Nidhi Singh Rathore
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Clique to Click

Documentation of everything needed, significant, and interesting that inspired my thesis process. From aesthetic study to claiming Digital Design Ethnography you’ll see a range of materials here, that capture the different facets of my Masters’ Thesis research.

state vs politics vs technology vs... what even?

Yet even if we cannot rely on such technological gadgets, we shouldn't give up. We can be inspired by anthropologists, zoologists, spend years on faraway islands, exposed to a plethora of ailments and dangers. Astronauts devote many years to difficult training regimes, preparing for their hazardous excursions to outer space. If we are willing to make such efforts in order to understand foreign cultures, unknown species, and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our won minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us.

~ 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by Yuvnal Noah Harari | Tweeted by @jack on Oct 05

As stated by design researcher Ramia Mazé at the 2018 Design Research Society Conference, Social and Public Debate: “design provides new understandings of and capacities to manipulate the interface between the personal and the state.”

First, grow the user base as quickly as possible without worrying about revenue; second, collect as much data as possible about the users; third, monetize that information by performing big data analytics in order to show users advertising that is narrowly tailored to their demographics and revealed interests; fourth, profit.

~ Walter Benjamin

Our politics are fake.

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity — a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the computer simulation falls away and reality appears. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling” — the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward — against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

Source: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html


Nidhi Singh