The Flemish Scrollers, 2021
Dries Depoorter,
Jul 12, 2021
It's not only students taking exams that are being proctored by AI. In this project a live video feed of the Flemish parliament is analyzed and an AI measures how much time politicians are spending on their devices instead of watching the person speaking live. The video is posted to a Twitter and Instagram account with the politician tagged. As expected, some of them spend most of their time online. But I reject the framing here that these politicians are 'distracted' and should stay 'focused'. This misrepresents, or perhaps simply misunderstands, the role politicians play today. They are no longer debating each other in solemn deliberations in order to make wise decisions. By the time they meet, the decisions have mostly already been made, the result of millions of communications between interested parties. Those politicians who are online are involved in this process and working on the next set of deliberations. Those who are not online are not engaged, probably not part of the decision-making process at all, and are there for show or perhaps as proxies for entrenched (but unelectable) interests.
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