The Internet has penetrated everywhere, and among other things, the largest corporate social network, Facebook, has emerged on it. Why I mention it right away is obvious. With more than a billion users and the mechanisms of its operation, it was nicknamed the largest propaganda machine since Josef Goebbels. Facebook made money from prefabricated messages commented and liked to order to create the impression of public opinion ... but mostly to disrupt and question other’s opinions according the hidden concerns of advertisers. To cause information confusion in people. It became known as the post-factual period, and it was found that false news spread faster and more than truth.
As usual, it initially grew on the ideas of receiving and sharing information freely. But then it’s hard corporate character became apparent. Between 2014 and 2016, Facebook gave Cambridge Analytica access to tens of millions of profiles and their personal data. In the US presidential election, which led to Donald Trump, and in the campaign for Brexit, media agencies, using precise psychological profiles, targeted tailor-made posts to change the minds of key groups of voters in undecided areas. At the same time, Facebook liquidated smaller companies and competing apps with uncompromising economic pressure.
Influence is not a question of truth or falsehood, but of affect. The affective message works with trauma, libidinal charge, danger from something evil, unknown. It works with the basic emotions of fear and hate, which are in the human brain evaluated in the developmentally oldest parts. The reactions are stronger and faster than the subsequent processing of the stimulus in rational cortex. What threatens us is always given the highest priority, because that way it is emotionally fixed in the structure of the brain. Structured objective information that makes logical sense is not so enticing. Noam Chomsky has described much earlier how the consent of a predetermined opinion is artificially created in television debates. Just not giving enough space and time to express any other. You will not explain a complex truth with it‘s context in 20 seconds. In such a moment you can only repeat or approve already known clichés, take an emotional stance.
The problem with Facebook is that it exploits the personal data of its users corporately. Although Mark Zuckerberg apologizes theatrically to create the impression that the company is doing everything they can to protect against fake news, and that leaking data through third-party applications was just an unfortunate mistake, in fact, that's exactly what he's making money on. On a service that takes all yours away, sells it and its goal is to make you addicted to the micro-satisfaction of likes, and without them you would feel unnecessary and lonely. Sad by design, writes Geert Lovink.
But that's just one side of the matter. The design of Facebook, ie it’s corporate model, is at its core based on the fact that it does not want to protect you from fake news or children from sexual predators and other manipulations. It‘s army of programmers will not make any changes that could easily prevent it. It makes money by selling these bugs and your vulnerability to advertisers.
As Facebook suppressed commercial competition and mainstream knew nothing else, voices began to emerge that social networks were bad as such and that mass negative phenomena were their original characteristics. Never. Sociologists and original developers came up with the principles of social networks that enriched human communication. Exploitation is a deliberate design and commercial model of Facebook, Google and other surveillance platforms, which algorithmically model the obtained communication patterns and data so that it has the financial value.
There is a lot of talk about these "algorithms" that will show you your preferred things and your message to other people. Algorithms that show the agencies that will pay, but the message from your friend will drop easily. The anatomy of separation is that it displays something different to each of your relatives, in a different order and context ... it supports one in xenophobia because it evaluates it as a topic of interest and for the other displays campaigns to help refugees. The result is the assertion in the isolated attitude, misunderstanding and loneliness that this global-corporate model creates.
Your decisions are stressed by rejection. The small ones are not welcome, you have to be dominant and spin the wheels of success, chase after quantity and likes. When you stop for a while, you are not visible and you will be replaced in the spectacle by others with a vision of quick success and attention. The next day you are forgotten while the reach / engagement vector is dominated by those who bet on basic instincts or hatred.
Would the publication of "algorithms" on Facebook, Google and others, help the civil society? What for? These are technologies that, by their very nature, serve a centralized proprietary medium to accumulate profit. Even some activists themselves use them for media visibility. And they do not hesitate to pay for this small benefit by losing democratic rights and participating in a forceful colonial conglomerate. Is such activism credible when it is ultimately compliant with companies profiting from the damage to democracy, misuse of private data, surveillance, bullying, social inequality, the spread of climate disinformation, with enormous energy consumption?
No one can reliably confirm that targeting by the corporate media could equally, without discrimination, help any candidate or party or movement to win. In fact, it benefits specific candidates. Those who do not explain ideas, but slander, those who, instead of fair argumentation, launch a dishonest campaign manufacturing enemies. It benefits populists.
In a text about film laboratories operated by artists, after the end of industrial production of film raw material, my friend defends herself against digital film. Inspired by her stay in Argentina, she wrote that DIY culture in the field of digital media (Apple, Facebook) enabled the dissolution of the traditional proletariat and its outsourcing through student university projects and start-ups. Thus, the power information dominion of neoliberal capitalism in developed parts of the world was confirmed and expanded.
Yes, DIY culture in the post-media field of film is free and does not harm anyone. The materiality of the film, optical and chemical processes are tangible and slow in contrast to the pressure of ubiquitous digital media. But was it really the DIY culture that gave rise in the new media to neoliberal global corporations that effectively precariate less developed cultures? Of course, Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg used the image of indie garage developers who have brought people a new, better world. But the start-up and administratively controlled corporation no longer has anything to do with DIY. It does not work on the community principle, it‘s ideas are based on completely different foundations.
The idealistic image of "convergence of the world" has in recent years proved to be a smokescreen for PR, carefully covering growth at all costs. The ambitious executives of these companies are going hard after getting more data, licenses from small and independent ones, and where they can't, after crushing the competition with force. Thanks to this, today we have stacks of cloud technologies that rewrite the borders of weaker nation states and, on the contrary, help the powerful to build them. Surveillance, monitoring of activities and actions, filtering, elimination. China has become a futuristic dystopian system of absolute control, thanks to information technology.
Proponents of neoliberal technology corporations like to paint a wonderful world of tomorrow using the words of scientists or innovators with a social vision. However, this evangelism is again a cover for completely opposite activities aimed at creating addiction, subordination, reducing choice and adjusting the flow of money from the pockets of people convinced that they are contributing to progress. Critical thinkers and developers who do not share such an obsession are only perceived as taking part by mistake from the outside, only for working with technology. They are misrepresented by some attribute of belonging to this group. It is no longer common to think about how the group is structured, it requires a deeper understanding of technology and people.
In 2019, after the death of Jeffery Epstein, the method of financing the MIT Media lab was exposed. For many years, this prestigious flagship for the development of new technologies at the crossroads of art and media has helped to launder dubious revenues by associating the person with the image of their academic futuristic projects. Evgeny Morozov points out how the "third culture" of Silicon Valley, which was supposed to replace outdated technophobic intellectuals, proved only as a transition from Cold War mainframes, represented by non-transformable dinosaurs IBM and HP, to funky personal computers. And Steve Jobs, the chief evangelist of "counterculture," served to spread consumerist mysticism. Friendship with Hollywood, philanthropists, and the academic world was the cloak for a gradual move toward a "science dinner" on the old familiar ground plan of money-sex-power. In the MIT lab, Epstein could walk with young girls in the role of his trophies, like a businessman eating sushi on their subordinate bodies.
It is a bit of a sad fact that the art of new media has been absorbed by digital technologies, and today it is difficult to distinguish it from commerce, which devalues anything creative immediately with the number of copies. After all, we also have artists who, on the demand of voracious dozens of TVs and web channels, like to produce a harmless filling for them. At the time of its beginings, however, activism was and still is the true essence of media art. Technological and information activism against dominant media industries.
If some developers and artists put themselves at the service of free trade, detached from social and environmental responsibilities, it is not the case of the independent scene and autonomous artistic strategies. In essence, these are always post-media practices, which do not aim to pave the way for media technologies, but on the contrary: it disrupts them, examines their limits, bends them, fills them with fleeting beauty for a moment... and brings them closer to human soul again.
Hakim Bey, the author of the fundamental concept of TAZ, a temporarily autonomous zone, empasizes the principle that inhabitants of these zones do not claim any territory on a permanent basis, but act as an uprising that does not directly engage against the state. It is a guerrilla whose operation liberates an area, be it space, time, imagination, and then dissolves to form itself elsewhere. Such autonomy is created by artistic mycelium, which disrupt the hegemonic media and are in opposition to them.
The artistic film communities follow the legacy of experimental filmmakers who have also been in opposition to and on the fringes of mainstream cinema, such as Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton. Nam June Pajk or Vašulka, who worked with video and electronic image, were in the same experimental community. And they also bent and disrupted television broadcasts, freeing the image from political hegemony. They based their actions on performance, deliberately on the uniqueness of experience and participation, which cannot become a marketable media product.
Today, the film is only seemingly peaceful. Leaving aside its unnatural nitrate, acetate or polyester base and chemistry based on toxic silver salts, as a medium in its expansion, it prominently supported the development of industrial processes and cognitariat in the 1920s and 1930s. Phase photographs of the movement symbolize factory control of every movement of workers at the production line. The film brought an industrial revolution to the eye and captivated the audience in a dematerialized mode of production followed by tyranny of idealized beauty. Film as dominant medium was directly connected with mass production, which produced tanks, aircraft and other weapons of World War II. And it is directly connected with the discovery of the world by Western civilization, which has made its economic colonialization more effective. The colonization of Latin America by technologically produced media content from the developed United States also dates back much earlier than the advent of digital media.
To change society means standing up to the media that is in power. And in this it is necessary to develop friendships between like-minded people.
One of Jean Piaget's experiments was to place a ball between a child on one side and an adult on the other. The ball was a different color on each side so that the child could see just one and the adult the other. It is reminiscent of the opinion and information bubbles that create microtargeting of media and advertising. We see the world in them only from our side. To a certain degree of cognitive development the child will not be able to handle the situation and will claim that the ball has the color he sees and cannot admit that someone else can see another.
The victory of populist xenophobic conservatives is attributed to speaking a vernacular language that majority easily understand, unlike the language of intellectual elites. Multibillionaires speak like undereducated and stand up for the interests of ordinary people. Less is pointed out that it is not a natural vernacular, but similar to a fake news hoax. Populists use strategies of imitation and feigned belonging in a thoughtfully prepared behind-the-scenes path to power, on which they do the exact opposite of what they say. To do this, they will be willing to cast doubt and censor information, present other views as foolishness, idealism, conspiracy, and break them in various ways so that they do not make sense. Why? They use their own maturity to strengthen others in their comfortable one-sided vision and thus more easily create an advantage over them. Our conformity to common opinion group and a common worldview is strong. With this popular care, which is confirmed to the people by their previous experiences, they are oligarchic elites and governments are ignorant.
Bruno Latour points out that various deniers and questioners have adopted methods of criticizing science. Conspiracy theories are absurd distortions of the arguments of humanities criticism, which have fallen behind the imaginary front line into the hands of the enemy and are used to question the facts. New elites amass wealth, and a dozen of individuals is richer than the entire poorer half of mankind. At the same time, these media strategies obscure how their richness is linked to the impoverishment of others and the draining of environmental resources. Telling one lie can be a problem. But owning the media and telling many lies without real meaning, on which rationality is slipping, has worked well for them.
The structures of ownership, finance and organization of established industries do not need to censor any opinions at all. On the contrary, it will gladly support freedom of speech. For one opinion, it is enough to ensure that the other opinion is published, not even the opposite, it is enough to sound like a reasonable one, indicating that not everything is verified, that there are other facts. For any dirty multi-billion project, it is enough to use a small fraction of the budget for PR and influencers, to pump the information corresponding to its interest into the media in such an amount that the counter-opinion does not prevail. Political movements have become marketing projects, where developers and business hide their interests behind precisely targeted phrases about the sociable neighborhood that citizens like to hear, chiseled by detailed marketing and psychological surveys of agencies.
The Guardian described how the lobbying company CTF operated a network of non-branded "news" sites for a number of clients: from polluters, the fossil industry, from the Saudi government to Boris Johnson's Brexit. In addition to controversial clients and the professional dissemination of misinformation, the company's employees also reported on misogynistic bullying. The marketing order takes place roughly in the following steps:
Many things are not a matter of facts, but a matter of interests, argues Bruno Latour in Recognizing Friends from Enemies in the Anthropocene Period. The case of Patrick Moore is well known. His media coverage and lectures on how carbon dioxide and global warming are beneficial, and how fracking helps the industry, are supported by the proclaimed image of former Greenpeace President who left the movement due to the irrationality of it’s protagonists and their misinformation, which he scientifically puts straight. However, Moore has been a PR spokesperson for many mining, nuclear and polluting industries for 30 years, much longer than he has been in Greenpeace, helping them cover up the problems of their dirty business in the media. Thanks to his former connection with Greenpeace, these companies are hiring him to challenge criticism.
Socially responsible and solidarity-based approaches are in a marginal position, as the representatives of these ideas and the citizens to whom they should relate have been separated. Journalists and other media authors belong to the circle of intellectuals and they have completely different living strategies than those who should accept their ideas and follow them. So how do intellectuals, rooted in the academic environment of permanent salaries and grants, represent workers? Mimicry is also here: on the side of those who seem to really mean it well.
It is the mimicry of journalists and artists to grasp any social issue that has the potential to arouse interest with their refined ability to communicate... and present it as their own agenda. Often after many years of building the specific value approach and discourse by others - in many discussions, local practices and hard social or environmental work – some can immediately imitate, conceal the original authors of ideas and build successful media coverage of themselves. No longer without a sensitive value approach and relationships with all involved. That is replaced by conformist attitudes only camouflaged by borrowed rhetoric. They quickly discredit the topic and destroy the long work of those invisible below. Typically, urban intellectuals secured by middle-class strategies are recreationally committed to current agenda improving their social and cultural capital. At first they looked like sympathetic friends and then they profaned the topic and left it when it didn’t work for them? Essentially it serves a covert defense of the conformist hierarchical system from which their position originates.
Parachute artists get involved in some socially or locally problematic issue, instrumentalize the stress coming from it to create an art project and gain formal recognition for the general benefit they contributed. Without further action with the community. They will use the trust they have received mainly for their own careers. Even many climate activists quickly adopted climate attitudes and rhetoric without changing anything in their lives. They do exactly the same as before, exactly the same as climaskeptics, with cosmetic changes regarding plastic cups. At the same time, they will tell you with a serious face that it is not worth changing something individually until the system changes. But they love Greta, they are for the climate and they avidly occupy the harmless media space left for them by business.
Representation itself is a problem. If the incomes of those who are supposed to exclusively represent others are separated and not directly linked to the salaries of those represented, as was previously the case with workers' leaders, interests diverge diametrically: the media-exposed representative is essentially interested in making the situation of his apparent protégés worse, or to present it that way. The worse situation, the more important is the representative position which often leads to the nurturing of long-exhausted stereotypes and prejudices: re-creating the class and gender division of society, maintaining helplessness and the victim's syndrome. The care and critique of the situation is only proclaimed: it remains with the words and formulations of the media profession. There is no real help and organization of the affairs of those whose problem is being exploited. They remain dependent on themselves. On the contrary, it happens that those who actually work to eliminate inequality are not desirable because they potentially jeopardize financial flows.
Many have even learned to formulate their opinions in such a way that they do not get out of a closed intellectual society too much and do not threaten their positions in universities and cultural editorial offices with too much controversy. All they have to do is collect the necessary points in their circles. More important is the refined language and aestheticized ways that are necessary to acknowledge their belonging to academic elites. This is valued more than the impact of their "social criticism" on real lives. The authority, which used to automatically draw from the cabinet position and stratification of society, today faces the option of being disrespected by those at the bottom. Low-income workers are then closer in opinion to their bosses and creditors, who actually give them at least some money.
At the International Anti-Authoritarian Festival in Athens in 2017, Jacques Rancière pointed out the convenience of such criticism. Accepting the vision of the world as an opposition to those above who control them all and those helpless poor ones leads nowhere. Even vehemently "fighting" against it is no emancipation and autonomy. This is not the case, it is just the acceptance of a position that fits them. Both those at the top who exactly want it to be as such, and those below who alibi-demonstrate or write an article, but they won't change anything because they don't change their thinking and actually accept the strength of inequality as they set it up in their minds and how it suits them - we can't change everything so we don't change anything, they are to blame - and the possibilities of another vision and creation of the world and free action in it remain untapped.
It is clear here what is called the crisis of representation. A fake-representation even more expanding the fake-news. Some people stand up for someone whose interests are diametrically opposed: they want to spread their views on social justice and a participatory tolerant society from positions relying on exclusivity, formal status and the related nature of power. Their class is so closed and incompatible with the situation of the weak and the poor that they cannot offer them any social or political shift.
In his book Hate for Democracy, Jacques Rancière describes how hatred came with growing inequalities of all kinds in a society that elevated police power above individuality. The personalization of state power in populist leaders then embodies the desire of the underprivileged to express themselves. According to him, institutions based on representation are not democratic, but oligarchic: and by definition unstable. They may leave room for democracy for a while, but they may also tend to centralize power. If the representative system is threatened and accused of instability, it is to blame for being too democratic. Financial capital destroyed people's collective forms of work and life, and someone cleverly called it "democratic mass individualism." All forms of life are lined up with a capitalist system of dominance, profiled by detailed surveillance of actions, and this perfectly absolutized authoritarianism is called liberalism. The democratic façade only obscures the power of the truly rulers. Or more precisely, it is a direct tool of their power. We must end the basic confusion, and that is identifying representation with democracy. Trump can hardly be mistaken for a representative of lost souls from the depths of America, and Bolsonaro was seated on the throne directly by interested financial circles.
Democratic institutions do not have to be protected from the populist threat, says Rancière. They must be created or constantly re-created. And in the current situation they can be created as counter-institutions, autonomous to those of the government.
Unlike the time of the birth of the counterculture in the hippie movement, the rejection of the commodification of art as a product, travel to India and the search for spirituality, there is no mass exit from the system today. Become voluntarily modest, not have your photos on Instagram? The facts of the climate crisis, plunder of resources, pollution, or extinction of species, many like to accept as their agenda and a topic that brings them media attention. Before any real change, however, they back up and create smoke screens with arguments that ultimately sound like a usable climaskeptically according to the wishes of the fossil industries. No one wants to lose a career and success in an existing system, contacts or income. Whoever really wants to organize and make a change is just as a dreamer for them, or even a suspect, because he threatens their theoretical model or status.
What is called white cube art has completely failed in its role as a driver of social change and fails to respond to a fragmented society, a crisis of democracy and the destruction of populations of living organisms. What social commitment does the art scene offer, when the artists and the media are just producers of engagement on consolidating the power of the upper middle class?
The described behaviors are enforced by the way the dominant media work. These are fixed in such a way in order to succeed, they force the actors to work and express themselves in a certain way and to compete for attention according to the given rules. Only with the knowledge of the functioning of the media, their differences and specifics is it possible to know the ways around the fake-news, fake-representation and fake-division jungle. Real power is exercised through the media influence on the masses, and without the subordination of the masses to certain media there is none. Another world cannot be created by the tools of corporate surveillance of capitalism. Fortunately, finding autonomous media relationships and strategies quite easily creates completely different arrangement.
Artificial intelligence associated with biotechnology and global computing. Mantras, behind which one sees a progressive development towards a transhumanistic utopia, others a frightening future of the planet's devastation. But technologies are not one whole, they are part of wider systems - media. They are a material part of gradually developed thought practices and human relationships.
If we see how artificial, detached, and alienated technologies are to our understanding, we must realize that they are created in this way by the institutions of our society. They are authorized and financed by institutions in the development stage, they are approved, standardized and regulated by them. These processes correspond to the current cultural ideas of worldview, perceived social reality and other intangible dimensions established by the methods of communication used. Therefore, if we want to understand the impact of technology, we need to see it as part of media strategies.
Neil Postman came up with the concept of media ecology as early as 1968. He assumes that an interconnected system of media, intervening in all areas of human life, has a huge ability to control and defines how man obtains and processes information. Hegemonic discourses retain control over the indoctrination of individuals and are conditional on any social change. It is therefore necessary to address these relations between the media, or man and the media.
The media does not exist in a vacuum. Interconnection occurs and is a determining factor in the immense complexity of media structures. The vocabulary of ecology is used here, "because it is one of the most expressive languages by which to indicate a massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter," explains Matthew Fuller in Media Ecology.
Jussi Parikka, a theorist of media archeology, offers a poststructuralist perspective on the media as complex dynamical systems and portrays phenomena such as computer viruses as endemics of the digital sphere. In the book Insect Media from 2010, he expresses the idea that the media are radically inhumane constructs of animal, often insect, models of interaction with the environment that man embodies. There is an older theory that insect interaction is also based on symbols and cognitive affections, and neurobiology adds plants to this. So far, however, no artificial intelligence or supercomputer has modeled the cognitive interaction of a bee swarm with flowers in the surrounding meadows. They are woefully unsufficient for that.
The media consists of three systems: technology, institutions and the language they use. Just as television or the Internet cannot do without the technologies that make them work, they cannot do without institutions. Without standardization authorities, there would be no single television channel, we would not call a mobile phone as the transmitters would interfere with each other and the receivers would not understand the signals. We would not get to a single web page, because without a domain system-assigned address, the computer would not be able to find it, and without HTML, the data could not be interpreted into colourful pages. When the media work and we understand them, it is the result of an agreement. Many collective agreements across the society. Communication in the appropriate language of images or sentences is again developed and restricted by organizations: schools with approved curricula, broadcasting boards and codes of ethics, editorial offices, publishers, grant commissions, courts, artistic awards or censorship.
Technology - organization - language is a triangle with interconnected vertices, where one is defined by the other two, affects them and is conditioned by them. Without any one of these three bases, there is no medium.
The development of media language usually belongs to artists. However, not always to the famous artists. There is a whole history of how artistic speech has developed in search of new technological possibilities for communication. By looking for a new way of using tools: how to communicate something that could not be communicated in previous ways. The original artists are developers, whether they are photography chemists or hackers. They are doing something that most people don't know, they don't want to understand, and their success comes with a social change.
By the way, denaturalization is not a technology problem at all. Denaturalized is the relationship of the communication symbols we use - denoting words, iconic images - to reality, or to nature. Denaturalization is an epistemological problem of language. Either it is a very complex, abstract language, detached from reality, or a language that is less sensitive to the phenomena we want to express. Technologies are mechanized or algorithmic thinking, expressed in language: plans, codes, or tables cannot exist without the language behind them. However, it is true that the denaturalization of perception, the associated symbols and language is technologically maintained.
The mistake that causes threatening development is to give up an active approach to media formation. Demand change from someone else: not to form organizations that share a consensus on the vision of nature's ecosystems and human relationships. It is a mistake to strive for this consensus, but to naively use the media and technologies that are in the hands of the powerful. Trying in vain to succeed in the media system controlled by them, which will not allow the spread of the necessary language and generate only a predefined social structure of society, beneficial to their owners. The mistake is to ignore the developers who create technologies as a participatory artistic texts: and not appropriate it.
The mistake is to wait for a fundamental epistemological change - or for a revolution - and, before it happens, to conformistly use and support technologies adopted by corporations again in the same feudal way as always, to compete for success in the media with sophisticated ways of marginalizing the unwanted. How much has been said about how the ways in which we are forced to communicate have a tremendous effect on what thoughts we are able to express. Postman, McLuhan, Chomsky…
A medium based on a system of dominant cultural habits can reach a point where it has peaked and ceased to evolve. It is mostly rooted in a certain social paradigm. However, the paradigm changes from time to time. In the semiosphere, there are structures that transcend the media, coordinate them, and provide even broader frameworks. The medium is overcome by a more advanced form, which seizes it and, with its new ways and relations, tears its contents from the original bonds and connects them to the new ones. Higher order technologies can capture the internal complexity of the media, the public becomes more active and sweeps away the unsatisfactory mechanisms of institutions.
The media have a limited time and life cycle in which they are able to effectively distribute their products. If they find themselves in an environment other than that which has historically been typical for them, and their course is already determined by other social forces than those that shaped them and kept them in the limelight, they will find themselves in the post-media phase. Post-media forms go back to pre-media. Hegemonizing symbolic power recedes into the background of collective, community, group and personal individualization processes and is replaced by ecologies. The content and structure of the media are arranged according to new rules that more respect the innate organization of natural and social structures. We must learn to see this situation around us.
The interfaces of pre-media and post-media forms are so wide that the boundaries are often unclear. However, they differ in that pre-media forms are completely non-technical, only physical and oral, while post-mediality is based on the experience of technologically accelerated and modified reception: but already collapsed, appropriated and without institutional control.
This closes the circle where the hegemonic media, which through the processes of codification, construction and production arose from the uncertainty of the pre-media, are again broken, deconstructed, brought closer to the body and transformed through it in the next circle of feedback. There are innumerable loops under way at the same time, in various intensities, through individual and collective organisms, through which technostructures generate semantic worlds. Which the organisms affectively enter, they co-create them and modify their semantic automatisms accordingly.
We have the freedom to diversify technology and the media. Anyone who wants to can change their thinking and use of technology. Connect with others, create independent enclaves and islands. And as they are responsively open, but also solid and protected from troll manipulations, they will grow. It is not about expanding the influence or the number of people affected at all! It is about creating organisms, creative and viable structures, grown through their surroundings and ultimately the complex semiosphere of the planet. We need the most advanced technology in our own hands. Ungovernable viral technologies.
A tourist is someone who travels to other countries, and in addition to snacks or clothes, he also carries in his backpack his ideas about the world, which he has acquired in his homeland experience. He sees foreign regions, but he sees them through the optics of the relationships and purposes to which he is accustomed. The tourist will never accept the experience of the place. His body moves, but the mind still remains in preconceived notions. Even a documentary filmmaker with a camera can be a tourist and see the situation and interpret it according to pre-biased logic. An esoterically attuned person, who feels an amazing connection with nature everywhere, collects stones in the mountains and turns them into a magical spiral or artfully balanced turret. But will not notice the plants, while destroying them the microclimate of moisture, heat accumulation and shade.
In places where rare plants, such as lilies or orchids grow, they are almost extinct. They need very specific conditions, eg alkalinity of the soil, moisture, partial shade. However, the tourist, a "nature lover", enchanted by the beauty of the orchid, can only think of one thing. He has to dig it out and plant it at his cottage. But orchid can't grow there. The cottage with a garden around is a colonized area. It is not about becoming part of the environment and nature, but about adapting nature to your own benefit. The construction begins by clearing the space around, preferably fencing it and creating a completely artificial place. The cottage or log cabin means considerable isolation from the surroundings, usually based on the territorial eradication of the area around the building, heavy construction and equipment, which is to satisfy the expected need for stoves, kitchens and other nostalgic comfort. The urbanism of the villages is already built on completely degraded ecosystems with turves and pools, in winter shrouded in fog by exhalations from local fireplaces. This romance is not a way out of the climate crisis.
Instead of the tourist mentality, we need a mentality that is home to the place, observational, scientific, based on respect, where we let conditions and relationships enter into our minds and control our thinking and technology, instead of imposing a foreign system on the environment. Researching and finding suitable experiences is an essential element that must take precedence over habit. The habit becomes invalid in a different environment than where it originated, at a different time, in combination with other influences, on a different scale. All this can turn a good helper of habit into an invisible and dangerous automatism. It was perfectly fine to cook on a fire and heat with wood when 30% of Ethiopia was afforested. But when the population has increased fivefold since then and afforestation has shrunk to 3%, this traditional practice is an unbearable gamble that leads to poverty. It is necessary to master solar cooking technology and restore afforestation. Not to make the same movements as mechanical key dolls, even though the music has stopped playing long since.
It is a bit of a myth that natural ecosystems are richest when left to human non-intervention. The opposite is true, areas are often dominated by species with highly competitive breeding strategies that spread rapidly, displace more sensitive species and, perhaps, deplete resources quickly. The diversity of meadows has long been tied to large herbivores; even before human farming, mammoths kept it by grazing. Human activity can be benefitial to nature and diversity. For example, water capture and irrigation technologies. The technology is also the design of a stone wall. Laying the stone will change the microclimate. It is damp around it and a plant that has not grown in place before, can sprout.
We need an architecture that divides us from the wild surroundings as little as possible. Architecture free from unnecessary restraints, which we only make out of habit and have lost their justification long since. We do not need houses isolating us, with dry weed free organized yards around. The new prestige is to come out the door right into the rampant edible forest. We need a different architecture. Architecture that has the possibility of expansion our relationship with the environment. Our homeostasis does not need liquidation of nature. Instead, it can convey the creative connection and enrichment of biodiversity.
Where we would be exposed to temperature differences, rain and wind, we probably would not have particularly creative thoughts - they would be reduced to trying to survive. The homeostasis that architecture provides for us, if it respects local conditions and relationships, does not have to destroy nature. Instead, even on a temporary basis, it can mediate creative connection.
When I go back to the early 1990s and Czechoslovak socialist society before, I remember the ecological situation very well. The smoky chimneys of factories producing stinking fog during the urban temperature inversion may have been the main reason why the totalitarian system had to fall. In the 1980s, the atmosphere of the ecological crisis was ubiquitous. Every now and then, television news featured images of an ozone hole threatening to destroy the earth with cosmic rays. Acid rains from exhalations had been falling on the Czech mountains, leaving only bare clearings with dead stumps. Every morning, I listened to the radio as a regular part of the news monotonous readings of nitrogen and sulfur emissions.
In 1994, Hana Librová published the book Multicoloured and Greens, about people who set out on a journey of voluntary modesty. It describes the admirable efforts of many communities to live consistently a life that would not have adverse effects on nature. She takes notes about life in self-sufficient ecovillages using only wind and solar energy, manual labor in agriculture and humble living. Nevertheless, she is hesitant about whether a solution can be expected from this model of environmentally friendly behavior. The problem is isolation from other people and the small spread of these ideas in society. A great deal of self-denial and austerity is not always very inventively compensated by the joyful aspects of existence. She states that the pain of most ecologically oriented communes is a certain misappropriation of their children, who yearn for a comfortable and pleasant life in a large city and flee to it at the first opportunity.
The following two concepts, which I will describe, living labs and medium design, work with the connection of city and nature, technology, society and entertainment in an open field of interconnected influences, where authoritarian power is eliminated. In a runaway car of our civilization, shocked to find that the speed is too high and out of control, we cannot pull our hands off the wheel and refuse to touch any technology. We will use the steering and the brake system to slow down safely. Nor can we expect that the current development of hundreds of years will suddenly be reversed and all people in the world will uniformly reject consumption. It is therefore more of a transformation on the one hand to more interesting media forms and on the other hand to their lesser environmental demands.
Living labs are development networks and ecosystems, based on an open philosophy and respect to local conditions and all participants. Technologies are applied directly in the real environment, their impacts are tested and all stakeholders and other organisms involved are indistinguishable from scientists. They are not observed objects on which procedures devised by someone else are verified. Productivity is not a major concern. The sign of successful development is the overall prosperity of the local ecosystem.
These are basically different principles from the culture of cabins, cottages and rural settlements, where the inhabitants of cities in their free time go sort of into nature. Nor is it gardening or the cultivation of crops for food. There is a strong principle of discovering and creating new situations in livinglabs. New connections of architecture and nature, non-consumer approach to cultivation, testing of open technologies to benefit biodiversity, renewable resources, making use of waste. There is a scientific approach and respect. The media level is very necessary, but on a decentralized basis, also the information maintenance as a practice of care. Social network is part of the architecture. Each space has its own experience, its memory, human encounters and their history. Every building should include sustainable ubiquitous technologies that communicate with soil, water and also with people. One solar panel is enough for this and otherwise the building remains self-sufficient. But even self-sufficiency is not a dogma. It is always more a matter of self-sufficiency research, evaluation and exchange.
Livinglab architecture is the art of creating stimuli for the creation and maintenance of the most fragile things: organisms, relationships, ideas. A habitat, a microclimate without which they could not exist.
Livinglab can be anywhere in an urban environment too. In the gallery, however, it is neither a workshop with a purpose or with someone who teaches others, nor a vernissage, where participants stand around, drink alcohol and passively watch aesthetic objects. It is a specific procedural form when it comes to communication and relationships, but at the same level it always includes local nature.
Keller Easterling criticizes the architecture we usually know as a repeatable pattern of formatting urban space in the service of manipulative trade and economic pressures creating inhospitable places, fueling only conflict and tension. Obsession with novelty and dominance. At the same time, the smart city brand proved to be a truly unique excuse for centralizing information and tracking.
Changing our thinking, we need to go to the basics. "Science built on binary oppositions, truth and untruth, where the old truth is always beaten by the new one, without the possibility of their coexistence; when all attention is focused on the object and the product," she writes, is good for pointing to things and naming them, but not to the description of mutual relations, "It privileges declarations, truth statements, modernist ethos and narratives associated with utopias and dystopias."
Easterling therefore proposes to deal with the design of the medium itself: the field in which the individual actors are located. Her medium design is a set of activities, a system composed of technological, social and political forces. The basis for the formation of the city is this area of infrastructure, and even the "heavy" physical space is an information system. Man and a tree are an information system with many potentials. An elementary understanding of the media means taking them as the surrounding environment, including earth, air, water. Characteristic is the mixing of networks of different types of information, both material, digital and others. Earlier approaches must be replaced by the notion of activity and disposition present in the organization, the interrelationships of the actors, the time possibilities of their reaction and adaptation in the environment. Each of the actors is then the designer of this medium.
It is not a question of solving the problem in any final way, but rather of the coexistence of many problems at the same time and the protocol by which their effects are balanced.
It is no big secret that a large part of purchases, consumption and related production do not bring people anything they really need. It is only a matter of statutory consumption, the purpose of which is to prove that they are in such a good position, attributing consequent means that they can afford the thing. Consumption obligatory to belonging to a certain class. But people can also direct their activities to other values that fulfill the status of success. It depends on public opinion what is considered a proof of success. What people find passion for, what becomes an attractive goal can be changed. Let’s say it is necessary to enrich ecosystems in one's life, to reduce the consumption of resources without people and their relatives feeling scarce or limited. It is exactly a question of art, what symbols it creates. In a humorous documentary, Slavoj Žižek analyzes films on a number of excerpts and, with the help of alalytic psychology, shows how the film basically teaches people how to desire and for what. And how film translates that into media patterns. Usually this is associated with sympathetic creativity. It is necessary to develop a whole lasting culture of activities and approaches that lead to a better fulfillment of life. It must include elements of research, communication, openness, art, poetry and the use of technology.
By the mid-1970s, widespread conceptions of ecology already existed, which included social and technological systems along with biological ones, and became the basis for artists and theory. Even an ecosystem-based culture already exists. Maybe it always existed. It has its spores and diaspores. There is also a medium that can connect them in a decentralized way.
System ecology already in the 1960s was based on classics such as Gregory Bateson or R. Buckminster Fuller. Technosphere and cybernetics occupied an equivalent place to natural and organic systems. Previous artistic ecological projects turned to nature in the sense of its preservation, protection and restoration of some ideal, untouched state. In the September issue of Artforum in 1968, Jack Burnham wrote in his article Systemic Aesthetics: “Increasingly, products – either in art or life – become irrelevant and different set of needs arise: these revolve around such concerns as maintaining the biological livability of the earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in man-machine relations, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and defining alternative patterns of education, productivity and leisure."
Today, his visionary connection to maintaining biological livability of the earth is called sustainability, and many of the art projects that Burnham mentions or subsequently emerged in this stream of thought are now of renewed interest to critics and curators. T. J. Demos in Decolonization of Nature describes, among others, Hans Haacke's 1972 project: Rhine-Water Purification Plant. At the Krefeld Museum, Haacke installed a device for purifying water from the Rhine river, with functional chemical treatment and water filtration using activated carbon and sand. The purified water was pumped into a large transparent acrylic tank with swimming goldfish, and that way was demonstrated how it is possible to technologically construct a life-supporting system. However, the project also intervened behind the cosmetic patch of restorative eco-aesthetics. Haacke documented the extent of the pollution of the wastewater discharged into the Rhine in Krefeld, which amounted to 42 million cubic meters each year, and quantified the volume and types of industrial and domestic waste, listing the main polluters. It was not only about restoring the degraded ecosystem, but also pointing out the role of the city in pollution, which attracted attention in the local media. He called the political effect of this operation a real-time social system.
Other artists initiated experiments, for example with the help of video, which developed the social integration possibilities of cybernetic systems. Radical Software magazine, which developed the idea of media ecology and the study of communication media and their effect on other media and society, played a crucial conceptual role in this regard. In conjunction with the then new cheap video technology, artists and activist groups formed local loops of community media. In opposition to the central control of one-way broadcasting of mainstream media, collectives such as Ant Farm, Videofreex, Vašulkas and dozens of others built feedback media ecology of grassroot systems of self-representation.
Gyorgy Kepes, who founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in 1967 in the Arts of the Environment in 1972, wrote that environmental homeostasis at the global level is essential for survival. Creative imagination and artistic sensitivity are the basis of collective self-regulatory devices that help us register and reject what is toxic and find what is necessary and meaningful. Pulsa Group, an interdisciplinary group dealing with the differences between sociotechnological and biopolitical systems, also publishes in this collection.
Researchers in programmed environments, as they were called, proposed to correct systemic breakdowns by creatively expanding the interactive awareness of local media populations, which include feedback principles: environments, program events, cable television, tapes, movies. In one of the projects - Harmony Ranch - they experimented with self-organized collective organic farming to find out about long-term growth rhythms and regenerative changes. Agriculture and the dynamics of group life were part of their ecology of cybernetic systems, whether focused on soil quality and vegetable production, or cooperative social forms and music production with acoustic and computerized instruments. They were visited by Nam June Pajk, Karlheinz Stockhausen or Steve Reich.
One of the main products of the Racical Software collective was Guerilla Television, designed by Ant Farm, which developed as a process manual for the Radical Software collective and synthesis that could transcend the boundaries of this community to a wider audience. Guerilla Television, in Michael Shamberg's view, goes from technical diagrams of video technologies to criticism of their use by the American media and to ideas on how to use this technology in different situations in different ways and for specific users such as children. Radical video is like contemporary metallurgy, a nomadic science that takes and adapts official scientific and technical knowledge.
This metallurgy, even media geology, is a symptom that something like a minority knowledge on the fringe is able to change large power aggregates. It is the ability to influence and lay the foundations of the media infrastructure that we have in our own hands. Technosocial infrastructures are an idea from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and transcend leftist concepts based on the principle of the Marx division of labor as social practice and technical means of production, The machine is not just a tool in which social experience is enclosed, instead it opens in different social contexts to various connections.
This is a concept in which there is neither technological alienation nor technological fetishism. Machines have social and technical elements at the same time, and there is no purely technical machine, just as there is no social grouping that is not mediated by technical components, albeit simple ones. Machines have a number of possible connections and the processes that initiate these connections.
The factory is a technosocial machine as well as a media system. However, at a time when we have entered the post-industrial age, intangible production is increasingly important. The production of expression and statement is thus privileged over the production of objects and commodities. The media are becoming the center of the struggle for social power, and between power regimes and resistance movements, the media are the primary terrain of rivalry. Even guerrilla tactics fight the state not only for territory, but above all for the affective disposition of the population, writes Michael Goddard in the book Guerilla Networks.
The editorial of the first issue of Radical Software, 1970, points to an obsession with hardware in the form of land, labor, or capital. This is contrasted with software, ie access to information and its dissemination. Herein lies the real power: the battle must be fought over information structures. "Unless we design and build alternative information structures that go beyond and reconfigure existing ones, then alternative systems and lifestyles will be nothing more than products of the existing process." The magazine had three sections, Harware, Software and Environment, and was contributed by key Raindance Corporation members Frank Gillette and Paul Ryan, as well as Gene Youngblood, Nam June Pajk and Buckminster Fuller. This approach differs from McLuhan's technological determinism, and one of the key elements was independent video practice.
In addition to the explicitly political urban New Left, there was also the New Communality movement, which tended to return to the countryside and to internally transformative revolution focused on interpersonal relationships and consciousness.
Shamberg describes the word "radical" not in the sense of political revolution and physical disruption of the system, but as a post-political discontinuity with the past, the transition from the old consciousness to the new consciousness through open information tools. Media ecology is at the same time a condition and accompanying phenomenon of the natural one. Alternative guerilla television networks allow us access the experiences of others.
“The presentiment of catastrophe can release an unconscious desire for catastrophe a longing for nothingness, a drive to abolish. It was thus that the German masses in the Nazi epoch lived in the grip of a fantasy of the end of the world associated with a mythic redemption of humanity.
Emphasis must be placed, above all, on the reconstruction of a collective dialogue capable of producing innovative practices. Without a change in mentalities, without entry into a post-media era, there can be no enduring hold over the environment. Yet, without modifications to the social and material environment, there can be no change in mentalities. Here, we are in the presence of a circle that leads me to postulate the necessity of founding an ‘ecosophy’ that would link environmental ecology to social ecology and to mental ecology.” Félix Guattari, 1992
The introduction of a standard protocol for social networking is now being discussed on the Internet. You don't need a closed commercial service to get your microblogging and messages to others. There are already several open protocols being used by independent sites to talk to each other. So far, ActivityPub, originally native in Mastodon software, was standardized. It suffers from only a few major shortcomings. Almost no security and privacy, vague specifications mean that sometimes web software cannot negotiate, your identity is dependent on one operator. It's simple, most similar to Twitter and doesn't have very good protection against smam and trolling. For some designers, this is enough and they hope that it will replace Facebook with a pleasing interface.
Perhaps the very first node of the independent social network was identi.ca in 2008, then on the StatusNet software and the Ostatus protocol. It focused primarily on the free software community.
In 2010, in a lecture for the Internet Society New York, Eben Moglen recapitulated the development of networks from the original ideas of all peers on the same level, gradually to omnipotent servers in the cloud and helpless monitored users. He called it the architecture of disaster. An increasing concentration of power has emerged without any discussion of the long-term social consequences. The helplessness of weak and thin clients against strengthening servers also means the helplessness of the people who own the client devices. You can't play what you want on your phone, just what the monopoly music publisher gives you. It is no longer the case of software companies, but managements of platform business models.
Moglen said about Zuckerberg that he had harmed humanity more than anyone of his age. Everyone wants to get together with someone on Friday night, and he used it to degrade the integrity of the human personality in a pretty stupid business: for a few web widgets that he offers you for free, he monitors all your privacy. Moglen already had a theoretical solution at the time: Freedom Box was a personal server that integrated email, storage, the web and an intimate diary and could communicate directly with other people, without dictatorial intermediaries. It shouldn't be bigger than a phone charger, it could connect anywhere and it should also have a couple of USB ports for connecting things.
The lecture inspired 4 NYU students to a crowdfunding campaign and at the end of 2010 they could release the first version of Diaspora *, which was to replace Facebook with a decentralized network, sponsored by a public institution and not owned by anyone. Diaspora was a media hit before a line of code was written. The youth, inexperience, huge expectations and bugs of the first version left a mark on the project and later it sank into huge difficulties. Ilya Zhitomyrsky, a handsome sympathetic superintelligent mathematician who took these failures to his heart, was found dead several months after saying in an interview that the Diaspora was his work of love. In comments, he was named Ian Curtis of technology.
When I quoted Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze also wrote an interesting text in 1990: Postscript on Control Societies. In earlier societies, called the sovereign societies of the classical era, the central power of the rulers was exercised by violence and other coercive means. Foucault described this in detail in several books as Discipline and Punish, etc. Later, disciplinary societies replaced violence with more sophisticated bureaucratic methods of command and control.
Deleuze extended this chronology to the current period after the modern age, which he calls societies of control. It connects them with new forms of technology, where former mechanical machines, levers and clocks were replaced by thermodynamic and information technology machines. Just as Marx based his economic theory on a strict analysis of the means of production of the factory, Deleuze sees the productive power of computers as determining the sociopolitical logic of our time. In the past, architecture and other monuments corresponded to well-visible and solid symbols of power. Today, they no longer reside in them permanently, but move as needed, invisible and unstable.
Therefore, according to Alexander Galloway, the key concept of political-technical dynamism today is protocol. A protocol as a set of rules of good conduct in some system of conventions. It is a native organizational principle of people and computers connected in a distributed network. The two parties shall agree on a mutually agreed standard of conduct by means of a protocol. Instead of social and political diplomacy, however, the protocol is now used to control how different technologies are adopted, implemented and used today.
Nevertheless, “hierarchies struggle with networks," or "whoever masters the network first and foremost, gains a major advantage," are ideas that no longer fit the situation today. What is a network? Most importantly, in networks, many protocols operate simultaneously. Completely opposite things can happen at the same time, there is no single network of power. Different media systems also work in networks, in different ways and simultaneously. Opposition is in the basic fabric of the protocol not only as an expression of pluralism. The new framework is a metastable network of multiagent individualized nodes. Protocol is much less about power, discipline, normativity, but more about management: modulation, distribution, flexibility.
A network is an organization of nodes and their connections. The connection conditions of some nodes and not some others, in fact, create many different possible networks. The links between agents and their topologies are given by the protocol. At the same time, there are many networks of different topologies, sometimes incompatible with each other. They are social, economic and legal topologies (eg copyright). The same points use different rules to create different networks. Information is distributed alternatively, energy flows in another ways, the quality of the connection can be completely diverse with slightly distinct rules.
Network theory is used for everything possible, such as transport or economic models. However, what is worth noting is that the protocols also work in biological networks. An informative view of the biological and genetic structure of organisms has its foundations in post-war science, Norbert Wiener formulated cybernetics for any system, including living ones. We usually talk about genetic information or code. Biological network protocols are modes of biological regulation in the genome and cells. We can use them to describe both genes conditioned by protein production and their metabolism as well as molecular cryptography of signal transduction through membranes. From the molecular level to the superorganisms of the body and entire communities of organisms, networks of biological components work and interact with each other, driven by the genetic code, mediated by distributed biochemical information.
Mike MacGirvin has been through a number of technology companies during his lifetime. He now lives in rural Australia and manages the development of projects for decentralized social networks: Hubzilla and Zap. He has something in common with Steve Jobs. he himself says that they both grew up in the summer of love and are the product of the same cultural influences. Both were in California's Silicon Valley at the same time as microprocessors and the Internet emerged. While Jobs worked on Pong at Atari, Mike worked a few blocks away on silicon wafer accessories. He allegedly once sold a guitar to Mark Zuckerberg in his music store.
In the 1980s, he wrote federated software for bulletin boards that provided several services, file downloads, email, games, and news. It was able to send federated messages to FidoNet, Bitnet and ARPAnet. He then wrote email clients and forums for NASA, an IMAP server and encryption enabled client at Stanford, worked for Netscape, led AOL's large-scale groupware and communications systems development teams, and took part as member of IMAP protocol standardization committees. He also registered on Facebook, but stopped using it in 2010 and found that there was no decentralized solution to replace it. The diaspora was in its infancy. That's how he wrote the DFRN (Distributed Friends and Relations Network) protocol. Connections to Status.Net via their OStatus protocol, as well as Twitter and Facebook, worked. He later studied the source code and packets of Diaspora*, found several tragic holes, and thanks to the Diaspora's developer, Ilya Zhitomyrsky, succeeded in creating a functional federation module for the Diaspora.
"You have the right to a permanent Internet identity that is not tied to a specific server, which you're using it and no one can take it from you. " Mike MacGirvin
Mike has been farming in Australia and has been dealing with decentralized protocols for decades. He goes to throw hay to his horses and listen to what they want to say to him, then on the forum he responds to the problems of Hubzilla users. He simply decided to work and no longer deals with marketing and startups. The Zot protocol manages comment moderation, blocking untrusted people, detailed individual settings of rights to every single channel and photo, privacy even in the case you do not want to be seen at all. Zot can do amazing thing, which is a nomadic identity. You identify remotely with other websites, so your single identity applies everywhere. And if you set up an account elsewhere and set up replication of your channel or channels, you have two homes. Or as you wish, you can move to a different network address, and your contacts will be notified and will remain with you. One of the nodes is not running - you are using another and your friends will receive your posts. You can be local on multiple nodes, and your posts and comments are distributed to everyone in a synchronized manner.
Mike is working on an ethical replacement for toxic online sites. Zap in a nutshell means: enjoy more time sharing and communicating with friends and family than fighting spam, trolls, extremists and toxic strangers. Another of the developers is Mario Vavti, who lives in Vienna, plays the trombone, and when a problem arises on the Hubzilla support forum, he sends a fix to the development repository in a moment. One of the nodes is administered by Tanja, who lives in the countryside in Germany. She has photos of forests and even Raspberry Pi on her profile, she shares configuration practices on the forum and writes documentation. She says she's not a programmer.
There are now tens of thousands of Mastodon servers in the federated universe, and another supernetwork is a network of several hundred Diaspora "pods". Dozens of instances use the Zot protocol, but thanks to Hubzilla, people can chat with others on both ActivityPub and Diaspora.
Federated social media can also be called low-power media, running on minimized computer boards such as Raspberry Pi with low demands on resources and low consumption, suitable for a sustainable model of operation. Their potential lies in a large number of interconnected publishing and curatorial nodes, which can also mutually back up or temporarily and permanently represent each other in their functions, which corresponds to the organizational model of cooperation between independent and established cultural institutions and the creation of alliances of care.
The rule becomes: Use software and digital infrastructures from people you know who share common views with you. Build interconnected nodes that talk to each other and choose the one you belong to, according to place or ideas. There is no point in making big nodes where there are hundreds of thousands and millions of people who do not know each other and whose operation must be paid for by advertising. Much better are small nodes more appropriate to physical places and relationships.
In Rotterdam, a group of artists, media students and theorists formed around the Varia space and the Xpub experimental publishing project, to rediscover collective approaches to technology. They get together and ride their bikes to someone's house, where they examine the Internet connection and routers while served drinks by the host, and install a miniature publishing server. Infrastructour aims to raise awareness of social ties, tell a story about oneself, understand networks, autonomy, publish online, present fanzines, and finally create a home network.
When educators and curators of free culture discuss with students how to create a website, they do not order any anonymous service in the cloud. They prefer to take and assemble old computer components with them and install Linux, because it's better to see what's behind such a website. Free software is becoming easier to manage and selfhost.
Community and federated networks have a strong commitment to care. Like the physical public space, the Internet is a place shaped by the normativity of superiority, and it is related to how social norms are negotiated and applied, often to the disadvantage of the smaller and weaker. The Internet is another place in the continuum between public and private space, where the stories and lived realities of women must be heard, protected from extremist forces that monopolize the discourse of morality.
Networks of One's Own are the answer to the feminist principle of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. As a woman needs her own space to write, these networks are an inspiration for thinking about digital intimacy, addictions, and relationships in networking practices. They examine how the combination of technical work and content work come together and how the tools and procedures used influence collaborative publications.
The publishers of Low-Tech Magazine have launched a solar version of their website on a 5W microcomputer board powered by a solar panel and a small battery. They spent a lot of time redesigning the pages to keep the code as small as possible and the images are in monochrome. The page has an indicator of whether the sun is shining and how much energy is available. If the weather is bad for a few days, the website will shut down. You can come another time.
This is part of the philosophy of returning to physical encounters and local conditions. The developers of the Zot protocol are also unwilling to include features that do not correspond to any of the physical interactions between people. In Organization After Social Media, Geert Lovink and Ned Rositter describe how organized networks have changed the practices of many types of small institutional forms as they progress from casual friendship and networking to persistence in time and stronger decision-making ability to action. These new institutional forms are an alternative to political parties, NGOs, trade unions and social movements. Unlike traditional physical communities, however, they have the ability for enormous reach and organization over long distances, even in a heterogeneous society.
Hackers in 2000 wanted to connect everything to the Internet, hackers in 2020 want to disconnect everything from the Internet, posts one of my contacts on independent network. I would illustrate a turn to the physical with one more example. In Catalonia, the Democratic Tsunami mobile application has been used to organize massive protests against the Spanish government. After experience with other activist apps such as in Hong Kong, which were installed from corporate markets such as Google Play or the App Store and on the request of the government were blocked, the Democratic Tsunami is available for manual download and its source code can be viewed on it’s own website. It is based on Retro Share technology, sharing data only in the physical presence via Bluetooth. Information is transferred from one phone to another nearby, there is no central server that can be blocked. Why? Organizers of protests and referendums on Catalonia's independence have been tried and given long sentences, they should spend 12 years in prison. Tracking down a center distributing invitations to events would be dangerous. Anyone who wants to join the network must be invited by someone who is already in by displaying an invitation on the phone display and the other phone taking a photo and scanning it. Each has ten invitation codes. Upon acceptance, it will start receiving information from the local part of the network from network members in their physical vicinity.
Distributed cooperative organizations as a model of administration as well as an economic model have equally evaluated work for free, care and work for money. It is verified that organizations with tens of thousands of people can also function as cooperatives without bosses. In the Future of Organizations, Frededic Laloux helps to explain them with colors and writes about this type as turquoise. He also provides an analysis and history of some of them and methods for achieving such management. Although theories of organizations are often focused on the greatest possible success in the market, we need their core values to include socially and environmentally meaningful work, an orientation towards common values, relationships, and the sharing of resources.
Much has been written about alternative cryptocurrency monetary systems and how they should provide freedom, anonymity, and more. However, it can be quickly recognized that cryptocurrencies are based on the freedom of individual privatization of profit, a philosophy of right-wing libertarianism that does not deal with social responsibility. Technocratically oriented cryptocurrency miners are more interested in the advantages that this technology gives them for their own benefit – against the others. In essence, they use special hardware to convert electrical energy into cryptocurrencies, thus being rewarded for high consumption. The profits from this energy consumption go back to energy companies. I have never encountered the use of exclusively renewable energy or the initiative to build independent energy grids related to any cryptocurrency. Blockchain isn't even instrumental to federativity. It’s features only work in one unique chain, to which everyone must contribute. It thrives in only one organization and a forks or other chains are incompatible with each other.
Another inappropriate example of an organization is the so-called sharing economy, as we know it from the practices of Uber or AirBnB. The focus on private profit quickly brought negative consequences in the form of precarious work without any social security. The ideal corporate model without responsibility, adherence to labor and social standards, in rentals without respect to local rules and neighborhoods. Families with children in the center of Prague do not sleep all night, when the noise of unscrupulous drunken groups of tourists shakes the house. Only the centers of these platforms become rich.
Jo Freeman, a member of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, advocated freedom of speech, civil rights, figured in anti-nuclear activism, and founded several feminist groups. At that time, key ideological steps were discussed, and thousands of groups became aware of women's issues in the political context. But as she noticed, this insight could not be translated into action. What worked for small, closely intertwined groups, namely the emergence of a sense of identity, but without formal structures, had no result in any major action. Unstructuredness created informal invisible hierarchies that were unreadable to others without sitting in endless meetings.
Jo wrote the text Tyranny of Unstructuredness, because this practice not only produced unconfirmed leaders, but actively encouraged abuse. In 1976, she wrote Trashing. In this text, she described the cases of women expelled from movement groups only because they showed their independence, their own opinion and had organizational talent. This trashing meant great losses for the movement and had devastating personal consequences.
One of the first video art feminist acts was that a group of women took a camera and each of them could record and say something about themselves, confide in the problem, and then hand the camera to another. In the resulting image, they were all represented equally. No one was speaking for all, everyone had the same opportunity to express themselves.
Joint decision-making and fixed rules of group organization are essential. It is necessary to prevent the group from being dominated by one or a few agile ambitious individuals and to start operating on the principle of abuse of work or care provided by collective by those who appropriate media attention and benefits.
The democratization of power must be based on common values, it must be effective and foolproof. If a group is non-leader and non-hierarchical, there must be real processes with rules to ensure this. In groups that are seemingly open to anything and anyone, the hegemony of those strong arises above others, without written rules many are disoriented and do not have access to democratic decision-making processes, they are controlled only by a group of those who know them. The structure must therefore be explicit, not just informal implicit. Usually it does not destroy relationships and the group better meets the needs of everyone. It is also less prone to attack.
The hidden informal structure is the basis of elites and, as in society, leads to the accumulation of benefits only for some. Jo Freeman gives examples of how elites are created, for example, by married women who, thanks to their husbands, have access to important resources and young childless girls are a threat to them, or women who do not belong to the middle class like them become unsuitable for friendship, those who work fulltime, etc. In informal structures of friends, it does not matter what is one's talent, what benefit brings for the group, whether they are sensitive and listen to others. However, these criteria are crucial for the political effectiveness of the collective. Explicit rules can then be fixed in software tools to help implement processes.
The Autonomous Farm and Collective la r.O.n.c.e (resist, organize, nourish, create, exist) in Brittany enters the world critically and creatively. If the critique of the current order “is not grounded in a certain optimism, a shred of belief that an imagined better world can exist in some form in this world, now, it risks turning to another theoretical model, abstract and cynical excuse to wait for the perfect moment – the revolution, collapse, the last judgement – a sure recipe for hopelessness. ” Writes John Jordan and Isabelle Frémeux, authors of the film and the book Paths through Utopias. John Jordan was one of the actors in Reclaim the Streets movement in the 1990s. In 1996, several vans crashed under their direction on the motorway around London, which was followed by a blockade of the highway in the form of a techno party, after which several trees were planted in the drilled concrete. He also organized the Liberate Tate activist event, which aimed to draw attention to the unethical sponsorship of the gallery by the oil company BP. Isabelle gave up her education and teaching media and cultural studies at the University of London to escape payroll and academy.
In their project, which consists of activists, botanists and artists, they are not interested in what they call "image politics", the aesthetics of galleries and institutions. "Capitalism works because it constantly manipulates our desires. It is important to regain such desires, therefore our work includes pleasure, play and adventure, but not within the frame of art, ” explains John. That is why la r.O.n.c.e wants to transform the pleasures associated with capitalism – an unsustainable waste material culture, fossil transport and an alienation, often sexist and classy commercial spectacle - into post-capitalist ecological sustainability, localized egalitarian community, political commitment and self-sufficiency. The greatest possible connection of organic forms, which is symbolized by permaculture and the development of biodiversity, is a convincing model of socio-political life. It is not about "making art" in the prison of the art world and corporate palaces, but about shaping reality. Utopia, for John and Isabelle, is a beautiful edge and beautiful is what excites all our senses. The edge between fiction and reality, between conceptual and concrete, between imaginative reality and its creation.
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