Month: August 2022

Dontcha wish your PM was hawt like me?

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

‘If you want a picture of the future, Winston, imagine a coddled manbaby dancing at his wedding to his sixth babymamma … forever.’

There is a very short video making the rounds of Finnish PM Sanna Marin dancing in a friend’s apartment. Somehow this has become a news item. Reporting on this is out of all proportion to any conceivable public interest. It made it onto Radio 4’s flagship PM broadcast.  The formally articulated agenda by which the focus is justified is:

  • She is partying too much and not focused on governing. Putin could roll his tanks over the border while she’s lipsyncing to Kelis.
  • Finnish Prime Ministers should observe some decorum, because we complain politicians are not like us, and then insist they behave… not like us. We are complex.
  • Maybe someone alluded to drugs and drugs are bad, because we cannot understand that someone might use the word #jauhojengi in jest

The fact that this story made it into the foreign-policy averse British media tells you the newsiness of it is nothing to do with that, and as for the idea that PMs should exhibit the dignity of the office … There is always an unspoken element to any news agenda.

The unspoken element to the reporting on this one is:

  • She is a young, attractive woman
  • She is in power
  • She seems to be aware of, or not ashamed of and trying to actively hide, fact number 1

It is that last one that really does for her. In our society this is pretty damning and really not seemly at all. Women are permitted to: be attractive; be in power; enjoy themselves. They are not allowed to do any 2 or more of these things at once. Attractive must be mitigated by being competitive with other women and a bit broken (Love Island). Powerful must be mitigated by being repellent (Cersei Lannister) or murdered by your sulky bidey in (Khaleesi). It would be simple if this unspoken element was articulated so we know where we stand. Notably none of the reporting on Marin mentions her politics or anything that would normally make a politician newsworthy, or which might matter to listeners in the UK. ‘Marin, who brought her country into NATO at a time of unprecedented crisis, overturning 70 years of Finnish policy, has enjoyed a drink in private with some friends’. The punishment for any editor insisting the last bit of that is what should be on the news agenda should be being forced to watch Boris dancing at his wedding on repeat until the end of time.

 

Diseases of affluence, without the affluence

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

One of the predictions made in global health was that as low/mid income countries became wealthier, their populations would adopt the illnesses characteristic of high income counties. Causes of death would shift away from neonatal conditions, violence and communicable disease to obesity, heart disease, stroke, cancer and other what are often called lifestyle conditions.These were called diseases of affluence. Then we learnt better.

The great disease shift has largely been borne out – many countries have overcome these causes of death. As lifespan increases and consumption and living patterns change we see some of the expected disease pattern where most diseases are those of old age. But we have another problem: that many of these conditions are now detached from affluence. They are concentrated in lower income groups within higher income countries. They spread throughout the globe and are most prevalent where countries are most connected into the global economic and cultural system. Chronic mental health problems, problems of long term addiction, and chronic life diseases are not diseases of affluence. Hence concepts like affluenza do not really capture the processes at work. While these inequalities are a result of the operation of the global economy, they affect those who are most disadvantaged by it, whose communities are most hollowed out by it.

The post-user and the digital drug market

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

The concept of ‘the user’ or ‘person who uses drugs’ is central to how we talk about drug supply and distribution. It implies a singular individual who has a continuous relationship with drugs and a defined trajectory through which they become drug experienced. The non human elements of drug use contexts have been integrated by Duff (2011), Dennis (2019) and others, who have sought to move away from the user as the centre of the universe. Research into digital drug distributions still often works with the background assumption that user=a single individual. To question that we can draw on research in human computer interaction.

Baumer and Brubaker’s concept of post-userism describes how the design of digital systems is evolving away from the ground truth assumption that the start and end point is the actions of a single human user. They sketch out the historical evolution of the basic assumptions in human computer interaction, from a single person sitting in front of a single fixed terminal, to the use of multiple mobile devices, IOT devices, and other digital things that take on some of what would previously be attributes of the user. Attributes such as distributed cognition are to the for here. That parallels a lot of new materialism and actor-network theory work. I would go further and say that the classic period of the ‘user’ also had some of these attributes baked in, but they were hidden due to who the users were. There was a near one to one relationship between the user’s cultural habitus and the design of the systems they were using.

They set out some attributes we should be alert to. There is indirection, where the system operator is acting for someone else. There are many instances where a device might be shared among a group, or where it is mediated by an operator. Then there is transience, where individuals interact with a system repeatedly without it retaining a singular ‘trace identity’ for them. Multiplicity is a common happening in some systems where people can have varied identities representing different uses or subject positions. Systems also work with user Absence where they are not centred on any one user, but have effects nonetheless. They give an example of Google searches for classically African American names, as a prospective employer might do, throw up adverts implying the person may have a criminal record. User absence or withdrawal does not guarantee they can avoid the effects systems have. Human and non-human also work together as hybrids, for example the automod we are working with operates as an ally for the human moderators. All sorts of interesting challenges come up here, such as how the trend towards biometric authentication works when the person using the interface is not the end user.

In drug market studies this perspective is apt, as we see systems which have these attributes. There are automated drug market systems such as Televend. Users operate drug purchase systems for others and insert themselves into the market as buyers, secondary distributors and social suppliers. In drug market studies we can systematically acknowledge how these changes have altered the nature of distribution and consumption. For example, the rise of performance/image enhancing drugs decenters the hedonic self, instead involving multiple selves. Legal liability and culpability are also in question when the systems are complex and distribute responsibility among different individuals and systems.

Baumer EPS and Brubaker JR (2017) Post-userism. In: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Denver Colorado USA, 2 May 2017, pp. 6291–6303. ACM. DOI: 10.1145/3025453.3025740.

Dennis F (2019) Injecting Bodies in More-than-Human Worlds. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9780429466137.
Duff C (2011) Reassembling (social) contexts: New directions for a sociology of drugs. International Journal of Drug Policy 22(6): 404–406. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2011.09.005.