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.

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.

“I must rule with eye and claw — as the hawk among lesser birds.”

-Duke Leo Atreides in Book 1: Dune

Over a week ago, Twitter announced a new censorship policy, stating that it would comply with any “valid and applicable legal request” to take down tweets. The announcement came just as we were still digesting Google’s unified privacy policy and were still debating the (now confirmed) rumors that Facebook was releasing an IPO. Twitter has since been applauded, denounced, and dissected by a variety of scholars, media critics, and business leaders. In this post I will give a brief summary of the controversy, briefly weigh in with a commentary of my own, and conclude with a discussion of what all this means for theorizing online social activity.

The Controversy

Twitter’s new policy has been discussed by a variety of sources, but two authors –Zeynep Tufekci and BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza– do an excellent job of synthesizing the major threads of the debate. Both do such an excellent job that I will, for this section, relegate myself to curator of quotes. If you have read both posts (here and here), then skip to the next section “Understanding Processes and the Process of Understanding.”

Twitter is a private company, not a social movement:

Tufekci-

Twitter can’t fight all free speech battles by itself; and it can’t change laws or governments around the world, nor can it ignore issues of jurisdiction. In particular, if faced with a court order that requires Twitter to identify dissidents in a country where torture or severe repression is in place…

Beschizza-

Twitter’s paid its dues; who doubts that it is the most trustworthy major social network? It’s earned the benefit of the doubt regarding its intentions. It’s unfair that people have accused Twitter of literally betraying activists, when it has done no such thing.

But the most common refrain I hear from Twitter’s defenders is that if you ever expected ethics from a for-profit company, you’ve earned your disappointment. Such naked cynicism from its own supporters can hardly warm hearts at a company that once called itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

 Twitter is engaging in a new and innovative harm reduction strategy, but it is unclear how or if it will work:

Tufekci-

Twitter spokespeople have repeatedly said they will only block content in [sic] “In the face of a valid and applicable legal order.” This is a good standard and I don’t think any company can get around this in jurisdictions where they have physical presence; nor is it clear that they should. Of course, we all need to be watching carefully to ensure that they do so and not just cooperate with governments based on “requests.”

Beschizza-

Twitter anticipates being able to censor only to local readers, and appears to anticipate easy circumvention loopholes. But how can it pick which court orders it will obey? If local courts demand more oppressive local measures and assert global jurisdiction over Twitter’s operations, Twitter could have to choose between obedience, local staffers’ freedom or jobs, or the indiscriminate blocking that all this is supposed to avoid.

[…]

More likely, English courts are in the habit of issuing “superinjunctions” to ban censored media from even disclosing the fact that they’ve been censored—given its pledge to publish, Twitter may have to choose between its commitment to transparency and avoiding contempt of court.

Keeping an open and transparent list of censored tweets behaves differently than just removing the tweet altogether:

Tufekci-

I suspect this policy will cause some governments to continue to block Twitter on the whole because it doesn’t make it easy for governments to block content (they have to at least follow some level of procedure) and it creates a “Streisand effect” on censored tweets.

Beschizza-

It’s understandable why foreign activists hate Twitter’s new policy: they’re the ones who would be silenced by it in their own countries. But that plain fact blurs under our endless capacity for abstraction, in which their political awareness morphs into a demented reflection of our own.

[…]

This view—that unless a censor can eradicate a message worldwide, it isn’t really censorship—strikes me as the point where the danger of Twitter’s compromise becomes most apparent. It inoculates our concern for the activist who has been silenced (and for the intended audience who cannot hear him) with our own pointless knowledge of his and their suffering.

The censoring is not very robust. A user can change their country settings or use a proxy network to get censored tweets.

Tufekci-

 The policy is not made hard to circumvent. Twitter helpfully included instructions on how to change your country (“manually override” the country setting which is determined by IP). I don’t know about you, but does this sound like Twitter is caving? Also, obviously, Tor users and proxy users will be able to access the content fairly easily.

Understanding Processes and the Process of Understanding

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.” The First Law of Mentat, quoted by Paul Atreides to Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

Last Wednesday, on this blog, P.J. Rey claimed (rather provocatively): “There is no ‘cyberspace.'” In his post he gave us the etemology of the word “cyberspace”. It was coined by the cyberpunk author William Gibson as a “consensual hallucination” that gave visual metaphors to abstract concepts and ideas. P.J. rightly concludes that such a depiction does not accurately reflect how we use the Internet today. Online activity effects all of us, whether we use the internet or not. The Arab Spring, Occupy protests, and Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign are evidence of the nonconsensual nature of the web. It is not a hallucination for the same reason. As P.J. says, “Causality is bi-directional. We are all part of the same human-computer system.” What happens online, does not stay online. I contend, however, that we are experiencing a kind of consensual hallucination, but of a totally different sort. Our consensual hallucination treats the real and material needs and concerns of individuals as rights and ideals that can be  taken out of their context and abstracted into otherworldly business platitudes. The  inventors and innovators of technology embed within their creations, the politics of their own worldview. Or, as philosopher and social theorist Langdon Winner put it: “artifacts have politics.”

The titans of the information economy (e.g. Zuckerberg, Costolo, Schmidt, Jobs) are usually of a Western persuasion. Their privileged lives are reflected in their creations. If those creations are intangible, like a use policy, the CEOs start sounding more like religious leaders than software developers. In the original 2011 post “The Tweets Must Flow” Twitter’s creator, Biz Stone and General Counsel (council?)  Alex Macgillvray wrote:

The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.

Western ethics regarding freedom of expression are just as much a part of Twitter as the REST architecture, the physical servers it runs on, and the HTML that codes the web page. Twitter’s new censorship process is simultaneously a business problem, a technical issue, and an ethical conundrum. Figuring out where one begins and the other ends is nearly impossible. When this array of code and ethics reaches the borders of (for example) Egypt, the employees of Twitter are faced with a trifecta of sociotechnical problems that must be solved to the varying satisfaction and dissatisfaction of investors (which includes a Saudi Prince) , American lawmakers, Egyptian authorities, and users.

When companies like Twitter (although this applies to Facebook, Google, and many others) do substantial business in other nations, they must engage in a process of resistance and accommodation quite similar to that of a scientist. This process, as explained by Andrew Pickering, entails working to towards a certain end (maintaining a business presence in Egypt), by way of resisting obstacles and accommodating those that you cannot. This can take the form of putting your foreign employees in harms way, caving to the demands of powerful regimes, protecting your brand by avoiding controversy altogether, or embracing your role as a potential platform for grassroots democracy. In the end, any privacy policy is going to say something about how the calculus of ethics and profitable business. Sometimes those two things share a similar goal, other times they diverge. Sometimes achieving both means letting a Syrian activist go to jail, overthrowing the Mubarak’s government, or creating certified user accounts for Justin Bieber and Charlie Sheen. Yes, Twitter is a business looking for profit, but the nature of the product means mangling HTML, ethics, and monetization schemes.

The Neoliberalization of the Public Realm

“We are generalists. You can’t draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.”

-Pardot Kynes

Today, when we socialize online, we are almost always using privately owned services. But the prevalence and prominence of private space for the public good is nothing new and is not, by its very nature, a threat to free speech. Occupy Wall Street was able to hold out in Zuccotti park for as long as they did, thanks to a loophole in regulating public land held by private individuals. Some of the greatest physical, offline forums for social action have been created by private businesses looking to establish themselves as the hosts to public life. At the same time, a privately owned mall can stifle free speech just as easily as a repressive government regime. That is why I want to separate out a specific process that is more accurately described as neoliberalization. 

From David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism”,

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political eco- nomic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

[…]

The process of neoliberalization has, however, entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers (even challenging traditional forms of state sover- eignty) but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, repro- ductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart. In so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substi- tuting for all previously held ethical beliefs’, it emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace.

Rather than talk about the difference between private and public, we should be talking about private ownership situated within a strong (and even violent) state institutional framework. The censorship policy that Twitter has developed has less to do about protecting free speech, and more to do with creating a neoliberal framework, through which, the company can most effectively monetize social activity while at the same time, establishing an ethic of speech practices that guide human action. Intention and causation get muddy here. Is this economic activity driven by a desire to see free speech enacted across the globe? Or are Western companies happy to help break the backs of repressive regimes because it is good for business? Or is it a mangle of both? Our cyborg religion of monetized free speech is colonizing repressive nation-states and I doubt anyone knows exactly what kind of world these silicon messiahs have in store for us.

David leads a small following through a virtual desert on twitter! @da_banks

Pitch-perfect Dune quotes care of Wikiquotes

[SPOILER ALERT: details about the first episode of Sherlock“A Study In Pink” are discussed below. The ending is not totally given away, but major story details are revealed.]

A few weeks ago, I challenged Kurt Anderson’s claim that cultural progress and innovation had stagnated in the last twenty years. Anderson, I contend, has ignored new mediums (the Internet), re-invented genres (hip-hop, electronic music), and new cultural stereotypes (geek chic, hipsters). But what ties all of these things together is the central thesis that consumer technologies are just as much cultural artifact as clothes or music. No where is this more obvious and brilliantly executed than in BBC One’s updated interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Set in present day London, “Sherlock” is a reinterpretation of the most famous Holmes mysteries and does an excellent job of translating the Victorian source material into a modern drama. That translation includes dress, idiomatic expressions, and vehicles- but it also includes cell phones, restrictions on smoking, and the War on Terror. Sherlock is a uniquely 21st century show that could not have taken place in the early 2000s or the 90s.The first episode, “A Study in Pink” is a loose adaptation of the first Sherlock Holmes mystery penned by Arthur Conan Doyle titled, “A Study in Scarlet.” (I’ll refer to them from now on as “pink” and “scarlet” respectively.) In both scarlet and pink, Holmes and Watson meet for the first time in a chemistry lab. They agree to be roommates, and immediately fall into a case involving the mysterious poisoning death of a woman [In “scarlet” its actually a man, see the first comment below] who has written “RACHE” (german for revenge) just before her death. In “pink” the word is revealed to be the password on a tracking service on a conspicuously missing mobile phone. The tracking service helps find the killer. In “scarlet” the word refers to revenge for a lost lover, and her missing ring brings the killer to Holmes. Two very similar plot lines, dramatically altered by the realities of technology. While “scarlet” requires putting an ad in a local paper (a paper that has a circulation of only a portion of London- a victorian technology), “pink” uses cell phone tracking and texting. What would this story look like in the 90s? It is difficult to say and I think that is very telling. As The Telegraph’s Olly Grant put it:

There are some good arguments why modernising Holmes might be an unexpectedly good idea. First, Conan Doyle’s tales did once feel genuinely modern; snappy, action-oriented, always more concerned with plot than period details. Second, many of the Holmesian “trimmings” were invented by others; the curly pipe, for example, was introduced by playwright and actor William Gillette in the 1890s.

The Holmes and Watson adventures then, are a good framework for showcasing your era’s overlooked and seldom noted material culture. For example, in both the original stories and Sherlock, Holmes deduces that Watson has a drunk for a brother, whom he rarely speaks to, and who has recently left his wife. He knows this because Holme’s watch has the tell-tale scratches around the key hole of an alcoholic’s shaking hands. Every night, when he goes to wind the watch, he misses a few times and scratches the case. In the 21st century version, the scratches are found around the charger of a smartphone.

The actual existence of a mobile phone in a movie or television show, does not necessarily distinguish it from the last twenty years of media. What does distinguish it from, say 2002- is the ubiquity (and hence, mundanity) of the mobile phone and the central role it plays within the storyline. It is a link to the killer, but we are not supposed to be surprised or impressed that a mobile phone is being used. Its just a good clue:

I was most impressed by how cell phone usage was prominent, but did not become a magical technology. The technology gives us useful information, but it cannot solve the crime. We see Holmes check the weather:

EDIT [2:49PM EST]- Saw this on my wall:

This is the full size of the picture:

EDIT [1:24PM EST]- Buzzfeed has compiled “25 Angry Kids Who Can’t Do Their Homework Because of the Wikipedia Blackout.” While this is pretty funny, it also underscores the need for educators to not just say “don’t use wikipedia” but to help students use networked resources in an appropriate and effective manner.

EDIT [11:25AM EST]- Google has put a black sensor bar over their logo on the search page. Facebook has not done anything officially, but my newsfeed is full of my friends talking about it. Maybe that’s the appropriate response? Public spaces are meant to be forums for discussion, the space itself is somewhat ambivalent.

Original Post- If you’re reading this on January 18th, 2012, then you are probably happy to find something that is not completely blacked out. While many of us, personally, are very much against SOPA and PIPA, all of us at Cyborgology thought it would be better to provide information about participating sites, rather than blackout the blog entirely.

Usually a strike is the beginning of a political battle, but it seems as though the fight to kill SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act) has already been won by the activists and businesses that feel threatened by some of its provisions. As of last night, Cory Doctorow reported on BoingBoing:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has killed SOPA, stopping all action on it. He didn’t say why he killed it, but the overwhelming, widespread unpopularity of the bill and the threat of a presidential veto probably had something to do with it

The companion senate bill, the “Protect IP Act” or PIPA is still alive and well though. If you are unfamiliar with SOPA or PIPA, here is a great video from americancensorship.org that describes why the two bills are so concerning:

It is easy to accuse SOPA and PIPA supporters as money-grubbing intellectual property hounds; greedy millionaires who care about their bottom lines over the freedoms on democratic citizens. But I think greed  is only a necessary -not a sufficient- condition for supporting bills like these. The truth is, Congress does not understand the Internet.

For me, the late Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) is synonymous with “Congress doesn’t understand the internet.” If you’re of college age or older, you probably remember the 2006 senate hearing in which Stevens emphatically declared that the internet was not “a dump truck” but was in fact, a “series of tubes.” Technologically mediated communities immediately jumped on the gaff and produced  shirts, songs, and even powerpoint presentations to share in a common joke. Once the novelty had subsided though, some started to worry about the fate of the internet. The blog for 463 Communications, a consulting firm in DC, was one of the first to raise the concern:

Regardless of what side one takes on net neutrality, it must be recognized that when the industry gets involved in a pitched, focused battle, not a lot of broad-based education unattached to a specific agenda is going to happen.  Quite the opposite.

Now, six years later, we are facing the same problem and it is a lot less funny. Even if you choose to ignore the humanitarian and civil libertarian arguments for why SOPA/PIPA is a bad bill, it is still incredibly destructive to business. It threatens to undermine the very basis of the so-called “information economy.” By making web site owners liable for something as mundane as a link to a soundcloud page, Congress would effectively halt some of the most innovative work being done in the fields of social media and web design. Even though the MPAA and RIAA are supporters of SOPA/PIPA, they also stand to lose from it as well. The culture industry relies on the ability to remix and appropriate existing material and turn it into something new and unique. But even something as mainstream and pop as Justin Beiber was originally discovered covering Justin Timberlake songs on Youtube.

At the end of the day, I don’t want my congress to pass a bill that would give Girl Talk more years in jail than a serial killer. More importantly, I certainly do not want to see a bill pass that could give governments the ability to shut down entire web sites. If SOPA/PIPA passes, there will be no more augmented revolutions on these shores.

It seems as though Congress, having grown tired of pissing off large swaths of the country, are now opting to write bills that anger a very particular group of people. Almost a month ago, on December 16, 2011, California Republican Congressman Darrel Issa introduced the “Research Works Act” which would kill government-assisted open-access journals. As PJ said before, journals (especially the closed private ones) are the dinosaurs of academia and as Patricia Hill Collins later noted,

The issue for me is the tightly bundled nature of the current hierarchical ranking of journals with employment hierarchies within the academy. It’s as if the journal system has been hijacked by the audit culture of the academy, one that requires that we place a “value” on everything. Higher education is on a slippery slope rushing to a place of ignoring the quality of the actual ideas in a journal article, instead assuming that a particular article must be “good” because it is published in a “ranked” journal. I find this kind of Group Think distressing — it stunts creativity and privileges those who are already at the top.

This bill would effectively make such hierarchies the law of the land. The bill prohibits government agencies (like the National Science Foundation) from disseminating any research that has been submitted to a private publisher. Rebecca Rosen reports in The Atlantic:

This is a direct attack on the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed Central, the massive free online repository of articles resulting from research funded with NIH dollars. Similar bills have been introduced twice before, in 2008and 2009, and have failed both times…

Unsurprisingly, the bill is supported by the Association of American Publishers, a trade group that has long had issue with NIH’s public-access policy, which requires authors who receive any NIH funding to contribute their work to PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.

This does not mean the federal government is stopping us from making our own open journals. It just means the largest funder of institutional science, cannot. If it passes, then there will be lots of work to be done by individuals an nongovernmental agencies. Private universities and grant writers could step in to fill the gap. But I am much more excited about the small journals and digital humanities clusters that are experimenting with new kinds of publication. In fact, Cory Doctorow, writing in Boing Boing, thinks that these new kinds of publications are so popular and effective that is has scared the publishing industry into pushing the bill in the first place. I do not blame publishing corporations for recognizing a vastly superior business model, and taking steps to squash it before they can find a way to make the same profits in the new model. I agree with Danah Boyd when she says,

“what pisses me off to no end is that the same Marxist academics who pooh-pooh corporations justify their own commitment to this blood-sucking process with one word: tenure. Not like that is the end of the self-justifications. Even once scholars get tenure, they continue down the same path – even when not publishing with students – by telling themselves it’s for promotion or because grants require it or because of any other status-seeking process.”

Chris Kelty, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff have been publishing in an experimental journal called “LIMN.” It is all available for free on the web site, but you can also order a reasonably priced print edition that actually takes advantage of the printing technology of the last quarter century- there are color photos, beautifully and uniquely designed titles, and you can buy it on Amazon or directly from them.

The former editors of Cultural Anthropology, Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun, have been working with wikis and other online tools in the hopes of developing new kinds of collaborative research projects. I had the pleasure of working on one such project last spring. The Asthma Files, is an ongoing project that studies the assemblage of social and technical actors that make up the asthma research community. More generally, its an exercise in new kinds of knowledge production and dissemination. According to the site:

The Asthma Files in an expressly experimental ethnographic project that aims to produce, convey and circulate ethnographic knowledge in new ways. It also aims to create new forms of collaboration among ethnographers, and with other social science and humanities scholars, between ethnographers and artists interested in environmental and scientific communication, and with scientists, activists, and others concerned about asthma. Collaboration among ethnographers is supported by a structure that allows differently focused researchers to bring material into The Asthma Files, and explicate it with questions that are shared among researchers.

The Research Works Act should be stopped. The Asthma Files is the product of a collaboration with NIH. This law, while not outright preventing this kind of work, could have a chilling effect on innovative thinking. We need new models for disseminating knowledge, not intrusive laws that prop up ineffective institutions.

Follow me on Twitter: @da_banks

Kurt Anderson’s recent article in Vanity Fair titled “You Say You Want a Devolution.” contends that the past 20 years have seen a total stagnation in the production of new cultural aesthetics. In other words, the end of the 50s looked nothing like the end of the 70s, but 1989 looks remarkably similar to 2009. Anderson concludes:

We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle-economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation.

This is concerning, since that means the entirety of our blog is nothing more than the fungal growth sitting upon the neutral technological substrate that we impregnate with decaying cultures of past decades. Tattoos, Facebook, Burning Man, the iPhone, Twitter, sex dolls, wifi, internet memes, reality TV, geek culture, hipsters, video games, faux-vintage photographs, and dubstep are all popular topics on our blog, and (along with blogging itself) are products of the last 20 years. Anderson assumes that cultural objects are made possible through technology, but refuses to admit that technologies can also be cultural objects in and of themselves.

Technology’s effect on culture is not just about the production and distribution of the media. Technology becomes part of the plot, it enables new kinds of narratives, and produces new art forms all-together. Here is a simple example: The “Can You Hear Me Now” TV trope. Movie writers cannot isolate their characters as easily as they did in the 90s. According to TvTropes.org (a wiki, who’s existence and wide-spread adoption wasn’t possible in the early 90s) movies have adapted to cell phones in many different ways. They have to break or get stolen, or the whole scene must take place outside of signal range. In Live Free or Die Hard (2007) John McClane fights to save the very telecom system that would have prevented the plot of the first Die Hard movie (1988).

But Anderson might ask us to look at the whole movie. Bruce Willis plays the same character, in the same movie, wearing the exact same thing, with the exact same police cars. It does not matter if the movie takes place in the 80s, 90s, or 00s- they all look and act the same. Fair enough, that’s what I get for using Die Hard to make an argument about culture.But if we take the “everything is a remix” approach to cultural studies, we see that the Die Hard franchise is really an assemblage of several different kinds of source material. The first two were based on the action novels Nothing Lasts Forever and 58 Minutes. The third was a rewritten movie script originally titled Simon Says. But the fourth movie is actually based on a WIRED magazine article. Anderson describes WIRED as a magazine that has always been about “cool as well as useful” and particularly popular because it helps us curate our “eclectic for-profit museums.” But Die Hard’s switch from conventional media source material, to a magazine about cool gadgets is not a coincidence. Social media and electronic gadgetry are becoming a huge part of our cultural lexicon and, unsurprisingly, have started making their mark on all aspects of society. A movie that doesn’t acknowledge or deal with the existence  of cell phones is just as absurd as a movie stylized like the 50s, set in 2012.

He also notes that, “People flock by the millions to Apple Stores…not just to buy high-quality devices but to bask and breathe and linger, pilgrims to a grand, hermetic, impecable temple to style.” Again, we must be conscious of the fact that the high temple of style is a computer store. Not clothes, not music, not cars, but computers. This fact should make Anderson worry about the validity of his own thesis. He seems to jump back and forth between computers as objects of culture in and of themselves, and as passive remix machines that let us produce a patchwork of old content. To Anderson, we have only changed  the methods of producing cultural objects, “not how they look and feel and sound, not what they are.” Anderson is ignoring the new prosumptive capacities enabled by technology that define the cultural style of the 21st century. The DIY culture, Reddit, Instagram, Arduino, and internet Memes are just a few examples of cultural artifacts from our prosumptive age.

And it is the sharing, remixing, riffing, altering, and improvising that serves as the hallmark for this generation. The various genres that utilize these methods: hip hop (which Anderson barely even mentions at all); hipsters’ eclectic bohemian clothing styles, electronic music (most popular of which, is now dubstep); and highly re-stylized photography are all beneficiaries of the means and desire to put one’s personal touch on a previous work. L.P Hartley, was not explicitly talking about technology when he wrote the words, “The past is a foreign country” but  Marshall McLuhan was, when he said “the medium is the message.” Both of them, however, remind us that cultural artifacts can take on radically different meanings when deconstructed, displaced, shifted, or repurposed. Lady Gaga’s act may look and sound a lot like Madonna’s, but while the latter sang proudly of being a “material girl” Lady Gaga uses the excess to critique fame itself.

Most of what I have described here, are somewhat subtle points. Where Anderson sees a sharp boundary, I see a recursive cause and effect. But there are two interrelated topics that Anderson gets very wrong: protest and war. In his Times cover story “Person of the Year: The Protestor” Anderson has a lot of reverence for the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East, but only mild praise for the Occupy Wall Street movement. One possible reason for this, can be found at the beginning of the article:

The stakes are very different in different places. In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don’t get tortured. Any day that Tunisians, Egyptians or Syrians occupy streets and squares, they know that some of them might be beaten or shot, not just pepper-sprayed or flex-cuffed. The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City.

It is a fair critique, and one that many #0ws protesters would benefit from hearing several times a day. I also agree with Anderson’s description of social media’s role in revolutionary activity:

Calling the Arab uprisings Facebook and YouTube and Twitter revolutions is not, it turns out, just glib, wishful American overstatement. In the Middle East and North Africa, in Spain and Greece and New York, social media and smart phones did not replace face-to-face social bonds and confrontation but helped enable and turbocharge them, allowing protesters to mobilize more nimbly and communicate with one another and the wider world more effectively than ever before. And in police states with high Internet penetration — Ben Ali’s Tunisia, Mubarak’s Egypt, Bashar Assad’s Syria — a critical mass of cell-phone video recorders plus YouTube plus Facebook plus Twitter really did become an indigenous free press.Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, new media and blogger are now quasi synonyms for protest and protester.

In his Times piece, Anderson seems to “get it” when it comes to social media. It has real effects on the world that strengthen off-line bonds and helps decentralized groups communicate and coordinate actions across large geographic areas. It is not a silver bullet, companies that manage the infrastructure can only take partial credit, and there is high penetration in “nonwestern” countries (something many people forget). In his Vanity Fair article however, Anderson describes #ows like this:

“The Occupy Wall Street (and Occupy Everywhere Else) protests are a self-conscious remix of the Tea Party and Arab Spring protests.”

This description sounds like over-zealous editing at best, and a meaningless filler sentence at worst. #ows’s relationship to the Tea Party has always been imposed, not deliberately (let alone self-consciously) embedded in the movement’s ethos. Tea Partiers have participated in, and visited Occupations, but that is not their defining characteristic.

And then there is war. Lots of war. Anderson briefly mentions Vietnam as a cultural touchstone of the 60s and 70s, but no mention of this generation’s indefinite warfare. No mention of drones becoming household words, no mention of the art that opposes the war, the record-setting protests that, while largely ignored by the media, definitely did actually happen. Also no mention of the video games as a form of media. Nothing about violent video games made by the American Army, no discussion of Hillary Clinton’s crusade to keep violent video games out of the hands of children, or the any of the similar discussions we have had, as a society, about interactive media.

Popular politics and protest are very influential in pop culture. But when such protest is ignored by the media, individuals are left to making their own media, and with it, their own culture. Anderson is looking for culture in all the wrong places. There are parts of our culture that definitely conform to Kurt Anderson’s critique. The GAP and Starbucks haven’t changed much in the past decade and, as Anderson correctly notes, “Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses…a massive damper has been placed on the genreal impetus for innovation and change.” One thinks immediately of the first episode of Portlandia, in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein triumphantly declare that “The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland.” But even then, the very existence of a show like Portlandia, suggests that this subculture has reached such a level of self-referential awareness, that it is only a matter of time before it is all “SO TOTALLY OVER.”

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Americans have gotten so good at being consumers that it almost seems hackneyed to acknowledge such a thing. I say “almost” because there are still wonderfully interesting things being said in some literary and academic circles that continually find deeper levels of meaning in the seemingly shallow end of the societal pool. Our near-perfect systems of consumption not only make it technically possible to exchange beautifully designed plastic gift cards,but  it makes it socially acceptable as well. A gift-giver can reliably assume that the recipient a thousand miles away has access to the same stores, with almost the exact same products. The gift-giver can also assume a certain level of homogeneity about gift-giving practices. Most of us share a set of common beliefs about what constitutes a good gift: It should, relate to our interests, be useful, carry sentimental value, reflect the nature of a relationship, provide entertainment, and/or fill a need. When you give a gift card, you are acknowledging the need or want, but allowing the receiver to specify its final material (or digital) form. This system relies on stability and uniformity to function smoothly. There must be a common culture, as well as a reliable stream of goods and services. But such stability is becoming less, and less likely. Whether it is peak energy, financial collapse, or a little bit of both- our world is becoming less predictable and the systems that rely on steady streams of capital and petroleum are breaking down. In their place, we might begin to find self-organizing systems that are not only more efficient, but also much more just forms of resource distribution.

I buy a lot of unpackaged spices, which means you have to supply your own containers. I asked for a spice rack for Christmas (yes, some people actually do that) and what I received from a friend was a thoughtful, personal letter and a gift card that would cover the cost of a spice rack. The mundanity of such an event obscures the herculean efforts that make such an exchange possible. Supply chains, centralized database servers, steady currencies, and the shared cultural meaning of receiving gift cards all come together to make gift cards a practical, as well as meaningful, gift.

We rely on all sorts of large sociotechnical systems to live our lives and conduct business. Some give us spice racks in exchange for pre-paid credit. Another system might report the evening news, while a third system might mount aerial drone attacks in the mountains of Pakistan or monitor the actions of Occupy Wall Street. While these systems are not identical, they do share some very specific commonalities. They are organized in a hierarchical fashion, individuals are assigned tasks that are spelled out by rules and guidelines and are organized by job titles or ranks. These were all identified by the German sociologist Max Weber at the turn of the 20th century. His observations on the nature of bureaucracy and hierarchy are still very useful today. We can also borrow of Jacques Ellul who theorized that machines and technology are presupposed by the social forces that value rationality, efficiency, and expansion of power. He called these foces technique. Earlier this month, Doug Hill wrote a fantastic piece about #ows and technique which describes the former in terms of the latter to great effect. I have written about technique elsewhere, concluding that the information technology might work against the previous tendencies toward technique and conformity.

The occupations around the world do not rely on the bureaucratic organizational schemes that Weber described, and they actively fight against the increasing expansion of Ellulian technique. The occupations are self-organizing, they are rhizomatic, and they do not rely on individual office-holders or positions. The #ows vocabulary has words for groups (e.g. General Assembly, working group) and for organizing procedure (e.g. point of information, blocking concern) but there are no words that describe individuals. Everyone is an occupier. Whereas hierarchical institutions rely on predictable environments and hierarchies of power and resource-allocation, self-organizing systems rely on distributed resources and relatively autonomous actors.

The most robust self-organizing systems rely on a few rules that govern nodes, which in turn, give form and function to the entire assemblage. Take, for example, a flock of birds. Computer graphics pioneer, Craig Reynolds, discovered that the best way to depict a flock of birds was to give each bird (or boid, as Reynolds calls them) three simple rules to follow: 1) avoid crowding, 2) go in the same approximate direction as your flockmates, and 3) always try to stay close to the center mass of the flock. This is the end result:

The occupations are very similar. Hold a GA frequently, organize action within working groups and caucuses, and work towards ending the centralized accumulation of wealth. Just like the flock, there is no leader, but there is a direction; there is little to no hierarchy, but there are rules that govern behavior. There have been numerous comparisons between #ows and the Tea Party, but these comparisons are superficial at best. A better comparison (if we must compare it to anything) would be NGOs like Americans for Prosperity, or Think Progress. Existing political action groups are fully embedded in technique. They are hierarchical and bureaucratic. #ows is effective not just because it is an idea whose time has come, but it is also an organizational system best suited for today’s sociopolitical environment. It needs to be robust enough to work in all kinds of communities, and it must survive the kinds of dramatic changes it seeks to enact.

Gift cards, chain stores, Think Progress, Exxon Mobil, and state governments rely on hierarchy and relatively stable streams of capital and resources. Their functioning is predicated on assemblages of capital and labor  stacked into hieachical sociotechnical systems that are governed by rules that are enforced by specialists and office-holders. #ows prefigures the kinds of sociopolitical and technical systems its members envision. It is decentralized, self-organizing, and nonhierarchical. I do not think anyone is in a position to predict what #ows will ultimately accomplish.  But if larger segments of society become self-organizing systems, we will certainly be living in a radically new kind of society.

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Today I want to offer a quick provocation that might make for interesting conversations (read: arguments) with family and friends this holiday season. Statistically speaking, you are probably on the road right now. Maybe you are just sitting down at your favorite reststop Sbarro (The Official Food of You Don’t Have Another Choice™) and, after checking in on Foursquare, you start reading some of your favorite blogs (that’s us). Then, maybe its your nosey uncle, or your 10-year-old sister, or your husband leans over and tells you to, “get off the Interent and interact with the real world.” Its a slightly rude thing to say, but you put your phone down and engage with those in bodily co-presence. What is it about the Internet that invites strong criticism from such a wide range of people?  It is often said that 1) the Internet encourages anti-social behavior; 2) that it makes us lazy and contributes to increasing waistlines and decreasing attention spans and; 3) our increasing reliance on Internet services means we are widening the “Digital Divide” and cutting out the poor, the elderly, and the differently abled. Statements like these are too numerous to cite with links. Its the kind of socia commentary and pop psychology that has graced the pages of most news magazines. Could we take these arguments and apply them to other large sociotechnical systems? Since we all have transportation on our minds, let’s levy these criticisms against the highway and see where it takes us:

1) Highways encourage Anti-Social Behavior

In 2005, the average American spent 100 hours a year commuting to work. Most people do this by car, and they do it alone. Talking to friends on Facebook seems a lot more social than spending over an hour a day alone in a metal box. An argument can be made that highways help us see each other more often. We can quickly and easily drive to friends and family that live far away, and visit them in person. A highway helps you get to grandma’s house for Christmas. But would grandma live that far away if highways did not exist? In other words, does the highway get you to grandma quicker, or does the highway make it easier for grandma to live further away? Highways, and the automobile-based suburbs they enable, have allowed Americans to live further apart than ever before. They make it possible to live in cul-de-sac suburbs that encourage isolation, rather than community. Highways also give us spaces to develop healthy amounts of road rage and aggressive driving habits.

2) Highways are bad for our health

Again, sitting in a seat for the equivalent of two weeks-per-year, is not healthy. A study conducted in 2004 showed a direct correlation between living in the suburbs and increased risk of obesity. Highways also are large sources of air pollution, stress, and death from injury. In many countries, cars are the leading cause of air pollution. Car accidents cause over 40,000 deaths a year in the United States, and we don’t even make the top hundred list of traffic fatalities per capita. Car accidents account for a third of all deaths of American teenagers. The suburbs make us fat and lazy if they don’t kill us first.

3) Highways make it difficult for the poor, elderly, and differently abled to access critical resources

Transportation takes up a huge portion of a family’s annual income. Behind housing and food, transportation is the third largest expenditure of most americans. Many Americans live in places where having access to your own car is a prerequisite for getting a job or getting to food. Those that cannot afford a car, are usually left no other option but to use under-funded public transportation that is ill-adapted to the existing physical environment. An automobile-human cyborg quite often requires a normal-functioning human body. Anything from ADHD, vision problems, paralysis, or limited dexterity make it more dangerous -if not impossible- to drive a car. This leaves the elderly stranded in their homes, and turns neighborhoods into deadly obstacle courses.

Critical Thinking

I am not trying to absolve the Internet of all sins against humanity. Surely, a digitally augmented society is much different than one that is not. Some of those changes can be seen as good, some are bad. These distinctions are a mix of subjective preference and empirical observation. What I am trying to do, with this thought experiment, is encourage us to point the criticism cannon in multiple directions. If we can question the embedded politics of IT hardware, and if we can recognize the profound changes the Internet has brought to our society, then we should also try to critically assess those technologies that have been around for a few decades.

You can follow me on twitter! @da_banks