(cross post with FLEFF’s Dissassembled Spaces blog)

Most people assume that if you Google something in the US and you do the same in another country, you will get the same results. It’s called the World Wide Web, right? Not so. Countries can and do exert influence on search engine companies to control the results that their citizens can access. Which is why there’s been a lot of talk recently about whether Google will pull out of China. Apparently, the Internet giant whose code of conduct is “Don’t be evil” has finally gotten tired of the Chinese Communist Party stipulating the kind of search results it can or cannot provide. Competing for a share of one of the world’s largest markets is good and well, but after it was revealed that the attacks that compromised the private information of thousands of Google users came from China, the company decided that enough was enough. Although no final decision has been made, the mere mention that Google was considering leaving China was major news.

In the West, the move has been celebrated as a slap in the face of internet censorship. At the same time, there have been concerns that the withdrawal of Google from the Chinese market will make things worse for people there. The assumption is that Google’s services do provide a little bit of freedom inside the great firewall of China (one theory behind the cause of the cyber attacks on Google is that the Chinese government was interested in spying on dissidents’ Gmail accounts). This would seem to suggest, to put it plainly, that Google and the rest of the big Web companies are important tools in the struggle to spread freedom and democracy in China and elsewhere in the world (recall the recent hubbub about Twitter saving Iran, Facebook liberating Moldova, etc.).

To build momentum for this idea, Google’s announcement was followed a couple of days later by a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The topic was Internet Freedom. Because of its importance in facilitating communication and dialogue across various divides, Secretary Clinton argued that the US government is interested in ensuring that the Internet remains Free. “We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas,” she said.

But what does this “single Internet” that the US government is interested in promoting look like? We need to take a closer look and ask questions. Simply sticking the word Free in front of something and saying it’s good for world democracy is not enough. Remember a little something called the Free Market? Just as that particular contraption was an important instrument in creating more global inequality, my fear is that the Free Internet –as envisioned by corporations and promoted by the US– will only allow the rich to get richer.

For one thing, is the US in a position to champion freedoms it itself is not willing to respect? During her speech, Clinton remarked: “As it stands, Americans can consider information presented by foreign governments. We do not block your attempts to communicate with the people in the United States. But citizens in societies that practice censorship lack exposure to outside views.” So what about the role of the US in preventing people in those countries from being exposed to certain views? I guess the Secretary of State had not been briefed on a recent bill approved by Congress that imposes sanctions on Arab satellite channels deemed hostile to the United States. If you want to block people from tuning in to the Hezbollah channel, at least don’t pretend that you are above using censorship to achieve your political ends.

Besides, does anyone really believe that ever-expanding corporate conglomerates are the best champions of democracy? Global capitalism’s track record seems to suggest otherwise. Just ask the people of the world what companies like Union Carbide, Dow, Shell, United Fruit, DuPont, Monsanto and so on and so on have done for their democracies. Given that history, companies that believe in Not Being Evil represent a complete and welcomed change, but I’m still not convinced that we should completely surrender our online public spaces and cultural products to corporations, specially when those spaces and products are important platforms for challenging authority. Secretary Clinton herself said that “…the internet can help humanity push back against those who promote violence and crime and extremism. In Iran and Moldova and other countries, online organizing has been a critical tool for advancing democracy and enabling citizens to protest suspicious election results.” But as Evgeny Morozov argues, the losses in online privacy that come from using “free” corporate-controlled social media tools may not be worth the gains in online mobilization.

Just don’t tell that to the State Department. At a 2009 Alliance of Youth Movements summit in Mexico City, where the supposed goal was to figure out ways to reduce drug-related violence, the co-sponsors (along with the US State Department) included Facebook, MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch), Google, YouTube, Pepsi and MTV. One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to feel a bit troubled by what seemed like the perfect marriage of US foreign policy and for-profit interests, cloaked in the language of liberal democracy and its purported promotion of human rights and freedom. In an age when social network analysis is becoming an increasingly important tool for securing the homeland, what better way to keep an eye on the ‘volatile’ youth of the developing world than to have them voluntarily fill out detailed profiles of themselves and their friends? And if they can do that while drinking AMP Energy and watching Jersey Shore, so much the better, it seems.

Resources:

Authority, Meet Technology: Slate/New America Foundation discussion about China, Google, and Internet freedom.
http://www.slate.com/id/2241755/workarea/3/

Arab ministers slam US congress satellite decision
http://blogs.rnw.nl/medianetwork/arab-ministers-slam-us-congress-satellite-decision

Clinton urges Internet freedom, condemns cyber attacks
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60K1V220100121?type=technologyNews

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks on Internet Freedom
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm

Evgeny Morozov, Testimony to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Files.Download&FileStore_id=1526

Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/politics/13cyber.html?_r=1

Resolved: We have seen the end of racism in the United States
with the election of the first President of Color

Ulises Mejias: “No, we have not.”

Rebuttal (4 mins):

Racism is a system of group privilege. In the US, this means that white people have constructed a system where they enjoy certain advantages just by virtue of being white, and where they deny these advantages to non-white people.

The election of a black president has not magically dismantled this system of oppression, which has been developed over the course of centuries. In contrast to my opponents’ genuine but misplaced optimism, I would like to offer some plain facts that suggest racism is not on its way out:

1. Because we still live in a racist society, people of color are the targets of violence. We have seen an increase in race-related hate crimes of 30% since 2002, and Homeland Security warns that we can expect to see an even sharper increase. According to the FBI hate crimes against Latinos increased by 35% from 2003 to 2006. Membership in hate groups has increased more than 40% since 2000. In response to the anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed by right wing media figures, we have seen about 250 new nativist groups founded in the past few years.
2. Because we still live in a racist society, people of color are denied educational opportunities. The hard work of the desegregation movement is often undone through Charter schools that allow white students to escape to better schools while leaving black schools to deteriorate. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the nationwide college graduation rate for black students is only 43%, a full 20% lower than that for white students. And according to a Chronicle of Higher Ed report, problems still persists in how available certain fields of study are to students of color, how many faculty of color are hired or retained, etc.
3. Because we still live in a racist society, people of color are denied the same level of health care that whites receive. Blacks, for instance, have higher rates of mortality and HIV infection. Black infants are more than twice as likely as white infants to die before their first birthday. When it comes to black babies, the US ranks 63rd place in infant mortality rates. That means that a baby of color in Barbados, Malaysia or Thailand is better off there that in the most powerful nation in the world.
4. Because we still live in a racist society, people of color are disproportionately punished by our justice system and incarcerated. Blacks comprise 13% of the national population, but 30% of people arrested and 49% percent of those in prison are black. According to Human Rights Watch, one in 10 black men in their 20s and early 30s is in jail or prison. Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement.

If these figures are not plain evidence that we live in a racist society, I don’t know what is.

Constructive Argument (5 min):

In my previous argument, I stated some shocking statistics that demonstrate that we still live in a racist society. But is it the case, as my opponents are arguing, that the election of the first black president is bound to start changing our racist reality?

Obama may have changed the face, literally, of power in this country. But it is my contention that he has done little and is willing to do little to challenge the racism that permeates our social institutions.

As evidence, we only need to look at a single act of Obama, and act that speaks volumes: Earlier this year, the first black president of the US decided to boycott the UN Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa. This bears repeting: Our first black president decided not to participate in a conference on racism organized by the UN.

Much has been made about the claims that he did so because of the alleged anti-Semitism that marked an earlier conference. Journalist Naomi Klein has exposed the lies behind these allegations in her recent article on Harper’s Magazine.

The real reason why the US and many other countries decided to pull out of Durban is very simple: before 9/11 cut its momentum, the Durban conference had emerged as a global forum for addressing the historical injustices of the slave trade.

It is not a secret that much of the wealth from which whites benefited and continue to benefit was built on the enslaved labor of blacks and other peoples of color. Racial oppression is a business model, and it has paid handsome dividends to whites.

Despite the fact that we see the occasional wealthy black celebrity, the truth is that race and poverty are undeniably linked in our society. For instance, during the current recession, unemployment has increased four times faster among blacks than among whites in New York City. According to sociologist Dalton Conley, the average black family has only one-eighth the net worth of the average white family in the US. To add insult to injury, poor black people are more likely to fall prey to predatory practices, as evidenced by the fact that in Obama’s home city of Chicago, black families acquired subprime mortgages at a rate four times higher than white families (Klein). In Baltimore, the bank Wells Fargo has admitted to intentionally marketing subprime loans to blacks through their churches.

Institutionalized racism is about the unpaid debt that the rich owe to the poor. If we want to end racism, we must pay back what was stolen through slavery. There’s no statue of limitations when it comes to crimes against humanity, as Nurenberg made clear. If we can bail out failed banks and companies with billions of tax dollars, why can’t we make reparations to the people who have not succeded because of our racism? We are not talking about individual handouts here, coming from your pocket! We are talking about investing in schools, hospitals and infrastructure. Precisely the kinds of things we failed to do after Katrina, which is why I believe racism is far from over.

Throughout all this, Obama has remained silent and inactive on the race issue, except when it can benefit his agenda (as when he needed to get out of the Reverend Wright mess), or when it absolutely cannot be avoided (as in the Gates affair). Other than that, the White House has encouraged only polices that are ‘race-neutral.’

But all the race-neutrality in the world is not making a difference. Thanks to the right-wing fanatics that populate our media, Obama’s presidency has in fact sparked a strong racist reaction. Not just more openly racist imagery targeting the Obamas and other people like Sonia Sotomayor populates the Internet, but also a new vocabulary to disparage Obama has emerged: instead of the n-word, people use words like socialist, Muslim, and foreign-born to mask their racism.

Racism is not over, nor do we have a president who has been willing so far to tackle the problem.

Final Argument (3 min):

Since Obama’s election, there’s been a lot of talk about a ‘Post-racial America.’ The term ‘post’  implies that there was a time when we recognized that this was in fact a racist society. Are we in a rush to bypass that realization by labeling ourselves a ‘post-racial’ society?

Modern racism is not just about individual white people going around consciously feeling superior to people of color, although I’m sure some of them do. Modern racism is institutionalized racism: it’s about social inequalities being replicated through our schools, churches and prisons; through our laws, government programs, and insurance premiums.

These inequalities are replicated because we have refused to deal with the very system of oppression on which this country’s wealth was formed. We continue to perpetuate those injustices when we pretend that a single event, like the election of a black man to the office of the presidency, can undo the damage.

In fact, I would go as far as to suggest that people who see in Obama’s election a sign that we have moved beyond racism are not helping to promote a meaningful dialogue on racism, but are instead inadvertently delaying it.

Unfortunately, we cannot end racism by not talking about it. White liberals (parents, teachers, bosses) want us to be color-blind. They think it’s a good thing to not see color, even though it defines us. They keep insisting that when they look at us people of color, they do not see the hue of our skin (which in my case, as a white Latino, is easy to do). They point to Obama as a sign that they are willing to entrust our nation to someone regardless of the color of their skin.

We have not seen the end of racism because we have not seen the end of the silence that people of color must maintain when confronted with talk about color-blindness and race neutrality. To even talk about racism makes one comes across as angry, and we have learned that we must quiet our anger over historical and institutional injustices in order to be accepted in white society. Obama’s greatest asset is his smile, because it signals he is not angry.

The election of Obama has not ended racism, it has merely given us a model of how to be silent. As the late Latino activist Juan Santos wrote during Obama’s election: “We stay silent, as a rule, on the job. We stay silent, as a rule, in the white world. Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large. He is our silence running for president.”

Only Muslims can change their society

The sub-heading is: “The US invasion of Afghanistan had nothing to do with its women – change in Islamic nations must come from within.”

Andrea Batista Schlesinger: You write that “We should be less concerned about designing technologies that will afford young people ’satisfying participation opportunities’ and more concerned about ensuring that new generations can challenge and question the opportunities that are ‘offered’ to them. The goal –for young people as well as old– should be the self-critical individual.” Do you think that the Internet — either as a medium, or as an environment — inspires/encourages such self-critique? Do you think that digital natives are more or less likely to be interested in and have the capacity for inquiry and/or self-reflection?

Ulises Mejias: Well, as with any discussion about the affordances of a technology (what the technology allows us to do or prevents us from doing), there are two sides to that answer. First: Structure is not everything! The features of the Internet by themselves do not promote or encourage x or y, democracy or tyranny. From that perspective, we can view claims that the internet will help us do this or that as simplistic. Ultimately, it’s all about what people do on the internet, how they choose to apply this technology (this is the cultural materialist or social constructivist position). In other words, the same Internet structures can be used in ways that promote self-realization, or for exactly the opposite purpose.

Which brings us to the other (seemingly contradictory) side of the answer: Structure is something! The technological features of the Internet do shape the nature of our actions to some extent. Consider, for instance, claims like Nicholas Carr’s that the Internet is making us stupid by diminishing our powers of concentration, distracting us with advertisements, and promoting a broad but superficial kind of knowledge that erases the possibility of a shared cultural meaning. According to these kinds of arguments, the way the Internet is used is not necessarily contributing to our capacity for inquiry and self-reflection.

I think what is important to recognize here is that when a particular use of a technology becomes the norm for a large percentage of the population, there is no way we can avoid saying that technology shapes society (or what is known as technological determinism). So despite the fact that the Internet is being used by a few people to engage in critical inquiry, at a mass level the Internet is not being utilized that way — that’s the norm.

Why do I say this? Well, the word ‘mass’ is very important here. A self-critical mass is an oxymoron. I do believe that the values behind today’s Internet mass applications (especially anything controlled by commercial interests, i.e. most of the Internet) are not meant to help people become critical, much less self-critical. They are meant to turn them into better consumers. Sure, I think the Internet offers exiting new possibilities for inquiry, activism, social involvement, etc., but it’s naive to think that these will become widespread without a fundamental change in social, political and economic structures. And to think that the same Internet that promotes the creation of masses will help us achieve such change is a double fallacy. I’m not saying it won’t play a role. It must. But the Internet by itself will not liberate us, that’s for sure.

ABS: Does the Internet create habits of mind that are conducive to the asking of questions? Studies indicate that young people engage with the news more as headline skimmers, and that they don’t spend much time evaluating the results that they get back from Google searches. But perhaps this is just about the young people we’re raising, and not about the Internet. Or is it inherent to the abundance of information that the Internet offers? Relatedly, do you think that the Internet encourages an “answer” orientation — that it’s all out there, you just have to find it?

UM: Geert Lovink recently wrote an article in which he calls on us to stop searching and start questioning. I couldn’t agree more. We’ve come to believe that Google has all the answers, without realizing that what is changing is our ability to formulate questions Google can’t answer. As suggested by the Carr article mentioned above, I do think that the Internet is changing our research habits and our relationship to knowledge, for the worse. What’s interesting is that when I discussed the Carr article with my students, they said: “The Internet is not making us stupid, it’s just making us lazy.” That’s even worse! We can’t help it if we are stupid. But to be lazy suggests that we know there is an alternative, perhaps even a better alternative, but we consciously choose to go with the option that requires the least effort and that places less demands on questioning what we are doing. This is typical mass behavior.

ABS: You wrote about online protest and its lack of efficacy – both in terms of its impact on government and the experience of those involved. You tie this to the lessening relevance of the “local.” How do you see the rise of the “Facebook cause” related to the interest in involvement in local community activism? Are they in competition? Do you think that inquiry is more, less, or equally present in involvement in the actual physical local community versus online causes? You wrote about the lack of risk in online protesting. Is this lack of risk accompanied by, or the cause of, a lack of questioning when it comes to deciding how or if to be involved in this cause?

UM: I believe that the Internet can help small groups with the organizational aspects of activism, but on the other hand I think that the Internet’s mass commercial applications, including the so-called Web 2.0 services, militate against civic engagement. The only thing what you call the “Facebook cause” (that web application intended to rally people around a social issue) can contribute is mass numbers: massive membership, massive signatures attached to the petition, massive numbers of comments and opinions… all of which can be easily dismissed because there is only a ‘virtual’ weight behind them. Reminds me of a quote by Gilles Deleuze: “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves… What we’re are plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements” (1995, Negotiations, Columbia University Press, p. 129). Of course, Walter Benjamin had already touched upon this “adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality” back in 1936 when he wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” So online activism is quite vocal, but not much else. Which is not to say that a “Facebook cause” cannot provoke some people to take action to the next level, to something that unfolds beyond the domain of cyberspace. Whether the sum of these little ‘lines of flight’ are enough to counter mass behavior remains to be seen.

You bring up an interesting point: Is online activism bankrupt because it cannot concern itself with the local? Actually, no. Unlike other critics, I do not proclaim the devaluation of the near and the death of distance at the hands of virtual reality. Networks do not create exclusive links to the far; they link to the near as well. What we should be looking at is the emergence of networked nearness — the phenomenon of rendering nearness in such a way that if something is not on the network it might as well not exist (even if this ’something’ exists in un-networked proximity). So the ‘local’ is alive and well. The problem is that we increasingly depend on technological networks to reveal what is local, what is near. And when the networks are controlled exclusively by commercial interests, this might be a problem. The social, as someone said, becomes part of the economy, instead of the economy being a part of the social. The process of inquiry that can lead to the kind of (risky) commitment to a social cause that can be translated into more than just an expression of support is subverted by the lazy behavior of the masses.

(Photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

For the last interview in this series, I sat down to talk to Rob van Kranenburg. Rob works at Waag Society, a new media think-tank that “wants to be on the forefront of developments by creating a consensus among as many of the stakeholders as possible (companies, government, citizens, European laws and professionals) to anchor values [such] as solidarity, sharing, learning to learn, creativity, beauty and a sense of change and innovation as deep as possible within the code and infrastructure.” Rob is head of the Public Domain program. A large part of his work deals with the problematic shift (evident in technologies such as RFID) from “privacy compliant applications to privacy compliant technology.” We met at the Waag offices in Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam, on June 17.

THE OUTSOURCING OF MEMORY AND AGENCY

Ulises Mejias: Since a lot of your work has to do with Ambient Intelligence, why don’t you start by telling us what that is? You have a phrase here, in one of the essays you gave me, about “outsourcing memory and agency to an ever more seemingly controllable environment on an individual level that is perceived as convenient.”

Rob van Kranenburg: Let’s start with the example of a pencil. As you write things down, you are outsourcing your memory into the environment. That’s how the Western notion of technology has worked. But now the idea is to hide all these functionalities into our environment. Like electricity, basically. It’s been hidden. All we see is the On/Off switch. Nobody knows how it works. If there is a power break, everything breaks. The same goes for our computer. The idea behind Ambient Intelligence, Pervasive Computing or whatever you want to call it, is to take the intelligence out of the computer box. I should make my environment ‘intelligent:’ I should make my clothes intelligent, my chair intelligent, so they recognize me. The walls in my house should sense whether I’m depressed. So this promise that the world can recognize you every step of the way, and give you everything you need, is very powerful. But the thing is that this notion of Ambient Intelligence can only work on a very stable environment. If the environment changes, it has very big consequences, on an interface level. Change must be minimal. It’s a totalitarian logic, within the whole system. Because it assumes it needs to be stable in order to “live.” We will have new generations growing up dumber in their interfacing activities with these environments, because there’s no need for them to think otherwise; they are being taken care of.

UM: What sort of projects are you working on at Waag?

RvK: There’s basically three tracks. One of them is called Smart Environments, and it’s kind of a full-fledged procedure or protocol to handle the Ambient Intelligence debate. We are trying to host the debate, to bring all these positions around the table, with the very naive and romantic view that we can actually get some kind of open source foundation for the infrastructure. It’s sort of the ultimate Dutch model, which is: We realize it’s inevitable, we are not going to try to stop it, we just want to make it… less bad! This is one track, and it flows immediately into another one called Smart Citizens.

UM: What’s that about?

RvK: This reflects my fear (I always see the dystopias; that’s what I do!) that despite the Internet, despite mobile phones, GPS, etc. …despite all these connectivities… people still have no repository of actions for making sense of what is behind the technology. All the kings before me did not have the tools I have now. All the philosophers before could not do what I do now. So people think they have all this connectivity, but they have no clue about the infrastructure that’s feeding the technology. And this infrastructure is saying: “Outsource all your interfacing to me! I’ll take care of it.” The result is that people cannot fix their own cars. No one cares about it, because everyone assumes the economy will just keep functioning the way it does. But even at a practical level, with 130 euros for a barrel of oil, and going up, it’s going to be very difficult to uphold this Ambient Intelligence dream. So we have this kind of citizens, who feel themselves kings, but have no clue about infrastructures anymore, and who’ve given up lots of solidarity moments also, because the Nation State is an empty shell… So what we need to do is script new solidarities with these new technologies, and not all this fear, and all this control. This is a major challenge.

UM: How does the Waag Society address this challenge?

RvK: The role of a place like the Waag is to put these things on the agenda, and be able to talk to the ministries as well as the hackers. For instance, last week we hosted the Commission on Privacy and Ethics, a very high-level commission with the Chief of Police, and the Chief of the Council of Culture, and we were able to put together a very mixed group of young people, privacy activists, etc. This is one of the few places where you can do this, because we have the respect of all the different parties, and can bring them to the table. So at the beginning of the Waag the idea was to have public domain on the Internet. But the Internet is going to be the Internet of Things, so we are going to have to look out for the public domain in this Internet of Things, which is everyday life! That’s why Smart Exchange is the third trajectory, looking for what is common, not so much what is different. We are all confronting the same issues. Ambient Intelligence is everywhere. RFID is everywhere. China just ordered one billion Smart Cards. Chinese university students are monitored in highly surveilled campuses. It looks very friendly, and very nice, but throughout these wireless interventions, people are being steered in certain directions. Smart Architecture is around the corner: materials that can change color or shape if you have the right Bluetooth ring or something … it really gets to a Harry Potter level, where some people will be able to see a door and some won’t. So we need to focus on these common denominators. If there is a kind of perverse capitalism working in there, why can’t we work in there? They work through the protocols, so why can’t we have the protocols working for us? Or make our own!

COUNTER (AMBIENT) INTELLIGENCE

UM: You argue that top-down policy making doesn’t work: “regulation is always a system failure as consensus should have been scripted into the design.” Can solidarity really be scripted into the code, as you suggest?

RvK: Maybe I don’t really believe it, but I think it’s our only chance now. It’s pointless to go to the RFID manufacturers and tell them “I’m against you.” But if I say: “Look, I think there is more money in privacy as a unique selling point,” then they will listen. Then you can start showing them things like RFID Guardian.

UM: You are somewhat pessimistic. In you writing you say: “Currently there is no alternative, no competition for the dream of pervasive computing, ubicomp, ambient intelligence, calm technology, disappearing computer.” But then I also sense some optimism, some hope being placed in the Open Source model. Is Open Source enough to counter the totalitarian tendencies of Ambient Intelligence?

RvK: I think it’s not enough. What is needed is first of all a place to articulate this opposition from. Even that seems to be gone. The universities, they just go with the flow. Companies offer intriguing research projects to the schools, who accept them without question. The teachers just keep an eye on the process and project management. The students implement whatever needs to be implemented. Then there are very few philosophers and political thinkers offering a critique, because one is immediately accused of being naive, of a sort of hippie optimism. Open Source as such needs to be investigated for all everyday activities. So we can talk about open source energies, and generic infrastructures, infrastructures that are of the people, out of the hands of the market, which is what we are trying to do at Bricolabs ["A distributed network for global and local development of generic infrastructures incrementally developed by communities"]. But right now Open Source is very much drenched in this ubicomp, pervasive computing model. IBM is really big into it. As long as it means “I’m opening up the sources, but I hold the key to the infrastructure,” it doesn’t really work. Corporations benefit because people are contributing their free time to building all these beautiful things for them.

UM: What happens to the concept of the public in Ambient Intelligence?

RvK: There really is no more public. The audience is really fragmented, their attention diverted from scandal to scandal. So we deal with experts, we talk to experts in the government, in companies, etc. But then what? When you try to reach out to people, they’ve got kids, and jobs, and no time. Everything that’s perceived as helpful is seen as good. For instance, Albert Heijn [a supermarket chain in The Netherlands] is going to begin experimenting with fingerprint scanning technology as a way to save time at the checkout lane, and that’s seen as good. In response to increased surveillance, people keep saying “I’m not doing anything wrong! I’ve got nothing to hide.” It’s very difficult to convince them that it’s not about what is considered wrong now, but what will be deemed wrong in three, four, or five years, when the infrastructure is in place, and all your movements can be tracked and traced and logged. But people don’t want to think about the ‘cool’ technology right now, they just want to use it! So the only way to make it a little better is to embed all these issues in the infrastructure. And that’s what we are trying to do with Smart Environments. Will this halt the machine? I don’t think so. But we can at least try to ease the transition. What else can we do? The Unibomber option is not an option for us, I don’t think. Adding more terror to already existing terror. One can also drop out, retreat. There’s people finding out which zones are not covered by mobile phone networks, and then buying that land. But maybe there is also a revolution somewhere in there waiting to happen. Something like the total fluke that was TCP/IP.

The networked society and its outsides: Interview with Geert Lovink

(photo and interview: Ulises Mejias, Creative Commons 2008)

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, net critic and activist (bio, blog, publications). He is the founding director of the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures, where I sat with him to chat on May 22.

SEARCH ENGINES AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

Ulises Mejias: Have you heard about Rushmoredrive.com? It’s a search engine for the Black community. It’s in English, and I guess the idea is that it functions as a Google for Black people. Whatever search they perform, it’s going to organize and bring up results that the search engine thinks are of more interest or relevance to the user. And obviously the next step is that we have a search engine for Muslims, and a search engine for Gays, and a search engine for every minority. So I guess my question is basically: Will there still be margins within the information society when everybody has their own custom-designed search algorithm?

Geert Lovink: Well, one of the margins is the relative drop of the importance of English on the Web because of the growing presence of other languages. It’s a relatively small group of people who speak English and so its influence is shrinking very rapidly. That’s a fact. If we look at the search engine market, there are very serious competitors to Google, and they are not where we might look. The biggest one is Baidu, which is in Mandarin only. Google has no entrance to the Chinese market to speak of, and it’s the fastest growing market of internet users. Is that a margin? No. Is Baidu going to focus on a certain type of identity? No…

UM: You don’t think that market is going to segment itself according to different Chinese identities (cultural, ethnic, sexual, etc.)?

GL: No. I don’t think so. The world of the Internet is going to be divided into large language groups to start with. But I don’t see language as an identity… I don’t think we’ll get very far if we think of English, Spanish, Arab, Mandarin or Hindi as ‘identity.’ That’s not very useful. I associate language with something else, with a general vehicle for communication. What you are talking about –these marginal niche markets for search engines– are very interesting, but the really interesting sub segments of the search engine market are focusing on something else. For instance: image search. Can you search an image that is not tagged based on image patterns? I want to see all the fragments where someone is wearing a red hat. So now we are seeing search engines coming up that focus on these kinds of queries.

UM: Specialized searches, like 0xdb?

GL: Right. Yes. It’s a niche market. It’s focusing on a general audience, but very likely not everybody is going to use it, or understand how to make use of these specific search technologies.

UM: So you think identity-based search engines are going to suffer the same fate of identity-based politics? There’s a limit to how useful they’ll be?

GL: And also they are language-based, so that puts a big limit on them. Unless of course they are going to multiply themselves in other language areas. Otherwise it’s going to be a very small pool of users.

ALTERNATIVES TO THE NETWORK

UM: This is what you wrote in Blogging, the nihilist impulse: “blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media, but they have consciously not replaced its ideology with an alternative.” You continue to say that “there is a sense that the Network is the alternative” but at the same time you question this alternative and say that users have nowhere else to go. You write: “There is no other world… What’s declining is the Belief in the Message. That is the nihilist moment, and blogs facilitate this culture as no platform has ever done before.” So, I was interested in comparing this notion of having nowhere else to go with Galloway and Thacker’s concept in The Exploit of an anti-web, something which they say we haven’t even begun to conceptualize…

GL: Well, I very much hope so, that there will be something like that. You can dream of something, whether it is utopian, dystopian, or alternative, subcultural or subversive, but that’s not what I was thinking about when I wrote that. Of course, there is an implicit reference that another world is possible. But I don’t think that this other world can be achieved merely through the design of alternative media spaces. I don’t think activists believe that through alternative media practices they can achieve their political goals, or set up structures –social and economic– such that capitalism will be reformed. I see very clearly the limits of the network discourse as such. When it comes to the formation of social movements or political forces in general, I see it more the other way around, and I’ve always seen it the other way around: that political forces come into being first, and then interact with the current media. And if there are groups within these movements that make clever use of the new media of their time, we can see very interesting uses. But I’ve never seen it the other way around, and I think it’s very naïve to believe that through Second Life or the blogosphere or whatever, that we can come to new political formations. At best we can speak of interesting subcultures or subcurrents, I think that’s possible. But we cannot have this kind of utopian idea, that these media products that we buy somehow embed some alternative future. No. We know what they embed. They are hard core architectures that have been designed by IT engineers and so on. They are not futuristic structures for a better world. If only it was like that! But we know enough about the people who design these machines, the circumstances under which they are produced, to know that they are an exact mirror of our society, at best.

UM: Is it necessary to stand outside the network in order to critique it?

GL: I think these days people would see it as a radical politics, or at least a challenge, to imagine a daily existence on the net without [companies like] Google… That’s our challenge. To imagine that. Can we position ourselves outside the “cloud”? Can we build alternative data centers that will not be surveilled? These are real questions.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND NEW MEDIA

UM: In The Principle of Notworking you quote Hardt and Negri’s argument that it takes a network to fight a network. But then you write that “networks might be an unsuitable form to win a fight… network discourse cannot integrate –let alone imagine– outside point of views.” Can you elaborate on that?

GL: This is a serious question for activists and social movements, which tend to be 10 to 15 years behind, so they are quite unfamiliar with the network logic, they haven’t seriously engaged with it. So there is not a radical critique of the network, unfortunately. If they are unfamiliar with the network discourse, with the network episteme, what’s going to happen? Some elements are going to be adopted, maybe. Obviously not the very widespread social networking practices, as we know them. It’s hilarious to think of a social networking site for activists, it’s just not going to happen. The paranoia is so widespread.

UM: Really? You don’t think that has already happened? I’m thinking of sites like TrueMajority or MoveOn. They think of themselves as networks, and using the power of networks…

GL: But not using contemporary tools. They envision themselves as networks, but in a different way. They take certain elements of the network, but they also distance themselves from the everyday use. It’s a bit funny. A lot of social movements throughout the last century thrived on the energy, the creativity and the imagination of young people. But these new networks are not tapping into the creativity of young users. That’s weird!

UM: Maybe some people within those movements have tried, but I think they run into the problem you’ve identified elsewhere: how do we facilitate large-scale [networked] conversations that do not only make sense but also have an impact?

GL: Or how can we have a small conversation without having to suffer all the time from the suspicion that authorities are tapping into the conversation for their own use. Most social movements since the rise of neoliberalism have been marginalized, and still are. So to have the self-confidence to break out of these limitations, and still stick to the agenda of radical politics… these are two things that don’t go together very well. So radical politics limits itself, therefore, to very strict offline engagements and events.

UM: Do you think maybe in the end that will be beneficial to them? Maybe they won’t spend so many resources chasing a dream that won’t materialize?

GL: It’s possible, but there is still a big problem with that, in that you do not really allow yourself to grow into a popular movement. And there are plenty of opportunities where small movements can transform themselves into popular movements: anti-war, healthcare, etc. And that requires new and effective ways of communicating as well.

ETHICS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SYSTEMS

UM: I’ve been thinking about the impact of Napster on ethics, and how within a short period of time, the code regulating a particular ethical standard was redefined, affecting masses of people. Do you think technosocial networks will usher in an age of viral ethics, with one code of ethics overruled by another, and another?

GL: That’s what we’ve seen happening. When I hear the word ‘ethics’ I think of the tragic decline of netiquette, and how Napster replaced that. Well defined codes of conduct were more or less in place within a group of internet users that still had direct or indirect contact with the first generation of those who designed the architectures and consequently the ethics that came with them. And in the late 1990’s we’ve seen these netiquette rules collapsing, because they could not be reproduced any more from one person to the next. That chain fell apart, because of the rapid growth. It was not possible anymore, as it was possible in 1995, to introduce users to the do’s and don’t’s… And instead, as you say, these large systems of anonymous exchange, like Napster, suddenly appeared; mass anonymity, not one singular person as “the” anonymous person, but mass anonymity, which creates this kind of breakdown of rules. And nothing else replaced it, to be honest.

UM: But aren’t masses on their way to becoming ’smart mobs’ with the help of these social network technologies?

GL: The one thing you can say is that media events are creating these temporary masses, but they are mass manufactured, in fact. A lot of the social protests we see these days already have this extreme temporality, a complete lack of any sustainable structure. That’s a given of political life today, that these movements and these events come up very quickly, a lot of people gather, and then they fall apart. We’ve seen that happening in “real” life, in cities, but we’ve seen that happening on the Internet as well. Very rapid growth and disintegration of these structures, sometimes even within days. Short lived, but at a mass scale.

UM: And useful?

GL: Well, they can have an impact, indeed. So useful, yes, but sometimes without enduring consequences.

The theme of the conference was summarized as follows:

Has there been a shift in political use of the internet and digital new media – a new web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

The conference was in large part the brainchild of Andrew Chadwick, Founding Director of the NPCU. There were 120 papers organised into 41 panels, and over 180 participants from over 30 countries. Some of the conference topics included: Parties, Elections and Campaigning; e-Governance; Constituency, Mobilisation and Engagement; The Politics of Blogging; Platforms, Power, and Politics; Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation; New Perspectives on e-Democracy; and Theorising Web 2.0.

What follows is a review of some of the presentations I found relevant to my interests (a summary of my paper is provided towards the end).

In his keynote, Stephen Coleman (Professor of Political Communication and Director of Research at the Institute for Communications Studies, University of Leeds) established the connection between politics and technology by arguing that the public is always constructed through mediation. But the ways in which technology and politics shape each other is anything but straightforward. Instead of simply asking “Does Web 2.0 help or hinder citizenship?” we should investigate the emergence of Web 2.0 as a discourse that re-orients citizenship itself. If citizenship is a creative act of self-representation, the opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 technologies would seem to open up a multiplicity of networked spaces for defining our political place in society (blogs, YouTube videos, Facebook groups, etc.). But according to Coleman, democracy requires commons as well as networks. Real political action requires that we go “beyond the ghetto of our Facebooks friends” to build platforms of solidarity or disagreement.

This issue of whether Web 2.0 allows for the creation of authentic commons or merely aggregates isolated individuals into interest-based networks was a recurring theme in the conference. For instance, Bernhard Rieder (Of People and Algorithms: Web 2.0 and the Production of Visibility) argued that the “wisdom of the crowd” is in fact a socio-technical construct that “represents a new arrangement for producing visibility and structuring public discourse.” In his paper, Rieder examines how Web 2.0 redistributes control over information flows and argues that “the democratic potential of this shift is counterbalanced by technological blackboxing, privatization and delusion of accountability.” Along the same lines, Jussi Parikka (Web 2.0 and Politics of Attention, Sociability and Capture) states:

“In a certain sense, much of the discourse around several web 2.0 applications is based on a forgetting, or assumption of “naturalness” in terms of “the sociability” of the people involved and the transparency of the media technological tools.”

One of the perils, then, is that before we get to question how meaningful is the kind of participation that Web 2.0 makes possible, democracy might be redefined to fit the affordances of the technology: Democracy is as Web 2.0 does. After all, as Tarleton Gillespie (WikiCandidate, Political Discourse and the Peculiarities of the Technological) pointed out, “democracy has had to evolve alongside the communication technologies taken up in its service.” Gillespie offered a model for differentiating between stated, materialized and symbolized participation, which can be useful in the analysis of actual participation v. a “sense” of participation. In the end, however, he argued that the promise of participation can’t be manufactured by Web 2.0 technology; it needs to be actualized through the involvement of the users. His presentation focused on some of the features of wikis as they relate to the formation of publics. For instance: Does the Revert function encourage dismissal of opinions? Does the “finished” look of wiki pages discourage dialogue?

Another common belief is that Web 2.0 can promote democracy by simply enlarging the visibility of marginalized voices. While Sandra González-Bailón (The Importance of Gaining an Audience: Visibility and Reach on the Web 2.0 Age) argued that there is “no democratization without visibility,” she cast some doubts on the claims that Web 2.0 can guarantee a larger audience. She observes:

“Gaining users’ attention is still the most crucial, albeit scarce, commodity online; web 2.0 might have widened the pool of producers, but consumers still manage a narrow scope of attention, which inevitably concentrates on a minority of sources.”

This is somewhat at odds with the scenario documented by Jonah Bossewitch (The ZyprexaKills Campaign: Peer Production and the Frontiers of Radical Pedagogy), in which a small committed group of decentralized activists used a combination of modern collaboration technologies (wikis, public tagging, Bittorrent, and Tor) to organize their resistance to Lilly’s attempts to suppress evidence surrounding the secondary effects of Eli Lilly’s blockbuster antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. According to Bossewitch,

This story suggests models for the purposeful deployment of emerging technologies by social justice movements, and demonstrates the strong symbiotic relationship between new and traditional media. [The case also exemplifies] some of the issues surrounding whistle-blowing in an era of omniscient surveillance, the relationship between anonymity and free speech, and the politics of memory.

But while Web 2.0 technologies might be efficient at organizing the work that decentralized anonymous activists undertake, its potential to coordinate in real-time the actions of a group for the purpose of creating social change (another one of the claims often associated with new information and communication technologies) needs to be contested. Joss Hands (Mobil(e)ising the Multitude: the Political Significance of Mobility in Contemporary Protest and Resistance Movements), for instance, pointed out that while mobile communications have facilitated the organisation of individuals into groups for the purpose of political protest and resistance (a scenario commonly associated with Howard Rheingold’s notion of the ‘Smart Mob’ or Hardt and Negri’s concept of ‘Multitude’), the emphasis on speed that these technologies introduce might be detrimental to the emergence and enactment of political will. He asks whether

“this necessarily produces an emphasis on the ‘mob’ element, or rather allows for a genuine ‘smartness’, thus, what is the distinction here between the multiple and the singular? And, what does it mean to be a political actor in such circumstances?”

The four papers in my panel on Theorising Web 2.0 continued to explore many of these questions from the perspective of the politics of power. Marcus Breen (Uncivil Society: Political Power Making in Web 2.0) began by poking holes on the utopian ideal of an equal-opportunity global communications network. He used a number of case studies (including one featuring Karl Rove discussing the use of email “e-blasts” by the Republican Party) to illustrate “how the culturally liberating possibilities of Web 2.0 may be circumvented and undermined by subterfuge in policy making and infrastructure control.” Underneath the rhetoric of openness, he argues, lies the reality that “the power deployed by political and business elites may produce models of society that are defined by their “uncivil” characteristics, reinforcing the view that civil society itself is a contested terrain.”

Meanwhile, Christian Fuchs (Social Theory Foundations of Social Software and the Web: From Web 1.0 towards Web 2.0 and Web 3.0) offered a model for tracing the potential in various generations of Web technologies for cognitive, communicative and cooperative affordances. What is at stake is the power to define the Web as a technology of competition or cooperation.

To David Berry (Web X.0: Politics as Imagined Technology) that struggle begins with the power to give meaning to the construct of something called “Web 2.0″, “Web 3.0″ or whatever. More than mere marketing terms, for him these names suggest that technology is a form of “imagined politics.” What Web 2.0 imagines, if we are to believe the literature from Silicon Valley, is an environment where actors are brought together to actualize new and revolutionary democratic potentials, where technology can ‘enhance’ or ‘improve’ democracy and freedom. However, it is interesting to note that

“the notions normally associated with Web 2.0 technologies, particularly those related to efficiency, speed, precise measurement, rationality and productivity would previously have been rejected as inappropriate to the realization of democratic debate and political action.”

In my own paper (Ulises Mejias, Social Networks and the Politics of Nodocentrism), I attempted to explore the politics of the network as episteme. As social networks are actualized by information and communication technologies (ICTs), they cease to function as mere metaphors and become templates for organizing sociality. Networks –as assemblages of people, technology and social norms– arrange subjects into structures and define the parameters for their interaction, thus actively shaping their social realities. But what does the social network include, and what is left out?

By definition, social networks are not anti-social, but they manifest a bias (which I term “nodocentrism”) against engaging anything that is not part of the network. There are two properties of networks that explain nodocentrism. First: the distance between two nodes within the same network is zero. Second: the distance between a node and something outside the network is practically infinite. Nodocentrism embodies a politics of exclusion, since in order for something to be relevant or even visible within the network it needs to be rendered as a node. In other words, nodocentrism is a reductionism that eliminates everything but the reality of the node. Nodocentrism informs a model of progress or development where things not on the network must and should be incorporated in order for them to exist (we find this ideology in the discourses of the digital divide, pervasive computing, etc.).

While nodocentrism makes for very efficient networks, I’m interested in what happens when it is used to define the social in networks owned and controlled by corporations. The problem then is that the criteria for inclusion, the power to name the social, rests disproportionately with network owners, not network users. Technosocial networks owned by corporations are like shopping malls in the sense that they re-inscribe the public unto a privatized space. The economy is no longer part of society; society is now part of the economy (Vandenberghe, 2002). In my presentation, I suggested a model for helping us think about the inequalities and injustices that result from using the privatized network as template for the social. This model follows the stages of development of a network.

The first stage is network growth. Networks start small, linking two lonely nodes, but their growth is exponential and explosive. Networks grow by adding or assimilating nodes. But what political function does the explosive growth of technosocial networks serve? Does it benefit network users and owners equally?

Networks don’t grow haphazardly, they follow certain rules. The rule that has the most impact is Preferential Attachment: Given the choice to link to a node with fewer links and a node with more links, we will choose to link to the one with more links. This means that in the long run, rich nodes get richer and rich networks get richer (this is the second stage).

Preferential attachment in technosocial networks leads to hyperinflation, a form of massive network growth that widens the gap between rich nodes and the rest of the nodes (the third stage). The presence of rich nodes or hubs benefits network owners, as hubs attracts more nodes through preferential attachment, and the network gets bigger. What is hyperinflated is social capital, meaning that the value of social networks is artificially inflated in order to attract more nodes. The goal of hyperinflation is to increase profit: bigger network membership means more eyes exposed to advertising, and a guaranteed rate of growth. But hyperinflation cannot be sustained indefinitely.

The excess of hyperinflation often leads to a bursting of the bubble. But market crashes can be good for business. In this stage of the development of the network, capitalization is used to convert inequality into gain for a few and loss for the rest. The privatized network is a commodity that can be exchanged and capitalized, and along with it the identity and content of all those users.

For the most part, capitalization goes unnoticed. Most people don’t care who owns the network, as long as they can use it for “free” (they are unaware of the cost they pay for this “free” service). But capitalization can also create discontent, at which time (the last stage) network owners are faced with a decision: tolerate a certain amount of sabotage from unhappy users, or purge the unwanted nodes from the network. The exercise of control over network membership is crucial at this point. The elimination of nodes requires complex forms of network collusion and transference. In other words, data from one network can be used to control membership in another network (for instance, information found on Facebook can be used to fire workers or expel students).

Corporations and governments engage in small daily acts of network purging: They cancel accounts, deny licenses, engage in surveillance, suspend service, modify terms of use, and trespass users’ rights. The way to secure the network is to assume a perpetual state of insecurity, which constantly requires new and improved methods for the purging of potentially unwanted nodes.

I ended my presentation by proposing the concept of the “paranodal,” the expanse between nodes, as the only possible site from which to un-think the logic of nodocentrism. Paranodality can provide the subject with the political context for disidentifying from the network, offering a site for the critical assessment of networked sociality. Of course, to unthink the logic of the network is not to pretend the network doesn’t exist, or to refuse to deal with it, but to re-imagine one’s relationship to it. The relationship of the paranode to the network is perhaps like the one of the parasite to the host (here I’m borrowing from Michel Serres): the parasite inserts itself into the communication process, between the sender and the receiver, disrupting the communication by being “noise”, and forcing the system to adjust to its presence. In this context, the paranode can be described as a parasite of the network, an element that lodges itself between nodes, distorting or introducing noise into the information that passes between nodes, and forcing the network –whether it acknowledges the paranode’s existence or not– to adjust to its presence. In my work, I attempt to theorize how this parasitical disruption can provide a way to think outside the logic of the network, to disidentify from it, and to resist its nodocentric view of the world.

Did Foucault prematurely announce the end of confinement? It sure looks like it when looking at the US, which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. According to government statistics, the number of people in prison and jail is outpacing the number of inmates released, even while the crime rate continues to fall. By June 2004 there were 2.1 million people in US jails, or one in every 138 residents (ref, ref). Race has everything to do with this issue: “blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 30 percent of people arrested… and 49 percent of those in prison… One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was either in jail or prison, or on parole or probation in 1995.” (ref).

And that’s just at home. The US is also in the business of confining people abroad. According to the article American Gulag in Harper’s Sept. 2006 issue, 450 prisoners are being held at Guantanamo, approximately 13,000 in Iraq, 500 in Afghanistan, and an estimated 100 in secret CIA “black sites” around the world. They have not been formally charged, and have little legal recourse. In essence, they are guilty until the US decides they are innocent. While the man in charge of the facility “firmly believes” that there are no innocent men in Guantanamo, a report based on data from the Dept. of Defense indicates that 55% of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its allies (ref, ref). According to Harper’s, 98 Guantanamo detainees have died to date, it is safe to assume not from natural causes.

But it’s not simply the case that this society is a bit behind in the transition from discipline to control. It is actually advancing equally well on both fronts. In fact, increased control goes hand in hand with increased confinement because increased control means more precise ways of identifying those who fail to perform to society’s expectations. In a technocracy, control is surveillance: the continuous monitoring of public, private and work life, and the “intelligent” identification of any deviance. But while new control technologies afford more effective and efficient methods of management and surveillance, you still need an apparatus for controlling those who fall outside the established parameters. This group includes those who have failed in the educational system and therefore cannot productively contribute to the service economy, enemies of the state (preemptively defined), non-conforming minorities, etc. (I’m not suggesting there are no criminals in prison; I’m merely drawing some conclusions from trends in the makeup of the prison population). The trick is then to turn the confinement of these ‘burdens’ of society into a business opportunity by benefiting from their cheap labor or by privatizing the industry of confinement itself (think Halliburton).

I hinted above at the role of education as a control mechanism that helps differentiate the productive members of society from those who should be confined and disciplined. The fact that the same groups who are disproportionately represented in the incarcerated population are also those most likely to drop out of the educational system is not a coincidence (only about half of Black and Hispanic youth graduate with a high-school degree; ref). But for everyone else who succeeds, what does education look like? The answer is: continuous control. I was struck by Deleuze’s comments regarding the changing nature of education in a control society:

In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything… school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business. (1995, p. 179)

This definitely puts a sinister spin on ‘life-long’ learning. The constant student is not one who engages in an ongoing perfection of the self, but one who is constantly assessed according to the performance standards of a service economy. Thanks to distance education, e-learning and technologies such as the Learning Management System (LMS), education becomes something that can be delivered anytime and anywhere, and which —more importantly— can be used to monitor performance throughout the ‘learning’ career of the individual. Thus, assessment-based education helps reconcile control and discipline in society by helping to effect, in the case of those who fail, a transition from controlled subject to disciplined object.

I want to go back briefly to Deleuze’s comment about control societies also operating through “instant communication” (1995, p. 174, my emphasis). It would make sense to assume that, in a crude way, control societies would want to control communication. But that is not the case. According to the standard technophile discourse, thanks to technology our societies enjoy an unprecedented freedom of speech and expression. Communication technologies with low operational cost and low barriers of entry (such as blogs) are praised for giving “everyone” a chance to express themselves. But Deleuze points out that “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves… What we’re are plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements” (1995, p. 129). Deleuze is suggesting that there is a connection between control and an over-abundance of (meaningless) expression. More of this type of communication has not resulted in stronger social bonds, but in increased isolation: concurrent with advances in ICTs, the last U.S. census shows that 25% of the nation’s households (27.2 million) consist of just one person, compared to 10% in 1950 (ref).

This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.

Offline Reference:
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press.

Creative Commons photo credit: thost

I was thinking of that as I was reading Andrew Feenberg’s essay Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom (originally published in 1992, before social software and the internet were really mainstream). Feenberg speaks of technology in the context of democracy. A truly democratic society is one where people have a say in determining what technology will produce through their labor, and Feenberg uses Marx’s concept of socialism to refer to a society where political agency is derived from work:

[Marx] claimed that we will remain disenfranchised and alienated so long as we have no say in industrial decision-making. Democracy must be extended from the political domain into the world of work. This is the underlying demand behind the idea of socialism. (p. 652)

How we work is a very political issue, and democracy (in this Marxist view) is the result of a system where workers have control over production processes and the fruits of those processes.

Of course, technology is a part of all aspects of our lives, not just work. Accordingly, Feenberg sees democracy as being enacted in everyday social life through the technologies we use. In other words, democracy is closely tied to how technology is actualized or put into practice. One of the problems of our age is that we tend to see our use of technology as inherently de-politicized. To save democracy, according to Feenberg, we need to stop thinking of it as something that politicians enact in government buildings, and start thinking of it in terms of our everyday technological practices:

The common sense view of technology limits democracy to the state. By contrast, I believe that unless democracy can be extended beyond its traditional bounds into the technically mediated domains of social life, its use value will continue to decline, participation will wither, and the institutions we identify with a free society will gradually disappear. (p. 653, my emphasis)

This point might sound familiar to those who have read Lessig’s (2004) views on free culture, in particular the way he associates the technological practice of ‘re-mixing’ content with a healthy democratic culture, and the way this practice is currently endangered by those who put unreasonable costs on our ability to remix. The irony is that many times those costs can be enforced by the same technologies that allow re-mixing! That is why Feenberg’s rejects views of technology as deterministic or neutral, and instead sees technology as “a scene of social struggle, a “parliament of things,” on which civilizational alternatives contend (p. 656).” To him, technology is not a static given but something that needs to be interpreted:

As a social object, technology ought to be subject to interpretation like any other cultural artifact, but is generally excluded from humanistic study. We are assured that its essence lies in a technically explainable function rather than a hermeneutically interpretable meaning. (p. 656)

Which is why Actor-Network Theory, I guess, sees technology as an actor in a complex network of associations, an actor whose role is open to interpretation depending on where you are standing. When I speak of the open affordances of technology, I refer to this issue: the fact that the same technologies can be used for different purposes according to different political agendas, and evolve accordingly. Feenberg argues that:

…differences in the way social groups interpret and use technical objects are not merely extrinsic but make a difference in the nature of the objects themselves. What the object is for the the groups that ultimately decide its fate determines what it becomes as it is redesigned and improved in over time. If this is true, then we can only understand technological development by studying the sociopolitical situation of the various groups involved in it. (p. 657)

So when people complain that social media undermines final communities and real commitment (Dreyfus, Borgmann), that it commodifies knowledge (Lyotard), or that is sets up a virtual domain that undermines reality (Baudrillard et al.), they are right to the extent that they are describing how technology is being used by a hegemonic authoritarian system. But that doesn’t mean that this ‘machine v. (human) nature’ model is the ONLY way technology can be used:

This is the point of Herbert Marcuse’s important critique of Weber. Marcuse shows that the concept of rationalization confounds the control of labor by management with control of nature by technology. The search for control of nature is generic, but management only arises against a specific social background, the capitalist wage system. Workers have no immediate interest in output in this system, unlike earlier forms of farm and craft labor, since their wage is not essentially linked to the income of the firm. Control of human beings becomes all-important in this context. (p. 657)

Which brings us back to technology, socialism, and democracy. Technological rationalization that puts emphasis on efficiency at the cost of the workers’ freedom is a function of capitalist reasoning, not just any kind of logic. Alternatives exist. Of course, some of those alternatives are now failed experiments (the wise words of Homer Simpson come to mind: “In theory, Communism works. In theory.”). But as Feenberg acknowledges, at least in socialism the democratization of technology was formulated as a goal. Unfortunately, because this point was made by Marx (and anything related to Marx must be evil and why don’t I go back to Russia), the power of this critique has been lost:

Machine design mirrors back the social factors operative in the prevailing rationality. The fact that the argument for the social relativity of modern technology originated in a Marxist context has obscured its most radical implications. We are not dealing here with a mere critique of the property system, but have extended the force of that critique down into the technical “base.” This approach goes well beyond the old economic distinction between capitalism and socialism, market and plan. Instead, one arrives at a different distinction between societies in which power rests on the technical mediation of social activities and those that democratize technical control and, correspondingly, technological design. (p. 658)

What Feenberg describes here (democratizing technological control and design) is starting to sound a lot like (certain applications of) Social Software. But the majority of applications do not aspire to this goal because, as Feenberg argues, hegemonies legitimatize certain applications of technology and not others:

The narrow focus of modern technology meets the needs of a particular hegemony; it is not a metaphysical condition. Under that hegemony technological design is unusually decontextualized and destructive. It is that hegemony that is called to account, not technology per se, when we point out that today technical means form an increasing threatening life environment. It is that hegemony, as it has embodied itself in technology, that must be challenged in the struggle for technological reform. (p. 663)

But how do we challenge the hegemony that has been coded into the technology? How do we set about reforming technology? Is violent revolution necessary or do we need, as Latour would say, to change the way we change?

The legitimating effectiveness of technology depends on unconsciousness of the cultural-political horizon under which it was designed. A recontextualizing critique of technology can uncover that horizon, demystify the illusion of technical necessity, and expose the relativity of the prevailing technical choices. (p. 658)

In other words, we need to un-think the encoded hegemony by becoming conscious of the agendas that motivate a particular application of technology, by questioning the choices embedded in the machine. This is similar to the notion of the digital divide as paralogy I’ve been thinking about recently.

But we must be careful to avoid falling into a chicken-egg trap here: Which comes first, the sociopolitical systems that engender truly democratic technologies, or the technologies that facilitate more democratic societies? Neither. Remember, we are talking about “a scene of social struggle, a “parliament of things,” on which civilizational alternatives contend (Feenberg, p. 656),” not a zero sum game of good v. evil that will be decisively won at some point in the future.

Technology can facilitate more than one type of technological civilization, and each generation must struggle to define which type of civilization it wants, or have someone else’s desires imposed on them. There is no point in waiting for the democratic technologies of the future, because they have always been at our reach. This is certainly true when we look at what is going on in the Open Source, Open Content and Open Learning movements (greatly facilitated by Social Software). And it is also true when we look at other grassroots expressions of democracy that do not require the kind of affordances embodied by Social Software (let’s not assume that only a society with access to these technologies can give expression to democracy!).

The Open Source, Open Content and Open Learning movements might seem like an insignificant contribution in light of the magnitude of the World’s problems, in particular when we take into account the small percentage of people involved in these movements. But as I have noted before, these movements can transform the benefits of Social Software into other kinds of benefits for larger sections of the world. And as far as manifestations of democracy go, I believe they are a worthy challenge to a status quo that revolves around private ownership and profit.

If —by whatever combination of strategies and happy historical accidents— Social Software manages to change the way we produce things (artifacts, knowledge), will these changes in the means of production result in more egalitarian societies? In other words, will Social Software prove Marx was right about the link between democracy and technology?

Reference:
Feenberg, A. (2003). Democratic rationalization: Technology, power and freedom. In R. C. Sharff & V. Dusek (Eds.), Philosophy of technology: The technological condition: An anthology. (pp. 652-665). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Accessed on May 5, 2006 from http://dogma.free.fr/txt/AF_democratic-rationalization.htm

Flickr Photo Credit:
Kim Pierro

Tags:
Andrew.Feenberg
Karl.Marx
social.software
democracy

First, I want to thank Patty Zimmerann for inviting me to this symposium. Patty played a vital role in my intellectual development when I was an undergraduate student here, and is one reason Ithaca College has a special place in my heart.

Video gaming is not one of my research areas, but I hope I can make a couple of meaningful comments to contribute to this discussion. My focus will be on the role of technology in facilitating knowledge and action at a distance, and how computer games can place that knowledge in the service of destruction or understanding. I should mention that I am publishing these comments on my blog, in case anyone is interested in reviewing some of the resources I will be discussing.

Telepistemology: Knowing at a Distance

Let me begin by making an observation about the role of technology in the development of our understanding of the world, specially our understanding of things that are not part of our immediate surroundings. It used to be that the farther things were from us physically, the more difficult it was to acquire empirical knowledge about them. In other words, geographic distance largely determined what was available for us to know, and to an extent, what we cared about. In that unmediated context, knowledge about and empathy towards a member of my community was greater than knowledge about and empathy towards someone in a distant land I could hardly begin to imagine.

Today, thanks to information and communication technologies (ICTs), geographic distance is not such a big factor in determining what is accessible to our understanding and empathy. This is what telepistemology means: knowing-at-a-distance. Furthermore, technology has enabled not only our ability to know at a distance, but also to act at a distance. Telepresence means being able to commit an act here with repercussions that are felt there, such as petting a chicken.

This is of course redefining our relationship to the world. What is spatially far can become epistemologically or ontologically near (through very different processes of mediation that I will ignore for the moment). Many people refer to this phenomenon as the Death of Distance. I don’t particularly care for that term, as it tends to hide the politics behind this shift. Distance is not dead. The terms of discourse have merely shifted in such a way as to devalue some things and value others. For example, what I call the irrelevancy of the near means that we can develop relationships with what is far at the expense of what is immediately around us. This is what allows us, for instance, to collaborate with peers in a global network while ignoring the decaying state of the communities outside our offices. In this example, poverty in our immediate surroundings has simply become irrelevant in relation to our existence in virtual communities.

Killing at a Distance

So while we struggle to balance our knowing and acting across the near and the far in order to bring about greater understanding and empathy, the history of knowing and acting at a distance to facilitate warfare goes way back. In fact, warfare since the bow and arrow has been all about action at a distance. Weapons have become increasingly sophisticated with regards to maximizing their destructive potential while keeping the soldier at a safe distance, and computer games have played a crucial role in familiarizing us with the types of user interfaces required to manipulate remote-killing weapons.

Consider the TALON robot, shown here. It’s currently being tested in Iraq. Its intended use is mostly for what is called explosive ordinance disposal (EOD), but one article (Robot Warriors Are Heading to Iraq!) already talks about mounting heavy weaponry on the TALON. If this future sounds too much like a Terminator movie, you’ll be happy to hear (I’m being sarcastic) that a developer of the TALON says: “For the foreseeable future, there always will be a person in the loop who makes the decision on friend or foe. That’s a hard problem to determine autonomously.” I wonder if once the ‘foreseeable future’ comes and goes, it will become more acceptable to let the machine make such decisions, and tolerate the margin of error.

If the connection between the TALON and video games is not already obvious, I would like to direct your attention to the Operator Control Unit (click image to enlarge): Which one of us brought up in a video game culture would not know almost intuitively what to do with that interface? All you need to look for is the joystick and the red button.

Killing at a distance does not always involve weapons. Knowledge-at-a-distance can have less belligerent but equally destructive ends. Consider what Tolstoy said in his essay Confession, when he lamented that unlike the old days of hand-to-hand combat, nowadays we kill people “through such a complex process of communication, and the consequences of our cruelty are so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of the action” (p. 100). We only have to look at how mass media makes the case for wars by providing us with very carefully orchestrated knowledge-at-a-distances packages to begin to realize what Tolstoy meant.

War Games & Disobedience Games

In the remainder of my comments, I would like to talk about a response to telepistemology that also involves technology, and what alternative role computer games can play. While one branch of technological development has concerned itself with knowledge and action at a distance, another has focused on reintegrating individuals to their surroundings, to the near, in augmented ways. I do not mean to imply that technologies that facilitate telepistemology are bad while those that facilitate embeddedness are good. Obviously, the devil is in the details. I merely want to contrast some applications.

When people find war morally reprehensible, one of the few options they have at their disposal in a so-called democracy is to protest the war. Here, I want to draw attention to the phenomenon of Smart Mobs as a recent example of strategies used to organize civil protest. The phenomenon, described by Howard Rheingold in the book of the same name, involves the use of common tools such as email, cell phones and social network services (such as MeetUp) to organize mass movements in highly effective ways.

What is the connection to video games? Just as we have an arsenal of computer games that train people on the mechanics of killing-at-a-distance, I think we need to start designing games that teach people how to organize against war using new technologies. Some examples are beginning to emerge, such as the upcoming release A Force More Powerful, a nonviolent strategic simulation game produced by BreakAway Games, which according to its authors is “designed to teach political activists how to plan and execute strategic non-violent warfare.”

In addition to having games that simulate the logistics of activism, we could have games that actually allow for its practice. While, to my knowledge, no such games exist yet, it is easy to imagine adapting the technology behind things like Human PacMan, a game in which human beings play the characters of the popular video game, and the game space is transposed to the player’s surroundings. Another example is CatchBob, a game that involves players using WiFi-enabled PC tablets to coordinate actions between members of a team.

Learning how to coordinate peaceful social movements with the aid of simple and cheap technologies can become a useful skill developed through computer games. But needless to say, the same tools and training can be used by groups with very different agendas. Which brings me to my last point. While it is tempting to fall back on the argument that technologies are neutral, this kind of argument will not take us very far. Technologies reflect the values of their creators, and are applied not in a vacuum but in specific social contexts, so they are anything but neutral. I do believe that technologies exhibit what I call open affordances: one technology can be adapted —within limits— to do something entirely different from what it was originally intended to do. But figuring out where those limits lie, how far we can change the technology before it changes us, is perhaps an even more important skill to develop.

Obviously the games we play shape our epistemologies. Someone playing Kuma War is going to have a very different disposition towards the world than someone playing A Force More Powerful. But I am also interested in the broader, and sometimes less obvious question of the epistemic and ontological shifts brought about by doing anything online. While I think we can design normative ways of knowing and acting at a distance, and use computer games to foster such behaviors, I’m also interested in exploring how these can be balanced with a re-engagement with the near. Or, more precisely, how the near will cease to be defined by space, and how technology —given the right pedagogies— can facilitate the projection of empathy.