Videos
Papers
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, 2023
Computer and information ethics are related fields of practical philosophy which address the prop... more Computer and information ethics are related fields of practical philosophy which address the proper use of computing and information technology. This entry provides an overview of their history and major topics of interest, including those germane to emerging technological and social developments.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
La Deleuziana, 2022
This essay conceives a Deleuzian image of thought proper to the digital medium. I call this "the ... more This essay conceives a Deleuzian image of thought proper to the digital medium. I call this "the digital image of thought" (or "the digital image" for short). I begin with an introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work on the image of thought and the related concept of the plane of immanence. Here, I emphasize that images of thought not only incarnate in entities recognized as either intelligent (e.g., a human mind) or as the products of intelligence (e.g., a work of art), but in material objects and media. The digital image, I argue, does not precede thought, but pertains to the latter category, as it is realized in the medium of digital data. Taking a speculative approach, I consider its implications were it to indeed inform human thought, arguing that in this capacity it would structure thought to meet the technical criteria of digital computability. From there, I present the digital image as a mechanism which would subsume thought under the needs of capital. Insofar as it yields digitizable (and thus monetizable) mental figures, I claim, it would figure minds as ideal environments for the creation of commodifiable concepts. I conclude by suggesting that, although the digital image is not an actually-existing precursor to thought, this possibility is an ideal of digital capitalism. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari's attempts to conceptualize a radically novel type of thought-one which would defy digital capture-are allied with contemporary political theorizations of the relationship between information technology and the psyche.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
M/C Journal, 2020
The form of the digital datum is discrete, fungible, and familiar, and digital mediation presuppo... more The form of the digital datum is discrete, fungible, and familiar, and digital mediation presupposes commensurability between various ontic, epistemic, and aesthetic phenomena. My paper asks whether digital media may nevertheless yield unrecognizable or sui generis forms. I take philosopher M. Beatrice Fazi’s reading of Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetics as my primary hermeneutic lens. Deleuze claims that aesthetic novelty, or that which has no formal precedent, issues from numerically continuous fluxes. Thus it cannot originate in digital media, which are discrete. Fazi intervenes by distinguishing the form of the digital datum from the process of computation. She indicates that the latter partakes of infinite and indeterminate sources and is continuous across time. As such, computational processes retain the capacity to yield the Deleuzean new.
Offering Deleuzean novelty as a theorization of “anomaly,” I argue that the cultural phenomenon of live-coded music exemplifies the computational production of anomaly. Live-coding musicians improvise by writing source code which instantaneously plays out loud. I examine live-coding programs to propose that the anomalous emerges at the interface of software and musician for the duration of live-coding performances. I also draw from Henri Bergson’s work on creative processes, which emphasizes improvisation and immediacy, to attest to the salience of live-coded music as a study in digital anomaly.
A coda situates my arguments politically. I reflect on notions that digital capitalism secures its hegemony by means of algorithmic homogenization and statistical prediction, and proceeds as an unfolding of similitude. The anomalous, I claim, defies and subverts this normative political program.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Spheres Journal, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Teaching Materials
This course examines the relationship between digital information technologies and privacy. The d... more This course examines the relationship between digital information technologies and privacy. The definition of privacy varies across sites of government and private-sector surveillance, practices of data mining and interpretation, and various cultural milieus. Privacy may be an experience, an affordance, a right, or a virtue, and is indelibly linked with race, gender, class, and ability, among other dynamics of identity. Digital media not only supply and invade privacy, but construct its meaning in concert with evolving social norms. Although it eludes simple definition, privacy is implicated wherever humans meet information networks.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In 1975, the world saw the release of the first personal computer. Soon after came the World Wide... more In 1975, the world saw the release of the first personal computer. Soon after came the World Wide Web (1989) and the first consumer smartphone (2007). As of 2020, digital technologies generate over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. As data proliferate, they present novel possibilities for human life, but also introduce several hazards.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Political theory has always served as an interface between philosophical thought and political pr... more Political theory has always served as an interface between philosophical thought and political practice. Yet it has been conceived in very different ways across historical epochs and cultural environments. This course presents foundational political ideas in their original contexts, and establishes continuity between them. It also deploys multimedia modalities to reflect the relevance of canonical political ideas in the present.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Reviews
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 2022
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Evental Aesthetics Vol. 8, 2019
In her book Contingent Computation. Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational A... more In her book Contingent Computation. Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics, media philosopher M. Beatrice Fazi proposes that aesthetics is a legitimate means of inquiry into the ontology of computation. Fazi’s aesthetics neither encompasses a philosophy of art nor raises traditional aesthetic questions regarding beauty, taste and judgment. Instead, she draws from the Greek word aisthesis, meaning “perception from the senses or intellect.” Here, “aesthetics” denotes “a theory of knowledge that is predicated upon
the immanence of thought and sensation.” Fazi’s aesthetics-as-sensory-knowledge is not concerned with artworks made by computers, but rather with computation as a means of rendering the sensible world intelligible. As she writes, “the computational aesthetics that I have proposed is, in essence, a philosophical study of what computation is and does.”
Fazi primarily draws on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of aesthetics. As she notes, Deleuze’s aesthetics posits a relationship between creation, becoming, and sensory knowledge. In emphasizing process as fundamental to the nature of computation, and in affirming the immanence of thought
and sensation, Contingent Computation rests on Deleuzian aesthetic precepts. However, Fazi disputes one of Deleuze’s most significant contributions, which is that computation can produce neither “the new” nor “the real.” After explaining how Deleuze conceives “the new” and “the
real,” Fazi revisits the premises on which he denies computation these essential functions. More specifically, she reads Deleuzian aesthetics through Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of indeterminacy, Alan Turing’s notion of computational incomputability, and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. In so doing, she demonstrates that Deleuze offers a productive avenue towards an ontology of computation.
My paper suggests an avenue of departure from Fazi’s claims in Contingent Computation by examining the role of infinity in her overarching argument. I read Fazi’s treatment of computational infinity alongside philosopher Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and media theorist Alexander Galloway’s essay “Mathification,” which comments on Being and Event. My reading
demonstrates that Contingent Computation furnishes materials for a theory of “computational subjectivity” which is a mode of subjectivity particular to computational processes. Fazi’s computational subjectivity, I argue, resides within the logical and formal structures of cognition, but cannot be represented in perceptible or positivistic forms.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The 37th volume of The Humanities and Technology Review.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Conference Presentations
Presentation on terminology and principles for digital epistemology. A theoretical account of how... more Presentation on terminology and principles for digital epistemology. A theoretical account of how Big Data and data science impact knowledge production within and across academic disciplines.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Cultural & Political Criticism
Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Real Life Mag, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Vice Motherboard , 2020
The investment app's interface oversimplifies investing to the point where new investors can get ... more The investment app's interface oversimplifies investing to the point where new investors can get way in over their heads. ES
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Commune Mag, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The New Inquiry, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Videos
See here for abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1js6UBst0wT2lqq5qrEWemebibZNQlv7dbUijSQryhlM/edit?usp=sharing
Papers
Offering Deleuzean novelty as a theorization of “anomaly,” I argue that the cultural phenomenon of live-coded music exemplifies the computational production of anomaly. Live-coding musicians improvise by writing source code which instantaneously plays out loud. I examine live-coding programs to propose that the anomalous emerges at the interface of software and musician for the duration of live-coding performances. I also draw from Henri Bergson’s work on creative processes, which emphasizes improvisation and immediacy, to attest to the salience of live-coded music as a study in digital anomaly.
A coda situates my arguments politically. I reflect on notions that digital capitalism secures its hegemony by means of algorithmic homogenization and statistical prediction, and proceeds as an unfolding of similitude. The anomalous, I claim, defies and subverts this normative political program.
Teaching Materials
Book Reviews
the immanence of thought and sensation.” Fazi’s aesthetics-as-sensory-knowledge is not concerned with artworks made by computers, but rather with computation as a means of rendering the sensible world intelligible. As she writes, “the computational aesthetics that I have proposed is, in essence, a philosophical study of what computation is and does.”
Fazi primarily draws on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of aesthetics. As she notes, Deleuze’s aesthetics posits a relationship between creation, becoming, and sensory knowledge. In emphasizing process as fundamental to the nature of computation, and in affirming the immanence of thought
and sensation, Contingent Computation rests on Deleuzian aesthetic precepts. However, Fazi disputes one of Deleuze’s most significant contributions, which is that computation can produce neither “the new” nor “the real.” After explaining how Deleuze conceives “the new” and “the
real,” Fazi revisits the premises on which he denies computation these essential functions. More specifically, she reads Deleuzian aesthetics through Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of indeterminacy, Alan Turing’s notion of computational incomputability, and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. In so doing, she demonstrates that Deleuze offers a productive avenue towards an ontology of computation.
My paper suggests an avenue of departure from Fazi’s claims in Contingent Computation by examining the role of infinity in her overarching argument. I read Fazi’s treatment of computational infinity alongside philosopher Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and media theorist Alexander Galloway’s essay “Mathification,” which comments on Being and Event. My reading
demonstrates that Contingent Computation furnishes materials for a theory of “computational subjectivity” which is a mode of subjectivity particular to computational processes. Fazi’s computational subjectivity, I argue, resides within the logical and formal structures of cognition, but cannot be represented in perceptible or positivistic forms.
Conference Presentations
Cultural & Political Criticism
See here for abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1js6UBst0wT2lqq5qrEWemebibZNQlv7dbUijSQryhlM/edit?usp=sharing
Offering Deleuzean novelty as a theorization of “anomaly,” I argue that the cultural phenomenon of live-coded music exemplifies the computational production of anomaly. Live-coding musicians improvise by writing source code which instantaneously plays out loud. I examine live-coding programs to propose that the anomalous emerges at the interface of software and musician for the duration of live-coding performances. I also draw from Henri Bergson’s work on creative processes, which emphasizes improvisation and immediacy, to attest to the salience of live-coded music as a study in digital anomaly.
A coda situates my arguments politically. I reflect on notions that digital capitalism secures its hegemony by means of algorithmic homogenization and statistical prediction, and proceeds as an unfolding of similitude. The anomalous, I claim, defies and subverts this normative political program.
the immanence of thought and sensation.” Fazi’s aesthetics-as-sensory-knowledge is not concerned with artworks made by computers, but rather with computation as a means of rendering the sensible world intelligible. As she writes, “the computational aesthetics that I have proposed is, in essence, a philosophical study of what computation is and does.”
Fazi primarily draws on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of aesthetics. As she notes, Deleuze’s aesthetics posits a relationship between creation, becoming, and sensory knowledge. In emphasizing process as fundamental to the nature of computation, and in affirming the immanence of thought
and sensation, Contingent Computation rests on Deleuzian aesthetic precepts. However, Fazi disputes one of Deleuze’s most significant contributions, which is that computation can produce neither “the new” nor “the real.” After explaining how Deleuze conceives “the new” and “the
real,” Fazi revisits the premises on which he denies computation these essential functions. More specifically, she reads Deleuzian aesthetics through Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of indeterminacy, Alan Turing’s notion of computational incomputability, and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. In so doing, she demonstrates that Deleuze offers a productive avenue towards an ontology of computation.
My paper suggests an avenue of departure from Fazi’s claims in Contingent Computation by examining the role of infinity in her overarching argument. I read Fazi’s treatment of computational infinity alongside philosopher Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and media theorist Alexander Galloway’s essay “Mathification,” which comments on Being and Event. My reading
demonstrates that Contingent Computation furnishes materials for a theory of “computational subjectivity” which is a mode of subjectivity particular to computational processes. Fazi’s computational subjectivity, I argue, resides within the logical and formal structures of cognition, but cannot be represented in perceptible or positivistic forms.
How psychedelics provide an “empirical refutation of digital positivism”
Whether consciousness exists on a spectrum from ‘less to more’
What data capitalism is, what psychopower is, and how this new paradigm might impact consciousness