There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life
The entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power: how data and algorithms shape the world—and shape us within that world.

With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power that have produced an uncommon ground—a disaggregated public sphere where the extraction of behavioral data and their subsequent processing and sale have led to the emergence of micropublics of ever-finer granularity.

Shepard explores how these new post-truth territories are propagated through machine learning systems and social networks, which shape the public and private spaces of everyday life. He traces the balkanization and proliferation of online news and the targeted distribution of carefully crafted information through social media. He examines post-truth practices, showing how truth claims are embedded in techniques by which the world is observed, recorded, documented, and measured. Finally, he shows how these practices play out, at scales from the translocality of the home to the planetary reach of the COVID-19 pandemic—with stops along the way at an urban minimarket, an upscale neighborhood for the one percent, a Toronto waterfront district, and a national election.
"1140985507"
There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life
The entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power: how data and algorithms shape the world—and shape us within that world.

With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power that have produced an uncommon ground—a disaggregated public sphere where the extraction of behavioral data and their subsequent processing and sale have led to the emergence of micropublics of ever-finer granularity.

Shepard explores how these new post-truth territories are propagated through machine learning systems and social networks, which shape the public and private spaces of everyday life. He traces the balkanization and proliferation of online news and the targeted distribution of carefully crafted information through social media. He examines post-truth practices, showing how truth claims are embedded in techniques by which the world is observed, recorded, documented, and measured. Finally, he shows how these practices play out, at scales from the translocality of the home to the planetary reach of the COVID-19 pandemic—with stops along the way at an urban minimarket, an upscale neighborhood for the one percent, a Toronto waterfront district, and a national election.
27.95 In Stock
There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life

There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life

by Mark Shepard
There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life

There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life

by Mark Shepard

Hardcover

$27.95 
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Overview

The entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power: how data and algorithms shape the world—and shape us within that world.

With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power that have produced an uncommon ground—a disaggregated public sphere where the extraction of behavioral data and their subsequent processing and sale have led to the emergence of micropublics of ever-finer granularity.

Shepard explores how these new post-truth territories are propagated through machine learning systems and social networks, which shape the public and private spaces of everyday life. He traces the balkanization and proliferation of online news and the targeted distribution of carefully crafted information through social media. He examines post-truth practices, showing how truth claims are embedded in techniques by which the world is observed, recorded, documented, and measured. Finally, he shows how these practices play out, at scales from the translocality of the home to the planetary reach of the COVID-19 pandemic—with stops along the way at an urban minimarket, an upscale neighborhood for the one percent, a Toronto waterfront district, and a national election.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780262047470
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 11/22/2022
Pages: 280
Sales rank: 1,043,755
Product dimensions: 6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mark Shepard is Associate Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he directs the Media Arts and Architecture Program (MAAP) and the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies (CAST). He is the editor of Sentient City (MIT Press). His work has been exhibited at museums, galleries, and festivals internationally.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
I Practices
1 Alternative Facts 29
2 Ground Fictions 47
3 The Data Blasé 67
II Contexts
4 Artificial Cohabitants 85
5 Spurious Correlations 103
6 From Tools to Environments 121
7 Right to the (Wrong) City 137
8 The Ruse and the Exploit 159
9 Pandemic Exceptionalism 175
Coda 199
Acknowledgments 213
Notes 217
Bibliography 247
Index 267

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Compellingly argued and richly illustrated, Shepard recasts lying with statistics for the algorithmic age. Essential reading for anyone interested in how knowledge production is contextualized, corrupted, and used in pernicious ways.” 
—Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University, author of The Data Revolution.
 
“Internationally recognized as a media theorist and interdisciplinary artist, in his first book Mark Shepard brilliantly explores the way that contemporary algorithms shape discourse on the Internet and exposes the biases inherent to those algorithms.”
—Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab and co-founder of Architecture Urbanism Design Collaborative
 
“The compelling episodes and examples in There Are No Facts draw the contours of the post-truth landscape. Now is the time for Mark Shepard’s captivating book!”
—Molly Wright Steenson, Vice Provost for Faculty and Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape and co-editor of Bauhaus Futures

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