Fake news has been all the news lately. The anxiety around fake news is a symptom of a growing instability in our capacity to tell, discern, filter, share, and amplify that which we believe to be true, in the algorithmic state of information networks. Fake news is not so much about searching for the truth, as it is about figuring out the first principles through which claims of truth can be made. Beginning with the idea of information overload as our new default, this talk looks at the way in which our first order principles of truth claiming are being challenged, manipulated, and reformed by the algorithmic practices of computational networks. Drawing from digital cultures, software studies, network theory, feminist technologies, and humanist critique, this talk unpacks the transitions that engineer the new conditions of ‘faking it’ and potentials for possible hacks.

Speaker

Prof. Nishant Shah is a feminist, humanist, technologist working in digital cultures. He is the Vice-President Research at the ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands. where he is invested in thinking through infrastructure of art, culture, and design for building resilient and equitable futures. He is a Senior Research Fellow in Media Cultures of Computer Simulation at Leuphana University, Germany, working through questions of simulation and the new technosocial subjectivities that emerge thereof. He was the co-founder of the Centre for Internet & Society India, where the work on technological ordering he initiated continues to inform his current preoccupations. He is a knowledge partner with the development agency Hivos, The Netherlands, analyzing new practices of collective action. His work remains at the interlocked edges of the body, identity, digital technologies, policy, and activism. His current interest is in thinking through questions of ethics and inclusion within Artificial Intelligence systems.

Prof. Nishant Shah’s profile website: https://nishantshah.online

Moderator

Denise Tse-Shang Tang is an interdisciplinary ethnographer who began her career by studying the relationship between lesbian sexualities and social spaces in Chinese societies. She is the author of Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). She co-edited (with Alistair Fraser and Maggy Lee) “Crime, Media, Culture: Asia-style,” special issue of Crime, Media, Culture, and is one of the editors (with Stevi Jackson and Olivia Khoo) for the Palgrave MacMillan book series Gender, Sexualities and Culture in Asia.