Our Syllabus

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 

-- The Declaration of Independence.

-- John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence ofCyberspace

-- Nancy Scola, Defining the "We" in the Declaration of Internet Freedom

                Week Two            

Tuesday, July 11

-- John Maynard Keynes, from "Europe Before the War" (a snippet is posted on our blog)

-- 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.

-- Saskia Sassen, Interactions of the Technical and the Social

-- John Oliver, Net Neutrality Explainer

-- Gigi Sohn, Breaking Down the FCC's Proposal to Destroy Net Neutrality

-- Malkia A. Cyril, The Antidote to Authoritarianism

-- Mike Ludwig, People on the Margins Have Everything to Lose in the Next Net Neutrality Fight

Wednesday, July 12
Co-Facilitation:  Nicholas O.
-- Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish

-- Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology

-- David Golumbia, Cyberlibertarianism's Digital Deletion of the Left

-- Landon Winner, The Cult of Innovation

-- Audrey Watters, The Best Way To Predict the Future Is To Issue A Press Release

Thursday, July 13
Co-Facilitation:  Annie

-- James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement
-- Corey Doctorow, You Can't Own Knowledge
-- Evgeny Morozov, The Meme Hustler

-- Tom Slee, The Sharing Economy's Dirty Laundry

-- Katherine Hayles, Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Weiner and Cybernetic Anxiety

                Week Three         

Tuesday, July 18
Co-Facilitation:  Claire & Isaac

-- Tim May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

-- Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto

-- Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko

-- Aaron Bady, Assange and the Computer Conspiracy "To Destroy This Invisible Government"

-- David Golumbia, Bitcoin As Politics: Distributed Right-Wing Extremism

(This is the piece replacing the broken links we discussed -- the link takes you to an abstract, click for the whole .pdf)

Wednesday, July 19
Co-Facilitation:  Sarah & Kizal

-- David Brin, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society

-- Amelia Abreu, Quantify Everything: A Dream of a Feminist Data Future

-- Evgeny Morozov, The Perils of Perfectionism

-- Yochai Benkler, from The Wealth of Networks, Conclusion

-- Frank Pasquale, Towards An Intelligible Society (start on page 213)

Thursday, July 20
Co-Facilitation:  Heri & Samantha

-- Dan Gillmor, From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond

-- Geert Lovinc, Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse 
-- Digby (Heather Barton), The Netroots Revolution
-- Clay Shirky, Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

-- Tressie McMillan Cottom, "Who Do You Think You Are?": When Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity
-- Alicia Garza, A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

-- Noah Berlatsky Interviews DeRay Mckesson, Hashtag Activism Isn't A Cop-Out

-- Zeynep Tufekci, No, Nate, Brogrammer May Not Be Macho, But That's Not All There Is To It

                Week Four

Tuesday, July 25
Your Midterm Precis & Toulmin Schema due at the beginning of the hour.
Co-Facilitation:  Leslie & Maggie

-- Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion

-- Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, How Social Media Changed Protest Forever

-- Michel Bauwens, Political Economy of Peer Production

-- Matthew Yglesias, Silicon Valley's Basic Income Fans Should Defend the Actual Safety Net

-- Indivisible

Wednesday, July 26
Co-Facilitation:  Xin & Jae

-- Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online

-- Zeynap Tufekci, Mark Zuckerberg Is In Denial

-- Zeynep Tufekci, The World Is Getting Hacked, Why Don't We Do More To Stop It?

-- Zeynep Tufecki, ISIS Has A Strategy To Create A Media Frenzy And News Outlets Are Struggling To Disrupt It

-- Sam Levin, Pay to Sway

-- Alex Kaplan, Shorenstein Report Identifies Steps for Stemming the Spread of Fake News

Thursday, July 27
Co-Facilitation:  Nicosia & Gina

-- Jeremy Crampton and Andrea Miller, Introduction to Algorithmic Governance

-- Frank Pasquale, Duped by the Automated Public Sphere

-- Frank Pasquale, From Holocaust Denial to Hitler Admiration, Google's Algorithm Is Dangerous

-- The Economist, The World's Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil But Data: The Data Economy Demands a New Approach To Antitrust Rules

-- Tom Nichols, It's Time to Reboot the Relationship Between Expertise and Democracy

                Week Five

Co-Facilitation: Nicholas B.
Tuesday, August 1 Screen film, Colossus: The Forbin Project

-- Frank Pasquale, Bittersweet Memories of Machine Learning, A Provocation

Wednesday, August 2
Co-Facilitation:  Allanah & Alexander

-- Trebor Sholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy

-- Karen Gregory, From Sharing to Cooperation: Lessons from Mondragon

-- Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity another link is here. 

-- Nathan Pensky, Ray Kurzweil Is Wrong: The Singularity Is Not Near

-- Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek #ACCELERATE Manifesto

-- Yuk Hui, On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries

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.)