SPOILER: I talk about how mobile platforms make significant/deep creative construction of a shared communication space more different. I enthuse about grassroots technology. I define a ‘mod ecology’ of remaking (mobile) hardware and an ‘app ecology’ (should be obvious). If  you want to hear more or ask questions, please comment or come and see me at OKCon in Berlin on June 30.

Innovation and the Internet

What’s so significant about innovation on the internet? I’ve been thinking about grassroots tech development and hacker culture of various types for years.  Most recently, my thinking has been oriented around the extension of open-sourcing and hacker practice beyond software, to hardware and design.  All of this is making me consider why the internet is so signficant. I’ve concluded that it’s because of the very recursivity of the internet as a platform for making: when you work on the internet to find the solution to a coding problem related to the internet, this contributes to rebuilding the internet itself. A bit more broadly, this is the open-source philosophy, and the driver for FLOSS movements.  That’s where things start to get interesting.

Open innovation: community, creativity, crowdsourced R&D

The generalized principle of working together to rebuild a system that is helpful to its builders is also what drives community innovation and (to an extent) other grassroots technology projects. These are activites that emerge out of experiences in particular places (or social contexts) and allow people to be expressive using technology – in ways that solve local problems but that are also a lot of fun. Like community WiFi, for example.

Similarly, open hardware hacking and the emerging DIY market ecosystem expand the possiblity to use technology creatively, to work beyond the confines of the device as a commodity or product.  Media theorists like my colleague David Gauntlett (whose excellent book will be reviewed here soon) argue that there is a deep social need to do this – and in fact craft or making is at the heart of our humanity.  So, if the raw materials be wood, stone, or easily modifiable Linux software and solderable boards, we take apart and remake because that’s partly how we want to remake our world.  This is at the heart of the ‘mod ecology’ where people take on, take apart, put back together hardware.  As we move towards mobiles, and as less of our creative innovation is directed at making and remaking the internet platform, ‘modding’ mobile devices will be a bigger part of engaging with technology. But so far, it’s still supported by the internet.

The scale of the ‘mod ecology’ is far broader than local network-building, which is bounded by the physical and social contours of a particular place, but somewhat narrower than rebuilding the internet. Building a local network means getting all the bits to work together technically, but also socially.  You have to get permission to hang antennas, speak to the government, argue with the operators as well as communicate online.  Similarly, hanging out in a local hack lab does imply spending time with other people who share the same day-to-day scenery as you, but with whom you might want to share plans as well. The broader ecology, like the broader DIY movement, is solidified by videos and photos of projects being uploaded, and communities of practice (including both tech companies and individuals) who answer each other’s questions.  It’s all online, but still so far, not recursive in the same way as hacking the internet was imagined to be (by Chris Kelty, among others).

Modding hardware means breaking warranties.  It’s disruptive to the hardware industry –  but not necessarily only in a negative way.  Samsung recently delighted the modding community who have been developing CyanogenMod, a custom ROM for Android, by giving a free sample device to the head of the dev community.  This could be seen as a symbolic acknowledgement of the R&D that open-source communities create.

The ‘App Ecology’ – a shallow form of engagement

The ‘mod ecology’  can be an immersive, creative and collaborative endeavor – but needs high technical knowledge, social capital, financial capital, time and interest (like most other forms of open-source innovation). What if you don’t want to nullify your warranty or solder a circuit board?  Well, then make an app. It seems that this would solicit the same kind of creativity and innovation. But to what extent?

Open systems like the internet are fantastic for innovation. They are based on open standards and protocols, and have helped to support the kind of localized creation and innovation I discussed above. But our converged devices are much more likely to be built on closed protocols: thus the need for open ROM like CyanogenMOD.  And unlike making a local network from scratch,  or modding a device based on open plans available on the internet, building an app does not necessarily contribute to the stock of knowledge held in common. The SDK Terms and Conditions for the major app building platforms are based on Apache licenses rather than GPL, so if you read carefully you realize that the finished app is the property of Google or Apple.  Furthermore, as my colleague Tarleton Gillespie is investigating, if you’re submitting an Apple app, the company submits it to its internal vetting program – so no apps that might facilitate drunk driving, but equally no apps that Apple reckons go against its core values.

The desire to make and create is in all of us. I’ve been delighted to see how it’s flourished in the tech world, and how the internet has created a platform that can be modified and improved by the people who meet upon it and innovate it. I’ve also seen how innovating and remaking systems in local places has a similarly beneficial recursive effect as systems come to be built into the places they come from (although their value is most obvious to the people who build them). As we move increasingly towards mobiles, the possibility for this creativity seems more significant through the ‘mod ecology’ and much less through the ‘app ecology’. The implications of this trend towards more closed platforms and, paradoxically, more corporate involvement in orienting the direction of modding (in order to crowdsource some R&D) are unfortunate. I think they are pointing towards a more shallow form of creative making, one that means we don’t contribute to the platform we create on in the same way as the internet made possible.

Maybe you disagree. What do you think? Was the internet such an incredible exception that we can’t expect collective creativity to work the same in the mobile era? Or can we? Is there a future for open mobiles? And most importantly, will anyone buy me a beer in Berlin?

Last month NYU’s New Everyday project published a collection of articles on the new politics, discussing Anonymous, WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring and the potential for ‘net freedom’ according to Hillary Clinton. I have an article included, which builds on some of the thinking I’ve been doing, in part on this blog, about Wikileaks and media power.

The New Everyday is meant to be something between a blog and a journal, a space for what editor Nick Mirzoeff calls ‘slow thinking.’  I think that this cluster provides good evidence of this space. The pieces work with each other, revealing the nuances in the shifting terrain of power and politics over the past few months.  Biella Coleman describes how Anonymous has moved from involving hackers ‘for the lulz’ towards a new form of collective action. I work through a theorization of media power and WikiLeaks, while Finn Brunton speculates that the future of online dropboxes will be more distributed, and Chris Anderson investigates the personality cult of Julian Assange.  Looking more broadly,  Jack Bratish untangles the relationships between ‘state-friended’ social media and the organization and framing of Egyptian opposition movements.  Finally, Jillian C York identifies the paradoxical relationship between the US State Department’s policies of ‘Net Freedom’ and its coordinated corporate/governmental response to WikiLeaks.

It’s a pleasure to contribute to a collection that is as timely, as thoughtful and as relevant as this one.  Well done, Biella and all!

I’ve just published an article in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication : Democratizing Communication Policy in the Americas: Why It Matters. The issue was edited by the fabulous Professor Shade and Dr Becky Lentz.

My article is called “Metaphors for Democratic Communication Spaces” and argues that how decision-makers talk about communications infrastructure is as important as the architectural decisions they make in rolling it out.  Decision-makers, even when they understand that the impacts of communications infrastructure are partly related to how consumers adopt it, still often expect that the technology will be a “magic bullet.”  So instead of thinking about how to create more democratic (or public interest) spaces through citizen participation, decision-makers stick with “build it and they will come.” The paper compares two Canadian public Wi-Fi projects, the Île Sans Fil project in Montreal, and the Fred-eZone project in Fredericton. It concludes that both go some way to creating democratic communication spaces, but that they could go further by using language and practices (like co-design) that let citizens participate in imagining how new technology will impact their cities.

Here’s the academic version of the abstract:

Communications policies, like many other social policies, are founded on an
ideal of democracy that connects the development of communication infrastructures with
democratic public spheres. This framing is a constructivist endeavour that takes place through
language, institution, and infrastructure. Projects that aim to develop these capacities must
grapple with the way such new media technologies are integrated into existing contexts or
spaces, often using metaphors. This paper analyzes how such metaphors are employed in
the case of local wireless networking. Referring to empirical research on networks located in
Montréal and Fredericton, Canada, the paper critiques the narrow approach to democratization
of communication spaces inherent in networks of this type. This narrow focus is associated
with metaphors used to describe a co-evolution of wireless technology and urban space.
The paper identifies that the design processes that shape these networks could benefit from
a more radical democratization associated with metaphors of recombination of space and
technology.

A previous version is online as an SSRN Working Paper.

This is cross-posted, with a few minor modifications, from New Public Thinking, where my collaborators and I were considering the question of “what is public thinking.”

I answered that I thought it was two things:

First: Thinking Beyond the Individual

This requires thinking about networked relationships, and power, but also about the world beyond the human.

Second: Thinking Beyond the Present

A popular way of considering this thinking about “sustainability”. But a more radical approach might be thinking not just analytically but creatively: what some call “design” thinking.

1. Thinking beyond the individual: the network

So many of our institutions and social conventions are constructed in order to establish individual gain. The competitive logic of capitalism is predicated on the idea that competing individuals create better outputs. Even the idea of the state is that it is a unitary entity, which acts on behalf of individuals. This is Hobbes’ idea of the Leviathan. We have now become accustomed to the idea of the state as responsible.

An alternative to this state is the conceive of thinking as happening in a network – this is the first notion of thinking beyond the individual.

In a network, each individual node is a unitary entity, but they are not arranged in hierarchy.

The network can scale and, because of its interconnections, develops value beyond the mere number of its nodes.

Peer to peer work can thus be an alternative to both the competitive logic of capitalism and to the idea that the unitary state has to act on behalf of the individuals it serves.

What if we thought about solving problems not as requiring competition between individuals but as leveraging the capacity of all of us? The advantage of thinking about a network is that it’s way more flexible than a state. It can adapt and amplify. Some networks become heterarchies, where a variety of power structures are in operation, and some remain horizontal. Networks can of course evolve into hierarchies, but once that happens we aren’t really using them to think beyond the individual anymore.

Thinking beyond the network: the non-human

The other way of thinking beyond the individual is to think beyond the human.

We tend to essentialize things into categories. For example, we say “women are like this, men are like that. Nature is this kind of thing, and civilization is this other kind of thing.” There is an interesting tradition of philosophical thinking that unpacks this. It’s sometimes called cyborg feminism, and Donna Haraway has done most of the most challenging thinking in this area.
The idea behind cyborg feminism is that we have essentialized ideas about both feminity/masculinity and about nature and civilization. And we tend to connect feminitity with nature and masculinity with civilization. But what if we could break down these tendencies? Our current thinking is that we should use the products of civilization (often produced through individual competition) to somehow protect a pristine nature. We should develop more, so that we can afford to protect nature.

The problem with this is that there is no natural opposition between the machine of civilization and the garden. The machine is already in the garden, and has been there for some time (Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden examines this trend in context with the history of American pastoralism). Donna Harway, the thinker who came up with the idea of cyborg feminism, suggested that we use the character of the cyborg to get past this false essentialism.

The cyborg is neither woman nor machine, neither natural nor technological. It has a particular view on the world – it’s not really totally in it or totally out of it. Haraway calls this ‘partial perspective’ and I think it’s a very useful stance for thinking outside of the individual.

What if we saw the world not as a contest between the pristine and the ruined? What if we though of it as an ecosystem? Here in the woods, humans are part of an ecosystem. They have dammed the river down below so they could build a road on it. They have changed where the sheep graze, and introduced some grazing cows as well. What would the cyborg think of this? Would the cyborg see more technology as a necessary good, or a necessary evil? Or something that is not quite both, or either.

So there are two ways of thinking past the individual. The first is to think in terms of networks to get past ideas that valorize either the individual, or the unitary state as the entity with responsibility to those it is meant to represent. The second is to think past the human, and specifically to think about humans and technologically driven civilization as not necessarily opposed to or essentially different from nature, but actually one and the same thing. From this perspective, we can start thinking about the major problems of our day, like making nuclear energy safe, feeding the world’s population, addressing major shifts in the climate, and protecting biodiversity, from a standpoint in which we are deeply embedded, but which we also acknowledge is situated, and partial.

This brings me to the second part of what I think public thinking is.

2. Thinking beyond the present: Sustainability

Thinking past the present requires thinking past individual benefits. Differently put, we might think about thinking in this way as considering the public good. In the UK, we are apt to think of any action for the public good as being the responsibility of the state, but I think this is one of the core problems that need to be addressed in our current thinking – we don’t currently have a very good sense of public stewardship. Again, there is a tendency to think that progress will somehow fix the future – that if we think enough about making things productive in the present, the future will automatically be better. Of course, this isn’t about thinking into the future at all: it’s just fetishizing the progress of the present.

So how could we actually think into the future – think sustainably? This requires a mindfulness of the future with a sense that the whole reason of thinking beyond the present moment is a concern with unknown others in totally different situations. This is, to my mind, the basis of the notion of a public good or a public service. Think of the well-known aphorism that we should make decisions about the land “for the next seven generations.” The public good here is something that can be maintained and sustained over a long period of time. In this way the public good ceases to be something that the state or someone else is responsible for, in the short term, and becomes something that must be sustained over time.

The “seven generations” aphorism can be overwhelming. The obvious critique is – well, we have built systems of society. We aren’t nomads or small-scale cultivators. True, but this doesn’t mean we can’t think sustainably. In the field of information systems, sustainable systems are not perpetual motion machines, but are simply systems that can continue to function over the long term with a set of defined inputs.

So what about making the public good into a sustainable system that had to be maintained over a long time? And, if we take our first set of premises, what about making that sustainable system one that is not based on defining benefits for individuals or for states, and not based on benefits only for humans, but instead mindful of the ecosystems they are part of and that they build?

Thinking Beyond the Present: Design Thinking

The final point I want to make about public thinking, and specifically about thinking past the present, is about how to do this. First of all, thinking about the network instead of the individual or the state gives a good sense of the scale we want to be working at: not the scale of the worldwide social network, in which we are all alienated individuals, but maybe instead the scale of the local community: some place where we can understand the ecological connections at work.

Second, I think that we need to start teaching and learning more about design, and less about analysis. Our analytic brains are well developed, but analytic work, which connects together facts and theories, is not very easy to align with the future. We could add to this some more design thinking, which is concerned with creating the conditions for innovation, for thinking into the future, about things that haven’t happened yet. This is quite different than analytical thinking, because in design thinking you’re looking at things that are jarring, that disprove your ideas, that are shocking, and follow them through. I’m convinced that the final part of public thinking – that is, thinking that is beyond the individual, that is in the public interest, that is thinking about creating sustainable systems in which nature and civilization are not irreconcilable opposites, is the ability to get to solutions in interesting ways. If you like – to remember what things feel like when they are new.

I’ll try to speak more about methods for thinking into the future next time. For now, I want to leave you with the sense that we should not throw our hands up in the air. All is not lost. It is not us versus the forests. Things are, as always, in flux. In his last post Dougald noted that many of the things that are part of the transformation might seem utopian, but are just part of an historical process. So let’s see how we can re-narrative that process to think beyond the individual and beyond the present.

I’m very happy to be a member of the New Public Thinking group blog, established by the provocative and brilliant Dougald Hine.  My first post over there reflects on what the Coyote trickster can tell us about our media narratives.  Enjoy!

The UK census is beginning, and so is the protest movement against it.  Organizations like No2ID, as well as peace organizations are arguing for a boycott of the census for various reasons, including its processing by Lockheed Martin, which also does defense contracting, and the potential of census questions to violate civil liberties.  No2ID has a list of their concerns here.

This boycott movement is a little odd for me, because in Canada academics have been lobbying against the government’s decision to CUT the long-form census.  The Canadian census creates publicly available data which is widely used in social science research (and its perceived as being relatively reliable). It’s seen as the only way of getting unbiased data about some things, like household internet use, or real levels of immigration. Now that the long form has been eliminated, ostensibly because it was intrusive and cost too much money, researchers are scrambling to try and reproduce the data it collected.

So this raises some questions for me about the British census, that I hope someone can shed some light on. I don’t know about how useful the British data is, and I don’t know whether the census here is more or less intrusive. It sounds like it is more intrusive, and it sounds like there is a history linking census with persecution, where I don’t have this association of the Canadian census. Also, does everyone fill in the same census or are there random ‘long forms’ where more information is solicited? It also sounds to me like questions about religion and employment are perceived as being more intrusive than they might be seen elsewhere.

Do you know who holds census data? Do you know how it’s used? Is there baseline data on population demographics that isn’t collected any other way? Is there a way to get this data without breaching privacy? Is this publicly accessible afterwards, or only available under license? And finally – how are we supposed to understand who is living in Britain if we don’t have a census?

I’m not sure if I’ve missed a trick, and the census is really not useful here, or whether there is some cultural understanding of what census (the verb, French recensement) means.  Any thoughts?

I’ve just returned from Berlin and Transmediale, where I was lucky enough to get to host a panel called Democratic:Ability, in which Garnet Hertz, Tapio Makela, Juergen Neumann and Nancy Mauro-Flude discussed the various ways that DIY and hacker culture promise, and constrain, political transformations.

We wanted to get away from a technocentric perspective on the relationship between technological tools and political subjectivities.   As such we discussed the way that DIY culture influences individual agency and challenges market ideology, as well as the difficulties of confronting institutions (like city governments) when scaling up P2P projects like community wireless.  In addition to examining these structures of political relations, we also considered identity politics, examining how projects like the GenderChangers Academy politicize our essentialist perspectives on gender and technology, and the significance of “boundary objects” in negotiating when things are political (for example, a piece of media art in an art gallery) and when they are not (a piece of media used uncritically in everyday life).  The presentations explored this work at the boundaries in various ways, including Nancy’s silent photo essay on processes of developing autonomy and agency and Garnet’s reference to several DIY citizenship projects that use DIY to reveal broader political issues.  Tapio focused on our imaginations of technology, and the way that our oppositional imaginings of technology also provide us with new ways of consuming technology – this connected with the observation that DIY practices are an emerging market for producers of certain electronic components.

One of our strongest lines of questioning was about how much had changed in terms of radical politics due to our interconnected and interactive media, our ability to DIY.  We struggled with this question quite a bit, which I see as being partly a reflection of the difficulty in reconciling the marginal with the hegemonic, the dominant paradigm with the emergent.  We noted that DIY technology can become political and can become radical.  Technologies can be boundary objects embedded in struggles that have been unfolding for a long time.  But how does this happen, when, and where?  We didn’t arrive at a fully-worked out answer in the discussion, but I reflected on this later:

The middle space, in between the new modes of production, is the space in which change happens – when the the capactiy of a certain tool or mode of working outstrips the constraints.  This allows it to transcend the breach between emergent, collective grassroots practices, and more entrenched power structures.  We can think about the emergent middle space in several ways:  we have boundary objects that mark it, we can think about the relationships that it structures between people and their fellows (who might be other humans, or technologies, or non-humans).  But we also have the middle space of social and organizational coordination.  Adjoining this middle space are institutions which might include the market or (perhaps most strikingly in Egypt) the political system, education or the patriarchy.  These are not completely fixed, as they are composed of our social relationships.  So how do they change?  And, more fundamentally, how do the ideas that we can work out about P2P technologies, DIY and hacker subjectivites, help us to understand them?

Tonight I chaired a public lecture by Evgeny Morozov, who is on a book tour with his The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World.

The book argues that, in the hype about the democratic potential of the Internet, we have overlooked the technology’s capacity to control dissent and even to support authoritarianism.  The internet, despite our hopes, doesn’t automatically establish democratic communications in repressive regimes.  Thus, we should make better internet policy that looks at the contexts in which technologies operate.

I’m not sure I agree.  I thought that the proclamations of cyber-utopia and the attendant disappointment when the reality fell short of the vision had been consigned to history at the end of the 1990s.  Surely, it is now possible to see that the Internet and the multitudes of social connections that it produces could be either positive or negative, or surely both positive or negative, depending on the context?  Is there a technology on earth that would be guaranteed to bring freedom and democracy without any of the bad stuff?

Regardless, the book presents some interesting new examples of how everyday people, activists, corporations and even authoritarian governments can use the opportunities of social media – for both good and evil.  The general narrative of these examples goes like this:  “activists use social networking sites to mobilize, and the rich data about connections that is generated helps them to situate their activism so it includes more links and connections than in the past.  HOWEVER, all those links and connections create data that evildoers (corporations or authoritarian governments) can use to track down those activists and dissidents.”   The more interesting examples cover the way that policy structures play into this duality – for example how existing policies are threatened by digital practice, or changed because of it.  Morozov also highlights how this “cyber-utopianism” and “internet-centrism” limit effective policy making by being too techno-centric.

There’s a weird way that the book falls into the same technological determinism it claims to decry.   If you didn’t imagine to begin with that the internet was going to be a democratic force, it wouldn’t be such a surprise that it wasn’t.  And further, the ‘democratization’ in question seems to be primarily American-style representative democracy, rather than radical participative democracy or media democracy – which you could argue adopt some of the internet’s opportunities.

The book dabbles in philosophy and popular culture, nodding at Kierkegaard and titling a chapter “Orwell’s Favorite LOLcat” but it lacks a sustained and deep theory of media.  Despite the length (400 pages) it reads as a collection of anecdotes that ultimately fails to develop a sustained policy critique based in a theory of what is unique about the internet.  This is a shame, since Morozov has strong expertise in internet advocacy in many non-Western contexts.

Beyond the simple premise, I had one other serious misgiving about the book.  Even though there is a bibliography for each chapter, none of the direct quotations in the text are cited.  This is no petty academic quibble – without a citation for a direct quote, it’s impossible for me to find the original work and judge Morozov’s interpretation of it.

I’m glad to see how this book captures the increasingly reflective zeitgeist of American geeks and cheered that Morozov thinks we need better policy (who doesn’t!).  But I encourage Morozov to dig a little deeper, push a little further, in his future writing.