User:Angeliki/Reading notes

Simone, A. (2018) Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South

Notes and abstract from the chapter 1 The Uninhabitable

Abstract

It refers to an urban life that is improvised and impossible to police because of its impossibility to be repeated second time, there is no pattern easily recognisable. This is an uninhabitable world. The one is intervening in each others lives and there is a lot of information but no ways to solve it. Unemployed men waiting and women living in domestic spaces divided by walls which "are not just porous sieves of information but marks of complex geographies where bonds and cuts in webs of lateral relations are made".

Even improvised lives need a place to be held and supported. This book supports the practice of districting. Taken the example of black urbanisation and the work of Sun Ra exo-planetary efforts are made to be part of the center of the city. "For Sun Ra, then, districting referred to an incessantly inventive practice of operating in the discontinuities between having a location in which one is identified and from which one can identify and speak to others"

(Paths to be constantly crossed

changing paths constantly difficult to police (that is a form of resistance)

The people don't trust the big people behind the scenes and they know all of them.)

Notes

The non-repeatability is a form of resistance because it is impossible to police it.

Burgess, M. (no date) ‘This Algorithm Could Ruin Your Life’, Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/welfare-algorithms-discrimination/ (Accessed: 14 March 2023).

Some highlights

"Imane’s background and personal history meant the system ranked her as 'high risk.'"

"These include its machine learning model, training data, and user operation manuals. The disclosures provide an unprecedented view into the inner workings of a system that has been used to classify and rank tens of thousands of people. With this data, we were able to reconstruct Rotterdam’s welfare algorithm and see how it scores people"

"Experts who reviewed our findings expressed serious concerns that the system may have discriminated against people"

"More than 20,000 families [in Rotterdam] were wrongly accused of childcare benefit fraud after a machine learning system was used to try to spot wrongdoing"

"Each week, she meets with a group of mostly single mothers, many of whom have a Moroccan background, to talk, share food, and offer each other support. "

"De Rotte, the director of the city’s income department, says these changes include adding a “human dimension” to its welfare processes."

Notes

"The pattern of local and national governments turning to machine learning algorithms is being repeated around the world." This reminds me of the article about Voice Recognition Software to Screen Refugees https://gizmodo.com/experts-worry-as-germany-tests-voice-recognition-softwa-1793424680. The software's inaccuracy affected the lives of many asylum seekers. The governments were trying to replace completely the work of linguist experts with this algorithm.

The relationship of tech companies with governments in order to develop tools for public use is obscure to the public: "The system, which was originally developed by consulting firm Accenture before the city took over development in 2018, is trained on data collected by Rotterdam’s welfare department."

This lack of communication and coordination between tech and social workers: "The government auditor found there was “insufficient coordination” between the developers of the algorithms and city workers who use them, which could lead to ethical considerations being neglected."

Platforms like Facebook become spaces for v=creating groups of support: "Throughout her investigations, she has heard other people’s stories, turning to a Facebook support group set up for people having problems with the Netherlands’ welfare system."

Abstract

The article refers to internet cafes and it focuses on the case of Rotterdam. The internet cafes in this city undergo a seizure and extinction because of association with illegal actions, racist assumptions and cause of nuisance. But at the same time these places are social spaces for meeting/belonging and bridging the gap between online and analogue life for poor migrants who don't own personal computers.

Lialina expands her thinking about their windows design which keeps traces of the previous companies involved and thus showing the transformations of these places. The choice of name and style combines homeland and cyber aesthetics.

The accidental visibility of the infrastructure (computers and hardware layout mostly) through improvised manifestations brings users closer to the computers and their materiality. "It’s an important point because a visible computer is rapidly becoming an obsolete paradigm in our modern digital reality."

Though the digital illiteracy and inequality stops the 'opening' of the infrastructure, and thus the understanding and knowing of it, on the level of the software, where the knowledge of open and alternative options are limited. She concludes that making these places as education places where teenagers from lower class backgrounds can learn more about computers would support these spaces and make digital inequality less present in such independent spaces outside of the limits of schools.

Notes

Use of metaphors that gets outdated with the years. Cuber is an older term than internet. Clear divide between analogue and digital but more complex. Meeting between a café and cyberspace.

"It was social networking in a true sense". A network between very different users in different spaces and status. Internet cafes allowed lower class to have access to internet.

In the beginning they were still more limited spaces where somebody could find internet. "The first decade of the new millennium would introduce new scenarios involving access to the internet in public spaces."

" manga cafés to be found throughout Japan and South Korea, which combine internet access, comic books and TV."

"Private cubicles are also available to internet café users in Africa who use it for different purposes. (...) women browsing dating sites in search for potential white husbands"

"These kinds of stories – whether they’re nonfiction or fiction – where internet cafés turn out to be places from another world(...) These places seem at once forbidding and attractive."

Media art exhibition in 2010 called 'Speed Shows' introduced by Aram Bartholl, who rented all the computers of an internet cafe, brought the media art audience in such a place, for some of them for the first time.

The case of Rotterdam: closure stories

"Firstly, the city doesn’t have and never really had any “classic” internet cafés." Internet seems to be accessible in different places.

"Secondly, Rotterdam has a great number of belhuizen (call shops), which took over the internet café functions for an entirely different segment of the city’s population – a poor, less-educated one, with an immigrant background."

In 2006 “Leefmilieuverordening belhuizen” (Quality of Life regulations regarding call shops) regulations, were enacted by the city, regulating the opening of new call shops:

"The regulation is meant to fight against the increase in the numbers of call shops by preventing empty real estate from exploited as a call shop."

"The reasons for this new law include, among others: oversupply, tax evasion, and the disruption of the social order on the streets where belhuizen are located."

"“Dispersion”, a book by Columbian architect and urbanist Diego Barajas, which analysed the role that Rotterdam’s call shops played in the lives of Cape Verdean immigrants."

"new re-territorialisation where "“the territory of a Cape Verdean nation has been established in the urban dimension of Rotterdam … where a belhuis creates a new local, an artificial condition of home, and a new landscape of its own right.”""

The market changed and gentrification replaced the cafes with other type of stores.

At Zwaanhals: "Therefore, the landlords in the neighbourhood have a direct incentive for getting rid of these call shops if they want to attract better tenants."

Another reason for wanting them closed:

"The neighbourhood’s residents often demand their closure because of what happens in the street in front of these places (noise around the clock, etc.), which is deemed inappropriate for a residential neighbourhood." and drug dealing. A angry sign: "It is not allowed to call dealers or to deal in drugs and stolen things."

Bad reputation/ loitering

"Some of these closure stories, however, are much more sensational and involve violence (...) The suspicion was never confirmed, but this location will never shake off the stigma of having been a terrorist den." "Even without sensational arrests, common people seem to be convinced that belhuizen serve as hiding places for terrorists, explosives-manufacturing labs, or money laundering establishments for terrorist organisations. "

The start of bad reputation: "At the time, KPN had a monopoly in the telecommunications market. It was only in 1997, after the telecommunications market had been liberalised[18] that legal belhuizen began offering their services through other providers.(...) Yet the idea that they were shady businesses in this way or another remained and got firmly implanted in the public mind"

"But often the belhuis is linked to illegal activities"

But in fact the drug- and illegal migrant-related cases are rare, isolated cases.

loitering:

"The only recorded offenses associated with belhuizen mostly involve disturbing of the public order, in other words, teenagers hanging around."

"The image of teenagers loitering around on belhuizen doorsteps plays a significant role in the shaping of the negative image that are associated with call shops." ". They also make a lot of noise, they smoke and spit on the sidewalk, and get into fights. Disturbing the public order is the most common offense associated with call shops. It’s also the only offense that any of the café owners will admit to."

connection to crime: "But Seinpost also pointed out that call shops were not to blame for increases in crime in the neighbourhoods: They are influenced by their environment because they are mainly located in Rotterdam’s less safe neighbourhoods. However, their generally poor appearance contributes to a subjective perception of insecurity in these areas […] they are in close proximity to the fencing activities of stolen mobile phones and they play an enabling role in the drug dealing trade, and they sometimes function as gathering spots for nuisance-causing youths."

appearance/design

"no complaints have ever been filed regarding their appearance, and there are no regulations governing their design, unlike laws that regulate the appearance of (marijuana-serving) coffeeshops."

"The idea was that a coffeeshop with a more open and transparent character would reduce feelings of insecurity and degradation and that the activities inside would be easier to monitor"

Lialina compares their design with amateur 90s web design and describes it as "amateurish, or use a more ornate definition – typical of immigrant entrepreneurship". But this seems to be a harsh comment according to local designers who are professionals and also the aesthetics are not western, but this doesn't mean that they are amateur.

hodgepodge (συνονθύλευμα/ακαταστασία):

"This hodgepodge design strategy applies to call shop windows that combine shop banner, sponsors stickers, standard neon signs and improvised notices, which are often incorporated into leftover elements from the previous owner’s window designs." There is a whole design concept in architecture and graphic design that embraces the vernacular language and the purposefully leaving some traces from previous use untouched or making it part of the new design in order to maintain history and not erase it.

"in sharp contrast to the elegant and properly designed signs of many of Rotterdam’s other businesses, among which design is itself a major business sector (...) Call shops look decidedly more eclectic, more burdened by visual overload. "

choice of name:

name of homeland + telecommunications nature of their business "Moreover, when shop owners choose a name for their business and order their signs they seem to usually opt for combining their own name or that of their hometown or homeland (or that of their most regular customers) with some word that identifies the telecommunications nature of their business"

names based on: geographic locations, “cyber” connotations

windows design and rebranding / keeping the old:

"design of their windows and signs usually combines ethnic elements with “cyber” elements," This happens in the first decade of the new millennium.

"The redesign of the call shops has focused exclusively on their outward appearance, or more precisely, their windows"

"And, though the call shops, somewhat proud of the changes, describe the transformations as “franchising”, “branding” would be a more exact term. The operator has converted his belhuis window into advertising space, and the shop’s entrance now often resembles something like an exhibition stand:"

"They’re happy that a big corporation has taken them under its wing, even though the association doesn’t go much beyond the visual. They look new, clean, and professional rather than just some dusty corner shop."

"Lebara’s design is the most distinctive and colourful of the three — and also the biggest in terms of the amount of space its blue-themed design occupies and the size of its logos."

A Jamaican owner of one of the oldest call shops, the American Connection: "He just didn’t want the name of the operator to be in larger letters than the name of his call shop. "

Not online presence

"The internet cafés of the world have something else in common: They never have home pages or online offices" The clients don't have internet at home so their finding happens through other older means: "their phone number in the Yellow Pages, which is logical because their customers would only ever see their home pages when they’re already inside the café using one of their computers".

Url's "represent the idea of the internet for window decoration purposes." but they don't really exist.

Hand over the internet code

"You are never quite sure what you are going to get for your 50 euro cents — a receipt, a piece of cardboard, a strip of paper torn from a notepad, a printout, or a handwritten code."

Variety of computer models and layout

" I never realised how many brands there were before I started frequenting the call shops" Hard to maintain uniformity.

improvised solutions:

"keeping users at a safe distance from the computers."

"Whatever strategy the call shop chooses, the end result will lead to improvised solutions to issues involving space, access and privacy"

Visible infrastructure

manifestation of computer existence:

Revealing the infrastructure like the Varia sever:

"Despite that, their tweaks demonstrate the presence of a computer; they manifest its existence"

"It’s an important point because a visible computer is rapidly becoming an obsolete paradigm in our modern digital reality."

"I dare to suggest that internet cafés are the last public spaces where we actually still see the computers. Not only do we see them, we can realize that they can be tinkered with, even if all it involves is taking off the case cover. "

Mixed social spaces and uses/ dubious business

"The Seinpost report discerns three types of shops: the “call shop” (belwinkel), the “call house” (belhuis) and the “mixed form” (p. 24). The call house only provides communication services, the call shop also sells telephone cards and associated products. The mixed form are call shops that double as barbershops, beauty salons or laundromats. The difference between the three has all but lost its relevance 2011."

"I would divide belhuizen into three different categories: internet cafés, internet cafés that serve as a front for another type of business and internet cafés that serve as community centres. "

"There are some belhuizen in Rotterdam that I didn’t even dare to enter. (...) Obviously, the phone booths were the primary places for some very dubious business transactions."

"belhuizen served as community centres where mothers could leave their children or where teenagers could play online games or just hang out."

transformations

"Replacement of phone booths by internet connections in 2003/2004: "This is when call shops began undergoing their transformation from providing a service for immigrants to an urban nuisance."

"When I spoke to Abdullah later, I assumed that local city officials must have been very pleased with the way his belhuis now looked – so clean and modern – plus its function in the neighbourhood as a place where teenagers could spend their free time in the most innocuous ways possible. He replied that, unfortunately, it cuts both ways. Once he began focusing on serving gamers and teenage customers, he started – for the first time in seven years – having problems with the police. "

"Teenagers can’t stay inside too long before they have to go out for a smoke or to chat with their friends outside in front of his shop. All this despite the fact that he has a sign on the door that forbids loitering in front of his call shop."

"Nazar has continued to evolve through a variety of stages of development – from call shop to internet café to computer club."

Digital inequality

" I recommend that we pay special attention to places like this and support their development, establishments not only interested in paying customers inside, but also bringing people closer to the computers in every sense of the word. And I would start with software."

"The improvisation ends where the software begins"

"This was the most difficult aspect of my call shop experiences. That internet cafés exist, and that they are mainly used by poor immigrants, says a lot about social inequality. But what customers are forced to interact with on the level of software says a lot about digital inequality as well."

"reveal a package of Windows applications that inevitably includes Skype, the bane of many café owners."

Installing alternative software becomes a more exceptional and improvised choice because people ask for it or because somebody installed it by themselves as they had freedom to install anything they want in the computers.

"being forced to operate within the constraints of software that gives you no options, monitors every click that you make and, along the way, bombards you with ads and annoys you with countless errors."

"The digital divide suddenly becomes very obvious. On the one side the users with personal computers – personal in a literal sense that they can choose the programs they want to install. On the other side, you have the belhuis clients."

"It might sound like some utopian idea: Instead of being places for ill-educated youth, they could become centres for computer education. They have even more potential than official schools in the sense that they offer the aforementioned independence and their historically openness to hardware."

"teach them how to configure a network – give them enough knowledge to at least enable them to open their own computer clubs."

Conclusion

"But there is increased concern about the number of African hair salons. In 2011, they began popping up as rapidly as the belhuizen did eight years ago."

"Crime and Punishment, the “little man” Marmeladov, answer this question: “For every man must have somewhere to go. Since there are times when one absolutely must go somewhere!”"