Repository for the code, readings and resources for the Politics of Code class at NYU AD Fall 2017. Find all the relevant course material in the wiki.
Pierre Depaz (pierre.depaz@nyu.edu)
Tuesday — 2:40 - 3:55PM - C3-153
Thursday — 2:40 - 5:20PM - C3-153
C3-032
Open-door policy
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.