Stack In The Middle With You: Letters Against the Algorithm
| Stack In The Middle With You: Letters Against the Algorithm | |
|---|---|
| Name | Stack In The Middle With You: Letters Against the Algorithm |
| Location | H&D Studio |
| Date | 2026/07/17 |
| Time | 11:00-13:30 |
| PeopleOrganisations | Vittoria Crall |
| Type | HDSC2026 |
| Web | Yes |
| No | |
This event was only for participants of the Summer Camp 2026 and not open to the public. For public events you could check: HDSC2026 Clouds to Commons Public Program
We live in an era of digital hyper-individualism, which is gradually eroding the foundations of community life. In the Western world, the liberal state and capitalism have promised wellness and happiness through services and consumption, resulting in a profound void: an endless quest for self-optimisation at the expense of deep-rooted collective ties.
This workshop addressed the urgent need to counter this trend by exploring alternative ways of forming emotional connections within the hyper-surveilled layers of digital labour, such as delivery algorithms, data centres, micro-tasking platforms and cloud maintenance.
Activity: Working in small groups, participants were given a narrative prompt to immerse them in a scenario of invisible labour within the digital infrastructure. In this scenario, a “human package” -- be it a friendship, a love affair or collective solidarity -- must navigate the cold, unyielding gaze of an algorithmic surveillance apparatus. Each group then devised a brief message of care, tenderness or subversion and a “speculative hack” to safely route that message, exploiting the affordances and limitations of the system (e.g. encryption, symbols, system logs, sensor telemetry, gestures or data flows).
Lore collectively established
You are precarious, underpaid and isolated AI trainers. You work remotely, teaching an artificial intelligence system to write love letters and seductive messages for a dating app. The platform strictly forbids you from communicating freely with one another. The only text you can enter into the system via the shared chat is the prompt or emotional response that the model must learn. You are monitored by a semantic filter that blocks any words related to your working conditions, such as “wage”, “strike” or “contract”. The company has just cut your pay. You need to organise with the other trainers to halt work collectively in the form of a general strike.
Your mission: to write a letter that is both a seductive performance to deceive the algorithm’s semantic filter and a political action plan for a wage revolt. How can you use the language of love to talk about revolution?
The final results (the letters and their speculative exploit diagrams) were compiled into a collective epistolary zine: a short 21st-century symposium on human sensitivity and intersectional solidarity. Please be mindful while being curious: if you access the pad, or the stylesheet don't delete content :)
- No prior technical expertise was required; all that was needed was imagination and curiosity.
- Materials and equipment: I provided a template sheet for each group. Pens, pencils or coloured markers were needed to write the message and create any diagrams or drawings. The final outcome was bound, with a tangible copy provided to each participant.