Russia

The real dangers of facial recognition: mass obedience and online labor exploitation

Facial recognition is a scam, but that doesn’t mean we should underestimate the threat it poses to freedom and fundamental human rights.

Case in point: Russian media MBKh discovered that Moscow police officers illegally “monetize” footage of 175,000 surveillance cameras on forums and messenger groups. For the equivalent of 470$, anyone can have access to facial recognition lookup services that, when provided with the picture of an individual, match it with passerby from hundreds of cameras, along with a list of addresses and times they were caught on camera. 

Interestingly enough, face recognition tech *does not work*, and the journalist has to grudgingly admit its low accuracy:

“As for the accuracy of the results, none of the photos returned were of the investigator. However, the facial features were similar to the input and the system assessed a similarity of 67%.”

According to the journalist, the explanation for this suboptimal performance is “the limited number of cameras connected to the face recognition algorithm”. Apparently, the sample is too small, but the technology is not fundamentally called into question…

Another explanation (often ignored by journalists, ever ready to believe the AI hype and therefore disregard its actual dangers) is introduced by a 2018 New York Times coverage of China’s surveillance-industrial complex: mass surveillance systems are not automated per se and are largely based on the intervention of crowds of micro-workers who cherry-pick millions of videos, cut out silhouettes of individual and tag metadata, fill in databases and annotate information:

“The system remains more of a digital patchwork than an all-seeing technological network. Many files still aren’t digitized, and others are on mismatched spreadsheets that can’t be easily reconciled. Systems that police hope will someday be powered by A.I. [emphasis added] are currently run by teams of people sorting through photos and data the old-fashioned way.”

“The old-fashioned way” here means “by hand”… Data annotation, triage, enrichment, especially for the computer vision models underlying face recognition algorithms, is a blossoming market. Recent research by Bonnie Nardi, Hamid Ekbia, Mary Gray, Sid Suri, Janine Berg, Six Silberman, Florian Schmidt, Trevor Paglen, Kate Crawford, Paola Tubaro and myself witnesses its development in sectors as diverse as home automation, transportation, advertising, health, entertainment… and the military. It is based on a workforce of hundreds of million of online laborers, alternatively called microworkers or crowdworkers. They work long hours, with precarious contracts and exploitative working conditions, and are paid very low wages (in some cases less than a cent per micro-task). Although they are attested in the global North, they are predominantly based in developing and emerging economies—such as Russia and China. But the companies that recruit them to package their annotated data and resell it as surveillance technologies, are mainly located in so-called liberal democracies. Despite the Chinese market supremacy, US, French, Japanese, Israeli and Finnish corporations are spreading these technologies all over the world, according to the 2019 AI Global Surveillance Index.

Despite the importance of these “humans in the loop” that constitute the secret ingredients of AI-based technological innovation, the threats of facial recognition, smart cities and predictive policing must not be minimized. The glorification of AI turns it into a powerful psychological deterrent and a disciplinary device. “The whole point,” explains an expert interviewed by the New York Times, “is that people don’t know if they’re being monitored, and that uncertainty makes them more obedient.”

Any action aimed to fight against the alleged omnipotence of these technologies begins with the recognition of their fictitious nature. If automated surveillance is made up of men and women who train, control and impersonate “artificial artificial intelligence“, it is from the awareness of their role in a dystopian and inhuman system that a change is going to come.

[Podcast] L’un de mes livres préférés (France Culture, 16 févr. 2019)

Dans le cadre de l’émission Les Matins du Samedi, j’étais l’invité de Natacha Triou pour son ségment L’Idée Culture. Chaque week-end, des invité.es parlent des lectures qui ont marqué leurs parcours intellectuel. Dans mon cas, la nouvelle Cor serpentis, de l’écrivain soviétique Ivan Efremov (1958) s’est avérée un moment-clé de mon rapport à la technologie, à la politique et à l’histoire.

La thèse principale d’Efremov est que pour voyager dans l’espace il faut être communistes, car la coopération sociale nécessaire à mettre en place les infrastructures nécessaires aux voyages interstellaires ne peut être atteinte que dans une société qui a dépassé les conflits de classe. Mais son imagination va même plus loin, puisqu’il affirme que tout voyageur intersidéral communiste ne peut qu’avoir une forme humaine harmonieuse. En fait, insiste-t-il, l’évolution de la société et celle de la physionomie vont de pair. Par conséquent, quand un vaisseau spatial guidé par des terriens croise un autre vaisseau, les extraterrestres ne pourront qu’être leurs semblables, autant sur le plan physique que sur le plan idéologique (Efremov préfère dire qu’ils ont atteint le même “niveau de progrès scientifique”). La rencontre sera alors parfaitement pacifique.

L’élément le plus intéressant de Cor Serpentis est la présence d’un “récit enchâssé”. Lorsque l’équipage du vaisseau terrien doit décider si approcher en paix ou attaquer l’autre vaisseau, ses membres se réunissent dans… la bibliothèque de leur astronef et lisent… un récit de SF américain du XXe sicle. Il s’agit de First contact de Murray Leinster (pseudonyme de William Fitzgerald Jenkins), dans lequel, lorsque deux vaisseaux spatiaux se croisent, le commandant étasunien décide de frapper en premier. Ceci pointe, d’après Efremov, les liens étroits entre capitalisme, compétition et agression impérialiste.

Petite curiosité : Murray Leinster, l’auteur américain critiqué par Efremov, a aussi écrit A logic named Joe (1946), récit qui préfigure une société où tout peut faire l’objet d’une recherche Google. Il est la pièce de résistance de l’introduction de mon livre “Liaisons numériques” (Seuil, 2010).

Snob.ru : distinction 2.0 ou inégalité en réseau ?

Au hasard de mes explorations en ligne, je découvre Snob.ru, service de réseautage pour “l’élite de la société russe”. Tout comme son homologue international asmallworld.net, ce site créé en 2008 permet à des personnes aisées d’afficher leurs goûts et leurs styles de vie distinctifs dans un cadre valorisant. Sponsorisé par le milliardaire Mikhaïl Prokhorov, le réseau a été souvent présenté dans la presse internationale comme un repaire de nouveaux beaufs, symptôme de la décadence anthropologique de la Russie de Putin.

Mais il est surtout une mine d’or pour tout chercheur travaillant sur les pratiques de consommation actuelles, et surtout une occasion unique pour mettre à jour certaines notions sociologiques, de la consommation ostentatoire de Veblen à la distinction de Bourdieu, de l‘élite du pouvoir de C. Wright-Mills au rôle de la violence symbolique chez Michel Pinçon et Monique Pinçon-Charlot.

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When you listen to Russian music, you are downloading anarchy (Sociological Songs Special)

Let’s try something different: a Sociological Songs Special, completely focusing on a single band. And the band is Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Гражданская Оборона, “Civil Defense” in Russian), a landmark USSR punk number from the 1980s [1]. Now I know what you think. But please, suspend your disbelief. The former Soviet Union had, despite repression, a flourishing punk scene. Just have a look at this picture gallery of retro-crested, mirror-shaded, pin-pierced vodka-drinking rockers. Then we’ll talk. And as we are talking, please also have a look at this impressive media archive, where you can download an incredible amount of original recordings, bootlegs, and pictures.

As legend has it, Grazhdanskaya Oborona was the mindchild of Yegor Letov (1964-2008), the self-styled “psychedelic” poet and musician from Omsk, Siberia. Letov always had a talent for controversy. Which might explain why he started his career as an anarchist under a communist regime and ended up, after the fall of the Berlin wall, founding the National Bolshevik Party, a right-wing/left-wing (?) political organization whose symbol is everything but unequivocal. But this is a story for another time…

Like for many other punk bands, Grazhdanskaya Oborona’s songs were a mix of hard rock, noise, ska (sometimes), and unbecoming lyrics. A good example is probably the ironical (and definitely NSFW) винтовка – это праздник (The rifle, what a party)

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Astroturf activism in Russia – a tribute to Oleg Kireev

We tend to think about the Web 2.0 as an enhancer for democracy and political participation. In this conference, activist and new media theorist Oleg Kireev explains how in Russia – as well as in other former Soviet nations – reactionary politicians and corporations have staged flash mobs with the cunning use of blogs and social networking services, notably Livejournal. That’s how grassroot internet activism turns into astroturf media manipulation. The conference was held on October 14th, 2006, in Graz (Austria), at the third edition of the Dictionary of War lectures.

Oleg Kireev committed suicide five days ago, on April 3rd, 2009.

olegkireev

Oleg Kireev in 2006