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Can we deter tech monopolies and combat income inequality through a reformed open source software development?

Can we deter tech monopolies and combat income inequality through a reformed open source software development?

The imbalance world of software development The foundation of the modern internet is built upon open source software. According to Nadia Eghbal’s report about the unseen labour of open source software development, more than 95% of the internet software...
Extraction and accumulation in times of platform capitalism

Extraction and accumulation in times of platform capitalism

The above visualization represents some of the core developments in what has been referred to as ‘platform capitalism’. It draws upon the small volume by Nick Srniceck with the same title. In ‘Platform Capitalism’, Srnicek explains how capitalism is...
A Call for Collectivization: Addressing the atomization and exploitation of ‘lean platform’ workers

A Call for Collectivization: Addressing the atomization and exploitation of ‘lean platform’ workers

Sketching the Problem: Lean Platforms and ‘Precarity by Design’ The platform labor economy, epitomized by platforms such as Uber and TaskRabbit, is actively reshaping the relationship between workers and the labor that they perform. Sometimes referred to as the...
A Capitalist Does Not Always Pay His Debts: On Debt, Rentism, and Inequality

A Capitalist Does Not Always Pay His Debts: On Debt, Rentism, and Inequality

Debt, governance, and inequality are three of the main building blocks of capitalist economies. These economies have features that allow great wealth to essentially reproduce itself in the absence of strong governance regulation, which in turn typically leads to...
China’s Dystopian Social Credit System Within Western Borders

China’s Dystopian Social Credit System Within Western Borders

Imagine a world where your every move, online and offline, gets monitored and scored by big companies and the government. This idea gets even more chilling when your online activities, behaviour, relationships and financial data ultimately determine whether you...
How are gender norms reconstructed through app store ecologies and visual interfaces?

How are gender norms reconstructed through app store ecologies and visual interfaces?

A look at popular medical, health & fitness apps in the Google Play store (NL) Figure 1: Google Play Store search results for “period” mobile applications Introduction This research project interests itself in the gender dynamics at play in...
Am I—Reflections on the search recommendations, algorithmic identity and the datafied subject

Am I—Reflections on the search recommendations, algorithmic identity and the datafied subject

“The endless, continuously updated streams of information online are selected, processed and made available through recommendations calculated by complex algorithms. Am I explores how these algorithmic recommendations shape our everyday existence – and both reflect as shape our sense...
VR as a Tool to Prevent Sexual Offenses

VR as a Tool to Prevent Sexual Offenses

According to an article by Refinery29, 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men report having experienced some form of sexual assault or harassment in their lifetimes (Ohikuare). With 2017 being the year of trailblazing campaigns such as...
Monetization on Twitch: Investigating the Relationship Between Audience, Creator and Content

Monetization on Twitch: Investigating the Relationship Between Audience, Creator and Content

The social and interactive nature of web 2.0 (O’Reilly) and new media platforms provide a sense of freedom for users to produce or consume content according to their preferences. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have, over the...
Life in the Amazon(e)

Life in the Amazon(e)

Introduction In 1995, the then thirty-year-old Jeff Bezos founded Amazon and by using the emerging World Wide Web, he was able to sell books globally, from his garage. Although he could probably not imagine that he would one day...
Swipe you left out of my life!

Swipe you left out of my life!

How the features of tinder encourage both connectedness and social indifference As the world is becoming more digitally connected and people are becoming more reliant on the Internet and digital technologies for various aspects of their lives, it comes...
You Won’t Believe What These Young Liberal Students Did Their Project On

You Won’t Believe What These Young Liberal Students Did Their Project On

Fake news When Pheidippides burst into the Greek assembly to exclaim ‘nenikēkamen’, after running from the battle of Marathon to Athens where the Greeks had just conquered the Persians, his death gave birth to the concept of the marathon...
Smart Home Technologies and the Transformation Of Domestic Space

Smart Home Technologies and the Transformation Of Domestic Space

Since Gordon Moore’s prophetic law in 1965, in which he claimed that microchips would develop so that the speed would double while size would decrease every year, has allowed for the evolution of ubiquitous computing and its introduction into...
Cookie Monster: building awareness around free labour and data-exploitation

Cookie Monster: building awareness around free labour and data-exploitation

  Introduction Users that roam the European Internet on a daily basis will have come across them countless of times. Each time a new website is visited it pops up in the middle of the screen or it rests...
Join the HIVE: The AR future of social networks

Join the HIVE: The AR future of social networks

The Age of AR Augmented Reality (AR) is set to be the next big step in computing,  and experts are predicting a big growth of the AR sector, estimating it at around 140 billion Euros worth by 2024.  Many of...
Free as in ‘labor’, not as in ‘movement’: Google’s Local Guides and Gamifying Digital Maps

Free as in ‘labor’, not as in ‘movement’: Google’s Local Guides and Gamifying Digital Maps

In the past few years, tourism has hit an all-time high across the globe. With decreasing costs of transportation and travel, more and more countries are seeing unprecedented numbers of visitors. By May 2018, Turkey had received 11.8 million tourists,...
Do the Robot: A critical alternative to gendered humanistic virtual assistants

Do the Robot: A critical alternative to gendered humanistic virtual assistants

“Alexa, how deep is the ocean?”, “Alexa play some music!”, “Alexa, call the plumber!” Mundane tasks such as making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, and searching for weather, traffic, sports, and other real-time information are all outsourceable in...
Culture, Art & Digitisation

Culture, Art & Digitisation

Being art lovers, we’re always looking for what’s new in the world of art. This led us to an article about L’Atelier des Lumieres in Paris which is exhibiting the works of Gustav Klimt in a digitally immersive manner....
“Grassroots Maptivism”: Mapping Feminist Movements Around the World

“Grassroots Maptivism”: Mapping Feminist Movements Around the World

The virtual space has become the preferred place to demand for change. There are several examples of such movements from all over the world – Occupy Wall Street, The Arab Spring, #BlackLivesMatter, #NiUnaMenos #15-M Movement. With over 4 billion...
Reality Slap Plugin: You Never Know When It Hits You

Reality Slap Plugin: You Never Know When It Hits You

With the number of Tweets, Facebook statuses, Instagram pictures and Stories many users share on a daily basis, we think it can be exhausting to keep track of the wide-ranging visibility a single post can have. With a public...
EcoScanner: Self-tracking Sustainability

EcoScanner: Self-tracking Sustainability

Piloting the EcoScanner: A Self-tracking Solution to Sustainability   Annika Heinemeyer, Daniel Jurg, Molly Doell, Ziwen Tang   Abstract Modern consumers are using apps to track all types of behavior (sleep, running, eating etc.). But while there are some...
Empowered by Data: Streaming Platforms Becoming Media Distributors

Empowered by Data: Streaming Platforms Becoming Media Distributors

                        Introduction Media streaming platforms have transformed traditional media industries and continue to do so. Netflix successfully started their own in-house production company based on insights from their...
Red, Greyscale, Blue: Mapping Colour Intensity against Political Bias in News Media

Red, Greyscale, Blue: Mapping Colour Intensity against Political Bias in News Media

In a world where mainstream media outlets are increasingly being bought by tech corporations, fake news sites might sway elections, and supporters of different political viewpoints rarely read sources with opinions that differ to their own, it is important...
Trigger Block: A plug-in making online life easier for people living with mental illness

Trigger Block: A plug-in making online life easier for people living with mental illness

18.5% of Americans experience mental illness in a given year (National Institute of Mental Health). With this percentage increasing throughout the years, one can wonder if the online world could bring comfort for those suffering with mental illness. To...