Alex Juhasz responds in Podcast form to “tame and disarm dangerous algorithms"
Hi, I’m Alexandra Juhasz and this is Episode 4 of We Need Gentle Truths for Now. The podcast engages in radical digital media literacy by enjoying a bite of education and a bit of poetry, creating humane responses to fake news and social media in the era of Covid-19.
For this episode, we consider hardtruth Number 53; “tame and disarm dangerous algorithms.” It was written by Geert Lovink, a professor, activist, and internet critic from the Netherlands. He wrote his hardtruth in 2017 for my online digital media primmer. As he reads them for us here, during the time of COVID-19, they become newly and even more relevant.
GEERT READS:
“The current situation demands a rethinking of the usual demands of activists and civil society players with regard to ‘media literacy.’ How can the general audience be better informed? Is this an accurate diagnosis of the current problem in the first place? How can holes be made in the filter bubbles? How can Do-It-Yourself be a viable alternative when social media are already experienced in such terms? And can we still rely on the emancipatory potential of ‘talking back to the media’ via the familiar social networking apps? How does manipulation function today? Is it still productive to deconstruct The New York Times (and its equivalents)? How might we explain the workings of the Facebook newsfeed to its user base? If we want to blame algorithms, how can we translate their hidden complexity to large audiences? A case in point might be Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, in which she describes how ‘ill-conceived mathematical models micromanage the economy, from advertising to prisons.’ Her question is how to tame and, yes, disarm dangerous algorithms.”
This has always been a project of radical digital media literacy: how to better know, tame, and even disarm the violent systems that currently rule us. At a Fake News Poetry Workshop held at Dartmouth College in 2018 we worked together to learn about, and thereby alter, the connections between fake news, artificial intelligence, and the stupid but powerful algorithms that underwrite the digital ecosphere.
University of Connecticut Professor Kyle Booten was one of the workshop’s co-facilitators. He built a bot, which like all artificial intelligence can learn to speak when programmers feed it words. In this case, the words were chosen by workshop participants. Dartmouth professor Jacque Wernimont fed our baby bot large blocks of words written by three entities: Buddhist monk and peace activist TIC NAT HAN; Joy Harjo, the first Native American national poet laureate; and the feminist digital pedagogy collective, FemTechNet. Fed on decency, reason, and art truths, the bot generated the following poem, read by Professor Wernimont:
“An Egg Speaks,”
Voice is perfect
RESOLVE is now conflict, (and)
Disappearance is peace.
(With the) demise of content (and) fellow others
We realized X. But dark means archive (and)
Someone continues reduced.
Image time well,
identities abandoning
Analysis of clouds; we will survive our history
Internet is surface (and) morning remembers.
We sent the poem to Geert Lovink in Amsterdam. He responded by rendering the bot’s poem -- which was written in response to his ideas albeit using other’s words -- into a digital tune. OK: Singing can’t entirely tame the beast of digital algorithms. But art can disarm our hearts and minds -- and that is one step … into an analysis of clouds. We will survive our history. Internet is surface (and) morning remembers.
SONG
Thank you for listening to Episode 4 of We Need Gentle Truths for Now. Fake News Poetry Workshops are one way to counter the internet’s dominant and dominating modes and values, to fight the corrupt ways of being and knowing that use digital media to create, fuel, and weaponize fake news and the people, machines, and corporations that make it. We invite you to live and know differently, by engaging. You can volunteer to read a poem or hardtruth. You can contribute your understanding of one of the hardtruths or poems. You can stage a digital workshop. Please email us at 100hardtruths@gmail.com. To learn more about the project, see the embedded links or listen to our podcast 0.
This podcast was produced, written, and read by Alexandra Juhasz. It was directed and edited by Matthew Hittle and copyedited by Gavin McCormick. Music by Noah Chevan and performances by Jacque Wernimont in New Hampshire and Geert Lovink in Amsterdam. Thank you for listening.