[spectre] New podcast: Matthew Fuller talks about sleep, procedural imperialism, big data and post-humanity

[Radio Web MACBA]

*New podcast: Matthew Fuller talks about sleep, procedural imperialism, big
data, post-humanity, and what he calls “denial of service attacks on
people’s brains”. *
Link: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/matthew-fuller-main/capsula
<http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/matthew-fuller-main/capsula>

Matthew Fuller is an author and Professor of Digital Media at the Centre
for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London. He works in the fields of
media theory, software studies, critical theory, and contemporary fiction.

In this podcast, Fuller begins with a detailed analysis of the notion of
scale, not only in an abstract sense, but as a doorway into pressing issues
regarding ethics, ecology, technology and post-human practices. Following
Fuller’s reasoning, the very idea of scale becomes a fundamentally
political question in a context characterized by profound environmental
damage. As such, it is a crucial tool to measure and understand the world
around us, and to rethink it and our impact on the medium we inhabit. This
subtle shift of the collective point of view is in a sense the backbone of
Fuller’s case, also in the case of his recent work around sleep: “People
are conscious in different kinds of ways, at different levels, when they
are asleep; but they are also not the classical human subject. So for a
third of our life we are not the classical human subject. And this maybe
provides a possibility for rethinking the human”.


'The degree of dullness that is possible with PowerPoint, the degree of
obfuscation, the degree of ugliness and structured incapacity to think, the
systematic moronisation of people through PowerPoint is remarkable and it’s
probably one of the greatest human achievements, to some extent. (...)
Things that well were well intended have unforeseen consequences. But those
unforeseen consequences are then taken up and entrenched as large-scale
social formations. And we don’t yet have the ability to see those. We can
see PowerPoint as malware, but we can also see games that are
systematically designed to occupy people’s attention. So for instance Clash
of Clans, and other games that preceded it, like FarmVille, are
deliberately designed using behavioural psychology to constantly prod
people, constantly nag at people, constantly demand attention in ways that
incorporate the user’s nervous system into the substructure of the
game'. Matthew
Fuller <http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/matthew-fuller-main/capsula>


E/N/J/O/Y!
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