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.

Naked on Pluto will be part of the fifth edition of the Speed Show series! This new release, titled ‘Open Internet’, will be happening in Paris the 13th of January. The event is curated and produced by Aram Bartholl, Marie Lechner & Anne Roquigny. Unfortunately the NOP crew is held hostage by EVr14’s cleaning bots at the moment and won’t make it in time! Please drop by for a chat, an energy drink and some browser based love brought to you by:

Anonymous, Jean-Baptiste Bayle, Christophe Bruno & Samuel Tronçon, Claude Closky, Marika Dermineur, Caroline Delieutraz, Constant Dullaart, JODI, Jérôme Joy, Tobias Leingruber, Aymeric Mansoux & Dave Griffiths & Marloes de Valk, Albertine Meunier, Geraldine Juarez feat. M.I.A., Evan Roth, Systaime, VideOdrome mailing list, La Quadrature du Net (Jérémie Zimmermann).

SPEED SHOW vol.5: ‘Open Internet’
Welat Internetcafe
12 Rue d’Enghien, Paris
13th January  2011
7:00-11:00 PM

More information here: http://fffff.at/speed-show-5/

Constant is a non-profit association, an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997. Constant works in-between media and art and is interested in the culture and ethics of the World Wide Web. The artistic practice of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine our daily life. Free software, copyright alternatives and (cyber)feminism are important threads running through the activities of Constant. Constant organizes workshops, print-parties, walks and ‘Verbindingen/Jonctions’-meetings on a regular basis for a public that’s into experiments, discussions and all kinds of exchanges.

Michel Cleempoel, graduated at the national superior art school of la Cambre – Brussels. Author of numerous digital art works and exhibitions, in collaboration with Nicolas Malevé. http://www.deshabillez-vous.be

Nicolas Malevé, a multimedia artist since 1998, has been an active member of the association Constant. As such, he has taken part in organizing various activities to do with alternatives to copyrights, such as Copy.cult & The Original Si(g)n, held in 2000. He has been developing multimedia projects and web applications for cultural organisations. His research work is currently focused on information structures, metadata and the semantic web and the means to visually represent them.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Essentially because of their scale. Facebook reports having more than 500 million active users.[1] This, of course, inspires all kinds of commercial dreams. Social networks barely brought something new to the web. For personal pages, Friendster predates largely Facebook and the other social networks. And the functionalities they offer barely innovate. It is their momentum though since a large portion of the online population happily subscribes and uses these services. In our view, social networks are an internet in miniature, what the bourgeois garden is to nature: a domestic version, with fences, controllable, reassuring, narrow-minded. They have their own version of email, chat, links, search, page but everything in redux. As they are powered by social pressure, they are an endless source of anecdotes fueling the media.

It is important to remark that we hear a lot about proprietary social networks and too rarely about free social networks in the mainstream media. They exist though and are used by governments, businesses or academic institutions: ie, elgg[2], a social network releasing its code under the GPL powers various important platforms like Oxfam, Federal Canadian Government, Johns Hopkins University or Université Lille 1.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
Internet offers the possibility of a more decentralized media ecology. The Peer-to-Peer exchange networks are a wonderful example of this. Proprietary social media (although sometimes built with free software never release their source code) are based on a centralized architecture. A company owns the server where the users connect and therefore can monitor their behaviour easily. It is barely new though. Centralized and decentralized technologies have always been co-present on the network.Think about the intial MSN Classic, the first attempt of Microsoft to capture its users in a mini-internet, not so far from Facebook.

MSN was originally conceived as a dial-up online content provider like America Online, supplying proprietary content through an artificial folder-like interface integrated into Windows 95’s Windows Explorer file management program. Categories on MSN appeared like folders in the file system Then officially known as ‘The Microsoft Network,’ the service launched along with Windows 95 on August 24, 1995. MSN was included with Windows 95 installations and promoted through Windows and other Microsoft software released at the time. Product support and discussion was offered through the MSN service, as well as information such as news and weather, basic e-mail capabilities, chat rooms, and message boards similar to newsgroups (from Wikipedia).[3]

At the time, users much prefered the possibilities of the internet. It seems today that an important part of them embrace a return to MSN-like technologies.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
You have to distinguish two things: the data you upload consciously and the traces that you leave. The first ones are covered by the way you handle copyright, the second ones are the property of the platform.

For the uploaded data, the Flickr terms of use (now Yahoo’s) used to state “What’s yours is yours”. But most of the time, this is nuanced by a series of conditions that change the meaning of the statement: for instance, you grant the company (and its affiliates) the right to use your data for advertising its services. For the traces, your privacy rights are the only way to regain control, but it is extremely difficult since you are barely aware of what kind of data is collected. The matter is further complicated by the fact that, when signing up, you grant the company the right to host your data in other countries, therefore possibly under different legislations (usually more favorable to them).

Now if we consider the aspect of responsibility for what is being said or shown, the platform denies all responsibility.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
As we read them, we don’t subscribe to proprietary social networks. We are huge fans of the Goodiff project, a service for automated tracking of semantic changes in web service policies created by Alexandre Dulaunoy and Michael Noll. They clearly prove the point that these terms of services are constantly re-written, one tiny modification after the other.[4]

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
As we don’t subscribe, we have no idea.

How do you value your private information now ? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
We usually lack scenarios to imagine what can be done with electronic information. Apparently innocent data can be used to produce critical knowledge. A good example is France Telecom offering to the French trade-unions active in its company to use a shared intranet. On the intranet’s homepage, you can see the number of connections: 5000 connections per month for 120 000 workers. An easy way to monitor in real-time the power of the trade-union in the company. Data which is initially gathered to monitor the technical status of the platform ends up being a statement about the penetration (or lack thereof) of the unions in the company.[5]

Additionally, if you leave information in a system, this information can be correlated with other sources of information to produce new knowledge about you. Even if this information is apparently innocent at first. The problem with proprietary social networks is that they tend to centralize so much about your internet life that they can correlate a lot of information about who you connect to, what are your interests, at what time you do what or when. This information is available to third-parties (advertisers) and constitutes valuable consumer profiles to them. Or they can be a means to check other information: an insurance company comparing profile information with a health insurance request, a tax officer comparing your spending habits in your declaration form and your social network profile, etc. In this respect, private data is the oil of the new century. And this only covers what we can expect under relatively democratic regimes. The web 2.0 companies do not resist very much the pressures of the Chinese government to give access to user data. And we do not need to go so far anyways, you only need a slightly authoritarian state to see that information easily finds it’s way to the police.[6]

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
We chose our alliances. If we need online services, we prefer to pay a small amount of money to trustworthy organisations committed to free software and serious about privacy rather than use the free online services. We prefer supporting Domaine Public or all2all in Belgium rather than using a free GMail account.

However alternatives are not always easy or available. When there is no trustworthy alternative, we try to use these online services as cautiously and as less as possible.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Commercial use through customer behaviour analysis, mainly. We are not only watching the banner, the banner is also gathering information from what one does, what one writes and to whom, from status to age and sex preferences. In this respect, it is quite similar to Google adds following you from page to page, site to site.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
At the moment, we know that ex-students made a club about Michel in Facebook. The club is closed to the public and it is a student’s joke. In itself it is not a big deal, but the fact that it is closed doesn’t allow to respond and nevertheless the information about its existence has leaked out of the social network. Used in a more delicate situation, this combination of closed group and leaks can be explosive. This illustrates the point that the use of privacy-preserving technologies for one person is pointless if others happily enjoy disseminating information about him/her in environments he/she can’t access.

By collecting information on other users, tagging them on pictures, sending them email invitations, social networks users are doing the profiling for the platform they contribute to.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
The worst case scenario is usually described in terms of the ‘personal little secret’ being revealed. Husband cheating on wife, homosexuality revealed, etc. Most of these stories one can find in the newspapers have an amibiguous moral tone: on the one hand the platform is blamed for the breach of privacy, on the other hand, more subtly, the victims are stygmatized as they had indeed something to hide. Names are published and photos (often coming from the social network) are printed. The consequences can be serious, they include cases of suicide. But as painful as it is, we think this part of the problem is relatively easy to understand.

There are, in our opinion, other damaging effects of the social networks that can prove virulent on the longer term. One is the epistemic violence used against a core element constituting the social: friendship. Everyone knows a Facebook friend is not a friend as in “real life”, that a “friend” on the platform has a different meaning, it means two nodes connected in a graph. But the more it goes, this cognitive failure that doesn’t capture the complexity of social binding and intimacies gets internalized by the users. They don’t dare to exclude or refuse requests, they feel obligations, and more importantly they internalize the idea that friendship is an instrument to quantify another fraudulous concept: reputation. On a daily basis, they perform a successful cognitive failure as they know the terms are wrong but they nevertheless act according to their logic.

The other damaging effect is the increasing loss of collective organisational skills related to the digital infrastructure. Every time a group chooses a proprietary social network to get organized, it looses the occasion of finding ways to create its digital habitat or its communication platform, its working environment. When Indymedia users go to MySpace, independant video-makers to YouTube, writers and philosophers to Facebook, we all loose a beautiful opportunity to reinvent our relationship to music, film or literature, critical thinking and meditation.

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?
First about privacy.
Privacy in itself is a complex notion. For instance, to make one’s coming out is a very crucial step for a homosexual. It is to take the decision of moving an affirmation about one’s sexuality from the private to the public sphere. Taking care of privacy in this respect doesn’t mean to burry one’s sexual preference in the closet, but to give the freedom to keep it private or to take a public stand. Additionally the division between the private sphere and the public one is extremely political. A partner molested in a couple may need that we don’t consider the home private and intervene. Privacy depends on contexts and strategies. In the digital world, it is not privacy in itself the problem but why some humans put machines to work so hard on virtual relationships. Why such an urge to diminish the importance of privacy? Why now? Why do we have now, immediately, to leave it in the name of progress? A better world, etc.[7]. We agree that privacy must not be reified and is a dynamic concept. But the reason why we must accept immediately its devaluation is rather unclear. And is decided unilateraly by the tech-industry moguls. This is what triggers our curiousity and suspicion. Privacy is an obstacle in the deployment of the social graph. The epistemic holdup on sociality cannot happen if relationships can escape the graph. But don’t think the same industry is not interested in privacy. It is very aware that it can be monetized and sold back through the privacy business. As they want to impose their own version of networked sociality, they want to impose their own version of privacy. What we are suposed to do is to let go of privacy and buy it back through privacy enabling/preserving technologies or services.

Now on the machines.
A recently published study[8] on the people who monitor the images of surveillance cameras reveals that 15% of the time is spent in pure voyeurism, and a good part of the remaining time is spent to track people and movements on the base of racial and social bias. One could think a machine could be more neutral, but the machines are programmed by humans, so the problem is simply displaced. An interesting example has showed up recently[9]. Yasir Afifi, who lives in Silicon Valley, discovered a GPS tracking device on his car. Uncertain wether this was a tracking device or a bomb, he posts the pictures on the internet and, reassured it was a GPS device, he intends to sell it. Soon after, the doorbell rings with FBI agents asking to have the device back. When they interrogate him, they show him a printout of a blogpost made by a friend of him. The blogpost indeed speaks about bombs in a mall, but is a general comment about security and terrorism. Typically the FBI software that monitors popular sites on the internet must have a predilection for certain keywords (bombs, mall) and their presence is likely to trigger a chain of events. But what is interesting is that not only the person who wrote the post is under surveillance but also the ones attached to him through the social graph, his ‘friend’. And that this surveillance itself implies more data tracking (GPS data) correlated to places that themselves have their own classification (airport, mall, etc).

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Yes, absolutely. We developped through different workshops a game called Yoogle!.[10] Yoogle! is an online game allowing users to play with the parameters of the web 2.0 and to exchange roles between the different actors of its economy. It presents itself as a game of the Goose with a track of 63 consecutively numbered spaces. The players navigate through stories, traps, challenges and riddles about the web 2.0. They can choose to play the game as a simple user, a technical administrator, a company or a State. The game at the moment is only in French, it connects to the database of information collected in the project e-traces[11] It received a fair amount of press in Belgium and France, and we use it during workshops and meetings
to give a concrete example of the functioning of web 2.0 and the issues at stake. We are really curious and interested in the development of games tackling the problems embedded in social networks, but we have a request: please, don’t force us to subscribe to facebook to play it :-)

[1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[2] http://elgg.com/powered.php
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Network#MSN_Classic
[4] http://www.goodiff.org/
[5] http://etraces.constantvzw.org/informations/spip.php?article6
[6] http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/yahoo-spy.pdf
[7] http://fr.readwriteweb.com/2010/08/02/a-la-une/tim-oreilly-amliorer-monde-vaut-bien-peu-de-vie-prive/
[8] http://www.internetactu.net/2009/08/31/technologies-de-surveillance-ou-de-discrimination/
[9] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101013/14344011415/how-is-it-that-a-random-comment-on-reddit-leads-to-your-friend-getting-tracked-by-the-fbi.shtml
[10] http://www.yoogle.be
[11] http://etraces.constantvzw.org

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.

Florian Cramer‘s background is comparative literature and art history with a focus on experimental arts, media, poetics and aesthetics. From 2006 to 2010, he was responsible for the Networked Media Master programme of the Piet Zwart Institute. Since 2008, he works as an applied research professor (Dutch: “lector”) supervising the research programme Communication in a Digital Age of the Piet Zwart Institute.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
I see two major reasons: One, social networks have popularized classical Internet communication with accessible interfaces. So finally, everyone – including journalists – understands Internet as more than just an electronic distribution channel, and has also been cured from the “cyberspace”, “hypermedia” and “virtual reality” memes. But as a result, functionality and communication culture that has always been a core feature of the Internet is falsely being perceived as new, as a “social media revolution”.

The second reason is widespread job anxiety among the makers of the traditional news media, and those who indirectly live on the food chain of classical mass media production. Research suggests that younger people devote most of their media attention to social networks and “Web 2.0” services. At the same time, nobody except Google and, to a lesser degree, Facebook has figured out a revenue model for them. They help making traditional media marginal, but don’t create equivalent work opportunities for ‘creatives’ – designers, writers, etc. Contrary to the common belief that “social media” brought a shift from centralized one-to-many communication to a decentralized and self-organized model, just the opposite is true in regards to media ownership. A culture of countless local newspapers and TV stations, for example, is being replaced with a few global players in the Internet. The days where filmmakers could live from making MTV video clips, where critics could survive outside academia as newspaper and magazine writers and artists lived from jobs in the advertising industry are almost over. The strong news media coverage of social network mirrors the respective anxiety of the editors.

To explain this a little bit more: On one of our conferences, the German advertiser Marc Schwieger quoted Henry Ford saying that fifty percent of the money he spent for advertising was money flushed down the toilet. Social networks and other Google Ads help people like Ford reaching only the 50% which are the real target group of his company. Since all traditional news and broadcast media economically depend on advertising, the whole industry is shrinking to half its original size as an effect. This streamlining and economic efficiency gain might even justify the dotcom and new economy stock market craze of the late 1990s retroactively. One heavily invests into a new technology only when expecting breakthrough productivity gains, productivity in the economic sense of generated value divided by labor costs. If users create most of your content, if you need designers only once in a while for a template overhaul, and most of your staff consists of software developers and system administrators, this means a radical shift in media professions.

This conversely explains why Apple has become a news media darling, with Steve Job’s press conferences being broadcast as breaking news. Apple’s consumer devices and services successfully sell (and thus finance) traditional mass media industry content: music, movies, TV series, now also magazines. I wouldn’t be surprised if these two competing models, user-generated social media and mass media content sold over online services, will continue to coexist, and if social networks will partly have been a hype of the early 2010s. They will probably continue to be the media for younger people in school and college, but even those may move towards paid editorial media with age. It boils down, after all, to a question of having no income and a lot of time for Facebook versus having an income but no time. A Facebooker/Twitterer/blogger lifestyle is simply unsustainable for anyone with a life, a job, or both. If my scenario is right, then social media will continue to be socially powerful but economically marginal.

(2) In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
As said, mostly in interface design and accessibility. If you analyze a service such as Facebook, you can see that practically all its social communication functions already existed, and were commonly used, in the multiuser terminal operating systems of the 1970s and 1980s – Unix, Vax, VM/CMS and others: commands to see which other users were online at the same time, mail messages and chats (‘talk’ in Unix), user status messages (‘finger’), sharing files (via setting file permissions) etc. etc. This, however, required physical access to a university or company server and expert knowledge of terminal-based operating systems. So only a very small elite of people knew and used these technologies. Dial-up BBSes, which provided similar functions for anyone with a home computer and a telephone line, had a similar user experience. In the 1990s, the classical World Wide Web primarily provided an interface for reading pages, but was harder to use for publishing stuff yourself. Pages needed to be coded in HTML and uploaded using external services like FTP, group communication needed to resort to other services like E-Mail mailing lists, newsgroups and IRC chat.

With the availability of always-on broadband Internet, newer generation web browsers and more complex HTML features, it became possible to integrate all these functions into web sites and use the browser as a one-stop interface. This way, the web was effectively turned from an electronic library into a user-friendly operating system. The earliest manifestations were web forums, auction sites, blogs and Wikis. If there’s genius in Facebook, then in the absorption of all these media into one with a relatively clean and straightforward user interface.

The idea of the online community as a social medium, on the other hand, is anything but new. Classical examples include The Well in the late 1980s, AOL, Compuserve and Digitale Stad Amsterdam in the early 1990s. Facebook for sure has taken this idea to a new level – but in the end it simply is what AOL would have morphed into if it had been run by more competent managers and developers. Data-mining was not yet as advanced in the 1990s, and privacy issues were less debated, but structurally everything was already in place back then.

(3) Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
It is your responsibility because it is your own stupidity if you share information that you do not want everyone to know. In this respect, posting something in a “social medium” is no different from, for example, publishing something in a newspaper or in a book. “Social media” services can only be blamed for the illusions of intimacy and privacy they create, making people falsely believe that they are only talking to their friends. But the same problem exists with E-Mail since unencrypted E-Mail can be read by anyone with access to the network nodes in between the sender and the recipient, and by the provider of your web mail service if you use one.

(4) Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
I avoid services and software for which I need to click an EULA as much as possible. – Good news is that in most juridictions, these EULAs are legally void. Unfortunately, there has not been enough effort to actively bring them down in court.

(5) Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
No, because others are aggregating information about me that I can neither control nor revoke. I have not been amused in the past, for example, that pictures of me and my partner taken in a private social context ended up on Flickr and Facebook, marked up with my name, and posted by people who falsely think of themselves as critical media activists. I had a full-fledged social relations profile on Facebook before I ever became a member because people had been careless enough to upload their gmail or Hotmail address books to the site, feeding Facebook’s social graph algorithm. And these examples do not even include hidden corporate and governmental information gathering. It would be naive to assume that company and government databases don’t routinely leak, with information being traded to third parties. The interesting perversity of the so-called social networks is that intelligence gathering has turned from high-paid agency work into volunteer self-surveillance. It was rather naive by the Chaos Computer Club to call the German government “Stasi 2.0” given that Facebook’s database and social graph really is the user-generated, Web 2.0 version of an intelligence database.

(6) How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
A good example of an information collection that was at first harmless but soon gained entirely new significance were European public censuses in the 1920s and early 1930s which tracked people’s religious affiliations.

(7) How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
I only use online services for public information.

(8) What do you think the information gathered is used for?
First of all marketing, secondly governmental intelligence, thirdly for a black market of insurance companies, banks and corporate employers to assess the contract risks of an individual or a group, plus foreign intelligence services and employer’s competitors seeking clues for bribing or blackmailing individuals or finding out trade secrets; and finally, to criminals for finding profitable targets. For this, one doesn’t necessarily need data leaks, but can work very well with public data. Thanks to camera manufacturer tags and no also geo location tags in digital photographs, Flickr, for example, is an excellent resource for spotting homes of people who own expensive photography equipment.

(9) Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
If I describe it here, I would provide more online clues and links to the respective information.

(10) What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
The answer to question (6) hints to the historical worst case so far.

(11) 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?
Given how rudimentary and error-prone semantic pattern recognition algorithms and other artificial intelligence algorithms are, the above is rather good news.

(12) Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
The game could succeed in this goal if it works as a simulation of the whole within the constrained, user-visible realm of a social Internet service. It could demand from its players to create data mining schemes under the guise of friendly services that affect the other players. Whoever succeeds in extracting the most valuable information wins the game, just like in real life.

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.

Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007).

Social networks are often in the news. Why do you think this is the case?
“Who cares about the internet!” is a phrase I heard kids saying the other day. If only we were there… Internet, the forgotten medium. It is indeed true that I have gotten used to the fact that the internet is overhyped and constantly in news over the past 15 years. Social media is just the latest craze, following terms such as Web 2.0 and the intense reporting around ‘blogging’. We should not forget that part of the urge to report is the fact that these social networking sites are in direct competition with ‘old media’ such as TV and print in terms of the ‘attention economy’ and related advertisement budgets.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
It is fair to say that social networking sites as we know them since the early 2000s did not exist before. What is new is the social aspect (befriending etc.). The micro-blogging aspect of Twitter goes back to the very beginning of the Web and that’s not what makes it so different. The definition of ueberblogger Dave Winer still holds for Twitter and many of the Facebook comments: it is ‘the voice of a person’, a short text grouped around a link. Social media so far is a centralized pointing system (and in that indeed a competitor, timewise, of the Google search engine). So one way of looking at Web 2.0 is from the perspective of ‘social search’. We are looking for friends, music we like and latest news. But what is the status of the conversation? Are we lured into that to press more data out of us? Social relations and conversations have become commodities that can be traded–and most people probably don’t mind, just as they didn’t mind to give their opinion in polls. Did we mind if companies found out about the television programs we watched? It’s just the idea of having intimate ‘friends’ and talking to them, which belongs to our private sphere–and this is perhaps where companies like Facebook went one step to far in their attempt to commodify, milk and exploit the social.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Good question. Some call for national governments to regulate this business. Many countries do not have the same tough laws like, for instance, Germany. In most cases you just sign away all your rights when you start using these services. One could also see this as the flip side of the free and open economy. The deal right now is quite simple: we give you access to all these wonderful services free of charge, and in exchange we sell your private data.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
No, sorry. I know I should. But aren’t people like Peter Westenberg from Brussels doing that on our behalf? I hope so. Please, Peter, continue to do the good work on our behalf! I promise to read some thick unreadable German philosophy books in exchange.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
I don’t think so. One of the things I noticed over the past few years is that I am getting less and less on Google if you search for me. I like that. It probably just means that their methods to store documents is getting more refined. Most of the links would have been doubles. I like the idea that it has its ups and downs, like stock prices. What I need to get a better grip on is the amount of video with me in it. I wished I could somehow organize this better but it’s still costly and hard to organize for an individual who is not a film maker or video artist to take matters in your own hand. I don’t mind bad quality perse but as a radio maker I can get quite upset about recordings with a bad audio quality. I really hope we can pull of a video theory movement. I am collecting theory (documentary) films but most of them were made for the regular film festival circuit or television. Theory has yet to move into the online video realm.

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 all depends on the political situation. I suppose we can all find ourselves in nasty circumstances in which people start campaigning against you. There is plenty of evidence for that already in the Netherlands with ‘shockblog’ sites like http://www.geenstijl.nl/. The English Wikipedia has a reasonable entry what these websites are all about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geen_stijl. In this particular case I don’t mind Geen Stijl. It’s more that it could point at a possible trend.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
I am not concerned about it. I just find it boring. It is good to campaign against it, not only from a privacy point of view but because it threatens to close down the open internet. The harvesting of private information as a principle enforces a culture in which people are being locked up in their own narcissistic monade of sites and services they ‘like’. The recommendation systems, also the one of Amazon, narrow down one’s intellectual horizon. Why not suggest things I dislike, never heard of or where relevant in that context in 1963 or 1728? I am in favour of serendipity as a system design. But let’s not give too many ideas to these companies. Maybe we should continue this conversation offline?

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
This is widely known but maybe not written about that much. The market for that information is particularly big in the USA, where you can buy all sorts of information about private individuals. It would be good to update that image with detailed reports about Google and Facebook. More investigative journalism in this area would be welcome.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
Five or ten years ago spam was somehow more sophisticated. The tricks were not that well known. One (criminal) company called me and tried to get credit card details from me. One has to remain alert not to click on certain links in spam messages.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Berufsverbote. Jail sentences. Hate campaigns. Expropriation of communities because of manipulated information. Broken friendships and marriages, you name it. It is well known what you can do with targeted campaigning against individuals. In Europe we live in an innocent post-Cold War era.

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?
Only few of us will see anonymity as a possible answer for the corporate and state attacks on your privacy. Perhaps we should promote anonymity more, but we all know that it is not the perfect protection. We’d better talk about pseudonimity.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
As a ‘serious game’? Maybe. I am inspired by the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, developed in Rotterdam by Moddr Lab. It could be good to develop a similar website or installation that you can use in museums, clubs and festivals that ‘simulates’ a full scan of your privacy data that can be found on the net, or bought, which would presume a little delay. Give Me My Data is going in this direction but only looks at what you submitted to Facebook. It would be good to combine sources and see if you can create a comprehensive profile. I once used an MIT Media Lab student project that did just that but perhaps it is better to go beyond the visualization of search engine data.

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.

First in 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.

Rob Myers is an artist, writer and hacker based in Peterborough, England. He is part of the GNU Social team. GNU social is a decentralized social network that you can install on your own server. Project catchphrase:

What if you could authorize your server to reveal as much, or as little information about you to other sites, as you wish… one time, one day, or forever?.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Often it’s moral panics of the sort that accompany the spread of any new technology. But there’s a growing awareness in old media that social networking software sites are starting to gain the kind of hold on human communication that postal, telegraph, and telephone networks have had in the past. That kind of power is always abused. Old media used to and still does where it can.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
Scale. A community site like The WELL, which predates the web, has only a few thousand users. Facebook has 500 million.

Regularity. Email and homepages were free-form. Facebook imposes a standard style and content on every page.

Reification. Rather than enabling people to play with different identities or interests in different forums, a social networking sit eimposes a single fixed identity on each unique individual.

Completeness. A social network now supports profiles, messaging, calendars, photo and video uploading, and many other services that previously had their own websites.

Business model. Social networks have given up on pretending they are going to try and make money directly from their users, it’s all advertising and data services for third parties now.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks
At the moment nobody is responsible for it, they just have power over it. Your data is controlled by the corporation running the social networking site you use. They are in turn beholden to their investors and to anyone who will pay to access your data, from marketing companies to government agencies.

We can take back control of our data by taking responsibility, socially and economically, for services that have so far been offered to us at no monetary cost but at an increasingly unacceptable social cost. Projects like GNU social (which I’m involved with) give us the software resources to do that. Projects like autonomo.us give us conceptual frameworks to evaluate our efforts against.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
I don’t read EULAs. The EFF have a service that allows you to track changes to EULAs but I don’t follow that. I really should.

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

I try not to think about it. I spend most of the day online. I email, I use instant messaging services, I use microblogging services like StatusNet and Twitter, I blog, I use Facebook, I search on Google, I browse through web sites, I purchase goods and services, I vote on or rate things, I watch videos and listen to music, I download files varying from a few bytes to a few gigabytes in size. Over time the volume of explicit and implicit data about what I am doing must run into terabytes.

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 suppose there are personal emails I wouldn’t want too many people to read, but for the most part private information for me is things like passwords and PINs. If I don’t want it to be public, I don’t put it on the net. I don’t think that will change; it isn’t technically possible or ethically desireable to break other people’s computers so that they cannot just copy and paste something you’ve written to them.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
The promise of web services at no monetary cost to us really distorts social relationships. We aren’t Facebook’s customer, we are its product. The customers are whoever will pay for access to our data and attention. This always makes me think of Burroughs’ introduction to “Naked Lunch” where he talks about selling the customer to the product.

I’d rather pay with money and involvement than with privacy and power. That’s why I’m a member of The Well, and that’s why I’ve bought a GNU/Linux plug server to run my own GNU social instance on (there’s a picture of it here).

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Online social networks are a reified model of social relations. You could see this in the Google Buzz debacle: unlike a sociologist’s model of a social network it had no conception of negative social relationships and so made everyone people had ever had contact with a “Friend”, including people’s enemies. This fits well with neoliberalism/managerialism’s need for authentic individual identities to exploit. The data gathered about these individuals is highly prized for corporate marketing and for government spying.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
I carefully self-censor censor what I write online. That makes me uncomfortable. There are jokes I don’t make, issues I don’t speak about, words I don’t use.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
People will be persecuted and killed for their beliefs discovered through social networks. 4chan and China’s Human Flesh Search Engine are the precursor to this.

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?
People have told the machines what to do, which is generally to more effectively intrude on our privacy on their behalf. I don’t care whether it’s a bored employee or a computer cluster forwarding interesting keywords from my webmail to the intelligence services except in so far as the computer cluster can do so much more efficiently. The intrusion has the same potential for harm.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?

It can. The relationship between games, social networks, privacy and human behaviour is already quite complex. Foursquare uses game mechanisms to encourage people to give up their privacy, for example.

I’d like to see a game that shows the footprint of every little action you take online, how much data is generated, in a visual way and then allows you to capture it as power-ups. Or a game where you play a marketing or intelligence agent trying to get more and more private data on people, to illustrate what goes on behind the smiley face of micromessaging your “Friends”.

But online community used to involve play, especially identity play, and I think that restoring that element of play into the social networks themselves is one of the best ways of resisting their reifying, limiting, exploitative identity politics. On the internet, Facebook knows damn well you’re not a dog. It’s time to fix that.

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.