I want to apologize for the hyper-mediated nature of this presentation. Unfortunately I have to attend to an urgent family matter and thus have to be on the other side of the country. I am thankful to Robert for being accomodating and allowing me to present this recording. I know that this is certainly not ideal, and I hope that you will forgive the strangeness of the situation. But given the focus of a number of talks at SLSA, I somehow see this as being somewhat appropriate.

Now that I've dispensed with the preliminaries, let me get on to the talk. My presentation will discuss a recent project of mine called MAICgregator that explores the relationship between universities, the military, and corporate actors. As such, I will go through some of the recent issues in this area, and concerns raised as a result of the so-called financial "crisis". Then I will talk about what I am provisionally calling "alter-data mining", a play on words that references the alter-globalization movement. This will lead into some remarks on Firefox extensions, and how they play with the materiality of the web. And finally I'll go through the MAICgregator project itself, my own activity in this area, and what some of my concerns are about it.

MAICgregator exists as one attempt—of many—to counter the hegemony of the present-day University. It is well-known that former US President Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address to the nation, wanted to speak not only of the military-industrial complex that became the renowned phrase that it is, but rather of the military-academic-industrial complex, this according to Henry Giroux. (The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007), Henry Giroux, pp 13-15), what I am here reducing to the acronym MAIC. Former US Senator J. William Fulbright spoke publicly of the same thing in 1968. As you visit US college and university campuses today, you easily see the extent of the military-academic-industrial complex. Companies and academia are big business, and while the “end” of the cold war took away the spotlight from the relationship between academic and the military, “defense” monies easily find their way into the university and out again to defense contractors. Corporations fund endowed professorships, schools outsource fundamental operations such as their bookstore to corporations like Barnes and Noble, and universities offer advertising space on brand-new plasma screens installed in said bookstores. Ads for everything from spring break vacations in Mexico to jobs at Lockheed Martin plaster the walls of today’s campuses.

Now, why is this so worrysome, some might ask? I think we see part of the reasons why in light of the present-day consternation over university budgets. The precipitous fall in university endowments is linked not only to the contemporaneous use of business models in the governance of universities, but also on the transplantation of corporate fund managers to highly-paid positions in the university hierarchy. This is an invasive transplantation, as fund managers more accustomed to the risk profiles of hedge funds are ill-equipped to managing much more conservative portfolios such as those of a university, an institution that is predicated on continued existence without the possibility of being “sold” or “broken up” in any type of “bankruptcy” proceedings. Indeed, it has been reported that Harvard University’s endowment was, at one point recently, leveraged 105 percent …meaning that it had invested more than it actually had on hand. While this may be a common tactic of those who come from a corporate finance background, it becomes downright distasteful in the context of an institution such as a university that operates on a vastly different temporality. Yet the University jumped on the bandwagon of hedge funds, real estate speculation, and investment in private equity, enticed by the thought of big returns. However, as soon as the investments went down, the endowments tanked as well.

If we start to unpack this a bit more we find real problems in "transparency" and "shared-governance". While the day-to-day functioning of the University in the United States is vested in the offices of the President, Provost, and various Vice-Presidents, the overall strategic direction is governed by a Board of Trustees or, in the case of public universities, Regents. Private colleges and universities are actually chartered as non-profit corporations and, as such, legally require these Boards in order to exist. These Boards function quite similarly to their counterparts in the corporate world, the Board of Directors: trustees have final say on all tenure decisions, they set fund-raising goals, decide on capital projects, and help set the direction of endowment investment. Thus, they are also implicated in the horrible decline in endowment monies experienced by many schools in the last year. However, their activities and deliberations are done almost entirely in secret: while there is a token movement towards transparency in the convening of public “forums” during regular trustee meetings, most proceedings are done behind closed doors. Such lack of transparency has been one of the most prominent issues raised by the recent protesters at NYU and the New School. In fact, in my understanding this was the main reason for the walkout in the University of California system a couple of weeks ago; while much of the anger was directed against the cuts being made the furloughs being mandated, what really upset the faculty was the reneging on promises of shared governance.

Indeed, the links between schools, corporations, governments, military activities around the world become rather frightening once you start putting it all together—which is of course why there is a lack of transparency in the first place. Let me suggest two examples from my home institution. First story: Recently Cornell inaugurated a new engineering building named Duffield Hall named for alumnus David Duffield after a gift of millions of dollars. Duffield is also the founder of PeopleSoft. Shortly after Duffield Hall was completed, Cornell completed a transition of all of its support software to...PeopleSoft, widely hated by staff, faculty, and students alike. It is impossible to verify a link between these two strands, but the silence on the issue has been deafening. Second story: Cornell University has received gifts from former Citigroup CEO and chairman Sanford I. Weill totalling in the hundreds of millions of dollars for its medical school in New York City. Citigroup, through its subsidiary Citibank, has additionally been involved in providing loans to a rebel group in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) associated with the brutal civil war in which millions have been killed that is additionally funded in part through the sale of coltan , a mineral that eventually is transformed for use in high-performance tantalum capacitors like those used in modern electronic equipment. While each of these components are out there in the world, these links remain to be made...

Now of course there has been much resistance to these issues around the world. A lot of the concern comes from what in the EU is called the "Bologna Process" which can be seen as contributing to the privatization of education through Europe via a rhetoric of "standardization" that, many argue, will further increase the already precarious nature of youth. And there have been additional protests and demonstrations regarding this in areas outside of the global North. One of the best collectives that is exploring this issue is called "edu-factory"; they have a website and active mailing list that discusses these issues. Within the states is the counter-cartographies collective at the University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill; they have developed a number of pamphlets and other material that go into a lot of detail regarding the situation there. Throughout Europe, but especially in Italy is something called the Anomalous Wave that has organized demonstrations, occupations, and presentations; this image is from a protest in Bologna last fall.

Photo from here.

One of the things that I think we have to ask ourselves is this: Why all this consternation over the university? Why do so many people worry about it, fight for it, and so on? This may seem like a strange question, but it really is not. For universities have not always been known as places of radical thought; in Marxist terms they could be seen as places where you reproduce the means of production, the bourgeois classes. Indeed, Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber, in an introduction to an edited collection entitled "Constituent Imagination" that explores alternative forms of knowledge production within and outside the university, make the historical context of this assumption clear:

This is somewhat of a glib response, but I think it behooves us take it to heart. This is something that I cannot go into much depth here, but it comes from a longer work where I examine just why we put so much energy into worrying about the university. To do this I explore Jean-Francois Lyotard's quite well-known book The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge that was published in French thirty years ago this year. What we need to remember is that his text is less about the downfall of grand narratives, and rather about the modes of knowledge legitimation in universities, and how universities, corporations, and the state are intertwined within that practice. Yet we still need to understand better why we invest so much energy within an institution that is so embedded within capital, and to do this I think we need to examine our libidinal desires. And thus I turn to an even earlier work of Lyotard's, namely Libidinal Economy, published just after Deleuze and Guattari's Anti Oedipus, in order to explore how we need to conjoin the libidinal to our analysis of the political economy of universities. If you are interested in this strand of things, contact me and I can send you a paper-in-progress.

Chief Privacy Officer, AT&T

Glen Urban, Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan School of Management; Chairman, MIT Center for Digital Business: Ad Morphing: matching on line ads to individual cognitive style

Data mining as a term is a remarkable bit of rhetorical slippage or slight of hand. In the juxtaposition of two terms we see the elision of disparate meanings and the transference of concepts from one word to the other. “Mining” used to refer primarily to the material, the digging into the earth in order to extract something of value, something that was hidden on the surface but became seen only through the hard labor of others—immigrants or the poor—in order to be sold as raw commodities used in the production of further commodities in the chain. Iron, gold, diamonds, copper, tin, aluminum, coltan—these are things that are mined. They can be held in your hand or in the back of an enormous truck. Mining creates land disputes as “rights” are now bought and sold for the contents of that which cannot be seen, but which can be sensed through various forms of technologies that can “penetrate” the earth. Mining is the creation of gashes in the earth in order to further our appetite for other items in which the mined material does not “appear” at all. Mining is still a vital component of the world economy and can be especially harmful and contentious, as we have seen with coltan and as threatens to happen with lithium in Bolivia. Data, on the other hand, is perceived to be the most immaterial. It is the thing that can travel “instantaneously” from one place to another, that has no physical analog, that does not obey physical laws. Yet data is materiality at its most fundamental: it always already exists as magnetic bits on a platter, or the movement of electrical or optic pulses down a wire or fiber; it is subject to the same physical laws as everything else in the universe. Data’s meaning—other than in its form as abstraction—is always imposed from the outside; the bytes that make up a text file are meaningless without a lookup table that says the number “68” represents the letter “D” or the number “100” represents the letter “d” (and yes, case is important or “sensitive”). Can these mappings be “owned”? Can data become a commodity?

Of course these are questions that have obvious answers today, and it is partially due to the rhetorical power of a term such as “data mining”. The phrase itself thus brings the legal power of the owning of mining “rights” to immaterial “data”, creating a mongrel that at the same time diminishes and displaces the horrors of the continued physical mining that must take place in order to feed the machines needed for “data mining” itself. What a concept!

Nevertheless, we can consider an alternative form of data mining, one we might want to call alter-data mining, building on the use of the modifier "alter-" with regards to "alter-globalization". Taking into account all of the caveats that we have already mentioned, as well as the conceptual issues with data mining in and of itself, we might be able to turn data mining techniques on the powerful themselves, using the results to begin to form one alternative mapping of the situation, while in the process commenting on the role of data mining in society. Important here would be not simply present the results of data mining in a value-free manner but to focus on the slippages and places where data mining breaks down, as well as to present the results of the data mining in a non-rationalistic manner.

Now there have been a number of examples of these sorts of projects---things like Open Government Information Awareness, They Rule, the work of Bureau d'etudes, and RYBN. I don't go into the specifics of these works here, as you can follow the links from the MAICgregator website. But important to realize is the ways in which artists these days are manipulating the techniques of data mining and directing them at those in power.

Now, I want to turn to the use of Firefox extensions in this space, and focus on why I think they are an important tactical tool at the moment. Firefox extensions or add-ons are today present a relatively low-barrier entry into the development of web- and browser-based artistic projects. While I do not want to discount the level of programming knowledge necessary to build them, they are still based on a libre platform and can be developed within a rather large community of programmers, programmers whose own work is, by default, available for inspection and study. (What I mean here is that all of the source code for an extension is contained within the extension itself, making it easy to learn from the work of others.) This is in marked contrast to previous strands of net.art that might have valorized the use of Director, Shockwave, Flash, or Java, the first three being expensive, proprietary, and closed platforms, and the last being an open programming language, but one where the actual source code is often difficult to get to if it is not provided directly by the artist.

So over the past couple of years there have been a lot of projects that use the medium of the browser to interject other types of data into webpages. This is key, since Firefox extension development allows you, as the programmer, to re-write other web pages at will. And to do this without having to hack into other people's sites, or to be clever in how you redirect traffic to your site (I'm thinking here of the RTMark project involving George W. Bush's website for the 2000 presidential campaign). As well, the ease by which extensions can be installed makes them an ideal vector for the propagation of radical or alternative perspectives to those that are fixed on the web page itself. This is especially the case within the modern university, where schools carefully control what types of information make it to their front page or internal portals, or where students consume their news in computer-generated chunks via Google News, absent marginalized or alternative voices. Add-ons provide one way to break open this lock on web-based media, combining disparate sources together in a montage that is at once both serious and poetic.

Just to mention a few projects: