nyuad-im / politics-of-code

Repository for the code, readings and resources for the Politics of Code class at NYU AD Fall 2016

Politics Of Code

Repository for the code, readings and resources for the Politics of Code class at NYU AD Fall 2016

Instructor

Pierre Depaz ([email protected])

Meeting Time

Tuesday — 2:40 - 3:55PM Thursday — 2:40 - 5:20PM

Office

C3-032

Office hours

Wednesday — 1:00 - 6:00PM (but anytime as long as you write me an email, really)

Course Description

While our relationships between ourselves, our environment, and other people are inherently political, computer technologies and technology companies consistently claim to remain “neutral”. This course will assume the opposite —software is political—, and focus on how software applications share commonalities with political systems, how they affect their users as political actors and how we can build alternatives or improvements to those systems.

This course is aimed at deconstructing the design and implementation of software as a political medium, such as Facebook’s timeline algorithm, city officials’ use of computer simulations to orchestrate urban life, blockchain-backed proof of ownership and algorithmic criminal assessment. Along with an introduction to political theory and media studies, coupled with an exploration of the underlying political impacts of those systems, students will work on several hands-on projects to offer functioning alternatives to those systems. To that end, this course will include several workshops in JavaScript, Python and Unity.