User-Agent: If everything is so smooth, why am I so sad? [electronic resource].

Anastasia Kubrak 2018

Open access content

Today, any inhabitant of a city is treated as a computational User by default. Smooth interfaces and real-time feedback loops augment our urban experiences, making us feel empowered, while subjecting us to processes of profiling, quantification, optimization and isolation. However, the sense of comfort and personal freedom that is gained comes at the cost of political agency and autonomy. This book aims to investigate what it means to be a human User in today’s technological infrastructures. While it attempts to grasp and map out a complex structural issue, it also reflects on the impossibility of addressing the problem alone, from a singular vantage point or field of expertise. Drawing on interviews with practitioners, including policy researchers, UX designers, software developers, architects, journalists, artists, social activists and media theorists, it brings together new (and sometimes opposing) perspectives on the issue. What strategies can we employ to gain more agency? How can we become aware of our own position and be re-politicised? And what does it mean to create and distribute printed content in the age of ubiquitous computation? 11 interviews, accompanied by a short essay, represent one of the many possible constellations of disparate ideas, viewpoints and interdisciplinary strategies for contesting platform capitalism.
https://www.librarystack.org/user-agent-if-everything-is-so-smooth-why-am-i-so-sad/?ref=unknown

Algorithms
Cybernetics
Data mining
Design
Electronic surveillance
City planning
User interfaces (Computer systems)

Text

Anastasia Kubrak
Nicolay Boyadjiev
Benjamin Busch
Genevieve Costello
Lina Dencik
Cade Diehm
Lucia Dossin
Lídia Pereira
Rinie van Est
Sam Hart
Silvio Lorusso
Surya Mattu
Francis Tseng
Laura Schuster
Will Pollard
Nicoleta Pana
Rana Ghavami