ART 80F - WEEK 7 LECTURE CONTENT
Digital Media Theory+ Hacking
Hacking is often included within digital media theoretical frameworks because:
- 'Hacking' originated within digital systems. Even analogue 'hacks' - such as the Cap'n Crunch Whistle - devised prior to the adoption of digital technologies were not discussed or defined as such until later.
- Algorithmic / programmed systems and digital files / media / data within those systems can be manipulated using other algorithmic operations, process or programs, which can be implemented, accessed and/or delivered via digital networks.
- Digital media itself informs + influences the design of both digital and non-digital hacks, activist networks, cyber attacks / terrorism / security + other resistance networks.
Theorist / Artist Geert Lovink
Definitions + discussions of Tactical Media
1997 emailifesto on Tactical Media
Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition. This is both the source their power, ("anger is an energy" : John Lydon), and also their limitation. their typical heroes are; the activist, Nomadic
media warriors, the pranxter, the hacker,the street rapper, thecamcorder kamikaze, they are the happy negatives, always in search of an enemy. But once the enemy has been named and vanquished it is the
tactical practitioner whose turn it is to fall into crisis. Then(despite their achievements) its easy to mock them, with catch phrases of the right, "politically correct" "Victim culture" etc. More theoretically the identity politics, media critiques and theories of representation, that became the foundation of much western tactical media are themselves in crisis. These ways of thinking are widely seen as, carping and repressive remnants of an outmoded humanism.
To believe that issues of representation are now irrelevant is tobelieve that the very real life chances of groups and individuals arenot still crucially affected by the available images circulating in anygiven society. And the fact that we no longer see the mass media as thesole and centralized source of our self definitions might make theseissues more slippery but that does not make them redundant.
2016 interview with Baffler discussing new book
I’m from a generation that grew up with the question: “What is the potentiality? What is the ‘newness?’ What can we do with this stuff?” After all, the stuff that the computer is made of was, in principle, quite amazing. But a lot of values—like community—did not materialize.
At the start the utopian element was the community aspect, the one that precisely fails in social media, because social media does not allow for real community building. Social media neither facilitates debate nor provides a group with organizational tools to grow into a movement. Communities need time, a certain autonomy and closeness. Social media does not permit that. And companies like Google and Facebook constantly undermine independent networking. They want the networking to be under their terms. Their goal is to make money out of the data the social interaction is generating.
What we also see now with the current tools is that the first phase of movement building is being undermined because it all happens out in the open under the paradigm of news production. Everything you say is rendered an ‘update’ or ‘status.’ All we can do in the current social media architectures is transmit news. But outside social media, communities do not merely generate news. They work on issues, people exchange arguments and materials, they get to know each other and then, out of a messy collection of local gatherings, something bigger emerges, the movement emerges after a series of events.
Theorist Alexander Galloway
- Structures / systems of control run by protocols
- Decentralized power structures / hierarchies
- Networked resistance
- Hacking - searching out the "exploit" of a system
From Protocol - How Control Exists After Decentralization - 2004
...the current global crisis is one between centralized, hierarchical powers and distributed, horizontal networks...
Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks
It takes networks to fight networks
Whoever masters the network firm first and best will gain major advantages
...what happens when the powers that be actually evolve into networked power (which is already the case in many sectors.)
In recent decades the primary conflict between organizational designs has been between hierarchies and networks, an asymmetrical war. However, in the future the world is likely to experience a geenral shift downward into a new bilateral organizational conflict - networks fighting networks.
case study - the death star
The decentralization of control networks + power
From the Wired Arab Spring Social Media Article 2016
Activists were able to organize and mobilize in 2011 partly because authoritarian governments didn’t yet understand very much about how to use social media. They didn’t see the potential, says NYU professor of politics Joshua Tucker, a principle investigator at the Social Media and Political Participation Lab at New York University. “There are a lot of reasons the people in power were slow to pick up on this,” he adds. “One of the things about not have a free press is it is harder to learn what was going on in the world.”
Today, governments take an aggressive hand in shutting down digital channels people use to organize against them. In Egypt, for example, where 26 million people are on Facebook (up from 4.7 million people in 2011), security forces arrested three people who administered nearly two dozen Facebook pages, according to Egyptian media reports. It also detained activists who had been involved in prior protests. And at the end of December, the government shut down Facebook’s Free Basics service, which had offered free Internet services to Egyptians on mobile phones. More than 3 million people had signed up for the program in just two months, according to Facebook. Meanwhile Turkey has made 805 requests for tweets to be removed since 2012, according to Twitter’s most recent transparency report; more than half were made last year.
These governments have also become adept at using those same channels to spread misinformation. “You can now create a narrative saying a democracy activist was a traitor and a pedophile,” says Anne Applebaum, an author who directs a program on radical political and economic change at the Legatum Institute in London. “The possibility of creating an alternative narrative is one people didn’t consider, and it turns out people in authoritarian regimes are quite good at it.”