Tag: assignment 4

By Emma Ogiemwanye and Kelly Wagman

Thirty-five years ago, scholar Donna Haraway released a paradigm-shifting text: The Cyborg Manifesto. Within it, she questions the boundaries we have fashioned in the material world–animal and man, man and machine, physical and nonphysical. She explores how our shared imaginary can expand to include femininity in the realm of technology. Radical thinkers, artists, and feminists have rallied around and carried forward these ideas. Our project aims to hold space for them by exploring the following questions through online platform design:

How might we hold space for creativity online?

How might we think about technology outside patriarchal and capitalist frameworks?

How might we build a platform that is antithetical to the dominant logics of extractive design?

With these questions in mind, we propose to erect a Temple to the Cyborg Goddess: a digital sacred space that does not ask visitors and members to endlessly scroll but rather, visit, ambiently explore and intentionally congregate around ephemeral online moments. We wish to provide a balm to the unhealthy practices of design driven by profit. The Temple will have an explicit zero tolerance policy for bigotry and hate speech of any kind that will be strongly enforced to make it a safe space for all.

The Temple will contain a Sanctuary, Gallery and Vision Wall. The Sanctuary will be a space of congregation with events scheduled at a regular weekly interval, much like a Sunday service. The Gallery will be a monthly rotation of artists’ works around a changing theme. The Vision Wall, inspired by the walls and trees of fortune telling paper in Japanese Shinto shrines, is a space to anonymously share hopes, dreams, fears and ideas.

An exciting aspect of this project is that we cannot foretell who our community will include. We are rallying around the imaginary of the Cyborg Goddess and expecting that it will draw a range of people familiar with and inspired by the concept. We plan to gain momentum by working with an initial group of artists to form the Cyborg Goddess Guild.

We envision The Guild it to be a community of artists, thinkers, futurists and dreamers who together hold space to imagine how technology fits into a world that rises above neoliberal capitalist impulses and fights for deep connections, frivolous wandering, ambient appreciation, and far-reaching questions.

We prefer to build a subscription model to sustain the site rather than using advertising. Just like physical sacred space is open to everyone, we will have public programming and open days to visit the Temple site. 

Street protest is a potent form of direct action, used across history and geography as a tool for progress and social justice. Because of its radical nature, it is always at odds with power, and is constantly threatened by repression. It is even more vulnerable in the current state of affairs, as it has been rendered impractical by the COVID-19 pandemic and the global quarantine experienced all over the world. But there are countless causes that still call for protesting, including the treatment of undocumented people, the struggle of women and victims of domestic violence, the labor rights of essential workers, and the protection of ordinary citizens against government surveillance. How do we enable people’s voices to be heard, despite their inability to assemble? In reaction to this crisis, can we take social movements online? What would it mean to occupy virtual space?

I suggest developing a decentralized, ethical platform that enables activists to assemble and occupy the web.

I hope to lower the barrier of entry to political mobilization, and channel housebound people’s energy to connect with their local and online communities. To achieve this, I find inspiration in the work of hacktivist groups like Anonymous, who leveraged distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack tools as a way to protest various causes.

While those tools historically allowed few users to generate a lot of fake traffic in order to disrupt targeted websites, I suggest doing the opposite: creating a tool that helps many people to assemble and engage in meaningful ways, while generating organic — yet disruptive — traffic. Below, I describe what a version of this tool could be.

When starting the app, users would be required to fill two pieces of information: the domain name they would like to target, and an emoji that would represent them and their cause as an avatar. Upon submitting this information, the app would load the URL provided by the user, who would then be introduced to the protest space. Being part of a protest would look like browsing a website, where the page would be augmented to become a virtual reality chat room populated with many (thousands?) of free-floating emojis representing other participants. Every participant could move around, chat with their neighbors, write slogans and amplify those written by others. All of this activity would generate traffic against the targeted website. But beyond mere disruption, I aim to create a space where deliberation and a sense of communion is possible.

Challenges for this project come in many forms: ethical, legal, and technical.

First, it can seem totally irresponsible to pour gasoline on the fire given the current context of crisis: a tool that encourages network disruption exposes endangered populations to harmful mob behaviors. Thankfully, the core distinction between this project and existing DDoS interfaces — the reliance on many users to generate some amount of traffic — makes it relatively ineffective as a weapon. Nonetheless, it will be critical to assess risks, provide regulation mechanisms, and ensure accountability.

Second, as this project is rooted in civil disobedience, considering its legal implications will be key. In the US for instance, denial of service attacks fall under CFAA laws, which are to be taken seriously. We will need to be attentive to the risks users might face, so we can provide them with clear, actionable information. Just like in their real life counterparts, participation in online protests carries risks and requires well-informed decisions from all parties involved.

Third, there are inherent challenges attached to the implementation of decentralized technologies. As protests catch fire, we will need to rely on peer-to-peer protocols in order to facilitate communications without flooding our own infrastructure. We will also need to investigate whether we can provide privacy guarantees, in the form of encryption and onion routing.

Please reach out if you would like to team up 🙏 As you can see there are plenty of fun problems to tackle.

Summary

So much discussion is happening these days that is backed up with data visualization, but the problem is, misinformation and trust issues could arise due to the fact that these visualizations are not fully understood, or can’t be reproduced to more accurate versions unless the author of the vis decides to do so.  In this work, I want to explore simple and lightweight workflows to democratize the process of discussing data on the web for social and knowledge seeking purposes. I looked into existing tools that empower users to visualize data on the web but they are disconnected from where the discussion is happening (i.e. social media). I’m proposing building a solution that is a layer over online communities that discusses data visualizations to allow community members to visualize and reproduce visualizations in-situ to improve the commenting experience and enrich online discussion around data stories .

The community

Any community that has discussion around data visualizations with the goal to effectively convey information. For the sake of this assignment, I’m focusing on blogs or reddit. 

Problems to address

Centralized Discussion

Sometimes users want to take the vis somewhere else to discuss it with another type of community. Also, sometimes users want to reproduce a different version and share it to their own niche. Can we make that discussion more decentralized?

Effective utilization of the Collective effort to Improve Data stories

Members of these communities are continuously fact checking the conclusions and data used, leading them to a healthy explorative behavior in which they probe, investigate and inquire about the conclusions, the data and the visualization. How do we capture that provenance and lineage for others to leverage on? Reading the visualization story alone is not as rich and useful as reading the discussion about it. That collective knowledge is what makes these data stories more appealing and informative.

Technical challenges in reproducing work and science

Many members in these communities expressed in their comments that they would like to build a visualization similar to what the author shared. There were many questions about how, and what in regards to the process. While this could be a sign of a healthy community that wants to learn. While the instructions and the language are encouraging, the affordances are not yet inviting to novice users. And that is a problem I want to be working on in my project for this class.

Proposed Solution

For building the user experience of the tool I will use a simple template-based approach for authoring the visualizations, and a library in the background to build the visualization using D3 and D3Plus. The tool consists of two main components: Web App and a Chrome Extension for authoring the visualization. The most important part  in this project is the discussion and commenting experience, how can we include interactive visualizations in the comments that are reproduced with better data and design decisions. My hope is to create a community that discusses data visualization with data visualization not just with text.