User:Ssstephen/Reading/A Prehistory of the Cloud
via subnet 10.0.0.103 on the xvm
Intimacies of the User: From the Stolen Look to Stolen Time
Stewart Brand's Dec 7, 1972 Rolling Stone article on Spacewar! Addeddate 2018-09-04 17:30:48
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California runs a demo of Spacewar every first and third Saturday.
Added to the list of nerdy tourist destinations.
personal computing would also mean some-thing that may seem odd to a contemporary reader: the illusion that a person would be “given the full attention and resources of the computer.”
Becoming a more common understanding, for networks rather than individual computers tghough I guess. Are computers in-dividual?
Hallucinating senses individually Are in any combination, rhythmically Shifting gears, focus upon intensity Wait, big people a talk nobody try fuck with i-man clarity Mind starts slippin' to familiar tracks Bending warping, interfering with the facts Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying We are hostile aliens, immune from dying
Spaceape, Burial and Spaceape.
Does the computer have my full attention? Which one? This tab. The tab with the PDF. My phone. My headphones. They are speaking to me. There are people saying things in the songs. What are they trying to say? What does it say in the PDF? I am reading and writing and listening.
More than a second When reading the newspaper I felt the war I felt her exposed position I saw myself in the picture And I I took a cab there to hold her I took a plane there to feel what she felt You make me like charity Instead of paying enough taxes
You Make Me Like Charity, The Knife.
I took a train there to hold her. What am I trying to give. What am I trying to take. What the fuck is going on.
By spending a fraction of a second on one user ’ s pro-gram, switching rapidly to other users ’ s programs, then immediately moving back to the first program, it appeared as if the computer were responding Figure 2.1 Spacewar! running on a PDP-1. (The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California runs a demo of Spacewar every first and third Saturday.) © Joi Ito, reprinted under Creative Commons BY 2.0 license. TIME-SHARING AND VIRTUALIZATION 39instantly to each user ’ s commands
What I paste is different to what I copy. I couldnt read the licence, it wasnt visible to me. I didnt read the title and page number because I told myself they weren't in the flow. Everything is in the flow. The caption for the figure, it wasn't where I expected it to be in the flow. The whole order of everything is getting looped and fed back. My notebook is open it says
I've fallen in love with you and I have no idea what to do about it.
What the fuck is going on. ꓤƎ it says under the laptop. I cant read the 𐤵ꓳꓶꓢ part but I know its there. I know because I have read it many times. and I also wrote it.
he user ’ s subject position is created not just by software, as media theorists would assert, but by the economic system that undergirds whatever relation any of us have with technology
Double spaces. A missing T. Genesis by Justice comes on which has a † which is almost a T. I am multi-threading. I have multiple cores. The school is closing, I can hear the announcement behind Genesis. This is the end for now.
It's two days later and it's sunny and the afternoon and I feel very different. I'm at home and not in the studio. Miles Davis' version of A Case of You by Joni Mitchell is playing. I know it from the James Blake version. Are songs in-dividual? Is music divided into songs, or artists, or something else?
Computer power is now so plentiful that we’ve stopped counting, and the minimal cost of computation seems to enable a sort of personal freedom.
Is this a shared experience? Having worked as a freelancer in for example video editing and 3D graphics, the limitations of the computers I have access to often come into play. They slow me down. They dont have enough space, so I have less security (backups) than a big company would have. Broadband speed is sold like new cars, there is pressure to upgrade. There is pressure to buy a bigger package from the hosting provider, more speed, more bandwidth. Buy more storage on your gmail account. Buy a netflix account to access data-culture. Buy a spotify account to have autonomy over the algorithm.
time-sharing seemed to restructure the very boundaries between work and leisure, public and private
Restructuring of these boundaries, is maybe more generally to do with our relationship to labour compared to in the past? Work tasks have been divided so are now more integrated into our lives, also consumption has become the model for more aspects of life allowing them to be commercialised.
how did computing come to feel personal?
What computers are involved in my experience right now? The music is playing from the speaker, connected by bluetooth to my phone, streaming data from Spotify which is most likely coming from a nearby Google datacentre (Eemshaven or Middenmeer here in the Netherlands, or maybe St. Ghislain, Belgium) via a bunch of intermediary KPN and other telecommunication connections. There is a laptop that I type this draft onto, but when I press "Save changes" it will go to the wiki also via a bunch of connections. The PDF is coming from I believe a Raspberry Pi in an apartment not too far away from where I am right now in Oude Nord, also through some intermediaries. But yes it still feels personal, the interface physically and psychologically, even emotionally.
, this shift was not simply the result of technological inno-vation; time-sharing was symptomatic of a postwar economic shift toward multitasking and freelancing
A vast and unseen layer inside today ’ s cloud, known as virtualization software, ensures that the data jumbled within the cloud ’ s data centers and networks appear as individual streams of data
This is in fact an act of dividing, as well as combining. It is boundary making and storytelling. It is potential gerrymandering, divide et impera.
the sewer system: centuries before computers were invented, sewers kept each household ’ s private business private even as it extended the armature of the state into individual homes.
Re Dave Harris on "T=he Practice of Everyday Life" De Certeau: subversive practices "interrupt the accepted framework and order, which 'leaks... meaning: it is a sieve order'".
the fact that the word “ computer ” had originally designated the female operator of a machine, rather than the machine itself.
In the Rotterdam Noord telephone exchange on Vlaggemanstraat, the women were replaced by machines in 1962. This street is also near me right now, and I suspect some of my data is passing through the wires in its' basement.
man and computer are two creatures living together in intimate association, or even close union.
from J. C. R. Licklider “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960).
If the quasi-illicit pleasure of cinema is peering in on a scene, as if through a keyhole, the computer user initially occupied a similar position.
History of cinema to computers, are there other links? Cinema is generally placed behind or before television, also a story about personalisation, individuation and the creation of intimacy.
“ two-timing ” aspect of time-sharing opened a variety of ways for users to furtively acquire time.
Time sharing as extraction, time stealing, time sharing as selfish and abusive.
By making the user equivalent to his or her usage, time-sharing yoked the user ’ s labor to the labor of the computer itself. In doing so, human – computer interaction initially functioned as a management technique, as a way to fash-ion an efficient worker capable of flexibly managing time. (It is no coinci-dence that multitasking, a concept that originally came out of time-sharing, now refers to this kind of flexible work.)
As a worker in 2023 I manage my time my self flexibly. I can relate to this.
time-sharing was often experienced as a permissive and even freeing system, for it asked users to think of the computer ’ s time as their own time
Is this a codependent, symbiotic relationship? What are the user's needs and what are the computer's? I need self-affirmation. Does this mean I have an individual self? Is "my" computer part of my identity? Is "my" virtualisation and "my" slice of the cloud's time sharing me? What parts of the government are me, or what parts of the city? Where do I stop and the computer starts, at the keys and the screen? Or is it blurrier?
By making each online resource freely available — computer storage, processing time, content, even software — the cloud encourages the pleasur-able and quasi-illicit feeling that we are getting away with something: that we, too, have stolen time.
Why do we want to know where our information is stored, how our data is used? Guilt maybe? Shame? Fear, curiousity?
Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building web sites, modifying soft-ware packages, reading and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces.
Are you essentially being exploited if someone else is profiting? If I go to a bar or a concert and part of the reason I go there is other people, does that mean the other people are being exploited? If we went to a house party instead and no one makes a (directly financial) profit, is it still exploitation? What if two of the people at the party work together at some point in their life? The causation here is not very obvious.
Asked to manage ourselves as users, we are also asked to manage our own privacy online by negotiating with private companies: by taking on liability for copyright infringement on reposted images, by managing whom our posts can be shared with, and even by opting in to restrictions on search results for children, in what Raiford Guins terms a culture of self-imposed filtering.
Is an alternative being posed here? If intimacy is not mediated socially through economy, what does it go through? Government control?
“The Victorians Built Magnificent Drains” : Waste, Privacy, and the Cloud
Scientist Alan Kay
Not how I would describe that person. At very least *computer* scientist.
I AM THE UNKNOWN GLITCH. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
Held over three days from July 26 – 28, 1966, the [“The Computer and Invasion of Privacy”] hearings featured law professors, sociologists, computer scientists, and New York state officials who had built a smaller version of this proposed data center.
The scientist noun after the computer adjective is really getting me today. In the context of professors, sociologists and state officials, the "scientists" are really given an air of empirical authority, they presumably have truth and logic on their side. Computers as we all know are made of logic. Computers don't make mistakes, they have errors in programs which are the result of bad human authors. Computer authors. Computer programmers. Computers. Computer linguists. Computer users. Computer slobs. Computer bowsies.
the telephone line and the plumbing system. These analogies offer a way to understand veiled cultural attitudes toward computing
Computer rats. Computer garbage. Computer callers. Computer listeners. Computer buggers. Computer bugs. Computer cockroaches.
Eavesdropping on party lines did not used to be considered an invasion of privacy, historian Ronald Kline tells us; indeed, eavesdropping was a widely accepted practice in rural communities that often formed that community ’ s “ social network. ”
Public/private limits of conversations on social media is so often unclear or different to other conversations. Conversations between two people in a public space, which is recorded and can be publicly or semi-publicly viewed at a later time.
It was for economic reasons — eavesdropping drained the batteries in their equipment — that telephone companies devel-oped public awareness campaigns to teach their users not to eavesdrop. These campaigns described the social strife that resulted from eavesdrop-ping and shamed the men who listened nevertheless by likening them to thieves — or gossiping women.
Oh no, not gossiping. Computer gossips. Computer bitches. Computer witches.
Surely, the State is the Sewer
$ ps
ideally, one would program without noticing the garbage that one produced or the resources one used.
Again does this metaphor sound particularly uncomfortable because of our current environmental sensibilities in 2023? Is using memory on a laptop the same as single-use plastics? Does the metaphor really work? A rough estimate of one laptop using 146 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year for 8hrs daily use, and an average onshore wind turbine with a capacity of 2.5–3 MW can produce more than 6 million kWh in a year means the rate is about 41,000 laptops per wind turbine. How much energy does all the rest of the network use? More than the bit at the end, or less? I leave my router on 24/7, maybe its about 7.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity in a month, and 87.6 kilowatt-hours in a year. which adds another 10% already to the energy cost (considering the modem is used for six devices) just by remembering one other node in the system. It is hard to approach this problem without starting at the user, that's the way I've been taught to think about it.
Role of ARPA/DARPA in vaccinations recently, did they also have a role in this story of computer viruses at the time maybe?
As is true of the plumbing beneath the city streets, it takes an effort of will to bring software to conscious attention
From Martin Campbell-Kelly, "From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog", vii.
Waste, after all, is the residuum of consumption and productivity, the inevitable by-product of the circulatory networks valued by capitalism.
if you are logged in as one user, the word “ nature ” might return results related to fishing and hunting, while a second user might receive results related to environmental justice.
My results for "nature" on Google Search:
https://www.nature.com/ (along with four specific pages on this site, a description of the Journal, and three recent articles).
Related questions: What is the concept of Nature? What does Nature include? What is the impact factor of Nature? Who is Davide Castelvecchi?
Images for nature (with some tags): beautiful, wallpaper, photography, landscape, flower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_(journal)
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nature
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/nature
Cloud Cartography
Both waste and vast-ness derive from the Latin vastus — desolate, but also empty, expansive.
Merely obtaining more knowledge about digital cul-ture ’ s materiality may not address the root problem.
Is it possible to see the root problem without this step though? It seems to clarify it a little at least, or frame it.
“The network intervenes in this calculation as a productive machine and as a pre-dictive/preemptive mode of simulation, ” 88 simultaneously helping to predict social connections (offering other users you might enjoy meeting) and also helping to produce and even police these connections.
It sounds like the network itself is being seen as an actor in this sentence? Is it maybe more the maps (or graphs) of the network that is active, and those maps and graphs have been created by other actors within, above or beside the network.
the cultural fantasy of “ mutually distrustful users, ” who are always isolated first as atomistic nodes before they can be recon-nected through social media or network graphs.
Rob Horning incisively comments: this is “ how Facebook addresses its users, a bunch of isolated nodes connected by its graces and its software, all competing for one another ’ s attention and approval, urged perpetually to up the stakes of their sharing by Facebook ’ s algorithms, which deter-mine whether their content will surface widely and reap the sought-after recognition. ”
Inside a data center, data are connected only paratactically to each other, porn next to military documents next to banking records next to your e-mail. In that model of physical proximity, we might see an alternate map of community.