Algorithmic Body Politics: Prototyping Leviathans or Wicker Men?
Algorithmic Body Politics: Prototyping Leviathans or Wicker Men?
How do we form political unity in an age of blockchain technologies, AIs, social media platforms, and other wonders of ledgers, algorithms, and data?
There are numerous attempts to engage various stakeholders with policy and design experiments that try to embed the legal, but also cultural and social norms directly into the corporate-owned and machine-readable code. AI ethical guidelines, ex-ante and ex-post regulations, such as GDPR, but also regulatory sandboxes for fintech services present some of the strategies how to deliberate and negotiate our algorithmic futures.
We try to connect citizens with their platforms and data in a new type of a social and algorithmic contract but the results are more like a parody of the Leviathan, the infamous Wicker man burning and sacrificing the individuals and their data to the higher bidder. The governance hybrids of code and regulations in this new algorithmic body politics only perform the asymmetries of power, knowledge, and prototyping (know-how, skills) rather than define what sovereignty means today.
To explore the possibilities of algorithmic body politics and digital sovereignty, we will use a hybrid sandbox for blockchain services to prototype smart contracts for an imaginary community of Lithopy. In this parody of a smart village and "fairytale with code" we will explore issues of algogovernance, automation, and regulation. Participants will prototype smart contracts with the help of templates (readable in plain English) and probe issues of bias and justice to find various ways of bringing together regulations and code and creating your own Leviathans and Wicker men.
The workshop is useful for learning the basics of blockchain service design and for discussing governance of emerging technology and very friendly to complete beginners: you will learns the basics of Hyperledger Fabric/Composer open source blockchain platform for smart contracts (chaincode), push some extreme scenarios of data governance (to prevent evil smart contracts), and then deliberate how to regulate code (or with code). You will also experience the Node RED framework to connect the blockchain services with satellite data and IoTs or other open APIs.
The imaginary lithium-punk village of Lithopy where people use satellite data to trigger blockchain transactions recently won a Digital Dozen Special Jury Prize for the best 2020 storytelling project: http://digitaldozen.io/projects/lithopy/
More on the project and workshop: https://github.com/anonette/lithopia
Denisa Kera & Petr Šourek
Denisa Kera is a philosopher and designer who experiments with various creative strategies of public engagement in emerging science and technology issues. She uses design methods (UX, critical design, design fiction, future scenarios, participatory design), ethnography and prototyping to research Science, Technology and Society issues. She spent the last decade as an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, as a senior lecturer on future design at Prague College, and most recently as a visiting assistant professor in Arizona State University, where she is an affiliate member of the Center for the Study of the Future. She is now researching distributed ledger technologies (blockchain) and applications (smart contracts) as a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the BISITE group at the University of Salamanca in Spain.
Petr Šourek is a philosopher, a playwright and a new media and performance artist based in Prague. He likes experimenting with new formats across various media. In 2012 he founded Corrupt Tour, the world’s first corruption tour agency, which takes tourists to see the homes and offices of the country’s most notorious business leaders and politicians. (“Corruption is everywhere,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “So, I thought, let’s use it as the raw material for a business. It has really captured the Zeitgeist.”) Petr also writes for the stage and for radio and television. His latest radio play, “Der Mechanische Türke,” is currently being produced by the Swiss broadcasting corporation SRF.