Category: blog posts

The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is not about designing “a people’s platform.” This book is a critique of the state of the media and internet technology industry, which often uses “for the people” style rhetoric to justify its profit-seeking and control-oriented design decisions. The socio-technical system of our current media ecosystem is not “open” or “democratic” or “free” in real terms; tech entrepreneurs and pundits are selling investors, consumers, and policymakers on a disingenuous vision of the future of cultural production. We may all have better access to the means of production now, but new elites own the means and modes of distribution—and that is where the political and economic value now lies.

Astra Taylor is at her best in this book when she is critiquing the media and internet industries as a content creator. As a documentary filmmaker and savvy storyteller of her own and her friends’ cases, she successfully humanizes what the free culture movement as a philosophy and business strategy has meant for creators. These are people who have worked hard to maintain editorial independence from corporate commissions, branding, big labels, etc. They have a progressive politics that is often in resonance with the core ideas of free culture regarding shared ownership of cultural goods and even an anti-institutional flare. But when big companies adopt this same rhetoric, they are doing so to sell advertising against the free culture on their platforms, leaving little or nothing for the creators.

The system makes more money for mainstream artists but the long tail just means that all the independent things are free too, without the economies of scale offered by Vevo Music Videos on YouTube or record sales driven by Spotify plays. Filmmakers, musicians, and journalists are all suffering from this in ways that are waved away because anyone COULD make it big, go viral, etc. They can be their own personal brand and through hard work, make a living. But, ironically, it’s harder than ever to make a living. The philosophy suggest that those who love to make culture should we content doing so without payment.

Unfortunately, a lot of this terrain is familiar. Taylor goes through much of the key ideas and books that either booster or criticize the internet’s potential for more, better, and freer exchange of culture and ideas. Her summaries help establish her legitimacy entering this space—she knows the literature. But the “he said this” and “he said that” is across such a broad array of issues and areas that her core argument gets lost in the middle of the book as she tries to connect the dots and touch everything relevant.

Finally, I wish the suggestions in the end for addressing the problems were more concrete and less hand-wavy. The title and subtitle suggest a radical proposal for democratic technology is forthcoming, but it’s not there. As a primer for like-minded activists and culture creators, this book could be very useful. But the audience of scholars embedded in this space will have to search for the nuggets of helpful new perspectives and arguments amidst a lot of rehashed summaries of Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr.

Glad it was written, her voice is important, but it left me wanting.

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The Inspection House: An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance by Tim Maly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Emily Horne and Tim Maly offer a contemporary tour through the carceral city and disciplinary society. Their “field guide” to the “conceptual terrain” of modern surveillance is a tour through prisons, ports, and financial centers—places where surveillance have encroached on their inhabitants beyond their expectations and certainly beyond the expectations of those whose idea it was to put it in place.

This field guide is mostly a tour through the ideas of the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and the post-structuralist Michel Foucault. Using Bentham’s idea of the panopticon (or “inspection house”) prison design, Horne and Maly with the help of Foucault show us how the concept of asymmetrical surveillance has become the standard by which society polices itself.

Most critics point to ubiquitous cameras and the data collection involved with every digital transaction as the full realization of a panoptic society we are resigned to now live in. But this book only briefly talks about CCTV cameras and iPhones. The priority is given to Foucault’s concepts of the carceral city and disciplinary society. In the interest of security, we have adopted the design principles of prisons and brought them into every city to control the flow and behavior of people. Furthermore, these rules, norms, and fears have been internalized: we discipline ourselves.

This is not a wholly bad thing. We hope that others feel certain restrictions on their activities that might harm others. It means we are able to produce sophisticated technologies like the iPhone. And Bentham wanted this kind of self-discipline in prisons in order to reduce the need for corporal punishment. However, there might be psychological traumas unforeseen by these efforts. And now that this physical surveillance and carceral structures are less visible—subsumed in gardens that block explosive-laden trucks or passively tracking our moves through the city—what does this mean to our power to resist: how do we understand the power being wielded?

Unfortunately, this short book doesn’t let us dive deep on these questions. They are left as questions, sometimes not even fully articulated. Horne and Maly offer us a guide through some key ideas and ways they have become real and pervasive in modern society. But I wish they didn’t limit themselves to conceptual terrain. This book would have benefited from photos of the architectures of modern surveillance and a more comprehensive set of activities that walk us through the ideas in order to question and reflect on the society we have created—where we are pleased with it and where we find it lacking or even abhorrent.

Read it for the Bentham and Foucault and for the clever examples. Find a reading group for the rest.

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In Mistrust We Trust by Ivan Krastev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ivan Krastev paints a bleak picture of the current state of democracy around the world. He argues that we so deeply mistrust our democratic institutions that it’s unclear what a corrective path forward looks like.

In Mistrust We Trust builds off Ivan’s 2012 TED talk in which he makes an abbreviated version of his argument based on five revolutions he identifies as contributing to the transformation of democratic society. First, the cultural and social revolution of the sixties destroyed the idea of a collective purpose by increasing individualism. This was followed by the market revolution of the 1980s whereby we saw a huge increase in inequality—decoupling the reduction of inequality with the spread of democracy for the first time. Then there was the end of Communism and the Cold War, which tore social contract between elites and the people in Eastern Europe. Then, the internet revolution, which brought echo chambers and political ghettoes—making it more difficult to understand people who aren’t you. Finally, Ivan points to the brain sciences revolution as arming political consultants with the knowledge that emotional manipulation is more powerful than ideas.

While the theory of revolutions is interesting and worth reflecting on, the most compelling part of the book is Ivan’s critique of transparency as a political religion riddled with inaccurate assumptions of how to “manage mistrust” in government. He argues that in fact we are fostering mistrust by trying to keep our representatives honest through monitoring, in other words we are assuming that control over others is equal to trust.

Without public trust democracy doesn’t work and a sustained campaign of transparency will only make it worse. We can’t simply design a foolproof system of good governance because that’s insufficient to convince us it is foolproof; it will merely press us to inspect it closer, confident we will find corruption lurking.

Ivan warns readers at the beginning of the book that it will not offer answers or solutions. It is a provocation. And I think it is an important one, especially for the civic activists and technologists in my circles. In some ways, Ivan is calling for the community-based and community-building efforts we celebrate in participatory design. BUT, if those efforts are always in opposition to and alternative from public institutions, rather than attempts to build them up into something we can believe in again, will things just keep getting worse?

A short, thought-provoking “must” read.

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fun and detailed look through the early history of the Internet. I revisited key figures like JCR Licklider, Vint Cerf, and Jon Postel, who I first learned about during my freshman year of information technology education at RIT. And I learned the inane origins of the inane debate between TCP/IP and OSI that added mind-numbing tedium to my computer networking courses in high school.

The majority of the book though focuses on the relationship between the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and Cambridge, MA-based Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) that won the contract to construct the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. I didn’t appreciate the impressive feat of engineering undertaken to connect the first mainframe computers together. Over the course of months, programmers, engineers, and computer scientists, largely coming from MIT / Lincoln Laboratory and inspired by a few crude experiments, some mathematical theory, and the visionary scientists cum policymakers at ARPA, willed computer networking into existence.

At least that’s how it seems from the dramatic retelling offered by Hafner and Lyon in this book. For a nonfiction examination of technical protocol creation, this is a pretty decent page-turner. They don’t spare too many technical details either, which I absolutely drank up—probably because I was familiar with the basic concepts already and so could simply enjoy the backfill of context and sweat.

I definitely recommend this to folks interested in getting a better sense of how we came to have the “series of tubes” we call the internet, and in appreciating the openness, pragmatism, and genius that built it. I also think the book helps us appreciate the fragility of what we have come to take for granted, and the rarity of the moment in history where federal funding and a willingness to experiment allowed the ARPANET to happen.

Finally, I want to recognize the grad students. While the core hardware of ARPANET was a perfect example of government contracting with a determined company, the success of the internet as a broader experiment was built on the free time and inquisitiveness of graduate students who wanted to play and push the system further: creating an ad hoc system of protocols and proposals (RFPs) that led to the internet transforming how we live our lives. Those early pioneers deserve all our thanks for their late nights.

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The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet by Molly Sauter

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I am a good friend and colleague of the author and followed this work from near its inception.

This is an important contribution to political theory, social movements and civic studies. Molly provides a nuanced argument for situating DDOS within a repertoire of more widely and traditionally accepted civil disobedience tactics. Her command of the relevant history, literature, and theory allows her to trace the fundamental qualities of disruptive political action, cutting through the nostalgic version of the civil rights movement and the confusing media and legal narratives that push political hacktivists into criminal and terrorist categories.

Once again, this is a work of political theory by an adept media scholar. She is not an apologist for DDOSers broadly. Molly is clear that DDOS’s efficacy as disruptive political action has never been clear and is in fact on the path toward diminishing returns. Moreover, despite Molly’s argument, we as a society may never successfully separate activist DDOS from criminal DDOS. The ethical boundaries under which legitimate civil disobedience occurs within this form of digital activism are hard to accomplish as the tools move away from one computer one voice, voluntarily and explicitly offered, toward passive participation or nonvoluntary botnets employed in protests.

In many ways, the metaphors to street protest and sit-ins break down in the online spaces, where there are no true public spaces in which freedom of speech and assembly can be practiced in legally sanctioned ways. Furthermore, DDOS actions don’t clearly represent their political nature

And where does it extend? I recently asked Molly if she thought that giving money to big campaigns, trusting them to spend it wisely, was similar to offering your computer to an IRC channel to use for DDOS actions they deemed a priority. Using her theory, we can relate both of these resources—money and computing—to political speech. And she believes they are similar. However, there is a difference in cost. One hundred dollars costs someone $100, whereas the computing resources are negligible as they are part of the sunk cost of owning computers and paying for bandwidth. There is also a difference in risk. Giving money to a cause is a low cost activity. In many cases you can give money anonymously too, if privacy is important.

Thanks to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act though, participating in a DDOS action puts a person at risk of felony fraud charges with significant prison time and “damage” liability. The value and legitimacy of political action should not be based on either cost or risk, even though, as Molly points out in her book, personal cost and the threat of arrest are historically markers of public legitimization of dissent. The police and courts help draw attention to an action by reacting to it and your willingness to be put on trial demonstrates your respect for the law whilst also disagreeing with it.

DDOS activists do not have the luxury of facing “reasonable” risk though in their civil disobedience. The legibility of DDOS as political action is hard for observers less sophisticated than Molly. The dramatic consequences of the CFAA forces most arrests into plea bargaining in which the role of legal spectacle to legitimize the political action disappear: there is no “day in court” for the activists, rather they come off as guilt-admitting criminals, who are now not allowed to talk about the intention of their actions publicly due to the conditions of the plea deal.

This is Molly’s other major contribution in this work: a cogent argument for reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in light of how it squelches what she argues should be understood as legitimate political speech acts in the form of DDOS actions.

Note: the book begins with a dense introduction as Molly outlines the theoretical, technical, and legal context of her argument, but this sets the stage for a highly readable journey through the evolution of DDOS as action and a healthy reminder of what civil disobedience is all about. Reading this book in the midst of the Ferguson and Eric Garner protests around the country, I was more reflective about disruptive action. What can we do online? Where should the direct and indirect actions go and how will they be judged? I’m both eager and worried for the future of digital activism, as I know Molly is.

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