User:Cristinac/Proposal3

Tentative Title

Connection available

Thesis intention

I am interested in the politics of access to information, and the underlying social and technical structure beneath systems of information sharing. During the remaining time at Piet Zwart I would like to investigate different methods of information distribution and their socio-cultural implications.

Description of the project/Possible pathways

For the following two trimesters I would like to document and organize my research into a guide mapping alternative autonomous information distribution networks and providing instructions on how one might go about building one.

At the same time, I will devise a series of practical experiments that push the question:

What is the political potential of disconnectivity?

By mimicking the restraints that specific networks of information distribution use to regulate access, I am hoping to be able to visualize how the infrastructure of a platform is exercising control over its users. Reintroducing limitations to platforms or devices that are generally assumed to always be connected to a network will raise questions about locality and reach.

Examples of the forms the experiments could take:

• a wifi router placed in a room that only connects when you provide it with enough personal information
• a website that automatically logs the user out if more than three people are sharing it at the same time
• a website that only allows every 10th user login attempt to connect
• a network of raspberry pi servers that each contains part of a text and once they are all connected, the user can read entirely

For the date of the presentation, I will be able to report back on the progress of these experiments and draw some conclusions which will help me further in my research.

Practical steps

Anthropological research.

How to make the project more feasible and more theoretically grounded:

• Started looking at the rules and regulations between closed groups and open groups that both share the desire to make information more accessible
• Looking at former wikis that are not in use anymore and trying to understand what led to their demise
• Becoming an active member of book sharing websites like Public Library, Monoskop, libgen - how difficult is it to join?

Technical research.

• Looking at openWRT, raspberry pi servers and rummaging the history of telecommunications to find alternative methods of technological communication

Why is it relevant?

The expression 'sharing economy' has first appeared in 2002 and was used in conjunction with community based redistribution of excess goods without financial gain. It became a more vernacular term in recent years when it was hijacked by Silicon Valley start-ups that have appropriated the term, but added one important element: financial reward. It was not a matter of sharing anymore, but of renting out. For this reason, just as abruptly as the word construct has gained its momentum, it is also starting to wind down in popularity and is currently being replaced with what speculators like to call 'access economy': paying to get access to other people's goods.

However, as has been proven by open access initiatives and the free software movement, access is not only defined in economical, but also in political terms.

“On the one hand, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) enables the Internet to create horizontal distributions of information from one computer to another. On the other, the DNS (Domain Name System) vertically stratifies that horizontal logic through a set of regulatory bodies that manage Internet addresses and names. Understanding these two dynamics in the Internet means understanding the essential ambivalence in the way that power functions in control societies. As Protocol states, “the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom—control has existed from the beginning.” To grasp “protocol” is to grasp the technical and the political dynamics of TCP/IP and DNS at the same time.” Galloway

Alexander Galloway argues in his book, 'Protocol', that it is possible to observe the hierarchical aspect of the internet from its very structure: while the distribution of information is a horizontal act, the access to this information is stratified vertically. Connectivity to the network is granted by a higher node, and the clearest instance of this is when we are denied access. But if disconnectivity is a means for reinforcing power relations between service provider and client, could it not also be used as a reversed tool: to empower the client and reveal the underlying infrastructure?

Temporary Autonomous Zone

“The TAZ [Temporary Autonomous Zone] is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself, to re-form elsewhere / elsewhen, before the state can crush it.” Hakim Bey

The concept of the liberated enclave that Hakim Bey, the alias of Peter Lamborn Wilson, was pushing at the end of the 80s was a vision of temporary anarchy. He saw it as a “tactic of disappearance” from the society of the spectacle. While his ideas have been heavily romanticized during the cyberpunk period of the 90s, they still hold great potential and it seems like many offline networks are adhering to his principles still. There are more and more enclaves operating outside the Internet either as artistic projects (Aram Bartholl's deaddrops, Telekommunisten's phone trees, Invisible Islands), personal libraries (Bibliotecha, PirateBox), mesh networks used by small communities (guifi.net, freifunk.net), but also other types of community networks (nethood, commotionwireless). What all these projects have in common is building a community around hybrid tools that do not rely on .

Relation to a larger practice

"The multitude not only uses machines to produce, but also becomes increasingly machinic itself, as the means of production are increasingly integrated into the minds and bodies of the multitude. In this context, reappropriation means having free access to and control over knowledge, information, communication, and affects because these are some of the primary means of biopolitical production. Just because these productive machines have been integrated into the multitude does not mean that the multitude has control over them. Rather, it makes more vicious and injurious their alienation. The right to reappropriation is really the multitude's right to self-control and autonomous self-production." Antonio Negri and Hardt

There are number of information activists who think about curating and making information accessible to a larger audience. One of them is Sebastian Lütgert, the person behind textz.com. The project began back in 2001, when he decided to put up a collection of texts he had acquired from various sources. The textz.com website quickly became a popular resource, which subsequently attracted the attention of Suhrkamp Verlag. The website was forced to shut down in 2004, but recently reappeared under the guise of an alternative reality game. On it, the visitors can find a link to the torrent file containing the complete source code of all published and unpublished versions of textz.com, including all texts, from around 1999 to 2006, as well as a set of instructions on how to find out the password needed to unzip the archive.

Lütgert proposed an interesting model of distributing the material. He set up barriers, that strengthened the protection of the files against unwanted attention and simultaneously invited the visitors to engage with the archive in order to prove their interest. The time and effort that the participants are putting into finding the code becomes the currency that they exchange for access. The collection is not free anymore, but needs to be earned.

Another example that is related to the topic occurred at the 'Ideographies of Knowledge' conference in Mons. While speaking about the Advanced eBook Processor v2.2, Nikita Mazurov made a remarkable observation. After recounting the situation of one of the Russian developers that had been working on the project, he put up a jpeg file that showed a link. He did so in order to avoid directly referring to the http address of the processor, whose promotion is prohibited by law. The simplicity of Mazurov's solution almost had a comical aspect, but it also raised questions about alternative methods to circumvent intellectual property conflicts.

What unites both examples is the reterritorialisation of the files, Lütgert and Mazurov create islands through disconnection: either by using passwords or geographic location. In the case of textz.com, the user needs to download the ZIP collection that will only be accessible to himself, while in the latter situation, the information included in the file is locked in pixels. They engineer distance between the external and internal observer as a tactical defence strategy.

Relation to previous practice

In my Bachelor work I focused on developing rudimentary methods of taking back control over information flow. Methods such as creating an automatic Wikipedia surfing program that navigated the site for the user and kept a log of all the pages it had visited, but also techniques to rearrange texts and create disorder. In a sense, these experiments were aimed at disrupting the textual interface.

Library of Babel

Library of Babel is a project based on the same titled story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the universe is described as an immense library. The project consists of 410 pages unbound book, which is a direct reference to the same restriction that all the books in the Library of Babel possess. For this project, I asked a friend to create a program that would randomly reorder the words of any given text, after which I passed The Library of Babel through the program 410 times. Each version was then placed on one A2 document, projected onto the wall and photographed. As time passed, one could clearly notice how light settled into the room, and the 410 photographs went from clear text on a dark background to blurred text on a light background. The resulting images were then printed in an A5 format and left as loose sheets. Randomly hidden amongst them was one title card that read the name of the project. The Library of Babel is a perfect metaphor for the anxiety caused by being subjected to an endless stream of information. A universe in which there is no functionality and nothing can be retrieved.

A general interest that I have seen develop alongside my practice the last year has been that of the dichotomy between open and closed information sources. Whether the divide is realised by physical obstacles (location), digital obstacles (DRM: Digital Rights Management), or economic reasons (tickets), it is often illusory. As most dichotic splits, there is ambiguity in the space separating them. There are for example, torrent websites that allow you to download material as long as you are able to maintain the download-upload ratio.

CAPTCHAbook

CAPTCHA is a program that is meant to protect websites by separating humans from bots and allow entrance only to the former. For the CAPTCHA project, I was rebuilding books by turning each line into glyph-images that were unreadable by machines, but still meaningful to the human eye. The process was automated and realised through python, which helped generate the new lines, order them and place them in a temporary database. During this project, I started considering alternative uses of the image generator, which seemed to be a possible, if unpractical, way of circumventing the DRM system of digital books. A user interface around the code that gives them an option to upload their own text file and create a CAPTCHA database from it to share with others or put up on their own website was considered, but unrealized because of a lack of technical know-how from my part.

Encyclopedia Of Potentialities

The connection with the subject became more pronounced in the Encyclopedia of Potentialities, which was dealing with the greyness of the 'open' European patent database. A patent is an agreement between the state and the inventor, which obliges the latter to provide insight into how their invention functions in exchange for the guarantee that their work will not be copied. While the primary reason for the existence of patents is increasing communal knowledge, there is a paradox that emerges from a situation in which transparency excludes access.

References

• Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Autonomedia, 1991
• Alexander Galloway, Protocol - How Control Exists after Decentralization, MIT, 2004
• Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2000.
• Access Economy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_economy

Bibliography

• Crypto-anarchy, cyber states and pirate utopias – Peter Ludlow
• Protocol – Alexander Galloway
• The Accursed Share – Bataille
• The Gift – Marcel Mauss
• Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving – Anette Weiner
• Anarchitexts – Joanne Richardson
• Temporary Autonomous Zones – Hakim Bey
• New Associationist Movement - Kojin Karatani
• The Utopia of Rules – David Graeber