All around us, algorithmic systems are constantly minding and modeling us, creating data points that serve as technical proxies for human intentions and actions. Meanwhile, we are minding and modeling in return – sometimes making adjustments to use systems as intended, sometimes playing with or subverting them. Click farms, mouse jigglers, steering wheel weights and other tactics designed to trick systems reveal important tensions and opportunities.

This talk examines the how systems measure and organize attention and social and technical challenges this poses. Growing concern about the way digital technologies are transforming human attention and agency set the stage for a pressing conversation about the impact researchers, designers, and strategists can have.

Speaker

Nick Seaver is an associate professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program in Science, Technology & Society. His research examines the interface between computation and vernacular social concepts (like “taste,” “culture,” or “attention”). He is the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (2022), an ethnography of music recommender system developers. He co-edited Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and was formerly the co-chair of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. He is currently a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Future Flourishing Program.