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

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

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

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

I was working recently on a short essay about net neutrality and, in the process, ended up writing a much longer piece about net neutrality. My aim in writing that longer piece (below) was twofold: I wanted both to demonstrate that net neutrality isn’t too technical and complicated for normal people to understand, and also to trace out how a trio of closely related issues—net neutrality rules, regulatory classifications, and the push to convert all voice traffic to digital—fit together, as well as what their combination might mean for the so-called “open Internet.”

SPOILER: You need to pressure the FCC to adopt strong net neutrality rules, and then you need to do a bunch of other stuff. Net neutrality isn’t enough, and neither Big Telecom nor Big Digital is talking about the pieces that will have the greatest (and most unequal) impact on Internet users.

Without further ado, here’s my attempt at a guided tour through roughly 18 years of Internet-related regulatory history:

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Over the course of the past few weeks, two major US corporations—Chase Bank and Amazon—have each undertaken campaigns apparently aimed at expelling sex workers from the financial system, despite the fact that this work is completely legal and the compensation is above board.

Social media has be buzzing with reports from porn performers of vaguely worded letters from Chase stating “we recently reviewed your account and determined that we will be closing it.” At the Cybogology-sponsored Theorizing the Web conference, porn performer Stoya described her experience: “I’ve personally had issues with Chase, which is why I was giggling, because they shut down my business account but then didn’t understand why I wanted to close my personal account.” While Chase and other financial institutions (e.g., Paypal, Square, WePay, City National Bank, and J.P. Morgan) have long engaged in ad hoc discrimination against sex workers, Chase’s recent actions are unprecedented in that they appear to indicate a systematic effort to uncover and blacklist anyone involved in sex work. more...

JoAnne McNeil (@jomc)

Hashmod: Lauren Burr (@burrlauren)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Streetview: Space, Place, and Geography

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

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Presider: Jillet Sarah Sam (@JilletSarahSam)

Hashmod: Alice Samson (@theclubinternet)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled World Wide Web(s): Theorizing the Non-Western Web

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

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