Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, June 19, 2017

Digi Demos This Summer at Berkeley

Summer 2017 
Rhet 166: DIGITAL DEMOCRATIZATION & ANTIDEMOCRATIZATION UNDER THE LAW

Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com

Course Blog: https://digidemosunderlaw.blogspot.com/2017/06/our-syllabus.html
Meetings: July 3-August 11, 2017, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 2-4.30pm, 140 Barrows Hall
 
Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies -- Participation/Attendance, 15%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Toulmin/Precis, 2-3pp., 15%; Presentation, 15%; Final Paper, 6-8pp. 40%. 
                Course Description
How did the promise of peer-to-peer participatory democracy devolve into twitter harassment, doxxing, toxic comment sections, and zero comments? Is techno-progressive "disruption" merely reactionary deregulation, venture capitalist "innovation" merely marketing hyperbole, futurological "acceleration" merely social precarization, tech's vaunted "sharing economy" merely a digital sharecropping society, its "openness" vacuity, its "participation" another form of television? How did early legal and political squabbles over privacy and property online set the stage for our current distress? How might the "end-to-end principle" defining internet architecture across its many layers comport with the ideologically reactionary figure of "negative liberty" playing out in generations of anarchic, spontaneist, populist online activism? What are the politics of a digitality figured as an immaterial spirit realm, when digital networks abet financial fraud and military surveillance via an "internet" powered by coal smoke, accessed on toxic landfill-destined devices manufactured by wage slaves in overexploited regions of the real world? Setting aside the logical possibility and engineering plausibility of "artificial intelligence" does AI as a rhetorical trope in legal and cultural discourse facilitate and rationalize unaccountable algorithmic mediation and muddy our thinking about "autonomous" weapons systems? How does social media facilitate the transformation of factual disputes over climate change, harm reduction, and the macroeconomics of public investment into polarizing culture wars? Are there appropriate and appropriable techniques at hand through which democratizations might resist these degradations? Might "The Future" still be more evenly distributed? Can we still count on the street finding its own uses for things?

                Week One                                                                                                            

Tuesday, July 4 Holiday

Wednesday, July 5 Introductions

Thursday, July 6 

                Week Two            

Tuesday, July 11 
-- John Maynard Keynes, from "Europe Before the War"
-- Tom Standage, on his book The Victorian Internet
-- Lawrence Lessig, from Code, Chapter 1, "Code Is Law," pp. 1-8; and Chapter 7, "What Things Regulate" pp. 120-137.
-- Lawrence Lessig, from The Future of Ideas, Freedom on the Wires, Chapters 2-3, Building Blocks and Commons on the Wires, pp. 19-48.
-- John Oliver, Net Neutrality Explainer
-- Malkia A. Cyril, The Antidote to Authoritarianism

Wednesday, July 12
-- Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish
-- Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology
-- Landon Winner, The Cult of Innovation

Thursday, July 13
-- Jessica Littman, Sharing and Stealing

                Week Three         

Tuesday, July 18
-- Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
-- Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko
-- David Golumbia, Bitcoin Will Eat Itself
-- David Golumbia, Bitcoinsanity, Part I and Part II

Wednesday, July 19
-- Evgeny Morozov, The Perils of Perfectionism
-- Yochai Benkler, from The Wealth of Networks, Conclusion

Thursday, July 20 (Precis/Toulmin due following Tuesday)
-- Noah Berlatsky Interviews DeRay Mckesson, Hashtag Activism Isn't A Cop-Out

                Week Four

Tuesday, July 25
-- Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion

Wednesday, July 26
-- Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation andDisinformation Online
-- Zeynap Tufekci, Mark Zuckerberg Is In Denial
-- Sam Levin, Pay to Sway

Thursday, July 27
-- Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller, Introduction to Algorithmic Governance

                Week Five

Tuesday, August 1 Screen film, Colossus: The Forbin Project

Wednesday, August 2
-- Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity
-- Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek #ACCELERATE Manifesto

Thursday, August 3 Final Paper Workshop

                Week Six
Tuesday, August 8 Poetry Reading/Individual Meetings

Wednesday, August 9
-- Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet (novel to purchase): We Heard You Like Books (2016). 
ISBN-10: 0996421807 ISBN-13: 978-0996421805/Individual Meetings

Thursday, August 10 Concluding Remarks (Hand in Final Paper, 6-8pp.)

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