lectures
Tired of Trees: Questioning Internet Protocol
Galloway and Thackers intro of The Exploit conducts a political philosophy within the nature of networks. There has been a developing relationship with the technological advances and the sovereignty that is said to control them. This would oppose the belief held by Geert Lovink who proclaimed that internet protocols are not ruling the world, but simply the government is. Upon examining this proclaim, Galloway and Thackets would argue that political formulas could not elucidate networks because it fails to analyze from a articulate level–taking into account the existence of their intricate qualities and extent. Instead this section introduces an idea about the nature of networks from an anti-code of thought which considers the relationships between biology and technology.
Their approach begins by debating whether or not America is a sovereign power or a network power. After a small collection of complicated questions such as “Does the policy of American unilateralism provide a significant counterexample to the claim that power today is network-based,” they suggest that the juncture between sovereignty and networks is the place where the apparent contradictions can best be understood. Such a contradiction that they come to find is how the American unilateralism counters the notion that we live in a global network society–”How could there be a global system of distributed control if there also exists a single superpower?”
Galloway and Thacker hint for a new method of control that is instead entirely innate to networks. They form a question that comes from the assumption that the present day American regime is in the political vanguard that aims to establish sovereignty in a new political structure that is antithetical to traditional modes of control. They ask the nature of the current geopolitical struggle and believe it is necessary to reach beyond a theory of power law distributions to a theory of political action rooted in networks.
Their argument has three steps, which are:
1. The modern period is characterized by both symmetrical political conflicts waged by centralized power blocs, and also asymmetrical political conflicts in which netwroekd actors struggle against centralized powers.
2. The present day is symmetrical again, but this time in the symmetrical form of networks fighting networks.
3. In order to be effective, political movements must discover a new exploit.
Examples of asymmetric conflict that exist today that shows a historical response to the centralization of power include the suicide bomber vs the police, peer-to-peer protocols vs music conglomerates, guerillas vs the army, netwar vs cyberwar, and subcultues vs the family.
The new exploit which is suggested would have to be a form of “anti web,” as they coin, which would be as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network was in relationship to power centers. It would have to consider the intricate unhuman elements of all networks and would later be called an exceptional topology. This exploit hasn’t been invented, as they conclude, and probably will fail to begin and the sovereigns will again breed their own demise.
My response to Digital Maoism
One of the responses to the digital maoism piece had a quote that said
“ Projects like Wikipedia do not overthrow any elite at all, but merely replace one elite — in this case an academic one — with another: the interactive media elite.”
— Douglas Rushkoff
I liked this quote because it touches on what we started to talk about in class the other day when we were talking about wikipedia. My problem with wikipedia was the idea of authenticity. For me it was hard to think of wikipedia as authentic because there was no academic authority so to speak.
However, as great as these community and peer generated groups may seem, I think it could easily become a very dangerous platform. Anything that has the ability to unite large groups of people without an authority figure or defined set of rules has the ability to become something threatening (the only apparent rules seem to be of moral nature which only exists within the individual that may be participating).
Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue
This essay by Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum explores the relationship between commons-based peer production and virtue. The authors define commons-based peer production as “a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large number of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation” (Wikipedia). They argue that these commons-based peer productions provide opportunities for virtuous behavior, and that this behavior, in turn, breeds more people enacting virtuous behavior thus changing their character formation towards more virtuous beings. This sounds complicated, but it’s really easy to see. They use a number of examples to show this. The one we’re most familiar with is Wikipedia. People contribute for the greater good of having full, informative entries. Users tend to use self-discipline in their posts. When people do things that are considered to be out of line with the goals of the site, there are ways to regulate that. On other sites, like our site here, there are ways of rating posts which determines what is interesting but also determines validity. Open source and free software are another example the authors talk about. No one owns the software products and people aren’t making money off their work. People volunteer their time (in varying degrees of time and effort) to contribute to these sites. There are a few studies on what the motives for people to contribute on particular sites are and the most common answers have to do with virtuous, selfless reasons. The outcome is often greater creativity because of the various sources and the passion put into the work. What’s also important is how they define and categorize virtues. The definition is very inclusive. Virtues are divided into clusters. Cluster 1: Autonomy, Independence and Liberation; Cluster 2: Creativity, Productivity, Industry; Cluster 3: Benevolence, Charity, Generosity, Altruism; and, Cluster 4: Sociability, Camaraderie, Friendship, Cooperation, Civic Virtue. The authors argue that commons-based peer production provides an area for these virtuous acts, including self-concerned and other-concerned acts. (I keep thinking about Marshall McCluhan’s the medium is the message.) Virtuous acts means more virtuous behavior, they suggest.In the end, they suggest that this technology is important for public policy. They include a quote by Alasdair MacIntyre: “Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life, as Aristotle and Engels noted, we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourserlves part of an action that was not of our making.” In terms of technology, we are constrained by what’s already here that we have to work with when it’s created by other people with that power. When we create our own technology, common-based peer production, we have the agency to have this our way. ”We’re beginning to practice new ways to be free and equal beings in a way that we were not able to do before,” Benkler says in his presentation The Wealth of Networks. That sounds pretty damn good to me. Here are some websites that are really taking the technology and using it for virtuous causes:
globalvoices.orgGlobal Voices aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore. 
 indymedia.org Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth.Â
facebook: vampire bites, bumper stickers, mind explosion!
I know in class we discussed how no one was taking their travel log into facebook. Upon my research for my own travel log, I stumbled upon this article which I found entertaining.
It’s about the daming effects of facebook - and basically this woman’s rant about it.
The Panopticon
In class last week we briefly discussed the panopticon and its implications as a measure of control and surveillance. In ‘The Trap’ R.D. Laing led a counter culture movement to the oppositions of state and government officials- stating their best interest is not for the betterment of the people but for themselves and their economic gain. The implications were that everything was done as a measure of control over its citizens, in reality formidably creating a limited freedom based on technology and an array of laws.
This whole idea brought to mind Jeremy Benthams construction of the first prison in the late 18th century. The Trap early on begins showing the Americans spying efforts during the cold war, strategically trying to learn their enemies next move. Modern day panopticons can be viewed as cctv’s (closed circuit camera’s) on almost every corner and store, back to back cameras situated high above strategically placed in between trees and anywhere else roaming eyes can’t spot them. Hollywood have seen a large rise in surveillance films, we saw this during the 70’s when Watergate leaked and now the post 9/11 era. Films like Minority Report, Enemy of the State, and more obviously Look and Time Code, all speak to this notion of surveillance and in these films it is where the audience takes a part of a ‘voyeuristic nation.’ There is a strong correlation from then and now to the rise in surveillance and the loss of freedom and individuality. Living in modern cities such as New York and London a person is caught on tape over 200 times a day, 0ver 70% of the time it is unknowingly. There was a proposed plan to create a a ‘ring of steel’ similar to that in London in the lower east side. The deal would add over 3,000 cctv’s to a 3 mile radius. We are often faced with sacrifices and compromises that must be made, nice cars for pollution, warm houses and electricity for an eroding atmosphere; the decision here lies in compromising ones individuality and freedom for a safer and more mediated public sphere.
The Trap on “Strategies” & New Media
While watching this documentary I stumbled upon a couple issues that I was readily intrigued in. This mostly surrounds itself around John Nash and Rands Corporations conception of game theory. Game theory was designed as a means of studying your opponents move, learning their state of mind so that you can follow suit and predict their decisions. I found it fascinating that during the cold war we built weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear and bio-chemical warfare, as a means not to go to war, does that make sense? when thinking of it from the game theory point of view it seems to make to much sense. This all ties itself into social beings and how they function on a societal platforms. ‘The Trap’ states we live in a modern society driven by suspicion and self interest. Adam Curtis paints a vivid picture of a world driven by these bleak theories, he points out that they all converge at some point.
In the 1970’s John Nash (game theorist) and psychiatrist R.D. Lang’s theories began to overlap. This aided in producing a widespread notion that government and state interference is all a means of control. The internet can be viewed as a modern day measure of control as well. Such things as cell phones, computers, and gprs builds an illusion of greater freedom when in reality we are being surveilled these days more than ever. It allows governments to track emails, phone conversations, and even driving locations. It equates to a ‘new’ form of control where our access to communication is instantaneous, however our suspicions are greater than ever. Living in this new century can often feel like living in a societal cold war of some sort. At times it can feel overwhelming to never be able to escape the strong hold that technology has on us.
The Lo(n)g Revolution by Anna Notaro
In Anna Notaro’s essay, “The Lo(n)g Revolution: the Blogosphere as an alternative Public Sphere?” she tracks the develop of the Internet in the creation of a ‘delimited public arena.’ She revisits Habermas’s classic overview of the public sphere and applies it to the digital age in the reinvention of a public arena in cyberspace. Habermas describes the public sphere as one that “may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” With the internet, many publics have been created as individuals are able to make issues topical and shape them as they interact with each other, as equals.
Very interesting in this article is Notaro’s section on Benjamin Barber who discusses the relationship between democracy and technology. Barber explains the three scenarios of the internet- the Pangloss (technology’s ability to serve corporate agendas), the Pandora (technologies facilitating the development of an ‘invisible and benign tyranny’) and then the Jeffersonian (government and citizen utilizing and adapting new technologies to promote and facilitate participation in democratic society). Though the last scenario is the most ideal, Barber does not see development going in that direction because the issues being expressed online (on blogs) are mostly ‘echo chambers’ where rather than ‘exposing ourselves to new ideas, we simply tailor our electronic environment to hear our own views reinforced over and over again.” Rather than promoting a healthy democratic interaction, we are just weakening and/or strengthening our own opinions and values.
After reading this article, I wonder how the third scenario can be achieved (if ever). With the development of the internet, topics of discussion has opened ten fold to include global issues and interaction which was before, almost impossible. Yet, what we know and what we say is always tied back to our innate feelings and opinions. And though the internet has created many publics that were before invisible, it still leaves other publics in the dark. Can new technology like the internet, or something even better ever get us to a truly democratic public where new ideas are presented and conversations facilitated in the way Barber describes? Or is it just wishful thinking so long as corporations and government regulation are involved?
The Trap and New Media
To me, the interesting connection between “The Trap” and new media is the underlaying notion of politics. “The Trap” examined politics and the ‘optimistic illusion,’ which states politics are out there doing best for the general public and not just for themselves. When in reality, expressing on behalf of general interest is impossible because general interests do not cover all of the public (the structure of the general interest is of certain class, income, race, etc).
With new media (specifically the internet), we are experimenting with what many refer to as the ‘democratic medium’ - one that gives substantially more power to the users to freely express themselves. However, this seems to me yet another illusion- the democratic medium is only available to those who have access to and can acquire the technology. The views that are being expressed on the internet is only half of the picture (those that have no access, have no voice). In turn, the politics of the internet are much like that of real life. The politicians (frequent users) of new media make up the ‘general interest’ but even this general audience is still limited.
The Trap
A BBC documentary series by Adam Curtis. More about it from Wikipedia.
I have embeded all the files here in the blog but in case you have a problem downloading it from Google Video, I have also uploaded it to my server, where you can download it from and watch in full screen using Quicktime.
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
A Guided Tour to the Bad Streets of the Web
The following is a tour of the forbidden corners on the online world. Warning: contains nudity and disturbing violent scenes, enter at your own risk:
A Guided Tour to the Bad Streets of the Web
