Plutonian Striptease VII: Florian Cramer

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Florian Cramer’s background is comparative literature and art history with a focus on experimental arts, media, poetics and aesthetics. From 2006 to 2010, he was responsible for the Networked Media Master programme of the Piet Zwart Institute. Since 2008, he works as an applied research professor (Dutch: “lector”) supervising the research programme Communication in a Digital Age of the Piet Zwart Institute.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
I see two major reasons: One, social networks have popularized classical Internet communication with accessible interfaces. So finally, everyone – including journalists – understands Internet as more than just an electronic distribution channel, and has also been cured from the “cyberspace”, “hypermedia” and “virtual reality” memes. But as a result, functionality and communication culture that has always been a core feature of the Internet is falsely being perceived as new, as a “social media revolution”.

The second reason is widespread job anxiety among the makers of the traditional news media, and those who indirectly live on the food chain of classical mass media production. Research suggests that younger people devote most of their media attention to social networks and “Web 2.0″ services. At the same time, nobody except Google and, to a lesser degree, Facebook has figured out a revenue model for them. They help making traditional media marginal, but don’t create equivalent work opportunities for ‘creatives’ – designers, writers, etc. Contrary to the common belief that “social media” brought a shift from centralized one-to-many communication to a decentralized and self-organized model, just the opposite is true in regards to media ownership. A culture of countless local newspapers and TV stations, for example, is being replaced with a few global players in the Internet. The days where filmmakers could live from making MTV video clips, where critics could survive outside academia as newspaper and magazine writers and artists lived from jobs in the advertising industry are almost over. The strong news media coverage of social network mirrors the respective anxiety of the editors.

To explain this a little bit more: On one of our conferences, the German advertiser Marc Schwieger quoted Henry Ford saying that fifty percent of the money he spent for advertising was money flushed down the toilet. Social networks and other Google Ads help people like Ford reaching only the 50% which are the real target group of his company. Since all traditional news and broadcast media economically depend on advertising, the whole industry is shrinking to half its original size as an effect. This streamlining and economic efficiency gain might even justify the dotcom and new economy stock market craze of the late 1990s retroactively. One heavily invests into a new technology only when expecting breakthrough productivity gains, productivity in the economic sense of generated value divided by labor costs. If users create most of your content, if you need designers only once in a while for a template overhaul, and most of your staff consists of software developers and system administrators, this means a radical shift in media professions.

This conversely explains why Apple has become a news media darling, with Steve Job’s press conferences being broadcast as breaking news. Apple’s consumer devices and services successfully sell (and thus finance) traditional mass media industry content: music, movies, TV series, now also magazines. I wouldn’t be surprised if these two competing models, user-generated social media and mass media content sold over online services, will continue to coexist, and if social networks will partly have been a hype of the early 2010s. They will probably continue to be the media for younger people in school and college, but even those may move towards paid editorial media with age. It boils down, after all, to a question of having no income and a lot of time for Facebook versus having an income but no time. A Facebooker/Twitterer/blogger lifestyle is simply unsustainable for anyone with a life, a job, or both. If my scenario is right, then social media will continue to be socially powerful but economically marginal.

(2) In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
As said, mostly in interface design and accessibility. If you analyze a service such as Facebook, you can see that practically all its social communication functions already existed, and were commonly used, in the multiuser terminal operating systems of the 1970s and 1980s – Unix, Vax, VM/CMS and others: commands to see which other users were online at the same time, mail messages and chats (‘talk’ in Unix), user status messages (‘finger’), sharing files (via setting file permissions) etc. etc. This, however, required physical access to a university or company server and expert knowledge of terminal-based operating systems. So only a very small elite of people knew and used these technologies. Dial-up BBSes, which provided similar functions for anyone with a home computer and a telephone line, had a similar user experience. In the 1990s, the classical World Wide Web primarily provided an interface for reading pages, but was harder to use for publishing stuff yourself. Pages needed to be coded in HTML and uploaded using external services like FTP, group communication needed to resort to other services like E-Mail mailing lists, newsgroups and IRC chat.

With the availability of always-on broadband Internet, newer generation web browsers and more complex HTML features, it became possible to integrate all these functions into web sites and use the browser as a one-stop interface. This way, the web was effectively turned from an electronic library into a user-friendly operating system. The earliest manifestations were web forums, auction sites, blogs and Wikis. If there’s genius in Facebook, then in the absorption of all these media into one with a relatively clean and straightforward user interface.

The idea of the online community as a social medium, on the other hand, is anything but new. Classical examples include The Well in the late 1980s, AOL, Compuserve and Digitale Stad Amsterdam in the early 1990s. Facebook for sure has taken this idea to a new level – but in the end it simply is what AOL would have morphed into if it had been run by more competent managers and developers. Data-mining was not yet as advanced in the 1990s, and privacy issues were less debated, but structurally everything was already in place back then.

(3) Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
It is your responsibility because it is your own stupidity if you share information that you do not want everyone to know. In this respect, posting something in a “social medium” is no different from, for example, publishing something in a newspaper or in a book. “Social media” services can only be blamed for the illusions of intimacy and privacy they create, making people falsely believe that they are only talking to their friends. But the same problem exists with E-Mail since unencrypted E-Mail can be read by anyone with access to the network nodes in between the sender and the recipient, and by the provider of your web mail service if you use one.

(4) Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
I avoid services and software for which I need to click an EULA as much as possible. – Good news is that in most juridictions, these EULAs are legally void. Unfortunately, there has not been enough effort to actively bring them down in court.

(5) Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
No, because others are aggregating information about me that I can neither control nor revoke. I have not been amused in the past, for example, that pictures of me and my partner taken in a private social context ended up on Flickr and Facebook, marked up with my name, and posted by people who falsely think of themselves as critical media activists. I had a full-fledged social relations profile on Facebook before I ever became a member because people had been careless enough to upload their gmail or Hotmail address books to the site, feeding Facebook’s social graph algorithm. And these examples do not even include hidden corporate and governmental information gathering. It would be naive to assume that company and government databases don’t routinely leak, with information being traded to third parties. The interesting perversity of the so-called social networks is that intelligence gathering has turned from high-paid agency work into volunteer self-surveillance. It was rather naive by the Chaos Computer Club to call the German government “Stasi 2.0″ given that Facebook’s database and social graph really is the user-generated, Web 2.0 version of an intelligence database.

(6) How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
A good example of an information collection that was at first harmless but soon gained entirely new significance were European public censuses in the 1920s and early 1930s which tracked people’s religious affiliations.

(7) How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
I only use online services for public information.

(8) What do you think the information gathered is used for?
First of all marketing, secondly governmental intelligence, thirdly for a black market of insurance companies, banks and corporate employers to assess the contract risks of an individual or a group, plus foreign intelligence services and employer’s competitors seeking clues for bribing or blackmailing individuals or finding out trade secrets; and finally, to criminals for finding profitable targets. For this, one doesn’t necessarily need data leaks, but can work very well with public data. Thanks to camera manufacturer tags and no also geo location tags in digital photographs, Flickr, for example, is an excellent resource for spotting homes of people who own expensive photography equipment.

(9) Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
If I describe it here, I would provide more online clues and links to the respective information.

(10) What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
The answer to question (6) hints to the historical worst case so far.

(11) Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
Given how rudimentary and error-prone semantic pattern recognition algorithms and other artificial intelligence algorithms are, the above is rather good news.

(12) Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
The game could succeed in this goal if it works as a simulation of the whole within the constrained, user-visible realm of a social Internet service. It could demand from its players to create data mining schemes under the guise of friendly services that affect the other players. Whoever succeeds in extracting the most valuable information wins the game, just like in real life.

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Plutonian Striptease VI: Marc Garrett

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Marc Garrett is Co-director and co-founder, with artist Ruth Catlow of the Internet arts collectives and communities – furtherfield.org, furthernoise.org, netbehaviour.org, also co-founder and co-curator/director of the gallery space HTTP Gallery in London, UK. Co-curating various contemporary Media Arts exhibitions, projects nationally and internationally.

Net artist, media artist, curator, writer, street artist, activist, educationalist and musician. Emerging in the late 80’s from the streets exploring creativity via agit-art tactics. Using unofficial, experimental platforms such as the streets, pirate radio such as the locally popular ‘Savage Yet Tender’ alternative broadcasting 1980’s group, net broadcasts, BBS systems, performance, intervention, events, pamphlets, warehouses and gallery spaces. In the early nineties, was co-sysop (systems operator) for a while with Heath Bunting on Cybercafe BBS, dedicated to arts, technology and hacking.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
I find this quite a complex question. There are a few reasons why social networks are often reported more readily and regularly represented by traditional media news outlets. The main reason can be put down to social media’s popularity in everyday culture, connecting with people’s everyday habits and behaviours through different forms of networked, communication gadgets and tools. The massification of easy interaction, demanding hardly any thought in how to use the technologically, on-line networked and mobile interfaces, makes them perfect conduits for distributed information and communication.

There has been much media noise about activists getting recognition for their causes using social networks.
In June 2009, the Iranian government tried to halt (and succeeded in the end) on-line and off-line dissent, whilst protesters exploited every avenue of communication to get their immediate situations seen by the world outside. Many posted videos taken by mobile phones of the violence taking place, to different social networking platforms such as YouTube. Then traditional news corporations took these videos as part of their news packages and reported on the troubles occurring in Tehran, Iran. The most visited tweets for regular updates was ‘persiankiwi’, whose tweets were displayed on the official website of Mirhossein Mousavi, the former prime minister who declared that his election victory had been stolen from him. “we must go – dont know when we can get Internet – they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names – now we must move fast”, was one of the many comments posted on this Twitter site. Also many images of Iran’s street demonstrations were uploaded to the photographic network of Flickr.

The artist Deena DeNaro, created an interesting ’short’ video piece in the style of ‘Ad-Busters’ Magazine and ‘the Yes Men’, called ‘Reversing the Wave’. As a critique of Nokia’s decision to offer Iran the technological ability to monitor its own citizens during the protests. DeNaro’s ‘Subvertisement’ film proposes a “Brand Identity Correction” by bringing “Nokia’s brand identity closer in alignment to its actions…”. DeNaro’s piece questions Nokia’s unethical stance placing “profits above privacy and basic human rights.” It was selected for the MoFilm competition for the Cannes Lions TV Advertising Festival 2010, where the brief was to produce an innovative 60 second advertisement for Nokia. In the end, it was withdrawn from the competition.[1]

The powerful human stories told from the streets, governmental and corporate attempts to restrict their freedoms and artists and activists cultural hacks naturally draw attention to these social networks.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
With the emergence of what is now called web 2.0 we saw the dying off of user created web-pages and self-built platforms for sharing information and interacting with each other. This led to a simplification and homogenization of interfaces and in turn limited the ways in which people could communicate and collaborate with each other. Instead of creating their own social spaces they played those created by others (most commonly corporations who stand to profit from harvesting their data).

Mobile technologies are now starting to dominate the experience of networked interaction and some fear that the Internet (as an open and free public space) will be left behind. Since the iPhone the consumer class and business class has incorporated as part of their habitual everyday experience, a new form of receiving and sharing information whether it be from their social or business networks or the latest national and international news sources. At the same time information and social interactions are scaled down; more detailed and contextual information is not as accessible within these more limiting interfaces.

Let’s face it, it’s all about business and as we have learned over and over again, this is what really matters over humane, social values. How human content with deeper engagement survives this depends on the imaginations of those out there and how they challenge, critique and develop technologies in the future.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Furtherfield has a policy where subscribers/users/collaborators are in total control of their own data, they can delete it all if they wish. We do not own their content – they do.

There are (of course) various issues relating to the uploading of data to social networks. Firstly, communication by everyday people on the Internet with blogs and popular social networks has created a social shift in that there is now less distance between work and leisure. Our sense of privacy is changing fast too. We hear of employers checking up on what their workers are saying about them on-line. I personally know of one individual who was taken to task at an interview because the interviewers noted that they had openly called their x-boss a twat on Facebook. Organizations now ask their workers to act with caution when using these platforms. Reminding them what they say or share about themselves, the company or the people they work with; can have an effect on the reputation of an organization, its public image and status.

There is a danger as people negotiate this change in public/private identity that they will become too self-conscious in sharing their own ideas and life experience. There are serious issues concerning how mentally vapid and shallow our societies will become if everyone self-censors according both to the lowest common denominator of peer-pressure and according to their career orientated sensibilities – some feel that we are already there. Self-censorship happens a lot in specialized and academic fields, and if this behaviour bleeds across into peoples’ everyday lives, it will become even harder for society to develop authentic dialogue and debate around important social and political issues.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Yes I do read them, sometimes. Most of my interaction on-line or when receiving software has a focus usually relating to my practice. There is always an inner dialogue at work asking myself what the compromise is and what I can get out of it, if agreeing with the terms put forward. Many EULA’s are so pretentious and dictatorial when they lay out their specifications, sometimes one feels that they need to be taught a lesson every now and then. It also depends on the context and whether certain EULA’s have been built or discussed, peer-created by a collaborative group or a community in the first place. It would be interesting to see some imaginative productions involving groups actively and imaginatively going against EULA’s, as a critique.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
A rough idea.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
This relates to a set of really interesting philosophical questions that arose recently in an interview with Heath Bunting on Furtherfield called ‘The Status Project: Data-Mining Our Identities’[2]. “Way back in 1995, there were already various groups and individuals … who were critiquing human relationships whilst exploiting networked technology. Creative people who were not only hacking technology but also hacking into and around everyday life, expanding their skills by changing the materiality, the physical and immaterial through their practice. It was Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) who in 1995 said “Each one of us has files that rest at the state’s fingertips. Education files, medical files, employment files, financial files, communication files, travel files, and for some, criminal files. Each strand in the trajectory of each person’s life is recorded and maintained. The total collection of records on an individual is his or her data body – a state-and-corporate-controlled doppelganger. What is most unfortunate about this development is that the data body not only claims to have ontological privilege, but actually has it. What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself. The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world. What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being. The electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.”

I have been using the Internet since the mid-nineties, have done and said so much that another identity has fully emerged. A different version of me is out there for all to observe, a ‘data body’. A life which can be observed and studied as being deeply involved in networked art, activism and digital communities. If particular individuals see this information and feel uncomfortable about it due to their own socially constructed and limited, conservative perceptions – that’s their problem, not mine. If it goes against me, so be it.

Heath’s own position on this matter is that “Technology is becoming more advanced and the administration of this technology is becoming more sophisticated and soon, every car in the street will be considered and treated as persons, with human rights. This is not a conspiracy to enslave human beings, it is a result of having to develop usable administration systems for complex relationships. Slaves were not liberated because their owners felt sorry for them, slaves were given more rights as a way to manage them more productively in a more technologically advanced society.”

Perhaps we are willing slaves for data-production.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for on-line services, and what do you think the information gathered is used for?
I always feel uneasy when giving out personal information to on-line services. The fact that content posted by people remains on the servers of Murdoch’s MySpace.com and Facebook.com, even after when one has removed the content, is disturbing. Facebook, MySpace and several other social networking websites send data to advertising companies to find consumers’ names and other personal details.

Berlin’s European privacy regulators recently declared their concerns with Google systematically collecting vast amounts of data about its users and their on-line habits. Increasing fears that Google could become a threat to consumer privacy. Although I agree with the privacy regulator’s intentions; I do worry that us humans are always termed under the ’singular’ and limiting category of being ‘consumers’. What about if you are not a consumer, does this make you less valid for civil rights – what if you happen to be a Roma?

Anyway, this data-munching by corporations is the tip of the iceberg. A UK site I have been visiting recently called TH!NK PRIVACY[3], offers free down-loadable materials for individuals and organizations so that they understand the issues around such mass collection of our data more, and what to do about it. I have issues about the site, but it’s a start, “data protection and electronic communications to freedom of information and environmental regulations … independent public body set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.”

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information on-line made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
Whether it is on Facebook or any other social network. I am always suspicious when asked to give details about my age or if I am married or not, and religious or political views. Not because I am worried with what they will do to me personally, but because it is none of their business.

Ironically, most of my real objections have been with situations where I have not been allowed to share relevant information on public platforms. I remember putting up information linking to some of my own earlier works of net art made from 95-96, on Wikipedia. And a certain individual kept deleting my details from the media art and net.art history section. In the end I just gave up. They did not want my information to contradict their more ‘official’, and historically accepted version of net.art. We also had difficulties creating pages about Furtherfield on Wikipedia, which in the end was resolved by various individuals on Furtherfield’s behalf continuously rewriting links and information on there. Because we are from a grass roots background, our information was deemed less valid than someone or a group who was from an institution or a corporate entity, quite frustrating really.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
The Internet being owned and controlled by corporate interests and the gradual eroding of self-made and community made spaces. A shift from active co-creation of social space to passive consumption of culture. Net Neutrality is under imminent threat.

One case scenario which springs to mind is the equivalent of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’. “Kafka thus illustrates a human tendency to submit to authority, even when that authority is dubious. Joseph K. doesn’t question the legitimacy of the case, the courts, or the law system that he has allegedly violated. And it’s important to remember that at no time during the novel does Joseph – or the reader – learn what he is accused of. However, this detail gradually loses importance as the story progresses – a fact that should provoke outrage in both characters and readers, but which ultimately fails to do so.”[4]

For me, it also extends to concerns linking to DNA patenting of life and everything. Fostering biopiracy of indigenous resources, turning life forms into commodities to be used for profit and destroying economic sustainability of developing nations. “We’ve been very concerned about the whole concept that companies can patent life-forms,” says Glenn Wiser of the Center for International Environmental Law. “That’s really troubling, and when it’s done without the informed prior consent of people, it’s much more troubling.”[5]

The world we live in, including ourselves is in danger of becoming nothing more important than data-products. The plants, our land, our food, the air we breath, our ideas, our affections, our (supposed) freedoms, our names, the sky, and of course – everything we are and what we do. It’s all up for grabs…

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written on-line is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
We have had a continuing relationship with machines for a long time now, and they have been extremely useful in offering different possibilities, whether we use them for supporting or killing each other. it’s not machines that worry me. It’s humans, especially those who sacrifice other people’s well being for their own greed and self-interest and imposed lame ideologies.

Can a game raise issues such as on-line privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Yes, I think a game can raise issues about on-line privacy. It would be great to see a game that hacks the very infrastructure of these social networks. Not just a game but an intervention. Not exploiting on-line, everyday users’ activities, but still offering them the choice to be aware of it taking place and if interested, allowed to be a part of it somehow. Imagine a game that in its activity broke down the monetary value of user-based information, giving the data less credibility, changing its ecology. Offering alternative, constructive avenues to move beyond the interface.

References:
[1]Deena DeNaro, Reverse The Wave.
[2]The Status Project: Data-Mining Our Identities, an interview with Heath Bunting.
[3]TH!NK PRIVACY – The Information Commissioner’s Office.
[4]The Trial, by Franz Kafka: Understanding Joseph K.’s Failed Case. Maria Luisa Antonaya.
[5]Lust for Life – ethics of bioprospecting by pharmaceutical companies. Barbara J. Fraser.

Comments: http://pluto.kuri.mu/

Plutonian Striptease V: Geert Lovink

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007).

Social networks are often in the news. Why do you think this is the case?
“Who cares about the internet!” is a phrase I heard kids saying the other day. If only we were there… Internet, the forgotten medium. It is indeed true that I have gotten used to the fact that the internet is overhyped and constantly in news over the past 15 years. Social media is just the latest craze, following terms such as Web 2.0 and the intense reporting around ‘blogging’. We should not forget that part of the urge to report is the fact that these social networking sites are in direct competition with ‘old media’ such as TV and print in terms of the ‘attention economy’ and related advertisement budgets.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
It is fair to say that social networking sites as we know them since the early 2000s did not exist before. What is new is the social aspect (befriending etc.). The micro-blogging aspect of Twitter goes back to the very beginning of the Web and that’s not what makes it so different. The definition of ueberblogger Dave Winer still holds for Twitter and many of the Facebook comments: it is ‘the voice of a person’, a short text grouped around a link. Social media so far is a centralized pointing system (and in that indeed a competitor, timewise, of the Google search engine). So one way of looking at Web 2.0 is from the perspective of ’social search’. We are looking for friends, music we like and latest news. But what is the status of the conversation? Are we lured into that to press more data out of us? Social relations and conversations have become commodities that can be traded–and most people probably don’t mind, just as they didn’t mind to give their opinion in polls. Did we mind if companies found out about the television programs we watched? It’s just the idea of having intimate ‘friends’ and talking to them, which belongs to our private sphere–and this is perhaps where companies like Facebook went one step to far in their attempt to commodify, milk and exploit the social.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Good question. Some call for national governments to regulate this business. Many countries do not have the same tough laws like, for instance, Germany. In most cases you just sign away all your rights when you start using these services. One could also see this as the flip side of the free and open economy. The deal right now is quite simple: we give you access to all these wonderful services free of charge, and in exchange we sell your private data.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
No, sorry. I know I should. But aren’t people like Peter Westenberg from Brussels doing that on our behalf? I hope so. Please, Peter, continue to do the good work on our behalf! I promise to read some thick unreadable German philosophy books in exchange.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
I don’t think so. One of the things I noticed over the past few years is that I am getting less and less on Google if you search for me. I like that. It probably just means that their methods to store documents is getting more refined. Most of the links would have been doubles. I like the idea that it has its ups and downs, like stock prices. What I need to get a better grip on is the amount of video with me in it. I wished I could somehow organize this better but it’s still costly and hard to organize for an individual who is not a film maker or video artist to take matters in your own hand. I don’t mind bad quality perse but as a radio maker I can get quite upset about recordings with a bad audio quality. I really hope we can pull of a video theory movement. I am collecting theory (documentary) films but most of them were made for the regular film festival circuit or television. Theory has yet to move into the online video realm.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
It all depends on the political situation. I suppose we can all find ourselves in nasty circumstances in which people start campaigning against you. There is plenty of evidence for that already in the Netherlands with ’shockblog’ sites like http://www.geenstijl.nl/. The English Wikipedia has a reasonable entry what these websites are all about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geen_stijl. In this particular case I don’t mind Geen Stijl. It’s more that it could point at a possible trend.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
I am not concerned about it. I just find it boring. It is good to campaign against it, not only from a privacy point of view but because it threatens to close down the open internet. The harvesting of private information as a principle enforces a culture in which people are being locked up in their own narcissistic monade of sites and services they ‘like’. The recommendation systems, also the one of Amazon, narrow down one’s intellectual horizon. Why not suggest things I dislike, never heard of or where relevant in that context in 1963 or 1728? I am in favour of serendipity as a system design. But let’s not give too many ideas to these companies. Maybe we should continue this conversation offline?

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
This is widely known but maybe not written about that much. The market for that information is particularly big in the USA, where you can buy all sorts of information about private individuals. It would be good to update that image with detailed reports about Google and Facebook. More investigative journalism in this area would be welcome.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
Five or ten years ago spam was somehow more sophisticated. The tricks were not that well known. One (criminal) company called me and tried to get credit card details from me. One has to remain alert not to click on certain links in spam messages.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Berufsverbote. Jail sentences. Hate campaigns. Expropriation of communities because of manipulated information. Broken friendships and marriages, you name it. It is well known what you can do with targeted campaigning against individuals. In Europe we live in an innocent post-Cold War era.

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
Only few of us will see anonymity as a possible answer for the corporate and state attacks on your privacy. Perhaps we should promote anonymity more, but we all know that it is not the perfect protection. We’d better talk about pseudonimity.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
As a ’serious game’? Maybe. I am inspired by the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, developed in Rotterdam by Moddr Lab. It could be good to develop a similar website or installation that you can use in museums, clubs and festivals that ’simulates’ a full scan of your privacy data that can be found on the net, or bought, which would presume a little delay. Give Me My Data is going in this direction but only looks at what you submitted to Facebook. It would be good to combine sources and see if you can create a comprehensive profile. I once used an MIT Media Lab student project that did just that but perhaps it is better to go beyond the visualization of search engine data.

Comments: http://pluto.kuri.mu/

Plutonian Striptease IV: Rob van Kranenburg

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Rob van Kranenburg lives in Ghent. He is in constant and full wonder about life in general and the human condition in particular.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
It says more about the news now. It is clear that the idea of mass media itself is now adding to the core of problems; its hierarchical notion of gaining more attention or more ‘hits’ is fueling imbalances in the world.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
Simple people like me, with no money, no heritage, no support, felt relevant by the ability to publish anything they want on he internet. This is sanity to me. The social networks work like a bit of a tribe where old friends find you, you can quickly see where someone is.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Me. I sometimes hesitate to Twitter or facebook or blog an idea, mostly when I am angered and angry and realize every moment that anything I put out there is there to stay.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
No.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
Yes.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I find it difficult to assert what is private at any moment. This changes over time. Strangely I believe I have more agency, which may not be true. The moment people assert their authority over me on account of formal reasons I walk away. If I can no longer walk, I have to go in hiding or fight.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
A trade off if I get my book, my networks, my data, my texts, my friends.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Making me a better offer. I’m not so worried about commercial parties; they want me happy, alive and rich so I can buy. They have no interest in putting me down. I may worry more about government databases but these are not as efficient so as to really worry. So I act in total transparancy and would not mind being tracked, traced and keylogged as it would only reveal my need to create more balance.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
Only because my friends started to reveal data that I knew they would regret later, and I deleted that immediately.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
In general in particular political contexts: death and worse if you are being forced to betray family and friends. For me in my luxurious situation the banality of my everyday life is all that is at stake.

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
It makes me wonder even more about why we as a community and as activitists, theorists are so lured into this narcissism of being worried about our mundane simple and rather boring lives? How many individuals have really changed the course of history or have really been deemed ‘dangerous’ by those in power? The case in Holland about databases and abuse in the thirties dealt with simple markers – jewish, non jewish, gypsy; non gyspsy and these qualities can be ascertained from everywhere. They were not concerned with individual authorship or ideas.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
That the end would compel you to get out into the street and organize within local communities for better and simpler relationships between the neighbourhood, you and the world at large. For this you have to share and go out and make friends and take risks.

Comments: http://pluto.kuri.mu/

Plutonian Striptease III: Geoff Cox

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Dr. Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics as part of the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, and Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), adjunct faculty, Transart Institute, Berlin/New York (DE/US), Associate Professor (Reader), University of Plymouth (UK), where he is part of KURATOR/Art and Social Technologies Research group. He is an editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia, New York), and co-edited ‘Economising Culture’ (2004), ‘Engineering Culture’ (2005) and ‘Creating Insecurity’ (2009). He is now working on a new book.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Social networks, or more specifically the social web, are bound up with vested interests and the social imaginary. They have become key sites for entertainment, making business and even doing politics. Along with this, and as communications technologies become key sites for various forms of contestation, there are bound to be some juicy stories. In addition, social networks are becoming the apparatus of the news. On the one hand, there is the use of platforms for various kinds of social movements and alternative news gathering, and on the other, the old news apparatus is adapting itself to new kinds of distribution channels – rather like selling any other product.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
In some ways not much, or not as much as the hype would lead us to believe. This is an important point, and one that many commentators would stress in that the Net is more than the Web, and that the Net has always been a sharing platform – BBS and UseNet, etc – what some refer to as extreme sharing networks. Even with Web 1.0 there were plenty of examples of social activities and file sharing making the notion of a new release little more than a marketing exercise. The distinction is that sharing now has become subject to centralizing and privatizing controls. I love the uncompromising way Dimitri Kleiner explains this: “Web 2.0 is capitalism’s preemptive attack on P2P systems”. Sociality and sharing have become enhanced but at the same time ever more commodified.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Strictly, if you agree to the terms of service, I guess the person who uploads it is responsible – as no doubt they are the ones who are signing away various rights to their data. In many ways this is the key issue, not the content as such but the ownership of the data. The data becomes capital and you decide whether or not to trade it.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Despite what I say above, no, not really although clearly I should. There’s simply not enough time in the day to read pages and pages of text – often many thousands of words and written in inaccessible legal jargon. To read the detail would make most services untenable on ethical grounds so I guess people are far more pragmatic and again trade ethical principles for use value (even those related to commercial exploitation). I personally don’t do that much trading along these lines.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
No, probably not, but I’m not too paranoid, but in general try not to upload much information about myself. I also am reluctant to use social networks as I prefer to have very few (real) friends. As expected, I try to be mindful of the various strategies being developed to encourage me to upload data. As we hear from the news, it doesn’t take much to be able to assemble a whole profile for someone from very little information as a starting point. The artist Heath Bunting has also demonstrated how easy it is to construct a profile of a “real” person (as part of his “Status Project”).

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I’m old school. Mostly I would like to demolish the whole notion of private property, as this relates to information too. As you can tell, I do not value it much at all in itself but the difficulty is that others do. A change of the prevailing logic around property would change the ways in which value is negotiated but this is rather idealistic on my part I admit.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
As I mentioned already, and it’s not something I do much. However, it seems clear that this is what people do, and often quite knowingly. They sign away rights to platform owners in exchange for sharing services and are willing to live with the compromises this necessitates. It seems like these are for free, but clearly they are not. I have tried to avoid such compromises where possible.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Ultimately this is for the accumulation of capital, or in other words profit or surplus value, and even if it is not altogether clear how profit or value can be extracted. Data on people is clearly a crucial aspect of this if not the prime commodity in itself – such are the conditions of informational capitalism and what people refer to as the attention economy.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
No, not really. As I said, as a skeptic (or luddite!), I don’t share that much information over online networks so remain fairly comfortable.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Individuals could be seen to be selling themselves to the network in a perverse reversal of usual relations (as users and their data become ever more entangled). To put it differently, the worry is that through social networks, new kinds of subjectivities are being constituted that are market-driven and that engage sociality in restrictive ways. This is the case already to some extent but the worst case scenario relates to the extreme degree to which this is happening.

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
No, not really, as social relations already involve the interplay of humans and machines, for better or worse – in strange combinations of human and non-human actions. Even radical networks have to take this logic on board.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Of course, why not, especially given that social networking is game-like anyway. I guess I’d like to see this as an opportunity to emphasize the rule sets that are at work, and to suggest that if social networking can be considered to be a game, that there are cheats/hacks that can disrupt the rules. I think my answers to some of the other questions also indicate this way of thinking and how the issue of privacy might be engaged or made contradictory.

Comments: http://pluto.kuri.mu/

Plutonian Striptease II: Dmytri Kleiner

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Dmytri Kleiner is a USSR-born, Canadian software developer and cultural producer. He is a co-founder of Telekommunisten, a worker’s collective that provides telephone and Internet services, and an independent researcher investigating the role of telecommunications, cultural production and migration in class conflict.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Several reasons, on one hand social platforms like Facebook have gotten many new users into online communications, on the other hand, unlike older platforms like email and usenet, Social networks are run by capital financed companies, and thus have PR and marketing budgets.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
The primary difference is that they are centralized, proprietary platforms, each controlled by a single commercial organization.

Perhaps the slides from my rectent talk may be helpful: http://docs.telekommunisten.org/paraflows

The difference that is significant to me is that decentralized common platforms are not controlled by any single entity. For instance no one owns email, you can send email to me even when we have different email providers, if I change email providers, I can still send you email from my new provider. However, I can only send you a message on Facebook by way of an account provided by Facebook.

The classic Internet communications platforms, Email, Usenet, IRC, Finger, etc, where all based upon decentralized systems interoperating based on standard protocols, the new social platforms are not like that, they are centrally controlled, proprietary systems.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Not sure what is being asked here. The law would make both user and platform operator responsible.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
Somewhat.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?
Yes.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I don’t worry about my private data, but believe in the right to.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
That is not my primary concern, rather I’m more concerned with economic models that require centralization and control of services.

To me the core of the problem is that these platforms are created with finance capital, and thus are financed in order to capture profit, thus profit-capturing must be engineered into the system, if a system can not capture profit, it will not be funded. Thus features like exchanging services for personal information become a possible business model for getting online ventures funded. The only way around this is to create other means of financing the development of communication technologies. Ways that do not require future profit, decentralized systems do not need to earn profit, because they have no expensive central infrastructure, they do, however, have development costs, and that is the problem, how to fund these costs without venture capital.

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Ultimately it is sold to those that want to control the behaviour of people, i.e. advertisers, lobbyists, etc.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
No.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
Identify theft, prosecution, relationship crisis, etc.

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
Not sure of what is being asked here again. The impact that it makes is that this machine readable information can be processed more systematically.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?
Sure it can. I would like to see the game help the players understand the competing interests involved, and why their interests are often contradictory. i.e. the contradictory interests between the investors and the users, developers, etc.

Comments: http://pluto.kuri.mu/

Plutonian Striptease I: Rob Myers

First in a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Rob Myers is an artist, writer and hacker based in Peterborough, England. He is part of the GNU Social team. GNU social is a decentralized social network that you can install on your own server. Project catchphrase:

What if you could authorize your server to reveal as much, or as little information about you to other sites, as you wish… one time, one day, or forever?.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Often it’s moral panics of the sort that accompany the spread of any new technology. But there’s a growing awareness in old media that social networking software sites are starting to gain the kind of hold on human communication that postal, telegraph, and telephone networks have had in the past. That kind of power is always abused. Old media used to and still does where it can.

In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
Scale. A community site like The WELL, which predates the web, has only a few thousand users. Facebook has 500 million.

Regularity. Email and homepages were free-form. Facebook imposes a standard style and content on every page.

Reification. Rather than enabling people to play with different identities or interests in different forums, a social networking sit eimposes a single fixed identity on each unique individual.

Completeness. A social network now supports profiles, messaging, calendars, photo and video uploading, and many other services that previously had their own websites.

Business model. Social networks have given up on pretending they are going to try and make money directly from their users, it’s all advertising and data services for third parties now.

Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks
At the moment nobody is responsible for it, they just have power over it. Your data is controlled by the corporation running the social networking site you use. They are in turn beholden to their investors and to anyone who will pay to access your data, from marketing companies to government agencies.

We can take back control of our data by taking responsibility, socially and economically, for services that have so far been offered to us at no monetary cost but at an increasingly unacceptable social cost. Projects like GNU social (which I’m involved with) give us the software resources to do that. Projects like autonomo.us give us conceptual frameworks to evaluate our efforts against.

Do you read Terms of Use or EULA’s and keep up to date about changes applied to them?
I don’t read EULAs. The EFF have a service that allows you to track changes to EULAs but I don’t follow that. I really should.

Do you think you’ve got a realistic idea about the quantity of information that is out there about you?

I try not to think about it. I spend most of the day online. I email, I use instant messaging services, I use microblogging services like StatusNet and Twitter, I blog, I use Facebook, I search on Google, I browse through web sites, I purchase goods and services, I vote on or rate things, I watch videos and listen to music, I download files varying from a few bytes to a few gigabytes in size. Over time the volume of explicit and implicit data about what I am doing must run into terabytes.

How do you value your private information now? Do you think anything can happen that will make you value it differently in the future?
I suppose there are personal emails I wouldn’t want too many people to read, but for the most part private information for me is things like passwords and PINs. If I don’t want it to be public, I don’t put it on the net. I don’t think that will change; it isn’t technically possible or ethically desireable to break other people’s computers so that they cannot just copy and paste something you’ve written to them.

How do you feel about trading your personal information for online services?
The promise of web services at no monetary cost to us really distorts social relationships. We aren’t Facebook’s customer, we are its product. The customers are whoever will pay for access to our data and attention. This always makes me think of Burroughs’ introduction to “Naked Lunch” where he talks about selling the customer to the product.

I’d rather pay with money and involvement than with privacy and power. That’s why I’m a member of The Well, and that’s why I’ve bought a GNU/Linux plug server to run my own GNU social instance on (there’s a picture of it here).

What do you think the information gathered is used for?
Online social networks are a reified model of social relations. You could see this in the Google Buzz debacle: unlike a sociologist’s model of a social network it had no conception of negative social relationships and so made everyone people had ever had contact with a “Friend”, including people’s enemies. This fits well with neoliberalism/managerialism’s need for authentic individual identities to exploit. The data gathered about these individuals is highly prized for corporate marketing and for government spying.

Have you ever been in a situation where sharing information online made you uncomfortable? If so, can you describe the situation?
I carefully self-censor censor what I write online. That makes me uncomfortable. There are jokes I don’t make, issues I don’t speak about, words I don’t use.

What is the worst case scenario, and what impact would that have on an individual?
People will be persecuted and killed for their beliefs discovered through social networks. 4chan and China’s Human Flesh Search Engine are the precursor to this.

Nowadays, most of the “reading” of what is written online is done by machines. Does this impact your idea of what is anonymity and privacy?
People have told the machines what to do, which is generally to more effectively intrude on our privacy on their behalf. I don’t care whether it’s a bored employee or a computer cluster forwarding interesting keywords from my webmail to the intelligence services except in so far as the computer cluster can do so much more efficiently. The intrusion has the same potential for harm.

Can a game raise issues such as online privacy? And if so, what would you like to see in such a game?

It can. The relationship between games, social networks, privacy and human behaviour is already quite complex. Foursquare uses game mechanisms to encourage people to give up their privacy, for example.

I’d like to see a game that shows the footprint of every little action you take online, how much data is generated, in a visual way and then allows you to capture it as power-ups. Or a game where you play a marketing or intelligence agent trying to get more and more private data on people, to illustrate what goes on behind the smiley face of micromessaging your “Friends”.

But online community used to involve play, especially identity play, and I think that restoring that element of play into the social networks themselves is one of the best ways of resisting their reifying, limiting, exploitative identity politics. On the internet, Facebook knows damn well you’re not a dog. It’s time to fix that.

Comments: http://pluto.kuri.mu/