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Hello everyone,<br>
<br>
Thanks to Tim and Renate for inviting me to be a part of this
important conversation.<br>
<br>
I’ve been reading with interest the other posts over the past week
regarding the ways in which social media have always been imbricated
with state and commercial interests. My somewhat provocative subject
line is meant to continue some of these thoughts, while hopefully
branching out into more constructive territory.<br>
<br>
Even prior to Snowden’s revelations, many of us have known of the
ways in which social media works against the interests of activists
and those interested in social change. We know how police have used
social media postings to try and identify activists and “looters”
after the fact. We’ve known how nation states will infiltrate
seemingly closed groups online in order to disrupt activities. We’ve
known that encryption is not a panacea, and that the very bedrock
upon which some much encrypted traffic flows, namely SSL encryption,
is subject to impersonation attacks, making it appear that you are
connecting to, say, Google’s website, when in fact your traffic is
flowing through an intermediary controlled by a state adversary.<br>
<br>
The materials that Snowden and the affiliated journalists have
released starkly shows us the present state of things. Our metadata
is being siphoned up in uncountable volumes. Seemingly innocuous
activity such as playing “Angry Birds” is collected with the same
intensity as actual “plots”. Those of us in the US who believe we
might be “freer” from this surveillance by the NSA are actually not,
for if you communicate with someone outside of the US, the NSA
argues that Fourth Amendment protections do not apply. Thus, simply
by the virtue of this e-mail list being hosted outside of the US,
US-based persons are caught up in this dragnet. I could go on and on
with examples.<br>
<br>
In short, we are all informers on ourselves.<br>
<br>
Yet we still use these services, hence the “film at 11” part of my
subject line. They are still the best way we have to communicate
with a widely dispersed community. Few of us are lucky enough to
have our intellectual community physically near us. We cannot simply
go to the cafe and hash out ideas and plans over coffee or a drink.
Our personal and professional responsibilities prevent us from
spending the necessary time with others. Some of us are forced to
use tools created by Google or Microsoft to engage in our
professional or academic responsibilities. And the fact is, these
tools work! (For the most part.) Anyone who has tried to develop
social software knows about the complexity and mind-numbing drudgery
involved in producing programs that are functional to a wide
community. And if you’ve ever attempted to install and host any of
the many personal “cloud” based systems such as OwnCloud, you know
the amount of work necessary to keep the system running smoothly. So
few of us would give over our time and energy needed to produce the
types of software needed to enable electronic communication at a
global scale. We are dependent on these systems, on a global
infrastructure that none of us could build and maintain, for lack of
capital, time, resources, knowledge.<br>
<br>
What this suggests to me, then, is perhaps we need to rethink our
forms of communication. If we are to use these conduits, these
“tubes” in the words of a former US Senator, then perhaps we need to
reconsider _how_ we use them. This has been an interest of mine for
a number of years. Back in 2008 I started work on a project called
Fluid Nexus (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://fluidnexus.net">https://fluidnexus.net</a>), a mobile phone application
that enabled people to communicate independent of centralized
networks through the movement of people. The idea was that the
application would use short-range networking technologies on phones
to enable messages to pass from one phone to another. People moving
from one locale to another would pass the messages along, rather
than having the messages go through the cellular network or the
Internet. Fluid Nexus was one of an early set of projects that
explored how ad-hoc networks could be used for activist purposes. I
originally wrote it for Nokia phones, then updated it for Android in
2011. That most recent update caused all sorts of consternation
within a certain subset of the cryptohacker community, as the app
doesn’t use encryption when it sends messages along. In fact, the
app works in what is called “broadcast” mode, meaning all messages
are sent to all other devices running the software, the idea being
that it’s better to get a message to anyone and everyone, rather
than only sending the messages to those you “trust”. I was accused
by these people of having “blood on my hands” and received a few
death threats as a result. The app never took off.<br>
<br>
Yet we’ve seen in recent months the use of a similar type of app,
FireChat, in the protests in Hong Kong. Activists are not as naive
as the cryptohackers would have us believe, as most activists
understand the risks they are taking when using these types of
systems. But they’ve evaluated the risks, and decided that they’re
manageable given their tactical needs at the moment. When the risks
become too much, they switch to something else. Isn’t this what we
once meant by “tactical media”?<br>
<br>
But perhaps we need to consider something even more drastic, that
being a rethinking of the very semiotic systems we use to
communicate. This is the conceit of a more recent project of mine
called _sylloge of codes_ (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.sylloge-of-codes.net/">http://www.sylloge-of-codes.net/</a>). Within
the Snowden revelations were documents that showed that the NSA and
the GCHQ (the Government Communication Headquaters, the UKs analogue
to the NSA) have worked to weaken the very encryption algorithms
that we are asked to rely upon. If this is the case (and I think
with all releases of national security information we have to be
open to the possibility of “false flag” and misinformation
campaigns), then we are truly at a loss. For if encryption, which is
assumed to be impervious even to the NSA and GCHQ, is breakable,
whither communication? Perhaps then we need to think more
poetically. _sylloge of codes_ is a project that asks us to think
about more poetic ways of communication. Computers are rather silly
machines, only able to “understand” the most basic of information,
and completely fail at dealing with poetic speech, writing, images,
video, and audio. Maybe we need to develop new “codes” that would
not be understandable by today’s computers, that would not be
subject to the same types of data mining algorithms that are used to
scan Twitter and Facebook. But I don’t know what those codes might
be. So _sylloge of codes_ allows visitors to the gallery space to
suggest what these codes might be, to begin creating a collection of
new codes that we could potentially use. These will likely be highly
localized, idiosyncratic, and perhaps understandable to a limited
few. But they can be very powerful. All we have to do is look at
“grass mud horse” and the recent attempts, perhaps overblown in US
media, to cut down on “puns” in Chinese state media.<br>
<br>
So while we continue to inform on ourselves, we can also begin to
think of more poetic codes, using that underutilized and
always-under-attack faculty, the imagination.<br>
<br>
Claudia Pederson and I will write shortly about another recent
project of ours that goes towards exploring some of the ways we can
engage with metadata on social media networks.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
Nick Knouf<br>
<br>
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Nicholas Knouf<br>
Assistant Professor, Cinema and Media Studies Program<br>
Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481<br>
Office: PNW 313 Office Phone: 781.283.2105 Fax: 781.283.3647<br>
<br>
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