Torrent Raiders

Torrent Raiders is an experimental game project by USC IMD student Aaron Meyers:

Torrent Raiders is a dynamic network visualization realized through the idioms and aesthetics of arcade-style video games. Driven in real-time by the activity of bit torrent swarms, Torrent Raiders takes place on the ad-hoc networks created by bit torrent users. Torrent Raiders playfully addresses issues of domestic surveillance and intellectual property by putting players in the role of a mercenary copyright enforcer, encouraging them to capture evidence against peers on torrents in order to collect bounties. Players assist in the distributed surveillance of these torrent swarms, sending information to a central server where it will be used to drive further visualizations of this information. As a dynamic visualization exploring privacy, piracy and surveillance, Torrent Raiders challenges Internet users, content pirates and government spooks to examine their allegiances and mistrust their computer connections. (torrentraiders)

Relevance: Galloway, Drucker -- code/network visualization, context-shifting etc.

David Golumbia, buzzkiller

I'm excited about all the new forms of politics, art and mischief that participatory technoculture seems to promise. I can get genuinely pumped-up about Kurzweilian "singularities," the Planetary Society and the Long Now Foundation. Sometimes I actually think things could be turning around for humanity.

Of course, there's plenty of reason for pessimism. Even the most fundamental threats to our existence as a species go unchallenged. Still, I like to hold out hope that we'll come up with ways to deal with the converging crises that confront us. I'm willing to run with the idea that the incredible affordances of the Internet and ubiquitous computing, while they are undeniably the fruits of a neoliberal elite hell-bent on solidifying their grip on the mechanisms of power through whatever means necessary, actually will have an empowering and emancipatory and ultimately positive effect, an emergent effect with assymmetric consequences unanticipated by the forces of Capital -- a kind of upbeat blowback...

To uberpessimist David Golumbia, such thinking is wrong on two counts: first, the world is fucked, full stop. There's no hope, just pack it in and roll over. Capital will inexorably leverage the immense communication and participation potential of the Internet and social media to its own advantage, using that power organize, mobilize and enslave. Eventually we'll all end up with chips in our brains, consuming the products of the cannibalistic corporations to which we have subsumed our souls. We as critics must identify this problem and write about it -- for which we will score points in the afterlife.

Second, trying to do anything about it will only make it worse. Golumbia might argue that even just calling the Internet the Internet reveals the depth of one's imbrication in the "feeling and fact of mastery" that technology provides. Put another way, computationalism does not belong to us; rather, we belong to it. Any enthusiasm about technology's promise is self-deceived nonsense that only serves to strengthen the hand of capitalism:

Among the oddest but most telling of the cultural changes accompanying the computer revolution is the one that emerges out of the late I960s social movements, in which a significant segment of youthful intelligentsia embraced the computer as a revolutionary technology that might transform the world along some of the same lines suggested by the counterculture in general (see Turner 2006 for an especially pointed history). In retrospect we can see that this has to be one of the most successful instances of co-optation in the history of social movements; for despite their appearance of transformative power, it is the ability of the computer to expand the feeling and fact of mastery that is most compelling about it. Much like their extended experiments with the profoundly capitalist medium of rock music and profoundly self-gratifying mind-altering substances-visible especially as the supposedly cognitively liberating psychedelic substances gave way to destructive and strongly isolating substances like alcohol, cocaine, and heroin-the counterculture was unable to escape the capitalist and hierarchical strand of dominant American culture it thought itself to be resisting. In the end, this revolution became about exactly the individualistic power it said it was resisting, in no small part via the embracing of a technology that wears its individualist expansionism on its sleeve. (153)

This text is super-depressing and seems to leave no room for optimism about a future that, like it or not, is going to have a lot to do with computational systems and network culture. While Golumbia does a good job of dishing out some straight talk about the horrific mobility and insidious reach of "individualist expansionism" and the vectors along which the computationalist worldview transmits itself, something really important seems to be missing here. Maybe it's just that Golumbia's overall vision seems a little angsty-adolescent. I mean, the world is a fucking mess, yes, absolutely -- but come on, David, don't give up!

OVERHEARD

"Is that...paper?"

one person's surprise/disgust that another person had printed out his readings as opposed to just reading them on the screen, at USC's IML building. Dead media phobia?

Surfing vs. Walking

Frederic Gros just published a book called "Marcher, une philosophie", in which he explores "walking" as a process fundamental to (critical) thinking. The walk helps one think the world not only through its physicality (the sweat, the oxygen) but also the inability to write anything down as ideas go through the walker's head. If even the library is seen in this context as a static environment antithetical to the philosophical advantages of walking, then what else do we "lose" when we conceptualize/gather/shape/build knowledge online?

It is true that we could think of surfing the Web as a virtual equivalent to the physical walk, but not when it comes to the physiological responses triggered by physical movement. Perhaps most importantly, what kinds of associations and concepts escape us when we can so quickly log, jot down, categorize and archive our ideas on the computer?

In Drucker's "Graphesis and Code", for example, she mentions Peter Campus's digitally manipulated "Wild Leaves" (1995) and "Alice and the Fairies" (1917). If Drucker had inserted the images themselves either onto the text or as hyperlinks, what would we lose as thinkers faced with the de facto visual equivalent of what she is speaking of? What conceptual avenues would we be shutting down by not being able to invent these images, to basically "fail" to see them?

OVERHEARD

"You're reading a physical newspaper?? How refreshing..."

Overheard at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy building.

Code and Materiality: Strandbeest & Mechanical Computing

Johanna Drucker's discussion of code and materiality ("Code is not an immaterial ideal") got me thinking about Theo Jansen's Strandbeest project:



Jansen's Strandbeests are the product of an iterative programming process that completely collapses the supposed boundary between materiality and code. The intricate interlocking wooden components of these lumbering giants constitute simple circuits, loops and if/then statements that govern the way the "animals" move and respond to their environment; like a traditional software designer, the Strandbeests' "programmer" deploys certain arrangments of form, sees what works and what doesn't (beta testing), then "re-codes" to make the animals more likely to survive and prosper. Jansen himself considers his Strandbeests a kind of ALife project wherein new forms are "evolved" and the "winning codes multiply." Physical computing projects like this (and this is clearly one of the most radical of its kind, given that the Strandbeests use no electronics whatsoever) are provocative examples of Drucker's contention that "form is constitutive of information, not its transparent presentation." (139)

Leaving magical Strandbeest beach aside for the moment, I wonder how other non-electronic digital systems complicate or compliment some of the thinking we've been doing this week about code and protocol. In particular, I'm curious to see if moving around or beyond our contemporary notion of what constitutes computation might address some of the ambiguities Mei identified regarding commonly-held definitions of the digital and the virtual. Charles Babbage's famous Difference Engine (a programmable mechanical computer from 1847), Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner, clockwork astrolabes like the incredible Antikythera Mechanism or the lesser-known but perhaps coolest-of-all pocket-sized Curta Calculator each exhibit very different kinds of graphesis (or maybe we should coin a new word here: antikemenesis?) -- where is the "code" when it cannot be separated from the mechanical processes that articulate it?

Uncle Databanks and the Information Monopoly

'The Cultural Logic of Computation, Golumbia's work, makes some key points that I find extremely refreshing in the face of the overwhelming optimism felt about Web 2.0 and the potentially liberating methods of information technology. The internet specifically and computation in general are granted the seemingly miraculous power to permit the flow of 'information' as if it were a pure substance, some sort of Platonic ideal 'thought matter' that simply flows, unimpeded, sorted and analyzed but somehow essentially unaltered by the processes that transmit, parse and collect it. The heavily Marxist critique leveled by Golumbia is not without considerable merit: what could better display the shift from Commodity-Money-Commodity to Money-Commodity-Money than the transformation of the interior 'Commodity' into a non-material fragment of information? Materiality does not disappear, but it is made substitutable and therefor rendered invisible. The 'infinite space of possibility' produced by digital space is sustained by material realities that, through their processing by data-mining algorithms, become subject to the abstraction of information capital.
The matter of proprietary tools seems to emerge as the central problem in this dynamic, the remarkable fact that, even as information increases in volume and the methods to parse it become more powerful and focused, the tools for parsing and the access to the information is held firmly in the hands of a select few. Monopolization is the demon here, a demon that is even harder to notice because it operates in the opacity that the supposed 'magical' properties of the internet produce. The result is panoptic, to borrow Foucaldian terminology. We are subjects of the gaze of a structuring knowledge that we cannot ourselves return, and our complacency is bought through convenience.
The hope that I would hold out rests in those methods of information production and distribution that are successful but seem unable to produce profit. Monopolization of data mining techniques is maintained only if it is seen as relevant to the creation of monetary gain. Community sites, maintained due to dedication and contribution, possess a far greater chance ot realizing at least some of the utopic dreams Golumbia so effective critiques. That these sites may well survive because of expendable income and time from comfortably middle-class capitalist/consumer subjects is something to be taken carefully into account.
However, the remarkable reproducibility of data structures means that proprietary information technology is can fall victim to the methods of distribution that it relies upon to operate. It would be crazy to try expect an independent consumer to acquire and analyze the mechanical means of production of a large company. However, it would be possible to copy and distribute propriety software; it's just made very difficult thanks to legal protections and corporate security. Add onto this the fact that it would require extensive knowledge of code to comprehend the reproduced system, and enormous corporate holdings to employ it properly, it at least makes possible the means by which to at least perceive the structure of the game you are forced to play. The plague contains its own cure, as is so often the case, but it is dependent on a comprehension of code itself, something more extensively dealt with in the other readings.