a number of counteracting forces, the most important for our purposes being the cheapening of the elements of constant capital.The absolute decrease in variable capital (i.e., the joblessness produced through an ever greater increase of productivity) which was to have brought about the revolutionary moment, was to occur through the relative decrease in variable capital, which is to say, the increased productivity of the worker which accompanies improved machinery, division of labor, and so forth.However, as this process continues, constant capital itself requires less labor-power to produce, and thus the technological means of production undergo the same general cheapening that the price of labour on the market undergoes.After all, if there is a decrease in the rate of profit, this can mean only that each produced item represents an ever smaller amount of reified labor, including raw materials, and most importantly, machinery.As Marx summarized,The value of the worked-up cotton has not grown in the same proportion as its mass . . .[and] the same applies to machinery and other fixed capital.In short, the same development which increases the mass of the constant capital in relation to the variable reduces the value of its elements as a result of the increased productivity of labour, and therefore prevents the value of constant capital, although it continually increases, from increasing at the same rate as its material volume.(Marx 1998:234) Thus, depending on the rate of cheapening and the level of efficiency of means of production within a particular industry, it may be that there is, after all, no relative decrease of variable capital, or possibly even a relative increase of variable capital, concomitant with absolute decrease of both variable and constant capital per commodity produced.If the means of production cheapen alongside variable capital, then, instead of describing the effect as a falling employment rate and therefore a falling rate of profit, we could better describe the effect as an increase in productive power which has no necessary absolute loss of either employment or rate of profit.Further, without this loss of employment or rate of profit, the crisis of realization need never come about, since even the laborer herself will actually be able to purchase the goods brought to market.This absolute decrease in the labor-value of constant capital per commodity produced, running in parallel with a similar increase in productivity in the realm of variable capital, thus seems to avert a possible crisis of capital; this being one of the reasons why the late Marx -here, much more a cool-headed economist than a Young Hegelian revolutionary -made only the very weak claim implied in his titling the principle here as 'the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.'However, we must take care to look behind the mask of this deus ex machina, for that process which brings an absolute decrease in constant capital in the commodities of a given industry not only restores the viability of consolidated corporations operating in that industry, but also makes the possession of the means of production of that industry ever closer to the grasp of the common wage-earner.The process of the absolute decrease of constant capital, seemingly inevitable for the reasons described above, if unfettered, brings the means of production within the reach of common laborers, at which point they are able to benefit from the use of their own labor-power rather than being forced to bring it to the marketplace, thereby undermining one of the conditions necessary for industrial capital.This possibility was not, as far as I can determine, ever addressed by Marx.[2] The most obvious explanation for this is that the cheapening of machinery which would be necessary to make this a revolutionary effect could not have been foreseen at that time; he would have to have been a mystic or a madman to take seriously the possibility that industrial machinery would be so cheapened that a wage laborer would be able to easily purchase manufacturing capabilities sufficient to compete with capitalist magnates.This possibility has, however, been realized, albeit in a limited scope.As computational devices have become smaller, more reliable, and more powerful, there has been a significant decline in the absolute constant capital that they represent.At the same time, these machines have been able to perform ever more complex operations in an ever smaller and more manageable time frame, and there has been a great increase in capital investment in the creation of ever more complex and effective operational commands.That is to say, as hardware has improved and cheapened, software has been able to represent a proportionally greater capital investment, and it is the peculiar structure of software that provides the core of the changes I mean to address here. Digital Goods and Digital ReproductionContemporary information technologies are remarkable in that any information entered can be stored andreproduced with absolute fidelity.Value can be preserved with minimal means of production -access to the information along with available storage space -and with negligible labor.This means, of course, that there is, practically speaking, virtually no valorization at all in the production of any particular iteration of a file or program, although there may have been labor required to order the information in a manner having use-value, to make this information accessible to information technology, and so forth.Furthermore, this is true of digital files of any kind, whether the idea is stated in a directly executable form or not, that is, whether the digital file is a piece of software or a document.(For this reason, I will not differentiate in the following between these kinds of digital files.Both software and documents are similarly losslessly replicable effectively without marginal cost, and, thus, both are equally subject to the analysis here.)The production and reproduction of digital files is in this way akin to the production and reproduction of ideas, excepting that digital files may be of a level of complexity and/or length greater than the human platform can support.More specifically, digital files are akin to ideas in that, as Thomas Jefferson famously stated, "he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me" ([1813] 2000).Given the minimal means of production -having an input of appropriate format in order to allow processing, such as a reasonable person speaking or signing our mother tongue; being of sound mind; not being asleep or distracted or so forth -the reproduction of an idea from an outside source is not only usually accomplished with little effort, but furthermore is actually necessary if any use-value is to be found in that information at all.Digital files are also such that their reproduction is a necessary means for and an integral part of their consumption.[3] Certain economically valuable expressions have been encouraged due to the great value of the labour-power expended in their initial production and the vanishingly small exchange value of the product thereby produced.The encouragement of this production, through the artificial creation of governmentally enforced scarcity, allowed for the production of ideas which would have little or no use-value to the producer, and, thus, allowed for the production of intellectual commodities, ideas produced for sale rather than personal use, either in the form of a product, such as a book or album, or in the form of machinery (i.e., software).Now that the means of production of such commodities are greatly and increasingly within public hands due to digital technologies, it has become possible to produce ideas for personal use that are also of value on an industrial scale -that is, as means of production become ever more available, ever more industrial-grade ideas are created for use rather than exchange.Here, if left to their own devices, so to speak, such ideas tend to be shared, rather in the form of a conversation.These non-material means of production, having been invented for personal use, have their reproducibility no longer as a discouragement to their creation, but rather as an accidental bounty, which tends to be given away freely within the community of such unincorporated producers.At this stage in its development, the means of industrial production become themselves revolutionary, bringing about a spontaneous communist economy.Where means of production are not publicly available, industries must be assured of the potential profitability of any socially beneficial activities we might expect them to perform, but where the public has free access to the means of production the public no longer needs to encourage corporate interests to produce in its stead.It is clearly no longer necessary for our society to guarantee the profitability of the production of a word processor, a web browser, or even an operating system, for fine examples of such machinery may be, and have been, produced by the public without commodification.Similarly, it has now become quite easy and ever more commonplace for people to compose, produce and distribute music and video without commodification, and without governmentally enforced monopoly over the works thus created, which monopoly, regardless, seems to present only an indirect and sometimes almost inconsequential incentive to artists themselves, given the extent to which the current system is biased in favor of distributors rather than artists.[4]Digital technologies have made composition and production of such media considerably easier in any number of ways, from digital cameras and video cameras to software tools.In terms of promotion and distribution, peer-to-peer networks are very efficient distribution networks, and web pages can easily serve the function of promotion, advertisement and distribution, as in for example discussion forums, blogs and personal web pages serving as gateways to other sites and/or materials, content specific artist-operated sites, portals open to direct submission by the public, and portals which make free and public domain works available which might otherwise be difficult or impossible to obtain.

While conducting multidisciplinary research, spanning engineering, social sciences, and humanities, on Internet of Things device (henceforth, IoT) adoption and use within disability communities, the authors noticed differences in the conceptualization and operationalization of “trust” across practical and disciplinary settings in the context of data privacy and IoT devices. We seek to present a conceptualization of trust which we believe, when pursued earnestly by designers, will be most broadly and universally effective in generating trust among users. In this presentation, following a review of conceptualizations and operationalizations of trust in a data privacy context, we will present a critique and reformulation of “trust” that centers marginalized perspectives, focusing most of all on disabled experience but also seeking to decenter privileged perspectives and keep experiences of BIPOC, LGBTQ+ persons, and women closely in view. Since power is most visible at the margins, centering marginalized perspectives is most likely to find the outlines and structures of power, and design centered on marginalized experiences is likely to be more universal than is a focus on privileged experiences even when supplemented with post hoc and ad hoc accommodations. We conducted this analysis from the frameworks of disability studies, phenomenology and postphenomenology, and feminist ethics of care.

This chapter seeks to further develop, define, and differentiate human-technics alterity relations within postphenomenological philosophy of technology. A central case study of the Alexa digital assistant establishes that digital assistants require the adoption of the intentional stance, and illustrates that this structural requirement is different from anthropomorphic projection of mindedness onto technical objects. Human-technics alterity relations based on projection are then more generally differentiated from human-technics alterity relations based on actual encoded pseudo-mental contents, where there are matters of fact that directly correspond to user conceptualizations of “intentions” or “knowledge” in technical systems or objects. Finally, functions and user benefits to different alterity relations are explored, establishing that there is a meaningful set of cases where the projection of a mind in human-technics alterity relations positively impacts technical functions and user experiences.

This session will present results from an interdisciplinary mixed-methods research project on trust and access in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices by disabled persons. The year-long project is directed by professors in Philosophy, Education, and Modeling and Simulation, and will produce a trust framework as well as a prototype app. This presentation will focus on research outcomes about how designers and engineers can build IoT systems and devices that are most likely to be trusted by users with disabilities. The empirical component of the project was situated in universal design (UD) and universal design learning (UDL), and included 63 survey responses, three focus groups, and 58 journals, with the qualitative data being collected and analyzed according to constructivist grounded theory. Oriented by this empirical research, we conducted a literature review of trust discourses in HCI and engineering publication, as well as a review of philosophical work on epistemological and ethical issues in experiences and practices of trust. In this presentation, we will present a primer for abled engineers on the lived experience of disability as a design context relevant to technology adoption. This will address the medical and social model of disability, an analysis of solutionism as a barrier to effective design for disabled users, and a typology of the most relevant sorts of trust for design for disabled users (viz. trust as reliability, trust as veracity, and trust as stewardship), developed through a post-phenomenological analysis of UX in tech interfaces paradigmatic of disabled lived experience. We will also provide an overview of our trust framework which avoids the solutionist implications of providing a checklist or series of principles by instead providing guiding processes and questions.

The social media site Twitter has been subject to significant recent criticism, because of some users' propensity for behaviors such as bullying, racism and homophobia, and rhetorical excess. Critics suggest Twitter has changed from its beginnings, where it was seen as a site that promoted broad-based debate and advancement of democracy. In this conceptual paper, the authors suggest that those ideals can still be realized, and that Twitter can provide the venue and the motivation for the generation of Habermasian public spheres. The authors argue that society's passion and consumption model for sport, along with technological affordances unique to Twitter, can promote behavior akin to public spheres, provided barriers to such discourse can be overcome. This analysis is the first systematic examination of the potential for public spheres to be realized within sport and social media and suggests the byproducts of such discussions can be tangible and measurable. (C) 2018 Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Popular social media platforms have faced recent criticism because of the tendency for users to exhibit strongly negative behaviors, threatening the open, prodemocratic discourse that proponents believe was made possible when social media sites first gained widespread adoption a decade ago. A conceptual model suggests that the microblogging site Twitter, and especially sport-themed debate through hashtags, can still realize these ideals. Analyzing a dataset of tweets about the firing of former Major League Baseball pitcher Curt Schilling by ESPN on April 20, 2016, as well as a qualitative questionnaire given to the users of the hashtag, this study attempted to ascertain how closely the discourse comes to realizing the ideal of the Habermasian public sphere. The findings demonstrate that although users draw value from participation in the discussion, they are less inclined to desire interaction with other hashtag users, particularly those who disagree with them. This suggests that Twitter hashtags provide an open forum that approaches the participatory requirement of the public sphere, but the lack of back-and-forth engagement suggests the medium is not ideal for the generation of deliberative public opinion.

Landon Winner has argued that ‘artifacts have politics’, demonstrating that code can have discriminatory effects, but work in philosophy of technology has not identified what kinds of user exclusion constitute an injustice. Previous theoretical work on affordances has also left non-affordances substantially untheorized, providing no clear basis for distinguishing problematic from unproblematic non-affordances. This paper presents a three-fold division of non-affordances as exclusionary of users due to (a.i) unproblematic mutually exclusive proper functions, due to (a.ii) unproblematic demographically distributed service provision, and due to (b) problematic discriminatory exclusion. Within this third category, two kinds of discriminatory exclusion are identified: (b.i) direct exclusion through interfaces that do not accommodate relevant user groups, and (b.ii) indirect exclusion through recapitulation of existing social prejudices. Within discriminatory forms of exclusion, (b), two modalities of exclusion are identified: disaffordance and dysaffordance. In the former, code fails to recognize relevant user identity groups; in the latter, code additionally requires unaccommodated users to misrepresent themselves in order to gain access to product functions. These forms of discriminatory code are illustrated using a series of examples, including user profile data entry fields, ‘flesh-colored’ crayons, kitchen counters, strollers, calendars, and gendered RPG game-play design. Through this theorization of non-accommodation, the paper seeks to provide tools to designers to avoid discriminatory code, and to provide tools to critics and activists to argue more forcefully for reform of discriminatory code.

The papers in this issue of First Monday were originally presented as a series of panels at the Association of Internet Researchers 2015 conference in Phoenix, Arizona. This short introduction explains the impetus behind the organization of these panels — which was to document diversity in approaches to the study of Internet economies — and briefly introduces each paper by locating them in the nexus between political economy and cultural studies.

Exchange of personal information online is usually conceptualized according to an economic model that treats personal information as data owned by the persons these data are ‘about.’ This leads to a distinct set of concerns having to do with data ownership, data mining, profits, and exploitation, which do not closely correspond to the concerns about privacy that people actually have. A post-phenomenological perspective, oriented by feminist ethics of care, urges us to figure out how privacy concerns arrive in fundamentally human contexts and to speak to that, rather than trying to convince people to care about privacy as it is juridically conceived and articulated. By considering exchanges of personal information in a human-to-human online informational economy — being friends on social networking sites — we can identify an alternate set of concerns: consent, respect, lurking, and creepiness. I argue that these concerns will provide a better guide to both users and companies about prudence and ethics in information economies than the existing discourse around ‘privacy.’

Technical design can produce exclusionary and even discriminatory effects for users. A lack of discriminatory intent is insufficient to avoid discriminatory design, since implicit assumptions about users rarely include all relevant user demographics, and in some cases, designing for all relevant users is actually impossible. To minimize discriminatory effects of technical design, an actively anti-discriminatory design perspective must be adopted. This article provides examples of discriminatory user exclusion, then defining exclusionary design in terms of disaffordances and dysaffordances. Once these definitions are in place, principles of anti-discriminatory design are advanced, drawing upon a method of phenomenological variation employed in the context of standpoint epistemology.

Early and persistent scholarly concerns with online identity emphasized the ways that computer–mediated communications have allowed new, inventive, and creative presentations of self, and the lack of connection between online identity and the facts of off–line life. After the ascendency and following ubiquity of Facebook, we find our online lives transformed. We have not only seen online identity reconnected to off–line life, but we have seen, through the particular structures of social networking sites, our online lives subjected to newfound pressures to unify self–presentations from various constitutive communities; pressures different from and in some ways greater than those of off–line life. After describing identity in computer–mediated communications prior to Facebook, and investigating the kinds of changed conditions brought about in social networking sites, I put forth a dramauthentic model of post–Facebook online identity. This model is comprised of three methods of exposure through multiply anchored self–presentation (mixed, agonistic, and lowest–common–denominator) and four strategies of interaction (spectacular, untidy, distributed, and minimized), each of which are employed non–exclusively and at different moments by most social networking site users.

The idea of the digital native was based on abstraction; when we look in detail at the digital activities of high-school and college students, we see deskilling and consumer training rather than information literacy or technical fluency. Yet that training is still training, and may be adaptable in such a way that it can become a literacy—in, for example, the way militaries have mobilised skill-sets produced through gaming. We too can and should mine the narrow and profit-driven consumer training that emerging adults have undergone for kinds of inquiry and critical engagement for which they may have inadvertently been given tools and training. In this article, we will analyse the structures of Facebook to see what sorts of consumer training it produces, and suggest avenues for the educational expropriation of that training. First, we take an inventory of categories of consumer training, analysing each and identifying exploitable elements within each. Following this, we suggest activities and assessment structures exapting these literacies and habits to educational ends. Many of these structures involve direct employment of Facebook in coursework, but others identify assignments, projects, and approaches which draw upon SNS consumer training but do not themselves employ Facebook. Keywords: Facebook, instructional design, phenomenology, consumer training, pedagogy The myth of digital nativity The term digital native was first coined by Marc Prensky in a 2001 edition of On the Horizon. He defined digital natives as people who have spent their lives engaged in technologies such as computers, video games, the internet, and mobile phones. Their exact birth year varies among scholars, but in general these are kids who were born after 1980. In 2001, Prensky pointed out research that indicates that as a result of this lifelong immersion in technology, the brain structure and thinking patterns of digital natives is quite different from the digital immigrants (those born prior to the technology explosion). In 2009 edition of Innovate, Prensky readdressed his 2001 publication, suggesting that as we progress further into the 21 century, the line between digital natives and digital immigrants becomes more blurred, and that we should focus our attention on what he labels as digital wisdom. “Digital wisdom is a twofold concept, referring both to wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities” (Prensky, 2009, p. 1). Since the Prensky (2001) article, there have been a great many discussions and debates surrounding the idea of the digital native. Digital natives cannot be determined by their birth year alone. Children born in developing countries, where even electricity is Rush and Wittkower 14 scarce cannot be considered digital natives. But even in wealthy countries, where children have access to technologies, there is a divide between those who use them effectively and those who do not (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008). Hargittai (2010) pointed out that while 81.2% students whose parents are considered highly educated own personal laptops, only 55.1% of students whose parents have less than a high school education own a laptop, and that parental education also plays a role in the skill level of the student. Hargittai and Hinnant’s (2008) study tells us that college students who have daily access to the internet vary in knowledge based on their socioeconomic status, parental education, race, and gender. University students come to us from all types of backgrounds, some are digitally literate, but many are not. Even among those of the ‘digitally native generation’ who are digital natives, though, the idea that digital nativity would itself automatically imply digital literacy/fluency, information literacy/fluency, or digital wisdom, is based on too simplistic an understanding of the cognitive and behavioural environment to which “digital natives” are native. “The digital” is not a single thing, and the digital landscape is not uniform. Skills developed in one sort of digital environment or practice may not be more broadly applicable. Even the phrase “digital native” is, in this way, a kind of fallacious equivocation, implying transitivity of skills and understanding across radically disparate kinds of activity. The digital native’s familiarity with seeking out information on Google in no way implies her familiarity with search engine algorithms, metadata, or the assessment of online sources; the digital native’s relative comfort in maintaining personal relationships online does not translate into fluency in maintaining privacy on social networking sites (SNS). Now, to be sure, there are some general truisms about life online that cut across a great swath of the everyday practices of digital natives, and these truisms can help us reform our pedagogy. We need to teach students the way that they can learn, not in the traditional ways that we and prior generations learned in the past. Generation Y emerging adults, or Millennials as they are often called, prefer fast, parallel learning. They are multi-taskers, and it is rare to find one who prefers working in silence. “Unlike most digital immigrants, digital natives live much of their lives online, without distinguishing between the online and offline” (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008, p. 4). They prefer to participate actively in their learning process. “Kids who have grown up digital expect to talk back, to have a conversation” (Tapscott, 2009, p. 126). Tapscott (2009) points out that in the United States today, we generally follow the Industrial Age mode of pedagogy, and this is not effective for Millennials who are used to fast paced environments and must be prepared to become lifelong learners. Universities have tried to keep up with new and changing technologies by doing things like giving all students a laptop, installing Smart Boards in every classroom, providing wireless internet access at every location, and making equipment like iPads, cameras, and e-readers available for students and faculty to borrow, although practices of effective use have sometimes lagged behind the availability of these resources. Access to the internet has drastically changed the way that we find and use information. Digital natives are “grazers,” who do not sit and read the newspaper from cover to cover each day, but read bits of information from various sources throughout the day and night (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008). They interact with the information much more than digital immigrants, by participating in online discussions, blogs, posting on Facebook and Twitter. In 2008, Barack Obama employed Chris Hughes to organise his online presence. “Obama had by far the largest Internet presence of the candidates” (Tapscott, 2009, p. 252). The campaign changed the way that Millennials, who were described by Mark Bauerlein (2008) as “the dumbest generation,” participate in politics. It is quite possible that they are actually learning and engaging with information more Exploiting fluencies 15 than digital immigrants, when the information is presented to them in a way that is innate to them (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008). This is all quite valuable. In addition to drawing on these most generic informational habits inculcated by life online, though, we can also take a more focused look at the specific environments to which “digital natives” are native, in order to see what specific literacies and fluencies have been developed and fine-tuned prior to their arrival in our classrooms. By doing so, we may be able to identify new cognitive ‘strong points’ to draw upon in our coursework. Consumer training and Millennials One barrier to proper appreciation of the meaning of digital nativity has been the focus on the importance of developing informational habits within a digital environment to the exclusion of recognition of the importance of developing informational habits within a market environment. In our online informational lives we represent constant sources of profit through advertising microtransactions, and online environments are often strongly determined by market forces. The fluencies developed among digital natives, then, are likely to be those that best support the profitability of the private interests at work in the digital environments to which they are native. We might call this “consumer training,” since it’s a purposeful development of habits of use which maximise the value of the user qua consumer to the corporation that owns the informational environment in question. We expect, then, that digital natives will be fluent in sharing and building relationships, but not as fluent in navigating privacy settings; that they will be very capable of finding appealing information for a given Google search, but not that they should be well aware of or comfortable considering how Google determines which results to display, distinguishing between ‘sponsored results’ (ads) and other results, or thinking through other informational distortions like Google bombing, spamdexing, and filter bubbles. Consumer training is further supported by processes of deskilling that introduce dependency on profit-based informational environments. Just as the presence of spellchecking in our word-processors has presumably led to underdevelopment of spelling skills in digital natives (and perhaps a slow atrophy among digital immigrants as well), so too does trust in Google presumably lead to underdevelopment of informational assessment skills. We see, for example, that when users are asked to answer questions using a Google search, they are much more likely to use the first couple of hits rather than later results—and that users continue to favor those first hits even when they are presented with a ‘doctored’ set of results, in which the top ten search results are given in inverted order (Bing et al., 2007). It is ha

In this contribution to a phenomenology of social network sites (SNS), we see how the share button brings about an alteration in our being-with others. On the side of the sharer, we see an experience of the world in a mode of possible retroactive sociality, creating an enigma in the constitution and attention of the subject of a given experience. On the side of the receiver, we see how being shared with creates sometimes unwelcome retrospective ideation of the sharer’s experience, and requires a choice whether, by liking or commenting, to bring the sharer into retroactive awareness of having been experiencing the shared alongside the receiver. Only if and when the shared has been received and the reception has been shared is asynchronous being-with at a distance constituted.

Philosophers of technology are not playing the public role that our own theoretical perspectives motivate us to take. A great variety of theories and perspectives within philosophy of technology, including those of Marcuse, Feenberg, Borgmann, Ihde, Michelfelder, Bush, Winner, Latour, and Verbeek, either support or directly call for various sorts of intervention—a call that we have failed to heed adequately. Barriers to such intervention are discussed, and three proposals for reform are advanced: (1) post-publication peer-reviewed reprinting of public philosophy, (2) increased emphasis on true open access publication, and (3) increased efforts to publicize and adapt traditional academic research.