User:Aitantv/Hito Steyerl (2014) Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise
Relational Photography
- "So what are the policies already in place that define the separation of noise from information, or that even define noise and information as such in the first place? Who or what decides what the camera will “see”? How is it being done? By whom or what? And why is this even important?"
The Penis Problem
- "It is no coincidence that Facebook is called Facebook and not Buttbook, because you can’t have any butts on Facebook."
Proxy Armies
- "Bot armies are celebrity militias, wildly jump-cutting between glamour, sectarianism, porn, corruption, and conservative religious ideologies."
Blockchain
- "Blockchain governance seems to fulfill hopes for a new social contract. “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” would record and store transactions in blockchains akin to the one used to run and validate bitcoin. But those public digital ledgers could equally encode votes or laws. Take for instance bitcongress, which is in the process of developing a decentralized voting and legislation system. While this could be a model to restore accountability and circumvent power monopolies, it above all means that social rules hardwired with technology emerge as Leviathan 2.0:"
- "Even though this is a decentralized process which no single entity at the top controls, it doesn’t necessarily mean no one controls it. Just like smartphone photography, it needs to be told how to work: by a multitude of conflicting interests."
Proxy Politics
- "A proxy is “an agent or substitute authorized to act for another person or a document which authorizes the agent so to act.” But a proxy could now also be a device with a bad hair day. A less than authorized agent. A scrap of script caught up in a dress code double bind. A “Persuading the debtor” detector throwing a tantrum over genital pixel probability. A drone gone rogue. Or a delegation of chat bots casually pasting pro-Putin hair lotion ads to your Instagram. It could also be something much more serious, wrecking your life in a similar way—sry life!"
- "Proxies are devices or scripts tasked with getting rid of noise as well as the bot armies hell-bent on producing it. They are masks, persons, avatars, routers, nodes, templates, or generic placeholders. "
- "A simple default example of proxy politics is the use of proxy servers to try to bypass local web censorship or communications restrictions. Whenever people use VPNs and other internet proxies to escape online restrictions or conceal their IP address, proxy politics are given a different twist. In countries like Iran and China, VPNs are very much in use. In practice though, in many countries, companies close to censor-happy governments also run the VPNs in a exemplary display of efficient inconsistency."
- "In proxy politics the question is literally how to act or represent by using stand-ins (or being used by them)—and also how to use intermediaries to detourn the signals or noise of others."