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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies
The Uncanny Swipe Drive: The Return Of A Racist Mode Of Algorithmic Thought On Dating Apps, Gregory Narr
The Uncanny Swipe Drive: The Return Of A Racist Mode Of Algorithmic Thought On Dating Apps, Gregory Narr
Publications and Research
As algorithmic media amplify longstanding social oppression, they also seek to colonize every last bit of sociality where that oppression could be resisted. Swipe apps constitute prototypical examples of this dynamic. By employing protocols that foster absent-minded engagement, they allow unconscious racial preferences to be expressed without troubling users’ perceptions of themselves as non-racist. These preferences are then measured by recommender systems that treat “attractiveness” as a zero-sum game, allocate affective flows according to the winners and losers of those games, and ultimately amplify the salience of race as a factor of success for finding intimacy. In thus priming users …
The Rhetorical Algorithm: Wikileaks And The Elliptical Secrets Of Donald J. Trump, Atilla Hallsby
The Rhetorical Algorithm: Wikileaks And The Elliptical Secrets Of Donald J. Trump, Atilla Hallsby
Secrecy and Society
Algorithms were a generative force behind many of the leaks and secrets that dominated the 2016 election season. Taking the form of the identity-anonymizing Tor software that protected the identity of leakers, mathematical protocols occupied a prominent place in the secrets generated during the presidential campaign. This essay suggests that the rhetorical trope of ellipsis offers an equally crucial, algorithmic formula for explaining the public production of these secrets and leaks. It then describes the 2016 DNC leak and Donald Trump’s “I love Wikileaks” moment using the trope of ellipsis, which marks a discursive omission or gap in official executive …