Some other interests

hyperdocs

NOTES

~20min

background: studied cognitive neuroscience, was interested in human behavior, behavioral economics, and how these fields could be applied. ended up working at IDEO for two years, transitioned into a fellowship at the New York Times/Washington Post working on a project called the Coral Project. the project's mandate was to find ways of building tools and practices for healthier/less toxic social spaces online. I experimented with machine learning features to help journalists more directly engage with the audiences reading their work.

after that I ended up as a researcher-in-residence with a collaborator, Fei Liu, where we worked on simulation-related projects (Humans of Simulated New York), was very interested in speculative fiction at the time and how computer simulations and their perceived legitimacy as an arbiter of what's true and possible becomes an important rhetorical avenue for proposing fundamentally different economies and so on (TODO a bit more about the project).

in parallel to that I worked on a game, The Founder: A Dystopian Business Simulator. here I was more focused on simulation as a rhetorical medium for presenting unpopular or immediately dismissed analyses or criticisms in a way where the insight of analysis or critique is "instant", becomes obvious. This game was about the Silicon Valley, startups, their relationship to capital (how it structures their priorities, operations, etc) and employees, and how this in turn affects technological development.

sometime after that I joined The New Inquiry as co-publisher, was there for about a year. I put together a syllabus for a class (which unfortunately never was formally run) out of two frustrations with popular science fiction and "futurism" more broadly: the futures they envisioned were never really all that radical, if they were at all, and two they never critically examined the actual conditions and processes of the technology that would underlie those futures. it's taken for granted that sophisticated computation or material technology will exist without any mention of: who's producing that technology? where is it being produced? and so on.

while I was at the new inquiry, we developed a concept we called "rhetorical technology", I don't think we ever actually published what we'd written about it, but we did publish a few projects that embody those ideas.

to gloss over it a bit, these projects aim to exploit some tendency or contradiction in a process, or a logic, etc. for example, the alt-right is very good at exploiting the logic of advertisement-driven media. they ideally also demonstrate a connection or introduce an analysis that is not immediately obvious to mainstream audiences. and finally, it should actually have (or at very minimum, have potential for) some direct material impact (this criteria is rather hard to hit). (there are more criteria than this but these are the big ones).

the first one I worked with two collaborators Sam Lavigne and Brian Clifton, White Collar Crime Risk Zones. We developed a "predictive policing" algorithm exclusively meant for white-collar crime, trained on data from FINRA and using the same architecture that HunchLab (a predictive policing company based in Philadelphia) uses. the project is in part to highlight the fact that such a predictive policing system would never exist because, despite how it's marketed to the public, that's not what predictive policing is "for"; it's not for crime but to criminalize, and "instead of criminalizing poverty, WCCRZ criminalizes wealth". the system is rendered as a heat map, and as you'd expect the areas with the most potential for crime are financial districts. one of the media outcomes we got was publications that would otherwise never mention predictive policing did so for the project (WSJ, Forbes), hopefully exposing new audiences to it.

another rhetorical technology project we did was Bail Bloc. this was closer to the peak of the crypto bubble; the general idea was that so many people are making obscene amounts of wealth off essentially nothing -- the purest form of speculative gain -- we'd piggyback off that same infrastructure and speculation. we made bail bloc as a distributed mining pool where basically people could download it and donate their spare computing power to mine a cryptocurrency called monero. we partnered with a local bail fund (the bronx freedom fund) to periodically exchange this monero for USD so they could bail more people out of jail. our pie-in-the-sky hope was that if enough people installed it, and the price of monero kept it's climb, then we could bail enough people out to lock up the courts and slow down the rate of arrests (people often take plea deals, pleaing guilty to something they didn't do so they don't have to stay in jail and lose their job, or be unable to take care of their children/other family members, etc; the criminal justice system depends on this dynamic to prosecute as many people as it does, it would be impossible for all those cases to go to trial)

i collect other examples of these projects, under an are.na channel, "sabotage, heresy, & traps" https://www.are.na/francis-tseng/sabotage-heresy-traps

Other interests -- not deeply involved in them, just sort of keep tabs from a distance. I hope to find ways to do more focused work on while at JFI:

are.na