Computational Terrains and Securities: Exploring Depth as Calculative Frictions

Keywords: Terrain, Cybersecurity, Digital, Computation, Calculation, Security
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 33

Abstract

Computation, algorithms, and other digital materialities have increasingly permeated different spaces and places, producing ‘deep’ and contested spaces of calculation and performance. Terrain has emerged as a key concern within political geography and beyond, and no more so than in a recent discussion in Dialogues in Human Geography (Elden 2021) and in relation to feminist thinking (Jackman et al. 2020). This paper therefore examines how thinking about computational terrains, as spaces full of depth, verticality, and volume, can assist in conceptualising more-than-human computational and algorithmic agencies. This will build upon (auto)ethnographic fieldwork across scenes of cyber security, from malware, software development, to applications of ‘artificial intelligence’, to consider its various enactments. Through an engagement with Anna Tsing’s (2005) work on friction, I will detail how computational terrains – that complicate and introduce depth to ‘cyberspace’ – permit new readings across ‘technical’ and ‘policy’ orientated perspectives to both ‘automation’ and ‘decision-making’. These depths, which are uneven, contingent, obscured, and shadowy, I argue are where politics emerges across computation’s calculative frictions. That is, thinking across and through terrain can balance computation’s axiomatic logics with the potential for something new to emerge, which is deep in its layers, networks, applications, and people. Terrains are then the condition for a computational politics to be performed in incessant calculative negotiation in ways that criss-cross, become abstracted, and extend to, multiple places. Such frictions of the ‘deep’ then challenge explicit human comprehension to a security that combines people, computation, and environments in broader ecologies of security.