The ‘open’ internet was supposed to give us a worldwide ‘network society’ where our communications would move from being controlled from above through broadcast models, and towards more horizontal ‘mass-self-communication’. The excitement about the use of social media in the Arab Spring and even the furore over Anonymous’ (temporary) disruptions of some minor engines of capitalism suggest that we are still tantalized by the potential that technology appears to bring. At the same time, we become worried about exploits of the networked power of the internet – that come in the form of cybercrime and widespread breach of existing laws and norms like copyright.

Increasingly, the negative and disruptive aspects of the ‘open’ internet seem to be getting more attention than the potentially positive ones.  Governments are concerned about the rise of cybercrime, the threat of filesharing to industries that depend on the control of intellectual property, and the control of dissenting speech.  Along with industries and police, they strengthen intellectual property laws, prosecute and shut down file-sharing servers, track individual activists through social networks, and arrange with Internet Service Providers to block and filter problematic internet content.

So now we are in a situation where law, policy, and architecture combine to close down aspects of the ‘open’ internet. This has the paradoxical result of driving underground some of the practices that used to take place out in the open – beginning with some of the more unsavoury actions that happen on the internet, like file-sharing, but also extending to the kind of activism celebrated as an example of the democratic potential of the ‘open’ internet.  On one hand the move away from the ‘open’ internet has inspired innovation in technologies like encryption, file-sharing and and community wireless mesh networks, but on the other, it could have longstanding impacts on our communication environment.

Yesterday, the Guardian reported that Pirate Bay, in an effort to resist a High Court decision that file-sharing sites should be blocked, has moved to a new system for filesharing, using magnet links instead of displaying torrent files on its website. Magnet files are links with no files associated with them, which avoid tracking by containing very little information apart from an indication of the content they are associated with. The attraction of magnet links, according to SoftPedia, is that they make it easier for file-sharing sites to avoid accusations of wrong-doing in court.  Other file-sharers use ‘cyberlocker’ technology where users pay for passwords to third-party file servers (often supported by advertising) where they can leave files they wish to share with others. Unlike torrents, cyberlockers (as well as magnet links) are difficult to monitor. They are also incredibly useful for benign purposes like sharing files between work and home, or collaborating with other people – the popular file storage system Dropbox is a form of cyberlocker.

These changes in practice are part of a move where some of the more unsavoury and disruptive products of the ‘open’ internet shift to dark corners where it is more difficult for governments and courts to get a clear picture of what is happening. They may respond by passing laws or enacting policies that attempt to address illegal behavior but in doing so may overreact to actions that are not illegal. For example, the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) recently took over a music sharing domain after suspecting its operator of conspiracy to defraud – but not without initially posting a message implying that people who downloaded from the site may have conducted criminal offense. SOCA eventally changed the message, but the implication was that the use of ANY music site could be a criminal offence – which might well limit the number of people who want to use legitimate music-sharing sites, and push the less legitimate ones further underground.

Activism too is moving into the dark shadows. One of the consequences of the Arab Spring has been a greater attention by governments to the communications of its citizens – and in parallel greater attention from activists to securing or encrypting their activities. The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative has been working on various prototype technologies meant to help activists avoid blocking, filtering, or internet outages. These include Commotion, a project that promises to use networked devices (mobile phones, laptops) as the points of connection in a mesh network that could grow to ‘metro-scale’. Designed to be decentralized and to link devices together in ad-hoc formations when and where required, the project promises to create an alternative network as an when needed. The New York Times reported on the project, which was supported by US government funds, calling it part of a ‘stealth internet’. My old community wireless networking co-conspirator Sascha Meinrath is quoted as saying “we’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is impossible to shut down”. The article also reports that other veterans of community wireless networking have moved away from creating networks that help to share internet access towards networks that are designed for secure communications – including the FunkFeur wireless networking project in Austria. This project has been building an autonomous network across the city of Vienna which is owned by its builders, a longstanding goal which, in case of threats or constraints on the commercial internet, could provide an alternative mode of communication.

Other projects go even further: ArsTechnica reports on The Darknet Project, another proposal for a worldwide meshed network, and Serval, a project to create ad-hot wireless mesh networks using regular smartphones.

At one level, these projects feel like reinventions of the internet, which a collective burst of imagination framed as a platform for horizontal, networked communications. But now that the centralization and control of that platform is becoming evident, we need something else to imagine. The problem is that in creating darknets and super-encrypted dropboxes, all of the other benefits to speech that the internet has supported can get lost. One open internet, as compared to numerous separate and encrypted darknets, suggests the opportunity for global interconnection and communication. Already, social pressure and the habits of millions of internet users conspire to create ‘echo chambers’ online. What remains is a shared imaginary of openness, of a resource to be governed by its users. The rise of super-encryption and darknets suggests that this imagined unitary resource is fracturing. As more of the unsavoury action goes underground, so might the kinds of communication we think of as ‘open’ and democratic. What do we risk when the activists go underground?

This morning I read thatt UK schools are failing to provide students with ICT training.  Only 40% of teenagers receive some kind of computer training, and from what I can gather, this essentially means learning to use proprietary software to do things like print screens, format texts for printing, and develop spreadsheets.  Journalists despair over these poor levels of computing training and worries that the country would fall behind if children didn’t take more computer qualifications.

But what these ‘computer classes’ are doing is training consumers – people who follow instructions and learn a standard set of processes on products provided by big companies. In creative terms, it’s like learning photography by looking at magazines without ever picking up a camera. What people who actually work as programmers or software developers do is mostly creative problem solving using tools based on logic and mathematics, as well as social processes including the design process – and of course, creativity.
It is these things – problem solving, understanding the capacities of different kinds of tools, creatively applying them – that are the foundations of being a participant, as opposed to a consumer.  This participation and creativity is what will will drive innovation and (maybe) economic growth.  According to David Gauntlett’s book Making is Connecting, participation and creativity also open opportunities for civic participation and (maybe) positive social change.

Using ICTs in teaching/learning is not really about ICT at all, then.  It’s about having learned various logical and linguistic processes that are part of particular problem-solving tools, and about having learned how to creatively apply those tools to solving problems.  You can learn the basic processes by learning foreign languages, or Boolean, or by paying attention in math class.  But the key to connecting coding to a broader ethic of participation is allowing places within education where these abstract things can have a concrete application. That should be across the curriculum, and it should be fun. MIT’s ‘programming for everyone’ Scratch lets you build and animate beautiful things – programming in the service of art. You don’t have to teach database design in a separate class if you require history students to determine how to devise a database that brings up different/similar/related historical situations related to significant social changes (ie, the causes of WWII, to cite the perennial favorite).

I went to elementary and high school in Canada, and yes I was taught programming (as well as touch typing) in my public (state) schools. I didn’t much like the programming I learned, as it was in a ‘computer science’ class that didn’t seem to have much to do with anything. I didn’t get to do anything interesting with the BASIC loops I built. But at other times in school I remember making cool things using all kinds of ICTs, as well as other technology. I learned how electronic circuits worked, as part of a geography project to devise an electronic quiz where lights would turn on when someone correctly identified a Canadian province.  And when I edited the school newspaper we learned to lay out the paper on a drafting board . . . and then using graphics software. Everything we did then can be done now in ways that are more interesting, more interactive, and more powerful.

But there is huge resistance, that I think is part of a culture that sees ICTs as discrete and separate entities that we engage with as consumers, following patterns instead of inventing our way in. When Will and I proposed to lead a session on research, creative work and technology for his alma mater that would have involved the students devising a research project with social implications, and then developing technical tools to solve their research problem, the school didn’t take up our offer. They said that they did use ICTs – their students learned how to make Powerpoint presentations.

I still need to learn to code, properly. I can’t ‘walk the talk’ as a scholar of code and digital media otherwise, and I want to participate too. I’m going to learn Python, because Will’s just finished running a course to teach it to London’s finest visual effects artists. But which language I learn doesn’t matter as much as learning what computer code can do – which is like learning what words can do when you first learn to read. Once you learn that, you can use those words to express your ideas and participate in the world. We now have even more interesting ways to express our ideas. Programming, building electronics, making and sharing electronic music – or videos – or blogs – or Tumblrs – are all ways to write ourselves into the world – and to participate.

I wrote this post over at the LSE Media Policy Project blog . . . enjoy!

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The London Conference on Cyberspace, attended by top government leaders and corporate actors, was set against a backdrop of increasing concerns about cyberwarfare and the risks (to governments and businesses) of the open internet. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was meant to deliver a keynote address. Clinton’s expected participation and the event’s focus on the threats to intellectual property and national security of open networks suggest that a worrying feature of US internet policy may be coming to the UK.  This feature – what I call the Clinton Paradox – consists of stressing internet freedom abroad while controlling or limiting networks in ways that could constrain the same freedoms at home. The UK government’s concern with the risks of an open internet, and its stress on policing and ‘protection from threat’ suggest that this same strategy may be repeated here. Already, we can see the roots of the “Clinton Paradox” in the response of leaders to recent events like the so-called “Facebook” or “Twitter revolutions” of the Arab Spring.

Both Prime Minister David Cameron and Hillary Clinton initially come out in support of these movements and of the importance of open communication networks in general. In February 2011 Cameron gave a speech in Kuwait, saying “[The movement] belongs to a new generation for whom technology – the internet and social media – is a powerful tool in the hands of citizens, not a means of repression.”  Similarly, Clinton’s 2011 Internet Freedom Agenda states, “the internet has become the public space of the 21st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. . . The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should.”

At home though, leaders took a different tack.  When WikiLeaks, founded to release publicly significant information not published elsewhere, published information embarrassing to the US government, Clinton helped to co-ordinate action by government, banks and internet service providers to withdraw support from the organization and (unsuccessfully) remove it from the web. Other domestic policies likewise tend away from freedom and towards control. For example, the US Federal Communications Commission has now ruled that mobile devices are not subject to the net neutrality rules that prohibit discrimination of media content based on its source or destination.  Instead, mobile operators, who now control the means through which an increasing number of people go online, can block, throttle, or degrade any kind of content they like.  Most recently, the ominously named E-PARASITE bill was introduced into the US Congress. It stipulates that an internet service provider can be liable for any content or site that it delivers that has a “high probability” of being used for copyright infringement.  Critics of the bill claim that this provision could extend to almost any site that hosts user-generated content.

Cameron’s recent actions suggest that his government could also be pursuing a harder line on control of internet and social media. After the riots in August, Cameron’s advisors for a time seriously considered censoring Twitter and other messaging systems. Net neutrality is less important than the opportunities provided to internet service providers to differentiate their service and develop new markets. Although no equivalent of the E-PARASITE bill has been proposed, the UK internet registrar, Nominet, is investigating ways of dealing with imminent criminality online, including the trade of illegal goods. These could include removal of websites. For the moment this endeavour is narrowly focused on crime, but it raises the question of whether government or law enforcement would like more control over what appears online.

The rhetoric of control and security suggests that an open internet brings risks of terrorism, crime and theft. Speaking in advance of the London Conference on Cyberspace, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague stressed the risks of cyber-attacks to government and business, noting that banking and taxation systems were ‘liable to attack’.  He stated, “”Countries that cannot maintain cybersecurity of their banking system, of the intellectual property of their companies, will be at a serious disadvantage in the world.” In his speech at the conference itself, he broadly supported the ideals of the open internet, while tempering his enthusiasm with renewed commitments to security and an end to the ‘cyber free-for-all’.  He mentioned the “heightened risk of exposure to crime as efforts to clamp down on crimes such as child pornography in one part of the world are rendered ineffective by illegal practices on networks in other countries” as well as the financial and social risks of terrorism online.

The UK government may be at risk of making policies that fit into the Clinton Paradox: praising the importance of an open internet but continuing to support policies and enforcement strategies that concentrate control of the internet and social media into the hands of a few. This is not a call to return to naïve cyber-utopianism. A global, networked communication and data transfer platform certainly carries risks. The question is whether those risks should be replaced with repression.

I had the pleasure to be in Brazil last week, and to participate in a teach-in at the Occupy Sao Paulo camp which was attended by a few hundred people. The group there shared some thoughts about the overall Occupy movements and learn more about the issues in Brazil, which include government corruption, land-grabs and rampant over-development.  Now, I hear news from my colleague Biella Coleman, who was with me in Brazil, that the protest is under threat.  She’s posted the following news from the camp organizers:

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On October 15, a group of nearly 300 activists began an occupation of São Paulo in the Valley of Anhagabau, one of the sites of the first rallies for direct elections during the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1980s. After a week of peaceful encampment, educational and cultural programs, and creating a sustainable community for not just themselves but many homeless people in downtown São Paulo, the Occupy São Paulo movement is coming under increased police threat. Today, Monday October 24, the governor of the state of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin is holding two special events. First, he is hosting Florida Governor Rick Scott (R). Second, Alckmin has decided to hold a parade of 3000 military police right next to the encampment.

After a week of police harrassment and a pending court case for them to hold the right to pitch their tents, the Occupy São Paulo movement sees this as an escalation of the harassment they have already faced by city police. Further, the presence of 3000 military police next to 300 occupiers is clearly meant to intimidate both occupiers and members of the public who have been coming up to the encampment and learning about the movement. Please take the time to call or email the governor and the secretary of public security of the state of São Paulo to condemn this action. You can also send messages of solidarity to the São Paulo occupation at occupysampaenglish@googlegroups.com.

To contact Governor Geraldo Alckmin’s office of citizen and organizational relations:

Fill out a comment form at: http://www.saopaulo.sp.gov.br/en/fale/fale.php
Phone: 55-11-2193-8463

To contact the Secretary of Public Security, Antônio Ferreiro Pinto:
Email: seguranca@sp.gov.br
Phone: 55-11-3291-8500

In this seemingly endless and heartless age of austerity, the cost of things is measured in dollars and pounds. Services that we used to think of as being of benefit for the public or common good are suddenly too expensive, and soon they are repackaged as things to buy. We get choice – we get to be consumers – we get, in theory, to exercise that choice in a market.

But really, the market is not very good at some things. And when you try to apply it to these things – things like health care, and community well-being – it is very easy to see the difference between tradeable commodity and public good. Here are some banal stories about noting the difference.

This morning my partner called the local council gym to find out if he could go and try out the facilities on a one-time basis before committing to a rather expensive £41 monthly fee. The gym’s managment has recently been turned over to a private company. Their website promised  a free induction, but the person on the phone explained that if you weren’t on benefit, the induction fee was £41. The same price to try the gym as for an entire month of unlimited use?  Not really very accessible. At the national minimum wage, 41 pounds represents just under 8 hours of work.  A full day’s work – just to try the gym?  A single visit costs £6, but you can’t visit the gym without the induction. And as a working person, you can’t get the induction for less than £41.

Not surprisingly, my partner told the person on the phone “with these rates, you have just lost a client” and went to go use the fitness equipment in the local park – free of charge. I can understand gym companies wanting to make as large a profit as possible. But this was the council gym. Surely our borough, where the average family income is £17,000, should provide access to  health-enhancing fitness as widely as possible. Surely working people deserve a break as well?  But this would seemingly interfere with a company’s profit motive.

Maybe fitness is a choice – and one that some people are willing to pay to cultivate. But we can all get sick. This week the House of Lords is debating the Health and Social Care Bill, which introduces broad reforms to Britain’s National Health Service. Some of these reforms include removing he duty of the Secretary of State to provide or secure the provision of health services which has been a common and critical feature of all previous NHS legislation since 1946. This provision is what makes health care publicly accountable. Without this provision it’s difficult for the Secretary of State to intervene and make sure that the public’s health needs are truly being served. Not only that, but these reforms appeared out of nowhere, not being in either the Conservative or Liberal Democrat manifestos. So much for public accountability and governance.

I’ve been spending more time than usual recently in doctor’s offices and hospitals. Of course I can see problems with the NHS, but at its core it is a true public service – one which provides the same (normally good, often excellent) standard of care to everyone. So this afternoon I went to join a few thousand other people to demonstrate on Westminster Bridge (between Parliament and my local hospital) to protest these reforms and to encourage the Lords to give them the vigorous debate that they haven’t received. The debates start Tuesday and continue through Wednesday. If you’ve had enough of hearing that the market will provide things (like accountability and fairness) that it can’t, please write to a Lord and ask them to please participate in the debate.

Or one day we might all be paying more than £41 just to get a chance to see a doctor.

It’s Ada Lovelace day today, the international day for recognizing the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It’s named in honour of Ada Lovelace, who was a brilliant mathematician and who wrote the world’s first computer program. The day was founded after research revealed that successful women need to see MORE female role models than men do. It’s also a fantastic excuse to celebrate and shout-out to the women we find inspiring.

I want to use my Ada Lovelace Day post to celebrate some especially unsung heroines – women who study the standards and protocols that underpin all of our digital communications networks.  Studying standards is a little like studying sewers, or railway engineering: it’s essential for understanding how our world is put together, even if it’s not very glamorous. It’s even more important when we consider that digital networks are now the platforms on which we do much of our communicating, and so much of our coming together as humans.  These networks run on protocols that are, like standards, the basic building blocks of networked communication. They govern what kinds of information moves, and where.

Standards and protocols might be invisible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t political – as everyone who has ever failed to get access to information because it was in a form their computer couldn’t read, because it was behind a firewall, or delivered using a protocol (like peer to peer) blocked by a communication provider.

So I’d like to celebrate two fantastic women who help us to understand this invisible world and its politics.

Dr Laura DeNardis is the author of several books on standards and protocols, including Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance which looked at the politics inherent in governing the internet. She is the former executive director of the Yale Information Society Project and is now an Associate Professor at American University. She is currently working on a book that explores the freedom of speech implications of internet governance decisions, including the privatization of privacy decisions and the decisions about net neutrality. Laura’s work has done a huge amount to raise awareness of the politics of the internet’s inner workings.

Alissa Cooper is Chief Computer Scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC, and a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute. She studies the internet itself, looking at where power and control is located across the network, and analyzing what the implications might be for innovation, privacy and expression.  That means she asks really hard questions about what happens to freedom of speech when internet services are blocked or filtered by ISPs. She is also an internet maker: she is co-chair of the Geographic Location/Privacy working group (Geopriv) within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  And since I know her, I can also say that she’s the smartest, funniest, most dedicated advocate we could hope to have for a better internet.

Thank you to these two women for inspiring me to look deeper into the technology I use every day.  Happy Ada Lovelace day to all.

PS: Alissa and I just published an article on Net Neutrality – you can see the abstract here, but the journal is paywalled, sadly 🙁

Here is my story of riots, media, sadness, frustration and hope for a good life in a great city. It is only my story, told only through my eyes, and with my still aching heart.

Sirens and Social Media

I just moved to South-East London last week. On Monday after work I went running in the park with my husband. We watched our neighbours arrive and use the space – all ages, all races, all outside in the sunshine. There was a hula-hoop class, and some people playing frisbee. We ran laps. Lots of kids were at the playground. As we ran, we discussed the rioting that was happening up in North London, and down south in Brixton, too.  What was happening? We didn’t know: we couldn’t say. We watched to see which way the cop cars were driving. South was away from us, East was towards home.

At the pub, the bartender was away from his post. We joked with one of our neighbours that perhaps we should just help ourselves.  When he got back from checking Twitter, he said that he was closing early: “A gang of thugs are running up the Walworth Road”

We checked Twitter ourselves. “The Walworth Road” was trending. The night was long, and tense. The neighbourhood, so coherent in daylight, seemed suddenly marked by invisible lines. The road was closed. The footage on the phone showed a giant line of black police trucks. No one was on the street except running shapes.

Owning the Street

On Tuesday morning I checked Twitter again. Someone from the area – an artist, apparently – had organized a cleanup down the Walworth road.  I was late, but went anyway. I spotted the cleaners immediately: a group of youngish, mostly white folks with a slight bohemian air, standing in the middle of the street where our middle-aged, mostly black neighbours had gone back to shopping. A shopfitter was nailing up the hole in the Carphone Warehouse shop.  “There wasn’t much to do” said one man “most of the places that were hit are big chain stores, and they have their own cleaners. There was a local jewellery store, but I’m sure they won’t let us in. We did as much as we could, and we’re waiting to see where to go next”.

It felt good to be on the street – to turn up and do something unexpected with a bunch of other people. We stood around waiting to hear the next buzz from Twitter. “Clapham Junction!” someone said, looking at their phone, “I heard there’s 350 people there already”. I joked, “we are the morning-after mob, running around town with our brooms and gloves”.

I thought about the thrill of being outside of everyday life, of being on the street with others, waiting for the next announcement, or invitation. The big wide, wild city, being made comprehensible by messages from others. But like the Walworth road of shoppers and broom-toting cleaners, the messages are divided. Social media market researchers note that Twitter users are mostly over age 25, and mostly have incomes of at least 20,000 per year. Meanwhile, the low-cost versions of Blackberry devices have made them attractive to young people, and that the particular features of encrypted messaging, so attractive to the business people who were the phone’s first market. Regardless of the demographics, what everyone wants to do is communicate, come together, and be together. Censoring one platform because that’s what one demographic uses is only an entry point into censoring us all, and taking away our right to use media to come together for all manner of  good -and fun- things like cleaning.

Constructing the News

In the street in Clapham Junction, everyone wanted to talk. I stood with three strangers as we watched the TV cameras focus in on the devastation. “How is this going to play?” I asked. “Well, Sky News has already focused on the punishment” said the tall black man I was chatting with, “No one wants to talk about causes. The language is already divided. I’m writing a play about the Brixton riots.  It was 30 years ago. So many things were the same: we had a Tory government, we had a royal wedding. The one thing we didn’t have was this. There has been a persistent, 30 year failure in dealing with the issues of the inner city.  ”  Our conversation moved on to greed, and to the way that the council housing sell-off a generation ago fed the housing bubble, making it impossible for the entire generation under 30 to ever expect to own their own home. “This is the first time,” said a man with a bicycle, “that people can’t aspire to a better life than their parents.  All they get is the idea that if they could just get on X Factor and impress Simon Cowell they could be rich.”

As he spoke, we saw the blonde head of Boris Johnson pass across the street below, secured in a clump of security guards and media. The devastation formed a perfect backdrop to his speech deploring violence and asking for more police resources.  People stood, holding brooms, booing the man who took a holiday while they lost their streets. A mother gave her small daughter a broom and dustpan saying, “Enough Boris, it’s our turn now”

The Good Life?

A few days have passed now. The politicians have returned to show their glistening pale faces on television. To tell us that we must meet violence with more violence, with water cannons and rubber bullets and the Army. That we must take homes and benefits  from the people who already feel that they have nothing and are worth nothing. That we must censor citizens because it is the ability to communicate and to gather, not the reality of poverty, that causes a riot.

All of this is wrong. The UK is an astoundingly unequal country. But it does not have to be. As I wandered through my new neighbourhood on Tuesday everyone I spoke to understood that support, compassion, and a sense of future are what’s missing for many inner city kids. We all need to feel that we can contribute – to feel that someone or something is depending on us. My neighbourhood straddles Lambeth and Southwark. In North Lambeth, community programs and youth parliaments have been working for years to create opportunities.  To cite only one example, Roots & Shoots has been working since 1982 to train and educate area young people, in the process transforming a derelict space into a wild garden. Incidentally, no major instances of looting were reported in North Lambeth.

I love my new neighbourhood. I want to make it an even better place. I’ll pay higher council taxes so that my neighbours have better places to live, or so that the schoolyard at the end of the street can stay open in the summer, or so that one more youth leader can start working.  I’ll give up my free time to mentor.  We all deserve a good life. A good life, like a good garden, comes from effort. It takes work, nurturing. It doesn’t come from robbing and looting – whether you are rich or poor or simply feeling entitled. I still think that we can grow something better together.

I’ve been fascinated for the past few years with the idea of the future, especially the way that technology is imagined as part of utopian or dystopian futures. The Virtual Futures conference at Warwick University gave me some interesting food for thought. It’s actually an anniversary of a series of conferences held in the mid-1990s, and many of the original participants were invited to return and to talk about the process of their careers in the interim.

The idea of revisiting past futures is fascinating.  It acts as a corrective to the sense that our, or any age, is distinctive. It also reminds us of how different kinds of technology drive different forms of speculation – especially when they are new. A few of the speakers referred to the excitement of virtual worlds and to the idea that internet communication could allow people to collectively imagine a shared world through text. Others described the response to the radical ideas of the time, like actor-network theory and the theory of assemblages. Many of the questions had to do with ideas of ‘what does it mean to be human; what does it mean to be alive?’ For example, Rachel Armstrong has been experimenting with ‘protocells’ made of liquid and minerals, which demonstrate some emergent properties such as clustering and ‘evolution’ despite not being alive. In this context, what does ‘liveness’ mean? Are the properties that scientists describe as life merely virtual? Performance artist Stelarc also explores the possible disconnect between life, body, and individual. He argues that what is important is not the individual body, nor even the individual’s sense of self, but what relationships are being made – socially and politically.

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a very significant shift in the kind of relationships being made, particularly between the ‘virtual’ and the social. Mark Fisher (aka blogger/teacher k-punk) pointed out how the cyberspace of the 1990s promised a kind of trance-like escape from reality, in which you could get lost, find yourself, or find others. This has been replaced with the current layering of technologies, interactions, and demands, which Fisher likens to parasites (following Michel Serres). These demand our attention, and our time. As Sherry Turkle has argued, each tiny demand for attention provides a hit of dopamine, providing a tiny moment of satisfaction, despite the fact that multitasking is actually far less effective than concentrating fully on a task.

This lack of control of time amplifies the strain of neoliberalism, according to Fisher. Precarity of labour, which initally had positive connotations, is exacerbated by the persistent demands of media. Heather Menzies, in a 2005 book No Time, examines this trend even more broadly, arguing that the crisis of attention threatens not just our sense of self, but the accountability of our society. We are asked to be consistently present and responsive. So instead of precarity providing more control over what time is spent in work, and in what way, our ‘virtual present’ is typified by persistent interruption, persistent response, persistent communication and diminished reflection.

Not only that, but neoliberalism, the ideology that promised emancipation through individual competition and resulted in the automation and speculation of managerial capitalism, has collapsed. Since 2008, it’s been clear that the existing system, and its ideology, no longer functions. Yet no credible alternative has replaced it. Essentially, we have been experiencing an age in which we are informed that everything is changing, yet things have remained mostly the same.

Richard Barbrook also explores the futures of the past, tracing the connection between American cold war ideologies and imperialist projects and the visions of networked society as providing liberation from space and time. His 2007 book, Imaginary Futures, traces the pre-history of the internet and its links to the American investment in science, cybernetics and military command and control systems. Like Fisher, he thinks that we have been getting the same vision of the neoliberal, cybernetic future for the past 30 years. He concludes, as well, that we need to actually imagine new futures, but doesn’t necessarily have a sense of what they might be – although he cheekily proposes ‘communalist cybernetics’ that draw on the fact that the internet is based on sharing, not on selling.

I am not sure that merely focusing on the opportunities to share is a convincing future. After all, the sharing economy is behind much of what Fisher sees as the amplification of parasitic demands on attention. Furthermore, despite the press about the decline of subscriptions to Facebook, the links between the social graph created by commenting and responding online are increasingly underpinning the media economy. All of this is the direct result of a social shift towards media as being based on sharing and contribution – often filtered, enfolded, or enclosed within structures of traditional media. It’s not possible, in this case, to definitively locate an ‘alternative’ like Barbrook’s communalist cybernetics.

I have been thinking recently that one way of considering alternatives, and even, “futures” is to take seriously the idea of failure. Barbrook’s research on the history of the internet reiterates how for decades, the same arguments about the primacy of managerial capitalism have been put forward. This reiteration left no place for the ideology to fail. Similarly, neoliberalism and managerial capitalism have overstayed their welcome, but their institutions have been proclaimed ‘too big to fail’. The past future (now our present) is Fukayama’s ‘end of history’ – the final triumph of managed systems over complexity.

At the conference, Stelarc pointed out that the artist’s role is not to outline a particular future, but to experiment with contingencies – to explore a number of possible  futures.  Some will not come to pass. Some will be demostrated as completely ridiculous. And most will ‘fail’ in that they will or can not be sustained. Reintroducing failure into our cultural imaginary may help us past what Fisher sees as the most dangerous political issue of our time – the sense that there is no alternative to neoliberalism.  Failure is evidence of complexity. There a thousand ways for something to go wrong. Developing a culture in which failure is possible is also a means of revealing the artistry in a process (social, creative, political) that can otherwise be concealed.

And maybe, permitting failure might also release us from the kind of precarity in which we are required to always be present, available for work, and successful.

I had a fantastic time this morning at the Polis Journalism conference.  I was on a fascinating  panel “WikiLeaks and After” with some true heavyweights:  George Brock from City University, Angela Philips from Goldsmiths University and John Naughton who writes for the Observer while observing the world from Cambridge.

We talked about what was learned, and by whom, through WikiLeaks. The focus was primarily on journalism, and whether it’s been changed, but we also talked about the systemic and extra-legal response from the US government and corporations, and whether this represented a departure from the previous role of the state, or a resurgence of state power.

We also talked about how mass media create drama in order to maintain their influence, and how the revelation of secrets is part of that enduring drama.

This drama contrasts with the reality of some of the shifts to journalistic practice that WikiLeaks revealed. Many of the panel identified the creation of partnerships between WikiLeaks and mainstream media as the turning point. It not only changed the way that journalists created stories by demanding journalists to sift data and unearth stories, but it introduced internet-based, supra-national drop-boxes as new sets of sources.

The end of the discussion turned on the extent to which journalists need to develop different capacities to work in this new networked, data-intensive sphere, or whether it’s more a question of developing appropriate skills to identify relevant expertise and form instantaneous connections.

It’s clear that systems of power and influence are changing.  It’s also clear that states and corporations will continue to have power, but that they will exercise it in different ways in a networked world. Similarly, resistance will operate differently, exploiting the features of the network. How journalism will play a part in reporting, shaping, and reflecting on these exploits remains to be seen.