Recent ucsdcomm items

The Future Is Rosie?: Disempowering Arguments About Automation and What to Do About It

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Future Is Rosie?: Disempowering Arguments About Automation and What to Do About It

Can Smartness Fail? The Charisma of High Tech as Class Politics

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper analyzes how smart city infrastructures are planned, implemented, and scaled, even when they fail. Understanding how these processes unfold is critical for technology researchers committed to creating equitable public infrastructures. In this paper, we focus on an urban smart mobility solution called FRED, put in place to increase connectivity within downtown San Diego. We analyze it through a decade of public meetings, contract renewals, planning documents, and media coverage. Our findings show that FRED’s intervention was a cover for scaling neoliberal transit privatization in San Diego. This is facilitated by the "charisma" of smart mobility technology – framed as clean and green, app-based, algorithmically optimized, and innovative – to upper-class actors like tech entrepreneurs, property developers, business leaders, and city officials. Reflecting on these insights, we explore alternative strategies that could have produced different outcomes and discuss how our...

Categorical misalignment: Making autism(s) in big data biobanking

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The opaque relationship between biology and behavior is an intractable problem for psychiatry, and it increasingly challenges longstanding diagnostic categorizations. While various big data sciences have been repeatedly deployed as potential solutions, they have so far complicated more than they have managed to disentangle. Attending to categorical misalignment, this article proposes one reason why this is the case: Datasets have to instantiate clinical categories in order to make biological sense of them, and they do so in different ways. Here, I use mixed methods to examine the role of the reuse of big data in recent genomic research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD). I show how divergent regimes of psychiatric categorization are innately encoded within commonly used datasets from MSSNG and 23andMe, contributing to a rippling disjuncture in the accounts of autism that this body of research has produced. Beyond the specific complications this dynamic introduces for the...

Putting the digital growth machine in place: Shifting growth genres in Silicon Valley’s urban politics

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A growing body of scholarship has raised important concerns about the swelling power of the technology industry in the politics of urban development. Yet in helpfully sounding the alarm, some scholars have risked obscuring the variegated ways that tech sector growth has been politicised and materialised in different places and times. To allow for greater attention to variety and the specificity of places, this article proposes that digital growth machines assemble, and are partly assembled by, cultural genres of growth that arise, stabilise and change in relation to the political and historical configurations of particular places. By tracing the changing politics of tech-led development in Mountain View, a small city in the heart of Silicon Valley that is home to the global headquarters of Google, the article argues that local growth machines have repeatedly shifted growth genres once an established genre had been problematised politically. During these moments of transition,...

Latinx geographies

Tue, 1 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Latinx geographies

The Datafication of Environmental Injustice

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Datafication of Environmental Injustice

Guerras Verdes

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Guerras Verdes

Pedagogic Fixation

Wed, 5 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pedagogic Fixation

Making Algorithms Public: Reimagining Auditing from Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

Sun, 7 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Making Algorithms Public: Reimagining Auditing from Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

Encountering Innovation, Countering Innovation

Sun, 7 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What could be gained by putting science and technology studies (STS) in conversation with innovation studies (IS)? These distinct fields have shared people over decades, as they build concepts, careers, institutions, and even nations. I review how this collection offers accounts of how STS and IS have been practiced in different times and locations: resisting underdevelopment, Western and middle-class assumptions about progress, or technology-centric policy. I argue, however, that it is critical to clarify the difference between innovation as an analytic and as an emic and ideological category. Neither STS nor IS should take for granted the ways political economy, class relations, racialization and gendering, and even national(ist) ideologies shape what counts as desirable forms of newness, what newness ought to be contained or criminalized, and the hierarchies of socio-technical transformation that emerge out of that. I offer three examples: San Diego’s “smart streetlights” program...

What is digital labor and how does it change us? Heteromation and other stories of computing and capitalism

Sun, 7 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What is digital labor and how does it change us? Heteromation and other stories of computing and capitalism

Managed by code: Worker problems on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform

Sun, 7 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers lack accountability and redress when they are managed at scale, and by code. Report compiled by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and academic collaborators, submitted to White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Making Sustainability ConcreteDesigns for Green Architecture in Silicon Valley

Fri, 3 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract “Sustainability” is an increasingly fashionable design criterion for celebrity corporate architects, their clients, and the governmental bodies that regulate urban development. Yet determining if and how a building is actually sustainable remains controversial, with different actors positing qualifications that are often at odds with each other. In this article, the authors explore how the ideal of sustainability is made concrete in contemporary corporate architecture, focusing on the design of one of Google's new corporate campuses in Silicon Valley that has been extensively touted and recognized as admirably green. The article draws attention to how various experts who participated in the design of Google's new campus rendered sustainability differently and argues that the temporal and social structure of the design process worked to compel coordination and compromises among these experts’ different renderings. Ultimately the authors advocate for problematizing the...

Living Theory Gender Play and Learning to Live a Life Less Ordinary

Fri, 3 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Living Theory Gender Play and Learning to Live a Life Less Ordinary

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out Kids Living and Learning with New Media

Fri, 3 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Presents an examination of the new digital media and technology practices of American youth, including text-messaging, the use of social media, and gaming.

Science and the State

Fri, 3 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Science and the State

Disruptive Fixation School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism

Fri, 3 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Disruptive Fixation offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.

Contested Care: COVID-19 Surveillance and Health Data in the Workplace

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Contested Care: COVID-19 Surveillance and Health Data in the Workplace

Guests of the Guerrilla: Integrated Spectacle and Disintegrating Peace, an Ethnographic Analysis of the FARC's Tenth (and Final?) Guerrilla Conference

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: During a week in September of 2016, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) held its tenth guerrilla conference, the Décima, in the plains of Yarí in southern Colombia. The guerrilla group blew the event open to the media, orchestrating a festival cum eco-conflict-tourism extravaganza to mark its transition to legal politics. This photo/ethnographic analysis of the Décima illuminates the FARC's symbolic and discursive formation at a pivotal transitional moment and how the group imagined its political possibilities at the cusp of its demobilisation. By engaging with Guy Debord's concept of ‘integrated spectacle’, I argue that the FARC's vanguardist structure led it to brand itself as the leader of a broad political mobilisation, even as it struggled to retain the allegiance of its former combatants. The article considers the ongoing relevance of the integrated spectacle for scholars and activists and opens a path...

Subir las noticias al bajar del monte: El experimento de las FARC en Cuba con la televisión en línea, 2012–2016"

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Entre 2012 y 2016, las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) negociaron un acuerdo de paz con el gobierno colombiano en La Habana, Cuba. Durante esos cuatro años, el grupo experimentó con distintas técnicas de producción mediática para redefinirse y acceder a nuevos públicos. En este orden de ideas, un noticiero en Internet fue clave para que las FARC pudieran difundir su punto de vista. Este ensayo analiza la estética de dicho noticiero en línea y lo hace en el contexto del incierto desenvolvimiento del histórico acuerdo de paz. Arguyo que las FARC han venido anticipándose a una “guerra de posiciones” en términos gramscianos, preparándose para una forma mediatizada de disputa política que absorberá y remodelará tanto la intensidad como los patrones tácticos del conflicto guerrillero, en el período del post-acuerdo de paz.

THE OLD AND NEW OF DIGITAL HISTORY

Fri, 3 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

THE OLD AND NEW OF DIGITAL HISTORY

Pacifista, between Vice and Virtue: Funding Digital Journalism for a “Generation of Peace” in Colombia

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Pacifista, between Vice and Virtue: Funding Digital Journalism for a “Generation of Peace” in Colombia

Transitar hacia la paz en Colombia. Entre la promesa y la ilusión en dos experiencias históricas (1953-2017)

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

En 1953 y en 2012 - 2016 tuvieron lugar en Colombia dos procesos históricos de paz que involucraron, de una parte, a las Guerrillas Liberales del Llano y de la otra, a las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. Haciendo uso de un corpus de imágenes derivado de medios de comunicación como El Tiempo y La Revista Semana, así como del Archivo Germán Guzmán Campos, y acudiendo a literatura secundaria y de claves de lectura derivadas de los estudios del performance discutimos sobre el sentido y alcances de la representación habitual de estos como “tránsitos hacia la paz”. Lo propuesto en el artículo deriva de un proyecto de investigación reciente sobre memoria histórica y práctica visual financiado por la Universidad Javeriana entre 2015 y 2018. La principal contribución está en evidenciar el carácter poroso y por momentos simulado de la paz pactada en ambos momentos históricos.

Green Magic: On Technologies of Enchantment at Apple's Corporate Headquarters

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract Apple's corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley has become an object of public fascination for its technical marvels and green magnificence. However, architectural critics and urbanists have widely critiqued the campus for being socially retrograde and ecologically injurious. This essay queries this divergence in public responses to Apple's headquarters by examining how the campus has been designed to counter a growing disenchantment with neoliberalism, its technologies, and its environmental defilements. In doing so, the essay argues for the analytical potential of adapting anthropological theories of enchantment and magic to the study of contemporary uses of the built environment for branding and public relations purposes.

Learning, Technology, and the Instrumentalisation of Critique

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Learning, Technology, and the Instrumentalisation of Critique

Wall Street’s Content Wars: Financing Media Consolidation

Thu, 7 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If we frame the ongoing streaming transition occurring in the cultural industries as ‘content wars,’ with metaphoric ‘battlefronts’ in Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, and on Madison Avenue, then the silent arms dealer in this conflict is Wall Street and the investor class, whose financial engineering goes largely unacknowledged in studies of the media industries. This chapter will explore the impact of private equity in the American film, television, and music industries since 2004. The mercenaries of these content wars, private equity firms have enacted leveraged buyouts in every sector of the cultural industries: major music labels (Warner, EMI), radio networks (Cumulus, Clear Channel/iHeartMedia), film and television production and distribution companies (MGM, Miramax, Univision, Dick Clark Productions), exhibition (AMC, Odeon), the top talent agencies (CCA, WME, IMG), audience measurement (Nielsen), and the trade press (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard). The arms race...

Review: Verde , by Federico Rios Escobar

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Review: Verde , by Federico Rios Escobar

The Art of Opacity

Fri, 3 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Art of Opacity

Critical Affects

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach and contribution adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of everyday life in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. This paper dwells on the affects of tech workers facing critique and scrutiny. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. By emotional habitus, we refer to the emotional dispositions honed among tech workers by tech culture's rationality and optimism. This habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of relating and acting. We argue...

Transportation for Smart and Equitable Cities: Integrating Taxis and Mass Transit for Access, Emissions Reduction, and Planning

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Transportation for Smart and Equitable Cities: Integrating Taxis and Mass Transit for Access, Emissions Reduction, and Planning

Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)

Gangster in guerilla face

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Doble cara (double/two-faced) is a key trope in Salvadoran political folklore. It is a folk theory of mimesis, which attempts to 'master the absent presence of the other' through a discourse of conspiracy. The term has a history in the US-funded Salvadoran civil war. In this article, I consider how doble cara has come to be deployed around a new and pivotal social subject - Salvadoran immigrant gang youth deported from the USA - and how these deported youth emerge as a packed and displaced sign for the trauma of post-civil war violence, the failed promise of peace, and ongoing entanglements between the USA and El Salvador. The article is written in conversation with Begoña Aretxaga, who inspired many of the questions explored here. Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications.

The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale...

Broken Promises of Civic Innovation: Technological, Organizational, Fiscal, and Equity Challenges of GE Current CityIQ

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Broken Promises of Civic Innovation: Technological, Organizational, Fiscal, and Equity Challenges of GE Current CityIQ

How Secrecy Leads to Bad Public Technology

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How Secrecy Leads to Bad Public Technology

Hackathons: Labor, Politics, and the Organization of Public Passions

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hackathons: Labor, Politics, and the Organization of Public Passions

On Walkers and WheelchairsDisabling the Narratives of Urban Modernity

Tue, 4 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Disability, as a differential of urban experience, is rarely integrated into the constitutive subjectivities of modern urban history. Despite the sophisticated theoretical and methodological innovations in the fields of urban history, cultural geography, and urban studies over the past three decades, the body that can see, hear, walk, and communicate normatively and/or without assistive technology—no matter how marginal its social or political status—remains consistently centered and remarkably unproblematized. This essay draws attention to this woeful lack of engagement and challenges scholars to confront key canonical definitions of urban modernity as fundamentally linked to the privileges of being nondisabled. The essay concludes with recommendations for “cripping” the spatialization of the city that might expand the historian's analytical repertoire, especially since urban modernity has typically relied upon architectural and technological spectacles of the visual, the auditory,...

Reshaping History: The Intersection of Radical and Women's History

Tue, 4 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This conversation, commemorating twenty-five years of the Journal of Women’s History, was convened as a joint project of the Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH) and MARHO: the Radical Historian’s Organization. Preparation for the panel discussion began with an email exchange among some of the participants. Iris Berger and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu were unable to participate in the panel discussion at the American Historical Association (AHA) conference in 2012, but their email comments are included here, as are other contributions from the preliminary conversation. The AHA panel in Chicago brought together major senior and junior scholars whose work encompasses both radical and women’s history to address the intersections of the two fields. All of the participants were asked to consider questions including: How did the origins of the fields connect? How have their trajectories converged or diverged across time? What have been the crucial developments in radical history, in...

Guns, germs, and public history: A conversation with Jennifer Tucker

Tue, 4 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this wide-ranging conversation, historians David Serlin (UC San Diego) and Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) discuss the role of material culture and visual media in shaping how museums communicate histories of science and technology. Tucker describes recent a public history project focused on 19th-century histories of firearms and gun regulation in light of contemporary debates about the Second Amendment "right to bear arms." Serlin and Tucker conclude by speculating about possible curatorial directions for a future public history exhibit focused on the social and cultural impact of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020.

CARNEY LANDIS AND THE PSYCHOSEXUAL LANDSCAPE OF TOUCH IN MID-20TH-CENTURY AMERICA

Tue, 4 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a Committee for Research in Problems of Sex-funded research project in which he conducted interviews with 100 women between the ages of 18 and 35 who self-identified as physically disabled. Landis interviewed the women about their sex lives, their sexual identities, and their relationship to their bodies and published the results in 1942 under the title The Personality and Sexuality of the Physically Handicapped Woman. The book represents conventional psychosexual presumptions about disabled women's stunted personality and frustrated sexuality stemming from the absence of a Freudian "sexual moment." Yet, the original research notes, housed at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, reveal that many of these women engaged in acts of erotic touching that played a far more dynamic and...

Mark Gallagher, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, $54.00). Pp. 336. isbn 029 274 421 8.

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Gallagher, Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, $54.00). Pp. 336. isbn 029 274 421 8.

Financialized Hollywood: Institutional Investment, Venture Capital, and Private Equity in the Film and Television Industry

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The financial sector has a hidden, but dramatic effect on Hollywood: three institutional investors hold the largest investment stakes in nearly all major companies; corporate venture capital has arisen within every entertainment conglomerate; and private equity firms have enacted leveraged buyouts of companies in all sectors, including production, distribution, exhibition, talent agencies, audience measurement, trade press, and content catalogues. This article argues that “Financialized Hollywood” is a dangerous development; financial engineering strategies are extracting capital and reducing operational capacity, further depriving Hollywood of the diversity and heterogeneity it might provide the public sphere.

The global social problem film

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The global social problem film

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Fragility

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Impermanence and fragility have become the defining conditions of the digital age. Technologies that were ubiquitous barely a decade ago, like floppy disks, now look like archaeological relics. It takes only a few years, if not months, before software environments are replaced by newer versions, often with limited backward compatibility. At the same time, digital technologies rely on hardware that has short life expectancy. The radical obsolescence of this new digital register raises a number of important questions. How are we going to prevent the fragile memories of contemporary digital cultures from receding into oblivion? This essay answers this question by looking at one of the institutions in which the problems associated with digital fragility are most especially felt, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and by exploring the ontological displacements that digital objects are operating at the heart of the museum.

The CIA in Hollywood: how the agency shapes film and television