This was written for the ‘Computational Thinking and Critical Practice’ class while studying on the Creative Computing Msc at the Creative Computing Institue in 2019.

Digital Self

Navigating Multiple Territories Simultaneously

In his A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow, when speaking from Cyberspace or what he calls ‘the new home of mind’, says to the ‘Governments of the Industrial World … leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’¹ Although an admirable and worthy stance to take to defend what was intended to allow ‘everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries’², you do not need to dig very deep to see that Cyberspace was not left untampered with.

Entire states now control what their citizens can and can’t see online (as with China’s Golden Shield Project); consulting firms are hired by political bodies around the world to form strategies based on analysis of easily accessible digital assets (Cambridge Analytica) and soldiers with journalsim skills are sought ‘to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age’³. I doubt Barlow could have predicted the scale at which Cyberspace has become political. Cyberspace is now woven into the fabric of our lives in more ways than we can appreciate. (I will be using the term Cyberspace in this essay, as Barlow did, as I feel it embodies more of the outside effectors, internal ideologies, and apparent feeling of the space I am talking of).

Benjamin H. Bratton understands the modern world in what he calls The Stack. The Stack is Bratton’s attempt to create an abstract model of the world; to sort through the layering and interconnected systems which make up the physical Westphalian territories we inhabit but also the geopolitical nature of the online landscape and the distortions of both has they mingle and intersect ⁴.

The Stack model suggests both the means and ends of a specific kind of platform sovereignty. It demands that we understand the designability of geography in relation to the designability of computation and to see the state (and other soveriegn institutions) in relation to both at once.⁵

The physical world as we know it has been subject to all manner of ecological and social experiments driven by utopian the vision of leaders or experts from various ideologies. From the ‘scientific forestry’ developed from 1765 to 1800 which aimed to re-plant forests for tree-felling to more ‘closely resemble the administrative grid of it’s techniques’⁶, to the Le Corbusier inspired pinnacle of high-modernity in the design and build of Brasilia. The top-down designed city of Brasilia was supposed to be a ‘city of the future … a realizable utopia’ but in reality it was a misunderstanding of what the local people needed and wanted.⁷ These examples given by James C. Scott as times when the state imposes its analytical model-based view of the world back on to the world itself are reasonably simple to understand, and thus the errors in oversimplification are somewhat clear (the undermining of the nuance relations between the trees of the forest and the undergrowth, or the inhabitants of a city and how they congregate and socialise). But the relationship between state and citizen is less clear in Cyberspace where in fact the state is not the only body with power, as perhaps Barlow suggested; the citizen may be rather more atomised in their digital existence; and the ways in which the system ‘produces new territories in its image’⁴ is a lot less obvious.

The User in Bratton’s model is described as the Apollo astronaut ‘a composite effect of interlocking organic and inorganic skins and metabolisms’ which interacts with the various layers of The Stack (Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface) as a ‘limited effector of processes bubbling up and down.’⁸ Perhaps Bratton’s User is a more appropriate means to understand how one (a human being) interacts with The Stack, more akin to a Cyborg as described by Donna Haraway.

Biology and evolutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science.⁹

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI System explores their own partial model of the world by thoroughly dissecting the Amazon Echo to understand the global operation it takes to produce a physically small but technology advanced so called smart device. ‘Each small moment of convenience … requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data.’¹⁰ The Amazon Echo not only reflects the complexities of the modern world, but also embodies, exploits and augments them.

Amazon as a company holds many of the same ideas found in the Echo. Amazon was born in 1994 when the capabilities of the new tech-companies were slightly misunderstood but the possibilities seemed endless. Neo-Liberalism set the dogma of growth and Amazon did just that. Amazon took full advantage of a ruling in 1992 which allowed online retailers to skirt tax collection responsibilities in states where they did not have a physical presence, allowing them to keep their prices low and thus dominate the e-commerce market¹¹. This was only overruled in 2018 at which point Amazon had applied its model elsewhere and proceeded to dominate in cloud computing, digital streaming and artificial intelligence¹², among many other markets.

But why is this significant? Or at least why is this more significant than the scale of Uber, Netflix or WeWork? All of these companies place stock value ahead of production as they work aggressively to dominate their respective markets before making profit¹³. It is because Amazon, along with Facebook and Google are the few companies who had the foresight to explore the possibilities of globalisation through Cyberspace and took the opportunity to claim territory and write the rules in this new land. As Crawford and Joler pointed out, the Amazon Echo as an object embodies geopolitics, trade routes, big data, human labor, surveillance, cultural corruption, energy and so on. Then it is with this device and others that it can re-shape the market in it’s own image, as perhaps Bratton would suggest.

Measuring statistics about control of web traffic is a murky and difficult area to research¹⁴, but none-the-less the aggregate figures do show that referral rates are very much controlled by Google and Facebook¹⁵. It is in this process of referral that control can be inferred. Approximately 50% of of web traffic to the top web publishers comes from Google or Facebook (in 2015)¹⁵ which drives the symbiosis of tech-companies, advertisers and publishers as they all benefit from digital walled gardens in which they are the only things to see. This coercion can then be extended into other aspects of our lives with new portals to Cyberspace as with the Amazon Echo. These devices allow immediate influence as the choice you have is now facilitated by the AI which backs up the system and the decision making process rendered invisible; the User can be forgiven for believing it is helping them make the right choice, whether they are aware that it is happening or not.

I could go on about the 48 anti-trust investigations into Google¹⁶ or Facebook land grabbing in Africa¹⁷ to point out the questionable moral decisions these big tech companies have made, but the core point is not a call for people to abandon these tools (which lets face it, are useful and valuable to our daily lives), it is more to work in the direction of a reformulation of the concept of who we are as citizens of Westphalian sovereign states, and as citizens of Cyberspace. It is naive to think of Cyberspace as apolitical, but also naive to think of “real life” as disconnected from Cyberspace. The Cartesian mind/body split has had such a profound impact on modern cognition¹⁸ and the Cyberspace/physical-world dichotomy fits this model all too well. Cyberspace is very much based in the physical and is susceptible to damage from shark attacks¹⁹ or old ladies with shovels²⁰, and our digital selves are more complex than cookies and location data. I think the perceived separation of Cyberspace from the physical world is what set the scene as an unknown land with laws yet to be written, which has led to a trial and error approach (from corporations and governments) to find out what can or should be allowed. This has left the User in particularly murky ground as it is the User who is the apparent beneficiary but also who is providing the labor in many models we see today.

As we look forward to how the systems we have now may progress, critical theory is harsh with the likes of James Bridle and Yuval Noah Harari barely seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (New Dark Age, Homo Deus respectively). Jaron Lanier is offering alternative models for how Users interact with other layers of The Stack by owning and monetising the data they provide (or labor )²¹, and André Staltz is providing alternative structures of Cyberspace with a ‘people centered web’ built on peer-to-peer protocols and mesh networks²². However as Harari says ‘it is not easy to think and behave in new ways, because our thoughts and actions are normally constrained by the present-day ideologies and social systems’.²³ Bratton provides some vision to an unkown time: as this full embodiment of the physical-world combined with Cyberspace is not yet a fully defined or understood space and its development is not at all planned, it may well lead to new ideologies and social systems.

While The Stack stages the death of the User in one sense—the eclipse of a certain resolute humanism—they do so because they also bring the multiplication and proliferation of other kinds of non-human Users (including sensors, financial algorithms, and robots from nanometric to landscape scale), and combination of which one might enter into a relationship with as part of a composite User.⁴

Perhaps as we embrace these methods of thought into our lives, and become composite Users, we will find ‘less anthropocentric frames of reference’ which could help break apart the deep underlying principles which allow for such systems of manipulation to thrive. As Haraway said ‘The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora.’⁹

References