Owen Mundy is an artist and programmer who investigates public space and its relationship to data. He makes images, sculpture, and software that highlights inconspicuous trends and offers tools to make hackers out of everyday users. A former photographer in the US Navy, he co-founded Your Art Here, a non-profit organization in Bloomington, Indiana that puts art in public commercial spaces. In 2010 he created Give Me My Data, an application that helps users export their data out of Facebook. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University and is currently based in Berlin funded by the DAAD.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Assuming “social networks” refers to the online software, application programming interfaces (APIs), and the data that constitutes sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, I feel its popular to discuss them in the news for many reasons.

Online applications that enable enhanced connectivity for individuals and other entities are relatively new and there is an apparent potential for wealth through their creation and the connections they enable. News organizations are businesses, so they naturally follow the money, “reporting” on topics which are considered worthwhile to advertisers who buy space in their pages, pop-ups, and commercial breaks.

Additionally, the public is still grappling with the ability for online software to collect and distribute data about them, both with their permission and through clandestine means at once. Most users of social networking software don’t understand the methods or potential for behavior manipulation in these user interfaces and therefore are wary of what they share. Other users seem to be more care-free, making many private details from their lives public.

Finally, online social networking software is still evolving, so it’s difficult for users to establish a consensus about best practices. I believe the accelerating functionality of web 2.0 software will continue to complicate how we feel about online social networks for much longer.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
If web 1.0 consisted of static pages, web 2.0 is made-up of dynamic information, generated by the millions of users accessing the web through personal computers and mobile devices. This rapid rise in user-generated content has been made possible by the development of online applications using a myriad of open source programming languages. Sites like YouTube (launched 2005 and written primarily in Python) and Facebook (2004, PHP) which consist entirely of content contributed by users, store information in databases allowing for fast searching, sorting, and re-representation. Initially, the web consisted of information and we had to sift through it manually. Web 2.0 allows for the growth of a semantic web and possibilities for machines to help us describe, understand, and share exponential amounts of data through tags, feeds, and social networks.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Obviously users are responsible for deciding what information they publish online. Still, Facebook’s “Recommended Privacy Settings” should emphasize more not less. While their privacy settings always seem to be a work in progress. One thing they do consistently is default to less privacy overall, thus more sharing of your information on their site. For a website that depends on user-generated content the motivation to encourage sharing is clear enough. Still, why do they use the word “privacy” if they’re not actually embracing the idea?

I honestly feel that all software that accepts user input, credit cards and phone companies, should be bound by strict written rules preventing them from sharing my information with advertising companies or the government. It seems like a basic human right to me. If there are laws preventing me from downloading and sharing copywritten music then there should be laws protecting my intellectual property as well.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Only when curious or suspicious. They’re usually intentionally full of so much legalese that I don’t bother torturing myself. But as an artist and programmer, I have an interest in sharing my information in public space because I benefit from its appreciation. Perhaps a more accurate answer to this question would come from someone who doesn’t have this interest.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
Yes I do. I am definitely conscious of the information I share. In addition I also research methods of surveillance and incorporate that knowledge into my art practice. So while I haven’t seen the visualization that determines the likelihood that my grandmother is a terrorist threat, it’s guaranteed that one is possible with a few clicks and some multi-million dollar defense contractor dataveillance tool. This is true for any human being through aggregation of credit card records, travel information, political contributions, and what we publish online.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
It’s important to me to situate my art practice in public space where it can provoke discussion for all audiences. But yes, I do intentionally avoid distributing dorky pictures of my mountain bike adventures. Seriously though, I’ve been watching the news. I can say that I’m definitely alarmed by the post-911 surveillance on U.S. citizens.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
It depends on the service. We all have to give up something in order to use these tools. For example, without telling Google Maps that I’m interested in Mexican restaurants in Williamsburg, I might never find Taco Chulo. This continual paradox in making private information public is somewhat rendered void if the sites we use actually protect our information, but it is more likely that everything we say and do online is used to some degree to enhance and direct advertisements. Here’s another example, 97% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, which should suggest that while they produce software, their ultimate goal is to appeal to advertisers. [1]

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
I have a background in interface design and development so I know how great it is to use web stats to see where users are clicking. If traffic is not moving in the direction that you want then you can make specific buttons more prevalent.

I can only imagine what a company like Google does with the data they gather through their analytics tools. The fact that a government could access this information is scary when you think of the actions of past fascist states. The amount of control a government could levy through a combination of deep packet searching and outrightly ignoring human rights is staggering.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
Definitely. Sharing financial information online always causes a little anxiety. One of my credit cards has been re-issued three times now due to “merchant databases being hacked.”

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
I just moved to Berlin so I’m looking at the history of this place quite a bit. This is relevant because, during the Cold War, before Germany was reunited, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Ministry for State Security (MfS) or ‘Stasi’ is believed to have hired, between spies and full- and part-time informants, one in every 6.5 East German citizens to report suspicious activities.[2] That’s millions of people. At this moment, the ratio of people entering data on Facebook to non-members is one in fourteen for the entire world.[3]We have probably the most effective surveillance machine in the history of mankind.

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
Well, it’s not surprising the interview has come to this point, since I keep referrencing the multitude of methods of computer-controlled digital surveillance. It’s true that machines have replaced humans for remedial work. For example: searching text strings for suspicious statements. But the ultimate danger to my privacy is only enhanced by machines. The real problem is when companies that I trust with my data decide to share it with corporations or governments that engage in behavior control.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
I find this question to be intentionally leading. Perhaps its because I’m generally optimistic and come from farmers, so I assume anything is possible? Not being a gamer though, I can tell you honestly that yes, it is possible, but you will have some challenges if you intend to reach an audience that doesn’t already agree with you. Reaching non-gamers who don’t already feel the same will be even tougher.

Games are generally immersive; you are either playing or your not. The biggest challenge you may have is reaching non-gamers, because they don’t generally invest large amounts of time in games for enjoyment. Try to find ways to highlight complexity and prompt discussion regardless of how long users play, and make this clear from the outset.

Finally, in politically-motivated cultural production it’s important to appeal to an audience first, and let them come to the issues on their own. Who would sit through a film knowing the twist at the end? Especially a conclusion intended to spur critical thinking and action, which is of course the goal.

[1] “Google Financial Tables for Quarter ending June 30, 2009” Retrieved October 13, 2010
[2] Koehler, John O. (2000). Stasi: the untold story of the East German secret police. Westview Press. ISBN 0813337445.
[3] “Facebook Statistics” Retrieved October 14, 2010

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics as part of the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, and Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), adjunct faculty, Transart Institute, Berlin/New York (DE/US) and editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia).

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Social networks, or more specifically the social web, are bound up with vested interests and the social imaginary. They have become key sites for entertainment, making business and even doing politics. Along with this, and as communications technologies become key sites for various forms of contestation, there are bound to be some juicy stories. In addition, social networks are becoming the apparatus of the news. On the one hand, there is the use of platforms for various kinds of social movements and alternative news gathering, and on the other, the old news apparatus is adapting itself to new kinds of distribution channels – rather like selling any other product.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
In some ways not much, or not as much as the hype would lead us to believe. This is an important point, and one that many commentators would stress in that the Net is more than the Web, and that the Net has always been a sharing platform – BBS and UseNet, etc – what some refer to as extreme sharing networks. Even with Web 1.0 there were plenty of examples of social activities and file sharing making the notion of a new release little more than a marketing exercise. The distinction is that sharing now has become subject to centralizing and privatizing controls. I love the uncompromising way Dimitri Kleiner explains this: “Web 2.0 is capitalism’s preemptive attack on P2P systems”. Sociality and sharing have become enhanced but at the same time ever more commodified.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Strictly, if you agree to the terms of service, I guess the person who uploads it is responsible – as no doubt they are the ones who are signing away various rights to their data. In many ways this is the key issue, not the content as such but the ownership of the data. The data becomes capital and you decide whether or not to trade it.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Despite what I say above, no, not really although clearly I should. There’s simply not enough time in the day to read pages and pages of text – often many thousands of words and written in inaccessible legal jargon. To read the detail would make most services untenable on ethical grounds so I guess people are far more pragmatic and again trade ethical principles for use value (even those related to commercial exploitation). I personally don’t do that much trading along these lines.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
No, probably not, but I’m not too paranoid, but in general try not to upload much information about myself. I also am reluctant to use social networks as I prefer to have very few (real) friends. As expected, I try to be mindful of the various strategies being developed to encourage me to upload data. As we hear from the news, it doesn’t take much to be able to assemble a whole profile for someone from very little information as a starting point. The artist Heath Bunting has also demonstrated how easy it is to construct a profile of a “real” person (as part of his “Status Project”).

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I’m old school. Mostly I would like to demolish the whole notion of private property, as this relates to information too. As you can tell, I do not value it much at all in itself but the difficulty is that others do. A change of the prevailing logic around property would change the ways in which value is negotiated but this is rather idealistic on my part I admit.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
As I mentioned already, and it’s not something I do much. However, it seems clear that this is what people do, and often quite knowingly. They sign away rights to platform owners in exchange for sharing services and are willing to live with the compromises this necessitates. It seems like these are for free, but clearly they are not. I have tried to avoid such compromises where possible.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Ultimately this is for the accumulation of capital, or in other words profit or surplus value, and even if it is not altogether clear how profit or value can be extracted. Data on people is clearly a crucial aspect of this if not the prime commodity in itself – such are the conditions of informational capitalism and what people refer to as the attention economy.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
No, not really. As I said, as a skeptic (or luddite!), I don’t share that much information over online networks so remain fairly comfortable.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Individuals could be seen to be selling themselves to the network in a perverse reversal of usual relations (as users and their data become ever more entangled). To put it differently, the worry is that through social networks, new kinds of subjectivities are being constituted that are market-driven and that engage sociality in restrictive ways. This is the case already to some extent but the worst case scenario relates to the extreme degree to which this is happening.

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
No, not really, as social relations already involve the interplay of humans and machines, for better or worse – in strange combinations of human and non-human actions. Even radical networks have to take this logic on board.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Of course, why not, especially given that social networking is game-like anyway. I guess I’d like to see this as an opportunity to emphasize the rule sets that are at work, and to suggest that if social networking can be considered to be a game, that there are cheats/hacks that can disrupt the rules. I think my answers to some of the other questions also indicate this way of thinking and how the issue of privacy might be engaged or made contradictory.

Introduction

Used and abused by many, the notion of “2.0, 3.0, x.0” is mostly jargon that inherited its vagueness from a desire to inflate technological value and its cultural impact. This is nothing but a commercial attempt to resuscitate the dotcom era by promising a future of connected services and communication. Unfortunately there is nothing new in terms of network infrastructure nor in terms of how people have used the Internet to date. At most, another layer of abstraction has been built on pre-existing technology, and some interoperability has been added in terms of data exchange. It doesn’t matter though, if all this vapour ends up either up in the clouds, or stuck in condensation on some forgotten server. All of us are experiencing how the use of the Internet and the growing dependence on computation has a serious impact on our everyday lives. There is no need to pretend this is a side effect of new web application trends and their social impact. On the contrary, the transition phase we are experiencing now is rather simple to understand: humanity has started its slow shift from total offline activity to complete online and digitally assisted life.

The outcome of this transition is not yet set in stone, and there are many conflicting visions on and different approaches to how we can project ourselves, and how communication can survive, in those “simcities”: utopian data and software network environments, nested in data centres’ towers.

MyLife 2.0, serving the megalithic black box

The 2.0 revolution never happened. Remembering how the whole concept has been “sold” to the late adapters, or to the dotcom crash victims, the main idea was to power companies of any size with augmented productivity tools focusing on collaboration and wrapped in a fresh and sexy design, with a more personal approach to communication. These tools would be used voluntarily and promoted by employees on blogs and social networks. In fact this was merely an attempt to port the “casual Friday” to the digital domain.

This obviously failed, just like all the other attempts to link personal life and working life, because most people make a clear distinction between the two. You cannot expect from someone who is already differentiating between private and professional mail accounts to force-blog about his job in the same tone he uses for his hobby web log. The direct consequence of this conflict made the use of so called “Web 2.0 tools” the exclusive domain of dedicated hired professionals and turned the whole promised revolution into the come back of old-fashioned marketing.

This failure failed to stop the process, however, and perverted it even more with a proliferation of “fake” blogs and “fake” profiles on various networks. These were made to look amateur on purpose and their content was carefully crafted in order to give a more human face to impersonal corporations or political groups or merely to try to initiate a buzz around a new product.

Masturbation camps

Of course, the ever-growing success of social network platforms proves that some elements of the face-lifted WWW are very successful. This is true until you take a closer look at what they have to offer. Without a doubt the strong point is to develop and extend social links on an idyllic playground that is either completely generic or themed around a certain topic or hobby.

But these networks are illusions, they are virtual constructs in a centralised black box. Not only do they not exist as a complex social mesh, they present very limited serial features. These places are like dictatorial micro societies that imply forced happiness and which ban any form of rebellion or non-conformism towards the stalinist software to ensure there are no traces of you left on the server database.

Some of these social networks are built around a service based on sorting, comparing, distributing and plotting the data you generate by for instance listening to digitally encoded music, by ordering books online, by rating films you’ve seen in a theatre (or downloaded on a torrent), or any other hack and hobby that can leave a digital trace. Aiming at providing a link between your friends’ data and your own, such tools are in fact specifically efficient for one thing: masturbation and exhibitionism. Very little use is made of the social element of a network. This does not stop people spending their time “pimping” their data and looking at themselves generating information and virtual links that describe their ability to feed a system with information, over and over again. The social aspect of a network is almost non-existent; friends and other links are just treated as another statistic to look at yourself.

Some will argue that there are forms of collective masturbation and exhibitionism that do add value and bring new ways of exploring digital information: folksonomies. This is true until a system reaches the point where too many communities and cultural context are mixed together, rendering any form of collective tagging incoherent. This cancer of metadata is called meta noise, and simply brings to light the fact that data tagging is only meaningful in the light of individual subjective interpretation. This might work well in small groups that share a common culture and lingo, but it becomes irrelevant when multiple communities work on the same platform.

I’m indexed in Google, therefore I exist

While new platforms are emerging all the time, pushing the limits of web applications for the masses, some of the very few dotcom crash survivors are managing to silently take over the world. A good example is the omnipresent Google, which managed in just a few years to become the invisible proxy to the WWW, and for many, literally became the Internet itself. Many of us are already solely using this search engine to pull information from the Internet, sometimes just typing chunks of URL in the search engine, instead of going to a site directly. This form of voluntary blindness 5 is moving us in to the dangerous situation whereby we outsource the accessibility of the Internet to a company that will take, again with the EULA implicitly accepted, any decision on the way everything is filtered, listed or sorted when the engine is queried. Here again we end up in a black box where the notion of distributed information is very much centralised and moderated.

Full body search before entrance

A probably equally important aspect of these black box network applications is the ability to pull from, and push information to databases. This feature is often presented as an argument for the openness and so called networking ability of these platforms. In fact, what is provided are digital customs for the data (the API) and a digital passport for its owner (an ID or key). This freedom of data is in fact very well controlled and authorises access on an individual basis. The same way a profile might be banned and erased from one of these simcities, access to the data can be completely denied or manipulated. Further more, the so called interoperability supposedly brought by various projects, in an attempt to bridge together several web platforms, will just limit the distributed nature of the network even further by promoting a unique database of profiles and identities as a main control.

Data mon amour

These black boxes did not arrive from nowhere. If they are successful today it can only mean that they serve a purpose for most users. It seems that, beyond the slick design and clever marketing of the online “panem et circenses” platforms, we are permanently high on digital data. It has such a prolific nature that we don’t need much to generate it and its mere existence calls for even more digital data creation, in the form of annotations, metadata, discussions and documentation. As a consequence any new gimmick that produces, interprets, filters or processes it is seen as a welcome new fix. For example, productivity fetishists fight to avoid declaring e-mail bankruptcy and, as methodology junkies, they will try the latest workflow trends just like anyone desperate to lose weight will try any new diet.

In fact it takes an incredible amount of energy to get things done, inform yourself, communicate with others and at the same time keep the ball rolling when most of your professional activity relies on permanent connectivity. The issue of coping with an overkill of data is an important factor when it comes to choosing between handling the data in your own way or agreeing to the terms of third party services.

Buffer overflow

The problem is that there is too much information to deal with and it is almost embarrassing to see that all of us tend to carry an increasing amount of backup, archives and other collections of primarily obsolete data that is impossible to sort.

Complete outsourcing is becoming more and more popular as it is increasingly difficult to manually handle these huge amounts of personal data. Storing it requires not only hardware and infrastructure but also maintenance and care that not all of us can afford or have time for.

From the computing and storage perspective, network applications become a service that is completely invisible in a similar way to how we receive gas and electricity. In the end we just need storage, and how we get it of little interest, just like we expect to get electricity from the wall socket without caring about its origin. Cloud storage and cloud computing relies on the fact that most people now consider computer services just like other mass distributed commercial commodities. This does not call for reflection on what is digital data today and how we should handle it, it is merely a lazy shortcut. Behind the buzzwords and hype there is no magic, just a combination of utility computing and platform-as-service, both powered by classic shared and virtual servers.

The expansion and popularity of cloud services is starting to shape and modify technology. Servers, which have so far been the main way of distributing and processing digital information over a network, are bound to disappear in favour of highly dense and compact computing hardware in data centres. This generates positive feedback that already has a major effect on mainstream computers that are most likely to end up as simple terminals for a remote operating system relying on various cloud services.

Such mainstream computers already surround us. Branded as netbooks, these machines rely on web applications. Alternative software specifications are more and more geared towards seamless integration of web services within a desktop, while enriching multimedia features at the same time, turning the browser into the new operating system.

Collapsing towers

While we are very much aware of social, ecological, and political issues relating to our everyday lives, it appears that we are totally ignorant of the risks of letting companies decide for us what the future of networks and digital data might be.

For example, the black box system leaves us completely dependant on a certain vendor product. The spreading of FLOSS [Free/Libre and Open Source Software] ideas and mindset has been particularly successful to demonstrate, amongst other things, that closed, proprietary systems not only enslave the user to a certain technology, but are also completely unreliable in the long term. This is illustrated particularly well by those platforms that can decide from one moment to the next to change features or just cease to exist. If your work and income rely on such a platform you might need to think twice about the implications.

Also, the Internet is not a fast-food service and has more to offer than a template culture. Creativity is an essential part of resistance. From the DIY autonomic or global automatisation perspective, network autonomy is always possible and increasingly easier, even when it comes to web applications or cloud services: if you own it, you can control it. These kinds of efforts, and access to technology are the living proof that there are many possibilities for small groups of people to form different types of collaboration from mutualistic and parasitic, to commensal forms of symbiosis with other network nodes, and to create an alternative cloud in order to provide a more horizontal access to the network and what it has to offer in terms of self organisation and distributivity.

We should always keep in mind that in these simcities, data is the fuel that powers the network. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and when you use “free” services, be it for private or professional reasons, the toll to pay is the data you feed the system, which is, for the majority of us, personal information. From that perspective, privacy is not a thing of the past, on the contrary, it is the new currency.

Finally, Internet architecture became a mirror of the way civilisation is evolving, building on top of previous technologies and knowledge. We constantly live at the surface of things. Although it could be argued that everything in software is a metaphor, we tend to interpret it as an objective reality, which in turn can only contribute to hiding the true nature of the Internet and computing. The risk here is to lose contact with the physical layer by building higher and higher towers of biased interconnections without understanding their foundations and origins. In doing so we fail to understand that transmitting information is different from communication, letting software be the only real inhabitant of this ever expanding territory.