The Tools Series is a series of Baltan Sessions that examines the complex and changing relationships artists and designers have with the technologies and tools they develop, modify or use to create, with an aim to explore social awareness around the tool choices they make as well as the (aesthetic) influences of these choices on the work they create.

During the Naked on Pluto project one of the key ways to confront the problems of centralised social networks turned out to be to encourage a deeper understanding of the processes and protocols of these sites.

So, like the previous workshop at CCCB, we centred this around a web application called FaceSponge, which we developed as a social programming interface giving quick access to the Facebook API and allowing participants to try out each other’s scripts. The other key issue was to find out people’s opinions, and so we collected answers on post-it’s to three questions for each area, which the participants later sorted for presentation to the public.

Social advertising

This workshop was perfectly timed with Facebook’s IPO, and as 82% of it’s revenue comes from advertising we started off by working on a simple spoof advert. We took one friend, and picked something they have ‘liked’ and wrote some code to promote it. This is what happens on social networks where a brand gets advertised to you because one of your friends follows or likes it. Being able to put a friend’s name in an advert is seen as an exciting future of advertising (or perhaps less so as the share price continues to drop).

function runme() {
    FB.api("/me/friends", function(friends) {
        var friend=friends.data[0];
        FB.api("/"+friend.id+"/likes", function(likes) {
            var like=likes.data[0];
            display(friend.name+" endorses "+like.name+" BUY SEVERAL TODAY!");
            FB.api("/"+like.id+"/picture?type=large", function(picture) {
                display_image(picture);
            });
        });
    });
}

Privacy

There are vast amounts of pictures available on facebook, and it was fun to write a script that presented them all back at in a chaotic manner without any other information. This also gave us a chance to show how the privacy on Facebook is imaginary, as the URL’s FB gives you for your friend’s pictures are public – regardless of anyone’s privacy settings.

// showing the holes in the walls                                               
// you think your photos are private?                                           
// these images are accessible without a login                                  
function runme() {
    FB.api('/me/friends', function(friends) {
        friends.data.forEach(function(friend) {
            FB.api('/'+friend.id+'/photos', function(f) {
                 if (f.data.length>0) {
                     var gallery=f.data[0];
                     // show the public url                                     
                     display(gallery.images[0].source);
                     // show the image                                          
                     display_image(gallery.images[0].source);
                 }
            });
        });
    });
}

Social pressures

The third area we were interested in exploring was the more subtle ways that social media are affecting communication methods. We came up with this strange script that collects the last things posted by your friends and puts them together without information on who posted them, or who they are for:

function runme() {
    FB.api('/me/friends', function(friends) {
        friends.data.forEach(function(friend) {
            FB.api('/'+friend.id+'/feed', function(feed) {
                if (feed.data && feed.data.length>0
                    && feed.data[0].message) {
                    display(feed.data[0].message);
                }
            });
        });
    });
}

We continued to play with and adapt these scripts in order to show more information. The mood was interesting as it flipped from serious to hilarity and then slight awkwardness at what we were dredging up. We followed each of these practical sessions by collecting feedback on thoughts and emotions for each section. Although this was a very demanding workshop (changing between coding, politics, funny juxtapositions of friend’s personal data and having to think about how it felt) we recorded a wide range of thoughts – from the dismissive, “doesn’t matter” to the outright enraged. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of this workshop was being able to expose these mechanisms to groups of people normally considered ‘users’.

With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. Recorded (VO EN/ES) in Barcelona the 24th of February 2012 as part of the I+C+i Our Life Online session at CCCB.

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

Session organised in collaboration with Fundación Telefónica.

WORKSHOP: Facesponge with Aymeric Mansoux and Gerald Kogler. 10h-14h

Have you ever wondered what is going on “behind the scenes” on social networks like Facebook? In this workshop we will explore our so-called social data and get a glimpse at how it is viewed by the company and third parties who access it. In order to break several myths about Facebook applications, you will be invited to take part in designing small programs that extracts and manipulate you and your friend’s online information. Nothing will be written back to Facebook at any time, we will only be reading existing data. No data will be collected or viewable by anyone else.

No programming experience is required. Basic knowledge of javascript can be useful to explore more advanced possibilities of the Facesponge sandbox.

This workshop is part of the Naked on Pluto project, a critical text adventure Facebook game concerned with issues of online privacy and control within centralized commercial social networks, designed and written by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths.

Facesponge is developed in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories.
All Naked on Pluto software is released under free culture licenses.

Schedule:

* Naked on Pluto presentation
* Gameplay session
* Anatomy of an FB app
* Introduction to Facesponge
* Breaking FB apps myths
* Group discussion

Practical information:

* The workshop will be taught in English.
* You will need to bring your own laptop.
* Places are limited.

DEBATE: Identity and simulation. Artificial life on the networks. With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. 19h-21h

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

REGISTRATION:

Workshop + Debate: 6€
Please send an email explaining the reasons for your interest to cursos@cccb.org
Limited capacity!

Debate: 3€
Tel-entrada (tel. 902 101 212 / www.telentrada.com)
CCCB page for the event

Gordan Savicic (AT/NL) is an artist playing with software algorithms, experimental media and fine art. His project “Suicide Machine 2.0”, where you can kill your virtual identity on social media sites, attracted lots of media attention. His work includes game art, interactive/passive installations and speculative hardware. His participation in collaborative projects and performances have been shown in several countries, such as Japan (dis-locate), Germany (Transmediale), Spain (Arco Madrid), France (IRCAM) and the Netherlands (V2_), among others. Savicic lives and works in Rotterdam and Vienna.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Part of their numerous news coverage is due to the reason that the old dream of silicon valley is again revived. Any little startup company could all of a sudden become the next big thing; romanticizing the emergence of accidental billionaires. The recent movie “The Social Network” is another example where “nerdy” startups are being portrayed through mass media channels as a part of a larger picture. This basically shows how ubiquitous social networks became to our society. People actually want to see and hear about those hypes (mostly aggregated through information channels and opinion leaders). However, social network companies are paying lots of money to their public relation departments to spread the news of an ever-growing user-(fan)base. Especially Facebook is proud of its 500 million users (October 2010), simply ignoring that at least half of them are inactive, fake or accounts used for spamming and stalking.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
At first glance social networks seem more practical rather than aesthetic. This design paradigm is characteristic for recent web applications which are (what I would call) based on the principle of NUI (Network User Interfaces), rather than having a fancy looking graphical user interface (GUI).

First, the elementary thing about them is the potential use of network nodes. Each user is a dynamic buoy shifting within a melting social sea which makes them so attractive to use. They can specify their own content or share photos and movies with their friends, show off with their entourage and even work collaboratively on texts, while all accumulated data can be easily made accessible to a considerable wide range of people. Andres Manniste brings in a good comparison when he bridges the incorporated function of social network sites to cell phones. In his view cell phones became multi-purpose tools (game console, still and video camera, mail client, mobile network node), while their GUI is being kept rather practical. In proliferating social platforms like Hyves, Facebook, Myspace etc. the GUI acts like a cellphone. The trajectory from sluggishly slow loaded html pages and bulky three hours lasting battery time cellphones in the 90s over to powerful multi-purpose AJAX applications and the iPhone might be even more evident in that comparison. The webpage appears as an easy-to-adapt interface to a social tool, a NUI with potential applications which are modularly expandable by many features. Like the cellphone it has a very simple intuitive interface, but a much more complex social impact.

Second, they are not simply objects, but processes. These processes can trigger social interactions which are served and performed on external servers and rendered into social environments. In terms of a standard hardware/software schema, one could ascribe the NUI the role of Hardware by rendering all computations remotely on (mostly) proprietary systems whereas the human interaction (cultivation of profiles and avatars) can be referred to as Software. More precisely, software that is being executed and generated only through user participation.

Finally, social networks became a ubiquitous tool for augmented information within urban environments when accessed through a smart-phone. You can find your peers through your geophysical location and update your status-messages on-the-go. Social networks aren’t so much about point-to-point communication (like email or SMS for instance), but rather became hybrids of one-to-many communication models (retweets, un/like, check-in/out). Nonetheless we already had most of the “Facebook-like” features more than 20 years ago (IRC chat, status updates, file sharing, etc.) but the interface design made them inaccessible for the „standard“ user. With the implementation of all those functions into a single web-site, it became possible for any person to share, like, comment, etc. and be part of a larger social networking group. Additionally, prices for broadband services and UMTS significantly dropped in recent years.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
After all it’s always the user and his free will to devote himself to those sites. Once you upload some of your data to any online service, you pretty much lost control of it. What most social networks have in common (except for diaspora p2p et al) is that they are totally centralized. Everything is being stored outside of the user’s hard disk; hence, even if you delete content it might be available to other users for an undetermined amount of time. On top of that Mr. Eric Schmid (CEO Google) is shamelessly suggesting that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrassing photographs and material stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
I do read them from time to time, but I am not really tracing their changes. Terms of Use are written by lawyers in the interest of their respective clients which means that they are pretty much “unreadable” for standard users. In most cases friends and peers are keeping me up to date with changes that seriously affect privacy issues on various platforms.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
About 22,700 web results (0.16 seconds).

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 keep most of my private information on servers where I have full access on their permissions and availability. Hence, their future is pretty much in my own hands ;). Nonetheless, with the rise of user-generated content the general question is whether we can keep track of the information other people are posting and sharing about us. Thus, even if you try to stay outside of the whole web2.0 shebang, other people will voluntarily drag your name into social networking sites and (for example) tag pictures with your name.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
I do have very controversial feelings while using my Android-based smart-phone which repeatedly asks me to re-connect to my associated Google account! Even though I am rarely using my Gmail account, it does feel a bit awkward to carry a Google firmware-flashed phone in my pocket. The crux of using online services owned by private companies remains always the same. On one hand they are very handy, easy-to-setup and quite reliable to use. Many people like the fact that they can practically control most of their digital identity from mail to sharing documents via a standard web-browser. On the other hand these online services are claiming more and more of/for our personal information; directly making us depend on then more and more. Since the advent of smartphones and 3G networks, both business and consumer people are carrying the information about their geographical movements and habits in their pocket day-by-day.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
It’s pretty obvious that most of the gathered information is used to generate targeted advertising and is subsequently sold to 3rd party companies. If people decide to curtail their information sharing, Facebook will have a hard time to maintain their business model which depends on the ‘social graph’ and information sharing. There has been a growth in the technology for information sharing but not a commensurate education in what information we should share. Then there is the conspirative fact that we don’t know how much personal information from social networks is being handed over to governments and secret agencies.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
No.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
We will reach the worst case scenario when people and organizations will stop fighting for their privacy rights. Imagine that insurance companies will soon rate your fees by gathering data from your health record, we could easily portrait ourselves already within the “worst case”. We depend on critical thinkers, activists and artists who challenge the way of how future technologies will affect our society.

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?
Machines are perhaps reading most of the online stuff, but they are definitely far away from understanding any meaning. Given that it’s quite error-prone, semantic interpretation isn’t really what it’s made up to be because most of it is based on an interpretation of massive piles of statistical information (obtained through huge databases).

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
I was trying to raise issues related to online privacy with one of my projects, called PlaySureVeillance. The project should stress a conflation of playsure and surveillance. Play/sure subdivided into play and sure, the latter underling the increasing ubiquitous use of play and games in our society. In PlaySureVeillance the idea was to generate a twisted parallelism between decisions made within a game and the creation of a virtual “doppelgänger” which is then publicly profiled on Facebook. Back in 2008, I was fascinated by the amount of games offered on Facebook and their massive usage. By installing a third party game, you pretty much give full access to your whole profile. Games have one basic criteria. The player’s free will to devote himself to he game. PlaySureVeillance was an attempt to profile a new subject out of (game) data. This subject is what Matthew Fuller calls Flecks of identity.

I’ve programmed two games for the Nintendo DS which deal with topics such as Terrorism and Nudity. The games have been put back into their capitalistic enclosure, into an innocent-looking game cartridge. The program code made use of one of the key features from the DS, namely the built-in WIFI function. The games themselves were casual games where each player bypasses certain levels of interaction. During the game-play critical questions about sexual, political and personal preferences are being asked and automatically uploaded to an external server. All the information gathered is then being used to create an automatized Facebook profile of the player. Social interaction is always a game of control, as all of David Lyon’s work on surveillance has shown. It is therefore always the question how far the player can break the code of the game.

Regardless of that, I envision our latest project (the web2.0 suicidemachine) as a sort of game!

This is the alpha release of Naked on Pluto! http://naked-on-pluto.net/

We hope you enjoy your stay on Pluto. Please read our privacy policy if you are worried about the game accessing your data. It’s a short and readable!

If you are having difficulty navigating the game, you can consult the help-file (blue rectangle on the left of the screen).

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

Dmytri Kleiner is a USSR-born, Canadian software developer and cultural producer. He is a co-founder of Telekommunisten, a worker’s collective that provides telephone and Internet services, and an independent researcher investigating the role of telecommunications, cultural production and migration in class conflict.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Several reasons, on one hand social platforms like Facebook have gotten many new users into online communications, on the other hand, unlike older platforms like email and usenet, Social networks are run by capital financed companies, and thus have PR and marketing budgets.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
The primary difference is that they are centralized, proprietary platforms, each controlled by a single commercial organization.

Perhaps the slides from my rectent talk may be helpful: http://docs.telekommunisten.org/paraflows

The difference that is significant to me is that decentralized common platforms are not controlled by any single entity. For instance no one owns email, you can send email to me even when we have different email providers, if I change email providers, I can still send you email from my new provider. However, I can only send you a message on Facebook by way of an account provided by Facebook.

The classic Internet communications platforms, Email, Usenet, IRC, Finger, etc, where all based upon decentralized systems interoperating based on standard protocols, the new social platforms are not like that, they are centrally controlled, proprietary systems.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Not sure what is being asked here. The law would make both user and platform operator responsible.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Somewhat.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
Yes.

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 don’t worry about my private data, but believe in the right to.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
That is not my primary concern, rather I’m more concerned with economic models that require centralization and control of services.

To me the core of the problem is that these platforms are created with finance capital, and thus are financed in order to capture profit, thus profit-capturing must be engineered into the system, if a system can not capture profit, it will not be funded. Thus features like exchanging services for personal information become a possible business model for getting online ventures funded. The only way around this is to create other means of financing the development of communication technologies. Ways that do not require future profit, decentralized systems do not need to earn profit, because they have no expensive central infrastructure, they do, however, have development costs, and that is the problem, how to fund these costs without venture capital.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Ultimately it is sold to those that want to control the behaviour of people, i.e. advertisers, lobbyists, etc.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
No.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Identify theft, prosecution, relationship crisis, etc.

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?
Not sure of what is being asked here again. The impact that it makes is that this machine readable information can be processed more systematically.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Sure it can. I would like to see the game help the players understand the competing interests involved, and why their interests are often contradictory. i.e. the contradictory interests between the investors and the users, developers, etc.