Books by Nathaniel Tkacz
Advance praise for the book:
“The new age of performance is upon us. This remarkable Index will ... more Advance praise for the book:
“The new age of performance is upon us. This remarkable Index will help you see where it leads.”
Don Chaffer, CEO and consultant
“This work is based on single idea: there is no limit to performance. The rami cations of this idea are truly profound.”
Cynthia Liu, Senior Performance Advisor
“The authors of this important work have grasped something about the so-called
data revolution few others have. It is not about surveillance. It is about performance. Read it now!”
Larry Beam, Data Analyst
Website: www.IPK.solutions
Wikipedia and The Politics of Openness
Few virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and... more Few virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and carrying more than a whiff of Silicon Valley technical utopianism, openness—of decision-making, data, and organizational structure—is seen as the cure for many problems in politics and business.
But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice—and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness—including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through “forking”—play out in reality.
The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer.
Times Higher Education
“Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness is an important book. . . . At one level it is a fascinating inside look at the operations of Wikipedia – from someone who clearly knows and understands it from the inside. . . . At the next level, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness is a critique not just of Wikipedia but of the whole idea of openness – one of the sacred cows of the internet, something considered almost beyond criticism. . . . Tkacz challenges assumptions and forces you to question your own views, particularly about openness itself.”
Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
“This book will make people sit up and think in a new way about a timely set of issues. Tkacz’s argument is not predictable or one-dimensional. Instead, it is productive of new knowledge at each step. Each new layer of argument uncovers riches of detail, new bibliographies of current research, and surprising new directions of thought. His argument balances nicely between powerful general statements and compelling concrete demonstrations.”
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown University
“A crucial intervention in the field of new media studies. The book thinks rigorously about participation and collaboration as few others do. It is certain to generate much excitement, debate, and even controversy.”
Ned Rossiter, University of Western Sydney
“Highly original and delightfully written, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness is one of the finest pieces of work I have read in the field of network cultures and software studies. Tkacz has undertaken a comprehensive critique of openness—or open politics—as it manifests across a range of institutional and social-technical settings. This book has all the key ingredients to make a substantial impact in debates surrounding network governance and software politics.”
The MoneyLab Reader brings developments in crowdfunding, currency design, technologies of payment... more The MoneyLab Reader brings developments in crowdfunding, currency design, technologies of payment, and other economic experiments into dialogue. The authors of this volume discuss the implications of the current architecture of global finance, its impact on ever-growing income disparity, and question money and finance as such. It is not always clear, for instance, whether genuine alternatives are unfolding or if we are simply witnessing the creative extension of neoliberalism. At stake is the full spectrum of technologies of economic (re)distribution.
Contributors:
Irwan Abdalloh, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Robert van Boeschoten, Finn Brunton, Paolo Cirio, Jim Costanzo, Primavera De Filippi, Eduard de Jong, Irina Enache, Andrea Fumagalli, David Golumbia, Max Haiven, Keith Hart, Samer Hassan, Ralph Heidenreich, Stefan Heidenreich, Geert Lovink, Bill Maurer, Rachel O’Dwyer, Pekka Piironen, Lena Rethel, Renée Ridgway, Andrew Ross, Stephanie Rothenberg, Douglas Rushkoff, Saskia Sassen, Inge Ejbye Sørensen, Lana Swartz, Erin B. Taylor, Tiziana Terranova, Nathaniel Tkacz, Pablo Velasco González, Akseli Virtanen and Beat Weber.
Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of b... more Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of billion-dollar industries. The control of light forms the foundation of contemporary vision. Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies. Digital Light provides a critical account of the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital light-based technologies and techniques by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media. As digital light remediates multiple historical forms (photography, print, film, video, projection, paint), the collection draws from all of these histories, connecting them to the digital present and placing them in dialogue with one another.
Light is at once universal and deeply historical. The invention of mechanical media (including photography and cinematography) allied with changing print technologies (half-tone, lithography) helped structure the emerging electronic media of television and video, which in turn shaped the bitmap processing and raster display of digital visual media. Digital light is, as Stephen Jones points out in his contribution, an oxymoron: light is photons, particulate and discrete, and therefore always digital. But photons are also waveforms, subject to manipulation in myriad ways. From Fourier transforms to chip design, colour management to the translation of vector graphics into arithmetic displays, light is constantly disciplined to human purposes. In the form of fibre optics, light is now the infrastructure of all our media; in urban plazas and handheld devices, screens have become ubiquitous, and also standardised. This collection addresses how this occurred, what it means, and how artists, curators and engineers confront and challenge the constraints of increasingly normalised digital visual media.
While various art pieces and other content are considered throughout the collection, the focus is specifically on what such pieces suggest about the intersection of technique and technology. Including accounts by prominent artists and professionals, the collection emphasises the centrality of use and experimentation in the shaping of technological platforms. Indeed, a recurring theme is how techniques of previous media become technologies, inscribed in both digital software and hardware. Contributions include considerations of image-oriented software and file formats; screen technologies; projection and urban screen surfaces; histories of computer graphics, 2D and 3D image editing software, photography and cinematic art; and transformations of light-based art resulting from the distributed architectures of the internet and the logic of the database.
Digital Light brings together high profile figures in diverse but increasingly convergent fields, from academy award-winner and co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith to feminist philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu.
For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikiped... more For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s rapid rise, novel organization, and freely offered content have been marveled at and denounced by a host of commentators. Critical Point of View moves beyond unflagging praise, well-worn facts, and questions about its reliability and accuracy, to unveil the complex, messy, and controversial realities of a distributed knowledge platform.
The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). With an emphasis on theoretical reflection, cultural difference and indeed, critique, contributions to this collection ask: What values are embedded in Wikipedia’s software? On what basis are Wikipedia’s claims to neutrality made? How can Wikipedia give voice to those outside the Western tradition of Enlightenment, or even its own administrative hierarchies? Critical Point of View collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion.
Contributors: Amila Akdag Salah, Nicholas Carr, Shun-ling Chen, Florian Cramer, Morgan Currie, Edgar Enyedy, Andrew Famiglietti, Heather Ford, Mayo Fuster Morell, Cheng Gao, R. Stuart Geiger, Mark Graham, Gautam John, Dror Kamir, Peter B. Kaufman, Scott Kildall, Lawrence Liang, Patrick Lichty, Geert Lovink, Hans Varghese Mathews, Johanna Niesyto, Matheiu O’Neil, Dan O’Sullivan, Joseph Reagle, Andrea Scharnhorst, Alan Shapiro, Christian Stegbauer, Nathaniel Stern, Krzystztof Suchecki, Nathaniel Tkacz, Maja van der Velden.
Papers by Nathaniel Tkacz
A government department. A hospital. An early warning and disaster response centre. A university.... more A government department. A hospital. An early warning and disaster response centre. A university. An individual going about daily routines. A city council. A think tank. Over the past three years, I have witnessed the use of information dashboards across these different scenarios. Once the stuff of expert systems, information dashboards have become a regular
installment of organisational and, increasingly, personal life. I have been studying these dashboards as a way to think about data in use and especially as this relates to decision-making. Dashboards bring together and visualise different measures of data, typically on a single screen. There are many ways that this can be done, with a mixture of charts, maps, gauges and more bespoke techniques; and they can be used for different purposes, from quick ‘overviewing’, to regular monitoring or data analysis and exploration (Few, 2013). While dashboards
and dashboard-like displays have been used in some contexts for over 50 years, recently this use has greatly expanded.
“Open”, in: Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities
Open is a term used across an array of digital and networked projects and artifacts, from... more Open is a term used across an array of digital and networked projects and artifacts, from government data initiatives and online teaching materials to software code and digital publishing. While the term has been in use in the contexts of political theory (Popper, 1962a; 1962b), philosophy (Bergson, 1935) and general systems theory (Bertalanffy, 1960) for a long time, contemporary uses of openness are often indebted to the open source software practices of the 1990s and the distinct but related Free Software Movement which preceded it. In this context, open as ‘open source’ was understood as a particular mode of software development (cf. Raymond, 2000) underpinned by ‘permissive’ intellectual property licenses. This legal framework ensured access to the human readable ‘source code’ of a program, thereby allowing anyone to contribute to a software project or to start a new project based on the pre-existing code. Transformations that took place on the web from the early 2000s onwards – variously described as increased participation, collaboration, the flattening of hierarchies, sharing culture, meritocracy, user-generated content, produsage, crowdsourcing, or commons-based peer production – either drew inspiration from the practices of open source software or were retrospectively likened to it, and this has led to a proliferation things described as open. Openness now simultaneously works across legal, technical, organizational, economic, and political registers. It is a core guiding principle of several of the most powerful players on the web (including Google and Facebook) and is increasingly taken up by governments to describe their modus operandi in a world transformed by digital networks. The Digital Humanities, which is here one domain among others, is no different. This from the Digital Humanities Manifesto (2008): “the digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.”
I like challenging authority.
The warm and fuzzy rhetorics of network cultures–words like collaboration, participation and open... more The warm and fuzzy rhetorics of network cultures–words like collaboration, participation and open communities–have always been made possible through acts of analytic metonymy. Once an ‘open community’ has been established, to take an example, deviations are all too often depicted as one-off exceptions, as problematic individuals bent on destroying the common spaces and creations of the well-meaning many. The figure of the troll and its modus operandi of ‘flaming’ are exemplary in this regard. The act of naming someone a troll, not only reaffirms the general ‘good faith’ of the rest of the community, but also transforms antagonism into a mere character flaw. In this article, I suggest the notion of the frame, read primarily through
Bateson and Goffman, can be translated into online spaces in order to make visible the structural conditions that underpin forms of online antagonism. Drawing from “article deletion” discussions in Wikipedia, I show how the ascription of negative subjectivities–trolls, vandals, fundamentalists etc.– is the result of an priori ‘frame politics’.
Keeping an eye on the dashboard
The Rise and Rise of Open Politics
Notions of openness are increasingly visible in a great number of political developments, from ac... more Notions of openness are increasingly visible in a great number of political developments, from activist groups, software projects, political writings and the institutions of government. And yet, there has been very little reflection on what openness means, how it functions, or how seemingly radically different groups can all claim it as their own. Openness, it seems, is beyond disagreement and beyond scrutiny. This article considers the recent proliferation of openness as a political concept. By tracing this (re)emergence of 'the open' through software cultures in the 1980s and more recently in network cultures, it shows how contemporary political openness functions in relation to a new set of concepts -collaboration, participation and transparency -but also identifies important continuities with previous writings on the open, most notably in the work of Karl Popper and his intellectual ally Friedrich Hayek. By revisiting these prior works in relation to this second coming of the open, the article suggests that there is a critical flaw in how openness functions in relation to politics, beginning with the question: How is that new movements championing openness have emerged within a supposedly already-open society?
The Spanish Fork: Wikipedia's ad-fuelled mutiny
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all... more Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge, brought to you by Coca-Cola. Imagine a Wikipedia with Larry Sanger calling the shots as chief editor, with a dot-com domain and overseen by a commercial enterprise instead of a foundation. In 2002, Wikipedia could have gone in many directions, including one such as this. Many features that define today's Wikipedia had to be fought for, and by people mostly overlooked in Wikipedia's mythology.
In Defence of ANT - A Reply to Johan Söderberg
Working together to produce socio-technological objects, based on emergent platforms of economic ... more Working together to produce socio-technological objects, based on emergent platforms of economic production, is of great importance in the task of political transformation and the creation of new subjectivities. Increasingly, “collaboration” has become a veritable buzzword used to describe the human associations that create such new media objects. In the language of “Web 2.0”, “participatory culture”, “user-generated content”, “peer production” and the “produser”, first and foremost we are all collaborators. In this paper I investigate recent literature that stresses the collaborative nature of Web 2.0, and in particular, works that address the nascent processes of peer production. I contend that this material positions such projects as what Chantal Mouffe has described as the “post-political”; a fictitious space far divorced from the clamour of the everyday. I analyse one Wikipedia entry to demonstrate the distance between this post-political discourse of collaboration and the realities it describes, and finish by arguing for a more politicised notion of collaboration.
SOUTHERN REVIEW-ADELAIDE-, Jan 1, 2007
The Exploit: A Theory of Networks [Book Review]
Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions [Book Review]
Media International Australia, Incorporating …, Jan 1, 2008
Page 1. ©2008 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 7589, 2008 75 Leonardo Reviews LEONARDO REVIEW... more Page 1. ©2008 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 7589, 2008 75 Leonardo Reviews LEONARDO REVIEWS Editor-in-Chief: Michael Punt Managing Editor: Bryony Dalefield Associate Editor: Robert Pepperell A full selection ...
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Books by Nathaniel Tkacz
“The new age of performance is upon us. This remarkable Index will help you see where it leads.”
Don Chaffer, CEO and consultant
“This work is based on single idea: there is no limit to performance. The rami cations of this idea are truly profound.”
Cynthia Liu, Senior Performance Advisor
“The authors of this important work have grasped something about the so-called
data revolution few others have. It is not about surveillance. It is about performance. Read it now!”
Larry Beam, Data Analyst
Website: www.IPK.solutions
But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice—and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness—including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through “forking”—play out in reality.
The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer.
Times Higher Education
“Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness is an important book. . . . At one level it is a fascinating inside look at the operations of Wikipedia – from someone who clearly knows and understands it from the inside. . . . At the next level, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness is a critique not just of Wikipedia but of the whole idea of openness – one of the sacred cows of the internet, something considered almost beyond criticism. . . . Tkacz challenges assumptions and forces you to question your own views, particularly about openness itself.”
Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
“This book will make people sit up and think in a new way about a timely set of issues. Tkacz’s argument is not predictable or one-dimensional. Instead, it is productive of new knowledge at each step. Each new layer of argument uncovers riches of detail, new bibliographies of current research, and surprising new directions of thought. His argument balances nicely between powerful general statements and compelling concrete demonstrations.”
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown University
“A crucial intervention in the field of new media studies. The book thinks rigorously about participation and collaboration as few others do. It is certain to generate much excitement, debate, and even controversy.”
Ned Rossiter, University of Western Sydney
“Highly original and delightfully written, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness is one of the finest pieces of work I have read in the field of network cultures and software studies. Tkacz has undertaken a comprehensive critique of openness—or open politics—as it manifests across a range of institutional and social-technical settings. This book has all the key ingredients to make a substantial impact in debates surrounding network governance and software politics.”
Contributors:
Irwan Abdalloh, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Robert van Boeschoten, Finn Brunton, Paolo Cirio, Jim Costanzo, Primavera De Filippi, Eduard de Jong, Irina Enache, Andrea Fumagalli, David Golumbia, Max Haiven, Keith Hart, Samer Hassan, Ralph Heidenreich, Stefan Heidenreich, Geert Lovink, Bill Maurer, Rachel O’Dwyer, Pekka Piironen, Lena Rethel, Renée Ridgway, Andrew Ross, Stephanie Rothenberg, Douglas Rushkoff, Saskia Sassen, Inge Ejbye Sørensen, Lana Swartz, Erin B. Taylor, Tiziana Terranova, Nathaniel Tkacz, Pablo Velasco González, Akseli Virtanen and Beat Weber.
Light is at once universal and deeply historical. The invention of mechanical media (including photography and cinematography) allied with changing print technologies (half-tone, lithography) helped structure the emerging electronic media of television and video, which in turn shaped the bitmap processing and raster display of digital visual media. Digital light is, as Stephen Jones points out in his contribution, an oxymoron: light is photons, particulate and discrete, and therefore always digital. But photons are also waveforms, subject to manipulation in myriad ways. From Fourier transforms to chip design, colour management to the translation of vector graphics into arithmetic displays, light is constantly disciplined to human purposes. In the form of fibre optics, light is now the infrastructure of all our media; in urban plazas and handheld devices, screens have become ubiquitous, and also standardised. This collection addresses how this occurred, what it means, and how artists, curators and engineers confront and challenge the constraints of increasingly normalised digital visual media.
While various art pieces and other content are considered throughout the collection, the focus is specifically on what such pieces suggest about the intersection of technique and technology. Including accounts by prominent artists and professionals, the collection emphasises the centrality of use and experimentation in the shaping of technological platforms. Indeed, a recurring theme is how techniques of previous media become technologies, inscribed in both digital software and hardware. Contributions include considerations of image-oriented software and file formats; screen technologies; projection and urban screen surfaces; histories of computer graphics, 2D and 3D image editing software, photography and cinematic art; and transformations of light-based art resulting from the distributed architectures of the internet and the logic of the database.
Digital Light brings together high profile figures in diverse but increasingly convergent fields, from academy award-winner and co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith to feminist philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu.
The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). With an emphasis on theoretical reflection, cultural difference and indeed, critique, contributions to this collection ask: What values are embedded in Wikipedia’s software? On what basis are Wikipedia’s claims to neutrality made? How can Wikipedia give voice to those outside the Western tradition of Enlightenment, or even its own administrative hierarchies? Critical Point of View collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion.
Contributors: Amila Akdag Salah, Nicholas Carr, Shun-ling Chen, Florian Cramer, Morgan Currie, Edgar Enyedy, Andrew Famiglietti, Heather Ford, Mayo Fuster Morell, Cheng Gao, R. Stuart Geiger, Mark Graham, Gautam John, Dror Kamir, Peter B. Kaufman, Scott Kildall, Lawrence Liang, Patrick Lichty, Geert Lovink, Hans Varghese Mathews, Johanna Niesyto, Matheiu O’Neil, Dan O’Sullivan, Joseph Reagle, Andrea Scharnhorst, Alan Shapiro, Christian Stegbauer, Nathaniel Stern, Krzystztof Suchecki, Nathaniel Tkacz, Maja van der Velden.
Papers by Nathaniel Tkacz
installment of organisational and, increasingly, personal life. I have been studying these dashboards as a way to think about data in use and especially as this relates to decision-making. Dashboards bring together and visualise different measures of data, typically on a single screen. There are many ways that this can be done, with a mixture of charts, maps, gauges and more bespoke techniques; and they can be used for different purposes, from quick ‘overviewing’, to regular monitoring or data analysis and exploration (Few, 2013). While dashboards
and dashboard-like displays have been used in some contexts for over 50 years, recently this use has greatly expanded.
Bateson and Goffman, can be translated into online spaces in order to make visible the structural conditions that underpin forms of online antagonism. Drawing from “article deletion” discussions in Wikipedia, I show how the ascription of negative subjectivities–trolls, vandals, fundamentalists etc.– is the result of an priori ‘frame politics’.