Marc Garrett: Curating and Making Art that Challenges Extractive Digital Systems
Channel: NeMe
Date: 2023-05-12

Elite groups constantly channel our social interactions, cultural identities, and interests on their behalf. The narratives and stories of who we are have become distorted, filtered, and engineered following the needs of marketing companies, accepted historical canons, mainstream news media, the military, numerous corporations, and nation-states. Truth, like everything else, is a commodity; it is not a right. The highest bidder owns truth and fact; if you can afford it, you can create, alter and sell mass misinformation to millions. 

More: https://www.neme.org/projects/toolkit-of-care/data-for-care

Our data is harvested and scraped through social media platforms and web browsers. Mass data extraction extends further, involving questionable social engineering and poverty. Amy E. Wendling reminds us that "Machine fetishism is a product of technological alienation" and that the financial crash in 2008 should have warned us of the disastrous effects of machinic alienation." OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, for its chatbot paid Kenyan workers less than $2 an hour to filter through tens of thousands of "toxic data" and graphic details of NSFW (not safe for work) content such as child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self-harm, and incest. AGI (Artificial general intelligence) introduces new forms of appropriation to the world with technologically based hierarchies reproducing the "ideas of innate supremacy" born "since the days of empire and colonialism." The uncritical emergence of a hyper-enthusiastic submission and mass use of AI resembles land grabbing by the powers that be and desperation by artists, academics, curators, designers and technologists using it to feel relevant in an ever-changing world, at whatever cost. However, blind devotion to reconfirming privileged world views "where the immediate vulnerability of millions of ordinary people counts as nothing" is building an even worse, uneven future and reconfiguring a stronger positioning for a 'super race.'