On Party Technology: People on Inflatable Pool Floats Can Do Without a Captain

Dear Felienne!

You won’t believe it. After ignoring your homework assignments and going off course week after week, I have done the work you assigned for this final episode of season one! And this time, I also managed to keep it shorter! So, here it comes…

Adapting Life to LLMs

Part one of the assignment was to read the paper ”Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (1980) by Langdon Winner¹, which I did (well, to be honest, I read parts of it properly and skimmed other parts). I loved the following quote:

It is still true that, in a world in which human beings make and maintain artificial systems, nothing is “required” in an absolute sense. Nevertheless, once a course of action is underway, once artifacts like nuclear power plants have been built and put in operation, the kinds of reasoning that justify the adaptation of social life to technical requirements pop up as spontaneously as flowers in the spring. (p. 134)

The quote made me uncomfortable, though, because we are going through something similar right now with AI at work. Now that LLMs exist and are widely available, arguments like ”students will use them anyway, so we better teach them how to do it properly” and reasoning like ”given how tempting LLMs are, you can’t trust a student anymore, you need to do an oral exam” have started to take over our daily conversations at work. Yes — in theory — we could simply close our eyes and ears and carry on as we always did. But in reality, things have suddenly changed, and alongside LLMs, arguments for incorporating AI in our educational practice have started to emerge — not like flowers, but more like weeds or mould. There is no way to stop these arguments for using AI and the justifications for why we need to adapt to AI, and now one also needs to relate to, act on, and think about those.

Reconfiguring Social Configurations

The second part of your homework was about analyzing any software system and asking oneself what social configuration this software requires or encourages. At first, I thought, “This is amazing; I need to talk about the digital voting software my colleagues and I are working on!” This e-voting software, which is called Decidos², is intended for small, low-stakes elections, such as student council elections, or voting that takes place during shareholder meetings, homeowners’ association gatherings, or in the context of municipal initiatives. In terms of social configurations, our software assumes a democratic setting in which all voters have an equal say and can vote securely and anonymously from the comfort of their own homes. Yet the software also assumes that the election organizer has special powers (such as determining who gets to vote, what the voting options are, and exactly when the election runs). Such details are not determined democratically in our setup. Also, our software has critical political constraints. For instance, we explicitly do not intend this software to be used in national elections. After all, our software is not resilient against authoritarian influence. So yes, it would be great to look at this system from a political and social configuration perspective. But then again, you envisioned this exercise for our Bachelor students. So, instead of looking at this voting system we are working on right now, I went back to my own Bachelor studies and revisited a software system I built with some teammates in Germany as a student in 2008.

Coincidentally, the main software project I worked on as a bachelor’s student dealt with changing social configurations in music-making! We had noticed that at most parties, a single DJ would play the music while the rest danced to their beat. It struck us (or at least me; I am not sure I can speak for the team here) as odd that one single person would have so much control over the music and, by proxy, everyone’s dancing. At that time, I was very fascinated by the so-called Reactable³, a round table-shaped musical instrument that allows people without any prior training to easily join in and out of collaborative music-making. I was intrigued by the idea that many people could play an instrument together and that, instead of having a single DJ, a crowd could make the music they are dancing to collectively. So, we built what we called the Wall of Sound⁴: a large touchscreen wall (which was a challenge at the time, as we had to build the touch functionality ourselves using infrared cameras and implement gesture recognition from scratch) that allowed laypeople to make music together collectively by moving science-fiction-like planets, moons, asteroids, and stars around in space, thereby triggering samples and effects and changing the soundscape. It’s really hard to describe in words, but in case you are interested, you can have a look and listen here:

The Wall of Sound was a lot of fun for everyone. The system transformed the room into a collaborative space and turned the party attendees into co-creators and performers. It invited, and maybe even eased, communication between strangers who could respond musically to each other, even if they had nothing to say to each other in words. If a party with a DJ is like a ship with a single captain who gives direction to an obedient crew⁵, our party resembled a crowd of people on inflatable pool floats, drifting and paddling freely in the water, improvising and exploring where they want to go. Turns out, people on pool floaties really can do without a captain.

As you probably have noticed, I still have very fond memories of this project. Hence, I could not help but wonder whether we could apply a similar setup to our podcast and put a twist on the relationship between podcast hosts and listeners. I am curious: could we give our listeners more of a voice? Is there a different, more collaborative form of making these recordings? No, please don’t get me wrong. I do not think there is a problem with our setup. Just like having a DJ at a party is usually a great idea, having a traditional podcast with two hosts has really been a blast! But if you, Felienne, or you, our listeners, have ideas on how we can reconfigure our relationship, involve you more, and give you all a voice in this as well, I would be happy to hear them, and I can’t wait for season two!

Cheers,

Hanna