How data and artificial intelligence create a new, abstract digital subject

Ideal Subjects examines how samples of our lives and daily behaviors have come to reside in the world of data and artificial intelligence—and what this means for who we are and what we may become. Detailing how AI-facilitated algorithmic prediction and data modeling make “ideal subjects” of us, Olga Goriunova explores the complex ways we relate to these digital abstractions.

As more and more of our experience is funneled through computational records and models, datafied aspects of our lives are segmented and reconfigured to operate as new entities. Rather than viewing these abstract assemblages as extensions of our selves, Goriunova encourages us to consider these products of computational processes as an entirely new kind of subject, one that is both more and less than a human.

Through close readings of contemporary digital practices and data analytics, Goriunova exposes the profound ethical, aesthetic, and political implications of producing and managing these new digital subjects. Highlighting the distinctive impact of computation on contemporary subject formation while placing the present within a history of shifting conceptions of the subject, she gives us much-needed tools for understanding how our intimate selves are rendered by the abstract entities of big data. Ideal Subjects presents an uncanny and deeply fascinating portrait of modern subjectivity in the technological age.

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Tracing the cultural history of play—from Fluxus to SimCity

Games and gamified activities have become ubiquitous in many adults’ lives, and play is widely valued for fostering creativity, community, growth, and empathy. But how did we come to our current understanding of what it means to play? The Impossible Reversal charts the transformation of notions of playfulness beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, when a legion of artists, academics, and engineers developed new ways of theorizing, structuring, and designing ludic activity.

Through examples ranging from experimental Fluxus games to corporate role-playing exercises and from the Easy Bake Oven to Tetris, The Impossible Reversal presents four styles of playfulness characteristic of the “era of designed play”: the impossible reversal, which puts a player in a seemingly hopeless scenario they must upend with a tiny gesture; expending the secret, which involves silly rules that gain an obscure power and require players to embrace failure; simulated freedom, a satiric criticism of the ordinary world; and oblique repetition, a way of playing that stumbles toward unimaginable outcomes through simple, meaningless, and endlessly iterated acts.

A unique genealogical account of play as both concept and practice, The Impossible Reversal illuminates how playfulness became essential for understanding cultural, technical, and economic production in the United States.

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Revealing the unheralded contributions of women of color to the foundation and development of the digital economy

The Inattention Economy challenges the widespread myth that the internet was born from the labor of a handful of white male entrepreneurs, recovering the uncredited and unpaid contributions of women of color. Focusing on three key inflection points in computing—the microchip era of the 1960s and ’70s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, and A.I.-fueled virtual reality in the 2020s—Lisa Nakamura illuminates these women’s instrumental roles in building new technologies and making them coherent to users.

From the Navajo women who manufactured the first semiconductor circuits in New Mexico to Tila Tequila, the queer Vietnamese American refugee who became the first true internet influencer in the MySpace age, to Black virtual reality creators, Nakamura highlights how women’s gendered and racialized identities have uniquely positioned them to mediate the development and proliferation of new technologies. She exposes how these women have been structurally excluded from racial capitalism’s benefits while their labor is considered as exploitable and inexhaustible as that of machines. Confronting this injustice, she focuses our attention on their work, which undergirds and makes possible the platforms ingrained in our daily lives.

Arguing for both recognition and material compensation for these women’s labor, The Inattention Economy is a powerful counterhistory of Silicon Valley and a persuasive call to imagine a different kind of internet.

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Uncovering race, gender, and sexual biases in popular self-publishing platforms

The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, E. L. James, Scarlett St. Clair, and many more. Such stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Wattpad, Webtoon, Radish, Inkitt, Qidian, Tapas, and Swoon Reads. However, as Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures.

At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often White, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Combining original interviews, walkthrough method, metadata analysis, and more, Parnell finds that self-publishing platforms reproduce challenges for authors from marginalized communities. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors.

When someone faces a difficult intellectual freedom (IF) issue, they usually don’t have time to wade through dense text to find the answers they need. Designed as a real-world reference, OIF’s Intellectual Freedom Manual provides trusted, comprehensive guidance for every library worker, from the volunteer to the director, in plain language. Whether you’re developing or reviewing policies, on-boarding new staff or trustees, responding to challenges and controversies, or studying librarianship, you’ll find this a vital tool, with features such as

• contributions that center the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQIA+ people, who are often targeted by censorship efforts;
• chapters that begin with an overview explaining the big ideas and offering reflection questions;
• an introduction to IF and why it matters, drawing on ALA's core IF documents and supported with adaptable policy worksheets;
• information and best practice guidance on key topics such as access, children and youth, censorship and internet filtering, collection development and management, copyright, meeting rooms and exhibit spaces, library programming, politics and religion, privacy, and visits and requests from law enforcement;
• stories from real people whose lives have been impacted by IF, showing how library policies shape culture, protect staff and users, and affect real people;
• concise breakdowns of IF issues from legal experts, helping you understand the laws and how they apply in real situations;
• practical advice on advocating for IF, getting help when challenges arise, lobbying, and working with your elected officials;
• a thorough index to help you quickly find the information you need; and
• a helpful glossary and selected bibliography of additional resources.

A feminist perspective on the early history of personal computing, revealing how computers were integrated into the most intimate aspects of family life

 

The Intimate Life of Computers shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry.

Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applications directly responded to the companionate needs of their users as a way to ease growing pressures on home life.

The Intimate Life of Computers is a vital contribution to feminist media history, highlighting how the emergence of personal computing dovetailed with changing gender roles and other social and cultural shifts. Eschewing the emphasis on technologies and institutions typically foregrounded in personal-computer histories, Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture.

1. Motivation: In the ocean of mathematical definitions, theorems, and equations, why should we spend our time on this particular topic but not another?
2. Intuition: When going through the deviations, is there a geometric interpretation or physics beyond those equations?
3. Implication: After we have learned a topic, what new problems can we solve?