JoAnne McNeil (@jomc)

Hashmod: Lauren Burr (@burrlauren)

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 Streetview: Space, Place, and Geography

It is difficult, if not impossible to talk about the Web without using physical metaphors to describe digital configurations. “The Web” after all isn’t really a web at all… Or is it? Offices, hydroelectric dams, bodies, and miles upon miles of interconnecting strands of copper, fiber, and electromagnetic signals makeup this amorphous thing that we call The Web. The panelists in Streetview aren’t talking about metaphors but are actually illuminating and revealing the physical contents and infrastructure of the web. Sites that seem  ephemeral and intangible to most of the world, are real flesh and mortar offices for a select few. It is this select few that gentrify entire metropolitan regions and run server farms that consume a city’s worth of fossil fuels. The Web is also deeply enmeshed in our own lives as it serves up wayfinding tools and documentation repositories.

Tim Hwang (@timhwang) An Urban Geography of the Web Industry
Because they are accessible from anywhere, connect individuals across great distances, and infrequently disclose their geographic origins, web services are often discussed as if they exist “on the Internet” alone.

What is often missed in the popular discourse is that the web industry has a very real geographic dimension. Insofar as they are corporations requiring offices, employees, and investors to thrive, the popularity of web services in the past decade can be connected to concrete changes in the built landscape of cities throughout the United States. These changes, in turn, have produced important distributive consequences along socioeconomic, gender, and racial lines.

This paper aims to connect the unique economic characteristics of the web industry with the political and economic conditions they produce in urban spaces. The project is two-fold. We aim to first develop a framework that helps to better understand the geographic effects of the internet industry. Then, based on this understanding, our objective is to suggest design principles for urban policy that broadly distributes the benefits of the industry while mitigating its harms.

Specifically, the paper will focus on three aspects of the web economy. First, it will examine how the demands of venture capital produce business ecosystems characterized by rapid, unpredictable corporate growth. We in turn connect this to the tendency of the web industry to produce large migrations of transient technology workers into urban areas, and the resulting impact on incumbent residents. The paper will distinguish these shifts from industries in which slower growth may encourage better integration of a new industry into the urban social fabric.

Second, the paper will examine how the network effects create winner-take-all outcomes in the internet industry, particularly in “social web” applications which gain in value as more users join a platform. We link this to the emergence of political environments in which local and state governments are confronted by a small set of powerful business interests with largely similar policy preferences. This paper will suggest that this shapes regional policy in a way distinct from one in which governments face a more fragmented industry.

Third, we will examine the localized effects of the web industry, arguing that unlike technologies that create broad follow-on employment across a range of different skill levels, web applications produce disproportionate, narrowly distributed gains within a population. We argue that this dynamic emphasizes existing problems of urban inequality, and raises a host of policy issues in ensuring that the economic benefits of the web industry are broadly distributed in a region.

Moving beyond a theoretical examination of these matters, this paper will rely on San Francisco as a living case study in how these market characteristics shape neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan regions. The paper will use a blend of interviews, urban planning data, and observational studies to inform the analysis. As other urban regions attempt to imitate the successes of Silicon Valley, our belief is that the lessons from such a study will become ever more salient and generalizable over time.

Sarah Jaffray (@artphilled) Aesthetic Action: Instagram’s Technogeographies of Resistance
Heavily influenced by de Certeau’s ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ and inspired by Bataille’s notion of ‘aesthetic action’, this paper deals with Instagram as a background for a communal cartography that has the potential to create ‘geographies of resistance’ (Steve Pile). It seeks to understand our contemporary pictorial turn, which is driven by our dependence on maps and our increasing use of the photograph as a method of communication. What potential does this paring have in the formation of our world? Connected to the locative media (GPS) of the app Foursquare, Instagram the world’s most used photographic app, becomes a map through which the potentiality of new spaces can be realized.

The research for this paper incorporates human geography, new media and political resistance aligning them with certain post-structural theories of Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes (Camera Lucida) and Foucault (Heterotopias). Beginning with an explication of our current visual culture the paper then leads into an analysis of mapping and counter-mapping practices linking them to the act of smart phone photography. It examines the implications of the geo-tag as a method of sharing within social media and it attempts to prove that equipped with photo-sharing applications, the photographic documentation of the smart phone both consumes and produces a new conception of site, creating wholly new spaces, which can be called technogeographies. This term is appropriated from Simondon’s conception of a location where machine/technology create a connection between ‘two geographies’ that once had no connection. Applying the term to the role of Instagram in the recent protests of Brasília and Istanbul’s Gezi Park, the paper then explores these new ‘third spaces’ as counter-maps to the established laws of ownership by state and economic forces. The result of the research is to prove that Instagram’s photography is a method of counter-cartography that re-constructs our notions of shared space through the communal consumption of the photograph as mapped co-ordinate.

More eccentric than extreme, Instagram has the potential for subversivity, which is defined “as a disruptive attitude that tries to create openings, possibilities in the ‘closedness’ of a sysem. . .as a result, [it] more closely resembles cultural activism than political praxis” (De Cauter, ‘Notes on subversion/Theses on Activism’). My hope for this paper is to provoke a shift in the modality of Instagram (and, in future, apps like it) from photo-sharing social network to counter-cartographic device that can ‘prime’ a resistance to the traditional delineations of border and capital imposed on our social spaces.

Mathias Crawford (@mfcrawford) Procedural Communities: Post-War Los Angeles and the Rise of the Network Self
For many the rise of ICTs during the 1960s and 70s are seen as ushering in profoundly new ways of ordering both the social world and the self. From new communities forged as a result of technologies that allowed individuals with shared interests to locate and associate with one another, to the leveling of previously calcified hierarchies that relocated agency to the individual, ICTs are portrayed as representing a definitive break from our previous, (material) existences. By turning to urban planning documents outlining the creation of a recreation infrastructure in suburban Los Angeles in the immediate aftermath of World War II, this paper will challenge this view. As this paper will show, a mode of living that has previously been firmly attributed to ICTs is in fact inscribed into the infrastructure of one of America’s largest cities – Los Angeles – hidden in plain sight in the form of post-war recreation centers. By building recreation centers that were derived from virtually identical principles and standards, recreation officials and city planners were creating what will be called procedural communities: process based groupings of individuals who were connected through a material recreation infrastructure that helped inculcate shared modes of embodied interaction in the world. In spaces that were encoded with particular affordances, Americans could perform modes of sociality that demonstrated and inculcated a particular sense of what it meant to be a post-war democratic citizen: namely, someone with flexible, near-limitless choice, but with very clearly defined standards of what the range of that “limitless choice” would be, and who would be continually adjusting to a world defined by a continuous state of fluidity.

Faced with some 450 square miles of unbounded space, a booming economy, a swelling population, and an earnest desire to produce communities and individuals that reflected a new liberal model of American selfhood, no city embodied the shift to a procedural mode of community more than post-war Los Angeles. While the city’s sprawl may make it appear like an exceptional case, the paper contends that is in fact a definitional one. A city without a center, the development of Los Angeles in the post war period shows how a social order attributed to the emergence of computers and of informationalism in the 1960s and 1970s is actually part of social changes that occurred the late 1940s and 1950s

Whereas many contemporary scholars and pundits see communities in which individuals circulate in the network society as being unavoidably composed of individual, private, mediated, commercial actions, this paper’s analysis will show how in the decades immediately prior to the development of the first networked computers, a strikingly similar mode of community was linked to material, free to use, public spaces created and maintained by government. By uncovering the true origins of what we now think of the network society and networked individualism, it becomes possible to separate out what is truly new about our digital world, and what is merely a redeployment or modulation of existing forces.

Jay Springett (@thejaymo) Colonising the Clouds. Infrastructure Territory and the Geopolitics of the Stacks
This paper will explore the implications of multinational technology corporations morphing into the entities that Bruce Sterling has named ‘The Stacks’ – companies that are setting out to build vertically integrated feudalisms. Building on and synthesising the work of Benjamin Bratton (UCSD), Tobias Revell (RCA/ARUP/SuperFlux), Paul Graham Raven (University of Sheffield), and Vinay Gupta (UCL ISRS) this paper will seek to explore ideas of infrastructure, corporations and nation states, territory, and the importance of societal understanding of the interrelations of all three.

It is a strange future-present we live in: corporations are people; Dogecoin exists; Google – a corporation whose mission statement to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ – recently acquired eight robotics companies and a thermostat manufacturer; and ‘The Stacks’ are emerging as digitally-dualistic geopolitical entities.

‘Institutional Memory’ is the method by which information is inherited and pass on between states, corporations and collective groups of people. Using this notion we can begin to unpack and explore the beliefs, biases, and assumptions of corporations and states towards concepts such as hierarchy, law, and – most importantly in our case – ontologies of the internet.

The concept of a separate, distinct ‘cyberspace’, the subtle shifting of corporate discourse from ‘The Cloud’ to ‘A Cloud’, and the boastful claims of the Information Security industry all point towards the web as being understood along dualist lines by the Stacks. This stands in contrast to non digital-dualist views held by government cyber commands which sees ‘cyber’ as a theater not a territory, demonstrated in their understandings of servers on sovereign territory and the legality of cyber-espionage.

The Stacks require deep strata of data to do their business, and in order to get that data the userbase must be made legible. Following James Scott’s “Seeing Like A State”, this talk will argue for the need to “see like a stack” in order for us to better understand the approaches of these entities towards data collection, knowledge creation, and territorial definition.

The conceptual shift upwards from owning and controlling spatial territory to owning and controlling ‘informational territory’ is not new. It began with closing of the US frontier in 1893 & introduction of the telegraph interoperability bill a few years after. Today however, as these infrastructural territories are created and claimed, their owners and creators are influencing our political and economic systems at every level, from the geopolitical to the micropolitical, resulting in what Bratton calls “the ‘accidental’ de-lamination of traditional Westphalian geographies of sovereignty through the realization of other topologies”

This talk will pose the questions: Where are the nexuses of political contestation in this new landscape? Has the discourse of digital dualism been overly focussed on the individual, or is it that only now are the implications of dualism at the geopolitical level being recognised? What are the implications for politics, as nation states evaporate into the clouds, and the Stacks continue to build their own private infrastructures and extend sensing/robotic platforms into the physical world?

Presider: Rachel Rosenfelt (@rachelrosenfelt)

Hashmod: Angela Chen (@chengela)

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 Discipline and Publish: The New Politics of Publishing

It is hard to overstate just how profoundly and completely the Web has changed publishing, both as a profession and as a set of technologies. Every major category of publishable content, from punk zines to encyclopedias has undergone massive changes and yet some things remain doggedly the same. Mastheads are still very white and male, (even the new ones) although some of the most intriguing and innovative publishing platforms are more representative of  the world. Rachel Rosenfelt, founder and editor of The New Inquiry will preside over a panel of four presentations looking at how the politics of publishing are changing and what it means for authors, readers, and society in general. Ana Cecilia Alvarez and Joseph Staten investigate the apparent disconnect between the popularity of a topic, and any individual piece on that topic. Alvarez, looking at feminist writing on Tumblr and other social media platforms, asks the provocative and absolutely necessary question:  “Feminism gets a lot of likes, but does this mean a lot of people like feminism?” Staten asks his audience to reconsider the thinkpiece and how it can be mobilized as a more effective tool for cultural critique. Matthew Clair and Mathias Klang consider the new kinds of ownership models and access systems that have cropped up over the years and outline their roles in expanding the control of private property. Clair takes a uniquely micro-level approach to studying neoliberalism within avante-garde writing communities and Klang discusses the implications of DRM on ebooks for both authors and readers. The panelists in Discipline and Publish approach this field with a critical eye towards the affordances and stated promises of new publishing technologies however, taken together, the panel paints a fairly optimistic picture of the future of publishing.

Ana Cecilia Alvarez (@_llorona) Tumblr Grrrl: On Feminism and Digital Publishing
As a writer publishing primarily on digital platforms—blog articles, Tweets, Facebook statuses, Tumblr posts—I often evoke “feminist discourse” in my work. Although indefinable (hence the quotations marks continuously hovering over the word), within these digital channels, a feminist vocabulary is palpably identifiable, especially between a specific subset of writers whose work circulates around feminist issues. I am one of them, most recently writing critical essays on the perils of feminism’s branding potential. For Theorizing The Web I want to complicate my own invocation of feminism for paid web content by asking the following questions: Feminism gets a lot of likes, but does this mean a lot of people like feminism?

In the not so distant past, having a blog, an independent form of publishing, was a libratory gift. No longer were writers subject to the power structures of old publishing models. In an astonishingly short span, the freeing potential of digital publishing has been strangled by the insistent drive to monetize digital content production. Currently the two most common forms of generating revenue—selling certain number of page impressions for banner ads, or selling advertisers the very publication model so they create their own advertorial content—demand an unsustainable amount of content, lowering the quality for sake of quantity.

Today, the most “successful” web content—content that generates the most engagement, be that through page views, likes, or retweets—often features rapidly digestible and incendiary subjects. A feminist diatribe, now populating Twitter feeds on a regular basis, is a more successful lightning rod for social media engagement than similar content that appeals towards other social justice causes. (For some reason) an article speculating whether an actress has been re-touched, under the guise of a feminist appeal towards realistic representations of women in media, will gather much more digital klout than an expose on the climate change, or food justice, or animal cruelty. If “the meme is personal is political,” feminism’s meme potential is particularly salient. What does this mean for writers (from here on, content producers) whose political inclinations work particularly well with social media engagement? How can we measure the effect of their influence? Do these feminist critiques circulate beyond the insular group of social media practitioners who are already too well plugged into these debates? How has the existing business model for for-profit digital publications implicated the political potential of its content?

I hope to be hopeful. Social media allows for an “affinity (or animosity) to collapse distances;” it draws attention towards injustices; it encourages exchanges. What I am forced to ask daily as a writer on the Internet is—how can I reap the potential of digital publishing platforms while I am forced to mine them for profit? How are my political leanings as a writer implicated in my profitability as a content producer? Can I separate the two?

Joseph Staten (@joseph_staten) Rethinking the Thinkpiece
The “thinkpiece” has become, in the last few years, one of the most recognizable (and shareable) forms of cultural criticism on the internet. Focusing on popular cultural artifacts typically consigned to the space of “entertainment” (music, music videos, TV), thinkpieces take these forms seriously and critique them on the basis of their expression of certain norms or ideas, often their representations of women and people of color. Thinkpieces typically cast the objects of their criticism as socially retrograde in their perpetuation of stereotypes, and deem them generally harmful. In the last two years, some of the most thinkpiece-d artifacts have been Lena Dunham’s TV show Girls, Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines,” and Miley Cyrus’s performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.

The internet has allowed both cultural artifacts and their critical thinking-through to be distributed more widely than ever before, seemingly increasing the social stakes of both forms dramatically.

But for all the realms of the social and political that thinkpieces consider, there is one they frequently exclude: the realm of the aesthetic.

My paper uses as its jumping-off point the concept of “coincidental consumption” recently introduced by Robin James and Nathan Jurgenson: the process by which the actual content of links shared on social media seems to become “coincidental” to their shareability. (A primary example is sharing an article without reading it first.) In a blog post expanding the concept (https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/11/15/coincidental-consumption-thinkpiece/), James notices how thinkpieces tend to reinforce the coincidental aspects of content: “”most of these thinkpieces discuss the social and political implications of these pieces without talking about the actual music–as though the music was somehow separable from the social and political work these songs and videos accomplish.”

My paper takes this idea one step further, and argues that it is not just music (or whatever particular medium) that think pieces ignore, but the entire dimension of the aesthetic as a category of investigation. Though there is certainly plenty to be gained by examining a music video or TV show for its socio-political significations, the question is, in James’ words, “what gets lost, what’s obscured,” by focusing on these elements to the exclusion of aesthetic ones. Part of my answer will be that the question of artistic quality–what is quality? does it even matter?–becomes severely confused because of the aesthetic leveling-off that the thinkpiece performs. Another part of my answer will be that thinkpieces *themselves* become drawn into the exact same dynamic of coincidental consumption that the objects of their critique reside and are distributed within, dramatically attenuating their potential impact on social thought. Thinkpieces themselves are shared, but not read.

Finally, I will suggest that a reintegration of aesthetic considerations into the social project of the thinkpiece will both sharpen it as a critical weapon and expand its impact as a tool of social good.

Matthew Clair (@mathuclair) Rethinking Technology and Culture: Digital Technologies and Neoliberalism in the Literary Field
This paper considers the relationship between digital technologies and neoliberalism, which I define as a contemporary set of economic cultural logics about the proper role of government, the market, and the individual in economic and everyday life. Over the past 40 years, sociologists have offered various explanations of the role of new technological developments in shaping, enabling, and reflecting socio-cultural and economic beliefs and practices. Most of this work has been theoretical, macro-level, and focused on the use of new technology in expressly economic contexts. Little work has considered if these theories hold at the micro-level in non-economic contexts. In this paper, I ask: what is the relationship between digital technology and micro-level beliefs and practices? In particular, do neoliberal cultural logics accompany the use of digital technology in non-economic contexts? I answer these questions through interviews, content analysis, and fieldwork among editors and writers in the avant-garde literary field. Assessing how and when they use digital technologies, I find that the relationship between digital technology and neoliberal cultural logics is not as straightforward as macro theories assume. While some neoliberal logics are enabled by digital technology, others are contested. I find that digital technology’s relationship to cultural beliefs and practices is heterogeneous and context-dependent. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my findings for: (1) macro- and micro-level theory on technology and society; (2) the study of neoliberalism as a set of everyday, micro-level cultural logics; and (3) neoliberalism’s role in structuring contemporary social life.

Mathias Klang (@klangable) Is that your book? The impact of e-books on culture
The book as we know it has been declared dead several times in modern history. This trend has only been on the rise in the last decade with the rapid developments in smartphone and tablet technology. It is hard to argue that these devices do not provide a level of convenience to the reader but cogent arguments have been put forward that these devices cannot be functionally equivalent to the analogue book and that by adopting e-books we are losing a vital element of our culture.

While the analogue book remains healthy online sellers, like Amazon, report that they are now selling more digital than analogue books. Pew Internet & American Life project reports that a higher proportion of U.S. adults are reading e-books than ever before. The purpose of this paper is to map out and explore the differences in reading habits and the ways in which these habits are impacting on the way in which we access written culture through technical means.

Technical measures, Digital Rights Management (DRM), have been developed order to maintain control over the ability to copy. On the one hand DRM, in relation to copyrightable material, is a technical measure implemented to ensure adherence to legally established rights. The reader who buys a book does not acquire unlimited legal rights to make copies of the book. Therefore, adding DRM to ebooks ensures that users cannot use technology to go beyond their legally established rights. However, DRM can also restrict users from using their ebooks in ways that are both socially and legally acceptable if we were dealing with analogue books.

Thus, ebooks bought via Amazon can only be read on their Kindle ebook reader, they cannot easily be lent to others and they cannot be resold. These limitations are impractical to implement on analogue books. However, the implementation of DRM with the limitation of certain practices is redefining the nature of the book, and in extension the whole ecology of reading. Technology is re-shaping, and maybe regulating (Baym, 2010; Winner, 1985), an established social practice. The role of technology as regulator has naturally been problematized earlier (Winner, 1985; Latour, 1992; Norman, 1988).

The focus of this work is to point out the ways in which the e-book reader is lured by convenience into using a tethered technology that removes some of the affordances the analogue book provided. Through examples and illustrations these limitations to book use will be demonstrated and their impact on the wider cultural future of books and readership will be mapped out.

Presider: Jillet Sarah Sam (@JilletSarahSam)

Hashmod: Alice Samson (@theclubinternet)

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 World Wide Web(s): Theorizing the Non-Western Web

Far too often in popular and academic contexts, the Western experience of the Web is taken to be the universal experience. While some of the largest web presences on the globe have their ideological and cultural roots in the United States, there are entire practices, technologies, and services that have never graced an American IP address. This panel isn’t so much about those practices, technologies, and services so much as it is a prerequisite effort at de-centering the West in the Web. As a whole, this panel thoroughly breaks down the deficit model of technological development: and instead shows the  iterative, mutually-shaping relationships between nation-states, capital, culture, and networked technologies. David Peter Simon examines how Silicon Valley’s work “possibly subjugates the same people they aim to help” by way of applying a Gramscian analysis to his own work in Nairobi and Kampala. Jason Q. Ng not only reminds us that Wikipedia is not the primary reference site for the entire globe (perhaps not even a majority of it), but that the Western conception of what censorship looks like and how it acts should be similarly contextualized.

The invited presentations by Tolu Odumosu and Dalia Othman both offer glimpses into different social and technical (infra)structures that compose and influence each other and individual users. Odumosu’s focus on the development of Nigerian telecommunications infrastructure demonstrates the historical contingencies that make the Web many Americans are familiar with, and the primarily mobile phone-based web that has taken hold in Nigeria. By learning about the configuration of the Nigerian web, we come to understand just how easily the Western experience could have been radically different. Othman’s work in the Arab Spring is equally attuned to the particularities of geographies and local sociotechnical histories. By studying the ways in which activists use social media to organize and resist, Othman reveals networks’ social topography in a range of countries where civil societies’ relationships to their governments differ.

David Peter Simon (@davidpetersimon) The Do-Gooder Industrial Complex?
Valley-grown media pieces often position the expansion of the Internet across Africa as revolutionary, forgetting to cite that, throughout history, every Western-led information industry has ended up in the hands of a few, greedy monopolies. I’m beginning to wonder how this tried-and-true narrative weaves against the backdrop of technologists getting involved in markets such as sub-Saharan Africa.

In this paper, I follow the course of privilege amongst Western technologists now residing in places like Silicon Savannah, in order to better grasp the changing landscape of technology in relation to social impact. I investigate whether the fact that Africa has transformed into a ‘darling of the tech sector’ resurfaces paternalistic and/or neocolonial relationships. Specifically, I explore how the presence of major players like Google and Facebook may colonise knowledge.

As Valley culture attempts to redefine what “social” means (both explicitly and implicitly), I’m curious to dig into how increasing participation in local communities by global participants confuses the championship of economic justice. To begin with, I present my own experiences of working and living in Nairobi and Kampala as a consultant, acknowledging the inherent conflict of being a white privileged male sprung from California seeking to understand and analyse Valley-fostered exploitation. Using Gramsci as a lens, I then take a look at how scenarios like the Western entrepreneurial explosion possibly subjugates the same people they aim to help.

I feel there is an urgent need for self-reflection in the space of technology-oriented social impact work. As Stuart Hall once explained, history tends to have a practice of suppressing members who are not a part of a privileged class. He reminds us, “”what leads in a period of hegemony is no longer described as a ‘ruling class in the traditional language, but a historic bloc.”” Hall’s words ring as a warning that, with continual expansion into “”new frontiers”” emboldened by software development, we could fall into the same shortcomings of industrial days past, albeit more thickly veiled.

Jason Q. Ng (@jasonqng) Fit for Public Display: Rethinking Censorship via a Large-scale Comparison of Chinese Wikipedia with Hudong and Baidu Baike
In 2008, Baidu’s chief scientist said, “There’s, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia . . . It’s very natural for China to make its own products.” Today Hudong and Baidu Baike greatly eclipse the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia in China despite (or because of) the censorship known to take place on the sites. However, identifying outright instances or patterns in censorship can be difficult due to the (mostly) user-generated nature and oversight of the content. This paper seeks to address these challenges, and among the methods employed is a large-scale comparison of the three services, matching thousands of Chinese-language Wikipedia articles with their in-China counterparts, in order to identify the “content gaps” in the two baike. However, by looking not only at which articles don’t exist on Hudong and Baidu Baike, but also at the content that does for potentially sensitive topics, this paper investigates what knowledge and information is fit for public display and consumption. If articles are shorter on Hudong and Baidu, what information do they carry? Does this information reveal anything about the authors’ intentions? By examining the topics and articles that are left visible in these baike and considering the motivations behind those who seek out, view, edit, and approve of these articles, this project hopes to offer a more nuanced view of the typical narratives about censorship in China. Trying to understand what sorts of expressions netizens are making via these online encyclopedias, despite whatever censorship might be taking place, is as interesting as the potential censorship itself. This project will hopefully push us to once again consider the many complexities when discussing information control in environments where oversight of content has been decentralized to companies and users—an environment which makes it increasingly harder to identify traditional instances of censorship.

Tolu Odumosu (@todumosu) Phoning the Web: A Critical Examination of Web Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa
Do people everywhere experience the “web” the same way? If no, what factors drive the different evolutionary paths of the web(s)? This paper attempts to contextualize the evolution and experience of the web Internet in Nigeria as a study in sociotechnical evolution of mundane infrastructure. How can we understand the Nigerian web in opposition to the American web? How do users of the web shape its form and structure? What is the importance of mundane infrastructure in the development of the web, and what are possible ways forward?

Dalia Othman (@daliaothman) Social Media, Activism and the Middle East
Since the Arab uprisings in 2011 a lot of focus has been placed on the role played by Social Media in these uprisings. From the Youtube video of the immolation Mohamed BouAzizi that went viral across Tunisia and inspired the revolution, to the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page that called for a demonstration on January 25th, 2011 in Tahrir and many more. Activists across the region had recognized the significance of social networks as a communication and organizational tool and used it to compliment their efforts on the ground. Today we see protests happening across the planet that are using social networks to organize, coordinate and disseminate information to mainstream media. Studying both the tools chosen by the activists is key to understand how activists are using them to create change. It is even more significant to study the connection between these activists that will allow academics to receive a better insight into the conversations that are happening and the information flows that offer an alternative perspective that emerges from events happening on the ground.
Taking a social networked analysis approach, I will go through the initial findings of the ongoing research being conducted on the Arab Blogosphere and Twitter maps from various countries in the region. This analysis will help identify key actors in the region (and in some cases the absence of certain actors) in addition to the links between these different actors. It is a fundamental step and a foundational one that will support building a knowledge base to help understand the flow of information and conversations -if any- between different activists in the region, in addition to the tactics used by activists to generate attention towards their cause.

Presider: Britney Summit-Gil (@beersandbooks)

Hashmod: Kate Miltner (@katemiltner)

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 Gone Viral: All Watched Over by Memes of Loving Grace.

There’s something categorically different about things that are a hit on the Web. Unlike a blockbuster movie or a critically-acclaimed TV show, a viral meme inculcates everyone in its production, popularity, and eventual descent into hackneyed trope-dom. Sometimes the “patient zero” of the meme is notorious or well-known, but often times there is no clear author. Such is the case in almost all of the case studies in this panel where memes are not so much treated as stories told by authors, but as tools and methods of political dissent, identity construction, and cultural critique. Patrick Sharbaugh’s presentation on civic engagement in Vietnam shows how viral memes afford new kinds of cultural protest that can come from very oblique angles, rather than head-on collisions with hegemony. Joel Penney surveys two seminal texts on virality and concludes that the intervening decades have proven these texts to be the basis of a “persuasion model of political internet use” but we have yet to see a systematic articulation of this persuasion model in action. Rob Horning turns the conversation inward by positing that “To the extent that the self is constituted in social media, it knows itself in terms of statistical measures of circulation and algorithmically generated feedback rather than other forms of content.”

Patrick Sharbaugh (@psharbaugh) Lulz Will Find a Way: How Meme Culture Is Empowering Civic Engagement in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
Although social media platforms have garnered much attention in recent years for their putative role in dramatic social and political movements around the world, scholars such as Clay Shirky have suggested that the real potential of such tools for change exists in the way they empower citizens and organizations to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views throughout society. According to this view, social media matters most not in the streets and squares but in the the social commons that Jurgen Habermas termed the public sphere.

Ethan Zuckerman has observed that by using the seemingly innocuous tools of meme and remix culture, citizens are able to create and participate in an active public sphere of indirect political commentary and debate that comprises an entirely new form of civic engagement, particularly for nations in which traditional civil society is proscribed. Social media platforms and creative practices in Vietnam are emerging as powerful tools in this regard, offering a voice to a citizenry who since 1975 have been unable to express in public their views and opinions on many topics considered ‘sensitive’ by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and government officials, who exercise tight control over traditional media channels in the authoritarian nation.

While showing little taste for direct engagement with traditional political activism, Vietnamese netizens are increasingly turning to the digital techniques of remix and mashup culture to indirectly express and debate sentiment on issues of social and political relevance. Using several case studies, I will argue that this widespread practice constitutes a culturally-specific form of civic and political engagement that has a subtle but real influence upon state policy in this rapidly developing Southeast Asian nation, in a manner distinct from but not dissimilar to that seen in the social commons of more open, developed societies.

Joel Penney (@professorpenney) Meme Warriors and Media Viruses: Theorizing the Persuasive Political Power of the Web
Twenty years ago, the journalist and media critic Douglas Rushkoff released the book Media Virus!, which became one of the most influential—and most criticized—early works of web theory. While the book went on to inspire a generation of commercial marketers to craft promotional messages that spread and replicate across digital networks, Rushkoff’s focus was in fact the use of viral dissemination techniques for radical-progressive political activism. Five years later, Kelle Lasn, a founder of Adbusters magazine, advanced a similar model of the new media activism in the book Culture Jam, calling for his followers to kick off an left-progressive revolution by acting as “meme warriors.” Both of these books put forth a postmodernist theorization of political power as the equivalent of networked communicative power in a fully media-saturated world. As Lasn proclaims, “potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of the information age. Whoever has the memes has the power,” while Rushkoff proposes that “a tiny virus, launched creatively and distributed widely, can topple systems of thought as established as organized religion and institutions as well rooted as, say, the Republican Party or even the two-party system altogether.”

Flash-forward to 2014, and political groups from across the ideological spectrum are now functioning as what Lasn dubs “meme factories,” churning out short bits of rhetorical media content (or “propaganda,” in his words) and summoning their supporters to spread them across a swath of digital networks. From electoral campaigning to social movement advocacy, political organizations are increasingly utilizing platforms like Facebook and Twitter as venues for persuasion via the peer-to-peer sharing of memes and other digital content. Does this shift towards media-based strategies of change threaten to dilute the force of political action, disconnecting symbolic victories in the ‘datasphere’ from the distribution of resources on the ground? Or were Rushkoff’s and Lasn’s visions of grassroots media power as the new political power truly prescient in the age of the information network?

On the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries of these seminal works, respectively, this paper re-examines their controversial claims and considers how their theories of media contagion as political power inform contemporary debates about “slacktivism” and the value of symbolic political expression on the web. The paper argues that these popular works of media criticism can be viewed in retrospect as forming the foundation for a persuasion model of political internet use that has since appeared in a handful of scholarly works (such as those of Manuel Castells, Henry Jenkins, and Ethan Zuckerman) but has yet to be formerly and systematically articulated. In contrast to more established models such as digital deliberative democracy and civic cultures, the persuasion model advanced by Rushkoff and Lasn is particularly useful for thinking critically about a variety of recent politically-oriented web phenomena, such as the HRC Red Equal Sign campaign, KONY 2012, and Justice for Trayvon Blackout.

Robert Horning (@marginalutility) Virality, Uncreativity, and the End of Self-Expression
The recent popularity of websites like Upworthy suggest how virality can be engineered as an end in itself in social media, as a formal component of content that trumps the specific nature of the content itself. In this paper, I will argue that something similar happens to the self: To the extent that the self is constituted in social media, it knows itself in terms of statistical measures of circulation and algorithmically generated feedback rather than other forms of content. Virality becomes both a feeling (an aesthetic response that confirms itself in the act of sharing) and a personal goal (aspiring to have a sense of one’s own ubiquity, confirmed by metrics).

Viral content teaches what it takes to engineer the self to go viral, providing a model for self-memeification. As the specific consumerist signifers of “cool” become more unstable under the pressure of their constant circulation, the online “engagement” metrics that track content become the newly reliable and stable measures of self-esteem.

By encoding audience enthusiasm at the level of form, viral content permits vicarious participation not only in the story — whose apparent popularity helps encourage an indulgent suspension of disbelief — but in the social itself. You can vicariously identify with how the story circulates, not just what it describes. Though the life span of any piece of viral content is short, the clear conventions of the viral genre allow readers to quickly identify similar content and access the same vicarious emotions more readily. Reading and sharing viral content make us feel as popular as a meme.

Social media supplies infrastructure for performing consumption as redistribution. Because I know my reaction to something I am reading can be performed on Twitter, I am sure to have a reaction—to method-act my response and see how it goes over. That performance can then circulate and substantiate me, as well as provide the pleasure of vicarious involvement with the story and with the crowd I imagine reading it. Having feelings is already pointless if you can’t be seen having them; soon it may be that having feelings will be pointless if your performance of them won’t go as viral as what prompted them. We will want to feel only what will spread.

Just as genuineness has proved irrelevant to viral content, it is also irrelevant to the viral self, whose “authenticity” is an after-effect of having marshaled an audience. Being true to some unchanging interior spirit, being consistent despite the demands of an audience watching — these are no longer relevant.

Social media sustain a measurement system that makes “more attention” seem always appropriate and anything less insufficient. If your content is not circulating ever more widely, then you are disappearing, in danger of total exclusion. But as long as others re-share what you share, your being is secure. You are rippling throughout the network, and you can hear the reassuring echoes.

Presider: David Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW)

Hashmod: R. Stuart Geiger (@staeiou)

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 Consensual Hallucination: Wa$ted: The Making and Unmaking of Commodities

From the clean lines of an Apple product to the intangibility of the Internet, we are encouraged to think of the Web as something that doesn’t take up much room, let alone produce waste. At the heart of digital dualism is the false assumption that what happens on the internet, stays on the internet. The panelists in Wa$ted thoroughly debunk that notion by showing just how tangible the Web really is. Even if the work that happens online is largely intangible, it often organizes bodies and physical means of production. Wesley Shumar, Nora Madison, and Tyson Mitman’s work on craft beer communities demonstrate how networked individuals are enrolled in the production of goods that is both a part of and in contention with the neoliberal regime that created it. Heather Rosenfeld demonstrates a similar point by showing how energy smart devices and utility grids both feed into the neoliberal conception of the citizen-consumer but also point toward liberatory potentialities and environmental justice. Silicon Valley isn’t usually lumped together with energy and car companies as major polluters but, as Andrea Zeffiro and Mél Hogan’s work on techno-trash and Brian Thill’s work on digital wastelands show, the Internet makes a lot of trash. From spam folders to mercury-laden landfills, our status updates have deleterious effects on ourselves, others, and the environment. While Zeffiro and Hogan’s work underscores truly global nature of ewaste streams, Thill shows how deeply the problem of waste is misunderstood by those that create the most of it.

Andrea Zeffiro (Co-authored by Mél Hogan) (@AndreaZeffiro) Out of Site & Out of Mind: A (Speculative) Historiography of Techno-trash
In Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (2011), Jennifer Gabrys nuances the incarnation of digital information with a focus on the devices on and through which information travels. Counter to the hype of new media, she brings attention to the cultural processes that make media fail, and in turn the politics and ramifications of (often planned) technological obsolescence. Similarly, in Greening the Media (2012), authors Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller diagnose an increasingly wasteful culture, enhanced and encouraged by devices that are quickly replaced and put out of use. Most recently, a study completed by the Solving E-Waste Problem (StEP) initiative estimates that the amount of global electronic waste will increase by 33 percent, from the 49 million tons tracked in 2012 to over 65 million tons by 2017 (StEP 2013). Given the magnitude of waste, what if we were required to physically store and care for our personal computing devices, such as cell phones, laptops and iPads, long after these machines served their intended function? In such an imaginary, unusable technologies remain within our sights, and in our sites. We use this paper as an occasion to think through this query by digging into the numerous layers in which our personal technologies and media practices contribute to a mode of ‘technological trauma’ and ‘drama’ that is best described as the trauma and drama of disembodied techno-trash (McLuhan 1962, 1964; Pfaffenberger 1992). For McLuhan, it was electric speed that inundated even the most remote areas in the world with Western technology. Today, the West continues to deluge the Global South with its devices and gadgets, but more often than not, these technologies quickly become obsolete and inoperative, or simply, trash. Electronic waste is increasingly unloaded in countries like China, Ghana, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Vietnam, where facilities or regulations governing recycling initiatives are lax. We employ our personal histories of technological ownership and put forth a speculative historiography of the life cycles of our devices and gadgets. In doing so, we illustrate not only the environmental burden of individual consumption practices, but also the scale of environmental trauma and drama that is symptomatic of contemporary global capitalism.

Brian Thill (@brian_thill) Tab-Flab, Dry Docs, Fave-Holes: On Digital Wastelands

One of the chief byproducts of modern life online is the endless proliferation of digital waste products: cluttered inboxes, unkempt feeds, open tabs, dead links, neglected faves, to-read piles, half-written blog posts. Historically, our relationship to the discarded bits of our everyday material lives has been one of abjection and removal. Traditionally, trash, as soon as it is classified as such, is wiped from sight, and often from memory. Our collective mountains of rubbish are submerged within great distant mountains of refuse, left to their entombment unloved and largely unconsidered.

Our relationship to digital detritus, however, opens up new possibilities for thinking about the dematerialized (or differently materialized) nature of virtual waste. These digital midden-heaps can serve an array of emergent functions: as aids to memory, as new forms of journal-keeping and self-discovery, as deep archives of collective energies bound to specific cultural moments, and more. Of course, digital waste is not “freed” from the realities of material existence; it consumes energy, resources, time, and space just as the proliferating garbage of the pre-digital ages did (and continues to do), and as such, it is inextricably bound to political, economic, and social crises just as material waste has been. But the current tendency for digital detritus to be more expansive and more distributed also means that it can serve as a mechanism for rethinking our relationships to waste, place, time, memory, and the self.

Efforts at reducing digital clutter, like “inbox zero,” misunderstand how the practice of everyday digital life is, by its very nature, even more “wasteful” than the disposable consumer culture that digital natives were born into, and attempts to think about digital garbage in the ways that seem most comprehensible to the lifestyle politics and environmental ethos of an earlier era. There are many productive things that ascetic philosophy or eco-awareness can do to shape how we think about digital waste, but we need to make sure we are not ignoring or downplaying the fact that notions of waste and value have been as radically reshaped by the digital age as communications, social relations, commerce, and labor have been.

Wesley Shumar (Co-authored by Nora Madison & Tyson Mitman) Mediated Worlds: Navigating the Hybrid Spaces of Craft Beer

Our ethnographic project examines how the Philadelphia craft beer movement- as a specific example of the larger craft movement in the U.S.- is exemplary of many of the features of the 21st century marketplace. One emphasis of our analysis is a focus on the use of social media in producing social spaces of affinity where people who share an interest in the aesthetics of microbrew consumption as well as the production of craft beer can gather. A second emphasis of our analysis looks at how the traditional separation of producer and consumer is giving way to a blended identity. Like the traditional separation of blue collar and white collar are being blurred in some new industries (Neff 2012; Ross 2003), we see these binaries between producer and consumer (and white collar and blue collar) being blurred in the craft beer world, too. Most critically, we will discuss craft beer in context to shifting economic movements and how worker and owner – producer and consumer – depend upon a social space that is broadened, enriched, and codependent on internet technologies.

In Gershon’s (2011) article, “Neoliberal Agency,” she argues we are all being hailed to become businesses, and that as businesses, we perceive ourselves and our world in particular kinds of ways. These ways are defined by a capitalist marketplace, where market exchange is supreme and other forms of the social are erased. On the one hand, it would be easy, and partly correct, to see the craft beer movement as part of this neoliberal ideology. On the other hand, craft beer, as a social movement, is motivated by a number of competing beliefs valuing community, quality, and creativity where these values are more important than profit. Our contention is that craft beer producers are creating a shift in capitalist commodity production that is resistant to the traditional profit-above-all model and moving towards a form of commodity production that privileges quality and community over profit accumulation. Ultimately, we see “craft” as an interesting and contradictory movement beholden to the logic of neoliberalism while at the same time having the potential to promote forms of resistance to consumer capitalism. We present the argument that the alternative economy space that craft beer inhabits is not possible (nor easy) without the web. Further, we argue that the internet has made the craft beer industry a notably different entity due to how its prosumers inhabit a space that is mediated.

Drawing on contemporary thinking about the ways the online and offline, mediated and physical spaces are articulated, the paper suggests that media is central to fostering the bonds of affinity (Gee 2005) that one finds in the craft beer community. Using Tom Boellstorff’s (2008) notion of the gap between the virtual and the actual and James Gee’s (2005) notion of affinity, this paper looks at how producers and consumers are sutured into spaces of affinity where new social as well as economic forms are possible, and quality of experience and commerce can mix in creative new ways.

Heather Rosenfeld (@brainvom) Plug Into Choice? The Neoliberal Environmental Justice of Smart Electricity Technologies

While not about the web per se, this paper investigates the integration of a particular set of digital technologies into daily life: smart electricity technologies. At the surface, ‘smart’, or digitally enhanced, electric grids offer myriad environmental and social benefits relative to the industrial electric grids of the last century. Through adding information and communication technologies to electric grids, they provide data on electricity consumption and flows at households and at key points in the circuit. This in turn can empower consumers, prevent energy from being wasted, and facilitate the integration of renewable energy into grids otherwise powered by fossil fuels. At present, however, smart electric grids are currently being installed, contested, and modified, to the point that they are better understood as a gesture away from a past of a non-smart grid and towards future possibilities yet to be determined and realized.

In this paper, I explore what these technologies, in their installation, contestation, and modification, mean for environmental justice. Environmental justice is commonly defined by activists and scholars as considering the distribution of pollutants, the recognition of different perspectives, an inclusive process in environmental decision-making, and community capacity-building. Through their reliance on the self-empowering, rational-choosing “consumer-citizen”, smart grids can be understood as being (a certain kind of) ‘neoliberal’, and neoliberalism is most often associated with environmental injustice, rather than justice. However, I find that precisely the neoliberal aspects of the smart grid – embodied by one utility’s motto, ‘plug into choice’ – are precisely what allow them to offer degrees of environmental justice. This neoliberal environmental justice is, however, limited, and I conclude by speculating about ways smart grids might be more just, in ways that challenge their neoliberal aspects but recognize possibilities for co-optation and counter co-optation of neoliberal rhetorics. This research is based on a case study of a municipally-owned electric grid, but it also draws connections to other smart grid projects.

Presider: Benjamen Walker (@benjamenwalker)

Hashtag Moderator: Aakash Sastry (@aakashsastry)

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 Consensual Hallucination: Fantasy in Public Life

Stories are one of the fundamental building blocks of society. How we tell those stories and assure their continuation has always been a mixture of tradition, practice, and technology. The presentations in this panel demonstrate just how deeply and profoundly the means of telling stories can effect their content. Of course, what is being told and the intended use of a technology can come into conflict, as we see in both Laren Burr and Molly Sauter presentations, both of which deal with varying levels of deception propagated by technologies that are usually treated as conduits of true and useful information. Fiction, whether it is purposefully masquerading as an accurate account of facts or designed to offer an alternative reality, can be immensely useful to those of us that think critically about the maintenance of the status quo. Iskandar Zulkarnain’s work on “playable nationalism” and Amy Papaelias and Aaron Knochel’s work on anti-racist ARGs show how the speculative can become the prescriptive or even the aspirational. All of the presenters demonstrate the power and promise of fiction to bring about productive reflection and opportunities for change.

Lauren Burr (@burrlauren) Doing It Wrong On Purpose: The Creative Misuse of Social Media
During a TEDxToronto event on October 26, 2012, Twitter handle @BrendleWhat sent out an inquiry: “Why is the City of Toronto taking bikes from @TedXToronto and throwing them into a furnace? #TedXToronto #BikeFurnace.” This single tweet sparked a flood of other similar reports that effectively hijacked the conference’s Twitter stream until the organizers reassured everyone that the police were not, in fact, burning bicycles. The #BikeFurnace prank made local news headlines as an unusually sophisticated case of event trolling. It was also a serendipitous example of an emerging genre of electronic literature that Rob Wittig and Mark Marino have termed netprov, or “networked improv literature.”

According to Wittig, netprov is a digital art form “that creates written stories that are networked, collaborative and improvised in real time.” It encompasses spontaneous and planned acts of fictional role-playing on social media, including a particular subset of creative Twitter bots and the occasional Internet hoax. Often compared to alternate reality games (ARGs), netprov uses the same strategies of participatory transmedia storytelling but differs through its notable ambivalence to game elements. It also distinguishes itself from earlier forms of electronic literature by its choice of social media as a platform.

As an experimental creative writing genre, netprov emerged as a social critique of both its own topical content and the digital networks on which it unfolds, fitting itself comfortably into sites of real-world dialogue. Unsuspecting bystanders can thus find themselves straddling several simultaneous realities, legitimately unsure as to whether the described events are fact or fiction, or where the boundaries lie between them. Netprov is a new phenomenon, having been developed only within the past three years, and it continues to wrestle with the critical and ethical implications of bringing fiction into the realm of social media. In this talk, I draw on theories of hybrid and x-reality as conceptualized by Adriana De Souza e Silva and Beth Coleman, as well as the ethical principles of transmedia design articulated by Andrea Phillips and Markus Montola, to examine several recent examples of Twitter-centric netprov that both coincided with real-world events and were believed to varying degrees and consequences by their audiences. Stemming from my doctoral work on the politics of pervasive media genres that span both physical and virtual spaces, this talk illustrates what happens when fiction and reality collide in the space of social media.

Iskandar Zulkarnain (@zhoel13) “Playable” Nationalism: Nusantara Online and the Gamic Reconstruction of National History
In this paper, I look at the development and distribution of Nusantara Online, an Indonesian-made massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) that imaginatively reconstructs the history of the Indonesian archipelago. The game, developed collaboratively by Sangkuriang Internasional and Telegraph Studio—two emerging start-up companies—uses the history of three major kingdoms in the history of Indonesian archipelago prior to the creation of the nation state—Majapahit, Pajajaran, and Sriwijaya—as material for its background stories. As an “allegorithm”—historical allegory and algorithmic model—for the Indonesian nation, the game suggests a distinct type of digital nationalism that I dub as “playable” nationalism. This concept captures the formulation of “Nusantara,” an earlier term for the Indonesian archipelago, as the idealized yet playful version of Indonesia, a version emphasizing the principles of digital collaboration. By engaging discourses developed in game studies, Southeast Asian studies, and post-colonial studies, I treat the game as an attempt to create an immersive setting in which player’s nationalistic experience is both “open-ended” and “programmed.” I also demonstrate how the game’s “playable” nationalism is rooted in a complex process of national identity formation in the post-Suharto public debates in Indonesia. Exemplifying the characteristic of Indonesian “digital generation,” the developers of Nusantara Online generally embrace new media technologies. Yet, they worry that the Indonesian people’s excessive consumption of foreign ICT products will lead to the crystallization of consumer mentality, thus uprooting Indonesian nationalistic values. At the same time, these developers also seek to present a polyvalent meaning of Indonesian history in the form of video games. At first sight, the game’s model of “playable” nationalism gives the impression of an alternative expression of everyday nationalism, emerging from outside official state discourses. Yet, closer consideration of the game, exposes the limitations of the game’s model of nationalism, which constrains players’ experience with its software mechanism, represents a conventional version of national history, and offers perplexing images of racial classification. In the end, my analysis of Nusantara Online’s “playable” nationalism can shed light on the ways in which national identity formations and technological visions are deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive, even in such a popular entertainment form as video games.

Molly Sauter (@oddletters) An Exploration of Civic Fiction: A Gay Girl in Damascus and the Cosmopolitan Romance of the Digital Bridge Figure
In this paper, I explore the concept of “civic fiction,” and its implications for digital cosmopolitanism in news coverage, through the example of the Gay Girl in Damascus/Amina blog hoax perpetuated by Tom MacMaster in 2011. This paper serves to further define and situate civic fiction within existing theories of communication, performance, witnessing, fiction, and testimonio. I am defining the phenomenon of civic fiction as the purposeful construction of counter-factual narratives that, by virtue of the counter-factual itself, allow an individual or an event to take part in a civic dialogue or space that would otherwise be inaccessible, or that they perceive would be inaccessible. Through the creation of the Amina persona, MacMaster altered the persona through which the online world interacted with him, in order to change how his contributions to conversations on Middle East politics were received.

This paper uses this example of civic fiction to critique the cosmopolitan bridge figure described by Kwame Anthony Appiah and later Ethan Zuckerman, specifically its role in modern international news coverage. Amina was originally received by Western news sources as bridge figure, someone who could “straddle the borders between cultures,” acting as “an interpreter between cultures…an individual both groups could trust and identify with…” (Zuckerman, Rewire, p 171). Zuckerman specifics aligns “bridge blogger” figures with modern international news coverage, assigning them the role of translating, contextualizing, and making accessible events in faraway places. Zuckerman had originally envisioned these figures directly attracting a global audience of readers, and the appeal of the “bridge blogger” figure to the news industry is clear. Especially in a journalistic age wherein foreign bureaus are being swiftly dismantled, the attraction of readily available, engaging local content that can be quickly adapted for a Western audience at the point of interest cannot be denied.

This paper argues that in being received into the role of the bridge figure/blogger, the Amina persona, who purported to be a Syrian lesbian while actually being performed by an American man, created a permissive space for a progressive Western audience to engage with the complex politics of a far-away conflict on familiar terms while operating under the idea that they were engaging in cosmopolitan solidarity across international lines. The Gay Girl blog presented a testimonio-like opportunity for solidarity-building and the extension of sympathy, performing an encounter with the subaltern while never venturing beyond the progressive Western confines of its own conception. The Amina persona effectively performed a bridge-figure because she was, in fact, a mirror.

Ultimately, the civic fiction concept allows for an interrogation of anxieties regarding the success of cosmopolitanism as practiced in the digital space. These anxieties reflect a perceived crisis of sympathy, and a lack of faith in the ability of Western audiences to meaningfully extend sympathy across cultural lines. The goal of this paper is to unpack those anxieties and, through the civic media concept, explore their implications for the digital cosmopolitanism project and modern international journalism.

Amy Papaelias & Aaron Knochel (@fontnerd & @artisteducator) Let’s Talk About…: An ARG in Spatial Dialogue about Race on Campus
Racial tensions play out in dynamic ways on the campuses of American universities. From parties themed by ugly racial stereotypes to blatant acts of hate crimes(1), the university campus provides a diorama of the complexity of race relations and identity politics that are more easily hidden outside the realm of vital young adult sociality. Over the past two school years on the campus of SUNY New Paltz(2), these tensions and complexities have erupted in two heinous acts of anonymous racist tagging within campus buildings that provoked the campus community to respond with a one-day symposium entitled “Let’s Talk About … ” Through a series of speakers and breakout sessions, the event brought together over 300 students, faculty and staff to discuss issues of race, gender and identity.

In order to continue to engage the campus community in dialogue about race relations, we have initiated a design process that spatializes the dialogue on race and campus life to augment the campus geography as a social space. Through geo-tagging technologies, spatial mapping, theories of psychogeographic discovery and interventionist tactics of street theater and art performance, our design process looks to expand the ongoing dialogue of the symposium “Let’s Talk About…” by bringing the dialogue into context: an augmented reality game (ARG) that facilitates place-based knowledge, layers past and present in a historiography of space, and creates dynamic but fleeting social provocations. Our appropriation of the ARG genre, a.k.a. alternate reality gaming, moves this practice from its locus within fantasy in transmedia storytelling to creating spaces of social interaction that augment events, history and people that are a part of our campus community. Augmentation in this sense is the realization of radical intersubjectivity that is provoking reflections on representation and the subject within varied fields of both space and time. In addition to creating a dialogic space along the lines of the “Let’s Talk About…” symposium, our design process is an inquiry to the deployment of web connectivity and mobile computing as enacting spatial dialogue immanent to the campus geographies that mold our social topography.

During the Spring 2014 semester, undergraduate art education and graphic design students will develop a working prototype of the “Let’s Talk About…” ARG. Students will collect stories of historical and current events surrounding race on campus and develop an interactive environment in which the campus can actively participate. As art and design faculty, we believe it is crucial to engage future makers and educators with practices that situate the mobile web as a site for embracing and investigating complex social issues.

Our presentation will document the design process, from conception to final working prototype, and how it is informed by theories in critical race theory, game design, mobile computing and spatial dialogue for bringing about a discussion of race on campus that is grounded in the history and peoples that make any campus vital, equitable, and empowering for all of its students.

Presider: Steven Losco (@godislobster)

Hashmod: Chris Dancy (@servicesphere)

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 The New Flesh: Bodies and Biopolitics

Leigh-Anne Goins (@kathryn_leigh) Theorizing PostRacial Conversations: #QuvenzhanéWallis #Oscars2013
Discourses surrounding Black femininity and Black women’s bodies often rely on historical narratives and intersectional ideologies –interwoven beliefs specific to groups, but not essentialized– creating particular and controlled narratives. Historically and contemporarily, ideologies surrounding Black women’s bodies and Black femininities are hypercritical. Within media, judgments fall upon Black women’s bodies through public out cry to images whether mediated presentations of actual women or fictitious characters. Racist and sexist narratives, whether interpersonally or through media produce exclusionary discourses that have distinctly negative effects: they restrict the opportunity for Black women to be seen as ‘moral equals’ worthy of equitable social recognition, and thus restrict access to social citizenship. In addition to Somers’ (2008) discussion of social citizenship, I draw from the work of Harris-Perry (2011), specifically the crooked room. Because my research of social exclusion surrounds online spaces, which are mobile, fluid, and diffuse, I extend the crooked room, to crooked spaces.

Contemporarily, discussions of Black women’s bodies and representations have the potential for increased negative judgments due to the prominence of, and increasing trends in social media usage (i.e. Facebook) and the Internet generally (news sites, blogs). When engaging in online spaces individuals are able to participate in multiple and simultaneous conversations, post comments and create images that veil racist and sexist beliefs. I argue, when Black women engage in online spaces that engage covert and/or overt racist and sexist language, it increases the negative effects of racism and sexism, as it provides the possibility for unremitting narratives of exclusion, restricting access to social citizenship and increasing feelings of imbalance. It is therefore important to theorize and interrogate how racist and sexist discourses in online spaces provide increased opportunities to exclude and control certain bodies.

This paper theorizes the potential discursive impacts racist and sexist discourses have on constructions of Black femininities and social exclusion through the case of Quvenzhané Wallis and the #Oscars2013 tweet. Engaging a Black feminist lens that incorporates theoretical frameworks surrounding social citizenship, (new) media, and critical discourse analysis, I examined 1500 comments, paying increased attention to post-racial discourses (overtly sexist but subtly racist, or subtly sexist and racist), resulted in in-depth analysis of 300 comments. Findings demonstrated that individuals relying on overtly sexist but subtly racist comments argued this was not about race, but gender often arguing the comment would have occurred had Quvenzhané’s body been white. Those arguing that the comment was neither racist nor sexist claimed individual played the ‘race card,’ or that Black women, their bodies, and femininities due to pathological constructions caused comments and jokes like this.
Whether comments engage explicitly with sexism, denying racism, or deny the effects of racism and sexism they maintain a discourse where Black women’s bodies do not belong, where Black femininities are not worthy of outrage or study. The effects of these disembodied discourses require further study and new frameworks that take account of socio-historical processes of oppression and the hyper-speed rate of the Internet.

Deanna Day (@deannaday) Unpacking Cyborg Fertility: Natural Family Planning and the Quantified Self
Personal medical care in the twenty-first century is increasingly organized around the principle of quantified self-surveillance; the standard biomedicalization narrative describes how a technologically-implicated tracking impulse moves from the domain of professionals into the hands of lay users as tools become cheaper, smaller, and more accessible. Often conceptualized as part of the “quantified self” movement, communities of these practitioners are increasingly organizing online to share their data, their methods, and their analysis. This paper historicizes this trend and argues that both the technological and epistemological origins of this movement can be found in the practices of an unexpected group of women: natural family planners who have used physiological charting to determine their fertility since the early twentieth century.

Despite its name, natural family planning requires an intellectual, social, and material infrastructure to implement. Practitioners quantify, chart, and statistically interpret their temperature on a daily basis in order to pinpoint the moment of their ovulation. The first specifically-branded fertility thermometers were produced in the 1940s under the brand name Ovulindex, and female users relied upon an elaborate system of temperature-taking, charting, and mathematics to interpret their “safe period.” Performing this technological work upon the body enabled practitioners to understand temperature charting as a holistic and natural approach to health care, while at the same time describing their bodies as “walking biological computer[s].” In the early twenty-first century, they continue this work using computerized thermometers, online communities, and smartphone apps.

These similarities notwithstanding, there remains a deep discontinuity between the masculinized community of contemporary quantified self-ers and women who identify as natural family planners. In this paper, I argue that maintaining this discontinuity has continuing political ramifications. First, it exceptionalizes fertility, placing it apart from larger discussions of health and making it a separate sphere of concern only to women, or — more exactly — only of concern to some women: the particular demographic of women for whom conceiving a child is their fundamental concern. It takes one component of women’s biology and reifies its connection to one particular social role.

I also argue that this discontinuity can prevent us from thinking critically about the potential impacts of the quantified self movement. An extensive critical discourse deals with the objectification of women’s bodies, and when we exclude the feminine (and the feminist) from the quantified, we’re at risk of cutting ourselves off from a productive critique of the methodology of the quantified self. What does it mean for a tracker to turn their body, and their mood, and their diet — their whole self — into a graph? What does it mean to make yourself into a quantified work object in an extensive medical labor system? And what does it mean for both women and men to exclude this particular, culturally loaded, physiologically complicated, and socially and politically important component of themselves — their fertile potential — out of that identity?

Nadav Assor (@nadassor) Building a More Perfect Drone
In this talk I would like to address the exploding presence of drone technologies in our culture from three perspectives that are meant to expand from a different direction on the many important voices that are already critiquing the political, social and human rights related aspects of their use. Common to all of my proposed perspectives is that they relate to drones as embodied human extensions, a part of the human corpus.

The first perspective is meant to address the embodied, physical nature of drones by defining the Dronosphere, an ecology of technologies and behaviors, implicating everything from FPV (First Person View) hobbyist culture to military drone operators, from highway commuters to synchronized dancers. The idea behind this outlook is that while drones are evolving to fly, crawl, walk and even swim, partially or completely autonomously, humans are transforming to “meet them halfway”, taking more and more cues and handing more and more control to expert systems that literally choreograph their motions, their gaze, and even their thoughts, thus giving new meaning to the term “Drone operator”.

The second is meant to expound on the spiritual nature of drone technology. I will present a preliminary investigation into the less discussed, mythological and religious background for drones and their deeply symbolic nature, granting everyone from the president to a lowly hobbyist powers of remote seeing once believed to belong only to revered shamans. The only area in which this symbology is readily acknowledged is in the army parlance for many of the most commonly used battlefield drones and their support technologies, covering everything from Norse, to Greek, to Christian mythology. I examine the similarities between what drone technologies offer and what these ancient myths have for so long promised, and (hopefully) present some material from a documentary production in progress about a fervently christian remote control plane hobbyist who explicitly links his ability to see the world from above to the promise of salvation from his broken body.

The third perspective is that of my own creative work, being first and foremost an artist whose work is very much grounded in the creation of my own lo-fi interpretations of military industrial technologies of seeing and moving through spaces, and between bodies. I will describe such projects as “”I Wanna be Your Drone”” , in which I ride my bicycle through a city, producing a subjective, fragmented video-panorama in a manner similar to that of the Google Streetview Van, while being remotely directed by a crowd watching my video feed on the other side of the city, functioning as a “human GPS”. I will also describe the piece “”Cut Stories””, in which I choreograph a crowd of documentarists via commands reminiscent of a smartphone navigation app. Last but not least, I will share details of my current work in progress for an upcoming exhibition, involving Ophan, an installation in which a captured, struggling hexacopter is used to generate chant-like drone sounds in a gallery-come-religious sanctum.

Una Tanović (@unatanovic) The Posthuman Condition in New Media Art and Electronic Literature
The humanities have always been concerned with the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Today—with digital, cybernetic and biomedical technologies beginning to challenge the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the organic and the artificial, (wo)man and machine—this question has taken on new urgency. To address it in a meaningful way in the digital age, we must first reformulate it: “What does it mean to be posthuman?” As N. Katherine Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman (1999), “Increasingly the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here. Rather the question is what kind of posthumans we will be” (246). My paper explores new media art and electronic literature that seeks to answer Hayles’ question.

The central questions addressed in this paper are: What do new media representations of the posthuman reveal about the way we as human beings see ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What do they reveal about the way we see and treat the other? To what extent does the posthuman when envisioned as non-human open the door to inhumanity—to acts of cruelty, violence and a disregard for the pain of others? And how does envisioning the posthuman as an amplified human guard against this? Does the binary code of digital culture reinforce or challenge binaries?

The texts under consideration in this paper provide two competing visions of our posthuman condition—enacting the two kinds of posthumans we can be—as exemplified by two new media artworks: Third Hand by Stelarc and 3rdi by Wafaa Bilal. Although both artists employ technological prosthetics to create a cyberbody (thus agreeing on the physiological circumstances of the posthuman condition), they do so with different ends in mind (thus envisioning radically different psychological and sociological circumstances for the posthuman cyborg). Stelarc’s cyberbody allows him to transcend emotions and abandon human subjectivity (understood here as self-possession and self-mastery), becoming less human. For Bilal, technology amplifies the emotions and allows him to regain a lost subjectivity by countering the inhuman “transit and chaos” of war, becoming in the process more human. These two representations of the posthuman—enacted by Stelarc as transcending the human or becoming POSThuman, and by Bilal as amplifying the human or becoming postHUMAN—are repeated to varying degrees throughout the primary texts under consideration.

New media texts depicting the posthuman as a non-human entity, in the manner of Stelarc, can be read as a continuation of humanist discourse and its binaries. Conversely, texts that amplify the “humanness” of the posthuman, in the manner of Bilal, are posthumanist in their attempt to confuse the boundary between the human and the non-human, thus presenting an implicit critique of humanist discourse. In acknowledging the “human” as a construct, these works see posthumanism as an opportunity to construct it differently: “more justly, especially for those who, because of their gender, race, or other characteristics, have historically fallen outside the ruling paradigms of ‘the human’” (Wolfe “Posthumanities”).

Presider: Michael Connor (@michael_connor)

Hashmod: Annie Wang (@annieyilingwang)

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 Tales From the Script: Infrastructures and Design.

Each presentation in this panel considers very different case studies but all are deeply interested in the  standards, practices, and assumptions that undergird our augmented society. From Karen Levy’s study of “meth-proof” Sudafed to Angela VandenBroek research into a nation’s Twitter account, the panel demonstrates that our relationships to consumer goods and services are often based in assumptions and technical standards worthy of interrogation. The panel suggests several opportunities to intercede in hidden or ignored infrastructures, including R. Stuart Geiger’s call for “Successor Systems” in the tradition of Donna Haraway’s “Successor Science” and the infrastructure-based activism presented by Sebastian Benthall. Taken together, this panel presents an intriguing look into some of the more institutionalized uses of networked technology.

Karen Levy The Myth of the End User
Who is the “end user” of a technological system? Designers are encouraged to think in terms of the end user’s needs, habits, capabilities, and goals when making decisions about the features of a product or interface of a website; “user experience” (or UX) is a growing subfield of tech education and research, and “user-centered” has become a watchword of conscientious design.

In this talk, I argue that the end user doesn’t really exist, and that conceptualizing the end user as we typically do obscures the dynamics of power that inhere in technological artifacts. The term “user” conflates four independent facets of engagement between people and technologies – ownership of an artifact, control over that artifact, its operation, and the choice to engage – which frequently do not co-reside in the same person. Moreover, the term obscures the institutional landscapes in which so-called “users” find themselves, and how technologies may harmonize or conflict with these entanglements.

To illustrate, I offer a case study of Nexafed, a new over-the-counter pharmaceutical. Nexafed is a “meth-proof” formulation of pseudoephedrine (Sudafed): it has the same active ingredient but cannot be tampered with to produce methamphetamine, as Sudafed can. Thinking in typical “end user” terms, the market for Nexafed seems nonexistent: if the user intends to tamper with it, it’s useless; if the user just wants to relieve cold symptoms and has no intention of cooking meth, it’s not clear why she would be motivated to buy Nexafed instead of Sudafed. But when we consider the end user in broader terms – as a constellation of power relations and inequalities that includes children, pharmacies, pharmacists, regulators, police, and thieves – the market for Nexafed comes into focus, and new motivations (like social shame, parental mistrust, robbery, and gossip) become salient drivers of the market.

I use this case to argue for a broader conception of the “end user” in technology studies: one that recognizes that complex social and institutional relationships are mediated through technological systems and design choices, and that ownership, control, operation, and choice aren’t necessarily integrated.

Sebastian Benthall (@sbenthall) Designing Digital Publics for Participatory Parity
This paper outlines a theoretical perspective from which to orient infrastructure-based activism for social equality. Drawing on Fraser, empirical literature, and original on-line ethnographic work, I conceptualize the Web as a nexus of multiple publics, and note that they fall short of the public ideal due to a lack participatory parity. In particular, participation and influence in these publics is empirically ordered according to a “power law” distribution, a statistical distribution known for its extreme inequality. This concept of inequality on the Web is more immediate and measurable in social media than concepts that depend on demographic categories, it is less discussed in that context–perhaps because it directly challenges those who benefit most from participatory disparity.

This participatory disparity in on-line publics both reflects and reinforces social inequality (due to race, class, gender, etc.). It reflects inequalities of digital access because participation requires agency and resources. It reinforces that inequality because influence within the public is a form of power. It is also self-reinforcing through generic patterns of on-line social network formation like the preferential attachment of new members to “follow” already popular members. Counteracting those patterns is a means of combating social inequality more broadly.

In the interest of setting an agenda for equality-oriented praxis, I note that Web publics are especially subject to regulation by technology, a la Lessig. This regulation can and does in some cases bring on-line publics closer to the public ideal. An example is Twitter’s automated spam blocking, a mechanism that takes social input to exclude participants who are expected to be acting in bad faith. But social media also self-regulates according to the commercial interests of its hosts and against the public ideal. For example, Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, which controls the contents of its news feed, prioritizes familiar sources of content that drive identity-divulging “engagement.” This facilitates Facebook’s ability to target ads at the expense of the circulation of ideas that would make it an effective site of public contestation and deliberation. Understanding the practical reality of these technologies opens the theoretical imagination to alternative mechanisms to regulate on-line publics with participatory parity in mind.

As a positive example of a technology that enables participatory parity, I highlight as inspiration the NYU-ITP “The Listserve”, a mailing list that sends one daily email authored by one of its subscribers picked at random. I present @TheTweetserve, a Twitter bot that extends this principle to Twitter as a digital public. This bot acts mathematically to correct participatory disparity by undermining social patterns of preferential attachment. I conclude with a general call for critical and social theory to provide constructive principles from which to derive ethical infrastructure designs.

Angela VandenBroek (@akvbroek) Tweeting Sweden: Complicating Anthropology through the Analysis of the World’s Most Democratic Twitter Account
After completing my masters in anthropology, I spent six years working as a web developer, weaving together ethnographic methods and insights into the design and development of websites. In the Fall of 2013, I returned to my academic roots and began coursework for a PhD in anthropology to explore, in greater depth, the relationship between humans and the Internet. However, my experiences in the field have often grated against two common theoretical trends in the anthropological literature.

First, I have found the academe to be infatuated with the user and dismissive of the Internet’s designers, developers and creatives, except when those creators fit neatly into categories of traditional anthropological interest, such as the open source and free software movement (Kelty 2008, Coleman 2013, Karanovic 2008, 2012, 2010). By extracting the user bit of the digital and failing to contextualize user experience amid the greater web of connections in and among digital technology, digital anthropologists have failed to heed the important lesson put forth by Eric Wolf (1982) in Europe and the People Without History: “…the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality” (3).

Second, the concepts of online and offline have taken on a privileged position within digital anthropology. I have found through work with diverse users this distinction to be of little importance to most users and technology professionals and that the actual experience of Internet involves many states of being and experience that have little connection to the simplistic binary of online and offline. The entanglement of the online-offline concepts — including virtual-actual, online-onground (Cool 2012), and other similar reimaged and renamed online-offline distinctions — within anthropology seem rooted in three problematic areas in the development of digital anthropology: establishing academic validity (Miller and Horst 2012:18), making disciplinary or specialist boundaries (Boellstorff 2012:35, 45), and the establishment of methodological best practices (Boellstorff 2012:34, Cool 2012:24).

The Curators of Sweden project began in 2011 when two official governmental agencies, the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden, gave a Swedish citizen full and seemingly unfettered control of the official Twitter account of the Swedish government. Every week since then, a new Swedish citizen has been given access to write as @Sweden, to curate Swedishness for the Internet. Through the example of the Curators of Sweden project, I will explore the dangers of ignoring the relationship between designers, developers, and creatives and their users by exploring the subtle dialog between creators, participants, and users across platforms, media, personal communication, and documentation that has shaped the project and its users’ experiences. I will also problematicize the online and offline concepts as analytical tools by extending the analytic scope of this “online” project beyond its online-ness to more fruitful engagements with history, politics, business, and technology. I will contextualize the project into the history of Swedish Modernism and Swedish nation branding that shaped the creators’ choices in design, development, and platforms.

R. Stuart Geiger (@staeiou) Successor Systems: Enacting Ideological Critique Through the Development of Software
During the “science wars” of the early 90s, Haraway and Harding introduced the concept of a “successor science,” a call for new sciences that blend objectivity with situatedness. In “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway argued “Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything.” I extend the concept of a successor science to the realm of software, introducing the concept of “successor systems” – doing ideological critique by designing and deploying systems that build better accounts of the world. I discuss three activist projects, all based on enacting an ideological critique through a technological system, rather than pure discourse.

Hollaback, a system for reporting and representing street harassment, critiques social institutions through a new technologically-enabled mode of knowledge production. Street harassment is a longstanding and ubiquitous problem across the world, but dominant institutions (from the police to news media) generally encourage women to ignore harassment, rather than report it. Hollaback provides a safe space for victims of street harassment to assemble as a networked public and frame this issue in a way that is often marginalized by various social institutions. Hollaback is a critique of the widespread institutional ignorance of street harassment, providing an infrastructure for building ‘better’ accounts of the world: ones that make often-ignored experiences of street harassment visible at a variety of scales.

Turkopticon is a browser extension that modifies Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. AMT disproportionately benefits employers, who are able to know and rate individual workers in ways that workers are not able to know and rate their employers, leading to exploitation. As a successor system, Turkopticon critiques this assumption built into in AMT, using feedback from workers about employers to produce a new mode of knowledge production that is designed to protect Turk workers. The system is named for Bentham’s infamous panopticon prison, discussed by Foucault; Turkopticon seeks to reverse the direction of surveillance built into AMT by putting employers under a kind of collective ‘sousveillance’ — surveillance from below.

Snuggle is a tool supporting mentoring in Wikipedia, explicitly built to counter the often hostile reactions that veteran Wikipedians unleash on new contributors. Most of the highly-automated tools that have been developed to support Wikipedian editors situate their users as police who are on patrol for “vandalism.” Assisted by algorithms that rank by ‘suspiciousness,’ these editors see some of the worst content submitted to Wikipedia, then make fast-paced decisions about what is kept and removed. Snuggle was designed to reverse the assumptions built into this practice, situating Wikipedians as mentors and newcomers as potential collaborators to be supported. The tool lets Wikipedians holistically search for potentially desirable newcomers, affording activities of praise, constructive criticism, and directed intervention.

As both a systems designer and a web theorist, I have a personal interest in discussing these successor systems from both a theoretical and design-oriented perspective. I will conclude with overarching recommendations for both designers and theorists interested in successor systems.

Last week Brendan Eich, the newly appointed CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, had to step down amid backlash from his fellow board members, Silicon Valley elites, and the public at large for his $1,000 donation to supporters of California’s Prop 8 anti-marriage equality bill. In the grand scheme of things, a $1000 contribution from a guy that is I-invented-JavaScript-wealthy to a $38.7 million campaign, probably didn’t change much. But the headlines were never about Eich secretly bankrolling Prop 8; it’s been about what kind of person should be allowed to lead the best-known open-source organization that makes the third-most-installed browser on the planet.

There’s lots of people who say that even if you disagree with Eich, this shouldn’t be grounds for him to step down because his beliefs have no bearing on how you build a browser. I deeply disagree, and it isn’t a matter of ideological opposition, but of observable fact: technology always has a bit of its creator in it and technology is never politically neutral. Moreover, I don’t think, as many have claimed, that Eich’s departure was a failure of democracy. In fact I see it as a leading indicator for the free software community’s maturing legal and political knowledge.

Before I get into my main argument, let me give some background on the organizations at play here. It’s a little confusing given that most of the people and the work that goes into Mozilla and Firefox are not associated with the for-profit company that Eich left. What follows is a summary of the requisite Wikipedia searches held together by my own passing familiarity with Free Software history:

Mozilla has several formal entities: There’s the organization, the foundation, and the corporation. They have a sort of Russian nesting doll relationship in which the organization formed the foundation which most recently formed the corporation mostly out of regulatory necessity. The organization was formed as a Free Software lifeboat after Netscape was purchased by AOL in 1998. The organization was financially supported by AOL until 2003 when they decided to drastically reduce their commitments. The Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, was set up to raise money for the continued development of what became Firefox, Thunderbird, and various other end user products. Today the Mozilla Foundation gains most of its revenue from Google who pays them $300 million a year to keep Google as the default search engine. The corporation was most recently set up in 2005 as a taxable, for-profit fully-owned subsidiary that would reinvest all of its profits back into the foundation. The foundation holds all of the patents and trademarks but licenses them to the corporation for their sole use.

Brendan Eich has been intimately involved in every piece of the nesting doll. He invented Javascript which was first implemented in Netscape Communicator, helped build the Foundation when AOL stopped supporting the project, served on the Foundation’s board as Chief Technology Officer, and then finally moved to the corporation as its CEO for eleven days before resigning from Mozilla entirely. Given this background, it almost seems like the timing of the outrage is arbitrary. Why object to Eich taking this particular office? The corporation reports directly to the foundation’s board, so one could even argue that the CEO position is a step down in the hierarchy.

A partial explanation for the timing is that, up until now, here was no clear indication that Eich apparently held such bigoted beliefs. His support for Prop 8 only came out in 2012 (the donation was in 2008), but two years is still a long time to take the kind of decisive action that OKCupid took when they asked Firefox users to switch browsers in protest. I can only assume that the biggest reason for the recent action is because CEOs act as avatars for the companies they lead. Eich himself said just as much in an interview with CNet when he observed that a CEO is “the one person who exemplifies the company.” I think this is especially true in Silicon Valley where companies are expected to have origin stories (e.g. garages, dorm rooms), philosophies (e.g. Don’t be evil, lean in), and great leaders. A bigoted CEO makes for a bigoted company.

Its important to pay close attention to the way Eich talks about himself as a political actor. He desperately tries to silo his identity so that people may selectively ignore the less-popular parts.  Marriage equality is always framed as an outside issue coming into a distinctly different body politic. Here are a couple of examples with emphasis added:

“…without getting into my personal beliefs, which I separate from my Mozilla work — when people learned of the donation, they felt pain”

 

“I have people there [in Indonesia] on the other side of this particular issue. They don’t bring it into Mozilla when they work in the Mozilla community.”

 

“I still think it’s pretty important to judge people by how they treat others, in my case for over 16 years, and allow them to separate some of their deeply held beliefs which do not come into play in their role at an organization like Mozilla–even the CEO role.”

 

“One of the things about my principles of inclusiveness is not just that you leave it at the door, but that you don’t require others to put targets on themselves by labeling their beliefs, because that will present problems and will be seen as divisive.”

It seems pretty clear that not only is Eich trying to chop up his own political identity, but many others as well. His extended, yet vague references to Indonesian Mozilla developers who agree with him on marriage equality is the best evidence of this. Eich seems to think that one’s political beliefs about the open internet and the concomitant organizations that sustain it, can be totally separated from one’s opinions on state-recognized marriage. This separation is predicated on the idea that some political opinions (e.g., same sex marriage) are the subject of mainstream party politics, while others (e.g., open-source) are fought out in other realms and institutions.

One the better known defenders of Eich is Andrew Sullivan, a reporter with a lengthy and distinguished background in not only journalism but LGBT rights as well. Sullivan sees the backlash against Eich as just as hateful and unfair as those who might support Proposition 8 or a similar piece of legislation. He writes:

[Brendan Eich] did not understand that in order to be a CEO of a company, you have to renounce your heresy! There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell. No, he wasn’t a victim of government censorship or intimidation. He was a victim of the free market in which people can choose to express their opinions by boycotts, free speech and the like. He still has his full First Amendment rights. But what we’re talking about is the obvious and ugly intolerance of parts of the gay movement, who have reacted to years of being subjected to social obloquy by returning the favor.

Given that Sullivan is a regular reader of Cyborgology (he frequently quotes and links to us on The Dish) I should take his reaction as a personal failing both as a writer and an educator. I am perplexed that Sullivan could write that despite quoting something I wrote on the politics of communication technology last May. The passage reads in part: “Technologies live and act beyond their creators’ intentions and quite often produce unintended consequences … The Internet doesn’t unilaterally impose or determine certain political organizations, but it does assist and afford their continued existence.” In the same post I also wrote:

the politics of technology are difficult to see because technologies that “work” are very compatible with the dominant political order, or a community that is large enough to provide and sustain the practical necessities for its continued existence. Technologies’ perceived “neutrality” is the up shot of this compatibility.

This issue of technologies’ compatibility with hegemony is doubly important when we talk about free software communities. Sullivan would have us see Eich’s stepping down as undemocratic: the result of an unreasoning mob demanding the head of someone who espouses one of two equally legitimate viewpoints on a topic that has nothing to do with his role as CEO. But nothing could be further from the truth, because, in fact, the removal of people with unpopular opinions from positions of power is supposed to be the very essence of representative democracy. What is Free Software if not technology that is created through –as Mozilla’s own manifesto states– “Transparent community-based processes [that] promote participation, accountability and trust”? How could a community encourage participation or build accountability and trust if its figurehead doesn’t recognize them as legitimate or equal? Kicking out Eich is what democracy in the workplace looks like.

That being said, we should also be cognizant of the fact that Mozilla isn’t just a workplace. It is, at its broadest and biggest nesting doll, an organization comprised of people volunteering their time and effort for something they believe in. Gabriella Coleman, in her book Coding Freedom, observes that Debian software developers were reluctant “to signify free software beyond a narrow politics of software freedom.” Along with writing and manipulating software, many free software developers also find themselves in the position of interpreting the finer points of intellectual property law. More specifically, they are obligated by circumstances beyond the community’s control to suss out code’s relationship to both speech and intellectual property.

Fluency and interest in legal matters obviously differs from person to person, and I don’t want to flatten the identity of free software developers and assume that whatever Coleman observed in Debian developers is completely transportable to the Mozilla community. I think it is reasonable, however, to assume that anyone deeply involved in any free software community has a heightened awareness and sensitivity to matters related to free speech. I feel comfortable with this assertion given that Coleman describes the entirety of the free software arena as “the largest single association of amateur intellectual property and free speech legal scholars ever to have existed.” Free software developers have to constantly defend their work against a property regime that sees their work as patentable and therefore subject to control. It is understandable then, that someone deeply involved in free software would immediately cast the issue as a matter of free speech.

The problem with Eich is, at its core, a problem with liberal democracy itself. (And here I’m not talking about liberal as synonymous with the American Democratic Party, but liberal as in Lockean concepts of governance and individual liberty.) Free software folks are going to be very receptive to, if not strong advocates for, defending one’s right to say an unpopular thing precisely because they want to protect free speech at almost any cost. This is why both Sullivan and Eich trot out arguments that, in many other contexts, would be considered absurd. Namely, when the interviewer compares supporting Prop 8 to overt racism or sexism, Eich turns to what is “legally permissible.” He goes on to say, “Beliefs that are protected, that include political and religious speech, are generally not something that can be held against even a CEO.” This is a textbook construction of liberal democracy: even if I hold a great amount of power, and even if my views directly contribute to the pain and suffering of others, it is legal and therefore I am unimpeachable. We see the exact same conceptualization of freedom from an anonymous Debian developer quoted in Coleman’s book, talking about what it means to write free software:

…when I write free software, I renounce the ability to control the behavior of the recipient as a condition of their making copies or modifying the software. The most obvious renunciation is that I don’t get to demand money for copies. But I also don’t get to demand that the person not be a racist; I don’t get to demand that the person contribute to the Red Cross. … I renounce the little bit of control over the other person which copyright law gives me and in that way, I enhance their freedom. I enhance it to what it would be without copyright law.

Coleman points out that this sort of neutrality to content is a “central feature of how segments of liberalism function as a moral philosophy for it enshrines certain fundamental principles—notably tolerance and free speech—as residing outside the sphere of the proper domain of politics.” Coleman’s project isn’t to debunk or reveal the underlying paradoxes of liberalism at work in free software, but I’d like to conclude by way of pointing out some well-documented problems with liberalism’s conceptualizations of tolerance and free speech.

Wendy Brown, who Coleman cites as one of those that has done a thorough job of identifying liberalism’s underlying falsehoods, describes tolerance as something that orders both people and concepts. Tolerance, she writes in her book Regulating Aversion, marks “nonliberal societies and practices as candidates for an intolerable barbarism that is itself signaled by the putative intolerance ruling these societies.” From the perspective of liberal ideology, “intolerance” is defined as anything limiting free speech rather than as prejudicial opinions that inflict harm on certain groups or individuals. This is how someone can, with a straight face, call intolerance of intolerance a bigoted act.  We must be careful to not conflate liberal ideals of free speech and the enactment of democracy.  Democracy, both in the workplace and civil society at large, can and does operate outside of liberal ideals. Democracy in the Mozilla community can look and act differently than democracy in a republic. While Eich’s ouster may appear to have violated very basic liberal concepts of free speech, it was nevertheless, a fundamentally democratic response to a socially unacceptable position. We didn’t see a failure of governance in Mozilla, we saw its flourishing.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr

Last week, The Verge’s Adrianne Jeffries (@adrjeffries) asked a really provocative titular question: “If you back a Kickstarter Project that sells for $2 billion, do you deserve to get rich?” After interviewing venture capitalists and the like she concludes that the answer isn’t even “no” it’s “that’s ridiculous.” After speaking to Spark Capital’s Mo Koyfman Jeffries writes, “Oculus raised money on Kickstarter because it wanted to see if people wanted and would buy the product, and whether developers wanted it and would build games for it. The wildly successful campaign validated that premise, and made it much easier for Oculus to raise money from venture capitalists.”

Kickstarter’s biggest innovation is its ability to cut two time-consuming tasks –market research and startup funds– down to a 90 day fundraising window. Companies that choose to use Kickstarter usually aren’t ready to offer equity because that comes after the two steps that Kickstarter is so useful in accelerating. Or, perhaps more honestly, companies opt to use Kickstarter precisely because they want to avoid selling off shares of their company as much as possible. Jeffries gives us a good financial and legal (juridical, if we want to be Foucauldian about it) but that seems like a wholly unfulfilling argument for someone who spent $25 on an Oculus-branded t-shirt. Let’s forget for a moment about what’s legal and normal –those things are rarely moral or fair– and start to compare what happens on Kickstarter to similar (and much older) social arrangements. To start, let’s go way back to the early 1990s.

In episode 93 entitled “The Soup” Jerry Seinfeld finds himself unwittingly locked into a debt/credit arrangement.  A comedian even more annoying than himself  named Kenny Bania refuses to agree that a debt for an Armani suit is cleared. The releveant parts are in the YouTube video below but the gist is that Bania lures Jerry in by not asking for anything in exchange for the suit. Then, once Jerry is wearing the jacket, Bania strongly suggests Jerry could buy him dinner as payback. Once they’re at dinner, Bania declares that this will not complete the transaction because he’s just going to have soup. Bania can and does keep Jerry in his debt until Jerry gives the suit away.

It seems as though many backers feel as though they only got soup after giving away an Armani suit. The extended metaphor is apt here, because while the economic relations fostered by Kickstarter are an abnormality when compared to the rest of human history (more on that later), backers really are acting like Bania expecting something from Jerry: It is both naive and obnoxious to complain about fairness and inequality because instead of stock options you are in possession of a “worthless $300 obsolete VR headset” a.k.a. the most advanced consumer-grade virtual reality system to date.   The problem isn’t that Oculus was able to cash out for 145 times what they raised on Kickstarter, it’s that Kickstarter doesn’t care to foster extended relationships between backers and project makers in the first place. Kickstarter works on the capitalist model of debt that anthropologist David Graeber describes as “a promise corrupted by both math and violence.”

Kickstarter isn’t kickstarting businesses so much as it’s kickstarting relationships based on debt. When you buy your copies of W.A.N.T or Murmuration: A Festival of Drone Culture what you are really providing is an interest-free loan to be paid back in rewards. Backers aren’t just purchasing a future product, they’re establishing a network of (more or less) mutually-beneficial economic relationships with the project creator. When a couple hundred people dump a couple thousand dollars on one person they aren’t just consuming goods and services; they are also saying something about what sorts of relationships they want to foster and strengthen. This is especially obvious in Kickstarter’s FAQ where they answer “Where do backers come from?”

In most cases, the majority of funding initially comes from the fans and friends of each project. If they like it, they’ll spread the word to their friends, and so on. Press, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Kickstarter itself are also big sources of traffic and pledges. Altogether, millions of people visit Kickstarter every week.

To an anthropologist, this should sound awfully familiar. For the vast majority of human history, small, rural villages have been ordered and arranged through the giving of gifts to newlyweds and new parents. The gift giving is not primarily as a sign of affection, but as a means to begin a debt that binds the new family unit to the larger community. It makes sense then, that Kickstarter campaigns begin with friends and spread outward: unlike purchasing an already-existing good with cash, backing a Kickstarter project requires a good deal of trust at first. It’s only after your network demonstrates trust in you that strangers’ trust can be won as well.  It is for this reason that we shouldn’t over-determine the giving and taking that happens on Kickstarter (or anywhere else, really) and instead think more deeply about what sorts of organizational forms are produced through that giving and taking.

Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus strikes us as unfair to its backers –and it has to or Jeffries would have never written that article in the first place– because it goes against some of the most basic precepts of human civilization. It flies in the face of centuries’ worth of human experience in creating sustainable and egalitarian communities. Economic relationships are relationships of trust and do not end until debts are canceled out with sufficient payments. The problem with Oculus is that everything seemed as though it had canceled out. But when one party benefits enormously, the debt no longer seems paid because that value had to come from somewhere. It’s as if we ordered the swordfish but got the soup and our dining companion revealed that they just purchased the restaurant.  To illustrate this point further, I want to turn to a lengthy quote from David Graeber’s Debt. In the quote he summarizes the experiences of anthropologist Laura Bohannan with a community in rural Nigeria called the Tiv:

…neighbors immediately began arriving bearing little gifts: “two ears corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful peanuts.”27 Having no idea what was expected of her, she thanked them and wrote down in a notebook their names and what they had brought. Eventually, two women adopted her and explained that all such gifts did have to be returned. It would be entirely inappropriate to simply accept three eggs from a neighbor and never bring anything back. One did not have to bring back eggs, but one should bring some­ thing back of approximately the same value. One could even bring money-there was nothing inappropriate in that-provided one did so at a discreet interval, and above all, that one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned, might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change, “in an endless circle of gifts to which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received”-and in doing so, they were continually creating their society.

Kickstarter serves up corrupted promises by sticking too-exact prices on uncertain futures. If we want projects like Oculus to remain financially stable but also independent of larger companies like Facebook, then we need something dramatically different than Kickstarter. We need something that fosters the continual creation of a society outside of large corporations, which may include making sure no one in the society has the ability to become a large corporation without everyone benefiting according to a predetermined arrangement. The fulfillment of donations with rewards has to be the beginning, not the end, of a burgeoning company’s relationship to its future customers. Or, more broadly, we need platforms that host and advertise requests to form lasting and mutually beneficial economic arrangements. For that to happen though, I think we need a radically different and far less numerical approach to debts and credits. We should also seriously question the utility of categories like customer, proprietor, user, and host.

The idea that this platform –something as mundane as a web site– could herald an end to this brief historical abnormality called capitalism is just as naive as expecting dividends from Oculus/Facebook or a full meal from Jerry Seinfeld. But if such a platform were to come about, I think it would follow very naturally from what Nathan Jurgenson has previously called Silicon Valley’s anti-capitalist capitalism. It is “a type of capitalism that is predicated, knowingly or unknowingly, on the idea of anti-capitalism. It’s not a capitalist logic that can co-opt anti-capitalism, but capitalism where anti-capitalism is an inherent part of its logic.” It only seems like a matter of time before someone finds a way to generate revenue from playing host to the kind of mutual aid that has sustained humans for thousands of years.

David is on Twitter and Tumblr.