6-week course at NYU ITP Fall 2020 semester
Wednesdays 6:30-9:25 pm, on Zoom!
Dan Oved (Office Hours) and Anastasis Germanidis (Office Hours)
"Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only – as the world's history suggests – one of its masks." -- John Gray
We are currently living in a society that operates under the principle that one body equals one agent, one vantage point, one identity. But near-future technologies may be creating a future in which the notion of a single personal identity becomes outdated. That future includes: machine learning techniques that make emulating the style and behavior of other people fast and easy; widely available AR/VR headsets that get people to identify with however many bodies they choose, instead of those they were born with; cryptocurrencies enabling the adoption of pseudonymous economic identities to transact pseudonymously across the planet. This is a course where we get to explore and anticipate the utopian and dystopian aspects of this weird future of identity by designing weekly interventions for obfuscating, simulating, multiplying, and merging ourselves online and offline.
| Criterion | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Participation | 30% |
| Assignments | 3 x 10% = 30% |
| Final Project | 40% |
In class lecture: An overview of the course; a brief history of identity offline and online, from the invention of last names and identity cards to today's battles between real name policies and pseudonymity.
Readings for next week:
- Kate Crawford, The Anxieties of Big Data
- James Scott, Seeing Like a State, Chapter 2 (Link in Google Drive)
Assignment:
- Install node.js on your computer (download it here). Verify it is installed by opening the terminal and running the command
node -v
In class lecture: How can we trick systems of identification? A history of surveillance systems; a survey of methods of population tracking and control by nation-states and corporations; a look at projects that try to mislead such information gathering by producing false data.
In class tutorial: Identity Simulation on the Web with Puppeteer
Assignment:
- Write a script (using Puppeteer or another framework) to automate one of your online social interactions.
Readings for next week:
- Lauren McCarthy, Feeling at Home: Between Human and AI
- Max Read: How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
References:
- James C Scott: Seeing like a State
- Kate Crawford: The Anxieties of Big Data
- VICE: The Data That Turned the World Upside Down
- Nicolas Rose: Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood
- Peng Collective: Mask.ID
- Paolo Cirio: The Obscurity Project
- Daniel Howe, Helen Nissenbaum, Mushon Zer-Aviv: AdNauseam
- Patrick McKenzie: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
- Sophie Calle: The Address Book
- Jill Magic: Evidence Locker
- Obfuscation: A User’s Guide to Privacy and Protest
- Tor Browser
- TrackMeNot
- Bayesian Flooding and Facebook Manipulation
- Anonymouth
- Stylometry
- URME Surveillance
- Invisible
In class lecture: What happens when identity becomes reproducible? Case studies of online sock-puppetry, astro-turfing, and Sybil attacks. A future look towards the implications of AI-based impersonation.
In class tutorial: Training a machine learning model using Runway.
Assignment: Create a dataset based on a portion your online activity, and use that to train an image or text generation model on Runway.
Reading for next week:
References:
- Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence
- Robin Hanson: The Age of Em
- Joseph Weizenbaum: ELIZA
- Will Wright: The Soul of the Sims
- Michael Mandiberg: The Essential Guide to Performing Michael Mandiberg
- NYTimes: The Follower Factory
- Orson Welles: F for Fake
- Mario Klingemann: Found a hideaway in the wastelands of BigGAN...
- John R. Douceur: The Sybil Attack
- Kyle McDonald: How to recognize fake AI-generated images
- seebotschat
- Francis Tseng: Humans of Simulated New York
In class lecture: To what degree is personal change possible? Psychology of personality, habit formation, and behavioural change theories. Individual vs. cultural vs. organizational vs. national identity.
In class tutorial: Live streaming on the web.
Assignment: Create your own, 2020 interpretation of one of the performances discussed in this lecture.
Reading for next week:
- Marco Deseriis, Improper Names, Chapter 3 (Link in Google Drive)
- Lisa Nakamura, "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet"
References:
- Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
- Venkatesh Rao: The World is Not Enough People
- Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities
- James Carse: Finite and Infinite Games
- Jane McGonigal: Reality is Broken
- Kristin Lucas: Refresh
- Lynn Hershman Leeson: Roberta Breitmore
- Lauren McCarthy: SCRIPT
- Max Hawkins: Randomized Living
- Chris Landreth: Bingo
In class lecture: Can we live with many identities, and what do they allow us? A history of personal pseudonyms and collective pseudonyms; a survey of the cypherpunk movement and intellectual foundations of cryptocurrencies.
Assignment: Create a tool or a performance based on any of the concepts and technical frameworks we've explored in the class.
References:
- Marco Deseriis: Improper Names
- Eric Hughes: A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
- Nymwars
- Andreas Pfitzmann and Marit Hansen: Anonymity, Unlinkability, Undetectability, Unobservability, Pseudonymity, and Identity Management
- /r/Tulpas: Intelligent companions imagined into existence
- David Eagleman: Incognito
- Lisa Nakamura: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet
- Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash
- Robert Axelrod: The Evolution of Cooperation
- Scott Alexander: Meditations on Moloch
- Jo Freeman: The Tyranny of Structurelessness
- Taylor Pearson: The Blockchain Man
- Lou Keep: The Meridian of Her Greatness
In class: Final project critiques
Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as though it were your own. More specifically, plagiarism is to present as your own: A sequence of words quoted without quotation marks from another writer or a paraphrased passage from another writer’s work or facts, ideas or images composed by someone else.
The core of the educational experience at the Tisch School of the Arts is the creation of original academic and artistic work by students for the critical review of faculty members. It is therefore of the utmost importance that students at all times provide their instructors with an accurate sense of their current abilities and knowledge in order to receive appropriate constructive criticism and advice. Any attempt to evade that essential, transparent transaction between instructor and student through plagiarism or cheating is educationally self-defeating and a grave violation of Tisch School of the Arts community standards. For all the details on plagiarism, please refer to page 10 of the Tisch School of the Arts, Policies and Procedures Handbook, which can be found online at: http://students.tisch.nyu.edu/page/home.html
Please feel free to make suggestions to your instructor about ways in which this class could become more accessible to you. Academic accommodations are available for students with documented disabilities. Please contact the Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at 212 998-4980 for further information.
Your health and safety are a priority at NYU. If you experience any health or mental health issues during this course, we encourage you to utilize the support services of the 24/7 NYU Wellness Exchange 212-443-9999. Also, all students who may require an academic accommodation due to a qualified disability, physical or mental, please register with the Moses Center 212-998-4980. Please let your instructor know if you need help connecting to these resources.
Laptops will be an essential part of the course and may be used in class during workshops and for taking notes in lecture. Laptops must be closed during class discussions and student presentations. Phone use in class is strictly prohibited unless directly related to a presentation of your own work or if you are asked to do so as part of the curriculum.
Tisch School of the Arts to dedicated to providing its students with a learning environment that is rigorous, respectful, supportive and nurturing so that they can engage in the free exchange of ideas and commit themselves fully to the study of their discipline. To that end Tisch is committed to enforcing University policies prohibiting all forms of sexual misconduct as well as discrimination on the basis of sex and gender. Detailed information regarding these policies and the resources that are available to students through the Title IX office can be found by using the following link: Title IX at NYU.