How can we create digital products and services that people can—and do—trust? It’s a question that’s integral to our work at IF. It’s becoming increasingly important as people become more aware of the possible consequences of data being recorded, joined up and used by organisations.
15th April 2019
Gabriele de Seta on China’s digital entrepreneurs, infrastructures and platforms.
A vast majority of current discussions about digital platforms and their infrastructural ambitions focuses on the “Big Four” that are often earmarked under the acronym GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). In his Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek describes how these companies share the common trait of having transformed a single product (a search engine, a smartphone, a social networking service, an e-commerce website) into a platform offering free services and capable of generating revenue through the exploitation of network effects and the extraction of user data. In the Chinese context, the GAFA companies are commonly mirrored by the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) trio of local platform companies that currently dominates the national Internet market. Similarly developed into platforms from pre-existing web search, e-commerce or entertainment services, the BAT companies have consolidated their dominance through acquisitions and investments in domains ranging from big data and AI to logistics and finance.
Benjamin H. Bratton has extensively theorized “the Stack” as a model useful to navigate the vertical overlaying of infrastructures and platforms with the geopolitics of informational and national sovereignty. For Bratton, the Stack is the result of various sorts of planetary-scale computation, coming together to form an “accidental megastructure” that is also a new architecture of sovereignty. While Bratton rubrics the future configurations of this accidental megastructure under the looming image of a “Black Stack,” Tiziana Terranova proposes to reimagine a new nomos of the post-capitalist commons as a “Red Stack,” composed by the three transversal and nonlinear levels of virtual money, social networks, and bio-hypermedia.
The Stack model, along with its speculative mutations that attempt to prototype planetary-scale computation through color gradations (the opaque black of cybernetic black boxes, the sanguine red of post-autonomist politics), offers glimpses of sociotechnical assemblages to come and design futures that might never be. And yet, by grounding their claims in a largely Euro-American experience of infrastructural imperialism and platform capitalism, these formulations overlook a geopolitical site where a different sort of Stack is already consolidating its interlocking layers: China.
Extremely interesting stuff // JAY
Notes: 3
EXPLORING EVERYDAY FUTURES
Questions concerning everyday futures are worthwhile since work on the future of, for example, the home, cities, energy, and mobility make implicit assumptions about the everyday. Although such assumptions may have far-reaching implications, they are not often addressed. Challenging the assumptions underlying visions of the future from a wide range of disciplines can help to articulate the various values, interests, and materiality’s that inform the ways in which ‘futures’ are constructed. A focus on the everyday allows a perspective on the various ways in which constructed futures are intertwined with societies, and how the latter are shaped accordingly. Thus, questions concerning the impact of future visions, such as exclusion, reproduction of vested interests, and inequalities, can be addressed.
Userscapes: The Ambiguous Agent in a Computational Paradigm - Genevieve Costello
In the proliferation of computational technologies the user emerges as an increasingly necessary subject-position to traditional regimes of modernity/globalization. The notion of user is no longer a design or platform affordance, but a bio and geopolitical position. Benjamin Bratton’s conceptualization of the User Layer put forward in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2016) conceives of the user currently as an extension of traditional geopolitical systems (nation-state/economy). I’d like to use Bratton’s theoretical framework, which distinguishes the computational reality of the Stack from the felt experience of it, to further differentiate the tangible and ethical elements of user experience. I argue that when the management of multiple user identities and political positions within popular online platforms are treated as the normative politics of everyday life, it diffuses user agency by dissociating individuals from computational structures.1 It is crucial to reconceive being in relationship to the force of computation, unique to the contemporary moment’s technological affordances at local and planetary scale. I propose the idea of userscapes to help alternatively orient the user as an agent within an unfolding era of computation and infrastructure, rather than the subject of interface narratives..
(via Userscapes: The Ambiguous Agent in a Computational Paradigm)
Benjamin Bratton. Design, Philosophy and A.I. 2016
Bratton’s current projects focus on the political geography of cloud computing, massively- granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of ecological governance. In his most recent book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015), Bratton asks the question, “What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities?” and in response, offers the proposition “that smart grids, cloud computing, mobile software and smart cities, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and other types of apparently unrelated planetary-scale computation can be viewed as forming a coherent whole—an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new geopolitical architecture.”
VIA European Graduate School Video Lectures
Benjamin H. Bratton. The Question of ‘Sensing’. 2016
The Question of 'Sensing’. Public open lecture for the for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland and Valetta/Malta. June 30 2016.
Image taken from the essay Colonising the Clouds :: Infrastructure Territory and The Geopolitics of The Stacks
“Here we have the vertical superimposition of two possibly incommensurate logics of geography and governance. One, a globally distributed, cognitive capitalist, NSA-protected polis predicated on data rationalization, and two, a geographically circumscribed central command which sees the Cloud as an extension of the body of the State. The topological difference between the two makes them incommensurate, and the friction caused by the grinding of these two “layers,” each demanding acquiescence of the other, will characterize the geopolitics of the coming decades.”
The Cloud, the State, and the Stack: Metahaven in Conversation with Benjamin Bratton
Apologies for the shameless self linking to my talk at Theorizing The Web 2014 #ttw14 but i thought it appropriate considering the previous post on here // JAY
As Previously mentioned The StackOn Software and Sovereignty is now out on MIT Press http://stacktivism.tumblr.com/post/139741280990
The extensive focus on material modes of transmitting ideology in Mr. Robot suggests that the contradictions that frustrate Eliot — and by extension the majority of scholars, activists, and people interested in revolution—come from misunderstanding how the various capacities of The Stack are able to transmit contradictory signals that nevertheless mutually reinforce platform sovereignty. Who are we? Why do we not only accept, but desire oppression? Mr. Robot suggests that there is no one answer to either of these questions — but by tracing the various signals encoded on the many layers ofThe Stack, we can start to envision how desire and belief are transmitted, sensed, understood, acted-upon, codified, and performed. We can also engage in targeted disruptions of these signals, but may have a much harder time destroying the entire system. Ideology must not only be understood as semiotic (“why do we desire our own oppression”), it must also be understood in terms of its material mechanisms (“how are we oppressed”). As Bratton argues, no one person controls the mechanisms of The Stack. Rather, like so many signals on a switchboard, ideologies move along path dependencies, exist for a specific duration, are caught in feedback loops and interference patterns and perhaps mistaken for noise.
The Platform Sovereignties of Mr. Robot // https://medium.com/@RogerWhitson/the-platform-sovereignties-of-mr-robot-e41b05f17ebc#.riro7vjgr
Publishing Critical Thought: Media, Infrastructure, Content Stream Organiser: Matt Mahon
This stream takes as its focus the relationship between critical thought and its conditions of production. How do the conditions under which critical work is produced affect the nature of critique itself? What forms of production of research (and what publishing methods) are recognised as critical, and under what conditions? How might the medium in which critique is produced itself be critiqued as form? Three simultaneous gestures point towards a method for working through these questions. From within recent media theory (and more specifically software studies), the question of the role of the digital (or at least of the assumption of a divide between the digital and the analogue) can point towards an analysis of the role that the production of knowledge plays in creating and framing critical thought. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s (2011) analysis of the role played by early computing in the rise of both practices of governmentality and its Foucauldian critique is key here. So are, among many others, Tiziana Terranova’s work on information, Mackenzie Wark’s call for analysis of the vectoral class, Nathan Jurgenson’s rejection of digital dualism. Equally, advances in critical work around publishing, and indeed critical methods of publishing, can lead to an interrogation of the framing of the critical and suggest possible alternatives – from the Elsevier boycott to the rise and fall of AAAAARG.ORG, how does refusal to participate manifest? What about attempts to release work differently, for example the Hybrid Publishing Lab’s glossary, or massively open journal projects like the Open Humanities Press and the Open Library for the Humanities? We might equally look to the custodians.online manifesto, or Ramus Svensson and Hanna Nilsson’s call for a publishing model based on the blockchain. Lastly, work around the infrastructure of the digital can be linked to these discussions (collection/ curation projects like Stacktivism or the New Aesthetic, or Benjamin Bratton’s work on the Cloud). We could think about the role of the library and its intensifying relationship to digital asset management. Consider the move towards iterative outputs of research (versioning and DOIs, and the growing importance of the simultaneous publishing of data with articles). What about the relationship between a book and its digital alternatives? What is the relationship between the stack, data and research outputs? What is the relationship between curation and critique? What constitutes a library or an archive under these conditions? Who is included in the bright new future? What forms of critical work are privileged? In what respects are the novelties of new media captured by the neoliberal institutions to which we already belong? What might be the effect of a move away from the form of the journal article as the paradigmatic academic product? What is the status of authorship and authority without REFable outputs? Why has the term ‘algorithm’ become so ubiquitous? This stream welcomes proposals that address these and related issues.
Proposals to present or showcase critical alternatives to traditional publishing models are especially welcome.
Stole this whole text form this PDF // http://londoncritical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/LCCT-CFP-2016-2.pdf - YALL SHOULD SEND SOMETHING IN - JAY
‘Is the state, the market or the platform better designed to tax the interfaces of everyday life? A false choice to be sure, but it raises the question of where to even locate the site of governance as such. What would we mean by the public, if not that which is constituted by those interfaces? Where else should governance, meant in the most plastic and necessary sense of deliberate composition of durable systems and conditions, subjects and mediations live if not there? Not in some obtuse chain of parliamentary representation nor some delusional monadic individual unit, nor some sad little community consensus powered by moral hectoring. But instead in the immanent, immediate exactly present interfaces that cleave and bind us. Where should sovereignty reside if not in what binds and cleaves us? Not derived from each of us individually, but drawn by what is in between us.’
Benjamin Bratton + Metahaven at the Berlin Transmediale 2014.
Reblogged From sonlapham454-blog
US claims it has rightful access to data stored on servers anywhere in the world
“That is a position that Microsoft and other companies contend is wrong. The companies maintain that the enforcement of US law stops at the US border.”
"Judge mulls contempt charges in Microsoft’s e-mail privacy fight with US - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/judge-mulls-contempt-charges-in-microsofts-e-mail-privacy-fight-with-us/
The government asked the judge to hold Microsoft in contempt.
“If Microsoft refuses to comply with the order, then the Government respectfully requests that the Court issue a contempt order that would, in turn, be a properly appealable final order, which could be stayed on consent pending appeal,” the government wrote.
The judge’s original July ruling endorsed the US government’s position that it should be able to access the world’s servers. “It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information,” Preska ruled.
That is a position that Microsoft and other companies contend is wrong. The companies maintain that the enforcement of US law stops at the US border.
THATS RIGHT “The companies maintain that the enforcement of US law stops at the US border.”
More at DataGuidance ::
David Howard, Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post, ‘The U.S. government doesn’t have the power to search a home in another country, nor should it have the power to search the content of email stored overseas.'
http://www.dataguidance.com/dataguidance_privacy_this_week.asp?id=2308
#superjurisdiction // JAY
It’s these “ghost effects” that EVP practice may now set their sights upon, if it indeed seeks pastures beyond vocal occultism. And where to look?
EVP should seek areas where ‘ghost effect’ hauntings may transpire, sites of contestation which perhaps foreshadow the breakdown of the post Bicameral mind. I believe such sites can be gleaned via the work conducted on ‘Stacks’ and “Stacktivism’. In said discourse, “‘The Stack’ designates “the chain of interconnected activities and technologies of current and historical significance that spread far beyond the individual” – @thejaymo. It affords the necessary agency to technology, and retains a concern for the subjects entanglement with increasingly ubiquitous technologies. In the stack, subjects become Users. This is an area where the writings of Benjamin Bratton are essential reading. Bratton likewise deploys the language of individuation, and his latest piece on the Black Stack makes a case, to this authors wide eyes, for several contemporary circumstances which one might identify as correlative to the Bicameral Breakdown milennia ago. Bratton’s account of the Black Stack, a conceptual edifice yet-to-come (“not the platform we have, but the platform that might be), treats the User as one of 7 infrastructural layers. In so doing Bratton teases out the nature of existing within vertical stacks and traditional nation states (whose horizontally delimited territories operate perpendicular to the Stack). Furthermore, Bratton identifies the geopolitical complexities of stack existence as entailing crisis for those who inhabit the position of the User:
“the Stack (and the Black Stack) stage the death of the User in one sense: they do so because they bring the multiplication and proliferation of other kinds of nonhuman Users (including sensors, financial algorithms, and robots from nanometric to landscape scale), any combination of which one might enter into a relationship with as part of a composite User.” – Bratton
These composite users, constituting a disposition perhaps better suited to thriving in the contemporary techno-social landscape, echo technological affordances pulling forth the bodies latent proclivity towards parallelism, just as Rotman speculated might happen.
“The position of the User then maps only very incompletely onto any one individual body. From the perspective of the platform, what looks like one is really many, and what looks like many may only be one” – Bratton
In framing it thusly Bratton re-articulates the problematic how does the subject cope with ‘living singularity in the face of multiplicity’. The ‘linear self’ individuation made perfect sense against a backdrop of a passing epoch of technology (writing). This triumph was remarkable in how it suppressed capacities within the human brain-body-mind system that were amenable to non-sequential modes of parsing reality. The question of how do we maintain singularity in the face of multiplicity is inverted, begging instead the quandry of ‘why persist in ‘sequential-self’ individuation’?
Bratton considers that “the neoliberal subject position makes absurd demands on people as Users… (and) elaborate schizophrenias already take hold in our early negotiation of these composite User positions.” Speaking of schizophrenias in this way is at once indebted to Deleuzean philosophy (and its consideration of late capitalist drives) and redolent of the outliers of individuation which prompted this essays investigation. The sum of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, surplus processes which the existing common individuation never need buffer, present themselves as cookie-cutter individuations which suddenly seem more appropriate to our current context – as indeed the Aeon essay on influencing machines noted. Moving in parallel with Bratton’s rigourous analysis spins out the stakes of seeking alternate individuations into the shifting, crisis riven, geopolitical stakes of our contemporary times – tumult that may usher forth new individuations. Many of the issues at stake in Bratton’s discourse are topics taken up and engaged by critical internet|digital artists, including the keen minds in the orbit of Stacktivism. EVP as praxis, process or methodology, can segue into this field of interventions through its powerful phenomenological link to historical alternate individuations – voice hearing and the posited prior register of consciousness that it once instilled.
Echoes of Individuation: The Black Stack, Bicameral Minds & EVP - by @quadrophobiac
LONG QUOTE FROM A #LONGREAD PIECE ON ELECTRONIC VOICE PHENOMENA. IT IS FANTASTIC. SO MANY JUICY IDEAS IN THERE TO GET MY/YOUR HEAD AROUND - perfect reading for a bank holiday sunday. read the whole thing! // Jay
This clip is 2 years old, but society still hasn’t reacted appropriately to the shift that Benjamin Bratton puts forward in this Q&A he did for Activate New York.
Even though it is widely accepted that the nature of the kind of resources he mentions (both the commons and the products of society) are changing, the ways these changes are addressed are highly unequal.
Where as numerous organization exist that actively combat the free distribution of the products of society, the freedom of natural resources is increasingly contested by (supra)national entities that seek to gain from them.
“One of the interesting things about digital technology is the way in which the things that used to be exchangeable assets (music, film, software and even political records) have now become in a way, because they are digital, something that is in essence unownable. They have become part of the commonwealth again.
Where as instead of something that was commonly owned now has become capitalized, there in fact the opposite has happened. There was something that was capitalized now in turn has become part of the commonwealth again.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGgcZ08HBgs
“You can’t hit what you can’t see, you can’t grab what you can’t touch. You can’t critically engage with technoculture and its infrastructure if you’re unable to unravel its threads, run your fingers through the seams, visualize its jurisdiction and weigh its influence on everyday life. #stacktivism is a conversation about those hidden technological and social infrastructures and the conventional metaphors that mask them: the cloud, the smooth and playful industrial design, the invisible interface. It has already spawned a conference earlier this year and on this week’s show we’ll have a quick look at some of the important texts being circulated about these vital backstage elements of our contemporary lives. Welcome back.”
The Weekest Links : #stacktivism
There was an absolutely fantastic piece on #stacktivism on a blog over at stressfm.
It is one of the clearest write ups of the thoughts and concerns that are related too and contained within the conversation I coined as being #stacktivism.
I urge everyone interested in this topic to head over and check it out
I am sincerely grateful to whomever wrote this. Please do get in touch - thejaymo x
‘Instead of viewing the various scales of emergent ubiquitous computing technologies as a haphazard collection of individual processes, devices and standards (RFID, cloud storage, augmented reality, smart cities, conflict minerals, etc.), it is more illuminating to model them as components of a larger, comprehensive, meta-technology. The Stack is planetary-scale computation understood as a megastructure. The term “stack” is borrowed from the TCP/IP or OSI layered model of distributed network architecture. At the scale of planetary computation, The Stack is comprised of 7 interdependent layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Network, Address, Interface, User. In this, it is an attempt to conceive of the technical and geopolitical structures of planetary computation as a “totality.”’
B. Bratton
Posted before we know. but such a great interview
