where cyberjuice meets mainframe

Perhaps I’m jaded. Perhaps I’m a nostalgist. Perhaps Facebook isn’t the most sinister CIA operation yet. But somehow, I cannot stop from thinking that the “Web 2.0″ as we know it today is an accident of history, an effect of a US legal decision in 2001 that irrevocably changed the course of the Internet.

Purr-fection

Anyone who doesn’t remember Napster gives themselves away as not a good, law-abiding citizen (as we might view those who refrain from downloading today), but rather as someone who just didn’t know, didn’t care, or wasn’t there. Like the reality behind the paternalizing phrase one hears in the USA about hallucinogens and the Sixties, “we were young and experimenting, and everyone was doing it,” those not using Napster were not doing so in order to avoid breaking the law. Some closet freak cases like those aspiring to the Secret Service or politics or neocapitalism definitely prove an exception to this rule. Regardless, at the time there was no legal ruling in regards to the legality of peer-to-peer networking. It was like the years before LSD became illegal: those who avoided it only did so out of a lack of either awareness or interest. While I could not easily find Facebook user statistics, I believe that Napster’s growth rate far exceeded it with a reported 70 million registered users at the time it was shutdown (after less than 3 full years!). Clearly file sharing, Napster’s core function, had serious pull. Compared to other forms of “social networking” whose values are only a function of their own inertia as walled gardens of people, Napster’s assemblage grew insanely fast precisely because file sharing represented the fulfillment of a latent desire to share data. In the initial case of Napster, this fulfillment was delivered through an easy-to-use interface for sharing libraries of music data.

Darknet Rising

In 2001, Napster was ordered to take down the central server that glued 70 milliion music libraries together. But what if that hadn’t happened? What if the right of free sharing had been enshrined and protected? Would Napster have remained the king of P2P?

We should discuss briefly the concrete reality of what did unfold. The ruling against Napster was a referendum on file sharing, effectively blocking the new economic force of data collectivization. Like LSD, P2P’s transcendental capacity would be occluded as a public option and the seekers of such transcendance forced to take alternative, risky, and/or more difficult routes. Another generation gets the reserved right to say, “Oh well, yes I [did this] in [that decade]. But times were different then, son. I was young, and I know so are you, but you know it’s wrong. And I didn’t.”

Never since has P2P seen such a social assemblage as Napster. Enabled by an easy interface and centralized indexing model, Napster provided a first generation look at a new way of networking. Though file-sharing precedence existed, extant examples[1] were simply file sharing piggybacked onto an existing communications protocol (Usenet, IRC) or were extremely centralized (FTP). Napster, however, was an application built to do nothing other than to facilitate direct connections between users who wished to share data. Though organized and indexed by a central server, the actual social interaction of the data transfer would be un-mediated except by the transportation mechanism of the internet. The application also provided a chat interface based on the same principle. This cemented the sharing in an emerging sociality, and it’s inclusion into the Napster application implies that other tools for socializing within the network might also be implemented.

These tools, however, were of no use in the post-Napster world. A world where the legality of participating on the network, indeed of the network itself had been clearly defined. Napster’s liability lay, ultimately, in its role as the “center” of the network. Every P2P protocol since then has focused on avoiding this liability by limiting the role of centralized servers. More importantly, the social climate around P2P is no longer a grey area–it is a decidedly “bad” activity (making it automatically cool in some circles.)

Hypotheticals and Assertions

Even if one still engages in sharing (many repented), it would be extremely unusual to include real personal information in, say, an account on the Pirate Bay. However, if P2P had instead been understood as a natural reaction to distributed networking and a legitimate exercise of the right to free assembly, Napster very well could have evolved many social tools that have since emerged: user walls, micro updates, etc. If this sounds like technological determinism–it is not. Rather it is the expectation that users would demand or invent new ways of socializing within the Napster, a rather social determinist point of view. And if not Napster, then another company, one that promised fewer fake files and better socializing. A Facebook to Napster’s MySpace, if you will. Except that neither of these would need to exist, because we would already be socializing within a more powerful platform: one that offers us the social act of sharing files as well.

YouTube itself might have been superseded, made redundant by the fact that streaming a video from a central server over and over again is less efficient than having a local copy, downloaded from peers and seeding to them as well. After all, by the time you finish the video, you have technically downloaded the entire thing–something that is done over and over. Or perhaps YouTube would have been implemented as a P2P assemblage, rather than a website sitting in front of massive server farms.

There are many hypothetical questions one could pose while pondering what might have happened. Perhaps I am wrong, and the incremental advances in social tools (from email to Wall post, from private picture hosting to a profiles’ picture albums) would still first, or only, emerge on the web. However, I think it is likely they would have evolved around the more powerful social tool of file sharing. Unlike other social tools, file sharing has been disbarred from publicly acceptable practice, meaning its evolution has been defined more by moves towards hiding its presence or distributing liability than by (existing and potential) social practices. Thus, the kind of evolutions of existing tools (again, email to Wall post, web page update to status update, etc) that Facebook, et al. have gone through, typified by increasing ease of use and sociability, have been denied P2P, whose socialization must account for the “unacceptable” nature of its practice.

Conclusions

Social networking as emergent on web sites such as Facebook and MySpace is not the only form such networking can take. Other systems can be imagined. However, with the stigma of file sharing darkening any P2P project, the most innovative and transformational forms are effectively neutralized of any chance at widespread success. The most prolific P2P platform of all time, BitTorrent, is marked by the distance of deviation from Napster in terms of interface. No search, no chat, no user names. These socializations occur instead on sprawling constellations of web sites, blogs, and forums. In a world with a different attitude towards P2P, it is possible that this division would never have emerged.

I am aware that such hypothetical situations are hard, and possibly even absurd, to research. However, I cannot help but feel that actual “social networking” has yet to emerge. Perhaps by examining the modes and practices of various P2P applications and comparing them with those of web based social networks, a clearer picture of what was lost, or even simply what is needed, can be developed.

[1] Excluding Hotline, which had 1) a less than ideal interface, 2) was not P2P in the sense of peers downloading from one another, and 3) was Mac OS only.

[Note: This is a slightly revized version of a post to the Masters of Media blog.]

Last week saw a momentous moment (to me) in the history of the future. For those who are not familiar with BeOS and/or have never heard me wax exotic about its capabilities, I suggest you read this excellent piece at osNews which goes into depth on the history and relevance of Be.

Context is slightly important–if for instance you don’t know that the Haiku team has been working towards this “R1 Alpha” for 8 years (ever since the collapse of Be, in fact), or that I’ve been waiting for it since the day I read of its existence,[1] you might say, “Why care?”

Ah, but that itself is still a matter of context–I care because in ’98, with a 350Mhz AMD K6-2, 256 MB of RAM, and BeOS I could:

• play 5 mp3s: 3 forward, 2 backward (yes, as in back to front)
• watch 2 Quicktime movies
• open a file browsing window and explore my hard drive

That is something that was unfathomable at the time. Or do you not remember Windows 98? Maybe you remember Mac OS 8? My friend had a PowerPC and Quicktime still wouldn’t play smoothly. One Quicktime. Alone.

So is Haiku a worthy successor to the BeOS legacy? It boots in under 2 seconds in VirtualBox[2], so it still has a blazing fast boot time. As for running natively (i.e. boot from the CD and/or install to a hard drive partition), unfortunately this Alpha would not go. As you might expect, drivers are rather rare. In fact, in order for networking to work in VirtualBox, one has to switch the virtual ethernet card to one of the Intel options. This also means that my graphics card is not supported, and so would be stuck using VESA, which would obviously have some impact on performance/responsiveness.

So, aside from all that, how is it? Words can’t hold the nostalgia that I felt when (virtual) booting into the Haiku installer. They didn’t change a thing, except to change any “Be” to “Haiku.” But nostalgia is no solid indicator for events of historical significance. The historical significance of this Alpha is that Haiku has finally arrived. Many fans, including me, have been waiting until this moment to join the community in full. The reports of Haiku running natively on hardware with tuned drivers at conferences imply that even today people are not used to seeing the kind of performance BeOS had 10 years ago. In short, it is historical because from here on out Haiku’s mindshare will only get bigger.

If anyone has a few spare millions, I suggest we form a startup.

– Notes –

[1] As you can see, there was quite a diversity of approaches at that time. It is interesting to see that only one, OpenBeOS (which became Haiku, or didn’t you read the history article? has made it to this day.

[2] VirtualBox is VM software. It let’s you create “virtual machines” on your computer to run different “guest” operating systems within a single “host.” A lot of fun and it makes operating systems much easier to play with than back in the day.

When challenged by Geert Lovink, my instructor for New Media practices, to contribute a new entry to Wikipedia in my native language, it seemed like a nearly impossible task. What does the mighty English edition of Wikipedia, at over 3, 037,000 entries, lack? At first I thought of the easiest route, that of adding an entry for my Ruby web framework of choice, Waves. But then on a whim, I wondered if one of the most visceral topics discussed in The Spam Book had yet received an entry. To my surprise, there was none. In order to rectify this situation, may I offer you this preliminary, incomplete description of war porn.

We’ll have to see just how long it stays up though. Most students I’ve talked to from my class have faced a swift delete.

[Update: I've uploaded a PDF of the original post in case it gets deleted. I'm looking forward to filling in more of this entry once I get my hands on a(nother) copy of The Spam Book.]

I just posted today my final (or maybe I’ll say “latest”) review of The Spam Book to the Masters of Media blog.

The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Hampton Press, 2009), edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, uses a relatively unique approach to add to the discourse surrounding critical understanding of the Internet and its cultural impact. Indeed several articles openly wonder whether there is any longer a separation between the two, where the networked societies are concerned. It’s most radical departure from the existing discourse is a readjustment of our understanding of the anomaly. Using the example of spam, Parikka and Sampson show that ‘anomalous’ is not a simple synonym for the rare. How could spam be an anomaly with such a definition, given that up to 40% of daily email traffic may be spam? Their response is an evolution of our understanding of anomalies, since “within the composite mixture of the everyday and the anomalous even the fixed notion that the normal is opposed to the abnormal is increasingly difficult to reconcile.” Instead they propose “a condition akin to a horro autotoxicus of the digital network, the capacity of the network to propagate its own imperfections, exceeds the metaphor with natural unity.”

The book is notable not simply for its re-figuring of the anomalous, but also for its strides away from the representational analysis so common in (new) media theory. In this way it could be classified in a similar vein to Software Studies: A Lexicon (and, in spirit and topological focus, to The Exploit). One example of this is the wholesale rejection of the traditional metaphorical relationship of the computer virus to the biological virus. Another is the move from essentialism to a theory of assemblage and topology. Rather than classify the anomalous as “outside a series” and analyzing the representational qualities of such deviation, they propose that “accidents are not simply sporadic breakdowns in social structure or cultural identity, but express the topological features of the social and cultural usage of media technologies.” Topological thinking, then, moves beyond such distinctions as “good” or “bad” and instead focuses on the actual interactions of assemblages within the topology of the network.

The book is divided into four sections and a coda. The first, “Contagion” contains essays that concern themselves with the contagious aspects of overlapping assemblages. In “Mutant and Viral,” John Johnston delivers a history of the artificial life (ALife) academic discipline and goes on to critique their rejection of the computer virus as a study-able object. This is a paradoxical situation, as computer viruses are perhaps the most successful forms of ALife in existence. While early theorists such as Fred Cohen long ago theorized the possibility of positive viruses, the anti-virus industry has instead relied heavily on importing immunological and epidemiological metaphors and techniques from biology in their approach to dealing with computer viruses. Johnston concludes that while a swarm intelligence of beneficent viruses may be the best approach to ‘immunization,’ the shift to “an ecosystem that cannot function unless given more life-like capacities that will put it outside of our control” is a large intellectual and cultural leap that is not without it’s own dangers.

Following this line of thinking, Roberta Bruini states “it is inevitable to reinterpret viruses as potential producers of creative outcomes, rather than just threats.” Her essay “Unpredictable Legacies,” discusses the seemingly boundless spread of the viral. Rather than remaining only within the domain of biological or computer viruses, the viral “concept” has spread to such diverse fields as marketing and resistance tactics. The idea that (some of) the very properties of a virus are themselves viral (in that these properties infect and change un-related assemblages) is a powerful recursive property that may lead to changes in the way we view even old phenonema. For instance, does global capitalism exhibit viral properties? If so, what impact should such an interpretation have on the formation and execution of resistance? Not all, or even most, of the properties of the virus are present in the viral, yet are the properties that do carry over susceptible to similar resistance modes or does each incarnation of the viral in an assemblage require unique tactics?

The most exhaustive article in terms of an explicitly topological approach is Sampson’s “How Networks Become Viral,” where he demonstrates that the architecture of the internet is not an democratically distributed network, nor is it a random network. Random topology was considered a given in distributed networks, inherited from both Cold War logic and bio/imunnological models (courtesy of the antivirus industry). In fact the network exhibits a scale-free topology in which nodes are governed by a power law: the familiar long-tail writ large across the interlinking of the internet. In such an “aristocratic connectivity,” the most popular (promiscuous) nodes are the most effective at disseminating contagion. The network is robust, yet fragile, tending toward both stability and instability at the same time. The universality of scale-free topologies, exhibited from the physical to the cultural layers, should dramatically change the emerging topological form of analysis, which so far has been rooted in the distributed network model as understood by Galloway.

The second section, “Bad Objects,” introduces the idea that “the mode of a bad object is not grounded in traditional ideas of territorial boundaries, but is instead found in the vectors of movements in a topology.” This transition from territorial boundaries to vectors of movements is later reflected in Richard Rogers’ exploration of the transition from old media style censorship (single book/single cite) to new media style censorship (observing what is done to supersede the censors in order to then censor that technique).

Within this second section can be found Parikka’s “Archives of Software,” which concerns itself with the representation of the virus. The media feel the need to have a visual “face” for the virus, leading to a feedback loop that affects the public perception and understanding of viruses. However, the most significant contribution of this essay is the understanding of the operating system as an archival framework.

We could, then, consider Windows as an archival framework of
contemporary network culture that organizes materials (texts,
images, etc.), channels users, and pilots the uses and
potentials of network culture. Windows operating system
(connected to the corporation and its networks) is an archival
machine in the sense that it controls large parts of what can
be said, shown, and heard in the contemporary digital culture.

From this he proposes a tactical an-archeology “not targeting operating systems or certain corporations as such but exposing the principles of how digital culture is framed through micropolitics of code.” There is clearly a lot of room to explore such micropolitics, however I wouldn’t mind Parikka being a little more clear on his own personal vision of these micropolitics. For instance, do Galloway and Thacker’s fork bombs fall under this category? Or does Parikka have something less “explosive” in mind? Perhaps he just means the subtle arranging of the user’s experience by code, following Software Studies’ understanding that the shape of the tool determines the shape of the outcome. Either way, this tactical an-archeology could prove quite powerful if it becomes more clearly codified.

The third section, “Pornography,” begins with an interesting cultural analysis of pornographic spam emails by Susanna Paasonen, “Irregular Fantasies, Anomalous Uses.” Perhaps the first boundary work to be conducted through spam, Paasonen demonstrates that, while the popular analysis of online porn is dedicated to alternative and niche genres, the heteronormative porn world is increasingly contradictory. By critically examining two porn spams, one advertising “huge penises” (here meaning anomalously large, making intercourse, in Paasonen’s words, “improbable”) and the other “fucking machines,” Paasonen reasons that “a reading of the more anomalous spam examples suggests that the body of straight pornography tends to leak toward fetishes and paraphilias in ways that work to unravel the over-arching notion of the mainstream or the straight.” That is, if heteropornography is the domain of the normal, than the tendency to advertise huge cocks “would seem to point to a degree of inner incoherence.” Even more striking, however, is the embodiment of the “normal” sexual ideal for a male to be a machine in the DIY “fuck machines” advertised in the second spam example.

This ideal of man-as-sexual-machine existed in the ideal of “fascist warrior,” as Katrien Jacobs points out in “Make Porn, Not War.” In her paper Jacobs proposes “rather than relishing a numb or helpless attitude toward pornography excess, or making simplified disavowels of the niche groups of sexism and violence, we can explore our morphing bodily sensations.” This is mirrored by Paasonen’s experience that by archiving and researching the porn spams she received her attitude towards them changed from annoyance and distaste to an anticipatory interest.

The last piece in this section, “Can Desire Go On Without a Body?” by Dougal Phillips, is a thought-piece on Lyotard’s libidinal economy. Phillips asserts that Lyotard’s model allows us to “replace the moralistic obscenity at the heart of pornography with a more ambivalent figure of a self-perpetuating, obesely swelling energy stemming from the intersection of desire and the screen,” making the reorientation of our attitudes towards pornography a common thread between all three articles. Not only that but Phillips sees a libidinal exchange in the P2P file sharing of pornography (and, I presume, file sharing in general). While this essay still strikes me somewhat as some interesting ideas wrapped in mental masturbation, the implications of some of those ideas have refused to stop developing in my head since reading it. I will need to investigate Lyotard more deeply before I can offer a proper critique, however.

The fourth section, “Censored,” contains useful methodologies for investigating censorship in repressive regimes (Rogers) and an investigation of the politics of search engine exclusion (Elmer). Their work in exposing contemporary practices of censorship, as well as the implications of an “anomalous space” of un-indexed information, comprises a wake up call. The kind of investigation that Roger’s utilizes in probing what information is and is not available in censored countries should definitely be extended into the realm of the search engine exclusion, regardless of the (to some) gray legal space in which un-indexed information exists. This is demonstrated by the Bush White Houses attempt to exclude pages with the word ‘Iraq’ in them from search engine indexing, allowing for the rewriting of history, for instance when a press release titled “Bush Declares End to Combat Operations in Iraq” was changed to “Bush Declares End to Major Combat Operations in Iraq.” Google would never have caught this shift, however, since it followed the White House’s instructions not to index that file. While the search engine increasingly becomes our means of accessing information on the Web, what is and is not excluded from search engine indexing takes on huge political implications. In a different vein, but something I’d also like to explore: is it possible to invert Rogers’ technique of dynamic URL sampling into a technique to mine out under-linked objects in the network? Is there a potential that under-linked objects may present useful information? At the very least it seems like another potential avenue for boundary work.

The final section, “Coda,” presents “On Narcolepsy” by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker. It fits well as an end-cap to The Spam Book, though those familiar with The Exploit will recognize the majority of the text. Still, this remixed micro-instantation of that book does contain much of relevance to the discussed material, and perhaps its familiarity has led me to forget the original impact of such statements as “Meaning is a data conversion.” In terms of the new, Galloway and Thacker discuss narcoleptic writing and then ponder the question “Is there a narcolepsis to software? Is there a ‘dreaming’ to the algorithm? Is there a ’sleep-writing’ that is an unintended byproduct of computers?” This line of thinking, unfortunately, is not followed for long, as they deviate to discussing the properties of spam as “an excess of signification, a signification without sense, precisely the noise that signifies nothing–except its own generativity.” Then it’s on to discussing the Bio-molecular Transport Protocol, the rewindability of spaces, and the resistance tactic of non-existence. Though I myself was initially quite disappointed at the lack of new material (and the chance to see Galloway and Thacker constrained by the format of a short essay), I expect these passages would have a significant impact on the first time reader.

Strangely missing from The Spam Book is any extensive discussion of the “bad object” of pirated material (though copyright infringement plays a small role in Phillips’ survey of a porn sharing community). Furthermore, the absence was a silent one, without explanation of the exclusion. The lack of investigation into pirate assemblages and topologies represents a missed opportunity here.

In a different vein, but something I’d also like to explore: is it possible to invert Rogers’ technique of dynamic URL sampling into a technique to mine out under-linked objects in the network? Is there a potential that under-linked objects may present useful information? At the very least it seems like another potential avenue for boundary work.

While each of the articles in this book deserve a thousand or more words on their own, by providing a selective overview I hope to have demonstrated some of the textual fluidity within this collection. Indeed it reflects the editors’ focus on overlapping assemblages in that common threads abound while approaches, and even disciplines, differ wildly. The ambivalent approach of assemblage and topology permeates these essays, even if most of the articles do not even explicitly use such terms. In this way, the collection does a great deal to justify this approach. By reconfiguring the expectations and experience of “bad objects” away from their representations and into the domain of their actuality, The Spam Book hopefully signals the beginning of a sea change among theoretical approaches within new media circles.

[Note: Unfortunately both the preface by Sadie Plant and the essay by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey entitled “Towards an Evil Media Studies” was not included in the stack of papers constituting my (preview) edition of this book. These pieces may have had an impact on my opinions, were they available.]

A female buffalo getting down on some dirt.

Had to share this great picture with you all. From the latest BFC newsletter:

The photo of this buffalo mama enjoying her wallowing time shares a little bit of the vision of how it can be; buffalo simply being buffalo, living their lives without threat of man-made borders, government policy or cattle politics.  Buffalo living without the menace of barbed wire fences or threat of boundary hunters; buffalo living outside the dangers of hazing, capture, quarantine or slaughter.  Free to raise their young in the buffalo way, returning to their natal grounds to bring forth the next generation.  Free to face the natural challenges of weather and predator and time, moving with their families as the cycles of the seasons instruct them to do, not at the behest of management plans or economic interests.  This buffalo gives us a tiny glimpse of a buffalo’s moment of uninterrupted bliss.

Right now, the buffalo inhabiting Yellowstone are enjoying such times, but summer wanes and the long, cold season will soon approach.  And as they have done for millennia, buffalo will follow their ancient migratory instincts and leave the snowy high-country for lower elevation habitat.  But, instead of finding the life-sustaining grasses they need to survive the hardships of winter, they will cross the imaginary line out of Yellowstone and enter the man-made conflict zone awaiting them in Montana.  First, they will have to dodge the bullets of “hunters” along Yellowstone’s north and west boundary, those who survive will then have to dodge government agents.  If the government and cattle industry have their way, hazing efforts could be much more aggressive this year.

With your help, BFC will be ready to stand in defense of the buffalo, document all actions made against them, and help tell the world their story in our collective effort to bring about positive change.

In 2007 I volunteered at the BFC for 6 months. It was beautiful and intense. This animal and all her relatives will be chased mercilessly for 2-3 months straight. Day in and out. The money being wasted on keeping the buffalo from roaming is unbelievable, but much more enormous is the toll of the absence of buffalo on the North American plains.

I believe the plains should be re-opened to nomadic life ways. The return of the buffalo could nourish the life of millions. Let the Buffalo roam!

So, it has finally happened. I’ve resisted the Urge to WordPress for over 5 years, and now here I am. It’s been a long time coming, really. We’ll see if we can’t have some fun.

General themes you’re likely to see on this blog:

• Research entries on new media practices.

• Howto articles on overcoming hurdles. The tradition of the open source community to spread that stuff around will be fully embraced here. (Probable tags: gnu, ruby, waves, archlinux, git, xmonad, gimp, wordpress, vista x64, .. )

• Film/music/performance/art/conference/etc reviews. Looking forward to some new media events in Europe this year, both as part of my graduate courses at UvA and through the underground here in the streets of Amsterdam.

• Pages for things like media, papers, software, exterior project links, etc.

• Prose describing personal experiences of possible potential interest to family, friends, and other cybxr agx organisms.

And of course all sorts of other bits of fun and unexpected awesome.