[-empyre-] social media as revolutionary technology?

Sun May 13 16:35:37 EST 2012

..on Sat, May 12, 2012 at 04:48:58PM -0500, Cara Wallis wrote:
> 
> Btw, to get back to the Arab Spring, when I read about “revolutionary”
> technologies and how, to some, things like Facebook and mobile phones
> “created” the Arab Spring, I’m very skeptical. Not that new media didn’t
> matter, but when Egyptian government cut off the Internet, the protests
> still continued, using “old fashioned” social networking tools.

Indeed they did!

.. and in Syria, Homs activists deployed a carrier-pigeon communication model to
replace compromised computer network infrastructure. 

Such implementations are indication of the kind of dexterity, ingenuity and
mobility required to survive inevitable attempts at State control and/or
manipulation of infrastructure in times where its own broader control is
threatened.

Such post-infrastructure dexterity as seen in Egypt, Libya and Syria are
probably not as widely celebrated as Twitter and Facebook as vehicles for change
because they offer no exchange-value within the booming global market for social
capitalisation.  One-way, local and off-line they cannot reciprocate felt
experiences of inclusion, (seemingly) risk-less convenience of
left-click-participation and nor do they yield opportunities for the production
of social capital via public performance of political and/or ethical conscience.

Social Networking, as it is most popularly implemented and used, is not a gift
and nor is it publicly owned.  Broadly misunderstood as a service, it is
distributed across just a handful of corporations. As such we cannot consider it
a valid, sane base for the projection or extension of The Commons. At its root,
Social Networking, as a project, inflates and exploits an ancient fear, that of
Social Irrelevance; an anxiety now mined as though mineral. Its marketed mantra
might as well be: "Value yourself as others do you."

Social Networking is without doubt the post-Cold-War, Closed World, totalitarian
dream come true. Drunken tweets, Facebook walls and Google messages reside on
storage media in rack-mounted servers in data centers surrounded by dirt, guns,
barbed wire and shareholders. Stored on private property, way out of our
control, we find ourselves suspecting the 'delete' button merely hides data from
ourselves..

.. similarly there is no more a Cloud as there is any Data Center that escapes a
geo-political frame.  The Cloud is perfectly emblematic of a deep and
dis-empowering sublimation of the kind of critical footholds we need now into a
sort of delirious, Mythic and solvent approximation..

An example: 

Ask anyone you know to tell you how the postcard you sent them arrived in their
physical mailbox and most will give you a relatively valid approximation of the
indexing system (post-codes), transport (vans, bikes, planes, trains), agents
(mail-men/women) and destinations (named mailboxes) that result in them actually
receiving that postcard. Ask the same person how the email you sent them arrived
in their inbox and their description will probably lean toward high surrealism -
better submitted to a poetry journal than a body of common, applicable
knowledge..

If you can't describe the mechanisms at work that comprise the infrastructure
upon which we so often claim to depend, you can't describe your Environment. It
is Engineering that increasingly provides, regulates and measures the flow of
water, pensions, indoor temperatures, electricity, TCP/IP packets, insulin, gas
and voice data. Those of us in the West will probably experience our last
moments in a cradle of LED-lit appliances and sensor data.

I do believe that the Humanities, in habitual avoidance of technical
vocabularies, are in danger of a sort of critical atrophy here - unable to
meaningfully describe or engage a great many of the techno-political substrates
upon which contemporary (urban) life is increasingly rendered.

One really sees this in discussions that begin framing a Network Politics around
the idea that the Internet, at root, somehow belongs to The People. It doesn't
and has never belonged to The People. It belongs to those that own and control
the cables. If you control a network topology, you control the propagation
(route), distribution and ultimate form of the content received.

Here's a great project that (inadvertently) describes the scale of this
delusion:

    http://submarinecablemap.com

Note that the owners of most of the undersea cables that allow for this
transcontinental, network-of-networks we call the Internet are not in fact
Governments or publicly owned bodies but scores of competing corporations. 

Here we see that to begin a meaningful discussion of liberty, civil rights,
privacy and ownership of data in the context of computer networks we cannot
avoid engaging this layer. This intensely political layer (the layer of 'stuff')
is positioned as the Physical Layer in the famous OSI Model - the most widely
used abstraction used to describe a Computer Network to burgeoning network
engineers:

    http://www.washington.edu/lst/help/computing_fundamentals/networking/osi

A final example, giving a glimpse at the innate geo-political, material and
deeply corporatised substrate upon which the Internet is implemented..

Below are all the computers that my HTTP request traverses to resource any data
at http://www.subtle.net/empyre, the parent site of this mailing list, from here
in Berlin. Each machine belongs to a company, resides in a different place
(sometimes even different country), with varying laws on data retention, deep
packet inspection, encryption, content filtering, etc. 

We see machines in Germany, Spain, UK, USA and Australia. 

Each necessarily makes a copy to local physical memory in the process of reading
and writing that underpins computer networking along a route..

julian at splinter:~$ traceroute www.subtle.net
traceroute to www.subtle.net (203.170.81.33), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  3.940 ms  4.768 ms  5.620 ms
 2  lo1.br12.ber.de.hansenet.net (213.191.64.23)  39.556 ms  40.498 ms  41.640ms
 3  ae1-102.cr01.ber.de.hansenet.net (62.109.108.125)  42.912 ms  44.009 ms 44.737 ms
 4  so-0-1-0-0.cr01.weham.de.hansenet.net (213.191.87.217)  51.522 ms  52.733 ms 54.299 ms
 5  ae0-0.xd01.weham.de.hansenet.net (62.109.67.242)  55.090 ms  56.292 ms 57.697 ms
 6  ae1-0.pr02.weham.de.hansenet.net (213.191.66.181)  58.508 ms  39.655 ms 42.777 ms
 7  ae0-0-grtdusix1.red.telefonica-wholesale.net.7.16.84.in-addr.arpa (84.16.7.233)  51.085 ms  54.452 ms  53.534 ms
 8  Xe-5-0-8-0-grtlontl3.red.telefonica-wholesale.net.120.142.94.in-addr.arpa (94.142.120.242)  63.284 ms  66.146 ms  67.384 ms
 9  xe-0-4-0-3.r02.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.9.129)  68.685 ms  69.937 ms  71.939 ms
10  ae-4.r23.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.40)  73.192 ms  71.132 ms 74.684 ms
11  ae-3.r22.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.198)  82.095 ms  77.867 ms 76.830 ms
12  as-0.r25.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.79)  344.571 ms  332.329 ms 376.900 ms
13  ae-7.r23.tokyjp01.jp.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.164)  354.715 ms  337.709 ms 340.529 ms
14  p16-2-0-0.r05.sydnau01.au.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.29)  414.284 ms  425.399 ms  419.056 ms
15  xe-1-1-0.a00.sydnau02.au.ra.gin.ntt.net (202.68.64.163)  412.916 ms  416.319 ms  417.047 ms
16  202.68.67.142 (202.68.67.142)  417.795 ms  415.052 ms  407.951 ms
17  180.148.64.106.static.amnet.net.au (180.148.64.106)  411.969 ms  409.738 ms 410.703 ms
18  180.148.64.113.static.amnet.net.au (180.148.64.113)  400.470 ms  412.528 ms 407.805 ms
19  te3-3.br02.wa.amcom.net.au (203.161.65.85)  620.757 ms  481.446 ms  467.667 ms
20  te7-2.cr01.wa.amcom.net.au (203.161.65.66)  464.867 ms  472.877 ms  468.424 ms
21  116.212.203.62 (116.212.203.62)  461.889 ms  465.786 ms  473.687 ms
22  acc-jcore-vl101-ge-0-0-0.per.syra.net.au (203.170.86.6)  482.157 ms  476.909 ms  477.957 ms

Cheers!

Julian

-- 
Julian Oliver
http://julianoliver.com
http://criticalengineering.org