Today’s Internet platforms are overly financed by advertisements. With 80% of global personal data which they offer to advertisers and third parties under unregulated policies, the major Big Tech players (ie. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft) became pivotal in the shift to the era of digital post-truth and the influence industry: micro-profiling, disinformation campaigns, bots, illegal data harvesting, troll farms, persuasive design.
As a response to this information asymmetry, DISNOVATION.ORG seizes the means of data analytics to create a series of psychological, cultural and political profiles of the most data-extractivist Big Tech companies of our time: GAFAM, NATU, BATX… To do so, their custom made algorithm exploits big data analysis techniques in order to extract hidden correlations from publicly available big datasets (ie. Wikipedia).
These automated actions will result in a series of highly detailed, and biased, digital profiles of Big Tech, similar to the ones constantly generated for each user by these very same companies. This counter-profiling data will be continuously released on a dedicated platform as notifications, optimized for social media sharing by each visitor. This will result in a distributed counter-propaganda campaign, eventually polluting the social feeds of Big Tech companies.
FROM SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM TO GLITCH CAPITALISM
A micro-publication about the artwork 'Profiling The Profilers' by DISNOVATION.ORG. Available as PDF and print on demand.
Essay by Alessandro Ludovico | Artist statement by DISNOVATION.ORG | Interview by Inga Seidler
Commissioned by: EMAP/EMARE & M-Cult
1. FROM SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
TO GLITCH CAPITALISM
Today’s internet platforms are overly financed by advertisements.
With 80% of global personal data which they offer to advertisers and third parties under unregulated policies, the major Big Tech companies (ie. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft) became pivotal actors in the shift towards the era of digital post-truth and the influence industry: micro-profiling, disinformation campaigns, bots, illegal data harvesting, troll farms, persuasive design.
This shift, contemporary to the emergence of the web 2.0, has been analyzed and problematized notably by shoshana zuboff. Surveillance capitalism is a “radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism” based on the commodification of “reality” and its transformation into behavioral data for analysis and sales.
The extent of the process of automatization and surveillance is such, that our society has become an open laboratory for capitalist optimization. In april 2018, Malcolm Harris wrote about the concept of “glitch capitalism” for the intelligencer. The whole silicon valley ethos of “move fast, break things” is essentially an endorsement of the glitch as a mode of production. America looks like a glitchy computer, and it’s because capitalism is a machine language, reducible to numbers. America exists to create wealth, and the system isn’t broken, it’s just obeying the rules to disaster; as a country, we’re more ourselves than ever.
2. USER PROFILING
Digital profiling is the process of gathering and analyzing information about an individual that exists online. This is the use of algorithms or other mathematical techniques that allow the discovery of patterns or correlations in large quantities of data, aggregated in databases. A digital profile can include information about personal characteristics, behaviors, affiliations, connections and interactions.
Easily accessible digital records of behavior (ie. Facebook likes) can be used to automatically and quite accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.
The information environment has become the new modern battlefield where state and non-state actors employ sophisticated techniques for targeting, propaganda and disinformation (dark advertisements, nudging, algorithmic biases, social bots, sockpuppets, black propaganda, click farms…).
3. COUNTER PROFILING
As a response to this information asymmetry, we seized the means of data analytics to create a series of psychological, cultural and political profiles of the most data-extractivist Big Tech companies of our time: gafam, natu, batx, and others.
To do so, we worked for a year with dr. José lages and his research team from institut UTINAM, Besançon, France. In order to “infer hidden causal relations” between Big Tech companies and specific societal and political issues, we are using an algorithmic method derived from pagerank (reduced google matrix analysis) to analyse the matrix of every possible link between every single wikipedia article.
Similar algorithmic methods are often used in data science, data journalism, and for probabilistic user profiling. It allows to estimate the strength of the hidden relations between various members (articles, pages, users) of the studied network (for instance between a user and an item for the purpose of product recommendation).
These automated actions result in a series of highly detailed, and biased, digital profiles of Big Tech, similar to the ones constantly generated for each user by these very same companies.
Rather than simply following the same categories as the ones usually tracked for the profiling and prediction of users’ activity (age group, demographic, consumer behaviour, location, income group, etc), we augmented these categories with additional critical insights, specifically relevant for big tech (political orientation, ethical orientation, propaganda techniques, type of induced addictions, types of biases, etc).
This counter-profiling data will be continuously released on a dedicated platform as notifications, optimized for social media sharing by each visitor.
This will result in a distributed counter-propaganda campaign, eventually polluting the social feeds of big tech companies.
Exhibited at:
V2: Launch @ HASH Awards, ZKM, Karlruhe, 2020 [DE]
V1: BIO26 the Design Biennial, Ljubljana, 2020 [SLO]
V1: Network Effects, Oodi, Helsinki, 2019 [FI]
V0: MUTEK-SF, San Francisco, 2019 [USA]
V0: Institut UTINAM, CNRS, Besançon, 2018 [FR]
V0: The New Newsroom, MU Artspace, Eindhoven, 2018 [NL]
V0: Im Zweifel für den Zweifel, NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf, 2018 [DE]
With The Support Of:NRW-Forum Düsseldorf (DE),
MU artspace Eindhoven (NL),
Institut UTINAM Besançon (FR) (with José Lages),
M-Cult (FI) (with EMAP/EMARE, Creative Europe)
The Work was realised within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms EMARE program at m-cult with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.
