TRIMESTER UNO
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BIG PROJECTS:
> Just Say Yes: • terms and conditions route - met benefits en risks. -> gang met verschillende deuren, hoe verder je gaat hoe meer benefits en meer risicos PULSE OF THE MACHINE/CONTROLLED SOCIETY • ——— begin met terms bij bus halte en dan filmen
> Wifi House: • Ardiuno wifi analyser / NODIG: ARDUINO WORKSHOP • SVG/CANVAS map van huis interactieve wifi signalen plus geluid map afmaken / NODIG: NA NULL LESSEN • INSIDE OF WIFI?? • wifi bij papa - altijd slecht
> Invisibily Visible: • cameras everywhere, much footage of everything plus sound - in interface collage, automatically updates - choose from random - visibile for a split second when wanting to see it larger / me but when looking longer change into yourself / empty footage big screen, me in footage small screen / random short sound clips when clicking on something / when moving over video the video becomes black or distorted • dag lang elke minuut nieuwe clips/geluid van de dag / update every hour, automatically — machine, pulse of the machine
/ NODIG: EXTRA PYTHON/TERMINAL LESSEN?
• insight an sound recording via terminal
• updates automatically via terminal • random choosing terminal
• distortion video ffmpeg - voorbeeld • recognition empty video versus motion video - voorbeeld • cropping recognition empty video versus motion video
• iphone recording
———————
future - live in big archive
agreements and system faults
dataleaks
privacy messages (fb) scanning
‘tappen’ en bewaren
zaak tegen fb bijvoorbeeld
tor netwerk?????
- birgit (phone calls / stored on a server)
- octopus mail delivery stem (transmidelliale - tweo years ago)
bij facebook en google naar binnen hele weg naar facebook echt volgen en maken dns systems raspbery pi - mini debian - command and control center • cameras in a place, and videos in another with - supposedly - that footage -
——— • unitary self • dimi-o • Superpanopticon • patterntracer • rhizomes • NetMonster • simulation • interface
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Roads are a fundamental necessary and social good
Enchantment
post-enlightment world has been characterized by a process of disenchantment
enchantment is thus less a form of knowledge or belief and more a ‘mood’, which involves ‘a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage’
roads retain a generic social promise, even in the face of specific circumstances in which they are acknowledged as having failed to deliver
roads are not just material forms
roads are promises towards a future which is uncertain and unclear
the promise of speed and connectivity
the promise of political freedom
the promise of economic prosperity
livelihoods and life itself are jeopardized by the tyranny of delay
economic prosperity is articulated as both a collective and a personal quest
material instantiations of dominant narratives regarding the ideal shape of an uncertain future
infrastructures are better thought of as a ‘disturbance in a casual mileu, the material entity which motivates interferences, responses or interpertations’
discursive interpretation and representation of social life
attention to enchantment as a way of moving beyond a position of professional cynism towards the forces that appear to construct the worlds within which we live, in order to recover other ways of sensing how the features of modern life become the subject and object of meaningful relations
through the experiences of life within and alongside unstable forces that infrastructures gain their capacity to enchant
[ for each of these aspects of ‘enchantment’, we turn our attention to the relational engagements that are consistently excluded in dominant narratives regarding the promises that infrastructures put in place. These include ethnographic moments when infrastructures seem to threaten to collapse, fall apart or be at risk manifesting fragility and material uncertainty. ]
contemporary forms of governance are premised on a pre-occupation with speed
both ensuring mobility of its populations, and managing
the dream of circulation
state depends simultaneously on their capacity for speed
the benefits that roads would bring to populations
mechanisms of control
standing reserve to describe the way in which nature is made to appear as a resource for human exploitation
described as a technological revealing, the relationship between a technologically framed way of being-in-the-world and the presentation of that world to the human imagination is explored
achievement against the odds
the environment was characterized by a stubbornly refusing to obey rules or orders that needed flexibility and guile to overcome
land and water – active substances
to recognize the instability of people and land is to acknowledge the achievement of containment whereby those aspects that constantly threaten a return to halts, delays and interruptions have (momentarily) been subdued
where are the regional, national and local authorities or the bosses of the patriotic front
abandoned plant as a localization and instantiation of that which cannot be known and controlled
hope that there is the possibility of change and that the encounter with processes of material disintegration produce a mood of unease and disquiet about the capacity of the state to perform its role.
At the same time, it is in this challenge and this anxiety that we find conversations and the interventions that re-make the state anew, an enchantment that re-imbues it with the power to change lives for the better
Wether the means through which people are making a living out of new connections that the road makes available are legal or not, the ruins of past economic boom times is a constant reminder of the fragility and reversibility of the promises upon which infrastructural projects are based
Infrastructures can dazzle with the possibilities they hold – the glitter of progress, the lure of profit, the promise of circulation, movement and a better life as rational and scientific plans – interlocking diagrams of modernity
Generate illusory effects supported by numbers, figures and pictures
Do not do the work of enchantment that infrastructures often seem to produce
Processes of transnationalism which supposedly promote mobility and flexibility also engender the opposite: immobility, entrapment, confinement, incarceration
Its is through an articulation with the lived, material encounters of stasis, rupture and blockage that infrastructural promises become reinvigorated and recast
Strengthens the desire for them and constantly renews the sense that sometimes soon they will appear and life will change for the better
Lists of numbers and technical specifications, or as hidden mechanisms subtending those processes more familiar to social scientists
Digging to unearth
Effect of standardization or formal classification on group information, the design of networks and their import for various communities, or on the fierce policy debates about domain names, exchange protocols, or languages
Inaccessible electronic code
embedded strangeness
the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place
identity tourism
plugs, settings, sizes
miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power
study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change.
Perhaps if we stopped thinking of computers as information highways and began to think of them more modestly as symbolic sewers, this realm would open up a bit.
System of substrates
Ready-to-hand
One person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty
Incomplete platforms, recalcitrant local computing centers, and bottlenecked resources
Part of human organization
Infrastructural inversion – foregrounding the truly backstage elements of work practice
Technological developments move from either independent or dependant variables, to processes and relations braided in with thought and work
Embeddedness
People do not necessarily distinguish the several coordinated aspects of infrastructure
Transparency
Does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task
[ the step of using ftp made the system less then transparent for the biologists, and thus much less usable ]
reach or scope
Infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice
learned as part of a membership
strangers and outsiders encounter infrastructure as a target object to be learned
[ it was easy to overlook other things that we had already naturalized, such as information retrieval practices over networked systems]
links with conventions of practice
[ the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by and affect electrical power rates and needs ]
embodiment of standards
infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures ad tools in a standardizes fashion
other standards escaped us at first
build on an installed base
it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strength and limitations from that base
becomes visible upon breakdown
respondents would say prior to the visit that they were using the system with no problems – during the site visit, they were unable to even tell us where the system was on their local machines.
This breakdown became the basis for a much more detailed understanding of the relational nature of infrastructure
Is fixed in modular increments
It is never changed from above
Changes take time and negotiation
adjustment with other aspects of the systems are involved
Nobody is really in charge of infrastructure
There simple was no magic wand to be waved over the development effort
transform in a surprising or magical manner
an idea that people make meanings based on their circumstances
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
structures of control
computer protocols
regulation of attention
the stimulation of desire
the stimulation of consumption
all senses
temperature/speed/florescence
associations with the senses
modernity
mutable
progressive
language to be learned
level of surface
skin/nose/eye/ear - surfaces
taken for granted
only become visible when on breakdown
visibility is necessary to continually renew its political effect
All visibility is situated
Form is loosened from technical function
Mediating exchange over distance
Binding people and things into complex heterogeneous systems
little relation to reality
Excessive fantastic object that generates desire and awe
Encode the dreams of individuals and societies
Vehicles whereby fantasies are transmitted and made emotionally real
Fantasies that stand as filters through which the object is seen
shaping modern society and realizing the future
Mechanisms to control time
Instigating waves of societal progress
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god
promoting circulation
bring about change
enact progress
gain freedom
one technological system comes to dominate over others
when independent systems converge into a network
a technical system originates in one place
move to other places with differing conditions, technological standards, and legal regulations
elaborating techniques of adaption and translation
Practices of routinazation and extension
Requiring an Account of translation (which can be technical, managerial and financial)
matter that enable the movement of other matter
They are things and also the relation between things
Present to the senses Displaced in the focus of the matter
System of substrates
Clear, linear relationship between underlying system and the phenomenal world to which it gives rise
division or contrast between Mind-body
The educational and cultural competence needed to understand its functioning and to operate it
Contort/deform
early technical choices get reinforced as subsequent system elements are built around or on top of them
A wide variety of actors were in a constant tug-of-war or negotiation for the future of the system
Modular
Gradual
Maintenance
dependence on human practices
standardization
(growth in) momentum
(growth in) Interia/trajectory
Leaderless
decentralized
seamless interconnection
translation from one system (or network) to another
Digital natives
Intuitive
user friendly
relative
context specific
historically-informed
Dynamics
Tensions
primitive or template for its template for its parents
social choices
transfer across space
transfer across context
growth in scale
Invention
It’s infrastructures all the way down
beyond the control of mere human programmers and analysts
computing werewolves
relation
the subordinate parts (of an undertaking/foundation)
service regarded as essential
system without which contemporary societies cannot function
participate in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of what it means to be modern
elements internal to the object itself, formed as part of a system
originating from outside obtain from a source externally
intractability
circulation
different networks
inceptive
serving to indicate or point out
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The politics and poetics of infrastructure
Society is build on structures of control mediated through the computer
In this society, production has been outsourced, value is produced virtually, infrastructures lie in computer protocols, and the forms of capture engineered into social media platforms, such as facebook and google. In this economy the regulation of attention is central to the production of value.
Beller argued that the rise of cinema represented a transformation in value production away from an industrial economy and toward the stimulation of desire and, trhough that shift, consumption
A new ethnographic and theoretical frame has yet to be devised in anthropology.
Infrastructure stand for an era
It is form of cognition, achieved through taste. Touch, hearing, seeing, smell. Aesthetics in this sense an embodied experience governed by the ways infrastructures produce the ambient conditions of everyday life: our senses of temperature, speed, florescence, and the ideas we have associated with these conditions. Infrastructures create a sensing of modernity. A process by which the body, as much as the mind, apprehends what it is to be modern, mutable and progressive.
Infrastructure is not just a technical object but a language to be learned.
Infrastructures operate at the level of surface, what buck-morss refers to as the terminae of the ouside of the body – skin, nose, eye, ear – rather than the mind inside.
Infrastructurs are by definition invisible, taken for granted, and that they only become visible when on breakdown
Invisibility is certainly one aspect of infrastructure, but it is only one and the extreme edfe if a range of visibilities that move from unseen to grand spectacles and verything in between.
Sneath argues that electricity was such a central symbol of state modernity in Mongolia that it was reffered to as lenins light
For this system of patronage to work or for lenins staging of infrastrucrual modernity to be successful, visibility was necessary to continually renew its political effect.
All visibility is situated and what is background for one person is a daily object of concern for another. The point is not to assert one or another status as an inherent condition of infrastructures but to examine how (in)visibility is mobilized and why.
Hypervisibility - opzoeken
Form is loosened from technical function
Budgets become ;arbirtrary symbolic arcs;
Pipes, in this sense, turn out not to be about pipes but about their production as a representational from that allows reports to be written, budgets to be satisfied and sponsors to be mollified.
By mediating exchange over distance and binding people and things into complex heterogeneous systems and by operating as entexualized forms that have relative autonomy from their technical function.
The realization that these bear little relation to reality
Awarding infrastrcurual projects has far more to do with gaining acces to government contracts and rewarding parton-client networks than it has to do with their technical function.
Unimpendent circulation – opzoeken
But is can also be an excessive fantastic object that generates desire and awe in autonomy of tis technical function. Many infrastrucrual projects are copies, funded and constructed so that cities or nations can take part in a contemporaneous modernity by epeating infrastructural projcts from elsewhere to particapte in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of what it means to be modern.
Building ‘miniature metropolises’ was understood as investing in a new being, a new humanity, a new cosmos.
They encode the dreams of individuals and societies and are the vehicles whereby those fantasies are transmitted and made emotionally real
Fantasies that stand as filters through which the object is seen
Their work is created a deep sense of fulfillment that made the memory of building communication infrastructures a depply emotional one.
Toward practices of conceptualizatyion that come before the construction of the systems themselves.
It is an eetnography that produces different infrastrucrual objects, where the budget as a site of formal rationzaliation is as important as the brute material of technological systems
Enlightment idea – opzoeken
This mode of thought is why the provision of infrastructures is so intimiately caught up with the sense of shaping modern society and realizing the future.
Mechanisms to control time Instigating waves of societal progress Possession of electricity, railways, and running water cam to define civilization itself
With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, wether motory or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts all his auxiallry organs he is trulu maginifcent.
Difficult to separate an anyalis of infrastrctures from this sedimental history and our belief that, by promoting circulation, infrastructures bring about change, and trhough cange they enact progress, and htrough progress we gain freedom.
Heterogeneous networks – opzoeken
Infrastructures, for collier, are a mixture of political rationality, administrative techniques, and material systems.
Soviet electricity provision, rhough his lens, is analyzed for how it reveals a system of total planning in a command economy rather than for what it tells us about the effects of electricity on users in Russia.
Infrastructures are not, in any positivest sense, simply ‘out here’. The act of defining an infrastructure is a categorizing moment.
Infrastructures typically begin as a series of small, indepependant technologies with widely carrying technical standards, they become infrastructures when either one technological sustem comes to dominate over others or when independent systems converge into a network.
(ontology of technology is composed of elements internal to the object itself but is formed as part of a system)
a technical system originates in one place but as it grows into a networked infrastruycture, it must move to other places with differing conditions, technological standards, and legal regulations, elaborating techniques of adaption and translation. Practices of routinazation and extension Requiring an Account of translation (which can be technical, managerial and financial)
Infrastrucures are matter that enable the movement of other matter They are things and also the relation between things Present to the senses Displaced in the focus of the matter
System of substrates
Clear, linear relationship between underlying system and the phenomenal world to which it gives rise
Although electricity is the infrastructure of the computer, the computer is the infrastructure of electricity supply
The educational and cultural competence needed to understand its functioning and to operate it
The Internet as infrastructure
Mind-body dichotomy Social Text – opzoeken
Neff interrogates the production processes in new media organizations and argues that their physical location in space is one of the most important ways to understand their development.
How do specific undersea cable routes ‘contort’ and ‘deform’ digital film culture. For them, to do infrastructure studies is to try to heal the dialect between structure and form. It is to cvonsider ‘the mechanics of transduction, storage, transmission alongside creation, distribution, and reception.”
Indeed communication in its original meaning was transportation, a box of goods was said to be ‘communicated’ when it was delivered.
“early technical choices (including some relateviley casual or arbitrary ones) have a tendency to get reinforced as subsequent system elements are built around or on top of them.
Internet begins with http://www altough most of this prefix is no longer necessary – it was originally meant to differentiate web traffic from other protocols that are now defunct (eg.nntp:,gopher), and the prefix refers to an era where individual computers were named by their services (www, news, mail). Sir Tim Berners-lee, inventor f the World Wide Web, recently admitted that some of the characters in URLs never served a useful purpose, and ‘were a mistake.’
A wide variety of actors were in a constant tug-of-war or negotiation for the future of the system.
Modular, Incremental, maintenance, invisibility, dependence on human practices, modularity, standardization, momentum.
Decay and entropy for understanding the system
monolith?, exogenous?
Interia, trajectory (inside system)
Infrastructure itself could be described as an achievement of negotiation, as its interconnectness means that modifying one part requires adjustments in another – and these adjustments are noth social and technical.
The internet is an excellent example of this precept because it is officially leaderless and decentralized.
The task of the analyst in this view, is to find and make comprehensible the invisible negotations that are producing the infrastructure.
Standarization allows seamless interconnection with other systems and processes, and it also promotes the normalcy and invisibilty of the system itself.
Like the internets gateways, these are intermediaries that provide translation from one system (or network) to another.
The significance of the gateways is that by focusing our attention on the boundaries of an infrastructure we can better comprehend its from and its limits. The advice that follows fromt his precept is: to understand a system, study its boundaries and the gateways that allow it to work with other systems.
Yet beyond its material components, the idea of the internet is also invisible, with web pages arriving as if my magic, relying on processes that are totally unknown and unquestioned by most internet users.
Hard and soft inside the system
Digital natives
Computers do not need to be learned at all: they are ‘intuitive’ or ‘user friendly’
Infrastructure is relative and contextspecific, but that all nfrastructure share features such that its proper study must be comparative and historically-informed.
Dynamics, tensions, heuristiscs
Visibility can itself be a site of struggle around infrastructure: for instance, cities exist politically in order to provide shared services, therefore cities often actively work toward infrastructural visibility to try to prove their value.
But with a few expections like this or that brightlylit, iconic bridge, cities are mostly not successful in making these systems stand out.
Infrastructure is taken for granted.
“modernist infrastructural ideal” of homogenization, utopian integration, and master planning under one provider.
Coincident with the rise of the internet, infrastructures of all kinds became ‘splintered’ and unbundled, relying on competition, market mechanisms, and segmentation of users into privileged and the less privileged who were offered different services (or no service at all)
“leading the shift towards the splintering of mass markets under forces of global capitalism and privitazion” by providing a model of a privately managed, transnationally funded distributed system apparently free from the old-fanshioned meddling of government planning
The internet, the newest infrastructure, has become an infrastructure primitive or template for its template for its parents: a model privately organizes system of distributed compulation – the ur-infrastructure.
“Understanding the nature of infrastructural work involves unfolding the political ethical, and social choices that have been made throughout its development.
All Infrastructures, the internet included, passed trhough loose and overlapping but recognizable phases of development. Invention and early development, transfer across space and context, growth in scale, and momentum and inertia.
No particular point in the sequence of infrastructure where things stop being social and become purely technical (or vice-versa), or where infrastructure itself stops – any thing that one points to has ‘subordinate parts’ (therefore it has an infrastructure), and this infrastructure has an infrastructure and so on.
It’s infratrsucture all the way down.
When new largescale computing projects were planned, designed, or introduced, things almost never happened as expected.
Centrainly beyond the control of mere human programmers and analysts. These computing werewolves continue to haunt the industry.
Understanding this situation required systematics reconsideration of ‘the scope of the boundaries that we draw around the computer system’
They initially framed this distinction as ;’hard’ vs ‘soft’ infrastructure, where soft infrastructure denoted things like the everyday habits of the human operators.
Infrastructure is a relation and not a set of things.
When we change the way that we look at something, the background becomes the foreground and vice-versa.
Certain components of the Internet have also been notably singled out for ‘meta-infrastructural’ status as essential components of the internet without which the internet itself would not function: most notably search engines and the internets addressing and naming system introduced in the example at the beginning of this chapter.
“the twin pillars of cyberculture studies are virtual communities and online identities’
this is the internet not as ‘what people say with it’ but as ‘how it works’
Infrastructure refers to ‘the subordinate parts of an undertaking/foundation’ or its ‘foundatiom’
In common usage it is often used in a similar sens to ‘utitliy’ or ‘public utitliy’ meaning ‘a service regarded as essential’
‘infrastructure’ is defined negatively; as those systems without which contempary societies cannot function re-issue the extremely valuable .ly domains it seized from the West to Libyan nationals presenting an economic motive instead of a religious one.
If you tried to reach the popular URL shortener bit.ly in 2011 you would have been redirected to the ungainly URL ‘bitly.com’
This episode led to the financial ruin of some investors in URL shortening firms, the loss of millions of dollars, and at the time it appeared that LTT’s action could have affected millions of English-speaking internet users. Despite all this, the story is an obscure one, receiving only minor press coverage.
It argues that ‘infrastructure’ is the new ‘network’
Inchoate? - opzoeken
URLs for web services to become lengty with codes, id numbers, and ephemera that made them ungainly to remember, type, and share.
URL shortening services: applications that would produce a short synonym that could be used to represent the ever-longer and harder-to-sahre URL.
Every click on a shortened URL generated data that could be captured, and this data about who clicked on which links could have considerable commercial value.
Yet the original engineers of the internet were wary of ‘the business of deciding what is and what is not a country’, so they decided hat the system of names would be based on a recognized international standard dating from 1974 that establishes two-letter abbreviations for countries (arcanely known as ISO #3166 [see ISO 2011])
“GET” smethod - opzoeken
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Roads are a fundamental necessary and social good
Enchantment
post-enlightment world has been characterized by a process of disenchantment
enchantment is thus less a form of knowledge or belief and more a ‘mood’, which involves ‘a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage’
roads retain a generic social promise, even in the face of specific circumstances in which they are acknowledged as having failed to deliver
roads are not just material forms
roads are promises towards a future which is uncertain and unclear
the promise of speed and connectivity
the promise of political freedom
the promise of economic prosperity
livelihoods and life itself are jeopardized by the tyranny of delay
economic prosperity is articulated as both a collective and a personal quest
material instantiations of dominant narratives regarding the ideal shape of an uncertain future
infrastructures are better thought of as a ‘disturbance in a casual mileu, the material entity which motivates interferences, responses or interpertations’
discursive interpretation and representation of social life
attention to enchantment as a way of moving beyond a position of professional cynism towards the forces that appear to construct the worlds within which we live, in order to recover other ways of sensing how the features of modern life become the subject and object of meaningful relations
through the experiences of life within and alongside unstable forces that infrastructures gain their capacity to enchant
[ for each of these aspects of ‘enchantment’, we turn our attention to the relational engagements that are consistently excluded in dominant narratives regarding the promises that infrastructures put in place. These include ethnographic moments when infrastructures seem to threaten to collapse, fall apart or be at risk manifesting fragility and material uncertainty. ]
contemporary forms of governance are premised on a pre-occupation with speed
both ensuring mobility of its populations, and managing
the dream of circulation
state depends simultaneously on their capacity for speed
the benefits that roads would bring to populations
mechanisms of control
standing reserve to describe the way in which nature is made to appear as a resource for human exploitation
described as a technological revealing, the relationship between a technologically framed way of being-in-the-world and the presentation of that world to the human imagination is explored
achievement against the odds
the environment was characterized by a stubbornly refusing to obey rules or orders that needed flexibility and guile to overcome
land and water – active substances
to recognize the instability of people and land is to acknowledge the achievement of containment whereby those aspects that constantly threaten a return to halts, delays and interruptions have (momentarily) been subdued
where are the regional, national and local authorities or the bosses of the patriotic front
abandoned plant as a localization and instantiation of that which cannot be known and controlled
hope that there is the possibility of change and that the encounter with processes of material disintegration produce a mood of unease and disquiet about the capacity of the state to perform its role.
At the same time, it is in this challenge and this anxiety that we find conversations and the interventions that re-make the state anew, an enchantment that re-imbues it with the power to change lives for the better
Wether the means through which people are making a living out of new connections that the road makes available are legal or not, the ruins of past economic boom times is a constant reminder of the fragility and reversibility of the promises upon which infrastructural projects are based
Infrastructures can dazzle with the possibilities they hold – the glitter of progress, the lure of profit, the promise of circulation, movement and a better life as rational and scientific plans – interlocking diagrams of modernity
Generate illusory effects supported by numbers, figures and pictures
Do not do the work of enchantment that infrastructures often seem to produce
Processes of transnationalism which supposedly promote mobility and flexibility also engender the opposite: immobility, entrapment, confinement, incarceration
Its is through an articulation with the lived, material encounters of stasis, rupture and blockage that infrastructural promises become reinvigorated and recast
Strengthens the desire for them and constantly renews the sense that sometimes soon they will appear and life will change for the better
Lists of numbers and technical specifications, or as hidden mechanisms subtending those processes more familiar to social scientists
Digging to unearth
Effect of standardization or formal classification on group information, the design of networks and their import for various communities, or on the fierce policy debates about domain names, exchange protocols, or languages
Inaccessible electronic code
embedded strangeness
the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place
identity tourism
plugs, settings, sizes
miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power
study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change.
Perhaps if we stopped thinking of computers as information highways and began to think of them more modestly as symbolic sewers, this realm would open up a bit.
System of substrates
Ready-to-hand
One person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty
Incomplete platforms, recalcitrant local computing centers, and bottlenecked resources
Part of human organization
Infrastructural inversion – foregrounding the truly backstage elements of work practice
Technological developments move from either independent or dependant variables, to processes and relations braided in with thought and work
Embeddedness
People do not necessarily distinguish the several coordinated aspects of infrastructure
Transparency
Does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task
[ the step of using ftp made the system less then transparent for the biologists, and thus much less usable ]
reach or scope
Infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice
learned as part of a membership
strangers and outsiders encounter infrastructure as a target object to be learned
[ it was easy to overlook other things that we had already naturalized, such as information retrieval practices over networked systems]
links with conventions of practice
[ the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by and affect electrical power rates and needs ]
embodiment of standards
infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures ad tools in a standardizes fashion
other standards escaped us at first
build on an installed base
it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strength and limitations from that base
becomes visible upon breakdown
respondents would say prior to the visit that they were using the system with no problems – during the site visit, they were unable to even tell us where the system was on their local machines.
This breakdown became the basis for a much more detailed understanding of the relational nature of infrastructure
Is fixed in modular increments
It is never changed from above
Changes take time and negotiation
adjustment with other aspects of the systems are involved
Nobody is really in charge of infrastructure
There simple was no magic wand to be waved over the development effort
transform in a surprising or magical manner
an idea that people make meanings based on their circumstances
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
social activists via social media are weak - no discipline or sacrifice
social media is network, hierarchy is opposed networks
adaptability and resilience
Generative resources are easily available, without the permission of any FSE, for re-use, improvement, or transformation, whereas tethered resources are managed at the sole
discretion of the FSE require either legal or technical permission in order to be modified
participation is power but has limits
Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines.
everyday usage and parlance arrests memory and its degenerative possibilities in order to support dreams of superhuman digital programmability
because of the speed of events, there is a real danger that an online phenomenon will already have disappeared before a critical discourse reflecting on it has had the time to mature and establish itself as institutionally recognized knowledge
cyberspace has implemented a real time that is eradicating local spaces and times.
Cyberspace real time threatens “a total loss of the bearings of the individual and “a loss of control over reason,” as the interval between image and subject disappears
the speed with which new technologies are assimilated in the United States makes them ‘invisible’ almost overnight: they become an assumed part of the everyday existence, something which does not seem to require much reflection.
[ time of theory itself needs to change; Lovink’s “theory on the run” and Wark’s theory as “micro-event” take on the same temporality or speed as digital media, refusing to stand outside their mode of dissemination. - It is not only on the run because it engages the present but also because it “expresses itself in a range of ways, as code, interface design, social networks and hyperlinked aphorisms, hidden in mailinglist messages, weblogs and chatrooms and sent as SMS messages.” - the micro-event travels along the same media vectors as the mainstream event itself, displacing the event’s terms in its travels.it appears first on the net and then later in print. ]
having a short life spam
Digital media’s ontology is defined by memory, from content to purpose.
regenerative memory
organ rather than store Vacuum tubes, unlike mechanical switches, can hold values precisely because their signals can degenerate—and thus regenerate. The internet’s content, memorable or not, is similarly based on memory. Many websites and dig- ital media projects focus on preservation
By saving the past, it was supposed to make knowing the future easier.
Saving the past was to put into place the future simple through the threat of constant exposure
people increasingly record their own “transgressions”
digital media was supposed to—in its very functioning— encapsulate the enlightenment ideal: that better information leads to better knowledge, which in turn guarantees better decisions.
As a product of programming, it was to program the future
The memex is a desklike machine with two projectors that would enable its user to make permanent associative links between documents and to retrieve them at will.
Memex traces are not to fade
with one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory”
The creative aspect of thought is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine
We are being buried in our own product
one is given the right to think X, one may think X, in which case the authority would be the machines themselves, our supposedly loyal servants.
may is an uncertain link to the future
there is no difference between access to and understanding the record, between what would be called, perhaps symptomatically, machine reading and human reading and comprehension, between informa- tion and argument.
The pleasure of forgetfulness is to some extent the pleasure of death and destruction.
supplementing of human memory has also been imagined as the death of the human species in so many fictions and films
de ́ja` vu as the mark of the artificial in The Matrix.
Digital media is degenerative, forgetful, eraseable.
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The Panopticon's Changing Geography Jerome E. Dobson and Peter F. Fisher
Panopticon, Big Brother and now an electronic human tracking device. The cost has minimalized which is why everyone is tracked people allow it because we get benefits without realising it. The Panopticon has always stood for total surveillance discipline and control. Surveillance technique has advanced. The Panopticon building stood for Utopion perfection of society. The second Panopticon - Television network, was enforcement of absolute tyranny. The third Panopticon - The Human Tracking System, has produced safety and security. The first Panopticon was seen as a place where morels, health, discipline could be adjusted to the will of the ones with power. The second Panopticon - Big Brother - was seen as a form of communism. CCTV is perceived as a good thing because they are - as they say - used for the solution of crimes. The tags that goods have for tracking don't arouse suspicion but it gets difficult when the item is for example a piece of clothing. This means the tracking device is on a person. There are different kinds of tracking devises. Normal cellphone signals can be used for tracking. GPS makes accuracy better. Even computers attached to the wifi network are tracked among the wireless antennas. Something that is not slavery in analogue form is not slavery when digital. Though the act of controlling and monitoring anothers location is an incident of slavery.(This is confusing) But it shows that power takes over the mind. The idea of a transparant Government can't happen when we want to keep our privacy. It's not just government but many smaller organisations. Nowadays the monitoring uses less work, because of automated recognition and GIS. The use of CCTV is not as positive as imagined. People use video to film themselves. Control cannot cover the whole, can only be covered to a certain aspect. There is of yet no one person who can watch without wanting to influence what he/she sees. Panopticon one has a cheaper labor because only one person has to keep watch. But the building was expensive. Orwell's Big Brother has a cheaper maintenance, but asked a lot of personnel to monitor screens. Costs of human tracking system are as much as a monthly cellphone, because of the inflation as years go by. It's possible to track anyone eventually, for only a few dollars. Pantopcion one has been a metaphor for all surveillance, from the building to the idea of tattling on your friends. Now we have choices in different techniques, so it's important to not think about the concrete matter. The panopticon was just as cruel as the original prison cells, the long lasting effect was the same to the individuals. This changed the idea that the Panopticon had a benefit. The Panopticon and Big Brother idea were both attached to a place and unmovable. The human tracking system van be applied anywhere and by or for anyone. Big Brother had a negative attitude towards surveillance and gave a warning to invasion of privacy. But public place surveillance is approved (by society) because crime regulation. Or so they believe. The Human tracking system is approved more then its predesecors because its less visible and therefore less frightening its gives you 'security' and 'safety'. On the other hand its more frightening then ever because the system can be imp laced on anyone and everything. The 'inspector' can be anywhere, in the public or within privacy. The benefits of Panopticon Three give just as much risks. Even the only good uses change society. In the end the greatest risk is 'geoslavery' and it has no redeeming qualities. The idea of an Panopticon Two used to be the greatest fear among society, but having gotten used to the technology, enjoying its many benefits, people have become blind to the fear. Because the panopticon was seen as a metaphor instead of technology, the philosophers of that time didn't foresee the upcoming technological surveillance possibilities.
What is it that we are actually dealing with here? What is the problem. One of the issues is the trade off between security an safety against privacy and freedom. Who has the right over that authority? Shouldn't 'no slavery' mean that for 'no geoslavery' as well? The fact that anyone can be tracked and controlled, by anyone, makes the panopticon Three a kind of social experiment. Equals and no equals can be equally powerful. Rach form of a panopticon over the last years was designed for total surveillance. This has been possible within their own format. Nowadays the benefits are greater, the geo coverage bigger and costs lower. Because of high benefits the public appeal to Panopticon Three is greater then ever. I'ts important to understand the technical side both and the metaphorical aspect of an instrument that is silently changing society.
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