SATURATION NAVIGATION
Abstract * A conceptual tool for reading data excess, informational overload and algorithmic visibility as infrastructural conditions that demand collective forms of orientation, refusal and counter-visualization. Keywords * Socioplastics AntoLloveras LAPIEZA-LAB Saturation Navigation SaturationNavigation DataCriticism overload metadata refusal - Essay * SaturationNavigation describes the condition of information excess: data are not scarce but overwhelming. The problem is no longer lack of knowledge but how to move within surfeit—how to distinguish noise from signal, data from world, correlation from cause. danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s critical questions for big data argue that big data is not just large but epistemologically novel: it trades in correlation, not causation; it strips data from context; it claims to speak for populations that cannot answer back. Lisa Gitelman’s “raw data” is an oxymoron collects essays showing that data are never given; they are taken, framed, cleaned, formatted, and interpreted—always cooked. Paul Dourish’s stuff of bits insists that information is always material; servers, cables, cooling systems, and rare-earth minerals are the hidden substrates of saturation. Daniel Rosenberg’s data before the fact traces how the concept of data emerged in the seventeenth century as “things given” (by God, by nature), but we now treat them as found objects, forgetting their fabrication. David Beer’s data gaze describes a new form of power: those who see through data see differently, and they see you—your clicks, your pauses, your purchases. Missing political economy is now added: Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism explains why saturation is a business model (more data, more prediction, more behavioral modification); Nick Srnicek’s platform capitalism shows how platforms generate noise and friction to extract value. Ontologically, SaturationNavigation posits that we do not live in an information age but in a data age—and data are not information; they are the raw material of a new mode of production. Methodologically, it requires data friction analysis, interface criticism, and glitch ethnography: studying what breaks, what resists, what cannot be digitized. Empirical fields include social media feeds, academic databases, urban dashboard systems, and personal data brokerage. The proposal is to navigate collectively: to develop shared practices of data refusal, algorithmic non-use, and counter-visualization. SaturationNavigation thus moves from individual media literacy to infrastructural resistance.
Bibliography *
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Anto Lloveras develops Socioplastics as a philosophical practice that produces distinctions across architecture, art, archive, pedagogy, ecology, urbanism, metadata and machine reading. His work asks what an idea becomes when it expands into hundreds of public entries; what work means when it includes care and maintenance; what an archive does when it digests rather than stores; and how an object becomes a field when surrounded by relations. His philosophy is operative rather than abstract. It becomes structure, vocabulary, method, route and public infrastructure. Socioplastics turns thinking into a built environment where concepts are not merely explained but inhabited, repeated, tested and transformed.
