Below is a partial transcript of the introductory remarks I gave at the Technoscience as Activism Conference held in Troy, New York and hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from June 26-28, 2012. The conference was funded by the NSF’s GK-12 Fellowship Program. 

I almost never read my presentations but we’re short on time and there’s a lot of stuff that I want to share with you and I don’t want to miss anything. Publicly reading an apology for reading in public is an apt metaphor for what this conference is about, or more precisely what it is a response to. When I approached Dr. Ron Eglash about putting on this conference I told him I only wanted to do it if I could make the conference reflect the kind of politics espoused in the presentations. I don’t want to invite a bunch of brilliant people to Troy, who want to talk about democratizing science and technology, and keep them in a single room all day. Troy should benefit from some of your unique experiences, and the people of Troy have done some amazing things that I think the visitors will enjoy and appreciate.

Too often, I (and probably many of you) have engaged in what I like to call “tote bag praxis.” We acquiescence to the institutional norms that reproduce expensive conferences that all look and act the same, and –perhaps- even make us think about our work in predictable ways. We think about our work in terms of how we are going to share it, so it bares out that we must occasionally reflect on how we engage in that sharing.

The usual conference model works for most scientists, but for those of us that are concerned about democratizing science and technology we should be on the lookout for new approaches to the traditional model. This is not to say we should abandon the traditional conference model all-together. There must be times when colleagues come together and talk shop with each other. But, as privileged academics, maybe we should find ways to keep the door a little bit more open, and the room just a little bit more inviting. Everyone in this room is committed to open collaboration with communities, and I hope that these next three days will encourage you all to question how we can democratize the conference.

This conference is a sort of experiment. It is a modest contribution to the wide range of activities and events that make up citizen science and democratic technology. This conference not only welcomes non-career academics into the room, but also encourages academics to get out of the room, and into the streets. That is what Thursday afternoon is all about, but more on that later. If you’ve had the unique honor of hosting a conference, you know that universities and professional associations are complex beasts that rarely do as they’re told. You also know that each conference has its own unique sets of problems and each hosting institution has its own idiosyncrasies, such that even the most straight-forward conference is met with some kind of resistance by one thing or another. That being said, I think there are a few characteristics that many institutions have in common, that stand directly in the way of democratizing the conference.

For example, imagine if universities devoted as much resources to local economies as they do to global industry. Would if they stopped making no-bid, noncompete contracts with corporate food service providers, and nurtured a market for locally owned restaurateurs and grocers? Most of the food you will have this week was made possible only through deft political and bureaucratic maneuvering. The default at RPI, as it is at most universities, is expensive and corporate. The preferred vendors list is mostly big box stores and chain hotels meant to be paid through credit card transactions. Everything that you picked up at registration came from Office Max. Had we bought it anywhere else, reimbursement would have been much more difficult. These sorts of mundane roadblocks are not insignificant. They do the daily work of enforcing the aspects of academic capitalism that put economic pressures on individual academics, while filling the pockets of companies. The cost of conferences could be much lower and more manageable, if universities stopped thinking about them as money-making opportunities, and start thinking about them primarily as opportunities for development and increasing the prominence of their faculty and students.

While a lot is being said about the complex relationship of industry, government, and academia, and what it has done to the cost of education, I rarely see a thorough treatment of the informal costs of graduate education. Not just fees and tuition (which are steadily climbing) but also the unwritten expectations that if you want to truly stand out as a young scholar, you will have to pay for conference trips and supplies out of pocket with hopes of being reimbursed before your credit card bill comes in the mail. This conference has suffered directly from this sort of arrangement. We are missing talks from around the world, which could be here, if higher learning institutions prioritized face-to-face collaboration across borders. It was really striking to see almost everyone who registered for the conference say that they needed travel assistance and that their host institution was unlikely to help. Competition for young academics is rising, but I do not see many departments increasing travel budgets or even recognizing that slow reimbursement processes are enough to prevent young scholars from traveling and purchasing needed supplies. We are in danger of adding yet another barrier to poor and working class people entering higher education.

I offer all of this as a provocation and I hope that, over the next few days we can reflect on the conference itself as technoscience as activism.

If you watch the documentary “Urbanized” (now streaming on Netflix) you will eventually see an interview with the man pictured above. His name is Enrique Peñalosa and he is the former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia. During his tenure as mayor he instituted several major changes to the city’s physical and social character. His signature accomplishment was a major  bus rapid transit system that is widely regarded by urban planners as one of the most advanced in the world. (See video after the jump.) While the physical changes are no small feat, characterizing his work as simply in the domain of transit or even environmental conservation, would be missing the larger picture. Peñalosa sees urban planning, and specifically access to transportation, as a moral issue. Constitutional rights must extend beyond the juridical or the legalistic sense and into the very physical manifestations of governance. His vision can be summed up in a simple, bumpersticker-ready quote: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” In this brief essay I will apply this rationale to networked computing both in the American context and the developing world.

I like Peñalosa’s thinking because it totally inverts the development narrative. It treats the American way of life as just one possible development strategy, albiet an economically, environmentally, and socially unsustainable one. Peñalosa recognizes that trying to emulate the American way of life means charting a 300 year course of dirty industry and deplorable working conditions. A middle class based on individualistic consumerism and free market capitalism requires the exploitation of people and natural resources. Its about changing everyone’s idea of success so that it is more horizontal and attainable for more people.

In 1971, Murray Bookchin, wrote: “In almost every period since the Renaissance the development of revolutionary thought has been heavily influenced by a branch of science often in conjunction with a school of philosophy.” He goes on to define a theory of social ecology, in which he states that environmental degradation is based in social inequality. In other words, a just allocation of resources to all living humans is a prerequisite for anything that could be called “environmental sustainability.” You can reduce a factory’s carbon footprint with as many technological fixes as you can find, but so long as the capitalist logics of scarcity and rival consumption, natural resources will be extracted in ab unsustainable manner.

How can we use these ideas to think about computing platforms? Or, more precisely, access to devices that connect us to each other and data resources.  How do we finish the sentence: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have computers. It’s where the rich use X.” Immediately my mind jumps to cell phones. They are cheap, they can arguably do more than a desktop or laptop and are better adapted to the unreliable electrical grids in urban areas and the outdoor environments in rural areas. But they work best when everyone has their own phone. Smart phones are built to have a relationship with only one person. Obviously their sole purpose is to connect you to other people, but the prevailing design logic is one person, one phone. This might be the right direction, but it is not the solution.

We can challenge the very notion that getting everyone online is an admirable, justifiable, or productive goal. The UN might have declared Internet access a human right but such a declaration is more about censorship than increasing access. Most of the Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression” [PDF] is spent outlining and condemning censorship and active internet restriction by states. It also recognizes that expanding internet access is a priority and outlines UN-supported policies and programs that will expand internet access in “marginalized groups and developing States.” One such program is the One Laptop Per Child initiative:

Another initiative to spread the availability of ICTs in developing countries is the “One Laptop Per Child” project that has been supported by the United Nations Development Programme. This project distributes affordable laptops that are specifically customized for the learning environment of children. Since this project was mentioned in the previous mandate holder’s report in 2006, 2.4 million laptops have been distributed to children and teachers worldwide. In Uruguay, the project has reached 480,000 children, amounting to almost all children enrolled in primary school. States in Africa lag behind, but in Rwanda, over 56,000 laptops have been distributed, with plans for the figure to reach 100,000 by June 2011.

This program come from a place of good intentions, but to quote the cultural historian Rayvon Fouché: “These programs driven by the ‘if only they had…’ mantra, sadly, though not purposefully construct the receivers of these technological tools as empty vessels into which Western technological knowledge must be poured.” [Source] Fouché goes on to describe the OLPC as yet another product of the West’s “messianic vision” that savior technology can right past wrongs, ignoring Phillip Vannini’s observation that “technology itself is the product and outcome of social organization.” We cannot deliver laptops as if it were food relief- a temporary stopgap measure that will alleviate a problem characterized as a fundamental lack of a certain resource.

It seems as though nothing short of a second digital revolution is necessary in the Global South. Perhaps the answer lies in, as Ron Eglash suggests, constructing a “Two-Way Bridge” [Chronicle paywall] between the people that are commonly characterized as the “haves” and the “have nots.” Eglash writes: “Whether we are talking about technology, health, education, or jobs, we can create problems if we talk only about absence — that is, if we reduce one side to have-nots. At the same time, we must not ignore the social causes of such absence. Thinking in terms of two-way bridges allows us to combine social critique with an appreciation of cultural resources.”  The key lies in developing local capacities that are specially suited to the unique historical, economic, and sociotechnical realities of marginalized groups both in the United States and abroad. Such approaches are in their infancy (compared to massive UN-backed deficit-model interventions) but the possibilities seem exciting. It isn’t nearly as elegant as the original Peñalosa quote, but perhaps this is the only way to finish that sentence is with a utopian (and admittedly, somewhat naïve) conclusion: A developed country is not a place where the poor have computers. It’s where the rich stop trying to save the poor and start working with them to eliminate that disparity all-together.

“Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.”

“Power to the imagination.”

“I don’t like to write on walls.”

-Graffiti in May of 1968 Paris, France. 

I was gonna write something about how I appreciate Procatinator more than everyone else, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not today anyway. Remember when the United States had this popular uprising and everyone was talking about it and the political establishment was actually afraid of what it could accomplish?  When hundreds of thousands of Americans were exposed to political organizing and direct action for the first time? That started a year ago today, and while the summer did not see massive protests, the Fall promises a new start. A resurgence built upon… arbitrary calendar dates, I suppose. Truthfully, I see no reason why Zuccotti park should be re-occupied, nor should anyone feel the need to act out of a fear of “losing momentum.” Momentum is important for steering large ships, but direct action is all about swimming against the tide. Anarchist movements (and Occupy undeniably fits this category) are by their very definition: voluntary, small, functional, and temporary. We don’t need another occupation of Zuccotti Park. We need something new.

I pulled those four descriptors from Colin Ward’s article “Anarchism as a Theory of Organization” originally published in Anarchy No. 52 in 1966. He expounds on functional and temporary by saying,

They should be functional and temporary precisely because permanence is one of those factors which harden the arteries of an organization, giving it a vested interest in its own survival, in serving the intersets of office-holders rather than its function.

Anarchist organization is temporary at two scales. First, at the micro scale, the role of authority and subordination are quickly traded between individuals within groups. As Bakunin (quoted in Ward) once said, “Each directs and is directed in turn.” At a more macro level, tactics and federated allegiances may shift and change. Strands of the Situationist International, a small avante-garde artist and intellectual movement that ran through the 60s and 70s, can still be seen in the tactics of #OWS and other “anti-globalist” movements. As Cindy Milstein described them: “The Situationists advocated playful disruptions of the everyday, from media to cityscapes, in order to shatter the spectacle via imagination and replace drudgery with pleasure.” The Situationists never called themselves anarchists, but that has little bearing on the use of such tactics today. Anarchism has adopted many of the tactics and arguments of the New Left, minus the vanguardism. Uri Gordon: “…the roots of today’s anarchist networks can be found in the processes of intersection and fusion among radical social movements since the 1960s, whose paths had never been overtly anarchist. These include radical, direct-action end of ecological, anti-nuclear, and anti-war movements, and of movements for women’s black, indigenous, LGBT, and animal liberation.”

For anarchists, the city was always seen as the major site of radical change. Ebenezer Howard, Colin Ward, and Murray Bookchin had begun work on organizing cities well before Marxists had organized around Henri Lefebvre’s “Right to the City.” David Harvey’s most recent book does an excellent job of popularizing and updating Lefebvre’s work and making the case for class struggle in the streets instead of the factory. It has become abundantly clear that the “urban precariat” must be united and organized under and through a popular social movement. It might be called “occupy” but it cannot look like the occupy of 2011.

At the heart of any powerful (and successful) movement is a disruption followed immediately by a diversion. Sometimes it is violent and misguided, which often leads to backfire and a doubling down of the status quo. Violent acts on individuals, and massive property destruction– the kinds of things that get labeled as terrorism– does little more than reinforce right-wing ideologies and gives credence to authoritarian measures of surveillance and policing. Disruptions that not only halt “business as usual” but immediately divert energy and action into a new sociotechnical order have lasting implications. A movement can disrupt major arterial connections of capital for a day or two, but sustained action requires a ready alternative.

Prefigurative politics were one of many guiding principles of the occupy movement. Prefigurative politics require that you live your beliefs, thereby demonstrating the efficacy, practicality, and appeal of the world as you see it. Ghandi and Martin Luther King both organized massive actions that required temporary alternatives to the usual arrangement of goods and services. The Salt Marches, where thousands of Indians collected salt from the sea in defiance of the British salt taxes, brought massive attention to the cause for independence. During the Montgomery bus boycott, activists organized carpools and alternative transportation options for those participating in the boycott. Neither of these examples were meant to show that thousands of people collecting their own salt or driving their friends to work is better than the original arrangement. Rather, just like Zuccottii Park, these actions are a proof of concept; a demonstration that individuals can provide for one-another and that a new arrangement is possible.

Indeed a new arrangement of the sociotechnical order is more than possible. It is necessary. Occupy was able to demonstrate this for a (relatively) brief time in the Fall of 2011. The problem with reoccupying parks and squares is that states and their organizing ideology have inoculated themselves to the effects of occupation. In other words, cities criminalize camping, police barricade parks, and the media fine tunes their narrative of apolitical crusty punks and naive hippies loitering in a public park. The demonstration looses its spectacular qualities as soon as it becomes expected. If radicals want to revive the power and the energy of September 2011, we must devise new tactics. Tactics that correct for past mistakes in organization and bring new people into the fold. Zuccotti did wonderful things, and it was a beautiful place, but it can no longer exist because, by its very definition, was temporary and ephemeral. Occupy cannot be focused on its own survival, or it will surely perish. The key to a healthy movement is to let the tactics follow values. Creativity, spontaneity, and adaptation are the keenest tools of organized people who know that a vastly better world is possible. Nothing would be more tragic than to see spontaneity replaced by the hardened arteries of permanent, professional organization.

I want to spend a few hundred words today, considering the geographic dimensions of digitally augmented/mediated social action. I am not only talking about GPS-enabled smartphone apps (Foursquare, Geocaching, SeeClickFix, etc.) but also the sorts of practices and habits– the kind that most people barely notice– that make up one’s daily Internet usage. Just as there are different car cultures in different parts of the United States (and the rest of the world), are there different “Interent  Cultures” based on geographic region? Does where you connect, have any impact on how you connect? In some respects, yes– speed, availability, and stability of a connection matters; nations put up firewalls to prevent their citizens from accessing dangerous ideas; and you wouldn’t (or can’t) do the same things on your work computer that you could do on your home computer. All of this leads to a common provocation: can we utilize the properties of scale, place, and community to create radically new kinds of augmented realities.  Can communities utilize a shared Internet connection to deal with local issues? Can we deliberately work against the individualist ethic of the Internet to revitalize public life?William J. Mitchell, Professor of Architecture and Media Arts at MIT, opens his book, Me++, with a description of the large apparatus that allowed Marconi to send the first wireless telegraph message:

Here, Guglielmo Marconi built four 210-foot towers, spun a spiderweb of wires in the sky, cranked up a kerosene engine to drive a 20,000-volt power supply, and ran a spark-gap rotor that could be heard for miles.

He then compares this massive machine with the cell phone in his pocket:

A century later, global wireless systems brough me to the spot and kept me effortlessly in touch as I stood there. In my hand I held an inexpensive transmitter and receiver that was immeasurably more sophisticated than Marconi’s immense construction,… I pulled off the cover (no doubt voiding the warranty) to reveal a palm-sized, previously made architectural model; the powerhouse had shrunk to a matchbook-scaled battery, the transmission house now resided on a chip, and the antenna tower was just a couple of inches long.

When a technology makes the critical jump from architectural or furniture piece to handheld device (and there are lots of them- clock towers to watches; communal beer bowls to individual beer bottles; libraries to Web of Science accessed on an iPad) it has a lasting effect on the social relations of its users. It means shared resources become individual possessions or subscribed services, and activities that were once socially or communally experienced are now personal. It might also mean that public goods become private commodities. But before anyone decries the loss of community, consider the benefits of indoor plumbing (versus communal latrines or wells) or the non-competitive consumption of electronic articles (versus waiting for a book to be returned to the library). We may also consider revisiting the social construction of technology to help us understand why the Internet behaves like it does and why we decided to go small in the first place. In other words, we can retrace our steps and make new decisions about how we innovate and what sorts of values and politics we want our technology to embody.

The computer was not always meant to be personal. It was a mainframe, something that you bought time on and shared with lots of other people. It was more like a clock tower than a pocket watch. More like a town’s well than a kitchen faucet. The technological determinist would argue that as innovation shrinks the size of technology, the social relations change and adapt. The social constructivist recognized that, implicit in this argument, is the idea that technology is external to social relations: that the process of design, research, and innovation are free from the emotions, values, politics, and economics that govern the rest of human action. What really goes on, according to the social constructivist, is much more interesting and complicated. Certain values win out over others, powerful actors shape the technology to their liking, and markets shape the supply and demand of the technology and its constituent parts.

Jacques Ellul called the over-arching logic and method of technological innovation, technique. Technique pre-supposed the machine, although the machine was also its ultimate expression. Doug Hill, on this blog, has done an excellent job of identifying some of the most important parts of Ellul:

The belief that humans can no longer control the technologies they’ve unleashed – that technique has become autonomous – is also central to his thought. “Wherever a technical factor exists,” he said, “it results, almost inevitably, in mechanization: technique transforms everything it touches into a machine.”

Along the way technique’s drive toward completion does provide certain comforts, Ellul acknowledged, but overall its devastation of what really matters – the human spirit – is complete. “Technique demands for its development malleable human ensembles,” he said. “…The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created.”

I am not convinced, however, that technique has become wholly autonomous. Societies can awaken from what Langdon Winner called the technological somnambulism of the modern era. We can recognize the role of the machine in our everyday lives and, having developed that understanding, become reflexive in regards to our use of that technology. Communities can identify the values they share, (caring, reciprocity, fairness, independence) and look to the past to find configurations that foster those values. They can also speculate and test out brand new configurations, patterns, and assemblages that take advantage of new information and technological achievements. This can mean recognizing the social and environmental destruction perpetrated by electronics manufactures and resolving to hack, recycle, and appropriate instead of buying new. New products can be built for durability not planned obsolescence. The treadmill of capitalist production and consumption works against these efforts, but that does not make it a sisyphean task.

I am interested in using local networks to enhance the communitarian aspects of shared hardware and software. For example, would if one’s online experience was colored and mediated not by an individual’s device, but by the community within which they live? What would the network architecture look like? What would social networking look like? Would we begin to see local flavors of Internet culture? Would these local networks become the basis for community dispute resolution, or the sites of time-shifted farmers markets? Of course, all of these things can be done today, on our individualist, location-agnostic Internet, but a thoroughly communitarian Internet would make these sorts of applications obvious and primary. The best way to describe this is through a very simple example: Imagine being excited to see what the Internet looks and feels like in a new town.

I offer the communitarian web as a provocation. We typically consider the homogeneity of the Internet as one of its greatest features. No matter where  you connect, you are going to experience a similar Internet. Some sites change slightly when they notice you’re connecting from a different country, but the Internet is generally agnostic when it comes to place. The characteristics of homogeneity and agnosticism are deeply connected to the individuality embedded within the network. The atomic unit of the Internet is the single user, but there are benefits to shared experiences that we do not actively seek out or choose. Its the same reason why universities and towns might still opt for bell tower chimes even though everyone has access to individual time pieces. The community-centric network should sound inefficient or even ridiculous. It is meant to work against the all-encompassing logic of technique and bring to the fore, a new set of priorities.

The cognitive linguist George Lakoff wants liberals to stop thinking like enlightenment scholars and start thinking about appeals to the “cognitive unconscious.” He asks that progressives “embrace a deep rationality that can take account of, and advantage of, a mind that is largely unconscious, embodied, emotional, empathetic, metaphorical, and only partially universal. A New Enlightenment would not abandon reason, but rather understand that we are using real reason– embodied reason, reason shaped by our bodies and brains and interactions in the real world, reason incorporation emotion, structured by frames and metaphors anad images and symbols, with conscious though shaped by the vast and invisible realm of neural circuitry not accessible to the conscious.” That quote comes from his 2008 book The Political Mind and –regardless of your political affiliation– it is certainly worth a read. Others appeal to your “embodied reason” all the time and, when they do it right, their conclusions just feel right. This is how, according to Lakoff, Republicans are so good at getting Americans to vote against their interests. Appeal to one’s sense of self-preservation, individuality, and fear of change and you have a voter that is willing to cut their own Medicare funding. I generally agree with Lakoff’s conclusions, but I do not think Republicans are the masters of this art. Internet pirates, the likes of Kim Dotcom, Gottfrid “Anakata” Svartholm, and even Julian Assange, state their cases and appeal directly to our cognitive unconsciouses better than any neocon ever could.

Appeals to individuals’ basic concepts of right and wrong are all they have. First, they are not sympathetic characters and cannot trade on their own (to borrow a phrase from Bourdieu) social capital. Whether it is Assange’s alleged rape charges; Kim Dotcom’s “self-styled ‘Dr. Evil’ of file sharing” lifestyle; or Anakata’s drug abuse, pirates are rarely bastions of trust or reasoned argument. Thus, they have to rely on the moral and ethical reasoning of their actions. They may be flawed men, but their causes are just and righteous. Second, many of these icons must state their case from compounds and hideouts in New Zealand, Cambodia, and Ecuador.  It is difficult to base an argument in a single country’s laws or customs when you are constantly moving through various expat and asylum statuses; not just because you are calling into question the basic definitions upon which those laws are founded, but because you do not want to say anything that could come back to bite you if you get extradited. Third, what they did was probably illegal. Whether it is hosting pirated episodes of Breaking Bad, or releasing classified diplomatic cables, large powerful actors are going to get their pound of flesh unless the protective forces of the international spotlight keep you in the news and  out of a rendition camp. The best way to assure that you are bathed in the spotlight, is to keep a loyal following that evangelizes on your behalf. Finally, if you are not the star of the show, then you are (almost by definition) #anonymous. That means your disembodied words need to confront basic concepts of right and wrong. They shift entire frames of reference. Their words are the stuff of spectacle- jarring, alien, and (as always) driven by lulz.

Before I go any further I want to make clear that I am not equating DISNEY.MOVIES.COLLECTION.BOX.NR.2.T-ARTS.mkv with video evidence of the U.S Army shooting unarmed civilians in Iraq. (See video above.) Rather, I am demonstrating a relationship between the public opinion of a flawed individual (which I will refer to, from now on, as a “pirate”), his or her cause, and international data crimes. What they are stealing is inconsequential, to the extent it has any bearing on how the pirate justifies his or her actions to the general public and the media. The target is different, but the underlying anarchist principles are usually the same. Today’s UDID leak is an excellent example:

You are welcome to hack what the system wants you to hack. If not, you will be
punished.

Jeremy Hammond faces the rest of his productive life in prison for being an
ideological motivated political dissident. He was twice jailed for following
his own beliefs. He worked until the end to uncover corruption and the
connivance between the state and big corporations. He denounces the abuses and
bribes of the US prison system, and he’s again facing that abuse and torture at
the hands of authorities.

Last year, [sic] Bradley Manning was tortured after allegedly giving WikiLeaks
confidential data belonging to US govt… oh shit. The world shouldn’t know how
some soldiers enjoy killing people and even less when they kill journalists. Of
course, the common housewife doesn’t deserve to know the truth about the
hypocrisy in the international diplomacy or how world dictators spend money in
luxury whilst their own people starve. Yep, the truth belongs only to the
elite, and if you are not part of them (forget it, that won’t happen), fuck
yourself.

People are frustrated, they feel the system manipulating them more than ever.
Never underestimate the power of frustrated people.
For the last few years we have broke into systems belonging to Governments and
Big corporations just to find out they are spending millions of tax dollars to
spy on their citizens. They work to discredit dissenting voices. They pay their friends for overpriced and insecure networks and services.

[…]

You home, stuff, car and computer, you will pay for everything you have for all
of your life. All the time: a monthly fee, forever until you die. That’s the
future; nothing is really yours. LAAS – Life As A Service.
You will rent your life.

This is how they make their case to the public. Generally, the argument makes an appeal to the individuals’ sense of safety (usually from government violence), coupled to rights talk or some kind of universal (even divine or natural) entitlements. The topics are usually the same: Information about government surveillance, copyrighted material with unfair use laws, or (as seen in the quote above) the hypocrisy of government action against its people. The direct appeal to values –“world dictators spend money in luxury whilst their own people starve”– are important for the three reasons outlined above. The pirate does not argue against the trumped-up claims of lost revenue by Viacom (let the pundits and the EFF do that) or the finer details of extradition law and the facts of the case. Instead, they point to fascist or nationalist politics, unwarranted arrests and searches, or the assassination of fellow hackers. Anonymous is reminding you that their fight will soon be your fight, if governments and corporations get their way.

How is this any better than manipulating emotions? In The Political Mind Lakoff describes how President Bush was able to keep soldiers in Iraq despite the protestations of the Democrat-controlled congress. He uses this as an example of “framing” –introducing a topic with words and phrases that work against the opposition:

The United States is at war wirth an enemy threatening our national security. The president is the ‘unitary executive,’ the commander in chief in charge of all use of the military; we can’t have five hundred commanders. The Congress is merely a bursar of funds, trying to “micromanage the war,’ ‘tell the generals in the field what to do.’ Withdrawal would be ‘surrender,’ and timetables for withdrawal ‘told the enemy when we were surrendering.’ (P. 147 Viking Press)

W turned a deliberative body into nit-picking bean counters. It was a highly orchestrated media campaign and it worked flawlessly. It is difficult to argue for withdrawal when so many people are describing it as a surrender. We see a similar attempt at framing at the end of the above quote from Anonymous. Monthly services systems like Spotify, Netflix or Steam ask you to trade ownership for closely guarded access. You can have access to millions of songs legally, but if you stop paying $9.00 every month, it all goes away.  Anonymous, by highlighting the never-ending cost of your Life As a Service, reframes our augmented lives: streaming is not convenient it is a gilded cage.  Very few people will actually take the time to “find the candy” and actually sift through the million-and-one Apple UDIDs. But they might read the statement on pastebin or see it quoted in the media. No one wants to rent their life. The phrase gets at our concepts of self and individuality. Marketing speak about convenience falls flat against a backdrop of self control. Why subscribe to services if it means handing over ownership of my life to a company that does not care about me? Nothing is more frightening than finding out you have willfully handed over control of your life. It is the sort of realization that flares up every time you turn on your Playstation, fly an American flag or make a phone call. You think back to the moments at which you were most naive and what it will take to regain that lost semblance of control. For some, that might mean actively deselecting parts of their augmented life. For others, it means finding a new normal. Whatever that is.

After the final night of the convention, Robert Gehrke (@RobertGehrke) a reporter with the Salt Lake City Tribune, had a colleague take a picture of him pointing at a chair. He was mimicking Clint Eastwood’s now infamous prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention. The performance was (almost) undeniably awkward and strange. Rachel Maddow described Eastwood’s one-man improv skit as, “the weirdest thing I have ever seen at a political convention in my entire life.” Before the network morning shows could pass judgement, twitter users had developed an entire visual language that not only made fun of Eastwood, but the entire Republican party. The performative internet meme called “#eastwooding” had taken shape within hours of Gehrke’s tweet, offering thousands of people a simple framework for creating their own political satire.

INTERNET, you know what to do… RT @RobertGehrke: Look. It's @thomaswburr "Eastwooding" http://t.co/vkYcXzcY #utpol

— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) August 31, 2012

Let me back up for a second and allow Gehrke to describe the genesis of #eastwooding. He writes,

It struck me that he could stand next to the stool and recreate Clint Eastwood’s unforgettable convention speech that we saw just an hour earlier and I could toss a photo on Twitter of him “Eastwooding.”

[…]

Ana Marie Cox, formerly The Wonkette, snagged it and retweeted it to her 1.3 million followers with the message: “INTERNET You know what to do,” and the #Eastwooding meme had begun.

Tens of thousands of people picked up on it and it spread all over the Web.

I think it is important to note that not only does Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) have a large following, but that she gained much of her fame from the hilarious blog that she started (and has since left) called The Wonkette. The blog covers real political issues, but is written with lots of hyperbole, tongue-in-cheek metaphors, and blingee gifs.  It is safe to say that her following is probably young, enjoys political humor, and is internet-savvy. In other words, sending something to Ana Marie Cox’s followers is not the same as sending it to The McLaughlin Group’s followers:

Beyond the fact that The McLaughlin Group has far less followers, those followers are not going to “know what to do.” Cox’s followers, on the other hand, knew exactly what that picture meant and what was being asked of them:

#eastwooding with beer, which maybe is what happened in the original #eastwooding http://t.co/lTwYvXIM

— Elise Foley (@elisefoley) August 31, 2012

Corgi #eastwooding, for @anamariecox @BuzzFeedBen pic.twitter.com/mT7KfP4U

— delrayser (@delrayser) August 31, 2012

Man, Obama's even getting in on #eastwooding: http://t.co/L60YkDKB

— Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) August 31, 2012

These three examples depict the usual permutations of, what I have termed, performative internet memes. The permutations are the result of friendly competition among twitter users who want a brief shot at fame. In order to stand out, a user has to play off the basic structure of the meme. It is easy to take a picture of yourself pointing at an empty chair, therefore, in order to stand out, one must add new material or place the chair in an odd or surprising situation. The first adds an additional prop to imply that Eastwood was intoxicated or came up with the idea while intoxicated. The second tweet relies on an absurd premise- a dog deriding the President of the United States. The third is an appropriation of an existing photo of the President, reinterpreted as #eastwooding. (This does not include all of the non-performative instantiations of #eastwooding, wherein photoshop is used to place things in and around the original empty chair). The speech act (tweet act?) of associating the photo with the meme is enough to give the image an entirely new meaning. One need not take a photo at all to participate in the political humor. As Jenny Davis has pointed out in the past, a meme acts as a both sign and the signifier. A corgi staring at a stool and the POTUS sitting next to an empty chair did not have a semiotic relationship until Gehrke and Cox invited the Internet to go #eastwooding. Now these pictures appear to (and, in fact, do) share a similar grammar and tell the same myth. You do not need to know the genesis of the meme in order to understand it, or even contribute your own, which is exactly why it is an effective and popular method of talking about the event. #eastwooding provides a forum for lampooning the GOP, while also acknowledging the shared experience of watching a movie star waste valuable prime time minutes by talking to a piece of furniture.

It would be fair if, at this point, you are still asking how this qualifies as political satire. How is this anything more than making fun of an elderly man’s poorly executed joke? The answer comes in two parts. First, the satire is not the individual posts, but the existence (and thus performance) of the meme itself. Jon Stewart could interview an empty chair on The Daily Show, and we would immediately recognize it as satire. For participatory comedy however, the hilarity does not come from a single performance, but from the innovation that happens in between and across individual performances. Eastwood’s performance was supposed to be a source of cultural capital, but instead became the butt of a thousand jokes. #eastwooding was one of the major stories to come out of the convention, (see here, here, here ,here, and here for a representative sample of a very large population) and even garnered the attention of the Obama campaign:

This seat's taken. http://t.co/tvHZDcfw, pic.twitter.com/jgGZTb02

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 31, 2012

Second, #eastwooding is satire because it tells the opposite story that Eastwood and the GOP wanted to tell. Like any good political satire, it inverts the meaning of the original statement: Eastwood is not a source of brooding masculinity, but of impotent rambling and confusion. It speaks to the existing criticism that the Republicans (and especially Mitt Romney) are out-of-touch. When they speak, no one is listening. Political cartoonist Joe Heller sums this up with his own empty chair:

The #eastwooding meme will probably die off by next week. Invisible Barack Obama does not have the same staying power as the invisible sandwich. But by Monday #eastwooding will have served its purpose. It helped thousands of people poke fun at what was supposed to be a serious event. It created a grammar of empty chairs, pointing, and Barack Obama that made it easy to lampoon a presidential candidate when he needed positive press the most. It fed a narrative emphasizing the out-of-touch nature of the Republican party. #eastwooding creating a favorable environment for the creation of similar memes like @invisibleobama: a parody twitter account that gathered more followers than Romney and Ryan added to their accounts, combined. #eastwooding is funny because it exemplifies all of the problems of the modern GOP in a simple, easy-to-enact gesture. It is appropriate then, that a party that is made up of old white men would be so perfectly critiqued by a technology (and mythology!) that runs on popular participation.

Follow David on Twitter: @da_banks

This post combines part 1 and part 2 of “Technocultures”. These posts are observations made during recent field work in the Ashanti region of Ghana, mostly in the city of Kumasi.

Part 1: Technology as Achievement and Corruption

The “digital divide” is a surprisingly durable concept. It has evolved through the years to describe a myriad of economic, social, and technical disparities at various scales across different socioeconomic demographics. Originally it described how people of lower socioeconomic status were unable to access digital networks as readily or easily as more privileged groups. This may have been true a decade ago, but that gap has gotten much smaller. Now authors are cooking up a “new digital divide” based on usage patterns. Forming and maintaining social networks and informal ties, an essential practices for those of limited means, is described as nothing more than shallow entertainment and a waste of time. The third kind of digital divide operates at a global scale; industrialized or “developed” nations have all the cool gadgets and the global south is devoid of all digital infrastructures (both social and technological). The artifacts of digital technology are not only absent, (so the myth goes) but the expertise necessary for fully utilizing these technologies is also nonexistent. Attempts at solving all three kinds of digital divides (especially the third one) usually take a deficit model approach.The deficit model assumes that there are “haves” and “have nots” of technology and expertise. The solution lies in directing more resources to the have nots, thereby remediating the digital disparity. While this is partially grounded in fact, and most attempts are very well-intended, the deficit model is largely wrong. Mobile phones (which are becoming more and more like mobile computers) have put the internet in the hands of millions of people who do not have access to a “full sized” computer. More importantly, computer science, new media literacy, and even the new aesthetic can be found throughout the world in contexts and arrangements that transcend or predate their western counterparts. Ghana is an excellent case study for challenging the common assumptions of technology’s relationship to culture (part 1) and problematizing the historical origins of computer science and the digital aesthetic (part 2).

Last Wednesday, our team attended the “enstoolment” (a ceremony similar to a coronation) of a local chief in the Ashanti region. Tons of people from all around dressed in their finest clothes and converged on the palace grounds to share in the festivities. Some wore traditional toga-like robes, while others dressed in polo shirts and slacks. The court sat on traditional stools, while most of the audience sat on plastic lawn chairs adorned with various Adinkra symbols. Black is the traditional color of formal events, which meant that when audience members took out their smartphones and tablets their lit screens shone like stars. Every few minutes, a new device emerged from underneath handwoven pieces of black cloth. The whole event challenges popular ideas about humans’ relationship to technology and what it does to our existing social habits. Just because there are cameras and internet connections does not mean people are disinclined to show up in person. An enstoolment is meant to happen in a particular place, with a bodily co-present audience. People still find the embodied ceremony meaningful, so they continue to show up and enjoy the ceremony. It is the same reason we still go to concerts even though we have plenty of recorded music- people like being around other people.

I am not trying to idealize or simplify the Ashanti culture, or the role of technology in our lives. Of course everyone doesn’t have a cell phone or an iPad. There are economic disparities in Ghana just like everywhere else in the world, and many people cannot afford a device that records video and puts it on the internet. Similarly, not every person at the enstooling ceremony was enraptured in the ecstatic wonder of ceremony. People made time for the enstoolment like you make time for a wedding or a city council meeting. Some people are more into it than others, some are tired, some were dragged there by a friend who is really into it, and a few felt obliged because their relative was a part of the ceremony. When we start thinking of “culture” as a distinct object, we begin to essentialize it: we turn it into a caricature of itself. An Ashanti businessman filming a royal ceremony with an iPad while dressed in traditional cloth might seem strange, novel, or even contradictory but such reactions are based in a reductionist logic. Culture is much more resilient and dynamic than something that can be dismantled by the very existence of an smartphone. As Clifford Geertz once wrote, “Culture is simply the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” Those stories can be told in person, and they can be told via text message. The stories will change, and the culture will evolve, but it is up to those that self-identify as Ashanti (or whatever the culture may be) to decide what inventions are compatible with their culture. We heard that modernizing the facilities with indoor plumbing and asphalt roads was a major debate. I think it is safe to assume that there are strong opinions about smartphones as well. We might be tempted to assume that the royalty are the luddites, the keepers of the Old Ways, but one cannot ignore the modern sound system and surveillance cameras that were also installed and utilized.

Even if the have an introductory knowledge of anthropology, most people think of culture as a static object. There are common references in the media to national culture, sports culture, geek culture, online culture, pop culture, and urban culture. Main stream media outlets and popular nonfiction authors play fast and loose with the term, using it as a shorthand for any kind of shared practice, while also confining it to some kind of exorcized other. Culture is something you outgrow (youth culture) or something you visit (Their customs are so unique!) As my previous Geertz quote shows, anthropologists like to point out that our actions are always embedded in culture. From your birthday to how often you do your laundry, culture (perhaps more accurately: cultures) informs what you say and do. Raymond Williams, describes culture as simultaneously significant and mundane:

“We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life–the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning–the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.”

Somehow, open definitions like Williams’ and Geertz’s have led many authors (claiming authority on the subject) to consider information technology as somehow apart from or even against culture. Culture, as the myth goes, is something established in the past and pushes against a constant barrage of modernizing and secularizing forces. We often think of culture as a paradox: on the one hand it is timeless, transcendent, and forms the bedrock of society. On the other it is fragile, easily sullied, and embattled. The former is utilized as a source of national pride, whereas the latter is often used to marginalize others. Technology is seen as the achievement of the strong culture (Technology as Achievement) and the corrupting influence of the weak (Technology as Corruption). Fascistic movements always appeal to the superiority of the national culture. It lasts because it is strong, and it is strong precisely because it can achieve great feats of technoscience. It trains athletes, fosters scientific pursuits, and wins great military victories. Eugenics campaigns were buoyed by the logic of Technology as Achievement. The movie “The Gods Must be Crazy” is an excellent example of Technology as Corruption. Produced and funded by South African apartheid supporters, the “Gods Must be Crazy” movies were made to convince audiences that racial segregation was meant to protect native populations from the corrupting influence of the modern nation state. South African tribes were depicted as child-like imps that lived in a world of natural mysticism. The most minor of intrusions -the existence of a coke bottle- would be enough to destroy their entire culture. Technology As Achievement and Technology as Corruption do not necessarily lead to fascism and apartheid but, taken to their logical extremes and popularly upheld, can justify the worst of atrocities.

Part 2: The Digital Boarderlands

In part 1 I opened with a run down of the different kinds of “digital divides” that dominate the public debate about low income access to technology. Digital divide rhetoric relies on a deficit model of connectivity. Everyone is compared against the richest of the rich western norm, and anything else is a hinderance. If you access Twitter via text message or rely on an internet cafe for regular internet access, your access is not considered different, unique, or efficient. Instead, these connections are marked as deficient and wanting. The influence of capitalist consumption might drive individuals to want nicer devices and faster connections, but who is to say faster, always on connections are the best connections? We should be looking for the benefits of accessing the net in public, or celebrating the creativity necessitated by brevity. In short, what kinds of digital connectivity are western writers totally blind to seeing? The digital divide has more to do with our definitions of the digital, than actual divides in access. What we recognize as digital informs our critiques of technology and extends beyond access concerns and into the realms of aesthetics, literature and society. I think it is safe to say that most readers of this blog think they know better: Fetishizing the real is for suckers. The New Aesthetic, a nascent artistic network, is all about crossing the boarder between the offline and the online. Pixelated paint jobs confuse computer scanners and malfunctioning label makers print code on Levis. The future isn’t rocket-powered, its pixelated. Just as the rocket-fueled future of the 50s was painstakingly crafted by cold warriors, the New Aesthetic of today is the product of a very particular worldview. The New Aesthetic needs to be situated within its global context and reconsidered as the product of just one kind of future.

I should start by saying that Bridle thinks “The New Aesthetic” is “a rubbish name.” Regardless of whether or not its a satisfying term, he must have originally chose it for a reason, and its probably the same reason that everyone else has embraced it as the moniker for all things de-resed, pixelated, and time-shifted. Its a straight-forward term that lets the reader know that it is not a movement, a school of thought, or an -ism. There’s no gate keeper that says what is or is not the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic is a consequence of a digitally augmented environment.   You know the New Aesthetic when you see it. As Bruce Sterling says,

[T]he New Aesthetic is culturally agnostic. Most anybody with a net connection ought to be able to see the New Aesthetic transpiring in real time. It is British in origin (more specifically, it’s part and parcel of a region of London seething with creative atelier “tech houses”). However, it exists wherever there is satellite surveillance, locative mapping, smartphone photos, wifi coverage and Photoshop.

The New Aesthetic is comprehensible. It’s easier to perceive than, for instance, the “surrealism” of a fur-covered teacup. Your Mom could get it. It’s funny. It’s pop. It’s transgressive and punk. Parts of it are cute.

Perceiving an object as “The New Aesthetic” and making a piece of art in the style of The New Aesthetic are two totally separate things, but the differences are usually inconsequential. For example, I might look at a mannequin and see abstract cubes, not pixels:

Now, look at the weaving pattern of this traditional woven cloth, stamped with traditional symbols from the Ashanti region of Ghana:

Without getting too far into artist’s intent (and for my purposes, I don’t think I need to) let us consider the ambiguity of perception and intention. More specifically, why are we ready to see the pixels in the mannequin’s head, but not the cloth? The answer lies in something similar to a digital divide. Not an actual deficit of access, but a deficit in western perceptions of access.

The way we get online matters. It determines what “The Internet” means and what it looks like. At this year’s Theorizing the Web conference, I was on a panel with Dr. Katy Pearce who made a very convincing case for the “device divide.” (Slide show here.) Her work in Armenia showed that even when you control for age, socioeconomic status, and geography the device you use to connect to the internet has a powerful effect on what you do on the internet. The mobile internet may let you go on dating web sites and play games, but its much more difficult to work or create content through a mobile device. Ghanaians rely heavily on their mobile devices to get online, but they also rely on Internet Cafès. Ghanaians have internet access, but it doesn’t look like American internet access. Jenna Burrell describes Ghanian internet cafe use as,

…something akin to an arcade where they could chat with girls online (or offline) or watch American hip-hop and rap music videos. Most Internet users were using chat clients, especially Yahoo chat, or they were reading and writing e-mail in web-based applications like Hotmail. In interviews with users recruited from these Internet cafés, I was frequently told that they used the Internet to find foreign pen pals. The use of search engines and general web surfing activities were extremely uncom- mon. These online pursuits were often much more than a pleasant diversion and centered on improving their life circumstances by gaining powerful allies in foreign lands. (Burrell, 2010)

This sounds a lot like Pearce’s conclusions, although Armenians seem less interested in foreign pen pals. It is important to know what The Internet looks like to different people in different parts of the world, because an American or British New Aesthetic is going to look different than a Ghanian or an Armenian one. This information is necessary, but not always sufficient, which is why a global artistic network must include as many people, from as many cultures, as possible. Back in May, I (ironically) offered a few critical questions about the New Aesthetic (now numbered for ease of reference):

1. What parts/aspects/facets of the digital are offered up as an ironic twist on out-moded technologies? In other words: Low res to whom?
2. Where do we find the New Aesthetic? Where is the New Aesthetic conspicuously absent?
3. What is its perspective? I see a lot of top-down.
4. What technologies bring the New Aesthetic into existence? I see lots of military technology, big science, corporate logos, and agribusiness. What happens when we appropriate these artifacts and perspectives? What happens when we consume them? What happens when we prosume them?
5. What parts of the digitally augmented world are left out, over-simplified, or left unquestioned? I see very little code.
6. Is the pixel the sine qua non of the computer screen or does something else pre-date it?
7. What is involved in the process of making things that embody the New Aesthetic?
8. What is not the New Aesthetic?

Contemporary anthropology and allied fields of study have spent the past thirty years challenging the technology/culture dichotomy, replacing it with a more fluid, dynamic, and adaptive depiction of both. From Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto to Jenna Burrell’s work on Ghanian internet cafès, anthropologists are bridging the rift between the cultural and the technological. Our work in Ghana, under the direction of Dr. Ron Eglash (a student of Haraway, and -for full disclosure- my academic advisor) sits firmly in this tradition. Our research group works on many different things throughout the month and, for the purposes of this essay, I will ignore my own work and make some brief comments on another group’s research on Adinkra stamping and Kente cloth weaving. They are developing browser-based math and computer science teaching tools based on weaving and stamping techniques. You can try the kente computing and adinkra grapher (and the rest of our culturally situated design tools) at csdt.rpi.edu.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is usually taught ahistorically and outside of anything typically identified as “culture”.  Two plus two equals four no matter where you were born, what god you believe in, or what kind of food you eat. The CSDTs are meant to introduce middle-school age students to math and science using real-world examples from various indigenous cultures. This goes beyond changing names in word problems (e.g. Jose and Maria trade apples, instead of Bob and Mary.) by actually demonstrating the implicit math and science that goes into these practices. For example, the trapezoidal Kente pattern below follows a very particular algorithm that produces predictable results:

With each new line the weaver must move a fixed number of strands towards the center. The vertical lines also follow a very specific pattern and width ratio. All of these patterns can be reproduced and expressed as functions. Our teaching tools allow students to program traditional and original Kente weaving patterns using a drag and drop user interface.

Certain Adinkra stamps follow very particular geometric curves. For example, the Gye-Nyame (meant to represent the supremacy of god and depicts a fist hold knives) has logarithmic spirals coming off the center “fist.” Adinkra symbols also rely heavily on the principles of transformational geometry: reflection, dilation, rotation, and translation.

The underlying math in these designs is important for the New Aesthetic because it forces us to reconsider our definitions of the digital. The Kente cloth is made line by line, just as your graphics card draws images on the monitor or your printer puts images to paper: line by line, dictated by a set algorithm. If/then statements, RGB values, and algorithmic patterns are all there, set in cloth by analog computers called looms. If this is not the New Aesthetic, images made tangible from the  binary world, then we need a more precise definition of the New Aesthetic. Consider each cloth and pattern akin to the computer punch cards of the last century. These outputs produce an image that also tell a story. Its practically hypertext. One image calls up an entire proverb and an entire cloth can tell a story. Does it have to come from networked computers? Does it have to mimic or resemble something a 1990s computer-user from America would recognize? Do we have to assume that the artist has regular access to our kind of online experience? Let us explore one final example.

Back in 2007, Eglash gave a TED talk about African fractals. My favorite part (and the topic I will be discussing presently) starts at 10:50:

As Eglash describes in the video, Bamana sand divination relies on a sudo random number generator to produce a narrative about the future. This divination system was picked up by European alchemists and caught the interest of the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz used the base 2 counting sequence to develop what we now call binary code. Every computer on earth is, in essence, a collection of mystics divining the future in the sand. It is precisely this historical lineage, that makes the “New Aesthetic” a very old concept indeed. As we draw our own lines in the sand, defining what is and is not the New Aesthetic we should consider our source material as the products of only one particular TechnoCulture. One that is pretty late to the game, if you are willing to count these 11th century geomancers as early forefathers of the computing age. If the New Aesthetic is truly about the intersectionality of the online and the offline, the digital made analog and back again, then we must decide what makes pixelated camouflage the New Aesthetic and not Kente weaving, Adkinkra stamping, or Bamana sand divination. If, while studying these boarderlands, we find that there is no discernable moment where the virtual was not substantiated in the sand, on cloth, or on display in a SoHo art gallery what becomes of the “New” of the New Aesthetic? If one concludes that these indigenous patterns are mathematical, even programable, but not the New Aesthetic, then we need a new definition that makes a more explicit case.

The pixelated future is being sold to us by Google and Facebook just like the rocket age was sold to the American public by a nation run by cold warriors. In its current form The New Aesthetic is anything but “culturally agnostic.” The future might go in the direction American entrepreneurs want it to, but let us make sure everyone can participate on their own terms. Let us make sure that everyone is included and given their due. If the future’s aesthetic is purely a product of the London art scene and Silicon Valley, I see little hope for the various progressive, metropolitan projects of the left. Instead, I see another imposed vision dictated by a select, elite few. The New Aesthetic has its roots in a global, multicultural effort that stretches from the sand of Egypt to the lofts of Austin, Texas. Without acknowledging either the privilege of the future’s aesthetic, or including the African and Middle Eastern roots (source code?) of our augmented world, we are blindly following another pied piper of mythical progress. The New Aesthetic is crowd-sourced and accessible to anyone, but lets situate our Western New Aesthetic within its global context. What kinds of New Aesthetic are we blind to, or do not recognize as such? Let us make sure that the aesthetic of the future includes everyone.

The research for this essay was supported by and was originally posted in RPI’s 3Helix Program funded by the National Science Foundation.

I am really pleased to see academics tackling the problems of ineffective activism and capitalist oppression. Overcoming such large and complicated problems means trying out every tool in the tool shed. That is why Levi R. Bryant’s “McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction?” is so important. It is one of many efforts by academics to apply their reasoning to an active social movement. His recommendations are quite brazen. Bryant writes: “You want to topple the 1% and get their attention?  Don’t stand in front of Wall Street and bitch at bankers and brokers, occupy a highway.  Hack a satellite and shut down communications.  Block a port.  Erase data banks, etc.  Block the arteries; block the paths that this hyperobject requires to sustain itself.” The ends that Bryant suggests are intriguing. They certainly demand bigger and better things from the Occupy movement, but the means by which he reaches these conclusions are severely problematic. I think they neglect to consider the full effects of such actions and I attribute this oversight to his choice of analytic tools: object-oriented ontologies, new materialism, and actor network theory.

At first, I was tempted to simply say, “Your Politics are Boring as Fuck” and leave it at that. A discussion of the “intra-systemic dimensions” of an “autopoietic system” sounds interesting to me but those words are not going to help build a movement, nor will they enable a single mother to feed her children. I am however, concerned about the tendency towards anti-intellectualism on the left (as well as the right), which is why these topics are worth discussing. Not because they bring about change in and of themselves, but because activists must value such debates as a breeding ground for much more pragmatic steps toward collective action. That being said, I think we as academics have a duty to make sure our debates will open space for the marginalized to be heard and seen, and our ideas are readily accessible to anyone that wants them. So when I read, “In the age of hyperobjects, we come to dwell in a world where there is no clear site of political antagonism and therefore no real sense of how and where to engage.” I facepalmed. Hard.

Last week I read this in my local newspaper:

A Troy couple charged in baby formula thefts were taken to jail and their 4-month-old baby was placed in protective care, East Greenbush police said.

The couple allegedly stole dozens of cans of infant formula on five separate occasions from the Target store on Route 4 by pushing their baby in a stroller through the store and hiding cans of formula beneath the infant in the stroller’s cargo space, police said.

There. Capitalism. I found it.

A couple stole $200 worth of baby formula and are being held on $2,500 bail. This is the site of capitalism. This is the coordinate of contemporary capitalism’s vector. It always points down to the poor and the working class. These are clear and present indicators of manipulation and greed by wealthy capitalists. Bryant’s focus on infrastructure (arteries) is partially based on Shannon Mattern’s work [Bryant’s link]. I would, however, also consider the work of Susan Leigh Star who notes that infrastructure is not just relational, it is also ecological. It is inseparable from the larger environment and means different things to different people. It should not be studied in a vacuum or out of context.

The highways that carry this formula to the Target stores; the ports that receive formula tainted with poison; and the satellites that connect activists in a global effort to bring about a better world that necessitates all of these technical systems are all part of a seamless web [dumb paywall] of technology and social relations. The arteries of infrastructure that bind the nodes of the web are certainly more complex, more abundant, and perhaps even more tightly woven than they have ever been. They are also, however, less material than ever before, and have become the lifelines of the working class like never before.

Marx warned that capitalist industry made “material relations between persons and social relations between things.” The stuff that we make is not predicated on a social relationship (I need a shirt. Will you make it for me and I’ll owe you one?) but rather, my labour is part and parcel of material objects and those social relations are bought and sold through objects. We don’t have to set up social relationships that fulfill our needs, we just go out and buy what we need after someone has built it for an unknown customer. We can see similar socio-economic relationships throughout history, even before industrialization. Graeber recounts the popular act of invading a neighboring city and issuing currency after destroying the accounting books. The invader seizing the means of production (the mines, usually) but also knows that they must destroy the existing social relations. So he burns the books, thereby destroying the written record of who owes what to whom. All of a sudden, people rely on freely exchangeable currency  (which is also the only way to pay your new taxes) in order to meet their daily needs. It was also a good way of keeping a mobile army well-stocked. Don’t carry around a bunch of provisions, just carry around enough firepower that you can convince anyone to trade your gold for their stuff.

Today, we are all a conquered people. We are not self-sustaining, and due in no small part to our obsession with self-sustaining activities, we barely even know how to sustain daily life at a community-wide level. Anyone who wants to “live off the grid” is looking to develop a homestead, not a local economy. Mutual aid is not even on their radar. We no longer rely on each other, we rely on large systems like highways, Walmart, and the Internet to get what we need. These large systems are, rightfully at the heart of our national politics right now. Of course the conversation is dumb as hell: they are reduced to the soundbite “you didn’t build that” and it just goes down hill from there. We need to consider working in different scales, at different registers. When we imagine these things going away, we immediately think to sustain ourselves, not each other. If you block a highway, be prepared to offer (at least) a temporary alternative.

We must recognize that while post-industrial capitalism is full of these huge systems, they are constantly being reconstituted and enacted every day. Our economy would cease to function if everyone stopped doing their very real, very tangible, jobs. The real and present dangers of starvation, thirst, exposure and disease are always a day away. Capitalist economies organize the means by which we defend ourselves against risk, by setting prices for goods and services and then doling out cash to buy these things. That cash is unequally distributed like never before, which means the poor are much closer to the very real possibility of starvation and disease than the rich or even the middle class. Their ability to sustain life is precarious and delicate.  Ergo, when something bad happens, and needed resources become scarce, it is not the rich that suffer. They can mobilize their capital to protect their communities and buy up the remaining goods. It is the poor that will suffer first and foremost. So when an Occupation decides to block a highway or stop a cell phone tower from working, they are disrupting the lives of the poor disproportionally more than the rich.

This is the sort of problem, the extreme disparity of access to the means of production and the ability to lead a healthy happy life, that object-oriented ontologies, new materialism, and actor-network theory are okay at describing, but extremely bad at explaining, and even worse at coming up with solutions. We become so focused on the connections, at the relations between human and nonhuman nodes, that we forget that a node can be a hungry child. I want Occupy movements to act in big and brash ways, but I want that to be in solidarity and at the will, of the poor. The Occupy moment’s greatest achievement and biggest failure is that it brought thousands of white, middle class Americans into a struggle that has been going on for decades and they think it is a new and temporary problem. The good news is that those privileged Americans will be introduced to concepts like systemic violence, institutional racism, and the inherent contradictions of capitalism. It means that the “national conversation” shifts. But it also means that the “temporarily embarrassed” middle class will fight to “get their country back” not recognizing that some never felt a sense of ownership in the first place. We can disrupt the infrastructure that supports capitalism, but when the cameras are trained on the protestors, and a reporter asks what this road was seized for, are we going to say “it should serve the people again” or are we going to say, “these systems were never built to benefit everyone and never can!”? I assume we’d say the former, but I think the latter is closer to the truth. These systems were made with the politics of oppression baked in. They require us to privately own expensive cars that burn fossil fuels. They require big federal governments to maintain. If we want to topple the very kind of capitalism that both Bryant and I reject, we must confront these truths. These are truths that Bryant does not confront. Thinking of capitalism as a hyperobject does not give me the tools necessary for such a discussion either. I can arrive at Bryant’s conclusion with Langdon Winner and bell hooks faster –and with the proper provision of developing a proper coalition– than actor network theory ever could. We should not dwell on the relationships of material objects with capital (although that is crucial) because we will never discuss what capital does to human relationships. ANT may tell us to block the road. But it never says for whom.

The problem with Seattle was not, as Bryant contends, “that they chose idiotic targets and simply acted on impotent rage.” It was that there was a very tenuous connection made to the violence in Seattle and the continuing violence in the Global South. That the state and corporate forces that beat back the revolutionary fervor in that moment, are the same ones that continue to inflict violence on the poor (and especially people of color) every day. The Battle of Seattle was popularly perceived as a clash with the police and nothing else. Not because it wasn’t “targeting the arteries” (and a good case can be made that it was) but because there is a carefully crafted narrative for this sort of behavior. It depicts protestors as idealistic roustabouts that would rather smash a window than vote. This is partially earned, and can just as easily be mobilized for an arterial attack as a G8 protest. We do not need any help finding mysterious and vague contact points for post-industrial capitalism. There are plenty of those, and they can be found without OOO, ANT, or New Materialism. What we need is a leftist politic that helps build coalitions and makes these struggles linked and meaningful for all concerned.

The price of 3D printers is plummeting. Like all complicated pieces of technology it is quickly moving from large, confusing, and expensive to small, simple and cheap. This year has been full of consumer-level 3D printers that are cheaper than some professional grade photo printers. Right now, these little things are capable of making plastic do-dads that are, admittedly, of lesser quality than some dollar store toys. But just like a magic trick, you’re not paying for the physical thing, you’re paying for the ability to do the trick. Design an object in a modeling software suite like SketchUp, convert it into some kind of printer-friendly format, and -so long as it is smaller than a bread box and made out of plastic- you can build whatever you want. 3D printers give an individual the ability to transform bits into atoms. In some ways it is a radical democratization of the means of production. For a fraction of the price of a car, someone can gain the ability to fabricate a relatively wide range of material objects. What are the implications for this new ability? What does it say about the relationship of atoms and bits?

Let’s get the sensationalist topics out of the way first: you can build weapons with 3D printers. As of this writing several high-traffic technology web sites are running stories about engineer Michael Guslick, who claims to have made “the first 3D printed gun.” Popular Science, ExtremeTech, DigitalTrends and LiveScience all have articles with misleading (or outright confusing) titles like “Functioning Rifle You Can Make at Home” and “Can 3D Printing Rock the Vice Market for Guns, Drugs, and Exotic Species?” The rhetoric in these articles would have any reader expecting to see home-made guns springing up all across the country. An interview with Guslick describes a far tamer story. He describes his creation as “extremely large and ungainly” and not a viable alternative to buying a traditional gun. From The New York Daily News:

“Criminals are not going to give this a second thought,” he said. “They will continue to look to the black market, rather than saying ‘Oh gee, we need to buy a 3D printer.’”

The gun enthusiast says he believes the media blew his story out of proportion.

“I guess this is a testament to how fearful people are of hearing that someone can 3D-print a gun without understanding that this wasn’t all that complex, it’s only in a legal sense that I have printed a firearm,” he said.

You can also get blue prints for knives, “brass” knuckles, and nun-chucks. Since there are very few regulations on any of these weapons, I don’t really see the introduction of 3D printers as a major change in humans’ ability and capacity to hurt each other using pre-existing technology.  What is dangerous, and what none of these articles seems to notice, is that 3D printing gives millions of people the ability to prototype, test, and reproduce totally new kinds of deadly devices. And as Dr. Evan Selinger wrote last week in the Atlantic:

…the perceptual affordances offered by gun possession and the transformative consequences of yielding to these affordances. To someone with a gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets. Furthermore, gun possession makes it easy to be bold, even hotheaded. Physically weak, emotionally passive, and psychologically introverted people will all be inclined to experience shifts in demeanor.

The danger isn’t in the ability to shoot people with home made guns, it is the kind of “transformative consequences” of 3D printer possession that lets us think of totally new ways of harming each other. Selinger (and indeed, most of the philosophy of technology) is concerned with the intent of and external influences on the technology’s designer and producer. Guns don’t make good hammers because the gun manufacturer is trying to make an excellent gun, not an excellent gun that is also good at one exceptional use (unless, of course, a sufficient market for hammering things right after you shoot them is found or developed). A 3D printer lets us customize our physical surroundings. One can imagine police departments, vigilantes, and militaries customizing guns for very specific “nonlethal” applications which have the underreported effect of actually increasing the use of force. People who really want lots of guns, don’t seem to be having a hard time getting them. We don’t need to worry about 3D printers making more guns, we need to worry about the new affordances they give those people that look to inflict violence.

The transformative consequences of 3D printers has a recursive element to it. In other words the sociotechnical relationship between designers, manufacturers, objects, supply chains, and end users start feeding back in new, much more immediate, ways. I can customize an object based on my specific needs. That capacity for customization leads to much more tailored tools and physical artefacts. This capacity is logically extended to the 3D printer itself, allowing the individual to fully (in theory) customize and specialize the construction process. Indeed, there is a thriving open source project for 3D printers made out of 3D printed parts called the RepRap Project. For about $400, a dedicated individual can build their own 3D printer and then use it to build most of the parts for future printers. The RepRap project has already produced over a hundred and fifty separate kinds of printers. As these machines gain in precision and function, they are capable of building better machines with even more precision and function.

Most of the discussions surrounding “atoms and bits” refer to social action and bodily co-presence. That is because our biggest technological advances have been in information exchange and not automated construction. Today’s 3D printers give us the opportunity to transmit physical objects as readily as we digitally transmitted images in the 70s. The first digital camera weighted 8 pounds and took 23 seconds to create a single black and white image. If (and I think its a big “if”) we were to develop the 3D printer as fast as we did the digital camera, we would be able to effortlessly transmit any physical object across time and space by the year 2050. I have no reason to believe that this is technically possible, or that human civilization will possess access to enough cheap fossil fuels to make tons and tons of plastic stuff. The point I want to make here however, has less to do with pragmatic feasibility, and more to do with how we treat the boundaries between the online and the offline.

My initial comparison of digital photography to 3D printing ignores the existence of the Internet and advances in digital data storage (the first digital camera relied on a casette tape). Consider the following thought experiment in which digital photography is stuck in 1970s but all other technologies are (more or less) up to 2012 standards. Given the possibility that both 70s-era quality digital photos and 2012 3D printing is possible, would we say that the black and white photo on the screen and the digital blueprint for a monochrome plastic toy horse are more or less real than a black and white film photo or a toy horse made in a conventional toy factory? Some would say yes. But if we transmit these bits across two computers and print out the black and white photo, and we extrude the plastic horse, these are incontestably “real” things. As the technology gets better (2012 digital photography, 2050 3D printing) the objects look better, but they do not become more “real.”

Baudrillard reminds us that we are surrounded by objects that refer to nonexistent entities. My Ikea furniture will never really give me the hip, urban mod lifestyle, the idea of which, was so necessary in the production of its value. Nuclear bombs are used as a deterrent, but only work as such as long as they effectively refer to a nonexistant world of nuclear winter. This is what Baudrillard called the simulacra. Objects that refer to nonexistent referents produce their own meaning through the very promise of the yet-to-be-realized future. But in a world where I can make my own object, where does reality come from? Are 3D printers extruding meaning and material agency along with ABS plastic? Are 3D printers ontological white holes that produce reality from their printer heads? This is the logical conclusion of digital dualism. That the online and offline are in a zero-sum competition with one-another. That they aren’t deeply connected or even inseparable. Modeling a bird house in software and then building it on a 3D printer is phenomenologically identical to sketching out a bird house on a piece of paper, and then build it with a saw, hammer, and nails. Just like the dangers of weapons production, the categorically different aspect of a 3D printer is my ability to produce a physical object that is identical to the virtual one (the only difference is one is made out of atoms, the other out of bits) and alter it to my own exacting specifications.

Our digitally augmented hyperreality precludes our ability to differentiate between reality and proxy, atoms and bits, or the real and the virtual. Indeed, the obsession over the differences between social action online and offline has blinded us to not only how alike they truly are, but how fungible the online and offline can be. I say “can be” because 3D printers represent a promise, not a reality. But it is that promise, when critically considered, that demands a symmetry across online and offline action.  We cannot make a priori assumptions about what is more “real” or “meaningful” unless we are willing to rewrite entire theories of semiotics, value, and meaning.

You can follow David on Twitter, really! @da_banks

I made my digg.com account on March 15, 2007. I think I had an account before the current one because I clearly remember using Digg in high school, after I saw Kevin Rose demo the site on The Screen Savers. My enjoyment of that tech community, at the time, was so complete. It felt like my tribe. I dutifully listened to This Week in Tech and I am even willing to admit that I watched the bro-tastic video podcast associated with the site “Diggnation”. My late teens and early 20s were consumed with tech news and I loved every moment of it. The community fell off a cliff somewhere around 2008 as a few big users were banned for violating rules against scripting and gaming. The site hemorrhaged users through the last few aughts. By the summer of 2010, AlterNet reported on massive gaming and censorship by gangs of conservative Yahoo newsgroups. Within a month of the scandal, a terrible revision of the site crippled the service, causing day-long outages and spotty service. Now, the site has been sold for a mere $500,000 to a company called Betaworks. They plan on relaunching the site on August 1st after a massive overhaul. While a server might still point to digg.com, I know that it is not the site I grew up with and the Digg Diaspora has been cast to the edges of the internet.

It took me awhile to make a Reddit account. For the longest time I felt like Reddit was a unapologetic Digg clone (there were so many) and I was unwilling to accept so much as an account confirmation email from the likes of them. I thought the alien was stupid looking and the whole site’s overly-minimalist interface made Craigslist look like it was a lovingly crafted Bauhaus creation. I wanted easy access to a directory of subreddits, I didn’t understand why any self-respecting website required a browser plug-in to be the least-bit useable. I have since come to love my adopted home, but it will always be adopted. My Digg.com account is one of the oldest accounts I own and I don’t want to give it up. Come Wednesday though, a new site with the same name will say it has a five year relationship with me, but I know that isn’t true. Its an impostor- some stranger claiming to be my friend.

Online communities are just that- communities that practically, legally, technically, and conceptually constitute themselves through and by an online presence. They are made up of real people that have real interests and real relationships. Those real people share and enact those real interests and relationships in a very particular world of atoms and bits. When that world disappears, that community doesn’t come back. You can call it the same thing, you can give the users similar tools, but it will never be what it once was. The Digg community, which should not be confused with the digg.com site, was destroyed by a few key mistakes in management.  I am not talking about the Diggbar (which did suck, for multiple reasons) 0r even the Publisher Streams that undermined the very idea of Digg as a user-submitted news site. Digg’s management killed Digg by trying to be leaders of the community instead of public servants for the community.

Digg died when so many of its users were revealed as cynical bastards that, having graduated from trolling, were interested in suppressing ideas and not sharing them. The resulting uproar was enough to cause massive external criticism that put pressure on what was already a hot debate. In the end, Kevin Rose and the rest sought to calm users and direct them back to digging. It was the social media equivalent of George W. Bush telling Americans to go shopping to defeat terror. The comparison between the two events is purposely hyperbolic and extreme not because I want to trump up the former or demean the latter, but because they follow a similar logic and ultimately work the same way. Some go back to digging and shopping because they desire a distant normalcy so badly. Others reject the decree because they see it as patently false: Something fundamental and structural is wrong and broken and must be addressed. The Digg Townhalls were good for suggesting new features, but they did little to build up trust. There is a feeling of angst that must be quelled through social as well as technical change. When the biggest social news site was found to be rife with corruption and cronyism, the response was better technology, not better social relations, and that is why Digg died and why that death matters. We had a moment where millions of people could have a discussion about how we treat each other’s ideas, and instead we talked about  duplicate story detection and captchas. We sought a technical fix for a social problem.

We weren’t going to solve nationwide political disagreements over Digg.com. I know that. But maybe we could have taken that time to be a little more reflective on why cynical groups like the “Digg Patriots” exist in the first place. Digg management could have forgone the Townhalls and instead doubled-down to produce totally new segments of the site to deal with the issue within the community. They could have built the Digg equivalent of /r/ShitRedditSays and kept the disagreement within the community. Instead, there was no platform for internal debate. That debate had to happen elsewhere and when that happened the community was as good as gone. A site that had once brought joy and hosted debate, had become in and of itself- a point of contention. To be a part of the community was to be a part of the problem. In the end, no revision could have saved the site. If this new Digg has any success it will have no connection to the Digg I grew up with and the community it hosted. I will always have fond memories of that site, but I know it is truly gone.

Follow David on Twitter where he posts stories he would have dugg: @da_banks