I want to start out by saying that “liberatory” is not in the standard OS X spell check dictionary. There aren’t even spelling suggestions. It is totally foreign. I think that’s telling. Also, our blog’s CSS prevents us from giving our entries long titles. The Title is part of the story, so let me put it in a more readable format:

Black Box Tactics: The Liberatory Potential of Obscuring The Inner Workings of Technology

There we go. Now where was I? Oh right, I haven’t started yet. Let me do that:

I was reading Winner’s “Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology” [PDF] for a paper I’m writing on the role of play in urban design, when I glanced at my desk:

The two bounced around in my brain and I ended up tweeting this:

I want to write: "Black Box Tactics: The Liberatory Potential of Obscuring The Inner Workings of Technology" @AcademicTitles

— david a banks (@DA_Banks) May 5, 2012

Get it? Black bloc tactics, black box metaphors? It was an off-the-cuff comment, but before too long, three people had retweeted it and I had gotten some replies:

@DA_Banks the #newaesthetic crowed would beg to differ. And Richard stallman. And me. 😉

— jay (@thejaymo) May 5, 2012

https://twitter.com/#!/Call_Me_Ismail/status/198850512987230209

@thejaymo @DA_Banks (that's a good angle for a blog post)

— nathanjurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) May 5, 2012

So now I was a little confused. Had I hit on something? Had I just inadvertently made some kind of art criticism?  I wasn’t even thinking of The New Aesthetic when I wrote the tweet!

Moment of absolute honesty: I just double-checked what the New Aesthetic was. Like, right after I wrote that last sentence I did a Google search and re-read this. I’m pretty sure I get what @thejaymo was saying now. The New Aesthetic isn’t an art form or a style– it’s the inevitable consequence of our augmented reality. It’s about noticing the process and the environment, a kind of brutal honesty that plays with these new frames of reference that went from prototype to ubiquity in under a decade:

I’m not going to pretend that what I just did was original, but a blog doesn’t give you a whole lot of space to make my point, so I’m willing to sacrifice subtly for clarity. Just like the iphone 4’s camera. You miss the detail, but the whole photo looks pretty good. And, as we all know, we are doing much more than creating an accurate visual record of events when we use our cameras. The sociologist in me is tempted to use Bourdieu’s Distinction to analyze what’s going on here, and I encourage you to read the wikipedia summary [^^^^ I just linked to it up there] and draw your own conclusions. For example, one might conclude that the “working class New Aesthetic” (if there is one) is dictated by their limited choices for online connection. It looks like second-hand smartphones with a small chip in the screen, or the whole experience is framed by the internet access terminal at their local library with an outdated browser. But I don’t feel like I’m on solid ground here. I would have to hit the stacks again before writing that post. Instead, I want to come back to where I started: Langdon Winner’s article.

To call X a “black box” (noun) or to “black box” X (verb) means you are unconcerned with the inner workings of X. Instead, X is defined by what goes in and what comes out. For most people, an iPhone is a black box because you understand what goes into it –photons, sound waves, and your touch on the screen–  and what comes out —images, voice, text— but how the inputs turn into outputs is pretty much a mystery to you. I imagine it has something to do with microchips, precision-cut aluminum, and the violence of global capitalism. Winner’s article is a response to a new (at the time, 1993) mode of inquiry called the social construction of technology (SCOT). These social constructivists were mostly historians and sociologists who would look at the histories of various artifacts (bicycles, bakelite, and light bulbs for example) and reveal the paths not taken. For example, at the turn of the 20th century bicycles were considered to be a toy of the aristocracy. Men would show how fearless and rugged they were by riding these dangerous machines:

 Social constructivists show that the design of modern bicycles was influenced by all sorts of social factors and the resulting artifact is contingent upon these social factors. The bicycle, social constructivists tend to say, has interpretive flexibility. My idea of what makes a good bike is different from yours and our differing perspectives compete within a social milieu to define future bicycles. It’s a really useful theory, because it lets you say, “it could have been otherwise” and from there, you can get a better understanding of humans’ relationship to their creations. Historical contingencies are good to think with because it reveals how much of our sociotechnical world is shaped and framed by decisions we never knew were made. It also blurs the boundary between the social and the technical; the cultural and the natural. I don’t want to get into actor network theory, so lets just leave it at this: Our technologies are social-relations-made-material. What our technologies are good at doing says something about what their designers’ value and what kind of world they want to live in.

Notice I said “what their designers’ value.” Not what “we” or “society” values. Winner is concerned about this approach because:

Who says what are relevant social groups and social interests? What about groups that have no voice but that, nevertheless, will be affected by the results of technological change? What of groups that have been suppressed or deliberately excluded? How does one account for potentially important choices that never surface as matters for debate and choice?

These are all essential questions for the New Aesthetic as well. These glimpses into the future say something about what we are leaving behind. This is not a call for romanticizing the past, rather I want to make sure everyone gets into the future. I find myself at the very edge of my expertise, and so I am only capable of offering critical questions of the New Aesthetic.

• 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?
• Where do we find the New Aesthetic? Where is the New Aesthetic conspicuously absent?
• What is its perspective? I see a lot of top-down.
• 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?
• What parts of the digitally augmented world are left out, over-simplified, or left unquestioned? I see very little code.
• Is the pixel the sine qua non of the computer screen or does something else pre-date it?
• What is involved in the process of making things that embody the New Aesthetic?
• What is not the New Aesthetic?

Perhaps I am over-thinking this. Maybe I should just “know it when I see it” and move from there. I feel like the kid on the playground who, after everyone has made up a new game, demands to be told all the rules upfront instead of playing along and learning as I play. The New Aesthetic is a fragile thing: just getting its legs. Perhaps we do not know enough about its progenitor technologies to demand absolutist answers to such sober questions. But I want to know who is liberated to say and express new things, and what that expression leaves out. What it ignores and what kind of future it depicts. Most of all, I want to know what we are leaving inside the black box.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the absolute width of our blog theme.

Thanks to @smajda at The Society Pages for installing that new tweet embed functionality.

and,

[EDIT: 5/9/12 — 13:24 EST] After this post, The Society Pages’ @smajda noticed that our title styles don’t support two-line titles (as I state at the beginning of this post). He has since changed this.

Reason #15,926 I love the Internet: it allows us to bypass our insane leaders israelovesiran.com

— allisonkilkenny (@allisonkilkenny) April 22, 2012

Sherry Turkle published an op-ed in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times’ Sunday Review that decries our collective move from “conversation” to “connection.” Its the same argument she made in her latest book Alone Together, and has roots in her previous books Life on the Screen and Second Self. Her argument is straightforward and can be summarized in a few bullet points:

• Our world has more “technology” in it than ever before and it is taking up more and more hours of our day.
• We use this technology to structure/control/select the kinds of conversations we have with certain people.
• These communication technologies compete with “the world around us” in a zero-sum game for our attention.
• We are substituting “real conversations” with shallower, “dumbed-down” connections that give us a false sense of security. Similarly, we are capable of presenting ourselves in a very particular way that hides our faults and exaggerates our better qualities.

Turkle is probably the longest-standing, most outspoken proponent of what we at Cyborgology call digital dualism. The separation of physical and virtual selves and the privileging of one over the other is not only theoretically contradictory, but also empirically unsubstantiated. 

The relationships that we curate and maintain online through Faceboook and other social media services are deeply anchored in offline interaction. There is no “second self” on my Facebook profile- it’s the same one that is embodied in flesh and blood. I might make myself look better than I really am, I might even lie, but how is this categorically different than my choice of clothing, the bumperstickers on my car, or a cheesy Hallmark greeting card? You might consider Facebook, bumper stickers, clothing, and Hallmark to be shallow modes of expression, but then deal with all of these symmetrically. What is the underlying social ontology that produces these things? A symmetrical approach, one that looks for antisocial tendencies in digital as well as nondigital technologies, will bring you to radically different conclusions (which I will spell out later).

Additionally, we must not forget that these communication technologies are made by people with explicit kinds of communication in mind. Some may incentivize short-sighted, uncritical thought, but others might be built to support or enable in-person communication. I agree with Turkle when she says “Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding” which is why users are constantly testing and playing with the designers’ original intent. We selectively delete posts, or create multiple accounts in a constant effort to make these sociotechnical systems do what we want them to do. Sometimes we go so far as to build totally new platforms. By ignoring this kind of behavior, Turkle is essentially accusing us of a false consciousness. We are not self aware of our communication technologies, Turkle contends, unless we make active choices not to use them. We are, essentially, sociotechnical dopes. The dope is on full display when she says: “We used to think, ‘I have a feeling; I want to make a call.’ Now our impulse is, ‘I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.'”

Imagine if we changed the unit of analysis from “communication technologies” to “antisocial technologies.” What might we find? We will have to look for technologies that produce effects and encourage certain processes. Our search might lead us to certain specific material devices, but not necessarily. Studies from around the world  (Trinidad, Ghana, United States, Jamaica, Armenia just to name a few) show a rich and heterogeneous relationship between humans and their communication devices. The effects are not all positive, but a lot of them are:  enabling closer family ties, allowing youth to find support networks, giving entrepreneurs in isolated regions access to valuable business connections. The internet is not a monolith and we cannot theorize it as such.

We must fight the urge to be techno-utopians as much as we should avoid Turkle’s digital dualism. I actually agree with Turkle on one thing- our augmented society is experiencing a dearth of evocative and meaningful relationships. (Here, when I say “our”, I am speaking in the western context.) Something that we might call “community” is in short supply. Maybe we do hide from ourselves too much, but that happens online as well as off. We are hiding from the people around us at the coffee shop, but we are also hiding from people online. I might block a friend who asks critical questions about my politics. If I am at a coffee shop without a device, I might choose to become intensely interested in my shoe or the ingredients of Vitamin Water. When we do run into people we don’t know, whether its in a suburban gated community (a technology about as old as the internet) or a friend’s timeline, we say and do a wide variety of things. Some are great, some are truly tragic and horrible.

Langdon Winner reminds us that technologies have politics built into them, sometimes those politics are intentional, sometimes they are deliberate. It is certainly useful to ask, “what sorts of politics are built into the Internet?” The internet’s Cold War origins mean its decentralized (to maintain functioning in the event of a concentrated nuclear attack) and it is constantly getting faster because computers were intended to give us the upper hand in making complex, “objective” decisions. This was a time driven by intense paranoia and individualist thinking. But ARPANET is not the social web we have today. There might be some of that cold war thinking deep in the backbone of the internet, but we cannot draw a straight line from game theory to your Blackberry addiction. There is something more fundamental here, something that predates digital technology.

Ultimately, I think we need to reconsider –dare I say it– what technology wants.  Both digital and nondigital technologies have the capacity to enable our most antisocial tendencies, or even cause those tendencies. Jacques Ellul thought that before machines and industrial factories, there was an underlying method called technique. Technique is, “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with the past.” Before someone could invent a technology that let us hide from our surroundings by clicking through “12 more of the most inadvertently sexual sports headlines” there was a desire to entertain our base desires with ruthless efficiency. Turkle herself says, “When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers.” This might very well be the case. But is it the technology that does it, or is technique, embodied in our email and smartphones, the underlying cause? Can we keep the technology and change the behavior?

This is where the distinction between digital dualism and augmented reality become essential. The digital dualist perspective says no: there is something in the technology that enables/causes antisocial behavior and we must overcome this false consciousness by actively refusing to use our devices. The augmented reality perspective demands that we look at root causes. That might lead us to the same ends: no texting at the dinner table, leave your smartphone at home at least once a week, but it also lets us consider other problems. Maybe your kids are on Facebook because you live in a suburb where you can’t meet another human without driving a car. It also forces us to think of the big picture- I will gladly live in a world where Cape Cod tourists are distracted by Facebook updates if it means disadvantaged groups have tools to reach out and organize across geographic boundaries. Let the rich be alone together, the rest of us will find something to talk about.

You can have deep, meaningful conversations with David on twitter: @da_banks

Theorizing the Web 2012 was great. Everyone involved did a bang-up job. I certainly learned more in a single day than I usually do at weekend-long establishment conferences. I have said a lot about conferences (here, here, and here) as have fellow cyborgologists (Sarah, Nathan, and PJ). All of these posts have a common thread: academia is changing, but conferences seem out of date in some way. They are needlessly insular, they rely on hefty attendance fees that are increasingly cost-prohibitive,  and they rarely take advantage of social media in any meaningful way. The relative obduracy of conference styles come into high relief once they are compared to the massive changes to institutional knowledge production. Universities have adopted many of the managerial practices of private companies. They are also acting more like profit-seeking enterprises: putting massive resources into patenting offices and business incubators, hiring less tenure-track teaching staff, and employing armies of professionalized managers that run everything from information technology services to athletic facilities. Conferences, on the other hand, have seen few innovations beyond what I call Tote Bag Praxis. 

Universities are starting to experiment with new educational paradigms (an industry term, not mine), and are taking advantage of information technology to reduce the cost of teaching; make it easier for faculty to keep track of students’ progress, and bring “real world” problems into the classroom. There have never been more ways to get an advanced degree and there are more places (both online and off) than ever to find them. These are just some of the benefits of recent changes to American pedagogy that has largely been driven by market forces. Universities are competing for students who are being awarded unprecedented amounts of student loans at a time when government support for education is at a historic low.

I want to be clear- I am not a fan of “academic capitalism.” Education is too precious –too fundamental to society– to be treated as another consumer good. American universities began treating education as a commodity as early as 1972, when Congress shifted a majority of higher education funding from institutions to individuals in the form of loans, stipends, and grants. While direct aid to students played an important role in getting minorities into universities, it also encouraged students to think of their education as a transaction that takes place in the market, rather than a civic choice to gain a certain kind of skill that is useful to society. Undergraduate education is a buyer’s market: a prospective student on a typical campus tour will see the deluxe apartment-style dorms, the mall in the student union, or the state-of-the-art athletic complex along side standard classrooms and other instructional facilities. These extra-curricular amenities are not a problem in and of themselves, but become problematic when schools vie for national rankings in “best food” or “most comfortable dorm” at the (literal) expense of instruction. Students pay for all of this by incurring and unprecedented amount student loan debt.

While undergraduate education has started to look more and more like cruise ships with classes, (oops) graduate and post-doctorate study has taken on the character of private companies. According to Kleinman and Vallas (2001),

…a process of convergence is underway in which the codes and practices of industry are infiltrating the academy, even as academic norms are increasingly governing the work practices of selected knowledge workers in high technology firms and industries.

Even when universities spend more money on instruction, they spend it on non-tenured faculty and lecturers. Labs are run by non-Ph.D business professionals that know more about the economics of business than the properties of compounds. Research labs are constantly searching for patentable discoveries that will earn them prestige in the field and a more secure position in their Universities. While the phrase “publish or perish” has characterized high-stakes academia, that only scratches the surface. Scientists must make departments profitable in order to earn their keep. Humanities and qualitative social science departments have to be a little more creative. Some have begun offering guided tours of historic sites or host for-profit trips to archeological sites.

What does all of this have to do with conferences? First, it provides a useful comparison. Universities are changing dramatically, but conferences seem to be exactly the same. While classics departments are going from rote memorization of The Iliad to offering guided tours of the Parthenon, the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting has changed very little by comparison. Second, it offers a cautionary tale. Efforts to radically transform institutions can have disastrous consequences (skyrocketing student debt) even when actors have the best intentions (increasing the diversity of enrollment). Finally, the process by which universities adopted the paradigm of academic capitalism can give us clues to successfully reinventing the academic conference.

For example, Elizabeth Popp Berman, in her essay “Why Did Universities Start Patenting?” [Paid journal] (2008) shows that increased patenting was not the result of the Bayh-Dole Act (the federal legislation that allowed universities to retain patents on state-funded research) but rather the Bayh-Dole Act was the necessary final step in a long process of creating a constituency that would support the bill. Universities began hiring patent administrators well before the bill was ever introduced. This created a built-in constituency that would support passage of the bill. Later, I will explain how this process of developing proto-institutions helps establishing support for changing institutional practices.

When it comes to challenge Tote Bag Praxis, I think we can learn a lot from academic capitalism. A complete application of academic capitalism to the conference model would give us something resembling TED Talks. This is (largely) undesirable for all the reasons Nathan Jurgenson describes in his essay Against TED. We get good stuff- big ideas are presented in an entertaining fashion and are distributed widely across multiple platforms. But every academic conference should not (could not) be like TED. Actually attending a TED conference is extremely expensive, and the TEDx franchises can be equally cost-prohibitive. There are ways of making it cheaper, but the default is expensive. I think #TtW12 does a better job of creating a more accessible conference on multiple levels. Its cheaper (by far), you have to be accepted but not invited, and everyone is allowed their own presentation style. No one is expected to unveil the iPad of social theory, nor are they expected to erupt in jubilant applause once a presentation is over. (Although both of these things have happened  at TtW11 and 12 on multiple occasions.)

Where then, is the middle ground between TED capitalism and tote bag praxis? Let’s look at the latter a little bit deeper before answering that question.  I define Tote Bag Praxis as an acquiescence on the part of organizers to the institutional norms that reproduce expensive conferences that all look the same, act the same, and (and this is the important part) produce the same kind of knowledge.  If you present your work in the same kinds of venue every time, you’re bound to start thinking about and structuring your work to fit that venue. The institutions that shape conferences –university accounting schemes, the organizational structure of professional societies, the publishing apparati that produce the same kinds of proceedings every year– have more of an affect on knowledge production than we think.

Theorizing the Web is different- conference fees are optional (although most pay) but the suggested amount is small. If you cannot attend at all, you can still enjoy a rich experience through livestreams and twitter backchannels. Many people might see this as somewhat superficial or totally unrelated to the content of the conference, but I disagree. Departments budgets are getting smaller and anything that makes them cheaper to attend, means they are more accessible to more people. But just like the Bayh-Dole Act needed to change universities before institutionalizing (and thus solidifying) that change, we need to change the way departments do their accounting and even create new offices that promote or encourage low-cost conferences. Right now, conferences seem to be expensive by design. I am running into this problem with my own conference. Bookkeepers cannot deal with sliding scale payment systems, or donation models. Even the most sympathetic business manager’s hands are tied by the institutional mechanisms that demand a particular (expensive) type of conference organizational scheme.

A/V equipment is held hostage by steep fees: universities and conference centers alike charge hundreds if not thousands of dollars to turn on a projector or rent a camera. These amenities are considered luxuries for attendees, instead of necessary tools for sharing information beyond the physical and social walls of the conference. Tote bag praxis demands bodily co-presence for all participants, and offer few tools for digitally augmenting the conference-goers experience.

Tote bag praxis also forces us to think primarily (but not totally) in disciplinary terms. Conferences are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, but funding and organizing mechanisms push us toward disciplinary boundaries. Funds are kept in silos for particular groups of people (“No, that money can only be spent on grant-supported personell that receive fifty percent or more of their funding lines from the Sociology Department.”) and physical spaces are part of the fiefdoms erected by departments that are terrified of losing what little resources they still control after the managerial hordes of academic capitalism have stripped them bare. I really appreciated the close working relationship the arts and sociology departments at University of Maryland seemed to share. It probably helped that they were housed in the same building, but the fact that an entire gallery was open to (and enjoyed by) conference-goers was  no small achievement.

Finally, to answer the question of how universities changed so much, but conferences changed so little, I think the answer is very similar to what PJ Rey has said about academic journals. There are entrenched interests that benefit from expensive conferences. It means higher society enrollment (society members usually pay smaller conference registration fees), and more money spent on facilities and private hotel franchises that make deals with universities for special rates and guaranteed business.

It is important that young academics chart a course somewhere between the stagnant water of  tote bag praxis and the destructive rapids of academic capitalism. Its uncharted territory, but the rewards are very promising. Changing conferences also means changing how we think about our work and how we structure the organizations that tie us together into academic communities. We have to think critically and reflexively about institutionalized conferences. What is worth saving? What needs to be totally rethought? Who do these conference models empower and who do they shut out? What kind of academic does the tote bag praxis produce? How can we change academia so that there are constituencies that will demand, fight for, and produce new conference models? The silver lining in all of this, is that academic capitalism might do this for us. As department budgets get tighter, fewer and fewer young academics will be able to afford expensive conferences. New conferences, probably smaller and focused around subjects instead of disciplines, will slowly bleed large conferences dry. Let’s try to make this transition thoughtfully and deliberately so that we make a new academy that rewards good scholarship and does away with economic stratification.

David A. Banks is on twitter. Follow him, won’t you?  @da_banks.

For further reading on academic capitalism see Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. “Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education”. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

David Graeber makes a compelling case against the “consumption” metaphor in Graeber, David. “Consumption.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 4 (2011): 489-511.

House representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced a bill back in November called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (H.R. 3523) or CISPA. It has since been referred to and reported by the appropriate committees. Since then, according to Representative Rogers’ own web site, over 100 members of congress have already announced their support for the bill:

The 105 co-sponsors of the bill include 10 committee chairmen.  Additionally, a wide range of major industry and cyber associations, such as Facebook, Microsoft, the US Chamber Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Internet Security Alliance, TechAmerica, and many others have sent letters of support for the bill.  A list of major industry and association supporters can be found at http://intelligence.house.gov/bill/cyber-intelligence-sharing-and-protection-act-2011

Unlike SOPA and PIPA, CISPA is all about collecting and sharing “cyber threat intelligence” and has less to do with copyright infringement concerns. This bill does not directly threaten the business interests of web companies, which means we should not expect their help in fighting the bill. In fact Facebook, IBM, Intel, Oracle, and Microsoft (among others) have already sent letters in support.

There is a “TL;DR” on the politics subreddit that I have fact checked and am comfortable with reproducing here:

[CISPA] Gives ISPs power to collect information about you and share it with companies. Does not explicitly allow censorship.

1. ISPs have the power to collect information about your Internet use.
2. The RIAA/MPAA/etc con [sic] contract with your ISP to obtain this information.
3. This information is “proprietary” — you don’t have the right to know what info they’re collecting on you.
4. The ISP is exempt from all legal and criminal action for surveillance under this bill.

One large part of the bill that the author of the TL;DR (user bo1024) does not mention is the role of CISPA in the War on Terror. Under CISPA, the Director of National Intelligence  would decide who in the private sector should be given high level security clearance and the ability to work closely with federal intelligence services to monitor, collect, and share online activity that is deemed to be a “cyber threat”. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, according to the official summary, must share with Congress a summary of all the information given to the federal government, and will provide “recommendations for improvements and modifications to address privacy and civil liberties concerns.” Such oversight might provide a modicum of reassurance to some, but –and this is me editorializing– the bill itself runs counter to the most liberal definition of civil liberties or privacy.

As I stated earlier, there will be no internet blackout from the tech companies on this one. Tech companies that were openly against or took no position on SOPA/PIPA are already supporting CISPA.  Here are links to the letters of support for:

• Facebook (against SOPA)
• Microsoft (against SOPA)
• IBM (“We’re not commenting on SOPA”)
• Intel/McAfee (against SOPA)
• Symantec (against SOPA)
• Oracle

Congressman Rogers is the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, which means he oversees the congressional body that sets the rules for the intelligence-gathering agencies of the American federal government.  He also received a total of $34,000 from the telecom services and equipment industry between 2011 and 2012. It is only fair to note however, that he received more funding from the health professionals ($74,000), Insurance ($69,290), and Pharmaceutical ($65,749) industries in the same time period. ISPs and telecommunications equipment companies were some of his largest individual contributors. AT&T and Verizon gave him $6,000 each, Comcast, L-3 Communications, and Time Warner cable gave him $5,000 each.

SOPA and PIPA were supported by telecoms, but roundly rejected by every company that based its business model on advertiser-based content. Wikipedia, Mozilla, and similar foundations were also against these bills, largely because a single copyright infringement could spell the destruction of their entire site. When they blocked out their home pages, or displayed a banner that urged customers to contact their representatives, it was because their business models were in jeopardy- not because they were concerned with civil liberties. CISPA is a direct affront to civil liberties but “cyber threats” have less to do about copyright infringement and more to do with the well-being of information/communication infrastructures and what is commonly referred to as “national security.” Facebook, Microsoft and others are not nearly as concerned about CISPA and (I believe) it is safe to assume that the provision that protects private entities from law suits has a lot to do with that change of heart.

Ultimately, I am most interested with how Twitter responds to CISPA. A company that has demonstrated s a unique perspective on governments’ relationship to free speech might oppose this sort of legislation. At the same time, CISPA does not threaten censorship so much as surveillance, and we have seen how Twitter reacts to the former but not the latter. The company’s management likes to tout its role as a tool of freedom fighters in foreign countries but we hear comparatively less about its roll in American activism.

CISPA is an excellent example of the federal government’s interest in obtaining online superiority in the domestic War on Terror.   Control and access of bits is becomes as important as atoms in modern warfare. It is no surprise that governments are seeking to extend their jurisdiction into the realms of online social activity. The Internet’s ability to dispace our actions temporally as well as geographically makes existing laws difficult to enforce, or makes them obsolete. The third amendment makes it illegal to quarter soldiers in privates homes, but that does not mean the government is prohibited from running data-collecting software on the servers that run my personal web site or store my data. The foundations of the first amendment assumed that individuals’ speech and the press were restricted to national borders. CISPA and similar legislation is the beginning of a new kind of colonization. Governments and corporate entities are interested in maintaing online, the same sorts of controls that they had offline. Whether or not we want to make our online spaces distinct and apart from the controls that we find offline, is up to us.

Follow me on twitter: @Da_Banks

This is the full Augmented Activism essay. The two parts provide prescriptive tactics for how to incorporate technology in activist work. Part 1 was originally posted here and part 2 was here.

Part 1

Academics usually do not talk about “tactics.” There are theories, methods, critiques, but we -as professionals-rarely feel comfortable advocating for something as unstable or open to interpretation as a tactic. In the latest edition of the Science, Technology, and Human Values (The flagship journal for Society for Social Studies of Science) three authors threw caution to the wind and published the paper “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey” [over-priced subscription required]. While the content of the paper is excellent, what excited me the most was their decision to describe their new “bag of tools” as a set of tactics. Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish take a moment in their conclusion to reflect on their decision:

We call our results tactics, rather than methodologies, strategies, or universal guarantors of truth. Tactics lead not to the true or final design solution but to the contingent and collaborative construction of other narratives. These other narratives remain partial and approximate, but they are irrevocably opened up to problematization.

I will employ the language and approach of the “tactical survey” to offer a new set of conceptual tools for understanding augmented protest and revolution. It is my aim that they prove useful for activists as well as academics and journalists following Occupy Wall Street and similar movements. This first part focuses on the intersections of transparency, social media, privilege, and public depictions of protest. Part 2 will cover the utilization of corporate technological systems (e.g. Apple products, Twitter) and building alternatives to those systems (e.g. Vibe, Diaspora). These tactics are forged from observations (first hand and otherwise) of the #OWS movement. They are intentionally abstract, because they are menat to apply to a wide range of instances and scenarios. 

Diversity of Tactics and the limitations of sousveillance

Last Monday, Chris Hedges posted a scathing critique of the black bloc tactics exercised in Oakland and New York. He describes black bloc tactics as “The Cancer in Occupy” (that is also the title of the piece) and calls on the occupy movement as a whole to oppose and denounce “black bloc anarchists.” Hedges characterizes black blocs as “…an inchoate rage to be unleashed on any target. Pity, compassion and tenderness are banished for the intoxication of power. It is the same sickness that fuels the swarms of police who pepper-spray and beat peaceful demonstrators. It is the sickness of soldiers in war. It turns human beings into beasts.”

The anarchist community has replied to Hedges’ piece with equal parts anger and resolve. Anthropologist, black bloc veteran, and anarchist scholar Dr. David Graeber wrote a reply in n+1 magazine  where he expressed concern that Hedge’s article had the capacity to do much more harm than any “black-clad teenager throwing rocks.” The message is dangerous, according to Graeber, because it destroys important lines of communication among activists. Graeber explains,

… “diversity of tactics” means leaving such matters up to individual conscience, rather than imposing a code on anyone. Partly,this is because imposing such a code invariably backfires. In practice, it means some groups break off in indignation and do even more militant things than they would have otherwise, without coordinating with anyone else—as happened, for instance, in Seattle.

Hedges and many others seem to think that recording and disseminating unjustified acts of police violence can win the war of words. That black bloc tactics muddy the message and give the media an excuse to call a protest a mob. This is simply not the case:

 Sometimes, with the help of social media, we can demonstrate that particular police attacks were absolutely unjustified, as with the famous Tony Bologna pepper-spray incident. But we cannot by definition prove all police attacks were unjustified, even all attacks at one particular march; it’s simply physically impossible to film every thing that happens from every possible angle all the time. Therefore we can expect that whatever we do, the media will dutifully report “protesters engaged in clashes with police” rather than “police attacked non-violent protesters.”

I have written on the power of sousveillance in the past, but must agree that there are limitations to its efficacy in the national context. Graeber is quick to note that the images of civil rights protestors getting blasted with fire hoses were recognized as police violence mainly because “Americans at the time didn’t view the Deep South as part of the same country.” Nathan Jurgenson has written in the Atlantic on the delicate balance between transparency and anonymity in the Occupy movements. Dissemination of information by the likes of Tim Pool and others have forced tough truths into the spotlight, but his reporting must still compete in a national conversation with the likes of Fox News and other forms of corporate media. When raw footage is broadly available, it is interpreted through previously held beliefs and ideologies. For example, when I blogged for Occupy Albany, many conservative commenters pointed to arrest records as evidence of violent protest tactics, not police brutality or selective enforcement. Cognitive scientists have a term for this- confirmation bias.

 The Privilege of Inviting Transparency

This blog frequently revisits the topic of privacy on the internet. Most mainstream coverage of privacy fails to describe what privacy actually looks like, and what it is supposed to accomplish. If a particularly gregarious Facebook user shares everything about themselves, but deletes the content after a few hours, is that an example of privacy or transparency? In the aforementioned Atlantic article, it is obvious that there is no universal boundaries for privacy and transparency. Transparency, as an ideal, is a function of several extrinsic factors that include but are not limited to: the privileged status of those being recorded; the likelihood that the means of a certain tactic will play into existing narratives or stereotypes; and/or the desire for a “safe space” where sensitive issues are discussed.

Within occupations, issues of transparency and privacy are often embedded within larger discussions of what it takes to create safe spaces for specific conversations and actions. Occupations frequently establish caucuses for people of color, women, LGBT communities, the homeless, and even self-described political radicals. These are places where those who share a common affinity can organize and call out occupations for their own acts of privilege or unintended racism classism, or sexism. These are platforms for internally dealing with the kinds of structural prejudice that all mass movements must deal with. In order for caucuses to function, they cannot put all of their meetings on ustream or even necessarily announce where and when they are meeting. Caucuses frequently deal with allegations of separatism and reverse racism. Such accusations often do more to derail important conversations all-together, rather than confronting intricate problems with well thought-out arguments made in the confidence of like-minded others.

Tactic 2: Notions of transparency and privacy are not only constantly evolving, they are also a function of privilege, tactics, and expected reception by an imagined audience. Universal concepts or policies of transparency and privacy are often detrimental to or discount the experiences of historically disadvantaged groups. Always consider the subject and imagined audiences of recorded and widely disseminated images and text.

Conclusion 

Whenever a Ustream  goes live from a news-studio-in-a-backpack, or a critique of tactics and ideology goes out on the web, the researcher or reflexive activist should begin looking for or considering the effects of-

• confirmation biases of imagined or intended audiences;
• concepts of transparency held by the subject;
• privacy as a function of withholding information from certain people or for a certain time
• subjects’ histories of privilege and structural discrimination;

Next week I will be discussing the roll of large technical systems (LTSs) in communication and organization. More specifically, I will consider the embedded hierarchy and labor organization within LTSs and in what ways they impede horizontal organization. From there, I will consider methods of appropriation and alternative pathways.

Part 2

Most of our interactions with technology are rather mundane. We flip a light switch, buckle our seat belts, or place a phone call. We have a tacit knowledge of how these devices work. In other words, we have relatively standard, institutionalized, ways of interacting with familiar technologies. For example: if I were to drive someone else’s car, even if it is an unfamiliar model, I do not immediately consult the user manual. I look around for the familiar controls, maybe flick the blinkers on while the car is still in the drive way, and off I go. Removal of these technologies (or even significant alterations) can cause confusion. This is immediately evident if you are trying to meet a friend who does not own a cell phone. Typical conventions for finding the person in a crowded public space (“Yeah, I’m here. Near the stage? Yeah I see you waving.”) are not available to you. In years prior to widespread cell phone adoption, you might have made more detailed plans before heading out (“We’ll meet by the stage at 11PM.”) but now we work out the details on the fly. Operating cars and using cell phones are just a few mundane examples of how technologies shape social behavior beyond the actions needed to operate and maintain them. The widespread adoption of technologies, and the decisions by individual groups to utilize technologies can have a profound impact on the social order of communities. This second part of the Tactical Survey will help academics, activists, and activist academics assess the roll of information technology in a movement and make better decisions on when and how to use tools like social media, live video, and other forms of computer-mediated communication.

“The Master’s Tools” or, The Apparent Hypocrisy of Apple Computers in Zuccotti Park

Skeptical journalists and talking heads were quick to point out an apparent hypocrisy within the Occupy Wall Street movement. How can these hippies protest corporations when they are using Apple computers? The earliest of these pronouncements came from a New York Times piece that ended with:

One day, a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Adam Sarzen, a decade or so older than many of the protesters, came to Zuccotti Park seemingly just to shake his head. “Look at these kids, sitting here with their Apple computers,” he said. “Apple, one of the biggest monopolies in the world. It trades at $400 a share. Do they even know that?”

These sorts of observations are usually left unchallenged. Eric Randall, writing in The Atlantic, noticed this trend and wrote:

Depicting protestors sitting on their MacBooks fits in with the broader narrative the media has settled on, one that depicts a disorganized group of well-educated college grads who can’t figure out how to stay on message. The MacBook seems always to be used as a sort of tongue-in-cheek “stuff white people like” condemnation of the jobless, disenfranchised protestors who can somehow swing a $1,300 computer.

This is nothing new. Ever since the “Battle for Seattle” Western news outlets have used this particular narrative to discredit activists and reasserts the legitimacy of status quo consumerism. Sociologist Richard J.F. Day comments on this rhetorical device in his book Gramsci is Dead: “This is an extremely common trope of exclusion by inclusion, which works by trying to show that They (anarchist activists) are no less tainted with the stain of capitalist individualism than We (good capitalist citizens) are, and therefore have no right to criticize the status quo.”

Members of OWS have responded to these sorts of accusations, but (predictably) little has changed. Randall quotes the occupywallst.org blog‘s response:

This is a specious argument, that if taken to its conclusion would preclude the use of any product to those angered by the injustice of its producer. If you disagree with the policy of GE’s board, you cannot own a refrigerator, if a major paper conglomerate cooks its books you may not use toilet paper. This protest is against injustice committed by the greedy, not commerce itself or the products of corporations.

This appears to be an intractable problem. The powerful get to where they are by making lots of people need (and therefore buy) their stuff. They become an obligatory point of passage.  An alternative is to engage in “lifestyle politics” and avoid the use of technologies that are incompatible with your politics. This, however, usually means you are spending considerable time and effort building new capacities from the ground up, and not using your energy and resources to actually fight what you see as wrong in the world. To the extent that fighting for change and building alternative capacities are mutually exclusive tactics, a collective must make a decision on time horizons and overall goals. In a pluralist social movement like #OWS, there is enough capacity to do both. Some can fight with the problematic tools that are currently available (e.g. Apple computers and Twitter) while others work on new technologies that are less connected to the corporations.

Building Alternative Capacity

Since the eviction of almost every physical occupation in the United States, occupiers (especially the geeky ones) have been hard at work finding new and inventive ways of coordinating and connecting. One of these efforts is TheGlobalSquare.org– a multilingual, open-source social networking platform that would offer a “platform for the movement.” The media has already billed the project as “Occupy Wall Street Builds Facebook Alternative” but that only tells half the story. Building an alternative to Facebook also means building an alternative set of behaviors. Services like Twitter and Facebook are built with a certain kind of user in mind. They can be used for activism, but they are built for monetizing social activity. This means identity-protecting pseudonyms are forbidden, and censorship is negotiable.

Social media technologies are built with equal parts computer code and social norms. The assumed relationship of the individual to the collective is built into the system. For Facebook that means being open to everyone. Its institutionalized through and by the default settings of your account and the corporate business model. For Twitter, it means talk and connect as much as possible, but within the bounds and abilities of state authorities to suppress free speech on the web. Global Square’s stated philosophy is (in part):

The Global Square recognizes the principles of personal privacy as a basic right of individuals and transparency to all users as an obligation for public systems. While User Profiles will allow for as much privacy as the individual desires (technology permitting), Squares, Events, and Task Groups must be, at minimum, completely transparent to their user groups, and Systems must be completely transparent for full auditing capability by all Users.

Here, again, we see the delicate interplay of transparency and privacy that characterizes Occupy Wall Street. For Global Square, privacy of the individual is paramount, but that privacy is nested within two levels of transparency- transparency of collectives to its constituent individuals, and global transparency of governing sociotechnical systems to all users. Chris Kelty used the term recursive publics in his book Two Bits to describe communities of open-source coders that develop platforms that allow for and sustain the community. Global Square represents a similar social recursion: it is a platform to build capacity for new platforms of capacity building.

Coda

Granted, the recursion can only go so deep. The code for Facebook or Global Square still run on the problematic hardware part 2 opened up with. The construction of open source hardware is much more complicated and resource intensive. This begs the question: Is it possible to have widely available digital technology in a world without exploited labor? Are the rare earth metals in our smart phones counter-revolutionary? What would a socially just version of Moore’s Law look like? These are questions left to future posts and other authors. What activists can and must do now, is enroll the expertise of engineers and scientist to explore these questions. This might mean activists learning the skills of engineering and science, but it might also mean creating a revolutionary computer science. Creating a computer for the people will be no easy task, and might mean creating a totally new technical artifact. It may also mean redefining technological progress to include lateral shifts that produce similar computational power but in more socially just ways. It is not enough to use these tools for good, we have to make new tools that are good.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Last Friday, Rachel Maddow reported (video clip above, full transcript here) that hundreds of citizens had suddenly started posting questions on the Facebook pages of Virginia Governor Ryan McDougle and Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. Their pages were full of questions on women’s health issues and usually included some kind of statement about why they were going to the Facebook page for this information. Here’s an example from Brownback’s page:

The seemingly-coordinated effort draws attention to the recent flurry of forced ultrasound bills that are being passed in state legislatures. Media outlets have started calling it “sarcasm bombing” although the source of that term is difficult to find. ABC News simply says: “One website labelled the messages ‘Sarcasm Bombing’ for the tounge-in-cheek [sic] way the users ask the politicians for help.” A few hours of intensive googling only brings up more headlines parroting the words “sarcasm bomb” but no actual origin story. These events (which have now spread to Governor Rick Perry of Texas as well) raise several important questions but I am only going to focus on one: Can we call Facebook a “Feminist Technology”?

Defining “Feminist Technology”

It’s a big question that requires us to marshal vague terms and lots of data. This post cannot answer the question in its entirety but we can make a dent. First I want to define what I mean by “feminist technology.” I will borrow the definition articulated by Linda Layne in the edited volume “Feminist Technologies” (2010). She describes feminist technologies as, “tools plus knowledge that enhance women’s ability to develop, expand, and express their capacities.”  On its face, it seems like a simple definition, but we immediately run into problems. First, women are not a single category and any given technology can have various consequences- many of them unintended. We might look at the average or net effect, but those two metrics frequently obscure the plights of the least powerful. A more generative discussion might compare imagined and documented individual experiences and compare those to the aggregate effects on the larger set. We might also want to consider whether or not helping a particular subset of women (such as pro-choice women), at the expense of concretizing or reifying gender differences is a feminist technology. Layne acknowledges these dynamics when she says, “…the overall effects on women must be considered. Even a technology that improves things for some women may not qualify as feminist if it does so in a way that perpetuates the gender gap.”

Technologies in Societies of Inequality

We must also recognize that individual technologies cannot change gender relations by themselves, but they can play a large role in altering the sociotechnical systems they inhabit. In other words, Facebook (or any single page) will not radically transform gender politics, but it certainly changes the game.

It is probably safe to say that when Mark Zuckerberg was building Facebook, feminism was not on his mind. The first iterations of what would become Facebook were more like “Hot or Not” than MySpace. Even today, Facebook still does not have a single woman on their board of directors while Google and LinkedIn have at least one. But even if Facebook were created with the most egalitarian of intentions, and its board were all women, these are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for being a feminist technology. What matters is if there’s something about how Facebook structures and predefines social action so as to empower women to “develop, expand, and express their capacities.”

Layne, quoting Woodhouse, warns, “New technoscientific capacities introduced into an inequalitarian society will tend disproportionately to benefit the affluent and powerful.” We have no way to empirically assess this statement, but it rings true. If I control a powerful social media network, I’m going to make it benefit my interests. Additionally, new advancements in science and technology often go for a high price before they become affordable for the rest of us. Let’s not forget that Facebook started at Harvard, then to affluent Boston universities and Ivy Leagues, then Stanford, followed by most other American colleges and universities, before opening up to everyone over the age of 13. But the interests of the powerful might run parallel to, or have no impact on, the interests of disenfranchised groups. Sometimes, the use of the latter plays to the interests of the former. When people make news on Facebook, Facebook gets free advertising. Anything that draws users to Facebook, and adds to their revenue stream without violating their terms of service, is welcome. Technology might flow to the powerful by default, but that does not necessarily stop marginalized groups from appropriating and adapting these technologies for their own ends. Information and communication technologies do not always follow the trends of other technologies.

Facebook as a Feminist Technology

Facebook seems agnostic to the intentions of its activist users, so long as it does not threaten business as usual. We saw this last year in the case of the Arab Spring, where Facebook would deactivate activists’ accounts if someone (read: political enemies) claimed they were using pseudonyms. As I have stated before, social media companies are very interested in tapping new markets in repressive regimes, but not out of the goodness of their hearts. They need more markets, and those markets require that they strike a profitable balance between transparency, privacy, government laws, and their own business models. As it stands right now, filling governors’ Facebook pages with sarcastic women’s health problems is not a threat to Facebook’s revenue. In fact, it probably increases traffic for what would normally be an inactive page. (When was the last time you checked out Governor Brownback’s page?) If these sorts of demonstrations caused every elected leader to deactivate their accounts in fear of similar retribution, we might see a reaction from Facebook. Then again, a rebuke by Facebook could spur an expensive boycott.

Does this tenuous position of monetized activism, amount to “feminist technology”? I would say no. But there might be one saving grace. I cannot help but see this “sarcasm bombing” in the same vein as mic-checking public figures. As Sarah Wanenchak said in our blog late last year:

…what was a tool of communication is now also a tool for directed and targeted protest. Communication is still a huge part of this; it can’t not be, given that one grievance common to many members of the Occupy movement is a perceived lack of “voice” in politics. Communication, in this instance, is protest. And the technology and the protest itself are fundamentally intertwined.

This also stands against the fallacy that technology itself is neutral: in its very design the Human Microphone is imbued with the ideology of its makers–especially given that its components are actual human voices, used with intent and consent. It might be used for any number of things, but it is inseparable from the people who created it and the people who bring it into being every time it’s used.

Mic-checking has been an effective (depending on your metric) method of protest that drowns out one powerful voice with the voices of many others. These high-profile mic checks are usually led by men, but I can recall several that sound like they were led by women. This balance is rarely found in day-to-day actions, and #ows is no exception. Men can (and will) reestablish their privilege first and foremost, by using the biological advantages of louder voices and physical strength. While we can identify men and women (mostly) on these pages, every user’s post is treated the same by the software. Everyone has the same box to type in, with the same font, and are positioned in chronological order. It is by no means a gender neutral space, but it does impose an equalizing force. A woman might be denied the ability to lead a mic check because “her voice isn’t loud enough” but anyone can lead the calvary charge to Perry’s wall. Facebook users can also opt to hide as much about themselves as possible, by raising their privacy settings and inserting a black box for a profile picture. So long as no one starts reporting profiles, activists can even switch their stated gender for whatever suits their goals. Insomuch as Facebook helps women activists overcome the sorts of barriers that they face offline, Facebook might be seen as a feminist technology.

Sarcasm bombing is another prime example of the complexity of our augmented reality. New technologies can support old hierarchies, and old technologies can do and mean new things after they have been appropriated or deconstructed (physically as well as metaphysically) by new users. When we evaluate technologies’ emancipatory potential we must be prepared for inconclusive or mixed results. The kinds of all-or-nothing conclusions made by popular press writers and most journalists miss the subtle and incremental changes that, over the course of time, end up changing our society.

I actually discovered it after the project was over. The duckies, the sports racers, world-wide sandwiches, and the ugly MySpace profiles were all finished projects that had been immortalized in this strange, eclectic mix of abruptly (but expertly) edited videos. I don’t remember how I found out about “The Show with Ze Frank,” but it was probably on the recommendation of some podcast host. The web site that housed all of the videos for “The Show” was very strange for two reasons- 1) it had rubber duckies of various sizes, colors, and shapes and; 2) It was not Youtube. Today, the site has undergone only minor changes. The proprietary video player has now been replaced with a blip.tv player and there’s a button on the right that allows you to “like” every video on Facebook. “The Show” drew thousands of viewers before Youtube was the go-to place for video on the Internet. The episodes were shared between dedicated fans while Facebook was only available to people with certain college email addresses. But what is, truly remarkable about “The Show” is that you have either stopped reading this and started watching your favorite videos all over again, or you have never heard of this before but the video above has instant resonance with you. It’s playful, but incredibly honest at the same time. It’s simultaneously goofy and sincere. It’s the ur comedy viral video show and after a very successful run on Kickstarter, it’s coming back.

Are the new readers gone yet? No? Then I should probably go over some background information:

Ze Frank made a video every weekday for an entire year starting on March 17, 2006. They were not uploaded on Youtube (and you still cannot find them) but they were syndicated on an RSS feed. You could get them as a video podcast download or view them on his web site. Watching The Show on the web site was a little more rewarding than the podcast feed. He would make subtle (or not so subtle) gestures to the sidebar and other parts of the site from his (the videos’?) position in the center of the page. The show’s content was user-driven. Ze would ask viewers (called sports racers) to dress up their vacuum cleaners, submit “power moves“, or make an “earth sandwich.” Almost every episode included a small segment called “s-s-s-something from the comments.” Ze would also discuss a variety of subjects including politics, love, board games, marketing, and anti-intellectualism.

Now, almost five years after the last episode, Ze Frank has collected $146,752 to make “A Show with Ze Frank.” Here’s the pitch:

I think The Show worked because it gave people a strong sense of community. Obviously there’s almost nothing physical about this community. There are shirts, some sports racer meetups, and the physical hardware that The Show is saved on, but the rest is all hyperreal and augmented. The community contains a secret language (hence my generous use of “scare quotes”) of surreal symbols and words. Episodes stand alone as entertaining individual videos, but they are emotionally resonant when you’ve seen or participated in the whole project. This is the difference between projects like Epic Meal Time, 5 Second Films and even My Drunk Kitchen. These shows have dedicated followers and foster varying degrees of community involvement. Hannah Hart’s work comes close, but actual MDK episodes rarely make requests for material for future shows.

Ze Frank’s shows are recursive. The Show’s very existence creates a viewership community, which then creates content for more shows, which then makes for a more dedicated community. This sort of recursive, prosumer entertainment relies on the same self-organizing social forces that make Facebook or Performative Internet memes possible. The cohesion and dedication of these communities are constituted and constantly maintained through the development of various organizing logics. These include in-jokes, arcane vocabulary, and symbols (usually on t-shirts) just to name a few. Ze Frank, consciously or subconsciously, knows this and has made the establishment of these organizing logics, a top priority. Backers of “A Show with Ze Frank” have already received nine updates. The first solicit ideas for community projects. Then comes update number 4:

You have to agree on the names for the 4 Gabbles that everyone will be divided into when the show begins. I will need them by next Thursday (March 8 )

UPDATE : Once you decide on the names I will need a hanko seal design for each. I have provided a template. use only lines of that thickness, remember they have to be carved. (i will make some final edits once they are submitted) http://www.zefrank.com/kickstarter/hanko_template.ai

if you are interested in how to make these stamps, i created a little tutorial : http://zefrank.tumblr.com/post/18626339725/how-to-make-your-hanko-stamp

I dont’ know what a Gabble is, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to mean a lot to me in the next few months.

This has been David Banks, theorizing so you don’t have to.

It’s the kind of story that writes itself. A popular media entity, on one of the oldest forms of electronic mass media, bears the brunt of activists’ Facebook wrath. It combines two old rivalries: liberals and conservatives and new media versus old media. In case you missed it, here’s the brief synopsis of events from ABC news:

Rush Limbaugh remains in big trouble. Advertisers – 11 at last count – are pulling spots off his radio talk show because of the reaction to his calling Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.” Opponents are mobilizing on social media for a long campaign to try to convince even more sponsors to drop his program. Ms. Fluke herself has rejected as insufficient Mr. Limbaugh’s attempts at apology

Fluke had testified before congress about the importance of “the pill” for medical uses beyond birth control. Rush concluded that she was having so much sex that she needed the American tax payer to help defer the cost of her contraceptives. (This has led to some speculation that conservatives don’t know how hormonal birth control works.) Thousands of people are organizing to get advertisers to pull their money out of Rush Limbaugh’s show, and many of them are organizing via Twitter and Facebook. Will we be subjected to another round of technologically deterministic news stories about “cyber revolution,” or are we going to have a more nuanced conversation? More precisely, does Rush have a social media problem or has he -all things being equal- just gone too far this time?The headlines almost write themselves. The rivals are polar opposites and very well known. In one corner, the old heavyweight champion: syndicated AM radio. In the other corner, the young and nimble contender: social media. The Washington Post is already covering the story from a social media angle: “Limbaugh backlash on Facebook, Twitter put pressure on advertisers.”

But is it only a matter of time before someone writes the headline, “Social Media Versus Radio In Battle Over Women’s Rights”?

Augmented activism is a new tactic but, as we have said before, it is constantly being improved and refined. As I write this, over 31,000 people have “liked” the “Boycott Rush Limbaugh’s Sponsors to SHUT HIM DOWN” page. (In the time it took to proof this post and get distracted by this youtube video another 1,000 or so people liked it.) Although Rush no longer makes the trending topics list, my Twitter feed is still full of Rush-related tweets. The Facebook page is full of people swapping stories about their calls to various advertisers and questions about what advertisers are left. For example here are a few posts about Netflix:

This sort of activism isn’t new. Letter writing campaigns are as old as America itself. What is new, is the immediate evidence of a collective effort. My letter seems small, 30,000 people feeling the same way does not. I may disagree with you on every other topic, but within this narrowly-focused event, we share a similar affinity and purpose. Even more importantly, our activism has an audience even if mainstream media doesn’t pay attention. Social media has a reflexive relationship with the social activity it fosters and enables. We act because we know there’s an effective and easily accessible venue for our speech and collaboration.

This is interesting from a social theory and media/communications perspective, but does it makes sense to talk about social media versus anything? Probably not. To the extent that certain technologies enable certain kinds of action, there is a narrative there. Radio broadcasts a single message to many passive listeners. There are call-ins, sure, but they choose who gets to talk. Social media is about a lot of people talking to each other. Not everyone gets heard, but if an idea strikes a cord with a lot of people it gets very popular very fast. Sometimes its a bunch of people reacting to a popular figure who said something on Twitter, but many times the news-worthy social media event is about lots of people thinking or doing the same thing.

Now, it would be convenient for this narrative if the latter ‘s popularity were rising at the expense of the former, but that is not the case. According to Arbitron, between 2010 and 2011 an additional 1.4 million people over the age of 12 started listening to the radio. NPR and conservative AM talk radio have seen new highs in ratings. Whatever is happening here, it is not a zero-sum game. Its also worth noting that one of the companies buying up recently-vacated commercial slots is a social media service, albiet a morally questionable one.

News-worthy social media stories have two flavors: 1) one person says a controversial or exciting thing and everyone reacts or, 2) an event is occurring and some significant part of it is being mediated through and by social media. I do not think Rush Limbaugh is going to go the way of the dodo bird, but he will certainly take a hit. Social media can help organize an effective large-scale advertiser boycott, but the presence of Facebook and Twitter do not mean conservative talk radio’s days are numbered. Social media helps organize information without the presence of a formal organizing body. But social media and radio are not mutually exclusive of one-another. The only social media story here is the same one we heard in the Arab Spring and the #occupy protests: social media gives us a guaranteed audience for our activism. It is easier to participate, and that participation is much more visible to many more people.

Whatever ends up happening to Rush Limbaugh (probably nothing) social media will certainly be part of the story. Access to social media, however,  is not a necessary, nor a sufficient cause for activism. You will see the headlines (Here’s another one! “Rush Limbaugh’s Advertisers Facing Social Media Firestorm“) but you will know better. Dissent happens on social media, it is even encouraged by social media, but it is not because of social media.

From June 27-29 I will be hosting (throwing?) the Technoscience as Activism Conference in Troy, NY. We are currently accepting abstracts for conference presentations and workshop proposals through March 15th. The conference is sponsored, in part, through Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s 3Helix Program funded through the National Science Foundation’s GK-12 fellowship. The conference will focus on community-situated design and look for new approaches that interweave social justice and science/technology. Participants are also encouraged to submit full papers for potential inclusion in a special theme issue of the open-access journal PscyhNology. Conference participants will be expected to participate in both moderated panel sessions on the PRI campus as well as hands-on workshops held throughout the Troy community. There are two goals of this conference: 1) To facilitate the free exchange of ideas across multiple boundaries on the topic of technoscience as activism and; 2) offer an experimental alternative to the traditional role/format of academic conferences. This new experimental format includes active collaboration with the geographically-defined community that hosts the conference.

Back in October, after attending the annual meeting for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S),  I posted a critique of the traditional conference format. I was frustrated with the apparent hypocrisy of expensive, closed-door conferences full of people that want to democratize science. Industry-backed pundits and authors have been much more successful in shaping society’s relationship to science and technology. Where are academics? Where are all of the public intellectuals? While I acknowledge that specialists need a place to exchange ideas amongst themselves, there are ways of making academic conferences more transparent and the products of collaboration more accessible. Panels can be recorded and posted on the web, and proceedings can be made available for free or by donation online. It might not hurt to host the conferences in less expensive venues as well. But smaller, more focused conferences like TAA need to go even further. Holding them on campus can reduce the costs, but organizers should consider the possibility of collaboration with community groups. Is a community garden building a new cistern? Are there free schools interested in search of new pedagogical tools? These are the sorts of community relationships that not only help community groups, but also improve the work of academics.

It is essential to work with and not for community institutions and organizations. No one wants a flock of academics to descend from their ivory tower onto a 30-year-old community institution and tell everyone what to do. A reflexive approach to privilege and authority within the academy is necessary for effective and generative collaborations between academics and community organizations. Scientists do not have all the answers, but they frequently hold most of the power. A generative collaboration between professionals and communities requires strong ties and mutually understood commitments to the projects at hand. Civic science means more than “add community involvement and stir.” Such superficial approaches can actually lead to worse outcomes and less accountability [Pertinent information comes at 7:44 in the video.].

This is no simple task. Overreaches in authority by scientists are, unfortunately, almost inevitable. But there are good examples of how to do it right. A couple of examples include the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) and the work to restore New Orleans communities destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, as documented by Barbara Allen and Isabelle Maret [PDF]. In both cases, the role of academic scientists are problemitized and subsequently redefined as (among other roles) support personel for citizens-led work. The mission statement for PLOTS says it this way:

Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. PLOTS achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.

The Technoscience as Activism Conference is deeply rooted in the sociological/pedagogical/conceptual array of DIY and hacker culture. The conference serves as a medium for the exchange of ideas, but the medium itself is also up for review, criticism, appropriation, and alteration. As the conference gets closer, and more people begin to propose workshops and presentations, the medium will become more tangible. This is where you come in. I hope academics and nonacademics alike are inspired to make this conference useful to them.

The call for papers and the submission forms can be found on the 3Helix Program website, but are reproduced here:

This conference seeks new approaches to interweaving social justice and science/technology. Some that are already known include DIY and “maker” communities, Open Source Science, “Technologies for Non-violent Social Change,” and other new hybrid forms of collaboration that put technoscience in the hands of non-experts, local communities, indigenous groups and the less powerful. Typical approaches to “ethics in science” treat ethics as a police officer that operates at the borders, slapping science on the wrist when it over-steps. How can we treat ethics instead as a pro-active force, integrated from the start? Social scientists studying scientific controversy may know very little about the particulars of the science, and the scientist embroiled within the controversy may not know very much about the dynamics of communities or the relations of power between experts and the public. This conference will highlight ways to provoke engineers, social scientists, and the educators of future thinkers into considering new and innovative methods of merging social and technical dimensions of science and engineering research, teaching and practice. It will contribute to the possibilities for a “two way bridge” across the lay/expert divide; one in which social justice is informed by technoscience and not just technoscience informed by social justice. To this end, we are looking for papers and proposed panels that can discuss transformative possibilities for every level of making science, scientists, technology, engineers, and knowledge. Existing categories in which pertinent (and important) discussions are taking place are, but is not limited to, K-12 STEM education, advanced pedagogy in the natural/physical/life sciences, ethics, public engagement/understanding of science, theoretical and social studies on information and communication technology, political sociology of science, Science and Technology Studies, appropriating technology, feminist studies, emerging nanotechnology, postcolonial studies, engineering education, urban studies, and experimental art.

Individual presentations can be submitted here

Workshop presentations can be submitted here

Facebook Event Page

See you in June!

Follow me on Twitter! @da_banks

A Review of Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants

Usually, I would not bother reviewing a book that has been out for over a year, but Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants complicates this blog’s ongoing discussion of public intellectuals and the translation of social theory into popular press books. Kelly claims to have read “every book on the philosophy and theory of technology.” If we are to take him at his word, and if we assume his own conclusions are based on (or are at the very least- informed by) that reading, we should seriously consider the overall quality of the corpus of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields. As social scientists we must ask ourselves: If Kelly’s work can legitimately connect itself to the likes of Nye, Winner, and Ellul, and still produce a politically and morally ambivalent conclusion, are we failing to provide theoretical tools that lead to a better world?

A little less than a year ago, Evgeny Morozov reviewed What Technology Wants. His conclusion –expressed in his typical wry style- cuts to the heart of the matter:

Kelly is not the first technology guru to make a living by selling advice to corporations. But it is hard to imagine the previous generation of serious thinkers about technology—the likes of Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford and John Dewey—moonlighting as corporate advisers to Danone and Halliburton. In contrast, most of today’s technology gurus-from Kevin Kelly to Clay Shirky to Douglas Rushkoff—take special pride in publicizing how deeply embedded they are in the very industry that they are supposed to scrutinize. Perhaps this is what technology wants.

Kelly’s thesis is not too far off from the work of Mumford or Ellul. Whereas Ellul might say technique has always been a force in human history but has only recently overcome countervailing institutions; and Mumford would agree that the industrial revolution needed both steam power and the socioeconomic desire for factory efficiency; Kelly contends that the technium is a natural force that springs from our collective imagination and goes to work assembling itself and acting as a counter-balance to natural entropy. Natural forces want chaos; the technium wants to bring order and complexity to systems. In other words, technology wants nothing more than to add choice, complexity, and diversity to the universe. This cosmic force, according to Kelly, provides a net benefit to society and must be left alone in order to flourish.

I will admit loudly and declaratively, that this book does more to popularize critical thinking on technology than a dozen careers in STS. That being said, I completely disagree with Kelly’s conclusions. This book, as Morozov notes, sits (unapologetically and rather comfortably) next to orthodox industry talk about ever-increasing prosperity delivered by scientific innovation. Kelly makes dozens of strong declarations that could only come from a white man that can mitigate the risks of modern society. “When it comes to risk aversion,” Kelly asserts, “we are not rational.” He uses this line of reasoning to promote a laissez faire attitude toward precautionary regulations of new or existing technologies. Demanding nothing less than irrefutable proof of danger would have kept lead paint and asbestos on the market. It also assumes equal access to environmental monitoring and product safety. Poor communities rarely have control over (or are even aware of) the environmental dangers that threaten their homes. This lack of scientific, measurable proof is a function of values and morals- things that Kelly refuses to factor into his work because, for him, global average progress is the only kind of progress that matters.

Strangely enough, the essays of Charles Dickens become relevant here. Dickens was a staunch critic of, what was then, the new field of statistics. For Dickens, the invention of the “average man” was a powerful silencing force for politicians and greedy businessmen. They need only point to the increasing wage/health/happiness of the “average person” to justify their actions. Talk of averages prevented conversations about the poorest in a society. Kelly does the same thing when dismissing the darker sides of the “technium”:

He [Wendell Berry] gets stuck on the cold, hard, yucky, stuff, such as steam engines, chemicals, and hardware, which may be the mere juvenile state of more mature things. Viewed from a wider perspective, where steam engines are merely a tiny part of the whole, convivial forms of technology really do allow us to be better.

Who is the “we” that is living better? The chinese sweatshop workers who build iPads are more likely to deal with the “yucky stuff” than the Palo Alto knowledge worker. Kelly challenges the claims made by the Amish about living totally off the grid (they purchase and rely upon goods that are manufactured using tools they outlaw in their own communities) but does not offer the same critical thought to American capitalism. We need authoritarian regimes to produce the artifacts that embody the glorious technium.

For Kelly, “moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a useful product of our wills and minds, and thus it is a technology.” Human betterment is “propelled by technology” so any effort to slow down technological progress is an effort to slow down social betterment. This is a common analytical error that is not unique to Kelly. Most popular press books, through one way or another, conclude that technological progress is equivalent to; evidence of; or a prerequisite for social change. Winner has challenged these sorts of claims throughout his work, but it is ignored by Kelly.

If Kelly believes that the technium is the cosmic propeller of human advancement, then I am not entirely surprised that he would devote an entire chapter to Ted Kacynski’s manifesto. As a member of the society that was once suspected of housing the Unabomber [PDF] I cannot fault Kelly for this bit of stagecraft. The manifesto is sensational, very controversial, and –as an entire room of Ph.Ds concluded [pay wall]- not totally wrong. But Kacynski’s work would have never passed the editorial board of ST&HV and his abstract would not have been admitted to 4S. Kelly’s book and Kacynski’s writings both benefit from extreme abstraction and macro perspectives that erase the kinds of important distinctions that make for good theory and critique. Both Kelly and Kacynski do a poor job of operationalizing the relationship of nature and technology. For Kacynski, technology is a distinct, identifiable and alien entity that invades the natural order. For Kelly, technology emerges out of human activity and picks up where biology left off- diversifying and adding complexity to the universe. These sweeping explanations ignore the social realities of knowledge production and the embedded politics of technological artifacts.

Kelly gives the average reader a powerful shove into the world of science and technology studies. He urges us to earnestly consider the deeper meaning and underlying motivations of our creations. But his conclusions are, by design, morally ambiguous and dangerously ambivalent to the real-world plight of most humans.Anyone with a degree in Science and Technology Studies should read Kelly’s book. Not because he has a new set of ideas that you should incorporate into your work, or because he he does a good job of bringing the theories of Winner, Nye and Ellul to a popular audience. He does neither of these things. Instead, Kelly has taken advantage of the social problems approach that is so popular within STS, and has provided a solution- a practice that is not very popular in STS. My bookshelf is full of very well-articulated problems, but very few solutions. Kelly’s book has one very clear suggestion- leave technology alone so that it may reach its inevitable conclusion. I am not sure if this means STS writers need to offer more prescriptive conclusions, or we must do a better job of correcting the record when our work is used to further the goals of industry. Either way, Kelly has taught us all a valuable lesson that we cannot afford to ignore.

Follow me on Twitter: @da_banks