Here at Loop bar for the Automated Culture symposium. @MarkAndrejevic welcomes us over an AI-generated soundtrack to a day of connections and shared logics across different realms #autocult

We're operating under a punitive, automated social security system in Australia, says Alex North from @AusUnemployment. This system has to be more difficult, and less well paid, than a job, to force people off it as quickly as possible #autocult

Cameo Dalley has researched the cashless debit card, introduced in East Kimberley, WA, in 2016. 80% of the people in this region are Indigenous Australians #autocult

The cashless debit card is about quarantining welfare. It restricts people to spending 80% of their money on approved purchases (food, clothes, bills) and lets them withdraw 20% of their allowance in cash. It's supposed to limit alcohol, drugs & gambling: Cameo Dalley #autocult

The card is based around surveillance intervening into Indigenous Australian lives, and involves a whole lot of very personal information being sacrificed to gain access to this kind of welfare: Cameo Dalley #autocult

Here's @venessapaech with an extremely good photo of her in her first online community: X-Philes Anonymous (where she met her husband!) Venessa is now a community management expert, and has seen the conversation change to being dominated by algorithms #autocult

The commercial logics that sit behind social media platforms aren't naturally compatible with community building: @venessapaech #autocult

Making a more equitable automated culture involves getting rid of the idea that bigger = better with online communities, and giving people *in* those communities more agency over how they're governed @venessapaech #autocult

"I'm going to tell a story about Robodebt", begins @beneltham. In 2016, people started calling Ben about debt letters they were getting. When you're a journalist, sometimes people reach out to you when they think you have the ability to hold people in power to account #autocult

The Aus govt's Robodebt system was ramping up. One of the big problems with the calls from debt collectors was: What is this money I owe? It turned out the govt were using a data-matching protocol to compare tax office data to Centrelink data to come up with a figure #autocult

Robodebt isn't *just* an automation. It's also the result of decisions made by people. It was a conscious decision by the government to capture as many debts as possible. What was being created here was the debt itself: @beneltham #autocult

Basically, the issue was taking one fortnight in a year and assuming that represented every other fortnight in terms of income to generate a(n often false) number. But Robodebt isn't robotic. It's about disciplining and punishing welfare recipients: @beneltham #autocult

The question that brings the panel together is about what can be done: How can we maintain the autonomy and agency of vulnerable and marginalised citizens in these automated fields? #autocult

Alex North: There's a huge amount of information being collected. We need to collect less.

Cameo Dalley: How can we stop ourselves intervening in people's lives all the time? Maybe we could assume people are autonomous and have their own agency over their own lives? #autocult

. @venessapaech: Watching people in online communities push back against automations involves watching them being context coaches. We need to focus on the deeply broken models of consent that operate when we sign up to digital systems #autocult

. @beneltham: Stop substituting measurement for judgement. Stop using information to hurt people #autocult

Ramon Lobato with Netflix's personalisation algorithms as a familiar case study of everyday automation. But how are these algorithms actually used? #autocult

Netflix has shifted from being a distributor to a producer of content as well. And unsurprisingly, it wants a return on its investment, and promotes its own content heavily. This means filter bubbles aren't the only commercial logic here: Lobato #autocult

There is now more device-level filtering of content: hardware providers like Samsung, LG, Google, Amazon, Roku, have different business models that lead them to recommend in different ways: Lobato #autocult

So when you are first choosing between Netflix, Stan, and Disney+, there are content recommendations at that level too: Lobato #autocult

Local content is another issue. The EU Audiovisual Media Service Directive is leaning towards promoting more European content. So governments have a hand in our recommendation systems too: Lobato #autocult

Understanding economic logics alongside sociotechnical platform logics is important to the future of these streaming services: Lobato #autocult

"Humans are not at the centre": A performance from @roslynhelper takes us into the afternoon of #autocult

In digital life, the most private parts of our identity are being algorithmically manipulated, says @thao_pow of the advertising campaign for Ex Machina: the star of the film was featured on Tinder but turned out to be a bot #autocult

How do technical systems "see" gender and race? Kyoko, a character in Ex Machina, is depicted as performing menial tasks, is objectified, is dismissed by our protagonist's host: "There's no point talking to her. She doesn't speak English": @thao_pow #autocult

. @nnniccc has studied brands at music festivals and argues that these events have been training machines. Entry to music festivals often grants corporate partners use of your image in advertising materials #autocult

How do music festivals become machine readable? They often feature large text objects and branding logos, which create and mediate particular kinds of sociality, and then convert this sociality into data: @nnniccc #autocult

Operational images - the festival snaps of signs, brands, and even common poses like holding up red plastic cups - are affective and meaningful. But they are also classified and clustered by machine vision: @nnniccc #datacult

. @ACMcCosker has just finished a book with @endotician on the new camera consciousness, about contexts and case studies for machine vision like selfies, drones, driverless cars #autocult

Camera consciousness is an old concept: actors performing to a camera for films instead of a live audience for theatre. Feeling a little uncomfortable talking to a camera instead of a person is a common experience! @ACMcCosker #autocult

The concept of camera consciousness includes an awareness of cameras, the camera transforming the world into visual data, camera-aware machines @ACMcCosker #autocult

How are deepfakes entering and changing our visual landscape? We can use deepfakes to understand the domains in which they appear. They pop up where there are sufficient data sets: politics, democracy, porn, celebrity, art @ACMcCosker #autocult

There's a little buzz about semiotics in machine vision communities: this is where we can start to see meaning-making happen. Meaning is a human competency @ACMcCosker #autocult

We are re-seeing the world through machines @ACMcCosker #autocult

So happy to have chaired a wonderful panel on digital rights as part of this automated culture symposium