field Guide to Fake News” | Liliana Bounegru
    http://lilianabounegru.org/2017/03/01/call-for-collaborators-a-field-guide-to-fake-news/#more-401

    We’re pleased to announce a new project to create “A Field Guide to Fake News”, led by myself, Jonathan Gray and Tommaso Venturini. It will be launched at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April 2017.

    In the wake of concerns about the role of “#fake_news” in relation to the US elections, the project aims to catalyse collaborations between leading digital media researchers, data journalists and civil society groups in order to map the issue and phenomenon of fake news in US and European politics.

    The guide will look at how digital methods, data, tools, techniques and research approaches can be utilised in the service of increasing public understanding of the politics, production, circulation and responses to fake news online. In particular it will look at how digital traces from the web and online platforms can be repurposed in the service of public interest research, investigations, data stories and data journalism projects.

    If you’re a data journalist or researcher interested in collaborating on data stories or investigations around the fake news phenomenon in your country, then please do drop us a line.

  • Platform Cooperativism: Taking back the internet - Co-operative News
    http://www.thenews.coop/100215/news/co-operatives/platform-cooperativism-taking-back-internet


    Le mouvement des plateformes assoiciatives a été lancé il y deux ans. Depuis l’appel pour créer des alternatives aux plateformes de la mort les death-star platforms est entendu et discuté dans le monde entier.

    Platform Cooperativism is a rising and ambitious movement, but based on a simple co-operative principle: to put power back in the hands of the people.

    ‘Ownership of the internet’ may sound like a lofty aim, but taking control of the online tools we use is really just a 21st century equivalent of owning the shop we run, or the pub we go to. Can the internet be owned and governed differently? And if so, how?

    In November, over a thousand people convened for an event at the New School in New York to discuss how this could be achieved. Billed as a ‘coming-out party for the co-operative internet’, it attracted academics, co-operators, business leaders and those just curious about what was happening.

    Writer and reporter Nathan Schneider co-organised the conference, and is at the heart of the movement. “[The phrase] ‘Platform Cooperativism’ is a call-to-action coined by my colleague Trebor Scholz,” he said, “just long and mysterious enough, I think, to arouse curiosity and to give a name to what, actually, a lot of people have been longing for and even working on.”

    Platform Cooperativism : Nov 13-14, NYC
    http://www.platformcoop.net/2015

    Platform cooperativism is a way to put power back in the hands of the workers."
    – Kristy Milland (worker at Amazon Mechnical Turk) 

    Introduction

    The seeds are being planted for a new kind of online economy. For all the wonders the Internet brings us, it is dominated by an economics of monopoly, extraction, and surveillance. Ordinary users retain little control over their personal data, and the digital workplace is creeping into every corner of workers’ lives. Online platforms often exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities in society, even while promising to be the great equalizers. Could the Internet be owned and governed differently? What if Uber drivers could set up their own platform, or if cities could control their own version of Airbnb? Can Silicon Alley do things more democratically than Silicon Valley? What are the prospects for platform cooperativism?

    Taxi drivers need to take control back of Uber, says economist - Co-operative News
    http://www.thenews.coop/106530/news/co-operatives/taxi-drivers-need-take-control-back-uber-says-economist

    A global economist has called for taxi drivers to unite against Uber and form a workers’ collective.

    Ann Pettifor, analyst of the global financial system and director of Prime Economics, said that workers should be in control of platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, especially since they own the working capital of the business.

    “This is an ideal opportunity for us to be arguing for more worker co-operatives,” said Ms Pettifor at the Co-operative Congress in Wakefield. “The really fascinating thing about Uber, about Airbnb and about these other sectors is that actually the capital of those businesses is owned by the workers.

    Why should Uber operate in this way? Why do taxi drivers not come together and form a collective?

    “So the drivers of the cars own the car, they have bought the car, they have invested in it, they maintain it, they invest in its maintenance, they insure it.”

    Ms Pettifor added: “They pay for all of that and then they pay something for the app. They are then allowed by Uber in California, in Silicon Valley, to retain some of their allowance but why on earth should Uber be such a company? Why should it operate in this way? Why do taxi drivers not come together and form a collective?”

    Congress 2016: Developing a national co-operative development strategy

    Death Star Platforms | Grassroots Economic Organizing
    http://www.geo.coop/story/death-star-platforms

    Fighting Fire with Fire? Matthew Slater

    How Platform Coops Can Beat Death Stars Like Uber to Create a Real Sharing Economy - Shareable
    http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-platform-coops-can-beat-death-stars-like-uber-to-create-a-real-sharin

    #platform_cooperativism

  • Unlike Us | About
    http://networkcultures.org/unlikeus/about

    Invitation to join the network (a series of events, reader, workshops, online debates, campaigns etc.)

    Concept: Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures/HvA, Amsterdam) and Korinna Patelis (Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol)

    Thanks to Marc Stumpel, Sabine Niederer, Vito Campanelli, Ned Rossiter, Michael Dieter, Oliver Leistert, Taina Bucher, Gabriella Coleman, Ulises Mejias, Anne Helmond, Lonneke van der Velden, Morgan Currie and Eric Kluitenberg for their input.

    Summary
    The aim of Unlike Us is to establish a research network of artists, designers, scholars, activists and programmers who work on ‘alternatives in social media’. Through workshops, conferences, online dialogues and publications, Unlike Us intends to both analyze the economic and cultural aspects of dominant social media platforms and to propagate the further development and proliferation of alternative, decentralized social media software.

    Whether or not we are in the midst of internet bubble 2.0, we can all agree that social media dominate internet and mobile use. The emergence of web-based user to user services, driven by an explosion of informal dialogues, continuous uploads and user generated content have greatly empowered the rise of participatory culture. At the same time, monopoly power, commercialization and commodification are also on the rise with just a handful of social media platforms dominating the social web. These two contradictory processes – both the facilitation of free exchanges and the commercial exploitation of social relationships – seem to lie at the heart of contemporary capitalism.

    On the one hand new media create and expand the social spaces through which we interact, play and even politicize ourselves; on the other hand they are literally owned by three or four companies that have phenomenal power to shape such interaction. Whereas the hegemonic Internet ideology promises open, decentralized systems, why do we, time and again, find ourselves locked into closed corporate environments? Why are individual users so easily charmed by these ‘walled gardens’? Do we understand the long-term costs that society will pay for the ease of use and simple interfaces of their beloved ‘free’ services?

    The accelerated growth and scope of Facebook’s social space, for example, is unheard of. Facebook claims to have 700 million users, ranks in the top two or three first destination sites on the Web worldwide and is valued at 50 billion US dollars. Its users willingly deposit a myriad of snippets of their social life and relationships on a site that invests in an accelerated play of sharing and exchanging information. We all befriend, rank, recommend, create circles, upload photos, videos and update our status. A myriad of (mobile) applications orchestrate this offer of private moments in a virtual public, seamlessly embedding the online world in users’ everyday life.

    Yet despite its massive user base, the phenomena of online social networking remains fragile. Just think of the fate of the majority of social networking sites. Who has ever heard of Friendster? The death of Myspace has been looming on the horizon for quite some time. The disappearance of Twitter and Facebook – and Google, for that matter – is only a masterpiece of software away. This means that the protocological future is not stationary but allows space for us to carve out a variety of techno-political interventions. Unlike Us is developed in the spirit of RSS-inventor and uberblogger Dave Winer whose recent Blork project is presented as an alternative for ‘corporate blogging silos’. But instead of repeating the entrepreneurial-start-up-transforming-into-corporate-behemoth formula, isn’t it time to reinvent the internet as a truly independent public infrastructure that can effectively defend itself against corporate domination and state control?

    Agenda
    Going beyond the culture of complaint about our ignorance and loss of privacy, the proposed network of artists, scholars, activists and media folks will ask fundamental and overarching questions about how to tackle these fast-emerging monopoly powers. Situated within the existing oligopoly of ownership and use, this inquiry will include the support of software alternatives and related artistic practices and the development of a common alternative vision of how the techno-social world might be mediated.

    Without falling into the romantic trap of some harmonious offline life, Unlike Us asks what sort of network architectures could be designed that contribute to ‘the common’, understood as a shared resource and system of collective production that supports new forms of social organizations (such as organized networks) without mining for data to sell. What aesthetic tactics could effectively end the expropriation of subjective and private dimensions that we experience daily in social networks? Why do we ignore networks that refuse the (hyper)growth model and instead seek to strengthen forms of free cooperation? Turning the tables, let’s code and develop other ‘network cultures’ whose protocols are no longer related to the logic of ‘weak ties’. What type of social relations do we want to foster and discover in the 21st century? Imagine dense, diverse networked exchanges between billions of people, outside corporate and state control. Imagine discourses returning subjectivities to their ‘natural’ status as open nodes based on dialogue and an ethics of free exchange.

    To a large degree social media research is still dominated by quantitative and social scientific endeavors. So far the focus has been on moral panics, privacy and security, identity theft, self-representation from Goffman to Foucault and graph-based network theory that focuses on influencers and (news) hubs. What is curiously missing from the discourse is a rigorous discussion of the political economy of these social media monopolies. There is also a substantial research gap in understanding the power relations between the social and the technical in what are essentially software systems and platforms. With this initiative, we want to shift focus away from the obsession with youth and usage to the economic, political, artistic and technical aspects of these online platforms. What we first need to acknowledge is social media’s double nature.

    Dismissing social media as neutral platforms with no power is as implausible as considering social media the bad boys of capitalism. The beauty and depth of social media is that they call for a new understanding of classic dichotomies such as commercial/political, private/public, users/producers, artistic/standardised, original/copy, democratising/ disempowering. Instead of taking these dichotomies as a point of departure, we want to scrutinise the social networking logic. Even if Twitter and Facebook implode overnight, the social networking logic of befriending, liking and ranking will further spread across all aspects of life.

    The proposed research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural production and social relations and an empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon of monopoly social media. Methodologically we will use the lessons learned from theoretical research activities to inform practice-oriented research, and vice-versa. Unlike Us is a common initiative of the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam University of Applied Science HvA) and the Cyprus University of Technology in Limassol.

    An online network and a reader connected to a series of events initially in Amsterdam and Cyprus (early 2012) are already in planning. We would explicitly like to invite other partners to come on board who identify with the spirit of this proposal, to organize related conferences, festivals, workshops, temporary media labs and barcamps (where coders come together) with us. The reader (tentatively planned as number 8 in the Reader series published by the INC) will be produced mid-late 2012. The call for contributions to the network, the reader and the event series goes out in July 2011, followed by the publicity for the first events and other initiatives by possible new partners.

    Topics of Investigation
    The events, online platform, reader and other outlets may include the following topics inviting theoretical, empirical, practical and art-based contributions, though not every event or publication might deal with all issues. We anticipate the need for specialized workshops and barcamps.

    1. Political Economy: Social Media Monopolies
    Social media culture is belied in American corporate capitalism, dominated by the logic of start-ups and venture capital, management buyouts, IPOs etc. Three to four companies literally own the Western social media landscape and capitalize on the content produced by millions of people around the world. One thing is evident about the market structure of social media: one-to-many is not giving way to many-to-many without first going through many-to-one. What power do these companies actually have? Is there any evidence that such ownership influences user-generated content? How does this ownership express itself structurally and in technical terms?

    What conflicts arise when a platform like Facebook is appropriated for public or political purposes, while access to the medium can easily be denied by the company? Facebook is worth billions, does that really mean something for the average user? How does data-mining work and what is its economy? What is the role of discourse (PR) in creating and sustaining an image of credibility and trustworthiness, and in which forms does it manifest to oppose that image? The bigger social media platforms form central nodes, such as image upload services and short ulr services. This ecology was once fairly open, with a variety of new Twitter-related services coming into being, but now Twitter takes up these services itself, favoring their own product through default settings; on top of that it is increasingly shutting down access to developers, which shrinks the ecology and makes it less diverse.

    2. The Private in the Public
    The advent of social media has eroded privacy as we know it, giving rise to a culture of self-surveillance made up of myriad voluntary, everyday disclosures. New understandings of private and public are needed to address this phenomenon. What does owning all this user data actually mean? Why are people willing to give up their personal data, and that of others? How should software platforms be regulated?

    Is software like a movie to be given parental guidance? What does it mean that there are different levels of access to data, from partner info brokers and third-party developers to the users? Why is education in social media not in the curriculum of secondary schools? Can social media companies truly adopt a Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights?

    3. Visiting the Belly of the Beast
    The exuberance and joy that defined the dotcom era is cliché by now. IT use is occurring across the board, and new labour conditions can be found everywhere. But this should not keep our eyes away from the power relations inside internet companies. What are the geopolitical lines of distribution that define the organization and outsourcing taking place in global IT companies these days? How is the industry structured and how does its economy work?

    Is there a broader connection to be made with the politics of land expropriation and peasant labour in countries like India, for instance, and how does this analytically converge with the experiences of social media users? How do monopolies deal with their employees’ use of the platforms? What can we learn from other market sectors and perspectives that (critically) reflect on, for example, techniques of sustainability or fair trade?

    4. Artistic Responses to Social Media
    Artists are playing a crucial role in visualizing power relationships and disrupting subliminal daily routines of social media usage. Artistic practice provides an important analytical site in the context of the proposed research agenda, as artists are often first to deconstruct the familiar and to facilitate an alternative lens to understand and critique these media. Is there such a thing as a social ‘web aesthetics’? It is one thing to criticize Twitter and Facebook for their primitive and bland interface designs. How can we imagine the social in different ways? And how can we design and implement new interfaces to provide more creative freedom to cater to our multiple identities? Also, what is the scope of interventions with social media, such as, for example, the ‘dislike button’ add-on for Facebook? And what practices are really needed? Isn’t it time, for example, for a Facebook ‘identity correction’?

    5. Designing culture: representation and software
    Social media offer us the virtual worlds we use every day. From Facebook’s ‘like’ button to blogs’ user interface, these tools empower and delimit our interactions. How do we theorize the plethora of social media features? Are they to be understood as mere technical functions, cultural texts, signifiers, affordances, or all these at once? In what ways do design and functionalities influence the content and expressions produced? And how can we map and critique this influence? What are the cultural assumptions embedded in the design of social media sites and what type of users or communities do they produce?

    To answer the question of structure and design, one route is to trace the genealogy of functionalities, to historicize them and look for discursive silences. How can we make sense of the constant changes occurring both on and beyond the interface? How can we theorize the production and configuration of an ever-increasing algorithmic and protocological culture more generally?

    6. Software Matters: Sociotechnical and Algorithmic Cultures
    One of the important components of social media is software. For all the discourse on sociopolitical power relations governed by corporations such as Facebook and related platforms, one must not forget that social media platforms are thoroughly defined and powered by software. We need critical engagement with Facebook as software. That is, what is the role of software in reconfiguring contemporary social spaces? In what ways does code make a difference in how identities are formed and social relationships performed? How does the software function to interpellate users to its logic? What are the discourses surrounding software?

    One of the core features of Facebook for instance is its news feed, which is algorithmically driven and sorted in its default mode. The EdgeRank algorithm of the news feed governs the logic by which content becomes visible, acting as a modern gatekeeper and editorial voice. Given its 700 million users, it has become imperative to understand the power of EdgeRank and its cultural implications. Another important analytical site for investigation are the ‘application programming interfaces’ (APIs) that to a large extent made the phenomenal growth of social media platforms possible in the first place. How have APIs contributed to the business logic of social media? How can we theorize social media use from the perspective of the programmer?

    7. Genealogies of Social Networking Sites
    Feedback in a closed system is a core characteristic of Facebook; even the most basic and important features, such as ‘friending’, traces back to early cybernetics’ ideas of control. While the word itself became lost in various transitions, the ideas of cybernetics have remained stable in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the biopolitical arena. Both communication and information theories shaped this discourse. How does Facebook relate to such an algorithmic shape of social life? What can Facebook teach us about the powers of systems theory? Would Norbert Wiener and Niklas Luhmann be friends on Facebook?

    8. Is Research Doomed?
    The design of Facebook excludes the third person perspective, as the only way in is through ones own profile. What does this inbuilt ‘me-centricity’ imply for social media research? Does it require us to rethink the so-called objectivity of researchers and the detached view of current social research? Why is it that there are more than 200 papers about the way people use Facebook, but the site is ‘closed’ to true quantitative inquiry? Is the state of art in social media research exemplary of the ‘quantitative turn’ in new media research? Or is there a need to expand and rethink methods of inquiry in social media research? Going beyond the usual methodological approaches of the quantitative and qualitative, we seek to broaden the scope of investigating these media. How can we make sense of the political economy and the socio-technical elements, and with what means? Indeed, what are our toolkits for collective, transdisciplinary modes of knowledge and the politics of refusal?

    9. Researching Unstable Ontologies
    Software destabilizes Facebook as a solid ontology. Software is always in becoming and so by nature ontogenetic. It grows and grows, living off of constant input. Logging on one never encounters the same content, as it changes on an algorithmic level and in terms of the platform itself. What does Facebook’s fluid nature imply for how we make sense of and study it? Facebook for instance willingly complicates research: 1. It is always personalized (see Eli Pariser). Even when creating ‘empty’ research accounts it never gives the same results compared to other people’s empty research accounts. 2. One must often be ‘inside’ social media to study it. Access from the outside is limited, which reinforces the first problem. 3. Outside access is ideally (for Facebook and Twitter) arranged through carefully regulated protocols of APIs and can easily be restricted. Next to social media as a problem for research, there is also the question of social research methods as intervention.

    10. Making Sense of Data: Visualization and Critique
    Data representation is one of the most important battlefields nowadays. Indeed, global corporations build their visions of the world increasingly based on and structured around complex data flows. What is the role of data today and what are the appropriate ways in which to make sense of the burgeoning datasets? As data visualization is becoming a powerful buzzword and social research increasingly uses digital tools to make ‘beautiful’ graphs and visualizations, there is a need to take a step back and question the usefulness of current data visualization tools and to develop novel analytical frameworks through which to critically grasp these often simplified and nontransparent ways of representing data.

    Not only is it important to develop new interpretative and visual methods to engage with data flows, data itself needs to be questioned. We need to ask about data’s ontological and epistemological nature. What is it, who is the producer, for whom, where is it stored? In what ways do social media companies’ terms of service regulate data? Whether alternative social media or monopolistic platforms, how are our data-bodies exactly affected by changes in the software?

    11. Pitfalls of Building Social Media Alternatives
    It is not only important to critique and question existing design and socio-political realities but also to engage with possible futures. The central aim of this project is therefore to contribute and support ‘alternatives in social media’. What would the collective design of alternative protocols and interfaces look like? We should find some comfort in the small explosion of alternative options currently available, but also ask how usable these options are and how real is the danger of fragmentation. How have developers from different initiatives so far collaborated and what might we learn from their successes and failures? Understanding any early failures and successes of these attempts seems crucial.

    A related issue concerns funding difficulties faced by projects. Finally, in what ways does regionalism (United States, Europe, Asia) feed into the way people search for alternatives and use social media.

    12. Showcasing Alternatives in Social Media
    The best way to criticize platform monopolies is to support alternative free and open source software that can be locally installed. There are currently a multitude of decentralized social networks in the making that aspire to facilitate users with greater power to define for themselves with whom share their data. Let us look into the wildly different initiatives from Crabgrass, Appleseed, Diaspora, NoseRub, BuddyCloud, Protonet, StatusNet, GNU Social, Lorea and OneSocialWeb to the distributed Twitter alternative Thimbl.

    In which settings are these initiative developed and what choices are made for their design? Let’s hear from the Spanish activists who have recently made experiences with the n-1.cc platform developed by Lorea. What community does this platform enable? While traditional software focuses on the individual profile and its relation to the network and a public (share with friends, share with friends of friends, share with public), the Lorea software for instance asks you with whom to share an update, picture or video. It finegrains the idea of privacy and sharing settings at the content level, not the user’s profile. At the same time, it requires constant decision making, or else a high level of trust in the community you share your data with. And how do we experience the transition from, or interoperability with, other platforms? Is it useful to make a distinction between corporate competitors and grassroots initiatives? How can these beta alternatives best be supported, both economically and socially? Aren’t we overstating the importance of software and isn’t the availability of capital much bigger in determining the adoption of a platform?

    13. Social Media Activism and the Critique of Liberation Technology
    While the tendency to label any emergent social movement as the latest ‘Twitter revolution’ has passed, a liberal discourse of ‘liberation technology’ (information and communication technologies that empower grassroots movements) continues to influence our ideas about networked participation. This discourse tends to obscure power relations and obstruct critical questioning about the capitalist institutions and superstructures in which these technologies operate. What are the assumptions behind this neo-liberal discourse? What role do ‘developed’ nations play when they promote and subsidize the development of technologies of circumvention and hacktivism for use in ‘underdeveloped’ states, while at the same time allowing social media companies at home to operate in increasingly deregulated environments and collaborating with them in the surveillance of citizens at home and abroad? What role do companies play in determining how their products are used by dissidents or governments abroad? How have their policies and Terms of Use changed as a result?

    14. Social Media in the Middle East and Beyond
    The justified response to downplay the role of Facebook in early 2011 events in Tunisia and Egypt by putting social media in a larger perspective has not taken off the table the question of how to organize social mobilizations. Which specific software do the ‘movements of squares’ need? What happens to social movements when the internet and ICT networks are shut down? How does the interruption of internet services shift the nature of activism? How have repressive and democratic governments responded to the use of ‘liberation technologies’? How do these technologies change the relationship between the state and its citizens? How are governments using the same social media tools for surveillance and propaganda or highjacking Facebook identities, such as happened in Syria? What is Facebook’s own policy when deleting or censoring accounts of its users?

    How can technical infrastructures be supported which are not shutdown upon request? How much does our agency depend on communication technology nowadays? And whom do we exclude with every click? How can we envision ‘organized networks’ that are based on ’strong ties’ yet open enough to grow quickly if the time is right? Which software platforms are best suited for the ‘tactical camping’ movements that occupy squares all over the world?

    15. Data storage: social media and legal cultures
    Data that is voluntarily shared by social media users is not only used for commercial purposes, but is also of interest to governments. This data is stored on servers of companies that are bound to the specific legal culture and country. This material-legal complex is often overlooked. Fore instance, the servers of Facebook and Twitter are located in the US and therefore fall under the US jurisdiction. One famous example is the request for the Twitter accounts of several activists (Gonggrijp, Jónsdóttir, Applebaum) affiliated with Wikileaks projects by the US government. How do activists respond and how do alternative social media platforms deal with this issue?

  • TransforMap
    https://tree.taiga.io/project/transformap

    TransforMap works towards an online platform to visualize the myriad of alternatives to the dominant economic thinking on a single mapping system. It will give everyone the opportunity to map the initiatives, communities, projects, worker-owned, self-managed, democratically organised companies and other institutions dedicated to meeting people’s needs, serving the common good and/ or contributing to a sustainable way of life. Homepage: http://transformap.co Community: https://discourse.transformap.co

    #cartographie #platform_cooperativism

  • About | TransforMap
    http://transformap.co/about

    TransforMap works towards an online platform to visualize the myriad of alternatives to the dominant economic thinking on a single mapping system. It will give everyone the opportunity to map the initiatives, communities, projects, worker-owned, self-managed, democratically organised companies and other institutions dedicated to meeting people’s needs, serving the common good and/ or contributing to a sustainable way of life.

    TransforMap will/ can show all the places, spaces and networks that work on fostering cooperation and deepening human relationships through (co-)producing, exchanging, contributing, gifting and sharing, for a free, fair and sustainable world.

    TransforMap invites all existing mapping initiatives to cooperate and co-create maps based on an open pool of data, a common taxonomy, free software and standardised APIs. It is published under an Open Data License.

    Our world is transforming. There are old and new alternatives all over the planet. TransforMap will show you how to get there.

    This was the short description. You are invited to read the long one also.

    TransforMap - a not so short introduction - Welcome on Board / About - transformaps
    https://discourse.transformap.co/t/transformap-a-not-so-short-introduction/239

    The challenge

    Today there is no map that allows anyone to easily identify and directly benefit from transformative social innovations, either in their neighborhood or globally. While a new economy based on horizontal collaboration for the common good is emerging with the mushrooming of practices like sharing, repairing, bartering, co-producing, co-using, commoning, Transition initiatives, etc. – most of them aware of the limits to growth and the finiteness of natural resources – it is extremely hard to get an overview of this global transformation.
    For common people and citizens as well as for researchers, these initiatives are often invisible: information is stacked in thousands of (sometimes) cryptic websites or an impressive number of (recent) maps – mirroring the different silos the communities and networks seem to be locked in.

    Hence, almost every mapping initiative is mapping in non-connected layers – we have collected here around 200 maps connected to ideas of socio-ecological transformation. That is, for each field (e.g. urban gardening) we have scores of maps that are developed in parallel, in each region anew, based on different taxonomies (i.e. ways to categorize initiatives and allow filtering) and which repeat the same effort again and again. Tragically, there is no way for users to navigate from one to another or get an idea of what this “mushrooming of social innovations” actually looks like and how powerful they already are. Additionally the maps’ data is often locked in by Terms of Services from proprietary mapping platforms (namely: many mapping projects use Google Maps; that is, they give up their sovereignty over their data).
    This setup has a two-fold effect: it leads to the constant reproduction of the silos mentioned above and it neither enables the adoption of alternative productive and creative processes or social practices, nor spurs synergies between the huge diversity of movements. As a result, many initiatives are abandoned when the initial energy runs out and the “the plenty of alternatives” remain marginalized, invisible. However, through a distributed, collaborative mapping effort, based on free and open platforms and technologies, the different communities of the socio- ecological transformation can overcome these shared problems.

    The TransforMap answer

    TransforMap is a collaborative answer to this challenge and its complexities. It aims to co-develop with users (common citizens as well as representatives of the different movements) the necessary tools and standards for free and open crowd mapping that allows for aggregating all those mapping initiatives in one map that can be navigated by neophytes. TransforMap is being developed by, and offers the opportunity to display ALL initiatives that belong to communities of practice approved by the wider TransforMap community.

    #cartographie @b_b