<< The Tasked Homunculus >>

 

Imagine the following scenario and world:

 
Doing the task well, is no longer sufficient in this world. In this world one must incessantly proof that one can do the task well, in a jargon and within time- and space-sensitive confinements that are defined and logged elsewhere; external to oneself. Either such processes toward proof are humanly observed (i.e., by other homunculi), or they are automated.
 
In effect, in this imagined world, the latter seems to be increasingly the case, spreading as if an ink blot across the ages and the social areas within which that world’s human individual (perhaps a homunculus) moves into, and out of, during their lifetime.
 
In this imaginary scenario, the task, as well, is no longer simply the act of making a living for oneself, one’s family, one’s community, one’s national context or one’s in-group’s nascent generations. The task is any data-generating act; preferably acts that can be aggregated and capitalized on by involving, at times unknown and obscured, third-parties.

The latter actor then is enabled to create, via its tasks, those tools toward improving tasks, to be fed back to those who have provided the data sets in the first place (e.g., that same homunculus), and to yet other parties interested in visualizing tasks outside of these tasks’ initially intended settings or (meta)physical aims.

In this imagined story, and in your imagination, where or how do you see yourself (if at all; and / or if you were that homunculus)?


—animasuri’22

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Header visual: digitally photo edited digital photo of paper and pencil folded against wood . “Mediated Existence” . —animasuri’22

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References and perverted note-taking intertwining “#task”, “#assessment” and “#data” from:

William, D. (2006) Assessment for #Learning. Cambridge AfL Keynote. Online Retrievable from here.

data tasked from bodies (as shedded data and free labor) from here

data tasked across species (as alienating datasets from those who do or don’t count) from here

data tasked across borders (as disembodied data teleportation) from here

data tasked from mobiles (as extended-cognition extenders) from here

#dataliteracy #wellbeing #systemsthinking #alienation #poetry #creativity #adaptability