Trust and Vulnerability as Technoscientific Practice

• In Event: Technicalities of Trust and Technologies of Sensing

Abstract

The increasingly central place of digital infrastructures in the organization of the self, combined with the manifold incitements towards the circulation of personal media has made trust a central problematic of contemporary identity construction. Digital intimacy in particular can be a minefield of trust challenges and experiences of acute vulnerability: leaky infrastructures, malicious actors and organizations, data-hungry states haunt the construction of both self and body. The political economy of the digital is built on both the maintenance of trust, and the inequitable distribution of vulnerability. While Facebook capitalizes off my viral post, I accept the risk of circulation and get paid in the affective sugar high of likes and comments.

The vulnerabilities of networked sociality highlight the vulnerabilities of life itself; humans are hopelessly at the mercy of others, queerly laid bare by our dependence on ever larger networks of people, objects and affects for familiar rhythms and the pleasures of the untimely. In this paper I look at trust building practices on infrastructures designed for circulation and exposure. The building of trust, both with others and with the infrastructures themselves, requires a bricolage of tactics and strategies and a complex understanding of the semiotics of digital platforms. I focus in particular on emergent “innovations” in digital communication, including emphermality, live-streaming, and geolocation to develop a vocabulary focused on the “quotidian and banal activities of sexual self-elaboration through Internet technologies — emergent habituations, corporeal comportment and an array of diverse switchpoints of bodily capacity” (Puar, 2012: 151).

Author

• Benjamin Haber, Wesleyan University