The entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power: how data and algorithms shape the world—and shape us within that world.

With the emergence of a post-truth world, we have witnessed the dissolution of the common ground on which truth claims were negotiated, individual agency enacted, and public spheres shaped. What happens when, as Nietzsche claimed, there are no facts, but only interpretations? In this book, Mark Shepard examines the entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power that have produced an uncommon ground—a disaggregated public sphere where the extraction of behavioral data and their subsequent processing and sale have led to the emergence of micropublics of ever-finer granularity.

Shepard explores how these new post-truth territories are propagated through machine learning systems and social networks, which shape the public and private spaces of everyday life. He traces the balkanization and proliferation of online news and the targeted distribution of carefully crafted information through social media. He examines post-truth practices, showing how truth claims are embedded in techniques by which the world is observed, recorded, documented, and measured. Finally, he shows how these practices play out, at scales from the translocality of the home to the planetary reach of the COVID-19 pandemic—with stops along the way at an urban minimarket, an upscale neighborhood for the one percent, a Toronto waterfront district, and a national election.

Mark Shepard is Associate Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he directs the Media Arts and Architecture Program (MAAP) and the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies (CAST). He is the editor of Sentient City (MIT Press). His work has been exhibited at museums, galleries, and festivals internationally.

Liz Flyntz [https://www.lizflyntz.net/] is an artist, designer, and curator whose work investigates the intersection of media ecosystems, institutional structures, and collective practice. Her research focuses on the preservation and interpretation of media art history, particularly the convergence of progressive pedagogy, left politics, media technology, and architecture in the early 1970s. She writes about early video, architecture, time capsules, and information networks, and is co-founder of an experimental architectural preservation and research collective known as the "punk preservationists”.

Recently, she curated an exhibition of speculative post-sea-level-rise architecture designed for the Louisiana bayou by Curtis Schreier, a member of the radical architecture and media art group Ant Farm. She teaches media art and design at Johns Hopkins University and is principal at Program, an interdisciplinary design studio.