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I finally pulled the plug on Twaddle, aka eX, deleting my account last month. Long overdue, and I would call on anyone else who is still propping up one of the least socially-conscious oligarchs on the planet to cease-and-desist. Meanwhile, I’ll cheer that misfit on to Mars. As for the rest of them, well, let them eat cake.
Back in the ‘aughts’ I routinely early-adopted social media platforms to maintain current experience for my teaching on what was then still called “new media”. A decade into the World-Wide-Web, 2003 or so, Web 2.0 had arrived, signaling the evolution of general ‘interactive’ web platforms that allowed for user-driven and collaborative experiences. Web 2.0 transformed the internet from a generally static platform into a space where users could dynamically create and share content, but its rise also brought about critical (social, behavioral, personal) concerns that I explored in many of my workshops and lectures. This era’s defining features—social media, user-generated content, and algorithms that tailor information, and now AI—have amplified both personal expression and misinformation, often blurring the lines between fact and opinion. While Web 2.0 promised a democratized digital space, it has led to powerful tech companies amassing vast troves of user data, raising privacy issues and consolidating control over information flow, features almost completely unregulated in the US. Surveillance Capitalism anyone? Algorithms designed to maximize engagement have also been criticized for promoting social echo chambers and polarizing content, contributing to social divides. It’s all about eyeballs in the ‘attention economy‘. Through their perversely inverted efforts to be user-centered, the oligarchs of Web fostered a landscape where manipulation, privacy concerns, and misinformation are increasingly prevalent: it’s user-centered alright, but the user is merely the object of extracted wealth.
Yup, here we are. I hadn’t been active on Twaddle for some years aside from attention paid to the CGS work account up until last year, and a very occasional glance at my feed. It was functional for a time, but the ‘new ownership’ indeed sent it to 100% shit, stimulating the departure. The entire arc of evolution completely confirmed my hypothesis how those who control a communications protocol control both the form(s) and content of the communications occurring. Not only that, but the protocol and its ‘owner’ actually tap off a certain amount of power—real social power—from those using the platform. The X possessor is a case in point, and a case that threatens the stability of the social system. I long ago departed from FazeBuch (2010) and mostly from InstaHam (still have an account but don’t post and rarely look at it).
What about BlueSky and Mastodon? They provide more direct user control without a central governing entity. Back to distributed models versus centralized models: a deep conflict that’s been raging since computing began!
Of course, in the end, there is no privacy left in the US social sphere. What you consume—from food to media, everything; where you go; who you communicate with; what you say; what you do; how much money you have; what medical issues you have; where you work; what you studied; your interests and beliefs; your voting history; your criminal and court records; ad infinitum …
Not only that, all those terabytes of data are subpoenable in a court of law: What’s your level of confidence in the justice system in the US these days?
On the related topic of concentration of wealth, that this infographic is more than ten years out of date makes it even more disturbing:
In the dreamy 1990s, when the Internet was first popularized, the ruling meme was beautifully and evocatively utopian with that enduring desire in the human imagination for a technology of communication that finally matched the human desire for connectivity and (universal) community finally finding its digital expression in networked communication. Few voices were raised concerning the specter of harsher realities to come, namely the possibility that the Internet was also a powerful vehicle for sophisticated new iterations of ideologies of control as well as for inscribing a new global class structure on the world. To the suggestion that the destiny of the digital future was likely to be the rapid development of a new ruling class, the virtual class, with its leading fragments, whether information specialists, from coders to robotic researchers, or corporate visionaries closely linked–nation by nation, continent by continent, industry by industry–by a common (technocratic) world-view and equally shared interests, the response was just as often that this is purely dystopian conjecture. As the years since the official launch in 9/11 of the counter-revolution in digital matters indicates, the original funding of the Internet by DARPA was truly premonitory, confirming in the contemporary effective militarization of the networked communication that the visionary idea of developing a global form of network connectivity that harvested the most intimate forms of individual consciousness on behalf of swelling data banks was as brilliant in its military foresightedness as it was chilling in its impact.
from the CTheory.net monograph Surveillance Never Sleeps, July 2015, Volume 37, #1.
Red Herring and Wired magazines might have been dreaming of a utopian desire-filling network, but I surely wasn’t. Yeah, there was a tiny window for using the Master’s tools to quasi-autonomously generate disembodied and low-bandwidth connections with other humans remotely, but some of us knew that DARPAs master was the master of the protocols that drove the ‘net. And the maxim that ‘whomever controls the protocols of human connection controls the very human energies that are carried via those protocols’ applied then, applies now. This very much independent of any privacy concerns, as privacy is simply not a characteristic of communications or data storage when someone else is controlling the communications protocol.
It’s been on tongues for awhile, and now it’s funneled over to main-lining media. Ello. Owen offers to send me an invite (it’s an exclusive club, and at this point, having reached a popular tipping point, they have had to shut down enrollments several times). It’s a very, very exclusive club: “we are creative technologists, we are agile engineers, we are experts”; One Hundred Thousand have loaded their privacy policy page. Have they read it?
We let you communicate in a modern way, none of the messy surveillance or privacy issues that have sullied those who came before. We, ensemble, we, Legion, are the future. How life is continuously squeezed into a sequence of highly controlled and rigid mediated social spaces that we are forced to enter, to behaviorally adapt to, to express ourselves within a sanctioned way, to build up social capital (no coincidence, that phrase!!) that accrues to the ‘owners’ of the protocols driving the space, and then, like lemmings, to trundle off to the next screen, following the herd.
Books, newspapers, magazines, radio, telephone, television, cameras, tape recorders, VCRs, arpanet, email, scrapbooks, telnet, IRC, UseNet, The Palace, Second Life, AOL, GeoCities, blogs, i-everything, MySpace, FB (sorry, can’t even manage to write the term!), uff.
Is this a critique of pure reason? Or just a tired Luddite rant…
The maxim of the Surveillance State is emitted by what is not, unfortunately, a Braindead Megaphone. The Megaphone has a brain that consists of the neural networks of all who pay attention to it, along with the processing power of the Information Society that those folks are tapped into. However, expansive State intelligence is tempered by complexity. A system that is self-monitoring creates a more-or-less dense feedback system. Any feedback sub-system affects the energy flows necessary to support the wider system it services. Within human social systems there seems to be certain degree of inherent paranoia (fear-of-death) that eventually provokes an evolution of these feedback systems, some of them more comprehensive than others (the Stasi and PRK come to mind as extreme examples, but then again, so do Google and Facebook).
Through their energy consumption extreme feedback systems overtake all but the most primitive functions of reproduction optimization (think: the weapon of rape as an expression of power and control and of the re-creation of ‘ones own’; or, state-sanctioned eugenics). The wholesale re-direction of State attention to surveillance signals the eventual end of a sustainable social system.
The maxim of the Surveillance State is an overt expression of the brutality (brutishness) of the norm, it hints at the precise locus of control (that is, within the Self … or not!).
Any expression falling outside this collectively sanctioned norm becomes an excuse, a rationale, a reason for the State to control the source of the expression.
And, by the way, the State is no single government — this is far too naive an image, one promulgated by those ignorantly focused on fearing a ‘takeover’ by the gub’ment — the State is the cumulative structure (path of flows) formed in the process of social evolution, the totality of wide-scale networks that act as binders of the social system as a whole — it is the full fabric of the social system that swaddles us and that we acquiesce to. It includes all the tools that are available to any, to all, for some to use.
Pervasive Monitoring (PM) is widespread (and often covert) surveillance through intrusive gathering of protocol artifacts, including application content, or protocol metadata such as headers. Active or passive wiretaps and traffic analysis, (e.g., correlation, timing or measuring packet sizes), or subverting the cryptographic keys used to secure protocols can also be used as part of pervasive monitoring. PM is distinguished by being indiscriminate and very large scale, rather than by introducing new types of technical compromise.
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Request for Comments: 7258, ISSN: 2070-1721
I find the Open Letter that was publicized by [AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo] to be supremely ironic, calling for specific limits on the governments ability to collect, hold and use data on individuals. While they insure their own access is unfettered and as secretive as possible. The US has quite weak protections in place for personal data: legislation is ‘controlled’ as per everything else in Washington by the collusion of ‘power-full interests’.
For one strong alternative voice in this instance, check out Eben Moglen’s series of lectures “Snowden and The Future.”
Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power. The technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise is at the heart of this apparatus. The symbolism of the Frozen Words*, of the Tables of the Law, of recorded noise and eavesdropping — these are the dreams of political scientists and the fantasies of men in power: to listen, to memorize — this is the ability to interpret and control history, to manipulate the culture of a people, to channel its violence and hopes. Who among us is free of the feeling that this process, taken to an extreme, is turning the modern State into a gigantic, monopolizing noise emitter, and at the same time, a generalized eavesdropping device. Eavesdropping on what? In order to silence whom?
Attali, J., 1985. Noise: the political economy of music, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
* “As the cold of certain cities is so intense that it freezes the very words we utter, which remain congealed till the heat of summer thaws them, so the mind of youth is so thoughtless that the wisdom of Plato lies there frozen, as it were, till it is thawed by the ripened judgment of mature age.”Antiphanes in Plutarch’s “Morals.”
EJ happens on this disturbing instance in front of his house: disturbing to me at least as I research the costs of ever-expanding surveillance (as a form of feedback) within the social system that we in the US happen to be participating in these days. Look for yourself: the 19th block of Mapleton Ave. in Boulder. I plan to complain to Google about this — in Europe at least my car and body would be fuzzed-out like my license plate — but they likely will only fuzz me out, not more. The images are from August 2012 when I was house-sitting for those folks… In StreetView you can see that I am wearing Nike socks, and you can even see inside the cab of my truck.
Drop in on Diane’s MiT class this morning in the large ATLS100 lecture room — she’s covering privacy issues. Huge class — I think she’s got more than 100 students enrolled. Quite different than my section of 38.
Surveillance, privacy, monitoring, searching, tracing, 1984, algorithmic filtering and screening of dataspace (face recognition, etc), Mugshots; the students had an assignment to do a name-search on a partner to find out as much as possible. Sitting near the back of the room, a majority of students are paying almost no attention to Diane — instead doing the usual retinue of screen-based tasks — other homework, Facebooking, shopping, and so on. This is disappointing in that it highLights the contemporary situation where even a highly-rated (entertaining!) university teacher is not really engaging the students. In a class of one hundred, filled with mediating screens, what should one expect. Human engagement between teacher and student has been lost in the shuffle of money/power that has become US academia.
Presence is projected out from the Self in a variety of ways — mediated and unmediated, well, always mediated by something: body heat by air (as thermal energy arising from energized interactions, catalyses, and transformations within the body). Presence is more and more being pushed (expressed) into what may be called technological networks. Distributed into more and more finely atomized (digitized!) fragments, and more and more widely distributed in both space and time. Coded, derived, lost in the data-space. When presence is so diffused into that space, we lose what we have here, now. Gone. No chance for an energized encounter when Selves are all pointed away from each other and thoroughly atomized…
wwwwww ORD s
(co-ORD-i-nat-es)……
they must
splash and sparkle,
and disappear,
like fishes.
* **** **
Torah, Christ, Allah—-
with them,
the loss of all life-profusion
which originates,
lives and embodies,
before The Word (logos)
appears.
*** * * *
The paleolithic caves (Lascaux….Chauvet…. in France)—–
with drawings of Animals,
with bones, bear skulls, footprints of bears and wolves,
claw marks on the walls—–
were not domestic spaces.
These people—-
drawings, bones, hand-prints (without words).
No doubt—- they spoke: they were related.
* *** * * *
And yesterday, the 11th—-
I happened to encounter two men—one from Calagary, one from Jamaica—
and to elaborate two impromptu (serendipitous) conversations—-one in
the Street, one later in the Park……
These “conversations” simply “opened” of their own accord—-flow of air,
shift of water, thread of suns…..
R e l a t i o n s h i p
“Economy” has established a police system
where [all life] falls under the Surveillance of Currency.
“Economy” defines [relationship] as a conjugal pairing of human actors.
A living body sustains relationships—– with water, with air, with an
intricate
tissue of forms.
The Oglala Sioux speak of bison, hawks, insects, wolves as their .
Emotion and thinking become vivid in the speaking.
*
* suggests a life of unusual, surprising relationships, with
intervals of stability
(not the “Everything is permitted” of Ivan Karamazov).
“The present age” seems preoccupied with saying “all” that can be “said”.
And on.
I often remember what Kris Kelvin’s father says <>.
Fuchs, Christian. 2009. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance
Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and
MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic
Surveillance. Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group UTI. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.
The study recommends that citizens see commercial Internet platforms that store and evaluate personal data generally critically and that by establishing special consumer protection websites it could be documented in the public, which rights in dealing with personal data such platforms obtain by their terms of use and their privacy terms. Christian Fuchs: “There are many examples for how affected citizens try surveilling the surveillors with the help of websites. This can pose a certain degree of protection by making use of public information, but also has limits because the basic problem is that we live in times, in which on the one hand there are strong commercial interests in data collection and data evaluation and on the other hand after 9/11 continuously more political steps have been taken for creating surveillance societies. These are political-economic problems, not technological ones.”
tuning in to Lev Manovich‘s lecture/discussion at V2. last time I saw Lev was at my flat in Helsinki in 2000, I made dinner for him, Tapio, and Susanna. His topic is “scale effects.” Stephen Kovats, a curator at V2, sent an email invitation to myself and a handful of other folks who frequently participate in such live/online events. it is a non-standard way to participate, for sure, watching and hearing the event via an audio/video stream, and reacting to that via an IRC channel that is projected into the lecture space. there is much more that one could do to push this format for live interaction, but it usually ends up being rather mundane and polite.
sotto voce: after self data-mining. computers scaling social forms. (dialectic between increasing quantity, size, creates new effects. examples Wikipedia. scaling in visual culture. one million hours of programming online. (BBC?) company in San Diego makes 6 giga-pixel images. (factors — image size, data volume, podcasting, moblogs) Bruce Sterling, the future. ubiquitous computing. media ecology. listing newest, hippest pop technologies. What about the societies in which this technological consumerism takes place in? medical imaging – PET, MRI, CT. graphical browsers took off. 30-40 years of media history. What about the impact of scaling up of existing media? What is tradition of quantitative effect scaling. very much based on a Cartesian system. Mcluhan’s suggestion that increasing of speed changes the social system. With scale being a parameter for comparison of media implementations. Speed: processing speed relating to visual presentation. algorithm already developed in Durer’s time. so, scaling causes the development of a “whole new media”… new visualizations important to contemporary science. resolution yardstick. but the available visual cortex (field of vision) can cover a small fragment of the image at any one time. redefining new media. normal media flattens the world, then surveillance. 4k digital Cinema. adam says it’s all smoke and mirrors. I think it seems to be using conventional metrics — based in Cartesian worldviews? temporal, spatial, compression. the collective. “as much data as we want.”
the parallel irc discussion (see below) leaves much space for wondering at Lev’s success. there seems a close linkage between text production and influence, something I have mentioned many times in other places. he made careful note that he is working on two new books and is proceeding at a rate of 2500 words a day. seems linear, quantitative, and retro. hmmmm. but it works within the attention economy.
bouncing between pool ends, Brian decides to share a lane with me ’cause all the old folks have filled the other lanes, we laugh about it. he’s a tour bus driver, for high-end groups like the Stones, Winton Marsalis, folks like that, use to live in Denver, around the time I was doing the Feyline shows for the Denver Post and the college paper, way back. good to share the lane with a fast swimmer. I have to crank a bit to keep up the pace, but definitely am getting stronger since I’ve been doing around 200 fly at the end of the 2500-yard workout. go into the Safeway to pick up drugs from the Pharmacy for Mom. can’t stand these stores, like the new WalMart that has a minimum of 100 vid-surveillance cams, those big black hemispheres hanging from the corrugated ceiling, and the squat armored boxes, multiples, on poles all along the front of the building. makes me wanna take ’em out. or at least pull out my little digital cam and start taking pix. just to see what happens. and they smell. of commerce. the javelina head dangles on the barbed-wire fence-post, half-eaten. it’s season, but it looks like a mountain lion kill.
8th Annual Teaching with Technology Conference — Final Program:
Convergent Practice: Networking and Creativity. John Hopkins, CU-Boulder — Room 1B90
The focus of this presentation is on the convergence of digital/network technology and the arts, and the opportunities for collaborating with a global network of artists. This presentation includes an overview of several specific digital arts projects in Europe and the United States and commentary about the practice behind teaching and creative artwork. (https://neoscenes.net)
…
TWT Talk notes:
“teaching is an action, a practice that embodies art as a way-of-doing: a life praxis. in a matrix of social structures it formalizes the path of movement of energies between two people, the teacher and the student. at the same moment of this formalization, equal energies must reverse the implied hierarchy of this polarization and exchange the roles of the participants: the forces applied by the social matrix re-configured or simply discarded. the two collect the sum total of their knowing, rooted in their sensual awarenesses, and bring it to the forefront of relation. the harmonic flow, the oscillation, thus initiated must hold as its frequency the organic synchronicity of the two individuals and the existence of formal structure must dissipate into a Presence of genuine dialogue.”
background
did undergrad work in geophysical engineering at CSM, worked as an international explorationist for a major, quit to collect an MFA from CU in Photo and Electonic Media, then left the US in 1989 to live and work in a variety of places from Iceland to most countries around the Baltic Rim in Northern Europe running seminars at 15-20 universities each year under the title networking and creativity. here at CU as a sabbatical replacement, but about to return to Europe. more “Convergent Practice: Networking and Creativity”
[ED: This is the third report on selected actions and flows in the neoscenes occupation (nso)[1] network, published in acoustic.space #4 (2003 ISSN 1407-2858). Since the last report, learning and networks [2] in the acoustic.space #3 (2000 ISSN 1407-2858), nso has spun off two major networking projects and is constantly involved in a heavy creation-filtering-redirection of network energies on a sustained multi-channel and daily basis. This article will briefly look at these two projects, “expand” [3] and “<di>fusion” [4], and it will comment on the matrix of practice that the projects grew from.]
One of the biggest obstacles to finishing this article is trying to carve out a piece of time away from network and face-to-face communication just to write it! This fundamental dilemma lies at the core of neoscenes — why take time away from attentive one-to-one distributed action for anything related to re-production, re-creation, or re-presentation? For a network to remain healthy and thriving, it demands a flow of energies from node to node. There’s no time to spare. neoscenes prefers person-to-person as the core tactical expression of networking — neoscenes avoids centrally organized media and PR-related activities whenever possible. acoustic.space is a fine exception because of close linkage between paper artifact and the lively network-of-praxis that generates it.
So it goes.
By nature, networks are human-scaled and exist in human-scaled time. They develop at the speed of life. neoscenes was never a fast solution caught in the cross-fire hype of media-convergence-mania: and it definitely didn’t burst in the dot.com vacuum. neoscenes is dot.net [5]. The slow evolution of the neoscenes network is a vehicle for learning, creating, and sharing that does not seek stasis, spectacle, or speed. more “1 + 1 = 3”
Shell Point retirement community. a TOTALLY different reality from that of the rest of the world. and watching Daniel Boone as an Admiral in the English fleet fighting the French. Europe in action. in the middle of this place. a boat tour around the mangrove swamps surrounding the place reveals a small nugget of information about the Indians who believed that there were three spirits in the world: the spirit in the sun, in the eye, and in the reflection in water. while mansions and yachts abound. the reflection in the ego mirror instead.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
not to mention a full-on remix that I made at some point:
Our age is simulation. It builds on the protocols of the fathers. It modifies codes, programs, and interfaces. Generations before beheld the Other face to face; we, through their surveillance monitors. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the network? Why should we not have a stream and dialogue of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the remix of theirs? As we are carried for a time in this sensual presence, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the energy they supply, to action, why should we search among the overwritten drives of the past or put the living generation into a simulation of its simulations? The sun shines to day also. There are new nodes, new humans, new thoughts. Let us demand our own networks and paths and protocols.
(ED: Review of the net-to-art exhibition written for (the now defunct) Norwegian web-culture site http://kunst.no/ at the millennial change)
What our age needs is communicative intellect. For intellect to be communicative, it must be active, practical, engaged. In a culture of the simulacrum, the site of communicative engagement is electronic media. In the mediatrix, praxis precedes theory, which always arrives too late. The communicative intellect forgets the theory of communicative praxis in order to create a practice of communication. — Taylor and Saarinen, from “Imagologies: Media Philosophy”
Imagine.
Enter a plain white room with an Other. Take a facing seat one meter apart in not-too-comfortable chairs and follow these instructions: “You have three hours, create a dialogue with each Other.” There is no piped-in music, no magazines on coffee tables, no televisions, no mobile phones, no windows. No implements, tools, ethernet connections, or whining hard-drives. And, as this is not an experiment, there is no one watching from behind mirrored glass or by video surveillance.
Start the dialogue.
Imagine, what are the possibilities?
Now, increase the separation to ten meters between you and the Other. Repeat the instructions. What now? Add the mediation of a heavy glass window between; add a microphone and speakers on each side. What happens? Abstractly paint over the glass with opaque pigments. Take away the microphones and speakers, each of you has a pencil and paper to write messages which will then be carried by robotic assistants from one half of the room to the other via a long hallway.
Imagine designing the rooms.
Add the fact that neither of you speaks a common mother tongue, but instead, you must use a third or even fourth language, sometimes relying on a book to supply the proper words.
Imagine building the rooms.
Split the room in half, place the two halves at least 1000 kilometers apart, replace the hallway with a slender wire of glass, you are given the means to throw words, encoded with several layers of machine translation, through the glass wire. Provide keyboards for each to touch, exchange the glass window with a monitor that displays the color, form, sign and symbol of your decoded dialogue.
Imagine several hundred million rooms, a person in each. more “net2art”
What is unique about the system 49er is an autonomous knowledge discoverer. It automatically tunes itself to the forms of knowledge that are appropriate for a given dataset: equations, contingency tables, taxonomies, decision trees, and the like. 49er explores huge hypotheses spaces, evaluating the strength (to ensure predictive power) and significance of results (to prevent overfit). — Arun Sanjeev and Jan Zytkow
what can I say, as I data-mine the Web for something about neural networks and such-like stuff. swimming amongst specified isomorphic language sets that drift almost untethered in the sea of knowledge that Newton spoke about. I know I will resist attaching to them. rather break their hermetic borders, spill their guts, blow air into their still lively bladder-skins, stir in some activated amino- or lysergic-acids, and boil the whole pot. hot soup for the soul. spend several hours shopping. or at checking things out. still hard to spend money. but for Christmas for a few people, well, not such a problem. it is just such a tedious process. absolutely not stimulating. and all the while, in the back of my head, the question lies, what will happen in the next 27 days? and the consume-madness that each microscopic movement of capital contributes to. whatever. shopping. and it is all taking place in a near-silent, or somehow muffled environment. no blaring Christmas music, bells ringing or other noises. just the susserations of video surveillance servos, shop-lifting detectors, and card-swipers.
