sufi
lala
I recently missed a talk on "Revolutionary Counter Optimisation Strategies" that sounded fantastic:
Optimization systems are everywhere: targeted advertising, personalized content feeds, location services, adaptive interfaces of software-as-a-service products, etc. In addition to their benefits, optimization systems can have negative economic, moral, social, and political effects on populations as well as their environments. Recent reports of neglect, unresponsiveness, and malevolence cast doubt on whether service providers are able to effectively reduce these effects on their own. Moreover, such negative outcomes are likely to predominantly impact the historically marginalized, minorities, and activists. In response, we propose Protective Optimization Technologies (POTs) that enable optimization subjects to autonomously or collectively defend against negative consequences of optimization systems without having to rely on service providers. We’ve seen many POTs in the wild. Uber drivers have been uniting to induce artificial price surges to counter the low wages caused by Uber optimizing for its own profit. Residents of neighbourhoods that suffer from heavy traffic routed there by Waze—a routing app that optimizes for convenience of its users at the cost of non-users—have fought back both with legislation and by reporting false accidents and traffic. AdNauseam is a browser add-on that automatically clicks on all web ads, effectively poisoning the behavioural profiling and data brokering systems—which optimize for click-through rates. As surveillance, control, and censorship increasingly become managed through optimization systems, one can imagine similar modes of resistance being part and parcel of the (digital) tool box of activists. In this session, we will introduce and discuss the negative effects of optimization systems, and provide examples of people resisting these. The rest of the session will be interactive and exploratory. During this second part, we want to gather accounts from those affected by these systems and discuss possible technological solutions to empower the affected individuals to counter such systems. By the end of the session, we hope to start conceptualizing realistic tools to fight back the discontents of optimization systems.