I was scrolling through Tumblr the other morning (like I do) when I came across “the world’s tallest slum.” Located in downtown Caracas, an unfinished 45-story skyscraper that was supposed to host Venezuela’s business elite is now home to an estimated 3,000 squatters. The “Tower of David” (named after finance tycoon that started and abandoned the project) is now owned by the state but there are no government-provided utilities. The building is, in essence, not much more than an immense concrete frame, upon which the residents have begun to build a community. They pool money to pay for building security, there are bodegas on every floor, and water and electricity reach as high as the 22nd floor. This is no small feat of engineering or human organization, but it isn’t comfortable living either. I don’t think it would be romanticizing the living conditions of these people to say that they (and no one else) have made something that is both modest and remarkable for themselves. Abandoned by both private industry and the government, some people pooled their limited resources and made their lives a little more livable.  Zulma Bolivar, a Caracas City planning official in an interview with the New York Times described the situation in one sentence: “This tower is a perfect example of anarchy.”

I’m not completely sure if Bolivar is using “anarchy” as a term of derision or as an accurate descriptor for the kind of politics that makes The Tower of David work. At its heart, that’s all anarchism is: the willingness to cooperate freely and the desire to see a day where all human needs are fulfilled through that voluntary cooperation. It’s utopian thinking that doesn’t let the thinker get away with discussing ends without also dealing with the means. The fact that a bunch of people were able to make 22 floors of poured concrete into several thousands small homes is a much better case for anarchism than any Kropotkin quote I can muster up.

The Tower of David is not a DIY skyscraper. It is not a rhizomatically up-cycled crowd tower. It is nothing more or less than people cooperating out of a shared desire to fulfil their own needs by and through the helping of others. I don’t want to devalue that work by applying goofy Richard Florida buzzwords to it, but there are some unmistakable similarities between the anarchistic relationships that turned an abandoned building into a thousand homes, and the organization structures that produce Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS).

I’m not asking Debian developers to start quoting Emma Goldman, but they do need to stop pretending that their work is apolitical. The way they organize work is a huge deal: it represents a very evolved and refined way of establishing working relationships while also maintaining individual autonomy. But what is accomplished with this organizational structure? F/OSS makes exceptional corporate utility software: most of the corporate sites and web services you use run on Apache or Nginx, but rarely do we ever get software or services that are made for individuals. We never get a phone or a social media network that blows the corporate competition out of the water. F/OSS isn’t apolitical, it sided with the 1%.

The Tower of David (and most free software) is what Bruno Latour would call a “Theater of Proof,” something that makes a persuasive argument through example. Your argument doesn’t necessarily have to appeal directly to morals, ethics, or some other abstract principle; you get past the “shoulds” and instead proudly display the “what can bes” of the matter. It is a kind of pragmatic, brass tacks debating style that I have come to really admire as I pursue a social science Ph.D. at an engineering school. And I know this practice is fairly popular among open source developers and engineers because Biella Coleman (who I believe is the first to apply Latour’s concept to these communities), Chris Kelty, and others have witnessed similar styles of argument in their own research. I also know, having read these authors, that F/OSS communities really don’t want to pledge allegiance to any kind of spot on the political spectrum. I understand the tactical and rhetorical reasons for acting apolitical, (Google wouldn’t make up 98% of Mozilla’s income if the latter was avowedly and loudly anti-capitalist) but none of those justifications make it true. Every time a Fortune 500 company updates to the new version of Apache, the open source community demonstrates its politics.

It isn’t enough to say that software is a tool, and you can’t help it if you make a really useful tool and a corporation uses it to make a profit. The average person doesn’t have a use for complicated backend server software. They do need a social media network that isn’t out to exploit them for profit. The failure of the F/OSS community to come out with a polished, user-friendly, and user-run social media network, while Facebook run’s on open source server software is confounding. This arrangement turns inexcusable when those same people demand that other’s learn to code if they want to take full advantage of what F/OSS has to offer. At the very least, F/OSS usability and popular technological literacy should meet halfway.

What does F/OSS have to offer the end user? I don’t want (but have) another Ouya. I started using Zotero after my (very public) breakup with Mendeley but not a day goes by that I don’t miss the polish and reliability of what Elsevier stole from me. Firefox was a great “not Internet Explorer” but has been losing users since 2010. Linux, while getting more and more user-friendly by the day, still isn’t for most people. Open Office is for people who can’t or don’t want to buy/pirate “the real” office. With the exception of WordPress and VLC I can’t think of a single, mainstream product that people just choose to use because it is better than the competition. This isn’t a good sign, especially if you believe in the liberatory potential of F/OSS and you do most of your arguing in the Theater of Proof.

I know you, dear developer, use Open Office and Gimp because it doesn’t have the feature bloat that all the sheeple think they need. I know it’s frustrating that Ubuntu Linux had an app store years before Apple ever did, and yet it is the latter that gets all the praise. The kids today don’t even remember that Firefox invented tabbed browsing.  I know Zotero works perfectly fine for thousands of people, but for the millions more that can’t or have absolutely no desire to install and configure plugins for basic functions like PDF sorting and renaming, it doesn’t. For many people, even technologically literate people like myself, choosing open source feels like the tech equivalent of eating organic: if you can afford the time and expertise costs you can opt into this DRM and ad free utopia where you have total control over your privacy and the user forums are actually useful. That’s not good enough.

I know I’ve made a bunch of generalizations so far. Community standards differ between F/OSS projects and many of them do the kind of work that I’m calling for. Maybe WordPress is what open source social networking looks like. Perhaps I’ve under-estimated or given too little credit to “ICT4D” projects like FrontlineSMS that let people do new things with tried-and-true technologies. And I’m sure I’ve caused lots of people to shout “What about Wikipedia!” at their device screens. Indeed, Wikipedia is an immense success story, and yet it is still far easier to leave a comment on a Wal-Mart item description than edit a Wikipedia entry. Even tech evangelists like Kevin Kelly will admit that a group smaller than my high school incoming class are responsible for almost all of the editing.

What’s most frustrating though, more than anything, is that F/OSS appears to be the answer to all the things we dislike about our networked experiences. More open and collectively managed alternatives to Facebook and Android should be thriving right now. Companies that manipulate and experiment on us aren’t a necessary evil for a networked society. Device manufactures that lock you into a walled garden of planned obsolescence are not a fact of digital life. Deeply configurable and ownable devices and networks should not be the providence of only the people that have the expertise to build the private ones for the rest of us.

These frustrations could go away if F/OSS started prioritizing things like user interface design and gave serious consideration to ownership models outside of classic corporations. Like the Tower of David, we could start building a new web from tattered remnants of the old Net. It’d be a web that returns value to its users in the form of better services or even cash rewards. Just as Mozilla was set up to foster and develop what AOL was no longer willing to pay for, can’t we cobble together something greater than the sum of its parts? Can’t developers do something half as cool as turning an abandoned building into a community?

Pardon the neoliberalist framing but, if we were to treat technological literacy as currency then we are faced with anarchism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Through this lens it’s hard to read “learn to code!” as anything other than a call to bootstraps. It is the kind of elitism that can only come from people who deny their own elite status or their complicit role in an unjust status quo. What is needed now, perhaps more than anything, is a little bit of overt politics from the F/OSS communities that nurture and develop the world’s software. Maybe its time to stop maintaining the software that makes Amazon run and start building something new for the rest of us.

David is on Twitter & Tumblr.

Ugh. I hate the new Facebook. I liked it better without the massive psychological experiments.

Facebook experimented on us in a way that we really didn’t like. Its important to frame it that way because, as Jenny Davis pointed out earlier this week, they experiment on us all the time and in much more invasive ways. The ever-changing affordances of Facebook are a relatively large intervention in the lives of millions of people and yet the outrage over these undemocratic changes never really go beyond a complaint about the new font or the increased visibility of your favorite movies (mine have been and always will be True Stories and Die Hard). To date no organization, as Zeynep Tufekci observed, has had the “stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams.” When we do get mad at Facebook, it always seems to be a matter of unintended consequences or unavoidable external forces: There was justified outrage over changes in privacy settings that initiated unwanted context collapse, and we didn’t like the hard truth that Facebook had been releasing its data to governments. Until this week, it was never quite so clear just how much unchecked power Facebook has over its 1.01 billion monthly active users. What would governing such a massive sociotechnical system even look like?

I am, by far, not the first person to ask this question. I’m not even the first person to ask this in the wake of this most recent revelation. Kate Crawford in The Atlantic suggests that Facebook implement an opt-in system for experimental testing. That way, users could be presented with extremely clear and concise terms for their participation. I would add this might even be an opportunity to provide value back to users through small payments for being a part of the study. I’m not particularly thrilled with the power dynamics at play, but if I can get paid to take experimental drugs, I think I deserve some money to have my emotions manipulated by computer scientists.

In either case, an opt-in system would still be an in-house solution. Would it be possible, or even favorable, to have external oversight of Facebook’s practices? Should the government do it? What about some kind of “user’s advocate” position within the company? If the latter were to be implemented would we vote on representatives or would be invited through a lottery? And what about very specific and complex issues like this emotion study? Are current institutions enough or do we need something new? Let’s take these questions one by one:

Should the government do it?

This is a deceptively tricky question because on the one hand, they already do through the Securities and Exchange Commission (now that they’re publicly traded) and through the Federal Trade Commission (in their role as a consumer protections agency). Back in 2011, when Facebook defaulted a lot of privacy to “public” the FTC required that Facebook open itself up for regular audits for “no less than 20 years.” On the other hand, trust in government agencies is at an all time low (no link required) so why would we trust the fox to tell us about the security status of our hen house? Hell, we even rate companies based on how much they protect us from our own government.

Should we have a user advocate position within the company?

This seems like an elegant solution but a few simple questions make it seem implausible. This person, if they were to have any real oversight power, would actually need to be in the Facebook offices. That would mean they’d need to move away from their current source of income and take up shop in Menlo Park or some other regional office. This would also be a full-time job, so any kind of employment and requisite compensation would need to be replaced. If these were paid government positions (good luck making that happen), we’d be giving even more money to corporations. Being paid by Facebook would be an obvious conflict of interest. Making it an unpaid position would ensure that only independently wealthy Google Glass Explorers would run for office or accept the position if they “won” the lottery. Also, given Facebook’s global reach, how would we handle language barriers? Even India, which holds the largest democratic election in the world and contains dozens of languages within its borders, resorts to using one language (Hindi) that only about half of the country speaks. Representation will be exclusionary, it’s only a question of how much and for whom.

Regardless of whether we hold an election or a lottery we run up against the classic problems of representing others’ interests within a complicated bureaucracy. Several centuries of political thought suggest a couple of inevitable problems: First, the representative will start realizing, once they settle into the job, that really progressive campaign promises or previously held beliefs are “not realistic” within the confines of their job or term. It would not take long for them to, at least from the outside, look like the Silicon Valley equivalent of a “beltway insider.” It isn’t an indictment of the person, it’s a sociological fact of complex bureaucracies: they only work through internal logical and cultural consistency. It would be impossible for one person (or even a committee of people) to make any kind of substantive change without acquiescing to a fair amount of the existing business culture.

Should the advocate be elected?

It’s tempting to hold elections for someone that will represent us in Menlo Park. It just seems like the very epitome of democratic control. We’d all vote for someone that wants to protect our privacy from governments and the company itself. Maybe they would even campaign on the implementation of a “dislike” button. Regardless of their platform we’d run up against the same old problems with all elected officials: first, like all enormous elections, those with a shot of winning are the ones that appeal to the most amount of people. This isn’t always the best way to fill a job position. Not only would we run the risk of having User Advocate Grumpy Cat, we’d also probably end up with someone that knows how to, and has the resources for, a global media campaign. That doesn’t sound like your average person.

Should we hold an advocate lottery?

A lottery would not solve the compensation and culture problems faced by elections, but they might actually be more representative. In theory, this randomly chosen person has the best chance of being the modal Facebook user and thus providing a more representative perspective of most Facebook users. They might even have a shot at being more persuasive given that it’s a somewhat unenviable position to have never chosen to pursue the job but still be under pressure to advocate on behalf of fellow users. They have the rhetorical position of a juror: serving a public duty in as impartial a manner as possible.

How do we regulate or popularly govern complicated tasks and technologies?

This final question gets at one of the biggest and longest-standing issues of governing in a technologically advanced society. If a lay advocate doesn’t understand the technology or the experimental design on their own, they’ll have to have it explained to them by someone else. If that’s the Facebook employee trying to implement the feature or design the experiment that can get very tricky very quickly. There would be nothing stopping them from obscuring or understating the possibilities of harm to users. How would the advocate make an informed decision?

Some of the first urban planners, in fact, were obsessed with this kind of question. Modern cities, if they were to fairly and efficiently distribute goods and services, would have to be deliberately planned so that the technologies of daily life didn’t end up in too few hands. It was obvious to them that without diligent and proactive planning, large cities would always be places of extreme power and wealth inequality. There was no other way around it. The very early work of those planners still remains severely underutilized in street, as well as digital, networks.

Are our existing institutions up for the task, or do we need new ones?

This is, essentially, the kind of question the federal government ran up against in the late 50s and early 60s when several disturbing psychological and medical experiments became public knowledge. Expertise can become so specific and so complex that only fellow experts appear fit to assess an experiment’s validity, efficacy, or ethical standing. Laura Stark’s work on the early history of American social science and medical ethics review seems incredibly prescient right now more than ever. It is tempting to paint Institutional Review Boards –those obscure university bodies that assess the ethics of research designs–as outgunned and outmaneuvered by private companies but that would be missing the point. IRBs, and Cornell’s in the case of the Facebook study, are doing exactly what they were designed to do.

According to Stark, in an essay for the Law & Society Review [paywall], IRBs were not originally set up to solely defend the rights of research subjects. She writes, “At first, there was not a tremendously high priority on determining what, precisely, constituted proper treatment of human subjects: the federal aim was above all to disperse responsibility for this new thing called subjects’ rights.”

How does the initial motivation for IRBs influence their current behaviour? A lot actually. IRBs have a great deal of discretion and that discretion is invariably wrapped up in how decisions can be justified to an angry government looking to not only disperse blame, but to come up with a rationale of why something was approved in the first place. Stark, theorizing the initial formation of these boards, writes “IRBs were declarative groups– their act of deeming a practice acceptable would make it so.” Indeed, that is still the case. Cornell’s IRB declared that “[b]ecause the research was conducted independently by Facebook and [Cornell’s] Professor Hancock had access only to results” the study design was ethical.

It is incredibly difficult to say whether IRBs’ wide discretion needs to be reined in. While this particular Facebook study should not have happened the way it did, making all research more complicated is not the answer. If you are a researcher, or even a friend of one, you probably know the pain and frustration of IRBs’ seemingly arbitrary research design changes. You also probably know that the pre-packaged ethics training one receives as a prerequisite for submitting something to the IRB has all of the intellectual stimulation of an SAT test. There is something deeply broken and no apparent way to fix it.

Starks’ prescriptions for improved IRB boards include “(1) drawing more people into the ethics review process, and (2) pressing this new cast of decision makers to talk to each other.” These are good suggestions in the University context, but what about corporations? Is this something that IRBs need more training in, or do we need to pass new laws that require IRBs in the corporate sector? Given the ever-increasing overlap of industry and academia, I’m more inclined to revamp IRB board training and mandated ethics training for researchers. We will continue to see collaboration across companies and universities for the foreseeable future, but at least the ones doing the research will have to pass through a university first. Part of being a researcher in data science, cognitive science, or any of the classic social and behavioral sciences will need much better training. That way, the next time a social scientist is presented with the alluring and increasingly infrequent opportunity to work on a well-funded project they will design a better, more ethical experiment.

David is on Twitter & Tumblr.

On Monday I posed two related questions:  “Are wearables like Glass relegated to the same fate as Bluetooth earpieces and the Discman, or can they be saved?  Is the entire category irredeemable or have we yet to see the winning execution?” I concluded that most of the problems have to do with the particular executions we’ve seen to date, but it’s also very possible that the very idea of the wearable is predicated on the digital dualist notion that interacting with a smartphone is inherently disruptive to a productive/happy/authentic lifestyle. Lot’s of devices are pitched as “getting out of the way” and only providing a little bit of information that is context specific and quickly (not to mention discreetly) displayed to the user. I contended that the motivation to make devices “invisible” can bring about some unintended consequences; mainly that early adopters experience the exact opposite reaction. Everyone pays attention to your face computer and nothing is getting out of the way at all.

More importantly though, wearables provide an all-too-literal demonstration of engineers’ “view from nowhere.” This phrase, coined by Donna Haraway, is meant to describe how the gaze of experts is perceived (by outsiders and the experts themselves) as neutral and objective. That means certain dominant values or practices common to engineers and their intended initial user base (Explorers) are built into the device at the expense of others’ lived experiences.  I offered one illustrative example of both a problem and solution to this dilemma which I’ve included below as the first suggestion, followed by four more that I think will improve not just future wearables, but design practices in general:

1. The body is part of the device, incorporate it into the design. With a phone your body posture makes it fairly obvious that you’re taking a picture: Glass isn’t as obvious. Glass’s prism lights up when its recording a video but this doesn’t mean a whole lot if those around you don’t know what it means when the prism on your face begins to glow. Short of projecting [REC.] on the user’s forehead, body posture might be the best indicator of the device’s state. If Glass required the user to continue touching the side of the device during recording it would not only present a much more obvious indication that the user was interacting with the device, it would also make it physically uncomfortable to record for long stretches of time.
2. Most wearables should not be capable of capturing and saving photos or video. Cameras and the services they provide need to be given much more critical thought. Not just in the manner described above, but more generally and deeply. Cameras have become more of a mediating device between one person and their world, not just an artistic or utilitarian instrument for one person’s use. Instead of capturing and saving images, perhaps a wearable can only identify things (not people) in real time or be used as a sensor for more basic data input like light, shapes, or colors. The obvious caveat here is that a hacked version would be doubly dangerous because no one would suspect anything.
3. Wearables with image capturing capability should be specialized and prominent or in some other way restricted in their usage context. No one complains about GoPro cameras the way they complain about Glass. That’s because GoPro cameras, those rugged camera-shaped cameras that are so obviously recording devices, are marketed for the specific purpose of recording you’re most eXtreme adventures. Very few people show up to a bar, casually wearing a GoPro. If the do, it’s pretty easy for others to notice that the person is capable of recording their actions and take steps to avoid them or ask them to leave. The current line of fitness-oriented wearables that usually go on your wrist are a good example too. They have limited, dedicated functions that generally do not capture data of anyone except their willing user. That’s important.
4. Wearables should hide as little information from people surrounding the user as possible. Like the “record” forehead projection I described earlier this week and quoted above, wearables should be “speaking” to more than just one person. With a phone, tablet, or computer it’s very easy to show someone else your screen. With Glass, it’s barely possible to offer an on-stage product demo. Instead of focusing primarily or solely on what the device offers the user, wearable product designers should be thinking about what sorts of social relationships are afforded or enabled when the device is worn and working. Does the device promote or reinforce the kinds of power relationships we’d rather not have in our society, or does it establish new ones? To that end…
5. Companies that sell wearables should promise to never sell their devices to governments or law enforcement. Call this a pet peeve of mine, but when policing authorities gain access to new kinds of cameras, it gets increasingly difficult to avoid what Melissa Gira Grant calls the carceral eye. That is, your actions are seen as a series of potential crimes that can be used to arrest, convict, or maybe just blackmail you at the discretion of law enforcement. Lots of leftists have applauded the introduction of on-officer cameras connected to on-duty police officers, saying that they’ll bring new levels of accountability for officers. How could a police officer commit abuse if there’s a camera rolling the entire time he’s on duty? As it turns out, police are caught abusing people on their own cameras all the time. In fact, as my colleague Ben Brucato (who studies this very topic, has observed that video evidence almost always works in favor of law enforcement, not civilians. We saw that most prominently and recently in the CeCe McMillian case but it is a widespread phenomena. As Brucato writes: “The camera’s earliest uses included the documentation of observed scientific data. The camera is a most privileged witness, and its privileged status is earned by virtue of its mechanical qualities that render it objective.” Ergo, when a video taken from a police officer is shown in court, framed as “conclusive evidence” to a crime it is taken as such. It becomes the official record and all other accounts, recorded or otherwise, are more easily ignored. It might be naive of me to expect companies like Google to make such a promise but consider this: which company is going to get the unfettered brand loyalty of the the civil libertarian technorati? The one that makes contracts with the government or the one that promises to never have their product sit on the brow of a government official?

 David is on Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat (davidabanks), and Yo (DABanks)

The wearable is going through an adolescence right now. Products like Google Glass, Oculus Rift, or the Pebble smartwatch are a lot like teenagers: They’ve come into their own, but still aren’t sure about the place in society. They are a little awkward, have problems staying awake when they need to be, and they attract derision by the New York Times. And just like human adolescence, this phase probably has a horizon. People could warm up to the idea of face computers, battery life will get better, and (eventually, hopefully) the public will learn to ignore Ross Douthat. But for right now, the wearable is in a precarious situtation. Are wearables like Glass relegated to the same fate as Bluetooth earpieces and the Discman, or can they be saved? Is the entire category irredeemable or have we yet to see the winning execution?

Let’s begin by listing some of the stated problems with wearables. The first and probably best document is Google’s own “Do’s and Don’t’s” guide for Glass explorers. We can pretty fairly assume that 1) not enough people were doing the “Do’s” 2) too many people were doing the “don’ts” and 3) these issues are generalizable across similar devices.

The Don’t’s aren’t very surprising: ask people before taking photos or videos of them, don’t stand around in public staring up into your Glass, and when people ask you about it or request that you take it off, be an adult and acquiesce to reasonable requests and questions. What’s really interesting are the “Do’s” and the very first “do” in particular:

“Glass puts you more in control of your technology and frees you to look up and engage with the world around you rather than look down and be distracted from it.”

A typical rebuttal to the Digital Dualism critique is that it is inherently and uncritically a “pro-technology” argument. That debate has been hashed out elsewhere and continues to grow and develop but it is worth noting here that this is not just a tech company but one of the biggest tech company on the planet making a digital dualist statement: that smartphones distract you from “engaging with the world.” It assumes that there is a “virtual” and a “real” world and that Glass is the perfect solution to the dualism: you can dip into and benefit from the latter without losing track of the former. Its an insidious idea that will make even the biggest and most successful organizations solve problems that don’t exist. Or, perhaps worse, create new problems that could be avoided with relatively simple social theory.

Consider for example, the fairly mundane act of taking a photo. With a phone your body posture makes it fairly obvious that you’re taking a picture: Glass isn’t as obvious. Glass’s prism lights up when its recording a video but this doesn’t mean a whole lot if those around you don’t know what it means when the prism on your face begins to glow. Short of projecting [REC.] on the user’s forehead, body posture might be the best indicator of the device’s state. If Glass required the user to continue touching the side of the device during recording it would not only present a much more obvious indication that the user was interacting with the device, it would also make it physically uncomfortable to record for long stretches of time.

What I just described is a problem with a designed solution but it is informed by several sociological observations. The biggest of which is that all knowledge and practice is situated within a culture. Really big changes to cultures –like the kind Glass and other wearables promise for the tech industry– don’t just adhere soundly to existing orthodoxy, they make new logics and reinterpret existing narratives. Making recording video slightly more difficult is counter-intuitive to what we commonly consider good design and the underlying logic of Google Glass in particular. In fact, if there is a single unifying narrative that connects all consumer devices, it is the idea that technology is best when it is invisible. Devices are meant to be desired (albeit guiltily) but ultimately looked past. Or, as Google Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan said at SXSW 2013 while wearing Google Glass and a fedora: “By bringing technology closer, we can get it more out of the way.”

The idea that the most pleasurable experience with technology is the one you barely notice goes back several decades. Legendary designer and living avatar of German minimalism Dieter Rams, for example, has been prescribing “Good design is unobtrusive” for over 30 years. Echos of Rams’ “Ten Principles of Good Design” (unobtrusiveness is number 5) can be heard in every product announcement and commercial going back for decades. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001 it wasn’t pitched as a “hard drive in your pocket” but as “1000 songs in your pocket.” Our devices are supposed to “get out of the way” and let us experience something pure and even visceral. The ideal device would be completely invisible.

This “invisibile device” approach to product design has produced immensely useful and entertaining devices but is, ultimately, a beautiful lie. Technology is always framing scenarios, affording certain social actions at the expense of others, and encouraging (and at times forcing) us to think in terms of likes, tweets, and photos. Designers want their devices to look beautiful but are also taught that the virtual is obtrusive. It is no wonder then, that Glass Explorers are having such a hard time: they’re sold a device that you’re meant to forget because technology is obtrusive, but that obtrusiveness manifests itself every time someone looks at you because you have this device hanging from your face. The sales pitch is that Wearables will make tech fade into the background but maybe that isn’t what the best tech looks like. Maybe the orthodoxy is wrong. After all, interaction with your data may appear unfacilitated and that might feel good, but I suspect that the pursuit of invisible devices breeds Glassholes.

It’s hard (at least for me) to look at Ram’s Ten Principles of Good Design and not think about what Donna Haraway called the “immodest witness.” Scientists and engineers are prone to thinking that their observations and conclusions are self-evident and that their gaze comes from nowhere; that they are not interpreting or translating the natural world through their own standpoint, but merely describing it in an impartial way. This means that undesirable social phenomena like racism or sexism can masquerade as natural phenomena. If you believe without question (as many scientists did and unfortunately still do) that women are naturally subservient to men or that there are clear, separate, and distinct human races, then you’ll go out and find justification for that kind of thinking in your data.

A similar kind of structural bias can be found in Silicon Valley. Back in January I wrote about this phenomena and observed that,

When something isn’t quite designed to your lifestyle you experience it as “I love this thing but I don’t understand why it does X, Y, and Z.” It would seem to follow then, that design incompatibilities between designed object and user would become increasingly obvious as any given user drifts further away from the intended user of the designed object. But that is, generally, not the case. Design something that’s just a little off, and it’s an itch you can’t scratch. Design entire product categories with only specific people in mind and its difficult to imagine the material world any other way.

This issue is blaringly obvious in the demo videos for Glass. A white man (invariably) does a bunch of upper middle class things to impresses a woman. We see, quite literally, the perspective of heteronormative white men and all the things they need to live a better life. It also shows the self-centered behavior that comes with extreme privilege: information is for your eyes only and the world stands ready for your gaze and enjoyment. A small design intervention like the one I described above for image capture asks that the user acknowledge that they are not passive or modest; that the user at least continue to exert some kind of energy in order to take or do what they want.

Can the wearable be saved? Its a difficult question to answer because it is unclear whether the motivating factors for creating the wearable –digital dualism, invisible devices– are the only thing making them desirable. To save the wearable as a device category is to confront and overcome the long-standing, intersecting oversights in the tech industry: assumed body norms, patriarchy, and the clunky way engineers and businessmen talk about “the social.” This isn’t a pedantic problem relevant only to Silicon Valley elites. Solving (or at least coming to a better understanding of) what is wrong with wearables could make for a more inclusive and thoughtful culture of technological development.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr. Also at davidabanks.org

Okay, maybe the title is a bit dramatic, but hear me out. Vacation responders, those automatic emails that tell would-be correspondents that you are away from your inbox, are contributing to unrealistic work demands. The vacation responder directly implies that if it is not activated, the response should be prompt. It sets up a false binary wherein we are either working or on vacation. Its easy to tell that the work/vacation split is dubious because these two states of being that are in increasingly short supply. Lots of people are out of work, and those who do have jobs are working longer hours than ever before. Obviously vacation responders aren’t the cause of our economic woes (that can be found here) but they do enforce the worst parts of late capitalism’s work ethics.

Good email etiquette (helpful advice that everyone [especially over 40] ignores here, here, and here) says that you should always promptly reply to emails sent directly to you. The vacation responder is meant to excuse you of this requirement by automating your “sorry I’ll get to this later” reply. What vacation responders actually do is reinforce the idea that we should always be accessible for productive work. To not be willing and ready to do work is treated as an exceptional state, as something that is inherently temporary and insincerely apologetic.

Its pretty safe to say that if a large organization has ever given you an email address with your name on it, you’ve used a vacation responder. I certainly have, multiple times, and for lots of different reasons. When I do field work in places with spotty network connections I’ll usually set something up that asks for patience while I find a connection. I used to set one up when I knew I’d be taking some kind of extended break from my normal routine and wanted to insulate myself from outside demands on my time. This past month, however, I did something much different that I like a lot better. Before I describe it I should offer a few caveats: 1) the nature of my work lets me be flexible with time and commitments. Obviously this won’t work for everyone and I’ll concede that vacation responders are necessary for some kinds of work. 2) It requires a kind of literacy with technology that is not evenly distributed amongst most people who have to use email. 3) If I miss an email or somehow mess up my personal replies the consequences are pretty mundane. Others are in a much more precarious position.

I got married two weeks ago (yay!) and for the whole week leading up to the wedding and the subsequent week-long honeymoon up the East Coast I was mostly unreachable but I never set a vacation responder.  Instead, I did my due diligence in letting most of the people I work with that I’d be incommunicado for a few weeks. My Cyborgology and Theorizing the Web collaborators knew I’d be away, as did most of my department. Anyone that I didn’t get in touch with was given a short, personal reply that said I’d get to it when I got back from my trip. I’d steal one or two minutes every third day or so (that’s all it took) to write one or two sentence replies. Anyone that might have fallen through the cracks is currently getting a very apologetic email.

Mastery of email doesn’t come from greedily emptying your own inbox. Rather it is trying to send out the least amount of emails as possible. I (which, for the purposes of this essay, is composed of both my conscious self and the algorithms that I set in motion to communicate on my behalf) sent much fewer emails in total than with a vacation responder. That’s important.

As I mentioned earlier, I occupy a somewhat privileged status where I can be really flexible with my workload. I don’t have clients or coworkers that expect a prompt response. Generally, if I don’t do something on time it just makes me look bad. My system for handling email isn’t some kind of correspondence utopia, but I do think we should be striving toward less vacation responders. That means reducing the jobs and instances that absolutely require them, and encouraging those that don’t need them to not use them. The vacation responder imposes a subtle but nearly-ubiquitous pressure to always have an excuse for not working. I’m not railing against the vacation responder itself per se, so much as the world that demands the vacation responder. It represents a world where we’re always “on” and our labor is always available and exploitable. We are still a long ways away from realizing each others’ right to be lazy but until then perhaps we can cut each other some slack.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr.

While I was, and still remain, a Beakman’s World partisan, I have fond memories of watching Bill Nye The Science Guy throughout the 90s. It is unfortunate that the just-so-happy-to-be-doing-science character of my childhood has turned into another angry white dude occupying a rectangle on a cable news show. Undoubtable he has a lot to be upset about: not enough Americans agree that the future will be marked by resource scarcity and vastly altered climates and even fewer are convinced that the way we live our lives can’t be sustained. Understandably, many of us (and cable news producers especially) turn to Science Guys like Bill Nye or Neil Degrasse Tyson for answers to society’s most important questions: What is the future going to look like? How can we make it better? Why are so many of us not agreeing on what needs to be done? This impulse is dead wrong.

Why do we defer to scientists when it comes to questions about the future? More specifically, why do we think scientists are the best people to make sense of climate change, natural disasters, industrial disasters, or disease outbreaks? Why do we value their opinions and prescriptions at all? Science seems to be implicated in most of these problems, so why ask a bull to fix all the broken china in the tea shop? After all, it was scientists and engineers that figured out a way to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and didn’t seem to have a good way to clean it up when their drill broke. It was scientists and engineers that invented the industrial processes that gave us polluting cars and factories. Without scientists, it doesn’t seem like we’d have these climate problems in the first place.

Anyone that regularly enjoys the Discovery Network, the Cosmos series (new and old), museums,  XKCD, PhD Comics, or any of the tumblr blogs that have some variation on the phrase “fuck yeah science” is probably ready to throttle me right now; to say nothing of the patrons of ThinkGeek, Edmund Scientifics, and SparkFun; or anyone holding an advanced degree in the natural sciences. It is unfair, you might be saying, to write off something as big and diverse as Science just because past scientists did their jobs to the best of their ability. Environmental catastrophes are the regrettable yet ultimately inevitable consequences of the kind of innovation that aims to make all 7 billion of us happy and healthy. The scientific method and the collection of knowledge it produces, you might say, isn’t inherently bad or destructive. We should blame or seek to reform/eliminate greed, capitalism, or some other thing that employs science to do its bidding.

I mostly agree with the above sentiment. In fact, I’ve even advocated not too long ago for a massive increase in federal spending for scientific investigation. Much of the problems we face locally and globally are the product of very complicated science and engineering practices and cannot be sustainably undone or corrected without some kind of advanced expertise. We stand little chance of abating or adapting to climate change without this practice we call science. At the same time, we must also recognize that science is more than the sum of its facts, or even the process by which it uncovers those facts. Science, as the previous paragraph should irrefutably demonstrate, is a social process and a culture.

The culture of science can look like stale hotel conferences or slick primetime network TV shows. Its contours are shaped by bacteria plush dolls and science fiction novels. The culture of science is shot through with race, class, and gender politics in ways that are too numerous to go into here. For now, it suffices to say that like any culture, science can make people feel a sense of belonging as well as alienation. It can bring order to an otherwise chaotic reality, or it can come off as a profane interruption to an otherwise peaceful whole. Cultures can also be contested from within, have internal contradictions, and be made up of strict orthodox adherents and skeptical radicals.

Science loves to talk about skeptical radicals. One might even say that the orthodoxy of science is radical skepticism. Every time Bill Nye debates a young earth creationist or a Heritage Foundation economist he puts the audience in the uncomfortable and confusing position of seeing True Believers as skeptical radicals in an otherwise scientistic society. Nye’s own framing is what lets fundamentalist Christians and Reaganite economists make believable claims to embattlement and persecution. It is Bill Nye’s own condescending arrogance of the facts that can make Judeo-Christian worldviews or neoliberal economics seem like breaks from a well-worn orthodoxy. Worse yet, I have yet to hear a single person swayed in either direction after the debate is complete. This is because both Nye and his opponents’ are different sides of the same coin. Nye’s smugness forms the secular background of creationists’ romantic rebel story. Nye just sits there, impervious to other standpoints or interpretations and recites green house gas emissions.

Which is not to say that climate change isn’t happening, or that the underlying science isn’t rigorous and an accurate depiction of what is actually happening to our planet. The problem comes from the negotiating position. Science Guys ask us to question everything and everyone but them. Or, more precisely, they are but mere men (almost always men) delivering a message that they see as self-evident. For example consider the opening lines to Fox’s Cosmos reboot hosted by Neil Degrasse Tyson:

…imagination is not enough because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than we can imagine. This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads and question everything. Accept these terms and the cosmos is yours. Now come with me.

Tyson then flies away in a gleaming, vaguely penis-shaped spaceship.

We must never forget that the “reality of nature” that Tyson claims is “more wondrous” than our own imaginations is in fact science’s account of nature. It is a depiction, arrived at through a social process and inscribed onto a green screen and lovingly produced by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane; a man who uses paternal authority as his primary medium. In the MacFarlaneverse Dad is always right, whether he’s talking about the Big Bang or who farted.

The authority is tantalizing yet almost invisible because we are lovingly invited to see the universe as the scientist sees it. We have a hard time questioning anything we are being told because we are seeing it with our own eyes as the scientist tells us it’s true. To reject what Tyson is telling you, is to reject your own perception of things. You accepted the terms, he granted you the eyes with which to see the cosmos, and you must continue to follow him or you will be left blind.

The process by which observable phenomena turn into scientific facts, which are then made into evocative and entertaining images, is obscured or ignored. We are only told to trust that this is the true depiction of events. That another interpretation must be from something other than the testing of ideas by experiment and observation. To assume, as Science Guys do, that anyone with the same set of facts would come to the same conclusion is naive, and yet that is precisely what they demand of us.

I am not saying that science is only as true as you believe it to be, or that anyone can do astrophysics without prior training. What I am saying though, is that the worth of scientific facts, and the particular way science determines what is worth paying attention to, should be continually explained and justified. Science is not as self evidently useful or true to every single person in every single instance. This isn’t because people are wilfully ignorant, backwards, or superstitious, but because science –for lack of a better term– comes with some baggage. Science is powerful and can also appear as a mysteriously alien force coming down from on high. It can often seem as though it arrived off of a (penis shaped) spaceship. And like any foreign invader, it might have a routine method of exploring the unknown but has no way of identifying salient characteristics to a problem the way a native can.

There is a huge body of literature on the subject of public understanding of, and engagement with science. Much of what I’ve already said is indebted to this body of literature and I’ve included a list of the major works at the end of this essay. Not only does this body of literature severely undercut Tyson’s whig history of how science has worked in the past (i.e., what happens when its unclear whether your test is broken or your idea doesn’t comport with nature?) it also gives a much more helpful depiction of how science and the public interact. Brian Wynne, one of the foremost voices in this field observes that many people experience “contradictory identities and beliefs,” when it comes to scientific accounts of the world around us. There are often competing ways of knowing or experiential knowledge that doesn’t comport with scientific accounts. To “side” with a scientist’s account of events can also “disrupt local relations” and cause further community strife.

The denial of scientific observations in favor of “keeping the peace” or siding with your neighbors in a debate over the source of pollution or the cause of a disease outbreak might sound anti-intellectual, but the scientific community does this all the time. Wynne notes that when institutional science encounters a contradiction between what is scientifically true and economically viable, those institutions tend “to externalize them on to others through forms of routine denial.” In other words, science might not study something, or pursue a line of inquiry purely because it is too expensive or too complicated to fully enact. Why can’t individuals do the same?

Instead of asking Science Guys about abstract matters of concern [PDF] we should turn to those directly affected by the issues up for debate. Instead of arguing over an IPCC report, we should be discussing what can and should be done for those communities that are already profoundly affected by rising tide waters and recurrent drought. The South African farmer can just as easily mobilize the observations made by science while also telling us what needs to be remediated immediately and perhaps even how to adapt to the new normal in the future. The farmer experiencing her fourth straight year of drought is much more capable of talking about the action that is needed to water her crops, than a world-renown astrophysicist, a tv personality, or a combination of both. If she also notes that (thanks to a scientists’ research) it has been proven that the petroleum-heavy farming practices in the United States is directly related to her plight that’s a much more tangible and compelling argument than a bow-tied scientist saying “but I have the truth.”

This is not an argument to let the young earth creationist speak. It is, however, a demand that we make room for accounts of the world that are not fully sanctioned by or are the product of scientific authority. Or, at the very least, those who are so committed to popularizing the contents of science give equal attention to elucidating the process of scientific inquiry so that we may have a larger and more informed conversation about what scientists take into account. We can no longer afford to divide the world amongst Science Guys, capitalists, and religious fanatics. There are so many other ways to take account of the world: there are midwives, cattle ranchers, philosophers (more on that later in the week), urban farmers, and tribes of people that have spent thousands of years developing a culture tied to a very specific part of land. These are just as valid and viable ways of knowing that do not necessarily fit into the three categories that get the most screen time. They are also ways of knowing that belong to, and are accessible by, a much wider range of humans. If, as Carl Sagan famously said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself,” then we shouldn’t limit ourselves to a single way of knowing.

Possibly one of the most insidious ideas to come out of the last two decades of corporate management has been the “do what you love” ethos. Not only is the concept built on the premise that you can afford to pursue your passion for free while you find a way to monetize it, the “do what you love” mantra also assumes that what you do for money will always fill most of your working hours and be something that you primarily identify with. Its a uniquely American concept that what you do to earn a pay check says something about you. That you’re not truly an artist or a scholar until you can make a living off of that labor. I’ve been thinking a lot about the different contours of work after this year’s extremely successful iteration of Theorizing the Web. It was my first year on the committee and, while I loved every minute of it, doing this kind of work always makes you think about what sorts of work organizations are sustainable and the nature of work more generally.

Let there be no mistake- TtW was a lot of work and the committee members weren’t the only ones pulling long hours. Our amazing volunteers who did everything from stuff name badges to record an entire day’s worth of panels, deserved more recompence than the committee could give them. We had shiny stickers but that definitely doesn’t cut it. There were other people with equipment and skills that we did not possess that were monetarily compensated, but at what one might call “friend prices.” Every single penny of our attendees’ generous donations were spent and yet so much of TtW was and probably will continue to be held together with favors and voluntary labor. This arrangement has its problems but, ultimately, is one of the main contributors to the tacit “feel” of the conference: a little rough around the edges, intimate, yet public in ways that a more traditional institution is incapable of being.

Miya Tokumitsu, in a Jacobin essay about the problems of “doing what you love” warns that the DWYL mantra encourages privileged people to ignore low-status work (e.g. janitor, fast food worker) and instead turn inward and seek out self-actualizing work that comports with how we see ourselves or aspire to be. Academics are in a particularly rough spot because while their work is generally considered to be very high-status and thus one of many options for bookish DWYLers, compensation is increasingly hard to come by. She writes:

Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output. This intense identification partly explains why so many proudly left-leaning faculty remain oddly silent about the working conditions of their peers. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.

Most of the TtW organizers are still grad students and, while I can’t speak for other committee members, its pretty clear that we all do Theorizing the Web because we love what it represents and the community it has garnered. Personally, I see it as an intellectual home that the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) could never provide. It is a great honor to work with such amazing people and I work hard out of love and respect for them and the larger community. That being said, we are also guilty of not thinking about compensating ourselves or potential new recruits. TtW pays dividends in social capital and CV lines, but no one is making a living off of the conference. That can be a problem if we want to expand participation in the conference.

This was my first year on the committee but speaking from what I’ve been told of the history of the conference, the pay-what-you-want registration donation was meant to reduce barriers to participation. Expensive registration fees (4S is $150 for students with early registration, then it jumps to $225. More like 4$ amirite?) can be a huge roadblock for a lot of people, but it’d be truly amazing if a conference could leave everyone whole- having not incurred a single expense due to their attendance. Truthfully, this seems like an absurd goal since no one should have to pay to do their job, but that is just one of the hundreds of contradictions that late capitalism has left at our feet.

We are certainly open to suggestions and recommendations for making Theorizing the Web the most economically just conference out there. Personally, I’m interested in finding brand new, long term organizational solutions that don’t leave us open to the increasing austerity forced onto universities and social science departments in particular. How do we radically reinvent the conference such that all attendees –from visitors to organizers– are adequately compensated for their work? These are ongoing questions that, just by being asked, could spur desperately needed changes in academia and perhaps the working world at large.

Presider: Rotem Rozental (@rotroz)

Hashmod: Ian M. Dawson (@ianmdawson)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Pics: Sex and the Selfie

Anne Burns (@AnneLBurns) Disciplining the Duckface: Online Photographic Regulation as a form of Social Control

The way we talk about photography on social media is damaging.

Ubiquitous and notorious, the selfie has had a prominent place in public discourse over the last year. Articles on ‘tips for selfie-taking’, anxious deliberations over its psychological implications, and galleries of ‘bad’ or ‘sexy selfies’ demonstrate the extent to which rules and proscription have been naturalized in regards to selfie practice. Regulating the selfie is a means for regulating the selfie-subject, where both are conceived of as being innately problematic and requiring control. As addressed in this study, notions of ‘too many selfies’ and the labeling of young women’s self-presentations as narcissistic, seek to limit both what, and how, women are encouraged to photograph. Such discussions impact upon notions of privacy and identity negotiation, but serve primarily to mark and marginalize certain groups. Therefore, through the limitations imposed on a certain type of creative practice, subjects’ behavior and participation within the public sphere is curtailed.

In this paper, I will argue that public discourse regarding women’s photographic self-representation on the web acts as a form of social control, where perpetuating repressive ideas has been naturalized as a contemporary form of leisure. Ideas of what should and shouldn’t be shared, whose images are more legitimate than others’, and what genres of images are more ‘worthwhile’ than others, serve to perpetuate gender inequality and legitimize the criticizing of subjects, through their photographic practice. By naturalizing unequal power relations, the discussion around photography is therefore used as a technique of subjugation, through enacting shame and humiliation.

Limitations on photographic practice extend to the micro level, where facial expression, pose and context are expected to convey both attractiveness and authenticity. Interpreted as an absence of both, the pouting ‘duckface’ exemplifies the coercive force of discourse regarding acceptable gender presentation. The online discussion of the duckface – visible in a myriad of memes, protest pages and discussion forums – displays a range of techniques of regulation, from mockery and humiliation, to condemnation and threat. The separation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ photographs / photographic subjects is ultimately a process of legitimizing one group, whose adept adherence to the norms of gender performance is in opposition to the rejected and ridiculed identities of those who are ‘doing it wrong’.

Using numerous examples, both illustrations and text, this paper analyses how the distinctions and hierarchies within photography support a wider context of discipline and prejudice. Analyses of the “anti-social” web need to consider how such instances of micro-discipline, in relation to cultural practice, reinforce social inequalities. Furthermore, critical approaches are required that address how the web sustains repressive processes of social organization, by repeatedly presenting the regulation of subjects as a form of entertainment.

Ofer Nur The Quest for the “Real”: Erotic Selfies, In-depth Interviews and the Transformation of the Gay Pornographic Landscape after Web 2.0

Both in content and form, the adult industry not only reflects sociological transformations and technological innovation, it also takes active part in accelerating some of those transformations. This paper is part of a larger project that closely examines and analyzes the changes in gay online pornography in recent years, especially two developments: 1. The rise of DIY porn to sustained commercial success online, and 2. the commercial and other manipulation of gay erotic UGC. The first dimension of this project is the application of what we know empirically and theoretically about Web 2.0 and the proliferation of erotic and explicit UGC in the gay adult online orbit which is different in several significant ways from straight online pornography.
The second dimension of this project looks with ethnographic lenses at the interaction between the producers of this adult content and the actors. This problematic, at times exploitative relationship is manipulated not only across race and class boundaries, but also across intra-gay gender performance lines (straight acting, gay for pay, MSM etc.). The manipulation of intra-gay gender performance for the pleasure of cyber voyeurs, I would claim, reaches a volume that is unprecedented in gay adult material that the pre-online industry created.

For the current presentation I will only briefly treat the findings based on the effect of the use of “lifted” erotic UGC on the gay adult landscape (especially on “tube” adult websites and commercial aggregators of such content). I will concentrate on the initial findings, gleaned from a number of DIY gay adult websites who, for purposes of satisfying the quest for “reality” content, conduct substantive interviews with their actors. These interviews allow a glimpse into the world of both interviewer and interviewee, many of whom do not belong to the gay “lifestyle” and were recruited for their erotic act specifically because of that fact. Closely observing these interviews, it is possible to analyze the mix of ethnic, class and local-global tensions present in them, and their manipulation for viewer pleasure. Thanks to the opportunities that Web 2.0 opened up for independent pornographers, we have access not only to the sometimes exploitative relationships between pornographers and their actors, but also to a previously concealed male-male erotic and sexual bonding that was buried under layers of privacy and shame that even the openly gay world left untouched. Now, with the advent of such DIY websites, male-male sex can be analyzed with promising and profound results, relevant to those interested in questions of ethnic, class, age and global inequalities as well as the codes of the world of MSM (men who have sex with men), the secret world of ultra-virile homosexuality.

Apryl Williams (@AprylW) Selfie Love: Exploring Notions of Self and Ethnicity on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram

Selfies and selfie-taking have become part of the social media experience. Sociologists and Communication scholars know that people take selfies but little has been done to understand why people take them. I Interviewed 32 millennials and digital natives about their social media use in order to understand how they use social media in their everyday lives. I found several emerging trends and patterns among the responses from my participants. These are patterns of prosumption – the production and consumption of experiences (Ritzer et al. 2012). I use the term conspicuous prosumption in order to describe the deliberate and explicit display of lived experiences on social media that is intended to show peer groups that one shares the same types of experiences. As Riesman theorized decades ago, other-directed groups are concerned with the opinion of their peers. Thus the conspicuous prosumption of experiences serves millennials particularly well. Selfie-taking, among other social media actions, is an act of conspicuous prosumption and allows users to engage with each other and to produce and consume (prosume) meaning through image sharing. In addition to the general patterns of conspicuous prosumption, I found and explored variation in the prosumption of meaning among different racial groups.

Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) Tweeting from Amongst the Corpses

In Syria, the battle for territory waged on the ground is matched by a battle for meaning waged on the Internet. Whether they’re Kurds carving out an independent state, revolutionaries or TEDx organizers sympathetic to Assad, Syrians use Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to tell their stories. It’s contested ground, filled with both propaganda and truth. Posting can be deadly. Both the Assad regime and ISIS target citizen journalists for arrest. In the embattled Lebanese city of Tripoli, I interviewed an aid worker who, at the start of the revolution, smuggled memory cards over the border that contained footage of demonstrations. Once he was in Lebanon, he’d upload the footage to Facebook. Assad had blocked access to the Internet once. Activists were terrified he’d do it again.

(From, In Syria, Western Fundamentalists Are Tweeting From Amongst the Corpses)

Presider: Jay Owens (@hautepop)

Hashmod: Andrew Dever (@andrewdever)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Ref(user): Movements of Resistance

Fredrika Thelandersson (@Fredrikaaa) Subversive Online Identities – Tumblr, Feminism, and the Radical Potential of Unrestricted Social Network Sites
The utopian dream of Internet as a space where one can experiment with multiple identities regardless of material constraints, has since long been revised and reformed, if not completely debunked. Sherry Turkle is just one of many scholars who have dismissed previously optimistic views of identity-building online (a view most clearly expressed in her 1995 book “”Life on the Screen”” and subsequently refuted in her 2011 book “”Alone Together””). The disembodied aspect of Internet-mediated life, and the possibility it gives marginalized subjects to express and organize themselves outside of their physical and often oppressive surroundings, has been largely forgotten in favor of Facebook and Twitter style self-presentations that directly reflect the physical self. While the debate around these “real life” online presentations and the frequent loss of privacy attached to them is crucial, it is also important to remember that there still are online spaces which allow for less controlled and more radical identity constructions. More open platforms such as Tumblr enable users to explore different identities in various community formations while controlling how much of their information they want to share.

Part of a larger project, this paper focuses on a subgroup of self-identified feminists on Tumblr, who are dominating a large part of the site’s discourse with their political and theoretical discussions. Raised in theories of gender performativity and intersectionality, they’re creating their own intellectual and practical frame of reference, influenced by academic theory as well as activism, and inextricably connected to a digital way of life and online self-expression.

The culture of this particular platform, at this particular moment, together with the blog and social network aspects of the site, encourages a form of self-narrating that draws on political opinions, affective bonds and aesthetic preferences. For the users I’m looking at, identity-building is inherently imbued with a feminist perspective.

This paper explores Tumblr as a site for feminist world building, that on the one hand functions as a safe space, free from harassment and discrimination for those who are at risk of it in their everyday surroundings; and on the other hand functions as a place for nuanced political discussion among the already politically engaged. I wonder if and how Tumblr (and other sites with similar structures) can function as sites for radical identity practices with the aim of subverting heteronormative, sexist, racist, cisgendered, and ableist conformities.

Wendy Wong (Co-authored by Peter A. Brown) (@wendyhwong) Trust No One: Anonymizing Technology, E-Bandits, and the Future of Activism
In this paper, we contend that anonymizing Internet technologies have negated the need for trust among those who seek to reveal private and secret information. Modern day activists can in fact steal, reveal, and spread information about governments, corporations, and other entities without the need to trust anyone, and in fact, it is this lack of trust that allows anonymous individuals to cooperate in largely electronically-based activism. Elsewhere, we label such activists as “extraordinary bandits” (e-bandits) to point out the centrality of anonymizing technologies in the work of actors such as Anonymous and Wikileaks (Wong and Brown 2013). Here, we demonstrate how anonymizing technologies, such as encryption tools and TOR networks, run headlong into the received wisdom we have regarding those who choose to resist power. Unlike research on criminal networks, drug traffickers, and patronage networks, which emphasizes personal relationships’ role in greasing the wheels of activity, we claim that it is the lack of trust that provides the lubricant for action by e-bandits. Given new technologies, e-bandits can operate in an environment where a lack of trust, and indeed, knowledge of “real” individuals, is essential to the success of e-bandits. Thus, the democratizing effects of the Internet in terms of expanding who can be an activist also has the counter-effect of eliminating the need for personal trust in or relations among fellow activists precisely because technology can help mitigate those concerns. Anonymizing technologies both democratize protest and resistance while creating new challenges in building trust, accountability, and transparency in transnational politics.

Our argument challenges the assumption and assertion that trust and politics necessarily have to mesh. In studies of democracies, political scientists have often used trust as a variable for determining the durability, responsiveness, and future of states, and indeed, largely view trust as an important component for healthy state-society relations. Trust plays an critical role in determining how resources are divided, as in the tragedy of the commons, and indeed, how governance institutions should be built to mitigate selfish tendencies in an environment where trust is lacking. Trust seems to underlie many of the most prominent theories of political science. In our conception, trust is not a necessary component 1) for drawing participants to political activism or 2) creating conditions under which they can coordinate their actions into campaign efforts. These actions can be subversive or illegal, but they are also mostly designed to disrupt normal political, economic, and social activity and to create attention around a set of concerns. We claim that e-bandits intentionally operate in the absence of trust. While they do form networks and operate as cohesive units, they employ anonymizing tools that mask their identities, not just from authorities, but from each other as well. This allows these groups to operate with a level of transience and anonymity that make disruption and capture by authorities extremely difficult. Infiltration by policing agencies, and the potential for co-offenders to reveal the identities of other group members becomes almost non-existent when encryption works perfectly.

Carla Ilten & Hector Postigo (@hectorpostigo) Activism 2.0: The Politics and Business of Platforms Built for Social Change
In recent years, Social Movement studies have started taking note of ICT, the web and of activism organized via online platforms. Garrett’s (2006) oft-cited review of the literature on ICTs and Social Movement Organizations (SMO) showcases research focusing on internet-enhanced activism and e-mobilizations. Myers (1994) has pointed to possible organizational shifts even before Web 2.0 was a coined term by describing dedicated “clearing house”” organizations that offer tactics, not causes and their function as a breeding ground for activists. Going beyond this “”enhancement paradigm””, recent work investigates web-based activism as genuinely online architectures of participation in Social Movements using the concept of affordances (Earl & Kimport 2011).

While those analyses focus mostly on traditional Social Movements with regard to causes, this present contribution investigates the tactics of a new niche of activism for social change that does not fit easily into existing definitions which highlight contentious activism as the hallmark of participation. “”Micro-volunteering”” focuses on non-profit and non-governmental provision of labor for social change and employs a socio-technical innovation: it is based in Web 2.0 architectures of participation, entirely online, and features Social Networking-type affordances such as profiles and portfolios to engage participants.

Building on Social Movement Theory, Science and Technology Studies, and Media Studies, our study analyzes two such non-contentious micro-participation platforms with regard to their Social Network-like architectures and their specific affordances and dynamics. The cases studied in early 2011 are 1) Kiva.org, an online micro-lending organization and 2) Sparked.com, an online volunteering clearinghouse. Our analysis of the two platforms is based in 1) a qualitative analysis of website structure and affordances using Atlas.ti, and 2) in in-depth interviews with the founders of the platforms.

We note some important similarities and differences between the organizations that have been characterized in the SM research and those in our case studies. The lack of contentious action gives them a distinct dynamic, which is both technologically contingent and socially fostered: Both Kiva and Sparked are architectures built on the Social Networking-type paradigm of harmony, micro-celebrity (here: individual activist branding through profiles), and employ a complex game structure around volunteering portfolios to engage participants. On top of this, individual utilitarian goals are implicit in Sparked’s highly skilled volunteering: professionalization, training and self-marketization for individuals as well as for companies who send volunteers are important motivations for participation. At Kiva, an entrepreneurial value system uncritical of capitalist economic structures is the baseline for micro-lending. These organizations represent true new hybrids when it comes to activism — both with regard to causes and socio-technical tactics.

This study has been funded under the National Science Foundation award no. SES-0748400, “The Digital Universe and Web 2.0: Proposal for Studying the Construction of Synergistic Expert/Non Expert Knowledge Networks for Human Rights.”

Presider: Alyce Currier (@notalyce)

Hashmod: Lynette Yorgey Winslow (@yorglow)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Casual Encounters: Sex, Sexuality, and intimacy

Justus Harris (@therealjustus) Rehearsing (R)evolution: Radical Intimacy and Intimate Games
Since the release of the smart phone, GPS-based applications have evolved to permit users to view each other’s images and determine locations when they come within a defined physical radius. Users can then request to meet at an agreed upon location. Grindr, used primarily by men seeking other men (MSM), was the first application to utilize location-based services this way. Similar applications, such as Skout, Blendr, and Tinder, have been developed for the heterosexual community. Regardless of whether users meet, these location-based applications often offer a sense of “proximal intimacy”, in this case an emotional feeling of closeness resulting solely from viewing the image of another user within a defined physical proximity. Drawing from Laud Humphreys’ research of the social codes of MSM in tearooms (public restrooms used for sex) after World War II, my paper postulates that while such technologies are new, the underlying behaviors and motivations are preexisting. They are part of a continuum of our socio-sexual history within public spaces.

My research examines social practices that Humphreys documented in tearooms and how they are mimicked by these applications. Stereotyped identities are produced by limiting users to one profile image with overlaid body stats and the experience of being cruised is made possible by giving users the ability to see when and by whom their profile was viewed.

My objective is to create an inclusive conversation that examines how our search for intimacy through new technology intersects historical social practice and evolving economic systems. As a gay man, I would like to acknowledge my personal experience with these technologies as well as the conference’s location in New York City, where many of the economic, technological, and social movements have emerged – Stonewall to Grindr to Wall Street. I am interested in sharing activist, legislator, and actor, Augusto Boal’s, praxis for looking at communication through games and acting, which he developed as a way to view the level of empathy and communication within groups of people, in this case those looking for sexual intimacy. Using this model, I challenge the notion that these applications are games, whose stakes primarily pertain to creating more efficient hookups (Jamie Woo, Meet Grindr). I present them as tools which have the potential to either liberate us from or replicate existing social oppression depending upon our capability to empathize and communicate. I seek to answer the questions: Why and how have we been willing to take risks in our search for intimacy and what are the stakes involved as we rely more upon these technologies to connect with each other?

Maggie Mayhem (@MsMaggieMayhem) #NotYourRescueProjects: The Red Light District Speaks
The digital red light district is a commercial hub where erotic providers interface with interested parties for the sale of items, live shows, custom films, as well as time and companionship navigating difficulties such as arbitrary and capricious terms of service, squeamish payment processors, and the ever prying eyes of law enforcement and “community standards.” This paper will present a survey of the limited modes of practical sex worker discourse. In spaces where sex related speech is tolerated, online erotic ecosystems are formed. In addition to being a rich and diverse erotic marketplace with its own jargon and culture, activism and community building are fostered on forums and with social media. Many aspects of the sex worker rights movement have been made possible specifically through the web.

Sex workers operate with nuanced personas demonstrating both marketing and political prowess juggling the desires of their client base, peer-to-peer networking, industry development, online activism, and direct action. An online sex worker presence walks a tightrope of appealing to immediate economic survival needs, personal social networking among peers, and practical hurdles of politics. This paper will demonstrate the bridge between commercial speech in adult entertainment and human rights activism by and for sex workers and why it must be protected. The specific challenges of community building in a landscape censored keywords, legal implications of speech, net neutrality, and an increasingly conservative internet will be discussed as well as the benefits and opportunities presented by social media when unregulated speech is permitted and encouraged.

A history of sex worker led activism and initiatives will be presented with a special focus on digital initiatives such as safety bulletins and bad date lists, the #NotYourRescueProject and #BanFreebies projects, humanizing sex workers through micro/blogging platforms, sex worker media, why we see a proliferation of sex worker speech on some platforms and not others, and the future of sex worker activism from the perspective of a sex worker and will specifically counter the “Nordic Model” of sex work legislation in which the purchase of sex is criminal but not the sale as well as end demand campaign as a whole.

Kevin Geyer (@kevgeyer) Doing Digital Gender: A Multi-Level Analysis of Gendered Behavior and Masculinities in Virtual Space
This paper explores how users negotiate and perform gender and sexuality in virtual video game spaces. Drawing from participant observation of several popular video games – from first-person shooters such as the Halo franchise to role-playing games such as World of Warcraft – I examine gender dynamics at the individual, institutional, and interactional levels. While users do have a great degree of creative freedom when assembling their avatars and dealing with other players, factors of game design and social norms hamper such liberties. Game developers regularly encode hegemonic masculinity, female hypersexuality, and heteronormativity into their creations. Furthermore, players’ engagements with each other in popular shooters more resembles a “boys’ locker room” than the “identity playground” that previous scholars imagined. I investigate these violent matches as contests for achieving masculinity: players regularly dish out misogynistic and homophobic speech, various weapons and prizes serve to bolster one’s masculine image, and imposing armor accoutrements (which actually make in-game success more difficult) are celebrated. Specific gendered patterns of behavior are examined as well, such as ‘corpse humping,’ a normalized act of rape which emerged organically from the masculine gaming community and is committed by players in dozens of shooter titles. I hope to understand how female players fit into this hyper-masculine world; I posit that women may be engaged in ‘clandestine masculinity,’ which allows them access into the game world without being outed. Finally, a number of gendered elements are considered in other virtual contexts, from aspects of gang rape in a violent episode of LambdaMOO to the sale of rape ‘pose balls’ and the marginalization of the furry community in Second Life. Ultimately, this study notes that while individuals technically have a great deal of control over their sex, sexuality, and gender in virtual spaces, there are strong normative and institutional restrictions in place against these kinds of freedoms. As adolescents spend a significant amount of time participating in these communities, it is vital to understand how video games affect notions of gender socialization and masculinities, both on- and offline.

Julian Gill-Peterson (@gpjulian) The Unruliness of the Cyberbully: Governing the Sexual Child Online
This presentation considers cyberbullying and sexting as symptoms of a generational crisis in technologically mediated knowledge about the child. As children in the United States have been baptized “digital natives” over the past decade they have also inverted the generational order of things by coming to know more about the Internet and social media than adults, thereby threatening in turn to become ungovernable online by parents, schools, and the law. Looking at dominant framings of cyberbullying, as well as the institutions that try to produce, contain and punish the cyberbully, I explore specifically how this crisis in governing the child opens onto the problem of the mediation of gender and sexuality by digital technologies in the treatment of girls cyberbullying one another, gay victims of cyberbullying, and teens who sext.

Cyberbullying is presented in cultural narratives as more pernicious and dangerous than offline bullying and this paper maps its conceptual genealogy and pursues its media archaeology across state-level anti-cyberbullying statues, criminal cases, professional and private spyware surveillance technologies, and popular film. Each of these material institutions, I argue, promises to deliver the absent knowledge of children’s mysterious online lives to the right adults and so to make them governable, whether by revealing sexting, the circulation of vicious rumors, or the otherwise hidden taunting of peers. By examining the problem for adults of how to produce a governable sexual and gendered child online, this paper asks after what kind of child-subject is produced by digital and new media.