Resisting Smartness

January 4, 2020 2:52 AM

Designing to Disrupt Alexa A cute way to mess with the panopticon.

Via Resisting Smartness.

A community-contributed resource considering the possibilities of resistance to surveillance-capitalism.

"How might individuals or communities resist surveillance, data capture, planned obsolescence, compulsory connectivity and productivity and other impositions of “surveillance capitalism”? At what scale, or what level of the “network stack,” might they meaningfully intervene? How might their subjectivities inform the politics -- and particularly the risks -- or their resistant action?"

posted by pompomtom (24 comments total)

So... the proposed product concept to counter the Amazon panopticon is to install another, opposing panopticon that equally listens and analyzes what you say? I'm not entirely sold on the idea.

Good thing that what Prendergast has done is only to 3D model some cute appliances for mock ads, because the amount of AI required to a) understand what you say at the same level as Alexa b) find via AI the "opposite" thing to tell Alexa is anything but trivial. A random sentence generator would be vastly simpler to implement, a white noise machine even more.
posted by sukeban at 4:19 AM on January 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

I sort of like the idea of the prosocial chatter (Blabber). It's interesting to imagine a world in which this became a level for positive social change - the idea that by elevating what appears in our social feeds, everyone's awareness and conscious would elevate as well. It's not unlike the actual effects of social immersion that determine why some societies, for instance, take better care of new parents and babies than others, or are horrified by gun culture. Change the water we swim in.
posted by Miko at 6:16 AM on January 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

Is it wrong of me to think the best way to avoid the panopticon (I so far as we’re able to without outsiders ramming us into its eye) is to just not buy into it?

You know, just not buy an Alexa?

Are we so envious of the metaphorical Jones that we have to have an Alexa everywhere?

On a side note, I’m pretty sure Siri “thinks” I’m all about doing things in five minute intervals, since I only use it to set timers during QA runs.
posted by drivingmenuts at 6:27 AM on January 4, 2020 [13 favorites]

There's a hidden Kurt Vonnegut novel in here somewhere.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 7:00 AM on January 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

You know, just not buy an Alexa?

FTFA: There is an inherent irony in this project, being that the best approach to defend oneself against privacy-infringing virtual assistants, is obviously not use one at all.
posted by solotoro at 7:31 AM on January 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

Just play Alexi instructional utube videos to Alexi and wait for a Möbius loop.
posted by clavdivs at 7:33 AM on January 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

Where time becomes a loop
Where time becomes a loop
Where time becomes a loop
Where time becomes a loop
Where time becomes a loop
Where time becomes a loop
Where time becomes a loop
Where time becomes a loop
posted by Thorzdad at 8:25 AM on January 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

I like this concept and would like to see if it can be used to disrupt Amazon's algorithm's generally, not just for the individual user. Basically to add more noise to cost Amazon more money sifting through it, and generally cheapening the value of their data.
posted by avalonian at 8:54 AM on January 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

There's a hidden Kurt Vonnegut novel in here somewhere.

Well now.

We've traded the privacy of the cave for the anonymity of the herd. They care less about who you are as an individual than your value as a product.

I believe "the" focus on the expiration date of your credit card, not whether your tastes are narrow or broad. Feeding them conflicting information probably results in getting more google-bang for your google-buck.

Time keeps on slipping into the future.
posted by mule98J at 9:45 AM on January 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

I feel like the subtext here is "become a design star and get a job with AMAZON for oodles of cash"
posted by Pembquist at 12:01 PM on January 4, 2020

Yeah, if anything here was actually effective, armored cars with cash would already been backing up to your front door because you’ve solved some billion dollar problems.
posted by sideshow at 12:19 PM on January 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I hope someone can tell me what is wrong with my thinking on this. It seems that the issue here is all about marketing. I ignore advertising as much as possible so I don't really care if Amazon wants to target me with advertising which I am going to ignore. I buy very little. Sure, privacy and all that, but privacy disappeared somewhere in the 90s (I'm a retired private investigator, I'm not just repeating something I heard). So why sweat it?
posted by charlesminus at 12:32 PM on January 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is the Alexi version of the facebook game of deliberately entering queries into a search engine to annoy your family members. For example if I search for mother of the bride dresses and flights to BC I can temporarily fill my daughters feed with a slew of ads for bridal products. If I search for high risk pregnancies and BC maternity leave policies I can fill it with ads for baby products. Whereas if I do a search on erectile difficulties my poor husband's feed gets flooded with ads for Viagra. Your parents might get quite cross if you search elder incontinence products but they won't know it's you. Two or three idle minutes can produce amusing results.

If I ever decided to become a terrorist I would certainly search for thriller novel writing support groups and how to find an agent and I would announce I had join NaNoMoWri and post about my daily page count, between trying to source backpacks and pressure cookers and searching for Hillary Clinton's home address. Diluting the data you give them is a kind of civic duty. With Alexi you don't even have to do the typing.
posted by Jane the Brown at 12:53 PM on January 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

Sure, privacy and all that, but privacy disappeared somewhere in the 90s (I'm a retired private investigator, I'm not just repeating something I heard). So why sweat it?

Woah wait has private investigating really stopped being a profession? What's replaced it, Facebook stalking?

OP thanks for the link to resisting smartness, I've been reading articles from there all day. This one is also really good:

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194
posted by subdee at 1:47 PM on January 4, 2020

This is... a type of performance art? Not sure that it contributes anything serious to the privacy discussions. Not to mention that the generic statements about Amazon's "algorithms" which these designs are supposed to "disrupt" tells me quite explicitly that the author has no understanding of the underlying technology or even attempted to understand it at any point. I might be biased as an insider to the voice AI development, but it's enough to search "how does Alexa work" to gain a quite accurate understanding of what happens when you talk to it. The paranoia that this piece is fueled by would be quite something, if it didn't seem just like an uninformed grad student's degree project designed to be "controversial".
posted by Ender's Friend at 2:22 PM on January 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

A phone which conveys an endless array of ads to people, follows them everywhere they go with a recorder, relentless tracking their every interest and behavior that it can and sending it away to anonymous agencies, which they twitchingly reach for compulsively throughout even a bus ride, for which they pay $$50? $$100? $$more? a month ... not counting the data plan ...

Remind me again about what is the smart part.
posted by Twang at 2:54 PM on January 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is... a type of performance art?

It's conceptual art.
posted by Miko at 3:10 PM on January 4, 2020

You know, just not buy an Alexa?

Sure, or a phone, or a computer, or a car. I'm a privacy/security nut, and I've got Alexae in most rooms in my house because the incremental decrease in my privacy isn't that great. I have lots of other microphones in net-connected devices, and I trust that anything major that goes wrong will be spotted by the infosec-paranoiac community. On the plus side, I've got shitty eyesight and having a voice interface to the Internet is pretty darn nice, and the number of incidental tasks like checking calendars, doing calculations/conversions, and checking simple facts is far more useful than you might think once there's a considerable cost to context switching on the screen device you're using.

I could be proved horribly, horribly wrong - but in most scenarios I can think of where this is the case, we'll have far bigger problems.

As for the original idea, I think we'd do a lot better jamming the system up by having browser extensions that just send out a stream of page requests to sites silently in the background of your session. Needs quite a lot of design to be plausible and hard to filter out, but it's an iterative war that I think we could win.
posted by Devonian at 3:15 PM on January 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

Along similar lines, but it's an actual product you can make yourself: Project Alias sends garbage to your smart speaker unless and until you speak a custom wake-phrase. (Mefi thread)

Still more art project than actual countermeasure, but at least it's an actual thing you can play with.
posted by chrominance at 4:49 PM on January 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is a wild guess, but the "feed random information to confuse algorithms" strategy might not work for big tech companies. Google can tell whether you're a robot by how your mouse moves on a page (that's what the "I'm not a robot" checkbox widget does). I'd guess they can tell "real" usage patterns from fake ones.
posted by Adamsmasher at 8:22 PM on January 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I use the local time & temp number for stores like CVS that require an account to get sale prices. Many other people use the number; it feels like we are a team of opters-out. Feel free to use 207-775-4321 as a signup number.
posted by theora55 at 5:42 AM on January 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is a wild guess, but the "feed random information to confuse algorithms" strategy might not work for big tech companies. Google can tell whether you're a robot by how your mouse moves on a page (that's what the "I'm not a robot" checkbox widget does).

Woah!
posted by subdee at 11:40 AM on January 5, 2020

Yeah, but what if the 'random' garbage you send is real people's requests filtered through an anonymiser and relayed through you? I can think of lots of problems with that, but it's a fun idea to kick around.

You can do an awful lot of interesting things on the Internet, which remains an open fabric. A dedicated bunch of algorittm jammers would have a lot to work with.
posted by Devonian at 1:22 PM on January 5, 2020

I ignore advertising as much as possible so I don't really care if Amazon wants to target me with advertising which I am going to ignore.

I get this (and I won't buy from Amazon anyway) but the issue with 'targeted marketing' is more that they're not just marketing sneakers any more. CF: US Election 2016, Brexit, UK Election 2019 etc.

I mean, obviously a disinformation campaign tailored specifically for my interests won't sway my vote, but those other people? Who knows?
posted by pompomtom at 8:01 PM on January 9, 2020