blay.se

The Governmentality of Risk Management and Resiliens in the Face of Crises

2012-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

The following are notes taken at a seminar at KTH with Ash Amin from sometime last year. Most ideas are his, and at the moment it is hard to distinguish where they end and mine begin… I should have posted it long ago but it was reactualized lately, partly after I attended a meeting for Transition Gothenburg (…and partly by watching the discovery series “Doomsday Preppers”)

Life becomes catastrophe management

There is a new mentality prevalent in political and public culture the last 10-15 years. One in which risk and crisis is not something that should or can be avoided and planned for, but something one (and that includes us all) must be prepared for and for which our systems must be resilient. Life is no longer about building on top of a solid foundation but to constantly evade and recover from crisis. The only stability possible is a prototyping stability that is constantly building and rebuilding. Building becomes a process rather than stable product (Nigel Thift, Out of Order).

Prediction becomes more difficult

Design involving speculation and resiliens becomes necessary due to the fact that complexities does not allow you to predict the direction. Speculation (as the creation of scenarios) can be used to hilight and make directions present (rather than making huge stabilizing projects). Speculation therefor is not a model of a coming “real” project, but a beginning that can expand contaigously with each iteration. Local experiments start as tests or concepts and can become methods that are copied and expanded by others. The problem of prediction is not only one of complexity but also one of information certainty. It is a dual problem. Not only is there so much information and interconnected events that prediction becomes difficult, the certainty of the information at hand is dubious due to multiple or even unknown sources to it. However, both causes should yield the same respons – distributed resiliens. Interconnections of events produce surprise. Even information that was reliable could be dangerous to act on since the conditions might have changed between the information gathering and the act. This is a problem that the US army have wrestled with in Afghanistan. In their theoretical reports, design thinking has come to the forefront of how to tackle this problem. This design thinking involves the use of probing prototypes, several iterations of design acts and a distributed, networked knowledge process. It is never assumed that the problem and situation have been understood properly. The complexity of the design situation forces the creativity, information-generation and action to happen at the edges. For the US army this translates into the soldier becoming an entrepreneur-soldier and knowledge broker having to act and analyse on his own, creating a system of distributed knowledge and action. Acting in a situation of uncertainty and risk requires one to act by divergence, rather than focusing to cover larger areas of possible outcomes. Resiliance is more important than being right and efficient.

Hacktivism as plugging in becomes difficult

If hacking is traditionally understood as plugging in to systems and using the force of the system against itself (see Abstract Hacktivism), this becomes problematic in a situation of high uncertainty. It becomes diffucult to know how to use the energy of what you plug in to since that system is not a stable and predictable one. Hacktivism therefor have to plug in horizontally to others they are constantly communicating with, so that they get information about system changes, rather than plugging in to black boxes that can’t be trusted. The only reason plugging into black boxes used to work was because the inputs and outputs of those systems remained in place. Any changes in that system could not have been predicted by the hackers. Today its hard to plug in because what you get as output can change quickly and if you relied on that for your input you are in trouble. Plugging in horizontally on the other hand allow you to get notified of systems changes and even be able to request them. This is called co-operation. The same logic applies to the commercial world. Companies used to create predictable markets and desires. Now the “prosumers” (producer-consumers) create these themselves. The companies therefor rely more on selling the prosumers (product-consumer) themselves rather than creating fixed products for them. This is a much more resilient strategy than having to invest resources and fixed infrastructure for product development that by the time it is ready to launch might as well be outdated.

Flow control as a new governmentality

The latest security paradigm is flow control, where good flows are turned up and bad flows shut down. It is a governmentality that observs and regulates rather than dictates and plans. In other words completely in line with deleuzes society of control. “We all need to act together”! This becomes the primary call. Everyone need to participate and generate flows, however the role of the government is to monitor, select, filter and amplify them. Choose the right flows and you will be encouraged, choose the wrong flows and you will be fought. Which flows are considered good or bad can only be decided after the fact, all must be enabled and actualized before the filtering can happen.

Brief history of risk management from the post-war period to 9/11

In the immediate post-war period we see the rise of a state whose main goal is to create a safe, predictable and controllable future. The main task is to control war driven technologies; nuclear, chemical, biological – and to keep war to a known and defined theatre of war. Three aspects of risk emerges in the post-war period.

Calculations of risk. Risk is known, upcoming risks are predictable.
Insurance against risk. Risk can be avoided or at least covered
Management of risk by experts. There is always an action plan for every catastrophy

Today, roughly after 9/11, these three have changed

Failing insurance Insurance can’t or don’t want to cover the costs and replace what is damaged in huge disasters.
Lack in trust in experts Due to more participatory media/knowledge landscape
Public discourse of risk There is an awareness of global risks. Environmental risks, viruses, terrorism. Everyone is an actor in these risk scenarios (as opposed to the threat of nuclear war)
Individualisation of risk management Everyone has to manage their own life risks and take their own risks. Everyone is responsible for calculating risks, taking risks in order to advance and facing the consequences in the event of failure. Individuals must tackle risk by taking risks (even the meta-risk of deciding which risk to prepare for).

Risk calculation today

Risk calculation today is not based of rational calculation of the probabilities that certain scenarios would become real. Instead, risk calculation based on absolute contingent scenarios of the “what if”-kind. They are not forecasting models of likely futures but scenarios built on what happens if something happens. The temporal dimension of forecasting has given in to the spatial logic of scenarios.

Citizens in todays risk management becomes post-catastrophy builders. Not only are they first responders to a crisis or function pre-emptively. The citizens must also form communities restructioning a disaster area (see Detroit). It is not expected that the state will be able to take responsiblity for the restructioning process. The role of experts is changing. Instead of providing solutions, the role of the expert becomes one of reengineering expectations – making people understand that they always have to be ready, that they have to learn to adapt to changing conditions, that they can’t expect infinite growth. Basically play down the expectations on the future. The expert creates a constant awareness of risk and must handle and create controversies (in a Latourian sense) in order to manage expectations and readyness/preparedness. The expert must make future scenarios speak (again in a Latourian sense) today. Expertize becomes sense-making rather than fixed knowledge. It is impossible to locally store knowledge about the vast number of different criseses that can hit so this has to be stored networked and searched for during the unfolding of the event.

Civil defense changes from command and control to community resilience. What is encouraged in a situation of crisis is informal citizen action, “hacking”, rather than citizens waiting for an expert response. In the recent British floodings [*I don’t know exactly which floodings this refers to, possibly an event in the beginning of 2011, but it has been a common and debated problem in Britain the last years], the civil defence authorities praised the people spontaneously building flood gates while riduculing the people whose first reaction was to call the authorities and ask what to do. From the perspective of civil defense, individuals and groups must become resilient and act in the event of catastrophy.

Research approaches

Several positive aspects of this development has been presented in reaserch which has hilighted the turn to democratic openess, deliberative communities and self-organisation instead of central expert authority (ex. solnit2009, jasanoff2010, callon2001). For Callon, the only way forward is to involve everyone in risk management and make it present or else it will catch all by surprise and allow for populist responses. This is close to the Latourian parliament of things. Solnit, looking at post-disaster research says that inventiveness and altruism kicks in during/after disaster. We do not get an all-against-all barbaric situation. Though this reserach is only looking at the first period during/after disaster. She also finds that everywhere a disaster has tried to be managed in a top-down fashion, it has failed. These has been the worst handlings of crisis. What works is bottom-up approaches. Jasanoff calls for a new kind of approach to technology development and management which she calls technologies of humility. This refers to technologies and technology policy that do not assume prediction and control and that reshapes the relations between experts, governments and citizens for a more distributed development. Technologies of humility build in as much preparedness for the unknown and for change as possible.

The negative aspects hilighted, which the above perspectives somewhat neglect, has been that it is a kind of laisse-fairre approach from the state which allows it not to take responsibility and blaim complexity as well as leading to an authoritarianism relating to the militarization of everyday life due to the constant preparedness. The above approaches neglets the new governmentality that comes with these developments.

In the above mentioned research, there is a certain romance for human lay knowledge that comes with a number of problems. It neglects complex systems (for example cities) and their dependence on complex circulations of information and matter and the vast coordination it requires to function; a circulation that is based on software intelligence. They also neglect that altruism and do-it-yourself approaches fades quickly in the time after a crisis. People soon start to ask for expertise and security. This romance of resiliens risks leaving the most vurnerable to their own devices, the ones most needed of support. When citizens efforts are prefered, only the capable manage and often not the ones most immediately effected by disaster. Finally, the research don’t cover that these approaches mean that the responsiblility of the center is lost.

Along these developments are also a new governmentality and a new biopolitics. We get the well-known suspension of democracy when a crisis is always in the air. This biopolitics rests on an “ontopower” (Virno?), an ontological clearence of the unexpected. The crisis is not treated as a part of the logic of the system but an unexpected external event. The unexpected is naturalized and therefor made permanent (as in the war on terror). The unexpected is dealt with by taking it out of the system ontologically. What we get from that is a militarization of everyday life, since the unexpected can strike anytime and anywhere. Even though the realization of the unexpected is completely contingent and unpredictable, it must be fought in the present. We therefor get a violence against a future that may or may not be realized.

Where does technologies of humility and the open participation fit within this governmentality? Is it just about picking up the pieces after the unexpected event? Or of a distributed surveillence where citizens discover the event approaching in the final minutes before it strikes just in time for an emergency reaction? There seem only to be small spaces for the democratic option. Spaces where it might be able to roam free and act freely, but whose borders and time-frame is very strict. This fits perfectly with flow control and the starting and stopping of autonomous flows (compare to cybernetics).

The role of hacking

How can hacking as a practice increase this space? By acting before crisis happens? By the eschatological practice of playing out crisis situations before they become disastrous (see Copyriot)? Or is hacking merely playing dangerously close to the preparedness discourse that also forms the basis of the war on terror and securitization of everyday life?

If we are to adopt a post-human approach to the resiliens and disaster research otherwise mostly occupied with human communities, we find this in the open technologies of hackers. Open technologies have the biopolitics of preparedness and resiliens built in. Open source software is used to prevent backdoors and security threats, from company control and censorship and in case of having to adopt the software to differnt situations.

The opposite of this resiliens technology is slick, user friendly technology that only performs the function that the developing company decides, which is performed effectively but which is also black boxed.

The distrubuted nature of technology development in hacker communities forces a kind of technology that is open, modular, based around sharing and is constantly being rebuilt. It has to be able to enter and exit relations yet still function and is therefor perfectly suited to be able to function also in a post-disaster scenario. It is technology being able to do more than its current function and able to function in other situations than the one it was built for, which could for example involve being able to generate energy in different ways and being able to be repaired with abundant materials. This also points towards a horisontal dependency and recognition of the complexity and interdependance of various systems which goes against the individualized attitude of survivalists.

Arbetsdefiniton av cybersecurity

2012-02-09T00:00:00+01:00

Vaknade i morse och kunde inte sluta tänka på vad som egentligen menas med “cybersecurity”. Kanske hade jag drömt något om det? Cybersecurity har en slags neutral klang hos sig, som om det handlade enbart om åtgärder mot virus eller att se till att obehöriga inte får tillgång till datorsystem. Men jag kunde inte skaka av mig känslan av att något mer står på spel. Detta är mina försök att utröna detta. Tack till IRC för diskussioner som hjälpte fram distinktionerna!

Problemet med cyber security, förstått som “cyberspace security”, är att cyberspace inte existerar¹. Det finns ingen digital dualism. Eller omvänt uttryckt, cyberspace är överallt. Det är något vi alltid befinner oss i vare sig vi för tillfället är påkopplade eller avkopplade. Därmed blir vi kvarlämnade med endast *security – strävan efter att radera alla störningsmoment i ett samhälle där allting kontrolleras av datorstödda system. Cyber i cyberspace refererar som bekant till cybernetics, vilket är vetenskapen om “command and control” inom formella system. Cybersecurity strävar sålunda efter ett samhälle där varje command åtföljs av en control utan störningsmoment på så vis att kommandot med säkerhet uppnår den önskade effekten. Med andra ord finns en risk att cybersecurity exanderar till att skydda mot allt som riskerar att störa de globala flödena – så kallad flow contol.

Om cyber expanderar till att omfatta samhället som helhet, finns det då någon gräns för vad som kan uppfattas som hot mot cybersecurity? Det finns uppenbarligen ingen sådan spatial gräns, eftersom hot mot cybersecurity kan uppstå varsomhelst i ett samhälle med allnärvarande cybersystem. Däremot finns det en topologisk(?) gräns. Cyberhot innefattar alltid hot som sker inom ett system. Ett cyberhot kan aldrig vara externt, utan bygger på något slags intrång av en extern aktör eller en omvandling av en intern aktör från en brukare till en hotfull agent. Exempelvis är det inte ett cyberhot om någon spränger ett datorstyrt kraftverk, däremot om ett virus i datorsystemet orsakar haveri. Den efterföljande förödelsen kan dock vara exakt den samma. Hur hanteras då ett externt hot mot ett datorstött system? Det faller under den vanliga anti-terrorismen. Det ska visa sig att anti-terrorism och cybersecurity kan ses som två sidor av samma mynt.

Men först tillbaks till detta med extern och intern i förhållande till system. Som explosionsexemplet visade har detta inte att göra med att spatialt vara innanför eller utanför systemets fysiska manifestation. Explotionen förstör systemet fullkomligt och håller sig därför inte alls till någon omringande fysisk gräns. Innanför och utanför ska istället förstås systemteoretiskt. I Luhmanns systemteori kan innanför ersättas med begreppet information. Information för Luhmann är inte något som existerar “där ute”. Istället är det något som systemet självt skapar. Något blir information för systemet när det omvandlar extern stimuli – retningar – till något som blir begripligt för systemet. På så vis kan Luhmann påstå att samhällen inte består av människor utan av kommunikation. Visserligen kan samhället vara beroende av att människor skapar den här kommunikationen, men det gör de inte en del av samhället. På samma vis är kablarna och servrarna nödvändiga för cybersystmet, men de är inte en del av det. Därför måste ett cyberhot vara något som cybersystemet förstår som information. Detta kan förstås både vara ett virus som tar sig in via internet, eller en anställd som har tillgång till systemet som trycker på fel knappar.

Så långt har vi alltså ställt upp att: - Interna hot – cybersecurity - Externa hot – anti-terror

Dessutom har det konstaterats att dessa olika hot inte är hot för olika typer av system. Det finns inte speciella cybersystem i samhället, utan alla samhälliga system har en mer eller mindre portion “cyber-aspekter” hos sig. Istället är det två slags hot som samma typer av system (eller samma typ av infrastruktur, mer korrekt). Är det här dock en vattentät definition eller finns det fortfarande oklarheter. Vad är internt och externt för ett system? Går det alltid att avgöra vad ett system gör till infomation eller inte. Kan vi tänka oss ett hack som gör att denna definitinon inte håller? Detta är lite kanske lite hollywoodmässigt, men tänk ett hack som går ut på att ett system hettas upp på en viss punkt som gör att det producerar ett error som får systemet att flippa ur. Är det terrorism eller cyberattack enligt denna defintion? Är uppdelningen mellan information och energi absolut eller en fråga om konvention? Det hela kompliceras ytterligare av att cybersystem inte bara ska förstås som datorsystem. I själva verket är de i de flesta verkliga fall hybrider av datorsystem och precisa instruktioner för mänsklig agens, alltså protokoll för beteende. En av de vanliga hackermetoderna – social engineering – vittnar inte minst om det. De villkor under vilka en säkerhetsvakt ska släppa in eller inte släppa in en person i serverhallen är lika mycket en del av systemet som om det vore ett kodlås där. Social engineering skulle alltså vara en cyberattack, dock vore det inte en cyberattack att klubba ner vakten och ta nycklarna. Även om utfallet i båda fallen är att man kommer in i serverrummet. Hur är det med en kortslutning förresten? En kortslutning kan sabotera ett system externt på samma sätt som en sprängladdning kan göra det. Men en kortslutning kan också producera information för systemet, t.ex. skicka ut “1” till en annan komponent i systemet istället för “0”. Kanske är gränserna definitionsmässigt absolut skiljda, men i praktiken kan det kvitta om det är ett internt eller externt hot mot systemet – effekten blir densamma. Välkomnar kommentarer om detta!

Hittils alltså en början till en arbetsdefinition av cybersecurity och cyberattacker. Vad det får för praktisk inverkan får gärna diskuteras här nedan och blir kanske frågan för ett framtida inlägg.

Tillägg om cyberspace: Cyberspace som term för internet idag kan både avfärdas som ontologiskt felaktig och som historiskt felaktig (vilket tas upp här). Det historiska avfärdandet består i att för tidiga datoranvändare var verkligen internet en anna plats, helt skiljd från deras övriga liv, men att detta nu inte längre är sant. Detta verkar vara grunden för William Gibsons avfärdande av termen idag. Den ontologiska kritiken däremot syftar till att internet aldrig varit skiljt från övriga samhället, även om det kunde verka så för dessa datoranvändare. Skiljelinjen går nog vid om man väljer att ta användaren eller systemets objektiva uppbyggdnad som utgångspunkt.↩

Photography and the History of Hacking

2012-02-05T00:00:00+01:00

This text is featured in “The Reader - North/South, River Run” produced by The School of Photography at the University of Gothenburg. The book is edited by Kerstin Hamilton and put together from lectures given at a course with the same name as the title of the book in the summer of 2011. It features among others: Annika von Hauswolff, Karl Palmås and a cartoon about Fredrik Svensk. My lecture on hacking and photography was held a sunny day in a park in Gothenburg

Introduction
The history of hacking
- 60’s
- 70’s
- 40’s
- 80’s
- 90’s
- 2000’s
Situated cybernetics
Examples of photo hacks

Introduction

The term hacker is today a widely used and multi-faceted term that mean very different things to different people. Some associate it only with credit card scams and breaking into computer systems. For others, it is a label to attach to one’s activity to give signal that it is unconventional, edgy and smart. To understand how all these meaning can be attached to a single word, I will make an exposé of the history of hacking to see how the different meaning has been attached to the word at different periods.

The history of hacking

60’s

The roots of hacking can be found in American academic institutions like MIT in the 50’s and 60’s. At this time, a new kind of academic subculture grows in the student clubs. It is a culture of people who are very brilliant but who don’t care about grades, going to classes or getting academic carreers. Students who follow the institutionalised academic path are called ‘tools’ and are frowned upon. Instead these people are obsessed with technical systems such as managing the electrical switches of complicated railroad models.

Computers at this time consist of the mainframe computer; a single, room sized machine of which students and researchers have only limited access time and whose rules and regulations are closely guarded by the bureaucrat technicians called ‘the priesthood’. Only programs that are part of serious research are allowed to be run on the mainframe.

The system obsessed students were desperate to get their hands on the mainframe and would sneak in at night to run their own programs without the permission of the priests. The practice of hacking emerges here as a way to accomplish a certain computing task with much less resources than when using the prescripted way. To make the most out of the limited time, the students had to learn to use the computers even more efficiently than the operators themselves.

The first use of the term hack was a name for a typical college prank; like dressing all the trees on campus in aluminium foil over night. Here is where hacking gets associated with tricks, humour and the unexpected. Also for the computer users the term hack was associated with tricks such as putting two wires together with tape to make the machine do something that was not in the manual. At first hacking was used as a degratory term such as “that is MERELY a hack” but later it was seen as something positive. Someone who was able to get something to work with merely a hack was someone who understood the system better than the people who followed the manual, perhaps even better than the constructor of the system. Even today many hacks is about accomplishing a certain task by consuming much less resources than the prescribed way, or making more of the resources than you were supposed to; such as turning discarded hardware into useful machines.The hack has become a democratisation of technology, at least for the one who is skillful enough to perform it; someone who is able and willing to put in the hours can shortcut established paths for gaining resources, influence and power.

70’s

The next stop of the history of hacking is the 70’s with the revolution of personal computing. What is interesting in this period is that computers had become a symbol of personal liberation of the kind that the American hippie counter-coulture movement had been trying to bring about. Only ten year earlier, when the counter-culture was launched as the free speech movement at Berkeley, computers were seen as the enemy. They were considered bureaucratic machines that turned individuals into nothing more than a record in a database. They were looked upon as dehumanizing control machines associated with the bureacracy of the American state apparatus. A decade later the situation is reversed. This can partly be subscribed to changes in the technology itself with computers becoming smaller and not requiring huge resources to build. The PC revolution was spawned at amateur computer clubs such as the homebrew computing club where people like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates were participating. But as Fred Turner points out in “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” (2006), a smaller computer does not necessarily make it personal, in fact it can be a tool to integrate the individual even more closely to the corporation. A cultural shift in the view of systems in the counter-culture movement was also necessary. To understand this we have to go back 25 years again, even before the original hackers at MIT. Back to the final stages of the second world war and the birth of cybernetics - a discipline with military origins which later became a symbol of counter-culture.

40’s

The father of cybernetics is Norbert Wiener. A mathematician who during the Second World War was given the task of contructing a system to increase the ability to shoot down moving airplanes. To do this, Wiener constructed a feedback system where the human aimed at the airplane; the system calculated the speed of the airplane and thus the trajectory it needed to shoot in order to hit the plane. As we can see, already at the birth of cybernetics there is a coupling of human and machine: the human cognition of seeing the airplane and the system cognition of calculating the speed. A feedback system constantly gathers information about its environment and can therefor adjust itself and adjust the environment until it comes into balance. Cybernetics does not distinguish between humans and machines, they are both components in the feedback system where everything is turned into information for the system: they are both information processing devices. Here, one can see both the association with cybernetics systems reducing humans to machines as well as how the coupling of human and machine can enhance the freedom of the human, enhance her power to act. Cybernetics became hugely influencial partly thanks to the ability to use the new computers to calculate system behaviours and process information. It was launched as a discipline that would unite all other academic discipline and the cyberneticians organised conferences and dining clubs where technicians, researchers from the natural and social sciences — such as biologists, physicists, anthopologists and sociologists — were invited. Everything could now be seen as a feedback system of information processing.

People begun to see cybernetic feedback systems in everything from technical to social and biological phenomena. For example the idea of an “eco-system” — that nature is a system balancing itself through feedback between animals, plants and climates — comes from cybernetics. The political implications of cybernetics also had a huge impact. Cyberneticians saw a human world constructed of simple, linear systems with no feedback where command and control flow from top to bottom. This was the cause of social unrest, planning errors and chaos in society. A cybernetic feedback system on the other hand could collect information about society and the impact various decisions had and thus recalibrate itself in order to remain stable.

These broad gatherings of people from different disciplines under the banner of cybernetics eventually reached some people associated with the counter-cultural movement such as Steward Brand and Ken Kesey. They were involved in the growing movement of communes in the US, a movement that had rejected traditional mass movement political action and turned to autonomous communes where new kinds of technology and tranformation of conciousness would bring about societal change. Central to this view was that everything was connected. Steward Brand even named his magazine “The Whole Earth Catalogue” and legend has it that he was influencial in having convinced NASA to allow Apollo 17 to turn back towards earth and take the photograph known as “The Blue Marble”, the first photograph that capture the whole earth at once, which Brand thought would provoce a planetary shift in conciousness.

Brand, Kesey and their peers started to bring in the idea of the feedback system into the movement. They saw the feedback system as a non-hierarchical process where every entity was a peer that communicated to other peers. If everything is a feedback system of information, it means that everyone and everything is connected and co-dependent. In their cybernetic view, power was located within the system itself, not in a particular individual. Brand, Kesey and the others started to introduce the ideas from cybernetics in the form of cultural experiments. One such experiment that was popular was to gather a dousin or so people in a circle. In the middle were cut up water hoses entangled in a mess, just as many as there were particpants. Each participant grabbed two ends of the hoses and put one against the ear and one against the mouth. Then they began to listen and speak and start conversations through the hoses, but the one that spoke to your ear was most likely not the same person you spoke to through the hose at your mounth. What emerged was a conversation at the level of the system rather than one between individuals. Experiments inspired by cybernetic feedback systems thus became a way to explore consciousness, identity, art and social arrangements. It is not hard to see how these experiments are echoed in the utopian promises of the personal computer and the world wide web. They would be the tools that was thought to bring about a playful, non-hierarchical, expressive and harmonized humanity made up by empowered individuals. We can see a difference compared to the early hackers at MIT who were interested in systems as an external object of study. Now, freedom was associated with becoming a part of the system yourself. One can debate whether this really is a form of freedom or whether a human more tightly coupled with the cybernetic system just becomes even more controlled, although the speed, intensity and acceleration of the system can give a sensation that can feel like freedom since the system flows without resistance.

Here we have two versions of control operating. In the simple system you have the pyramid structure of power where power flows from an elite at the top down to the masses. The masses are limited and restricted by the despot at the top of the pyramid. Cybernetics as very different from this model since it also stipulates that feedback should flow from every part of system and be able to influence it. This seamingly democratic model is what appealed to the counter-culture. But this cybernetic feedback is also another form of power where every entity of the system has to produce information about its behaviour in order for it to be fed into the system. The lack of obvious restrictions comes at a price, which is that all movements must be registred by and fed into the cybernetic system. In today discussions on political power we are precisely located between these two. And we don’t know exactly which power to trust. Surveillence society or despotic society?

80’s

After this detour we are back in the Personal Computer revulotion. Companies like Apple, Microsoft and Oracle are formed, promising a new computing era away from the mainframe era of IBM. Computers are put in everyone’s hands and for the first time it becomes a matter of consumer electronics. This also means that commercial rules start to apply to computer enthusiasts. But once again, the hackers have no intention of following the rules. Games and software are now sold with copy protection to prevent people from sharing the information. And here we see the advent of cracking copy protection. It becomes a competition of skill among hackers to crack new forms of copy protection before everyone else, to show that you are the most skillful. The challenges of this lead to the formation of hacker groups — people working together to crack games faster than a single person could. Around this cracking of copy protection, a whole subculture is born. The cracked games are distributed with an intro showing which hacker group cracked the game and this intro features animated computer graphics and computer generated music. Because cracked games are distributed on floppy discs that do not have much space on them, another skill competition arises from making as advanced animations and music as possible using as little memory as possible. This so called “demo scene” grows quickly during the 80’s and leads to huge “demo parties” where animation, music and programming skills are shown off in battles with others. The hacker becomes a media figure at this time and is often featured in dramatic stories about computer security breaches, credit card scams and large-scale piracy. This will eventually force a distinction in the hacker community between hackers and crackers where hackers say that they are improving systems while the crackers are breaking them.

So far, one thing is missing from this picture which is associated to the word hacker by anyone today - the network. Computers had been networked a long time with the origins of the internet stretching back to Arpanet in the 50’s. But the first home-made computer networks are formed in the 80’s using modems over the telephone line. People start to set up BBS’s in their homes. The Bulletin Board Systems was an early forefather to the modern internet forum (and perhaps the first digital “social media”). When you call someone’s BBS you get back a bulletin board with information, files and messages left by other people (unless the line is busy by someone else calling, of course…). On these BBS’es, the first virtual communities start to form (for example The Well featuring a certain Steward Brand). But there is a catch. In order to reach the coolest BBS’es and network with the best people you often have to call long distancne, and long distance is expensive. Once again the hacker steps forth and plays by different rules than the others. This is the era of phreaking.

Telephone lines at this time was strictly analog and operated by control tones being sent to the telephone switches. When you punched in the numbers on the keypad of a pay phone, all you were doing was sending tones with different frequencies to the telephone switch, telling it how to connect you. As a coincidence, it was found that a whistle that came as a gift in the “Captain Crunch” cereals had the precise frequency that was necessary - 2600hz - to signal to the switch that you were allowed to make a free long distance call. Soon, all hackers were calling each other for free all over the world. Phreaking was an essential component for allowing the virtual communities to be able to span the entire globe and dramatically increase the level of knowledge and information exchange in the hacker community.

90’s

The 90’s sees the birth of severals ways in which hacking becomes political when the world wide web and profilation of computers in corporations and state institutions makes it an important infrastructure of society.

Free software, although it started in 1983 when Richard Stallman started the GNU-project to develop a free operating system, did not really kick off until the early 90’s when Linus Torvalds develops the Linux kernel. Free software features a legal hack — the GPL license — which states that a GPL licensed code can be used, copied and modified freely by anyone for any purpose as long as it retains the GPL license of any software that uses its code. This prevented free code to be locked in by corporations and forced anyone using code snippets from free software to also release their software with the GPL license.

The 90’s also see the birth of another very excplicitly political hacker movement that goes by the name hacktivism. This was created by political activists who tried to transport methods from street politics — such as demonstration, blockades, strikes and sit-ins — to the digital realm. The most famous of the early examples is the Electronic Disturbance Theatre who in 1994 did a DDOS-attack against the website of the Mexican Government in solidarity with the Zapatistas. However, apart from the political rethorics, one can question if they really accomplished something new. Both the political terminology they used and what they did with computers was standardised use. But still, we can see the hacktivist legacy echoed in the actions of groups like Anonymous today.

And as the culmination of the cyberpolitical 90’s, former Grateful Dead member, now cyberevangalist John Perry Barlow writes “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”(1996). There cyberspace is declared to be a new frontier of freedom where the laws and norms of the industrial society have no reach and identities and communities were formed without the restrictions of the flesh.

Parallell to the cyberpositive political evangelists, internet entrepreneurship explodes as the web becomes a commercial sphere, all reaching its climax with the dot com bubble bursting in early 2000.

2000’s

So what happened in the last decade? Hacking became everyones tool. Little tricks spreading like wild fire across the internet. Unlock your phone, bypass the registration of the software, copy the copy-protected files. You don’t need skills or personal contacts anymore. Even your grand mother is file-sharing. The model of hacking and open source became general models of organising and taking action, called “abstract hacktivism” by Palmås and von Busch. As computing spreads to become the fabric of society, no area is far from being hacked. The expansion of computation into every domain of life makes it possible to view everything as code, as a computer system that can be manipulated. Every area of society can utilize free sharing of information and non-hierarchical networks. It also works the other way around; code underlies everyting in society. Lawrence Lessig says that this means that today, “code is law”; the code sets the boundaries of what actions are possible. A clear parallel to the cybernetic vision of one discipline to rule them all; then, feeback system, now, software and networks.

At the same time, the internet became a militarized critical infrastructure with the last years even seeing the emergence of such a retro-sounding term as “cyberwar”. The dual character of cybernetics as military and counter-culture at the same time is echoed in the present condition.

Situated cybernetics

Hacking in art opens up vast new domains of exploration and non-standardized use of tools and situations, but it comes at a price. To introduce the hacker perspective into an artform like photography runs the risk of reducing projects to technical cleverness and put focus only on the process and the resources it makes use of. The only lasting result is a documentation of this process trying to represent it, which by definition is inferior to the now mythical hack. There is also a risk of becoming enchanted by the seemingly unlimited possibilities of the hacker.

The practices of hacking seem to reveal great potentials for intervening in and subverting systems, but perhaps this is an illusionary empowerment only illustrating that the real powers have moved elsewhere. That the control over systems has moved to lower and more complex layers of the technological society leaving hackers and other creative types with a sandbox where they are free to play around on conditions set by the network owners who even encourage a creative participation as a free generator fo content for the networks.

It is therefor a need to be careful when approaching hacker practices. Because, what can be gained from introducing a hacker perspective is a close engagement with the material objects, systems and structures that make up the environment of the creative practice and by that gain a new perspective on its aesthetics. Technological systems can limit, direct and control human experience and perception, allowing only part of the human potential to be expressed. However, technology also has the power to intensify the human senses, making them see and feel more than they would without it, making them able to perceive and touch objects that would otherwise have been withdrawn, below or above the threshold of what the human sensory apparatus can experience. The benefit of looking at a creative practice from a cybernetic lens could therefor be to shine new light on the human and the human potential rather than revealing technological systems.

There are two oppesed but intertwined storiess of cybernetics still present today. One is about subsuming all of reality to one feedback system, reducing everything to information for the system, a cybernetics of a control and surveillence society where every movement becomes registred data for the system. The other is about cybernetics as a technique for letting go of control. Of coping with the complexity of a given situation without reducing and trying to control it. You could call them transcendental cybernetics (aiming to capture the world within a system) and situated cybernetics (directed to a specific situation).

Situated cybernetics celebrates the inventive and creative character of cybernetics, while rejecting its totalizing claims. It can acknowledge cybernetics as a skillful craft of engaging with complex systems; useful in many practices, necessary to be able to cope with increasing complexity; but rejecting the idea that everything can and should be captured by cybernetic systems. The best hacks, the best cybernetic performances, are the one’s that does not brag about being able to achieve absolute control of a system, but the one’s that shows how the world always comes with surprises and unexpected turns, always exceeds our attempts at controlling it, but that given the right skills and tools, this chaotic complexity can be coped with, endured and even enjoyed.

Examples of photo hacks

Pinhole Camera

Photography of course has always been a machinic artform and the camera is always present for reality to inscribe itself physically on the film. It has been no stranger to modifications and amateur constructions in its history, but at least until the digital camera it has not been more than a simple system, lacking any mechanical or electrical feedback loops. Here, a simple schematic for building one’s own pinhole camera, a system without feedback.

Taeyoon Choi - Cameraautomata

When hacking is introduced into an art practice, it shifts the interest from the final product to the process. A duck roams a tourist area equipped with a digital camera, a sensor and a printer. When someone tries to take a picture of the duck, IT takes of picture of the photographer and prints the photograph out its back. Feedback is introduced between the sensor, the processing device and the actuator. The process in which it intervenes is both a sociotechnical one, being about both the social practice of tourist photography as well as the material and technical actors involved in it.

Julius von Bismarck - Image Fulgurator

Hacking in art gives plenty of opportunities to enact hacking in its original definition of a prank. Here a camera is modified in such a way that the back is removed, replaced by a flash that lights the camera from the back, through a film with an image or a text imprinted, through the lens and onto the surface the camera is pointed to. On top of the camera sits an automatic flash trigger that will trigger as soon as another person close by takes a photo using flash. The result is that the fulgurators image is projected on the surface that someone is taking a picture of during a milisecond — too fast for the eye to pick up, but enough for it to be imprinted on the resulting photograph. Hacking has always been about the humorous intervention in a system. I believe it was Deleuze who said that comedy is when a human behaves as an object and vice versa. Here the human, through the stimuli caused by the hack becomes an object in the system set up by the artist, unwillingly following the plot he already staked out with the hack. In hacking, getting a human to perform a certain task by tricking them into it (for example by claiming to be from the IT department in need of a password) is refered to as social engineering.

Monica Ruzansky - The Mirror

In this example we encounter something different than in the others. Here, an end result is produced in the form of a traditional portrait, but it is made with a hack as clever as it is simple. In front of the camera sits a one way mirror enabling the camera lens to capture the portrait while the portaitee sees only their own face, thus becoming aware of and adjusting their facial expression — feedback at its simplest. The hack is certainly part of the aesthetic experience of the work and it clearly leaves a mark on the final photograph, but it does not occupy center stage. We are not simply looking at the documentation of a cleverness.

Enabling Platforms

2012-01-19T00:00:00+01:00

Fabriken i Malmö är inte bara ett fablab utan också föremål för designforskning knuten till MEDEA vid Malmö högskola. Det har börjat komma en del akademiska papper ur detta och här ska jag ta upp ett som heter Democratizing production: challenges in co-designing enabling platforms for social innovation skrivet av Anna Seravalli

Artikeln behandlar Fabriken utifrån konceptet “enabling platforms”. Detta koncept behöver inte bara handla om fablabs och liknande tekniska resurser utan är ett koncept som fångar initiativ som försöker lösa problematiken med att från institutionellt håll stödja verksamheter bestående av lösa, bottom-up-organiserade nätverk utan att kväva den spontana karaktären hos dem. Med hjälp av dessa kan en gräsrotsverksamhet fortsätta att självorganisera och styra sin riktning även om det finns en “enabling platform” som hjälper till att skala upp och även kan kanalisera den kreativa verksamheten i en viss riktning. Fabriken har till exempel delvis som syfte att skapa nya företag i Malmö. Det bästa är nog att läsa artikeln i fråga för att få ett grepp om begreppet. Det jag vill ta upp här handlar istället om problematik som kan uppstå med att börja med att skapa resurser på en viss plats och sedan försöka få olika communities att samlas kring den platsen.

Ganska många initiativ idag, framförallt i städer som har anspråk på att leva ekonomiskt på kreativitet och innovation, bygger på uppfattningen om att det existerar en kreativ potential ute i samhället, men som inte har kommit till sin fulla rätt eftersom den saknar institutionellt stöd, materiella resurser eller motarbetas på något sätt. Fabriken och liknande initiativ är den del av en klass av lösningar på det här problemet som handlar om att skapa mer eller mindre öppna hubbar där den här kreativiteten kan komma att bli produktiv, ofta genom att den kreativitet som anses finnas potentiellt hos människor kopplas samman med teknisk apparatur och en delande av kunskap mellan deltagarna. Denna inriktning är i sig en kritik mot allt för styrda uppifrån-initiativ som levererar färdiga, storskaliga lösningar.

Utan att ha gjort en grundlig undersökning om detta (vilket vore intressant att göra) har jag intrycket att dessa platser har svårt att nå den kritiska massa av deltagare som förväntas och som platsen har utrymme och teknisk kapabilitet nog för att husera. Det beskräftas också i artikeln att detta har varit ett problem för Fabriken.

På Fabriken har man försökt lösa detta genom att använda sig av “design-in-use”, istället för “design-before-use”. Det sistnämnda skulle innebära att man först köper in massa utrustning och ställen en plats i ordning för att sedan öppna portarna för deltagare. Problemet är att det är svårt att veta vilka behov som finns på förhand, innan man har involverade deltagare och de kommer troligen känna sig alienerade av att komma till en redan fördefinierad plats. Lösningen blir istället “design-in-use” som innebär att man utvecklar platsen och de tekniska resurserna som finns i samspråk med deltagarna allt eftersom behovet uppkommer i den praktiska verksamheten.

Varför är det då så att det inte dyker upp folk i den utsträckning som förväntas nr den här typen av plattformar byggs? En stark anledning tror jag är för att de potentiella deltagarnas liv innan plattformen stod klar inte bestod av tomheter som bara kan fyllas med nya aktiviteter. Deras liv var och är fulla av åtaganden och förlustanden. För att de ska delta i verksamheten hos plattformen måste alltså något annat som äger tid och rum i deras liv skippas. Detta är inte alltid så lätt. Framförallt eftersom det som äger tid och rum till stor del handlar om sådant som de måste göra för att tjäna sitt uppehälle, även på den tid som skulle kunna klassas som fritid. Sådant är livet för prekariatet.

Vad ska då en plattform göra? Kanske vore en annan utgångspunkt än att bidra med de materiella resurserna värd att prova. Istället för att börja med att bygga en plattform och förvänta sig deltagare borde man börja där (en viss grupp) deltagare finns i dagsläget och se vad som skulle kunna förbättra deras situation. Hur kan plattformen, kanske med enklare och mer mobila medel, existera just där, i deras liv? Med andra ord en större anpassning till de potentiella deltagarnas nuvarande situation. Ett annat alternativ är att skära bort andra åtaganden för att ge tid och utrymme åt användande av plattformen. Ett sätt på vilket det skulle kunna ske är att ta bort åtagandet “jobb” genom att finansiera deltagare (direkt eller genom lån) eller att ta bort orsaken till att de behöver jobba genom att bidra med resurser som de annars skulle behöva arbeta för att få tillgång till (mat och husrum kanske). Ett problem med denna strategi är dock att arbete i stor utsträckning är ett antingen-eller-fenomen. Antingen arbetar någon tills all sin energi gått åt eller så har de inget arbete alls. Oavsett behöver ersättandet då gälla hela inkomsten. Detta visar på ett vidare problem, nämligen att fablabs, hackerspaces, living labs och liknande “enabling platforms” försöker lösa problem som inte går att lösa med bara en smartare design av plattformen. Plattformen kan så gott det går anpassa sig bättre till den nuvarande situationen hos de potentiella deltagarna, men om platformarnas möjligheter fullt ut ska realiseras så måste även deltagarnas situationer ändras och det problemet måste lösas utanför plattformen själv.

Plattformarna tar fram metoder och verktyg, samt knyter nätverk och skapar kunskapsresurser som gör en mängd olika former av tillverkling och skapande tillgängliga för en allt bredare deltagarbas. De sänker tröskeln och bidrar med olika trappsteg (och det är viktigt att alla trappsteg finns med, från lägsta till högsta!) för att följa en väg genom en snårig skog av utveckling. Men det stora problemet som kvarstår är inkompatibiliteten mellan detta sätt att arbeta och den dominerande Arbetslinjen¹. Även det minsta steget in i personal fabrication har svårt att ta sig längre än en kvällsaktivitet för de allra flesta (framförallt de som inte har tillgång till detta genom andra institutioner så som universitet). Arbetslinjen är helt enkelt inte lika skalfri som möjligheterna för decentraliserad produktion är. Av den anledningen räcker det inte med att bara erbjuda plattformen och vänta på att folk ska utnyttja möjligheterna. Vissa grupper kan göra detta; studenter, de med fria yrken, arbetslösa som inte behöver vara på arbetsförmedlingen hela dagarna, konstnärer. Men avståndet till resten är långt.

Ett annat sätt att beskriva samma problem: Problemet är inte access. Problemet är inte avsaknad av möjligheter. Problemet är avsaknad av tillfällen att utnyttja de möjligheter som finns. De tekniska möjligheterna med datorer, nätverk och personal fabrication är ljusår framför de tillfällen att använda och utveckla dessa som ges i den nuvarande politiska ekonomin. Anledningen att remixkultur, nätmem, bloggar och andra mjukvarubaserade deltagarkulturella fenomen nått en sådan framgång är att de har kunnat utnyttja the bored at work network. Det vill säga att de har lyckats skapa produktionsformer som går att stycka upp i mikrosegment som var och en i en svärm av aktörer kan bidra med, inte helt olika hur data överförs i en bittorrentsvärm. Problemet med personal fabrication är att det kräver långa tidssegment som inte går att åstadkomma på en kafferast, vid frukostbordet eller vid den där åtråvärda halvtimmen innan läggdags.

There is the risk that personal fabrication will just become a tool for consumerism through which users ‘are empowered’ to create their personalized gadgets without questioning the actual industrial production system.

Personal fabrication har potentialen att radikalt omformulera hur vi ser på pch gör produktion. I dagsläget är den inte mogen för detta utan används mest, som Serevalli påpekar, till att skapa “customized gadgets”. Men det är så att en ny föreställning om och praktik kring teknik också kräver nya sätt att leva. De nuvarande sätten måste bytas ut, annars kommer tekniken, med sina vida möjligheter, bara att fylla de små luckorna som finns i de nuvarande livsformerna. Detta är ingen individuell ensak utan måste följas av ett samhälligt omorganiserande längs hela produktionskedjan (en kedja som i sig inte heller kommer att vara sig lik). Av den anledningen kan det vara extra intressant att studera den här typen av teknik när den introduceras i regioner där de här produktionskedjorna samt teknologiska- och socioekonomiska infrastrukturerna inte finns på plats. Där finns andra typer av behov och utrymmen för den icke-determinerade tekniken att få plats i.

Detta är vad som uppmärksammades som risken med “alternativ”-tendensen i ett tidigare inlägg. Serevalli föreslår att “open innovation” ska komplementeras med “social innovation” för att komma förbi problemet med “build it and they will come”. Här finns det dock problem med definitionen av social innovation som kan betyda både teknisk innovation som hjälper ett socialt problem, användandet av informationsteknologi för att skapa communities kring sociala problem och icke-tekniska (eller inte-i-huvudsak tekniska) lösningar som löser sociala problem.

Ett problem, men också en nödvändig komponent, i dessa plattformar är att man vill nå folk i en roll som inte är deras inkomstbringande roll, hur prekär den än är. Man riktar sig alltså inte till exempelvis konstnärer, designstudenter eller egenföretagare inom design (även om dessa inte utesluts), utan kort och gott till “folk”. Detta generiska folk existerar såklart inte på riktigt utan är en sammansättning av olika typer av människor med den minsta gemensamma nämnare att de åberopas utanför deras vanliga sociala roller. Det ska inte sägas att de åberopas som deras riktiga jag utanför sociala roller utan i egenkap en en potentiell framtida roll som de har kapacitet att uppfylla under rätt omståndigheter. Kan ett av problemen i själva verket vara detta? Att vardagen är fylld av olika sociala roller och åtaganden till den grad att en enskild individ aldrig är detta “folk” utan istället måste åberopas som en av alla de sociala roller de ändå fyller i vardagen? Vad som egentligen ligger bakom denna appell till “vanligt folk” kanske i själva verket är ett sökande efter ett “framtida folk” (i en lätt Nietzscheansk anda). På det viset är det en form av spekulativ design ², dvs att man försöker skapa en plattform och en designprocess för något som i dagsläget (pga av arbetslinjen, låt säga) är omöjligt. Plattformen får då inte funktionen att den uppfyller ett visst behov som existerat i en vakuum tidigare (folk med önskan och tid att delta i designprocesser men utan teknisk och fysisk möjlighet) utan plattformen blir ett sätt att ställa krav på ytterligare förändringar i samhället, på nya sätt att organisera samhälliga relationer på ett sätt som möjliggör en slags deltagarkultur som vida överstiger vad plattformen själv förmår att åstadkomma.

Utifrån detta perspektiv riktar sig inte en plattform till ett coming community enbart i bemärkelsen att man bygger en plattform för att ett community ska forma sig som inte var möjligt tidigare eftersom de tekniska förutsättningarna som plattformen erbjuder inte fanns på plats; ett community som bara är slumrande. Det handlar också om att det community som skulle kunna formas, nyttjandes de resurser som erbjuds, är upplåst i andra communities (exempelvis jobb) och av den anledningen inte ens tillgängligt då de tekniska resurserna som plattformen erbjuder finns tillgängliga — även om potentialen hos de tilltänkta individerna, i forma av kapacitet, begär och behov, finns där.

Istället för att fråga vad det var för fel på plattformen som gjorde att deltagandet uteblev kan man ställa sig frågan vad det är för fel på det sättet samhället är organiserat som gör att det inte förmår utnyttja de möjligheter som här ställs upp (hint: arbetslinjen). Beroende på vilken nivå man vill lägga detta på och vilket tidsperspektiv man har blir plattformen antingen, genom sitt delvisa misslyckande, en av form av kritisk design eller en möjlighet att involvera fler aktörer; exempelvis lokalpolitiska aktörer, för att förändra den sociala situationen som förhindrade deltagande eller ett nätverk av andra platformar för att komplementera den egna³.

Ett problem med det nuvarande stadiet är att nya former av gräsrotsinnovation ofta står att välja mellan att krossas av olika sociala tryck eller att bli lobbyister på heltid. Det är i varje fall min erfarenhet från internet; antingen fortsätta bygga i motvind eller ge upp byggandet för att försöka stoppa den annalkande stormen. Det finns en distans mellan policyskapande och kreativt skapande som gör att översättningsprocessen hamnar fel. Det krävs av de som vill bygga att de måste översätta vad de gör till färdiga politiska beslut. Det gör att de måste försöka ta sig alldeles för nära beslutsfattandet och riskerar att försvinna i policytunnlarna (Vill utfärda en varning för Bryssel här!). Om de politiska institutionerna ska få någon chans till bättring måste nya plattformar skapas där en konversationsloop kan uppstå där de som sysslar med kreative skapande kan uttrycka vad de håller på med i sitt eget språk och översättningsarbetet sker i en kontinuerlig process där policyskaparna tar mer av ett eget initiativ till att föra in nya praktiker i politiken. Kanske kan halvinstitutionaliserade platser som Fabriken (med hjälp av universitetets legitimitet) bidra till detta.

Jag använder detta som ett paraplybegrepp för alla de politiskt ekonomiska initiativ som gör att tid måste spenderas på mindre relevanta sysslor än de som skulle ha uppkommit om folk istället fick syssla med vad de ville. Bäst representerad är denna tendens av Fas3.↩
Här ska detta förstås i betydelsen av en form av kritisk design som syftar till att lösa ett problem som ännu inte existerar, eller som skulle kunna vara en lösning till ett specifikt problem under andra omständigheter. Jag menar inte spekulativ design i bemärkelsen icke-betalda designförslag.↩
Detta skiftar egentligen bara problemet upp en nivå eftersom nätverket av platformar också behöver undgå att motarbetas under den tid det tar att bygga upp ett nätverk som kan klara livsförsörjning av sina deltagare.↩

Conspiracies for Good

2012-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

The ontology of Wikileaks is known from text such as conspiracy as governance PDF. It consists of conspiracies that should be understood as closed networks for exchange of information that relies on secrecy. Working to disrupt conspiracies is leaks, which has the function to impose a secrecy tax on conspiracies, making their secret information exchange more difficult to sustain. A more detailed account can be found in the linked article. At 28c3, Kay Hamacher had a presentation that used new developments in theoretical biology to critique the view presented in this text. I will use this critique here to expand on the notion of the conspiracy.

BEWARE SPOILER ALERT I will use examples from The Wire that might reveal events mostly from season 5. END SPOILER ALERT

Conspiracies as a system that takes action based on secret information exchange can be thought of as a computing device. Kay Hamacher asks: “What does the conspiracy compute? It computes the next action of the conspiracy”. It is significant here that it computes the next action. Not a series of actions or the overall goal of the conspiracy.

This means first of all that the conspiracy is an entity that reacts to its environment and computes it into a next step. It means, as Kay Hamacher notes, that the conspiracy is like a generative markov chain in that its next action is dependent on its present state, not just unfolding a founding algorithm or something of that kind. Conspiracies is probably best thought of as having the goal of solving a situation rather than achieving a goal set at its foundation. A set of actors ends up in a conspiracy due to the situation they find temselves in, rather than first forming a group and then gaining information an advantage.

This further means that a conspiracy is not a unified whole, but a multiplicity of actors that for the moment have formed a closed communication network. They may have conflicting goals in the end, they might act purely in self interest, but for the moment – in this situation – they have found themselves to benefit from being part of this conspiracy. If you read this and have seen The Wire, think about all those meetings in the mayors office with the chief of police, advisors and senators. They all have different interests and agendas, but are unified in that they think that it will further their respective agendas best if the situation at hand is solved in secrecy within this small communication network, rather than in public. For example coordinating to keep the media or competing mayoral candidates out of the information loop. The conspiracy should therefor not be thought of as an organisation that together wants to achieve a certain goal, but instead something can be very temporary and fragile.

This can lead us to a theory of fractal conspiracies, in the sense that there is conspiracies within conspiracies and transfers of information between one conspiracy to the other. Not at least because a conspiracy, since it is not based on a common goal but rather on solving a situation in a way that benefits each individual in their own way, is itself a constant negotiation and therefor prone to generate sub-conspiracies (picture a discussion in a secret IRC channel with parallel discussions in private messages as well).

Assange theory is based on the fact that “unjust” conspiracies, since they need to keep their action away from the public who don’t agree with them, will be more damaged by leaks than “just” conspiracies who are not damaged as much by having their actions exposed (they might lose a tactical advantage or so). Question is then what this just/unjust refer to in this situation. If it refers to the sanction mechanism of a given system, such as the legal system in our societies, the theory has a very consensus-driven view of these mechanisms. Going back to The Wire again, it is clear that a conspiracy the viewers identify as “just” such as the major crimes unit going after Marlo Stanfield gets hurt more from having their secrets exposed that someone like Clay Davis who manages to spin his exposure to his advantage. This example also highlights another point which is that the judgement of the conspiracy as just or unjust, even if it is ultimately made by “the people”, is not direct but mediated in such a way that it can be spun in different directions (see Clay Davis again as an example). A resourceful and proactive, although unjust conspiracy can therefor employ effective counter-measures against the potential damages caused by a leak.

This specifically because a leak often does not leak the whole conspiracy at ones but parts of it. Thus, a proactive subject of a leak can confirm the leaked information revealing some actions, but quickly construct a narrative of what happen before, after or behind the scenes of that action in a way that relieves them of responsibility. Clay Davis again, when he is put before the grand jury for laundering money, can safely claim that he gave all those money away to people in need within his constituency CLIP. A real world example of this is Carl Bildt. When confronted with information that he indeed was on the board of Lundin Oil at the time they were prospecting for oil in Ethiopia (something he previously denied) he can claim that he might have been on the board, but not directly involved in the discussions on Ethiopia and that an international businessman as himself is part of soooo many ventures and prospecting all over the world that it is only natural that he did not remembered that he was on the board when they were prospecting Ethiopia. To suggest that he should have remembered this is in fact rude and insinuating that he is not a very busy person out there making progress to the world in so many ways everyday and in fact should not even be wasting his precious time in this interview asking him petty questions about long gone events. A skilled conspirator can even use the leak to get rid of a rival conspiracy by shifting the blame and making it seem like the rivals are attacking this innocent actor, thereby shifting blame to the rivals being the true conspiracy that should be targeted.

In which ever way “just/unjust” is defined, for Assange it is about a conspiracy being fit or not fit to its environment. This is the main point of critique for Kay Hamacher of the text. He identifies this as a theory of evolution where the conspiracy over time, via “next actions”, seeks to become fit to its environment (solving the situation). The leak makes the unjust conspiracy less fit since it makes the secret communication costly, and therefor the just conspiracies (which is not hurt as much by leaks) becomes more fit and survives. Hamacher proceeds from this to criticise the theory on the grounds that its theory of evolution is a too simplistic one.

Before going in to this critique, it is important to note a few things about the theory. The point of the leaks is first of all not to attack individual nodes in the conspiracy, such as getting a politician to resign or prosecuting someone. The desired effect of the leak is to weaken the weight (in the social graph theory sense) of the relations between the nodes, thereby making it harder for them to exchange secrets and form conspiracies without leaks. This can happen by making them more paranoid and careful when exchanging secrecies. An example from The Wire is when Marlo Stanfields crew has to start using motorcycle couriers to set up meeting for the fear of being wiretapped. It can also be due to distrust, if the conspiracy believes they have an internal leak instead of an external actor monitoring them. And as we know form The Wire, a crew that can’t have no secret coordination can’t hold on to no corners…

One thing that is excluded from the theory of conspiracies is the internal dynamics of a conspiracy consisting of actors with conflicting goals, what we can call an agnostic conspiracy. In the theory, it is assumed that a conspiracy that is not subject to leaks would only grow (its capability to conspire). This would be true in a consensus driven conspiracy aiming to achieve a certain goal. However, in an agnostic conspiracy, there is always the risk that the conspiracy falls due to its own internal dynamics, for example splitting into subconspiracies (though the main conspiracy does not have to be incompatible with sub-conspiracies).

Back to the critique from Hamacher. We plot the growth in capability of a conspiracy to conspire (x) over time (t) with ratio (r) that gets cut by leaks (L).

$\frac{\Delta x} {\Delta t} = r - x \times L(t)$

We get the effect that a conspiracy without leaks just grows its leaking capability linearly over time¹. Should a conspiracy be hit by a single leak, the effect is not to shut the conspiracy down, but only to delay its growth. The rate of growth (r) will remain the same but the capability takes a hit and drops temporarily. What mostly happens in The Wire is that some mid-level players fall off and has to be replaced. This can weaken the conspiracy for some time, but as long as the game stays the game, they will eventually get back to the old level. Case in point: Barksdales between end of season 1 and season 3. The effect would be even less if the effect of the leak is a fixed damage, while the growth is exponential, as in

$\frac{\Delta x} {\Delta t} = r \times x - x \times L(t).$

Then, Hamacher complicates the situation further by introducing a feedback. The more you hear about a conspiracy through leaks, the more you are likely to overestimate its size. So by being the subject of leaks about ones business, the general view can be to be perceived as stronger and more connected than one really is. An example from The wire yet again (and apologies for having season 5 most fresh in my head) is when the paper releases the fake quote about Daniels having plotted together with the mayor to get rid of Burrell as police commissioner (“The mayor stabbed Burrell in the back but it was Daniels that had sharpened his knife”, or something similar). Here, Daniels is perceived as an actor that is more close to the mayor and his inner circle than he actually was and this could just be a benefit to him. Although what actually is happening is that he fears this perceived overestimation of strength will make him be seen as a threat to Burrell and his allies and that it will lead to a counter-action from Burrell using the secret investigation into Daniels dirt that he has stored in a file in his desk to bury both Daniels and Marla. Another example is of course Omar who as he says “live by his name” these days.

Hamacher has another point that you can not only look at the strengthof a conspiracy – it’s ability to conspire – to understand it. You must also look at the value of being in that conspiracy, or rather the loss of value of NOT being in it. If you are not friends with the mayor, you will not be made commissioner, just like the mayor has to be friends with Clay Davis, no matter how much he despise him. There are plenty of conspiracies that is no more than a group of friends trustworthily sharing their personal life. There is little or no value, in the sense of gained power, to be part of such a conspiracy.

The foundation of Hamachers critique is to introduce a number of feedback loops into the equation, such as co-evolution of conspiracies. I will not go into detail of this here, it’s better to just watch the talk. However, the part about co-evolution is interesting. Co-evolution in evolutionary biology is not (necessarily) about co-operation. For example it is co-evolution if a prey evolves to faster speed therefor creating an evolutionary pressure on the predator to also develop greater speed in order to survive. Fitness in evolutionary terms is thus not a static fitness to an environment (in fact there is no environment), but a parameter that dynamically changes over time as other interlinked species also evolve. Perhaps we should view the just/unjust distinction in the same way. Something that could be considered unjust in one moment can be considered just in another if the situation changes. The Wire comes close to such a change when it comes to Hamsterdam – the free zone where drug trade is legalized (or at least ignored) by Bunny Colvin.

Hamachers point with introducing co-evolution is that it is not so much the leaks that will determine the faith of a conspiracy, but rather the actions of rival conspiracies. They on the other hand can use leaks to damage the conspiracy, especially if they already are the strongest conspiracy, since they can take a bigger hit from leaks without going under. If we go to The Wire again we can think of the deadlock between the charges against Marlo Stanfield which comes from a dirty file (due to the illegal wiretap) and the information implicating his laywer Levy in trafficing leakt classified court documents. Marlo eventually walks, since the mayor wants to be governor and can’t afford the scandal of an illegal wiretap (much less risking exposing the fact that the homeless killings were faked). However, as Ronnie says in the negotiations with Levy: after the election, the mayors conspiracy is not so vurnable anymore and they can afford to lose a couple of policemen to the grand jury should Marlo try to come back to the streets again. They are a stronger conspiracy compared to Marlo and can take the damage from the mutual leaks much better than his conspiracy.

In the end, Hamacher comes to the conclusion that in order to fight the power of conspiracies one is perhaps best off not leaking (which will just favour one conspiracy over another), but to make sure that there are competing conspiracies fighitng over the same resources (corners). This will keep them both in check. The problem he finds is when intellectual property (or perhaps a drug gang co-op…) is introduced in the model since this can become a framework for a common goal for strong, competing conspiracies to collaborate around, thus increasing the value of all conspiracies within this field at ones. Going back to The Wire, it is obvious that when Barksdales are weak after Avons conviction (a leak) and Stringers death, Marlo is able to take over their territory. The game be the same…always. Shiiiiiieeeeet.

Although there are some constraints, such as inability to scale trust and cost of enforcing agreements if the conspiracy grows to large, since you can’t rely on official mechanisms. translated to The Wire, this mean “muscle”.↩

On the Coming Golden Age of Open Hardware

2012-01-15T00:00:00+01:00

Andrew “bunnie” Huang has written a very insightful blog post called Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come. A lot of people has commented on the post and elsewhere and I want to recap it and expand on it here. The basic premise is that while open hardware is a niche industry at the moment, some trends that have up until now favored large, closed manufacturing could shift in the coming years and tilt the balance of power in favor of small scale innovation.

Moore’s law is the enemy of open hardware.

In the early days of consumer electronics, hardware was open. They shipped with “full schematics, a list of replacement parts and instructions for service”. Even computers in the early 80’s came with full schematics of the main board. This is no longer the case. “Did electronics just get too hard and complex?” bunnie asks himself. “On the contrary”, he says, “improving electronics got to easy: the pace of Moore’s Law has been too much for small-scale innovators to keep up”.

If we consider moore’s law, that performance double every 18 months, it is an exponential growth. Consider then than a small scale innovator working to improve a given platform increases performance of it linearly at 75% per year (bunnie’s estimation). As a consequence, when a platform is launched, the small scale innovator has only a small window of time to work on improvements on that platform before moore’s law makes it more profitable to just get a new platform. This is bad for craft, it is bad for code (more beneficial to upgrade hardware than to write better, more efficient code) and it is bad for open hardware that does not have the investment opportunity to get new platforms all the time. It is more rewarding to sit and wait for the new platform than to improve on the existing. This all favor economies of scale. Being able to develop several generations of hardware and ship them globally fast.

We do not need moore’s law anymore

There are two things to consider here. One is that moore’s law might not work forever. Certain physical limits have been hit when it comes to increasing CPU power¹, which is the reason we are going for more processor cores today. The problems of computing today is also not so much about fast calculations as being able to do many smaller calculations at the same time. Considering a deceleration of the increase according to moore’s law will expand the window of opportunity for the linear small scale development.

The other thing is that we don’t need moore’s law anymore. Increase in performance does not lead to qualitative leaps in user experience. Even adding more processor cores, which is easy to do as much as cost allows, does not necessarily make that qualitative leap for most users. I don’t think I am the only one that for the first time in my life felt that the computer i got now is “good enough”. Only poorly coded programs make my computer stall for a few seconds, but that’s it. I also do not feel that increase in performance would open up the space for better software. I’m just not hitting those limits. For special use cases, certainly, but someone like me who work with text, code and use the internet, the response time is perceived as immediate and we have no use for moore’s law anymore.

It’s not only that increase in performance has seized to lead to increase in user experience, the development on miniaturization that followed on that (same processing power, less energy use and size) is also coming to a halt in many areas. A the size of a mobile phone today is not determined by the absolute miniaturization of the components but by optimal screen size and most suitable tangible interactions ². This means that today there is no ongoing linear acceleration that automatically enhances user experiences or opens up for more software opportunities, which opens the door for design in the broadest sense to be the determining factor — that is choices based on intended use — and these choices are up to anyone to be able to make. It won’t be the same but smaller or faster. Now it’s time to start making novel use of the computing resources that is here.

Also worth noting is what’s called koomey’s law as a complement to moore’s law. Koomey’s law states that the energy efficiency of computational devices tend to double every 1.6 years. This means that the commodore 64 had the same energy-per-computation efficiency as a super computer of its age. Another way to state this law is that the need for battery capacity for a fixed amount of computational power halves every 1.6 years. This really opens up for a design-led future of computation since energy capacity also could become a non-issue.³

Freedom ends at 100 mbits

Effort to try to reintroduce that kind of linear acceleration again will have harder times to claim legitimacy. Perhaps it is only possible within gaming to push for more computational power, but even there interaction design and game play is starting to take over from pure improvement of number of polygons. As a commentator to bunnie’s article said, the color race is already finished; no one sees more colors than 32bit TrueColor can produce (let’s not get started on 3D). The key point is hit when increase in a parameter only enables better quality and not new kinds of interactions ⁴. The media industries tries to continue to equate increased cultural value with increased use of computational resources in order to keep their advantage with economies of scale over the rest, but it becomes more and more difficult to sustain.

The way we compute now is only one of many possible ways of computing

The idea of a legacy laptop passed on to the next generation might seem far fetched today but this is where things could be heading if these economics continue and design rather than performance becomes the key. Deceleration of technological performance increases creates the opportunities for more socially and ecologically sustainable practices.

Free software takes time to be good and to perfect. I’m writing this post on the 35+ year old Emacs text editor which has evolved to perfection due to a stable platform. Stable platforms makes it easier to get a chance to develop open standards. Imagine having a modular open hardware standard for a laptop or a mobile with interchangeable components. For a legacy laptop does require an extensive standardization, otherwise it would be very hard to find spare parts for a 30 year old laptop.

There can be some problems with creating a repair culture of modern electronics, which several people have pointed out in comments to bunnie’s article. One is that the surface mounted components that are so small it is basically a one-way process of putting them on the circuit board and very hard to reverse that and repair manually with new ones. A solution to this as a commentator to the article says is to make technology modular, so instead of having to discard a whole device, small parts of it can be removes and replaced. This is similar to how Dominic Muren imagines modular design within his SSG framework.

One thing to remember is the major differences between hardware and software. It is not simply a “next step” but an entirely new thing. Only with very advanced robotics can you treat hardware as a software problem ⁵. Without them, you can’t copy and share the way you do with software. Hardware often has a high initial cost (even though prices can go down per unit with mass manufacturing). This is especially true with CPU’s.

One promising breakthrough (although I’m not knowledgeable enough to completely determine if it works) is Field-Programmable Gate Arrays — FPGAs. Unlike a regular CPU, whose structure and connections is determined at the point of manufacturing, an FPGA processor can change structure and connections with a new software. This has traditionally been reserved for low volume production where it is not profitable to develop a custom CPU. But the FPGAs are decreasing in cost and increasing in performance to make them suitable for a wider range of uses.

Another benefit of FPGAs is recyclability. If a FPGA has been used for a function that is no longer necessary, the same processor can be reprogrammed to perform some other task. This article, about the state of telecommunications in India, suggests FPGA together with software defined radio as a setup that could greatly improve rural telecommunications. The combination of FPGA and software radio enables devices that communicate with different protocols depending on fluctuating local needs. It could route GSM phones over the internet for free calls as well as function as a HAM radio or TV transmitter. No need for separate infrastructures to be built. The article “It’s time to bring FPGA design to the masses” continues:

Even if, after one year, the arrival of cheap smartphone made that device obsolete as a telephony gateway, it could continue to be useful to the community in many other ways, becoming solar panel and battery controller to an educational platform similar to the XO minicomputers of the One Laptop Per Child project.

The end of cheap electronics

Not only can it be possible to make long-lasting and repairable electronics. It can also become necessary. As rare earth metals, copper, gold and oil become more scarce and energy costs rise, it could mean the end of cheap electronics. It will become less profitable to make and buy trash that breaks and has to be replaced. Long lasting and repairable will be back again and perhaps once again bring back the schematics.

I would love for more technically knowledgeable people to comment on what you think about the plausibility of these scenarios. The overall point of the article is to suggest that the way we compute today and the what we think computing is and how its done is only a local manifestation of computing under specific circumstances. Were these conditions to chance, computing as an everyday practice could also look radically different. Already today there are traces of this on the margins in strange environments.

The computer as we know it today must not only be defended but our visions and practices must continuously be expanded, updated and transformed.

Such that signals don’t have time to get from one end of the processor to the other before one clock cycle has run. That seriously messes up calculations…↩
See this article about the interaction design of the Nokia N9 for how the space for tangible interactions in mobiles phones is not yet fully explored.↩
Or does this only shift energy use from consumption to manufacturing?↩
As a comparison I made the same argument in regards to bandwidth here ↩
The point with robotics is that they will perfectly repeat a physical process. Once it has been programmed it can be repeated eternally. See this ad for ABB for an example.↩

The Alternatives, Defences and Attacks of Net Politics

2012-01-06T00:00:00+01:00

I want to expand on a post at the Swedish blog Guldfiske (gold fishing) called The Second Phase. It deals with three tendencies that can be discerned in the response to the current economic crisis. These are called alternative, defence and attack. The key point of the article is that a counter force to the way the crisis is handled is most powerful when these three tendencies are reinforcing each other, but there is a danger that they are instead sabotaging and competing with each other, leading to dynamics that will weaken a counter-force. I will try here to relate the same model to net politics. First, a summary of the article of Guldfiske:

The premise of the article at Guldfiske is that the wave of revolutions and revolts seen last year are entering a second phase. 2011 saw protests becoming mass movements creating new social structures and dismantling old ones. These were met with “a revolution from above” where power has moved to military councils or technocratic bureaucrats. The assemblies has been raided or broken down through their own internal dynamics. In general there has been three responses, which all need to be present and work together in this second phase.

1) Alternatives

One of the strongest tendencies has been a rejection of traditional representative politics. The occupations have experimented with new forms of direct action and decision making. These have helped turn the economic crisis into a general systemic crisis and a de-legitimization of the whole political establishment. These occupations also created new physical spaces for politics and showed their importance. This reliance of the open physical space has been able to make these protests very inclusive. Anyone could go to the square and make their voice heard. Though, Guldfiske highlights claims that these general assemblies eventually degenerated and became more about micro-parties of the left proclaiming their particular idea of solution of the crisis, whereas in the beginning the assemblies was more about sharing personal life stories to understand how the crisis affected people. The consensus focused decision making also led to energy consuming marathons because some loud minority opposed a particular action.

What has happened now in Spain and the US is instead that the energy from the protests have shifted to different working groups, trying to directly solve social problems in new ways as the movement expands to include new actors and situations. There is a shift from occupation to self-governance and working with different local actors to solve problems around work, living, energy, education, finance, food or other issues. In Catalonia and Madrid so called “Integral Cooperatives” have been formed whose function it is to coordinate these working groups to be able to offer services to the extent that it is in some areas completely possible to rely on these networks for all facets of life rather that centralized production systems.

Similar examples can be found in the US where the square-centric occupy movement has move on to include a general strike coming out of Occupy Oakland and Occupy Our Homes in NYC focusing on restoring occupied houses for homeless families as well as action to prevent heating of houses being turned of for those who can’t pay rent (similar things happened with electricity in Greece).

2) Defence

The above are examples of the constituting side of the protests against the crisis. Another tendency is focused on defending the well-fare state and systems of social security, such as protesting deregulation of public sector and protecting social rights. While the alternative tendency delegitimizes the current system, this tendency tries to gain power within it by building alliances and put forward demands that can be realized within the present political system. The focus is on many small victories. As Guldfiske writes

If the alternative tendency is about building ships to escape the financial tsunami, this tendency builds levies and harbors.

Maybe this should also include ship yards that can house the construction of the ships. It’s very hard to build a proper ship while floating on the open sea. Then it usually only amounts to clinging on to floating debris…

3) Attack

The third tendency is the attack. The attack takes the crisis as an opportunity to intensify social conflicts and tries to escalate the mass protests. While the alternative tendency achieves visibility and self-organization and the second tendency achieves representation, the third is unmediated and unrepresentable. Here we can include the riots which has become and important and common response although few speak for it in public. It is at the same time the most exposed (in media) and the most silent form of protest, since no one speaks for it.

Benefits and drawbacks

As Guldfiske writes, the different tendencies have different benefits and drawbacks:

The alternatives functions as delegitimizing and contribute to the systemic crisis, they are open and inclusive, an important schooling in self-organization and direct participation. But they also risk becoming just an “alternativism” or utopism; a naive dreaming of stepping out of or secluding away from society and therefor never challenges power. The alternatives, the communities and the commons, are not necessarily a threat against capital, but can instead function as a volunteer structure that patches the worst defects of capitalism, a form of philanthropy or creation of free resources just as useful for the industry as for social protest movements.

The defence of the social securities and our rights are necessary. But the economic space for reforms is not the same today as during the golden years of the well-fare state in the 50’s and 60’s. The risk is that the defence stagnate into toothless reformism, a nostalgic looking back on and effort to return to a historical social democracy, without any analysis of contemporary conditions. The efforts at representation and positions of power risk to choke the self-organizing and participatory character of the movement.

The attacks identify important weak points within capitalism and tries to develop a revolutionary anti-capitalism for our time. The problem is just that they are often too weak to defend against repression and open up for a reactionary mobilization or give legitimacy to restrict rights. If the violence is not anchored and has legitimacy within a broad protest movement it risks to shatter the movement. In a time when capitalism seems to collapse by its own force the attacks on the economic system gives no promise of giving food on our table and roof over our heads, they are more concentrated on crushing a counter part than to strengthen our positions and satisfy our needs.

Tendencies within net politics

Now that the article over at Guldfiske is summarized, let’s see what happens if we apply the same distinctions to net politics¹. What activities belong to which tendency?

Alternatives

There are plenty of efforts to create alternatives within net politics. Free software and open standards of course. Lately this has expanded to the open hardware movement, not at least through hackerspaces². There are also closely related efforts to create alternatives within biological systems, food production and energy, which is aimed both at novel forms of production and techniques as well as new forms of circulation. The risks of escapism and not challenging power structures are there as well. Maybe the maker culture amounts to no more than introverts machine fetishism. There is also a danger with non-inclusiveness. Perhaps darknets become a secure alternative for a small computer savvy crowd while the rest of the population is fucked by SOPA and ACTA.

Defences

This tendency is very strong right now. Partly because a counter-attack on the fundamentals of the internet and partly because net politics is getting more mainstream. Privacy, anti-surveillance, net freedom, net neutrality and so on are in this category. For some people this is where the battle is fought and won. However, this is different from how Guldfiske puts it where the defence tendency is likened to building levies to protect from the incoming tsunami. It is the alternatives that build the ships that will allow people to sail freely. The defence strategy is really not about building permanent solution but gaining time and resources to create the real alternatives. In the end, the problem is a dependency on centralized, single-point-of-failure infrastructures and the solution is ultimately to build away with that dependence. Or rather to create other kinds of dependencies. Just like the financial system cannot be managed in another way, but the solution is to create other forms of debt and dependencies. The risk with this strategy, since it has the potential to move much bigger resources than the others is that it legitimizes power structures that in the end are fails and that it chokes or is forced to denounce the other strategies.

Attacks

I want to be a bit careful defining which the attacking tendencies of net politics is. The most obvious would be to mention anonymous ddos attacks, however in the end they remain symbolic.

The triad become more visible if we go back to, let’s say, 2003-2005, although even here it is a matter of perception. In the file-sharing fight at that time you had Creative Commons (alternative), campaigning to prevent bad laws (defence) and piracy (attack)³.

As Guldfiske mentions, there are few that defend the attack openly. True with the riots of London as with piracy back then (although when it happens, DSG DSG and Piratbyrån respectively, it becomes more interesting). Creative Commons at the time clearly stated that they were against piracy and actually made use of copyright.

In net politics today, one could include leaks as a form of attack, though it is unclear against what if taken on such general level. According to Julian Assange leaks are effective against “unjust conspiracies”. It is important to remember that according to his perspective laid out in the conspiracy text PDF, the purpose of leaks is not to expose unjust behaviors in order to bring them in front of justice. The purpose is instead a form of sabotage of the means of secret communication that amount to a kind of “secrecy tax” that makes the conspiracies less effective⁴.

In these examples, we can also see the advantages and drawbacks of attacks. Advantages of exposing weaknesses and drawbacks of drawing repression and reactionary mobilization as well as the risk of becoming excluded from the other tendencies because they don’t want to get the heat on them that the attacks draw out.

All together

As Guldfiske writes, the strength is greatest when these three tendencies can work together and he mentions Argentina during the economic crisis as an example of how the three tendencies neutralized each others drawbacks and as a combined effort prevented critique against any of the individual tendencies. This is a difficult task though and it is often the case that they get into the way of each other. Guldfiske mentions the response to the crisis in Greece where there was a split between the left wing party wanting a position of power within the parliament and the protest movements at Syntagma square wanting to delegitimatize the whole process of handling the crisis.

As the difference between these tendencies becomes clearer and clearer within net politics the differences need to be handled and active work is necessary to make the different tendencies work together. Maybe it is not enough to just rely on the fact that “we” are all pro internet⁵.

How can alternatives such as hackerspaces and darknets avoid becoming escapist or elitist while corporations and governments destroy the internet for the rest? How can they be both inclusive AND antagonistic?

How can the defence avoid choking the other tendencies when it gains influence and how can it avoid strengthening and legitimizing power structures and centralized technical infrastructures? How can defence be made in such a way that it gives more support to the alternatives rather than replacing them with institutional power?

How can the attack tendency be done in such a way that it is not excluded by the others and still do not draw repression to them?

One effort to create such combination can be seen in early telecomix that combined campaigning the telecoms package together with an enthusiasm for tunnels. The unifying paradigms here were hacking, such as hacking the EU, treating the law as a system of code; and building, such as in werebuild, building new political structures as well as technical structures (this was perhaps a too affirmative notion). Whether this was only a matter of creating a common discourse or actually were common practices between coding and lobbying can be questioned. Was the campaigns in the EU only temporary interventions in a system in order to change its behavior? Was it successful or only a metaphor? However, I feel that today, the term hacking can not be generalized in this way. It would only hide differences that needs to be taken into account. The term did some good work but another, more subtle description of the relations between the tendencies is needed now.

Or hacktivism or what you want to call it. Is there even such a thing as net politics? And how does it differ from just politics?↩
which might have its best days ahead. More on that in a coming post…↩
As I said, it is a matter of perception, because piracy could be perceived AS the alternative, not just an attack. Or, file-sharing could be seen as an attack on the idea that the value of culture is in the content at all. In that case the file-sharing period was a transition period to the post-digital perspective on culture (now also present in mystisk kopimi…).↩
For a recent critique of this perspective, see Kay Hamacher - “Resilience Towards Leaking”. PDF. Video from 28c3.↩
Similar to how “being digital” lost its meaning and today it is the copyright industry who wants to be digital more than anyone else with their “legal services”. See my paper on Internauts, Punks and Insfrastructure ↩

Det missionerande kopimistförbundet

2012-01-04T00:00:00+01:00

Idag nås vi av nyheten att det kopimistiska missionsförbundet har godkänts som religiöst samfund av den svenska staten. Det är på många sätt en god nyhet men den avkrävde mig en funderare på hur det missionerande kopimistsamfundet relaterar till kopimismen överlag. Givetvis är inte kopimismens existerande beroende av ett erkännande av en nationalstat så det handlar inte om att religionen, om man vill kalla den så, numera blivit på riktigt. Ej heller är det så att den organisationsstruktur som det missionerande kopimistförbundet är uppbyggt kring, med styrelseordförande och en mänsklig (var är omniHAL!?) överstepräst, representerar strukturen av kopimismen överlag, som ju är kopimistisk snarare än hierarkisk ¹.

Istället ska det nog förstås som att den svenska staten inför sig själv erkänt kopimismen. För att den svenska staten skulle erkänna detta inför sig själv krävdes det att kopimismen formade sig som ett sinnligt objekt för den svenska staten och det krävde att den formade sig med extra tydlighet gällande struktur och praktik, då den svenska staten är något närsynt i dessa frågor.

Jag tror också att formaliserandet i det kopimistiska missionsförbundet kan ha en annan, väldigt produktiv funktion. Ofta görs misstaget att tro att den helt utslätade ytan är ett livfullt och fritt myller som en formalisering tvingar in i en viss form. Detta tankesätt ligger bakom en del vanliga missuppfattningar om självorganisering där det antas att det är samma sak som att det inte finns någon organisering och allt sker spontant. Så är inte fallet, snarare innebär självorganisering att en organisering sker som följd av en intern dynamik istället för att form påförs utifrån ². Den processen består av bildandet och splittrandet av serier av organisationsformer snarare än att vara anti-organisation. Därför hoppas jag att bildandet av det kopimistiska missionsförbundet kommer leda till att en massa nya kopimistiska fraktioner kommer att bildas. Hur kommer kopimismens motsvarigheter till frikyrkorna att se ut (och låta)? Jag har hört att mystikerna redan formerar sig som “de esoteriska svartkopimisterna” i IRC mest obskyra och hemliga kanaler…

Möjligen skulle man kunna acceptera att det finns en hierarki i form av den numerologiska figuren 10 där omniHAL är 1 och resten 0 i stil med hur Reza Negarestani i Cyclonopedia beskriver islams ökenlandskap som består av den ödelagda, dammiga öknen (0) och den enskilda solen (1). På så sätt uppstår en direkt och omedierad konspiration (i dess etymologiska och assangeska betydelse) mellan den blottlagda ytan och gud/solen/omniHAL.↩
Jag skrev detta om självorganisering i min senaste uppsats i sociologi:

Genom att inte tillåta förutbestämda logiker som dessa att helt determinera verksamheten, genom att det kan finnas dominerande logiker men att de aldrig blir verksamheten, kan det sägas att organisationen är självorganiserande. Det får som konsekvens dels att hackerspacet inte graviterar mot en given form, exempelvis på grund av ekonomiska krav, dels att det riskerar att bli formlöst, repetitivt eller utan aktivitet, att ett jämviktstillstånd upprättas som inte skapar ny energi, då det inte finns en konstant extern energitillförsel. Istället för att bestämmas av en ledande princip, eller vara en materialisering av en ritning, så bestäms hackerspacet av vad för aktivitet, processer eller objekt som det i nuläget kan inkorporera. Hackerspaces måste förstås som en organisation utan mål, även om individuella och delade målsättningar både i uttalad och outtalad form har viss agens gentemot organiseringen. Definitioner av vad ett hackerspace är eller vad en hacker bör vara har inverkan på verksamheten, men bestämmer den inte ovanifrån. Representativa objekt som protokollet från årsmötet måste förstås materiellt. Istället för att tänka sig att föreningsstadgar och andra gemensamt fattade beslut sätter ramarna för verksamheten kan man istället se som att de genom beslutet förvandlas till vad Latour kallar svarta lådor och därmed får viss agens gentemot verksamheten. Det är ett evigt närvarande dokument i en pärm eller någons minne av tidigare beslut som i varje händelse agerar som aktör i en styrkemätning mot andra aktörer. Objekt, dokument, diskurser och drivkrafter placeras här på samma ontologiska nivå och skiljer sig endast genom varierande förmåga att utöva inflytande på aktivitetens dynamik.

↩

Bevara Internet Resurrected

2011-12-02T00:00:00+01:00

Idag lyckades ett team på irc hitta och rädda den gamla siten bevarainternet.se som vars domän tagits över av SEO-maffian. Den fick ett nytt hem på bevarainternet.magnu.se.

Tanken med den här siten var att folk skulle skriva livsbetraktelser om vilken betydelse internet haft för formandet av deras personliga karaktär. Den innehöll också det här mellanspelet som jag baserade på ett stycke ur Artur Lundkvists bok “Det talande trädet” och det slog mig att det är en fin beskrivning av internet. En vildvuxen och snårig skog snarare än den släta och ordnade oceanen.

Skogen är det andra havet. Det hav i vilket människan vandrar. Detta hav kräver en annan typ av sjöfart än oceanens släta rum. Här måste man göra väg genom den snåriga, igenväxta och fuktiga vegetationen. Öppna ängar delar plats med underjordiska tunnlar.

Skogen omsluter alla arter, åtskiljer dem tillräckligt för att försona dem med varandra, insvepa dem i samma fred. Spåren korsar varandra i alla riktningar och alltid följs spåren av nya varelser, alltid växer där något i dem, levande sömmar genom skogens mantlar.

Vi besjunger skogarna, vårt ursprung och tillflykt, vårt mänskliga förråd; där skogen råder översvämmar och urartar inte människan, vänder sig inte mot sig själv i förintelsens raseri, känner sin begränsnings mått inför de högvuxna träden.

Bevara Internet

Design:
Ibi Kopimi Botani

Skribenter:
Alf Rehn
Christopher Kullenberg
Daniela Alba
Geraldine Juárez
Guido Zeccola
Johanna Nylander
Jussi Karlgren
Karl Palmås
Magnus a. Eriksson
Olle Lindgren
Seth Larsson

From Digital Technology to (and back to) Network Cultures

2011-11-08T00:00:00+01:00

This is a longer version of a presentation (squeezed in on 15 minutes) I held at a meeting in Lund discussing the possibilities of starting up an internet research institute (Summary of the seminar here). I took the opportunity to reflect on the meta-question of what studies of the internet can mean today as opposed to 8 years ago when I first got involved with internet related issues, or the completely different world from 15 years ago when I first used the internet. Can the internet really be a unifying principle for a research institute today or is the internet, ironically because it now affects every part of society, too broad a concept for organizing research, while at the same time neglecting important variables?

Researching the Internet Today

If we briefly take a look at the internet today we can see that it has become a well integrated technology essential to global business, governance, culture and war. It grows at the most in Asian countries, many times through mobile phones and wireless communication rather than PC:s and cables and women are becoming the lead users of social media rather than male geeks.

The development of the internet we have had here in Sweden and similar places most certainly won’t be the digital development that other parts of the world will go through. Here, the internet started as a fringe activity for nerds and then grew to become essential for the rest of the society, seemingly taking each of them by complete surprise. For places that gets access to internet now, internet norms and services is already established in other parts of the world and it is more likely that internet access comes as a broader set of policies implemented when the connection is set up. For the next billion of internet users, the internet will already be so entrenched in society, globally and locally, that its effect on society will be indistinguishable from other socio-economic processes that comes with it. The internet on its own has only been able to be perceived as so disruptive here in Sweden because of the relative stability of the rest of society. This is not to say that the internet will disrupt social processes where it is introduced, but rather that the disrupting effect will not be because of the newness of the medium itself, but by the disruption caused by the powers that manages to turn the power of the internet in their favor, and this is all dependent of how the internet is deployed. This inability to isolate the impact of one factor is a characteristic of integrated, complex systems. The system as a whole is not just an aggregate of the effects of individual factors, but has emergent properties that can only be understood if the interplay of all the affected parts are taken into consideration.

This creates a problem for research that wants to investigate the impact of the internet on society. If the development of the internet and Internet use is deeply entangled with other kinds of social processes and not just installed as a solely technological infrastructure in an otherwise unknowing society; when there is no similar situation to the one researched, except with no internet, since every factor has been changed since the time internet was introduced; what will one compare the situation at hand with? These kinds of comparisons can only be made in a context where the internet has just been introduced and been introduced in such a way that the areas that it affects were unaware of its introduction and its impacts; in other words, only when the internet is introduced as a disruptive technology. But with how much surprise will the internet be introduced in parts of the world that gets connection now when the internet has already matured for 20-30 years in other parts of the world?

An alternative to understanding the impact of the internet of society is for researchers to focus on descriptions of how the internet is used in different contexts. However, this is a limited approach that only generates endless description of internet use without gaining a full understanding of the situations that are being studied because internet use is and will become only a small parts of what makes up most social, cultural and technological situations. Everything is not about to become digital as some people used to predict. On the contrary, the digital is everywhere, and that is an important distinction.

The Internet research ends up having to keep the separation of internet and the rest of the world as an ontological fact and only study phenomena on the internet, which will only be phenomena that occurred under specific periods of the development on the internet in a given context. More and more phenomena that can be registried on the internet will only become understandable if all the developments taking place off the internet that is affecting the phenomena is taken into account. The internet then becomes nothing more than a tool to register data about general conditions in society that none the less can have some advantages over other methods of data acquisition. Internet research then becomes any research that in any way makes use of the internet for observation and data collection, which soon will have to include basically any research on any kind of social phenomena.

Example: The Future of Health Care and Networks

As an example of these problems that arise when looking at the impact of the internet in a situation where it is deeply entangled in other social processes I will briefly describe competing visions of the use of the internet in the future of health care in Europe and how it relates to the future use of networks.

Health care is one of the top political problems within the EU, not at least because of a quickly aging European population that will soon need lots of care. At the same time, health care is a hi-tech, innovative, patent-generating and energy-intensive sector that is the recipient of a lot of hi-tech research funding and innovative health care services is assumed to be one of the major driving forces of the future internet networks. The future internet is a specific technical/political term used within EU research and is referring to an effort by the EU to take leadership position (away from the Americans…) in the development of the next generation of internet networks (see this post). One form of health care services that is assumed to make use of the future internet networks is tele-medicine — that is, digitally mediated connections with doctors, presumably in a real-time audio-visual communications environment. The reason is of course that virtualized expert medical care in someones home is much cheaper than building huge hospitals and having people come there to meet their doctor. It is also related to a hyper-specialization of health care in which only certain clinics, labs or doctors can perform certain operations, perhaps private clinics with patented equipment that local hospitals is most likely unable to acquire. The future of health care in this scenario consists in throwing research money at these elite hi-tech institutions that function as centers of computation and knowledge, pushing the limits of what kind of operations they can perform and diseases they can cure and by virtualization or robotic operations increase the number of people that can have access to them. This of course requires the ability to push massive amounts of data traffic very fast and ensure the quality of service. You don’t want lag when a surgeon on the other side of the world controls the robotic arms that performs your operation.

There is however efforts to rethink health care in a radical way and utilize the internets ability to manage social networks to do it. Sometimes, this is referred to as 5% health. In this scenario, health care is mostly concentrated on working preventive. A problem with the centralized solution sketched above is that it only treats symptoms. It gets better and better at treating these symptoms but the health problems grow faster. A lot of the efforts of health care goes to what is called welfare diseases such as obesity and its related heart problems and diabetes (which in the US is increasing by 30% a year according to this article by John Thackara). Other diseases, such as dementia, is more in need of a social support network to manage the early stages than hi-tech treatments when things have gone really bad. What these kind of efforts are trying to do (such as this, this and this) is to break the division between passive users of health care and active, professional medical personnel by connecting wider networks of patients, relatives, nutrition experts, medical personnel on different levels of professionalization, food producers and distributors, urban planners and designers and everyone that is a stakeholder in the ecology of the disease and make them share and organize knowledge, ideas, data and connections. All in a more spontaneous and self-organized manner than the hi-tech hospitals. Managing this of course comes with its own set of challenges, but they are not primarily solved by increasing the speed, power and precision of existing technology but is about organizing information, people and resources in a meaningful way and creating social, political and infrastructural conditions for these kinds of networks to emerge. They can not only be brought about by developing new technology but require new social organisations, perhaps even new kinds of health care related architecture and urban planning. A goal of many of these efforts is also to make health care more resistant to coming transitions away form a fossil fuel based society where the hi-tech hospitals is just not sustainable.

In the health care example, we can see how the internet is used as a tool (among others) to bring forth two very different visions of the future of health care. One, which is about getting access to an energy intensive center of computation, information, knowledge and technology. This is a situation that keeps a strict distinction between user of a service and its professional managers and makes the users very dependent on the maintenance of this professional class. This distinction is echoed in, and reinforced by, the internet technologies suggested, but it is not brought about by the internet itself. This is obvious because in the other vision of the future of health care the internet technologies are bringing forth a different kind of situation where the health care is deprofessionalized, consists of a network of peers with many different skills and which, through preventive methods, reduced the dependency of the class of medical professionals in the energy intensive, centers of computation.

It is not just the same internet technologies being used differently either. In the first case, the network needs to be ultra fast, is very sensitive of small delays and must be customized to ensure quality of service of a few, very important types of use. In the second scenario it is more important that the internet is ubiquitous, adaptable to many different kinds of uses and platforms and low on energy use. It is not as crucial that every millisecond of delay is pushed to the minimum and it is build on redundancy rather than the securitization that is necessary for quality of service guarantees. Two internets, two ways of life, two organizations of society, two futures of health care.

Network Cultures

My suggestion then is that studies of the internet from now and into the future must be studies of these different ways of organizing society, which naturally will make use of internet technologies, but not only them and it is not them that determine the organizing principles nor set the requirements. These organizations are complex socio-technical processes that require a synthesis of many different academic disciplines to fully grasp and in that sense it is certainly valuable to construct a trans-disciplinary research institute to tackle these new challenges. But I argue that the internet can not be that unifying concept. What that concept will ultimately be is something to discuss. Perhaps peer-to-peer production as some people call it, perhaps organized networks as Ned Rossiter calls it. As an example, I will try out the term network cultures, often used by Geert Lovink and others.

Instead of depicting a generic technology, network cultures highlight a specific form of organization of connectivity. It is not enough for a phenomenon to be digitized to be a network culture. In that sense it is more narrow to claim to study network cultures than to study internet use. But it is also more inclusive — network cultures exist also outside the internet; sometimes only using internet to a small degree, sometimes using completely different forms of communication. They certainly existed before the internet, but did they have a different impact then; and what organizing principles and limitations in space and time had to be used to form a network culture then?

Network cultures are opposed to institutionalized organizations with stable and standardized ways of interacting, although network cultures can exist in the middle of such institutions. Network cultures has a natural affinity with the prototype, experimentation and temporary and precarious relations — for good or worse.

The question of network cultures is how they under certain conditions can arise and be sustained while under other conditions fail to flourish or collapse. Network cultures can either be the result of favorable condition or the only choice in a time of crisis.

For me, focusing research on network cultures instead of the internet signals a post-digital perspective on the internet where it is tied up with processes of globalization, urbanization and economical and energy crises, and where many sectors of society has learned to manage it rather than be taken by surprise by its introduction. Personally, my interest in this kind of perspective has been widely sparked by being involved with hackerspaces and the maker culture which certainly wouldn’t have reached its level of development without knowledge sharing and connections over the internet but which is also brought into its present shape by urban developments, shifts in global manufacturing, discarded technology as a result of a society geared toward perpetual growth and the different political developments of their local situations. Comparing the present post-internet maker culture with the way it looked pre-internet is to compare two completely different worlds and nothing can be said about the internet and the way it is going without a deep understanding of the way the world has changed the last decades. And if you have been spending the last 15 years on the internet, I can tell you that a hell of a lot has happened on the outside.