Elizabeth A Wilson's Affect and Artificial Intelligence traces the history and development of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the West, from the 1950's to the 1990's and early 2000's to argue that the key thing missing from all attempts to develop machine minds is a recognition of the role that affect plays in social and individual development. She directly engages many of the creators of the field of AI within their own lived historical context and uses Bruno Latour, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Alan Turning's AI and computational theory, gender studies,cybernetics, Silvan Tomkins' affect theory, and tools from STS to make her point. Using historical examples of embodied robots and programs, as well as some key instances in which social interactions caused rifts in the field,Wilson argues that crucial among all missing affects is shame, which functions from the social to the individual, and vice versa. J.Lorand Matory's The Fetish Revisited looks at a particular section of the history of European-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic conceptual engagement, namely the place where Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual practices were taken up and repackaged by white German men. Matory demonstrates that Marx and Freud took the notion of the Fetish and repurposed its meaning and intent, further arguing that this is a product of the both of the positionality of both of these men in their historical and social contexts. Both Marx and Freud, Matory says, Jewish men of potentially-indeterminate ethnicity who could have been read as "mulatto," and whose work was designed to place them in the good graces of the white supremacist, or at least dominantly hierarchical power structure in which they lived. Matory combines historiography,anthropology, ethnography, oral history, critical engagement Marxist and Freudian theory and, religious studies, and personal memoir to show that the Fetish is mutually a constituting category, one rendered out of the intersection of individuals, groups, places, needs, and objects. Further, he argues, by trying to use the fetish to mark out a category of "primitive savagery," both Freud and Marx actually succeeded in making fetishes of their own theoretical frameworks, both in the original sense, and their own pejorative senses.

Elizabeth A Wilson’s Affect and Artificial Intelligence traces the history and development of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the West, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s and early 2000’s to argue that the key thing missing from all attempts to develop machine minds is a recognition of the role that affect plays in social and individual development. She directly engages many of the creators of the field of AI within their own lived historical context and uses Bruno Latour, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Alan Turning’s AI and computational theory, gender studies,cybernetics, Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory, and tools from STS to make her point. Using historical examples of embodied robots and programs, as well as some key instances in which social interactions caused rifts in the field,Wilson argues that crucial among all missing affects is shame, which functions from the social to the individual, and vice versa. J.Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited looks at a particular section of the history of European-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic conceptual engagement, namely the place where Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual practices were taken up and repackaged by white German men. Matory demonstrates that Marx and Freud took the notion of the Fetish and repurposed its meaning and intent, further arguing that this is a product of the both of the positionality of both of these men in their historical and social contexts. Both Marx and Freud, Matory says, Jewish men of potentially-indeterminate ethnicity who could have been read as “mulatto,” and whose work was designed to place them in the good graces of the white supremacist, or at least dominantly hierarchical power structure in which they lived. Matory combines historiography,anthropology, ethnography, oral history, critical engagement Marxist and Freudian theory and, religious studies, and personal memoir to show that the Fetish is mutually a constituting category, one rendered out of the intersection of individuals, groups, places, needs, and objects. Further, he argues, by trying to use the fetish to mark out a category of “primitive savagery,” both Freud and Marx actually succeeded in making fetishes of their own theoretical frameworks, both in the original sense, and their own pejorative senses.

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Event marketing considerations for pivoting from live to virtual gatherings

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If you’re looking to pivot a live event to a digital one, check out this primer from Google’s own events and experience marketing team.

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Caitlin Wood's 2014 edited volume Criptiques consists of 25 articles, essays, poems, songs, or stories, primarily in the first person, all of which are written from disabled people's perspectives. Both the titles and the content are meant to be provocative and challenging to the reader, and especially if that reader is not, themselves, disabled. As editor Caitlin Wood puts it in the introduction, Criptiques is "a daring space," designed to allow disabled people to create and inhabit their own feelings and expressions of their lived experiences. As such, there's no single methodology or style, here, and many of the perspectives contrast or even conflict with each other in their intentions and recommendations. The 1965 translation of Frantz Fanon's A Dying Colonialism, on the other hand, is a single coherent text exploring the clinical psychological and sociological implications of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon uses soldiers' first person accounts, as well as his own psychological and medical training, to explore the impact of the war and its tactics on the individual psychologies, the familial relationships, and the social dynamics of the Algerian people, arguing that the damage and horrors of war and colonialism have placed the Algerians and the French in a new relational mode.

Caitlin Wood’s 2014 edited volume Criptiques consists of 25 articles, essays, poems, songs, or stories, primarily in the first person, all of which are written from disabled people’s perspectives. Both the titles and the content are meant to be provocative and challenging to the reader, and especially if that reader is not, themselves, disabled. As editor Caitlin Wood puts it in the introduction, Criptiques is “a daring space,” designed to allow disabled people to create and inhabit their own feelings and expressions of their lived experiences. As such, there’s no single methodology or style, here, and many of the perspectives contrast or even conflict with each other in their intentions and recommendations. The 1965 translation of Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, on the other hand, is a single coherent text exploring the clinical psychological and sociological implications of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon uses soldiers’ first person accounts, as well as his own psychological and medical training, to explore the impact of the war and its tactics on the individual psychologies, the familial relationships, and the social dynamics of the Algerian people, arguing that the damage and horrors of war and colonialism have placed the Algerians and the French in a new relational mode.

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Inside Google Marketing: 3 things we’re considering as we rethink live events

the complete guide to growth hacking!

Discover how event marketing teams at Google are reevaluating event marketing strategy during this unique moment amidst a global pandemic.

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In Ras Michael Brown's African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina. In Kelly Oliver's The Colonization of Psychic Space­, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it. These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver's project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question "How do we belong to the social as singular?"

In Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina. In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space­, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it. These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”

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THINGS WOT I HAVE LEARNT AFTER BEING VIRTUALLY HOUSEBOUND FOR 3 YEARS THAT MAY BE HELPFUL TO THOSE IN SELF ISOLATION AND/OR LOCKDOWN DURING THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

coldalbion:

(Background: I have a lifelong disability and am a wheelchair user. After surgery I’ve basically been stuck living and sleeping in one room for three years. These are things I have learnt which may help, though with the caveat that everyone is different, and baseline mental health varies.)

1. YOUR MENTAL HEALTH WILL PROBABLY SUFFER - and although humans are social creatures, even the most introverted will chafe against boundaries enforced upon them by circumstance. The degree to which it suffers will be related to your mental health baseline and physical health. Understand that this IS NOT YOUR FAULT. Stimuli and enrichment methods are required. It’s why animals need such things in zoos and conservation parks. This leads us on to my next point.

2. COMPREHEND WHICH ACTIVITIES ARE ACTIVE AND PASSIVE FOR YOU Spending your confinement solely doing passive things (watching TV, Netflix, browsing the internet, scrolling through the internet) will take a load off your brain and make the time pass quicker. But if that’s all you do, the sense of disconnection increases over time. Activities which require you to *do* something, even if it’s just engaging your motor skills via video games, or lifting some cans of beans, or actively reading - these deliberate acts foster a tiny sense of achievement which gives your brain a dose of helpful chemicals. If you want to consider your activities, look up the work of Marshall McLuhan as regards “hot media” and “cold media” (See https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/MIDD…/Hot_versus_cool_media for basic premise.) Balancing out your media intake with hot and cold activities keeps your brain active and pumping tasty neurotransmitters.

3. LIMIT YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE TO SOCIAL PURPOSES. Infinite scrolling as found on many social media platforms is a hot medium, as per McLuhan. The reason Likes exist is to give that little spike of interactivity. It’s not a conspiracy to say many platforms are designed to keep you on them so they can show you more ads. (See also https://www.theguardian.com/…/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on… which explains the brain chemistry angle) However, DM’s and other messaging faculties are supremely useful. Use them to interact with your friends, indulge your fandom theories. Person to person interaction requires and enhances deep-seated neurological and biophysical reflexes. Text your mates. Skype/Facetime or otherwise call them. Use the technology of the 21st century for genuine social ends, deliberately. Catch up with their lives one to one or in groupchats.

4. PICK TIMES TO CHECK THE NEWS AND STICK TO THEM. This relates to point 3 - unfortunately we live in a 24hr news cycle, with constant liveblogging of important issues. This means that we’re constantly streaming anxiety inducing situations into our brains JUST IN CASE. That’s not helpful, particularly when you can’t actually DO anything about those events - the urge to DO something is why people are panic-buying. It’s a very basic primordial need to grab resources for defence. By picking times of the day to check news, you are again, making a DELIBERATE CHOICE, enacting some small level of agency, while at the same time limiting anxiety-inducing stimuli. If the news gets too much, then don’t check it as much - or at all - and do something else.

5. IF YOU DO THINGS WITH FRIENDS, SEE IF YOU CAN DO THEM ONLINE. Run that game of DnD/Other TTRPG you’ve been meaning to. Hold your book club online. Have a few drinks online over voice-chat if you are missing the pub. Hold watch parties for your favourite shows. The key, as ever, is to be engaged rather than passive. It’s harder if you’re ill, yes, but it can be done.

6. USE YOUR IMAGINATION TO CREATE THINGS. Write that fanfic. Start that novel. Design that game. Doodle. Paint. Humans have been creating since the day we became human. Consider things from the perspective of a pre-modern person. Make handprints on your own personal cave wall - contact each other and tell spooky stories. Build a complex fantasy world. Write an account of your confinement for some person to find pieces of years after you’re gone from the world. Think about a problem, and learn how to solve it via taking online classes (See http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses) Write an essay on your chosen passion or hyperfixation - nobody needs to read it but you. Treat yourself to intellectual stimulation, if that’s your thing.

7. IF YOU HAVE A SPIRITUAL. RITUAL, OR MEDITATIVE PRACTICE DO IT. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect, or limited in scope. This also includes atheists and those who despise woo - you have personal rituals, things you do that have Meaning to you as a person. Maybe it;s alphabetizing your music collection, or spring cleaning or cooking your favourite meal like grandma used to make. Humans have patterns they perform. When you perform them DELIBERATIVELY (or dare I say MINDFULLY) you become aware that these are the scaffolds that structure human life.

8. STRUCTURE YOUR TIME. Following on from 7, we often don’t realise the structure of our lives until it is disrupted. When that’s removed, our minds can go into freefall. If you’re isolated/in lockdown, oftentimes you won’t be able to access those structures. Rather than wait for them to to become accessible again and risk a period of feeling lost and directionless, which can enhance depression and anxiety, it’s best to develop a new structure based on the resources you have. It can be as loose or as strict as you like, but sticking to it allows us to develop a rhythm which makes time pass in recognisable fashion and gives us a sense of being-in-the-world as some sort of engaged process.

9. KEEP YOUR SLEEP PATTERN REGULAR AND LONG ENOUGH. The key here is REGULAR. Following on from 8, it’s important to keep your body well rested, as this aids your immune system and cuts down on the possibility of your body having to deal with stress . If you’re ill it’s harder to keep this regular, because sometimes your body just needs sleep to regenerate NOW. Equally in isolation, particularly if you’re feeling mentally low, it can be tempting to sleep forever, because y’know, you’re feeling low and what’s the point. (Of course the point is why we have 8 in particular, along with all the rest.)

OBVIOUSLY EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT. Particularly for those with disabilities or chronic illnesses, we may be even more limited in our activities while isolated than able bodied folks. That said, the key is to remember that certainly during this pandemic, and otherwise YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONE FEELING THIS WAY. Rubbish as it may be, many are in the same boat. If it pleases you to, seek them out - see what commonalities you have, what hopes and dreams and fascinations you may share. FIND THE OTHERS - it’s what humans have always done.

Be well.

From @

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Talking the talk: Going beyond face value with diversity

the complete guide to growth hacking!

Bobbi Brown Cosmetics set up a marketing experiment to learn how diverse talent and scripts drive consideration among consumers of all ages.

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Cyborg Theology and An Anthropology of Robots and AI

Scott Midson’s Cyborg Theology and Kathleen Richardson’s An Anthropology of Robots and AI both trace histories of technology and human-machine interactions, and both make use of fictional narratives as well as other theoretical techniques. The goal of Midson’s book is to put forward a new understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding to supplant the myth of a perfect “Edenic” state and the various disciplines’ dichotomous oppositions of “human” and “other.” This new understanding, Midson says, exists at the intersection of technological, theological, and ecological contexts,and he argues that an understanding of the conceptual category of the cyborg can allow us to understand this assemblage in a new way.

That is, all of the categories of “human,” “animal,” “technological,” “natural,” and more are far more porous than people tend to admit and their boundaries should be challenged; this understanding of the cyborg gives us the tools to do so. Richardson, on the other hand, seeks to argue that what it means to be human has been devalued by the drive to render human capacities and likenesses into machines, and that this drive arises from the male-dominated and otherwise socialized spaces in which these systems are created. The more we elide the distinction between the human and the machine, the more we will harm human beings and human relationships.

Midson’s training is in theology and religious studies, and so it’s no real surprise that he primarily uses theological exegesis (and specifically an exegesis of Genesis creation stories), but he also deploys the tools of cyborg anthropology (specifically Donna Haraway’s 1991 work on cyborgs), sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies. He engages in interdisciplinary narrative analysis and comparison,exploring the themes from several pieces of speculative fiction media and the writings of multiple theorists from several disciplines.

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Reach beyond reach: Brand marketing in the age of machine learning

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Based on our research here are our bold predictions for what brand marketing and advertising will look like in Canada by 2025.

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The Think with Google Podcast

everything you needed to know about growth hacking

From Think with Google and Gimlet Creative, a new podcast that explores the future of marketing, to keep your marketing team ahead of the curve.

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Women in marketing: 5 Google leaders share their career stories and advice

growth hacking is the big word in the marketing industry, do you know what it means?

We spoke with Google Marketing women and asked them to share their career stories, challenges, and advice for women, or anyone, developing their careers.

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