The continuation of AOWS was separated into four sessions, sparking reflection on the current emerging topics in society and the world we live in. These lectures also came at a perfect time since they touched on a lot of topics explored during the master's until now and, therefore, served as an introspection of where we came up to this point.
The session was led by Jose Luis de Vicente, a cultural researcher and curator working in the space between the arts, technology, and innovation. The lecturer was one who coined the term "Weak signals" some years ago. Referring to constant presence of small trends, deviations of the normal, pointing the future and giving a glimpse into a certain direction.
Moving to life in the Anthropocene, a geological era where human activity can disrupt the bio-geophysical composition of the Earth, can be closely associated the climate emergency we are currently experiencing.
Some interesting facts that helped me to grasp the problem were:
- the probable disappearance of Barcelona’s beaches in 25 years.
- projected amount of plastic in the ocean will surpass the amount of fish by 2050.
- a huge loss of large animals in the wild (±80% inn the 20th century).
One of the most provocative artistic interventions around the topic was Olafur Eliasson's piece titled "Ice Watch".
Bringing a huge issue of ice melting close to the everyday people, those who would hear something about it in the news, but never experience or take a personal perspective on this subject (myself included). This example was also very relatable to me since prototyping through provocation, or provotyping (as we defined it in a different class), is something I always felt most interested about for any storytelling purposes.
On the other hand, the controversy around going to Mars felt like another capitalist plan to get more money and stop taking responsibility for our actions.
Something completely new to me has been the discussion about the rights of unborn and young children. Paired together with having the majority of decision makers in politics being older than 45 years old, I think it's a very strong point that needs to be addressed more seriously and is very interesting for me personally to explore in one of my later interventions.
The concept of net neutrality has been one of the first things we explored in the second lecture. The principle refers to equal treatment of all internet communications. A self note for me is that with Web 2.0 and current information traffic, prioritisation for certain types of traffic exists.
The other focal point of the class has been about the economy of attention and human time. In particular to my professional interests were how much the user interface features of all of top apps such as Instagram or Netflix were directed towards taking more of your time. In a sense the business model is focused around trading human time for data. Time is indeed the biggest economical value in 2022 and probably much more into the future.
Let's start by aggregating some of the definitions of what "Job" means by my classmates:
- Trade of time
- Survival
- A promise of stability
- The means by which the people develop their purpose, identity, their role in a household and community, a creation of self-worth
- An exchange of efforts, of labor for money and skills
- A way to keep busy
- Unpaid work, family management, motherhood, care economy
- An obligation and a way to access services
- A capitalist way to control society
- The means by which the economy produces, a unit of production
- The repetition one does
The biggest topic of the day has been around robots and atomisation of 'bullshit jobs' by robots. Interesting fact: "robot" means "labor". There are a lot of controversies around the topic. On one hand, AI and robotics are extremely far away from coming to any point of general intelligence and have very specific benefits compared to humans usually having to do with processing huge amounts of quantitative data in a manner of seconds or performing some easy monotonous tasks. A speculation where AI replaces all human for these particular tasks has both good and bad connotations. On a long-term, humans will focus on developing new skills and performing more meaningful and rewarding tasks. Short-term, however, there is always a backlash of people loosing jobs, etc.
Other discussions revolved around the switch to remote jobs and 4-day work per week, after having seen some initial research of people being more productive after Covid-19 has switched our workflows. Personally, I feel like the research conducted so far to indicate the productivity results is at a very initial stage and seems to have a lot of bias. What the discussion leads to however, is a potential future without jobs. I feel like the only image appearing in my eyes is that of living a dream of hedonistic pleasures. However, whenever I think more about it, I clearly see that it's a huge change of a way of life on a planetary scale. Our lives hugely revolve around our jobs. It probably one of the biggest things society constantly talks about.
Nation states can be considered fairly exclusive from a cultural stand point. Having specific community norms and biases for what is wrong and what is right. Nation states also oftentimes came from people sharing the same language and culture, defining their traditions, way of life, etc. What that means essentially is that our world is separated into distinct groups of people who share certain common points which they don't do with other groups. And how being part of a group augments your social status and influences your perception of others.
Moreover, the other big side of the nation state is the governing power, army, tax collection, the law.
On the other hand, globalisation has been the trendiest thing of late, especially on the economical side. However, when it comes to politics, the international governing bodies do not hold a lot of power.
