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 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.

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.

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.