A project about online ethics and how to protect them.
Already in a very early stage in this project we were interested in ethics and virtual emotions.
It brought us to the topics crime and punishment. We were looking for alternative punishment methods, which provide a chance for social rehabilitation.
The idea was to restrict body parts and thus limit certain actions.
We wanted to implementing some kind of, we called it „parasitic guardian“ which should create consciousness of the behaviour in a more subtle way.
We decided to punish online hate speech and tried to combine it with our ideas of a social way to rehabilitate.
The approach:
Take the hatespeaker‘s illusion of online anonymity,
by creating a physical connection to their online actions.
Teach hatespeakers to take responsibility for their
actions, by putting them into situations of discomfort.
Make hatespeakers experience loss of control,
by actually taking theirs.
Let hatespeakers punish each other,
by triggering our device through hatepostings.
To get the physical connection we link sozial network accounts to the hand.
The control would be taken, by influencing the hand movement.
It would be triggered after a certain amount of convicted hate speeches, depending on the severity of the punishment.
How does a subtle hand controlling punishment device look like?
We kept the idea of influencing the hand movement by triggering it with electronic muscle stimulation.
However, the muscles for the contraction should be on the outside of the underarm towards the elbow to crate a non aggressive hand gesture.
The device will be sent home to the convicted person. On the instruction sheet he can see his hate post, the duration of the punishment and the instruction to applied it.
Though the core part is the fictional NGO "THEMIS" which distributes the product, filters sozial networks and blogs and by doing this, it offers governments a neutral service to take care of online hate speech.
in collaboration with, Fabio Hofer | Phillip Loidolt | Jona Lorenz
