Browsing by Subject "Computational Media"

Digital platforms play an increasingly prevalent role in 21st century capitalism. They shape our search results, facilitate our communication habits, structure our workdays, reinforce our communities, and increasingly impact cultural life in ways that extend beyond mere communications. Their interfaces influence decisions about what films to watch, their algorithms recommend what songs and podcasts we enjoy, and their agreements with distributors frequently determine even the most basic access to digital media today. The current largest music streaming service in the world, Spotify plays an important role in cultural life today, asserting itself as a networked intermediary between users, advertisers, and the music industry in an effort to capitalize on the infrastructural aspects of cultural access through ad-supported and subscription- based music streaming options.

This thesis explores what Anne Helmond has called the “platformization” of digital media, with a specific focus on the Swedish music platform Spotify. Building on Jeremy Wade Morris’ notion of the “digital music commodity,” I argue that Spotify’s efforts to situate digital music within their own software system align with recent trends in the technical and intermediary structures known as platforms. The stack, the software scaffolding present beneath nearly all of today’s major platforms, offers a useful lens into discussions of such software intermediaries at scale, providing insight. into the material basis that platforms rely on in daily operation. Each chapter focuses on a single aspect of the organizing logic of Spotify, tracing the broad superstructure of the platform to its source in software tools. Across chapters on machine listening, recommendation algorithms, and digital platforms in totality, the work stresses the ways platforms have become “a new business model capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data” with the rise of these large, economy-shaping intermediaries.

Today, humans must rely on technical operations that exceed their perceptual threshold and control. The increasingly complex and abstract, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between the psychic and social realms, as well as the local and global scales. Jameson’s attentiveness to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations is still helpful for us to map the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers – where its differential impacts are felt and negotiated strongly.

This dialectical move, unifying and differentiating at once, is crucial for my project of situating the Middle East within the imperial operations of global capital, thereby overcoming its peripherical reading. In contrast to the post-oil spectacles of the Arabian Gulf, such as Dubai, I look at the war-torn and toxic cities that are spreading in the rest of the region, such as Beirut, due to the violent operations of militarized states as well as the ever-growing economic and ecological deterioration. Hence, these cities constitute two sides of the same coin, bounded by more extensive structures of wealth accumulation and class formation in the region underlying the dominance of the Gulf and US imperialism. Consequently, we can unpack the spatial-temporal reconfigurations of global capital from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, militarism, logistics, and computation.

Expanding on Jonathan Beller’s idea of computational capital, I argue that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus within the matrix of racial capitalism. In other words, computational media are operationalized within a capitalist society that preys on the continuous reproduction of imperial divisions, techniques, institutions, and rights while obscuring their historicity. Thus, we need to bring back the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions (labor) to ethico-legal systems (law). Consequently, Jameson’s cognitive mapping needs to be reconfigured not only due to the shifts in the granularity and scale of capitalist extraction but also due its embeddedness within the histories of modern thought and colonialism.

My aim is to revive the utopian project of envisioning alternatives to capitalism while reformulating the image of historicity and globality today. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms, intervening in the economic, legal, and symbolic systems that animate computational media in the Middle Eastern context, ranging from smart weapons to smart cities. My analyses show that artistic practice could allow us some insights about the economic and social structures that govern our immediate and situated experience, whereas media studies could help us to navigate through the convoluted cartographies of computational capital today.

As my project demonstrates, there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space. Those urban struggles will persist, always exceeding the bounds of our theories. My project affirms an aesthetic that does not exist yet, not because it is impossible but, rather, it cannot be encapsulated in a formula since it is always already in the process of making on the streets.