Re: social media critique: next steps?

[Jonathan Marshall]

There is also a sense in which no one is in control. Technologies and actions 
always have the possibility of unintended effects, unexpected consequences and 
so on. It is also likely that hard attempts at control will eventually be 
undermined by the disorders that the attempts generate.

Even if someone pulled the plug because it was unprofitable they can't 
guarantee the exact results of this action. Sure they would not be profiting 
anymore or loosing money on that investment, but what will happen is uncertain. 
Will alternates be set up, will improvements be made elsewhere, will the 
'owning company' collapse because they no longer have investor confidence, or 
people boycott them?

Even if the people (whoever they are) manage to articulate a collective will 
(whatever that is) then they still won't be able to control things completely.

Maybe the God you mention designed the world so it was unpredictable

jon

From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of Felix Stalder 
Sent: Wednesday, 17 January 2018 10:45 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  social media critique: next steps?



On 2018-01-17 03:22, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control
> machines and machines that control humans.

Machines are never in control. Even if you believe that the liberal CEO
FB has somewhat lost control of his creation, it still does what it's
supposed to do ever since the first angel (Peter Thiel) touched it: make
investors rich. The moment it would stop doing this, the plug would be
pulled, no matter how much each of us depends on it.

Therefore, I would phrase the dilemma differently. The struggle is
whether an oligarchy controls the mass of people through machines, and
the mass of people using the machines to articulate and enact their
collective will.

In may ways, machines -- deep-learning, big data -- are god. The seat of
knowledge on a scale that mere mortals cannot comprehend it and the
source of action that, for all its arbitrary surface appearance, can
always claim an underlying justification that remains hidden to all but
a few.

A combination of ancient egypt and feudal europe.


Felix






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Re: social media critique: next steps?

[carlo von lynX]

On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 11:55:47AM +0100, Andre Rebentisch wrote:
> and the conservative technologist (=us) then says: Who needs X, there is Y.

I guess I don't qualify. Slack, Mattermost and Matrix bring a lot
to the table that IRC doesn't provide.

> The real issue of the last decade is that customers always trade less
> invasive modes of communication for new modes that include behavioral
> tracking as a business and revenue model.

By "Tell them they can have their cake and eat it" I mean not
that they can be pacified with XMPP when they actually want
Whatsapp. I mean that the surveillance revenue model becomes
illegal and therefore Whatsapp, Slack or Facebook becomes an
app that you can *buy* for a moderate amount of money and then
runs off of your device using a distributed network instead of
a cloud and is technically *impeded* from exfiltrating user
information to the company that wrote the software.

So they can have most of the things they have grown accostumed
to, only that the underlying protocol stack and surveillance
economy have been replaced.

> With (default) encryption of email you solve the classic privacy
> shortcoming of email. Now, users weight the costs of that, and
> ironically they do often opt for more privacy invading solutions. At
> times, the privacy invading mechanisms may even be more protective
> depending on your threat model. As an example, during the Syrian
> uprising using GMAIL webmail might have protected the communication of a
> dissident better that having sophisticated encrypted mail installed on
> your local devices (that gets you killed when found).

I don't consider the shortcoming of SMTP solvable as long as
metadata collection challenges our collective ability to exercise
democracy. Our threat model is different: at some point in time
we chose to have a democratic constitution (or equivalent) and
should the majority of politicians still value such constitution
(they better should, because if mass manipulation goes on they
will all lose their jobs and be replaced by less friendly folks)
then it is high time for them to enact measures to protect
democracy from technology. These measures might lead to suitable
new protocol standards which by mistake might make also the Syrian
Internet harder to monitor, but that is not the primary goal.

> When we open our mind to the idea of competing media platforms it
> becomes clear what will "end Facebook": Other platforms that serve
> similar purposes, are more convenient, better integrated and so forth.

And also pose a serious threat to democracy, because platforms that
don't do so cannot economically compete with those that do. The
market can't fix this problem. Only regulation can.

> Morlock Elloi wrote: "1. The current (and foreseeable) political climate
> will not have any monopoly-breaking anti-trust mechanisms applied,
> period. This is the 20th century thinking, a non-starter. The opposite
> actually happens."

I see a general intellectual awakening to the fact that the Clinton
generation made a mistake in dropping FDR anti-trust policies, and
all the left-wing governments of Europe following suit. Let's see
if that awakening comes in time to have political repercussions.
EC is already trying out all tricks to deal with the Silicon Valley
monopolists, but it isn't daring to impede abuse on a technological
level directly.

> I would argue that a "data cartel" law is feasible, both technically
> (=proper legal instruments) and practically (enforcing it), as well as
> politically (majority consent). Right now no one is asking for that.

I think that we won't achieve our societal goals if we only "forbid",
not impede technology from breaking democracy. I wonder if we will 
still have enough democracy by the time EC learns that forbidding
didn't work out (who cares if data crime produces no evidence? the
strategic gains outplay the risks of getting caught big time), or if
all of today's staff will be decomissioned (SCNR) and replaced by
figures that follow other people's interests.

> That also means, to not only rely on data protection laws as a panacea
> but add a layer of data use and anti-eavesdropping protective measures
> enshrined in law, as well as - your agenda - demands for technical
> minimum standards in communications.

Not sure if the word "agenda" is suitable if the person promoting it
has little personal gain in it, but yes, that's what I've been talking
about ever since the dreadful summer of 2013.

> "It is as possible to fix Facebook as it was possible to fix slavery. "

I find this phrase quite fitting, actually. By fixing slavery, a
minimum of civil rights was introduced into the labor market.
By fixing Facebook the way I suggest, we reinvent social networking
as a civil fundamental thing and enable a market of fair trade,
free of middle men. I know this has been promised gazillion times
before, but as long as distributed networking software to actually
achieve this hasn't reached the necessary 

Re: social media critique: next steps?

[Morlock Elloi]

There is a symbiotic relationship the affects both sides. Where the 
boundary is becomes irrelevant. The point is that the majority will be 
excluded from the symbiosis.


There is one rare talk about thinking machines that makes sense, from 
the guy who defined the field: 1951 "Alan Turing's lost radio broadcast" 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMxbSsRntv4



On 1/17/18, 03:45, Felix Stalder wrote:

Machines are never in control. Even if you believe that the liberal CEO
FB has somewhat lost control of his creation, it still does what it's


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Re: Speed (of nettime)

[Felix Stalder]

On 2018-01-13 21:22, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> It's important to understand the mechanics of how machine-fed deluge of
> stimuli affects victims. When driving car very fast, one focuses on the
> road in the front, because it's essential for the survival - not on the
> horizon, not on the scenery on the side, and certainly not reflecting on
> the past mile. The machine-pumped information has similar effects,
> reducing the attention to the present in the very narrow sense. While
> driving fast, if someone asks you a serious question ("can you lend me
> $100K?"), you may easily say yes or no without much thinking, depending
> on how the question was phrased, because you are focused on the road.

I agree, speed is a key issue of affecting cognition. Reflection vs
pattern recognition, as McLuhan put it.

On a very mundane level, one of the things -- almost the only thing --
that the moderation of nettime has done over the past decade(s), was to
slow things down. Depending on more or less random circumstances (time
and mood constraints of Ted and myself), a post could sit in the queue
for up to day or two. Usually, it was a few hours.

At least the few hours delay, I always thought was very beneficial. Why
hurry, just because it's technologically possible to transmit it data at
high speed?

Turning off moderation seems to have been a good thing over all, but we
lost perhaps another good thing, delay. I wonder if it would be useful
to re-introduce it in some way. Technically, I'm not sure if there is
way to do it with mailman, though.

Felix



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Re: social media critique: next steps?

[Felix Stalder]

On 2018-01-17 03:22, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control
> machines and machines that control humans.

Machines are never in control. Even if you believe that the liberal CEO
FB has somewhat lost control of his creation, it still does what it's
supposed to do ever since the first angel (Peter Thiel) touched it: make
investors rich. The moment it would stop doing this, the plug would be
pulled, no matter how much each of us depends on it.

Therefore, I would phrase the dilemma differently. The struggle is
whether an oligarchy controls the mass of people through machines, and
the mass of people using the machines to articulate and enact their
collective will.

In may ways, machines -- deep-learning, big data -- are god. The seat of
knowledge on a scale that mere mortals cannot comprehend it and the
source of action that, for all its arbitrary surface appearance, can
always claim an underlying justification that remains hidden to all but
a few.

A combination of ancient egypt and feudal europe.


Felix






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Re: the thing with Europe

[Patrice Riemens]

On 2018-01-16 20:38, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Or maybe it's time to put down our phones, pick up shovels and start 
laying fibre.

I don't know.


This, of course, is the only solution. If all other arguments fail,
consider that this gets you to the jail fastest. QED.

---

Europe was mentioned several times recently as alleged potential for
doing good stuff, breaking MAGAf, regulating, taxing, creating
communal infrastructure etc.

If Europe resembled anything from the 1983 Stuttgart Declaration, then
this would be a reasonable hope and actionable direction.

It doesn't.

It's a 2nd class neoliberal financial cartel, dominated by US directly
and via proxies (DE, UK.) Pipe dreams notwithstanding, this is not
changing any time soon. The smartest ones  gravitate to US, because
becoming rich CEO or semi-rich CTO is more attractive than championing
community issues. Most Europeans have foreign cellular and landline
providers - they couldn't even fix that, and they are going to
communalize and regulate Internet?

"Europe" has, in the progressive circles, the same sinister role that
Democratic Party had in the US: capture, coopt and subvert anything
that endangers the system. It is no wonder that right-wingers are
doing so well.

Forget Europe. If anything happens, it will happen in the heart of the
Empire, where shovels and the shoveling drive exist.



But Morlock, you know since Henry Kissinger, who couldn't find it in the 
phone directory, that there ain't any 'Europe'!


Caioui, p+7D!
(happy in Italy, where Bruksel (aka 'Europe') is an 'onshoni shogket' 
(distant thunder), and life is still relaxed - in my village at least)






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Re: social media critique: next steps?

[olivier auber]

Agreed Roel, thanks for your nice list.

I would like to add one more project: Duniter.

As said here:
http://perspective-numerique.net/wakka.php?wiki=SymetrieEtNeutralite2Engl

"If you want a symmetrical network, it is necessary to design it in such a way
that it generate itself a new form of currency which has to be also
symmetrical"

That what Duniter tries to do.

Duniter is a cryptocurrency software, which means it is a software
providing the ability to create currencies. Duniter is different from other
cryptocurrency softwares you may know (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Peercoin, ...)
for 2 main reasons : its currency code includes the concepts of a Universal
Dividend and Web of Trust; but also its Blockchain code, which is far more
energy efficient, getting rid of the massive waste of energy introduced by
Bitcoin.

https://duniter.org/en/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjR-7nNEA1o=youtu.be

Olivier Auber

On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 8:58 AM, RRA  wrote:

> > This is in the end what Silicon Valley tries to prevent at all cost:
> > resistance and exodus. How can such a momentum be unleashed?
>
> So aside from the discussion of who listens (or didn't listen) to whose
> opinion it can be interesting to have a closer look at action and momentum.
>
> Three projects caught my attention and I think could be an interesting
> case for this 'next steps' discussion:
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