Did Hesse Predict the TED Backlash?

Dan Airely giving a TED Talk. via Fotopedia.

While researching material for my new essay project on games and their connection to the baroque/enlightenment era, I came across this quote by Herman Hesse in his acclaimed novel Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game on the futile knowledge pursuits the age previous to the novel's setting produced:

"Both specialists and intellectual privateers supplied the middle-class citizens of the age (who were still deeply attached to the notion of culture, although it had long since been robbed of its former meaning) with large numbers of lectures.  Such talks were not only in the nature of festival orations for special occasions; there was a frantic trade in them, and they were given in almost incomprehensible quantities.  In those days the citizen of a medium-sized town or his wife could at least once a week (in big cities pretty much every night) attend lectures offering theoretical instruction on some subject or other: on works of art, poets, scholars, researchers, world tours.  The members of the audience at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were tacitly assumed- in most cases nothing of the sort was present.  There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassubrg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords.  People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen.  At these lectures, as in the feature articles in newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning."

Given the recent backlash against TED, notably through the critiques provided by Nathan Jurgenson and Evgeny Morozov, one has to wonder if this is just a repeating cultural theme being resurrected in a new age.  For Hesse, the reaction against this 'Age of the Feuilleton' produced the greatest cultural achievement of Human intellect- the Glass Bead Game.  While utopian, one hopes that Hesse's narrative development has similar resonance in our own TED-happy age.

Creating a Modern Feudal Order

'Plight of the Data Serf'

"The seventeenth century was a period when old answers were inadequate, but new ones had not yet been found to take their place," wrote James Billington in his 1966 book, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture.  Describing the historical transition of medieval Russia into the modern period he added, "The inevitable waning of old Muscovy could well be described under the first three chapter headings of Johann Huizenga's classic Waning of the Middle Ages: The Violent Tenor of Life, Pessimism and the Ideal of the Sublime Life, and The Hierarchal Conception of Society." [119]  Billington had good cause to promote these three chapter headings as pithy summaries of the period in Russian history.  The ascension of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 brought radical change to the structure and operation of the Russian state.  Not only did serfdom become legal through enactment of Russia's first printed law code, the Ulozhenie of 1649, but in doing so the newly established Romanov dynasty ensured its nigh-absolutist rule through the cooperation of the nobility.

In late June of this year,  the Twitter Developer Blog posted an announcement titled 'Delivering a consistent Twitter experience'.  The overall theme of the post, consistency, took on worrying overtones by the end as developers read "in the coming weeks, we (Twitter) will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used."  This announcement generated considerable anxiety among developers because the API is the primary protocol applications utilize in order to interact with Twitter.  Stricter guidelines were generally understood to mean that the owners of Twitter wanted to assume tighter, centralized control over the platform.  Then, yesterday, those stricter guidelines arrived.  In a new post on the Twitter Development Blog, 'Changes Coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API', Michael Sippey (Director of Consumer Product and author of the previous Twitter announcement listed above) spelled out upcoming changes being made to how third-party developers can access and utilize the API.  Display guidelines for third party clients are now becoming display *requirements*.  The amount of users allowed to access the Twitter API through third-party clients will be limited, dramatically.  Marco Arment, developer of the very popular Instapaper app, provides a great breakdown of the impending changes on his blog.

There would appear to be little in common between the situations described above- but deeper inspection reveals that serfdom, and the process behind its implementation, unites both.  Russian serfdom of the seventeenth century bound peasants to the land in order to reliably extract economic resources and appease the nobility in exchange for their allegiance and loyalty.  Data serfdom of the twenty-first century binds users to centralized platforms in order to reliably extract verifiable data and appease marketers in exchange for cash and control.  The story of how Russian serfdom came to be finalized in the Ulozhenie of 1649 shares similar parallels to how Twitter and other data platforms seek to create a 'Hierarchal Conception of Society' through access to their data fiefdoms.  Twitter's API announcement, like those made by other data lords, is just one step towards realizing a return to the feudal system in the age of data platforms.

Serfdom, like any complex and normative legal system, does not simply come about by happenstance or decree.  It is the product of several decisions that accumulate into a binding corpus.  Russian Law Codes of 1497 and 1550 initially allowed peasants to leave their landowners estates, but only during a two-week period that occurred at the end of the agricultural season in November.  Between 1550 and 1649, the Russian state continued to restrict the right of peasants to move, largely through backing gentry requests to have escaped serfs returned to their owner's estate.  In fulfilling these requests, the Russian state not only improved its stature among the various landed lords but also ensured that economic resources- in the form of military readiness, agricultural production and internal population migration- remained stable.  This was a very compelling economic arrangement for a state situated with an abundance of natural resources yet few, and often flighty, available people to work the land.

If we take a similar survey of Twitter's demesne, some interesting factors begin to align.  Back in 2006 when Twitter first debuted, many standards of form and protocol were not yet established.  Common features used today like the retweet, the @ reply, and even hashtags were not embedded in Twitter's design initially and came about only through the formation and later adoption by users of these standard conventions on the platform.  Outside developers began to craft their own Twitter clients (think Tweetdeck, now owned by Twitter, or Tweetbot) thanks to the generous opening of Twitter's API, which allowed for both reading of the Twitter stream (the ability to bring your stream to a client) and writing to the stream (the ability to post a tweet from Tweetbot, or another client).  To put it in feudal terms, the Twitter lords staked out a new data domain and actively recruited both laborers (average Twitter users) and lords (third-party developers) to settle so that the 'land' could be developed and put to greater informational/economic use.  While these third-party clients allowed new developer lords to effectively create their own titles and dynastic lines, Twitter could abide this fragmentation of power because it brought more data serfs into their collective domain.  API access facilitated the creation of a new feudal order.

This last point is important, as Twitter actively sought two levels of users- one level as common laborer and another as a sort of landed gentry to help manage/recruit common laborers.  Developers, given a large degree of access to the data domain of Twitter via the API, could become petty data lords themselves, creating applications that grew Twitter's data domain and facilitated collection of user data crops from regular serfs toiling away in multiple 140 character plots.  This move allowed Twitter to benefit from other's labor in promoting their service and, as a natural consequence, gave these petty data lords a compelling reason to make their applications the best in order to secure the largest possible data crop.

The Russian state, too, promoted such a distinction between 'users' and 'petty lords' through the pre-serfdom institution known as pomeste.  Cavalrymen, the distinct element that helped Russia acquire new territories through warfare during the 15th century, were given plots of land that contained settled workers at the conclusion of hostilities.  With this plot of land and supplied work force, the cavalrymen could not only support themselves and the maintenance of their equipment (horses, weapons and armor were all very expensive) but also provide low-level stewardship for a, then, growing Russian state.  Success of the pomeste system provided one of the building blocks for Russia's eventual embrace of serfdom, and it could be equally argued that the success of Twitter's early API allowance for developer uses provided the building blocks for the, now, apparent regulation of the Twitter experience by the platform's owners.

Under the cover of 'consistency', Twitter is restructuring the rules governing their own petty data lords behavior and acquisition of power through collection of data serf production.  Last year, developers were warned to not build "client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience', i.e. to not develop alternative visions of the Twitter interface.  Now the company is sending signals that the 'consistent' Twitter experience will mean less developer involvement in the running of the platform.  Instead, developers are encouraged to put their efforts towards the new 'cards' feature, whereby a tweet acts as a container of shared content like a YouTube video or photo from Instagram.  Yet this is far from the relationship Twitter initially cultivated with developers and signifies a sea-change in how the company plans on managing its growing count of data serfs.

Not only has Twitter effectively declared its demesne to be that of the *entire* Twitterverse, but also that its vassal developers, once allowed to carve out their own estates in the Twitter kingdom, now must make due with much smaller plots of land, i.e. 'cards', limited data serfs to work those plots, and loss of title.  Enter App.net.  The new upstart platform raised just over $800,000 to back its vision of a Twitter-esque experience without the need to resort to advertisers for support.  Instead of providing a free service, App.net asks up-front for users to pay a $50 subscriber fee for one-year access.  (This could change- the venture is still so new, many things are changing on a daily basis)  Developers pay more, but they are given access to App.net's API and the ability to build any application they desire to work on top of the App.net platform.  

If this sounds familiar, it should be- this is exactly the same process Twitter pursued in its early days.  Yet the idealism behind App.net- backed to a large degree by the insistence on a subscriber model- to remain free from advertising puts an interesting spin on the feudalization effort currently pursued by large data platforms.  Whereas the goal of the data lords is to continuously and reliably extract verifiable data crops for use in marketing, App.net looks to promote what appears to be a 'Guild' like system.  Instead of data fields, App.net seeks to cultivate guild members of various rank whose expertise is the only limiting factor for advancement on the platform.  Playing with the feudal metaphor, App.net's 'Guild' platform can be seen as a very urban response to the growing power of agrarian data lords.  Of course, App.net is still very much new on the scene and it has yet to be demonstrated if this alternate vision can survive and thrive among the presence of feudalistic data lords, or if it will become a mildly differentiated data lord itself.

However, even the appearance of this new 'Guild' type of data platform will do little to alleviate the plight of data serfs around the Internet.  As the recent moves by Twitter demonstrate, there is an increasing trend among data lords to isolate their kingdoms from each other as smaller, yet powerful, vassals like Instagram, Spotify, and Tweetdeck begin to declare their allegiances to specific platforms.  The feudalization of data platforms is in full swing, leaving data serfs to suffer the brunt of their liege lord's designs.  "The seventeenth century was a period when old answers were inadequate, but new ones had not yet been found to take their place"- the same could be said of today.

Connections Conference Slides

This past week I traveled to Washington D.C. to attend the Connections conference, held at the National Defense University and focused on bringing together the professional wargaming community with hobby designers and academics interested in using games for their research/teaching.  I presented on how board games and history can form more meaningful 'knowledge handoffs' (thanks Katie King for this wonderful term) between the varied methodological and epistemological spheres games and history separately inhabit.  Below is a copy of the slides I used in my presentation, so feel free to peruse their contents or even download them for your future reference.

Anchors in Time: Knowledge Handoffs Between Board Games & History from Jeremy Antley.

From Data Self to Data Serf

Photo by L D M

"We belong to you, but the land belongs to us." - Russian Peasant Refrain

"But even when I am at a loss to define the essence of freedom

I know full well the meaning of captivity." - Adam Zagajewski, 'Freedom'

"You can't be what you were

So you better start being just what you are

You can't be what you were

Time is now and it's running out…" - Fugazi, 'Bad Mouth'

A few months ago, in preparation for my (then) upcoming 'Theorizing the Web' presentation, I tweeted the peasant refrain quoted above and made a comment to the effect that this is how, I believe, many feel when it comes to social media platforms and the data those platforms contain.  Essentially, the modern phrase would be 'We belong to your platform, but the data belongs to us."  Upon further reflection, however, I've started to think that this isn't the case at all.  Take, for example, the difference of opinion between American data platform owners and privacy advocates from the EU or the recent piece by Alexis Madrigal on the Atlantic titled The Perfect Technocracy: Facebook's Attempt to Create Good Government for 900 Million People.  Looking at the social media's sites process for regulating content on its data platform Madrigal states, "People know that Facebook controls a large slice of their digital lives, but they don't have a sense of digital citizenship."  I think the problem goes beyond the ideal of citizenship, even though Madrigal's statement hints at the larger issues.  Evidence grows that we are becoming serfs amidst the growing fields of cultivated data- and there has yet to emerge an articulation on the relation of our serfdom to data platforms like that embodied by the peasant's refrain.  Why is this so?

From my perspective, the heart of data serfdom centers on a question over what counts as certified, verifiable knowledge and the degree to which that knowledge is permitted to circulate or be modified.  Data platforms embrace stable declarations of the self through updates, likes, pins and other markers that, once declared, are difficult to change in content or meaning.  Even if one erases, or 'unlikes', something, the impression generated by the data platform of your data self remains tied with this now etherial 'like'.  Because we cannot change the content of these declarations easily, the validity of the message becomes even more key, even more vital.  This presents some unique challenges with regards to the relation of our data to ourselves.

Low-Mobility Value Facebook's 'Like' Button Produces
Photo by Eric Schwartzman

I would like to investigate the writings of Rob Horning (@marginalutility) and his focus on the 'data self', which explores how neoliberal capitalistic practices capture users in a sticky web of commodity production/exploitation.  His perspective and analysis helps clarify points I would like to make regarding how data platforms current utilization of low mobility knowledge constructs fits nicely with the evolution of documentary regimes into their new hybridized form.  Whereas pervasive documentation once allowed governments and others in power to shape the normative discourse (or at least put it into quantifiable terms), the new data platforms allow those in power to not only continue pervasive documentary practices but also avail themselves of that practices ills through integration of highly personal intermediation.  Social media is the embodiment of this intermediation.

In Advertising and the Health of the Internet, Horning addresses Atlantic writer Alexis Madrigal's piece detailing numerous companies that exist solely to track users data.  Picking apart Madrigal's premise behind the inherent value of this data, Horning states that the natural extension of Madrigal's logic would have one conclude that, "the health of the internet…depends on the degree to which we can turn thought into marketing through the process of circulating it."  For me, circulation is the key term in this statement.  Why?  Because I believe a key insight for understanding the 'data self' centers on the operation and interaction between high mobility and low mobility knowledge constructs, terms I've created to deal specifically with the circulation and adaptation of information.  In order to understand the terms of my critique, it would be best to take moment and define the terms and their execution as I intend.

Data platforms embrace, wholly, the configuration of low-mobility constructs, especially when it comes to articulating a data self that not only provides panoptic power but also algorithmic control in how we view our relation to others and ourselves.  Low-mobility constructs, generally, aren't modified through their transmission or reception.  I've often brought up the book as a prime example, but the same holds true for a Facebook update or Amazon purchase or Pintrest post.  These online statements are essentially one-offs that everyone can see- yet no one can change your thoughts, or purchase, or 'pin' through their own transmission or addendum.  All they can do is create a low-mobility response, adding shades of inflection to a conversation that is both asynchronous and bound in stasis bubbles.

This in itself would not be revelatory.  But if we look at Horning's line stated above through the lens of low mobility a key point does arise.  Circulation of thought in low-mobility form is entirely dependent on validation.  Because low-mobility constructs are highly resistant to being changed through transmission, the very act of circulating these constructs hinges on validation by the transmitter and, to some degree, the recipient as well.  High-mobility knowledge constructs, in comparison, can enjoy the added value validation brings, yet their impetus for transmission rests solely on the inherent capacity to be changed by both the transmitter and recipient through circulation.  Its very mutability is what ensures its survival and circulatory value.  In the past, I've used rumors as a prime example of high-mobility artifacts and specifically examined how Russian peasants often successfully used rumors to obfuscate demands made by Imperial authorities exemplified in low-mobility edicts or laws.  (See, for example, my Theorizing the Web presentation paper discussing this phenomenon in more detail)

Photo by Gabriel Rodriguez

Data platforms and the 'data selves' they produce, in order to generate some sort of commercial value, embrace low-mobility methods of knowledge production because the incessant need for validation as a precondition of circulation not only makes our various crops of data stable, (hence Target can accurately predict pregnancy-changing consumer behavior before even you are aware of it) but it also traps how we view ourselves in purely low-mobility, unchanging terms.  The only change allowed is that validated by the platforms, whose certification of knowledge creates a self-fulfilling and continuous loop of data.  This, in turn, creates a new view of the self whereby the past is illusionary and the future is now.  Meanwhile, the present languishes amidst declarations based both in the past (I 'liked' this post, I 'pinned' this item) and situated in the future projection of the self (think saving articles for 'Instapaper').  It should also be noted that this view of the self, largely predicated through digital terms, impacts the operation of augmented reality the self inhabits.  (An effect Nathan Jurgenson calls the 'Facebook Eye')   This is the kernel of data platform enserfment so many find themselves in today.

The 'landed' lords of the platforms, and the various petty 'landless' lords they sell our 'cultivated data' to, depend on this stable projection of the self trapped forever in the present.  If we could change our thoughts and our projections on the fly, carefully arranged cultivation processes would be tossed into a state of near-anarchy.  The asynchronous effects demarcating our lived self from the data self would grow to such proportions that any attempt to place a commodity effect on our production would yield false, shadow selves and thus become worthless to data platforms and marketers alike.  Moving targets are much more difficult to hit, especially when your gun is fixed in place.

Photo by Michael Mandiberg

If we look at the history of information through the lens of mobility, a progressive shift from the predominance of high mobility constructs, embodied by oral conceptions and utilizations, to that of low mobility constructs, introduced first by manuscript culture but later reinforced by print culture, can be detected.  Our current digital platforms of data only reinforce this trend, as I have tried to explain above, binding our actions increasingly in terms that are indicative of low mobility expressions and shunning forms that could allow the possibility of high mobility transmogrification.  In doing so, the new data platforms managed to solve an age old problem that plagued panoptic potential of documentary regimes.  By channeling the documentary process through a highly mobile (but not high mobility) process of algorithmic control, platforms can enjoy the benefits of both documentation and control with only minimal disruptive potential.  Increasingly the self becomes merged with the projected data self and the asynchronous friction that this process would typically engender becomes smoothed over due to the ease by which the data self can be fed, nourished and anesthetized.  Numb to the pain, we no longer recognize that our data is not our own.  No need arises for high mobility responses to low mobility control.  We become data serfs with few means to shape the terms of our bondage.

Russian peasants at least possessed access to the high mobility world of oral reinterpretations and rumors to challenge low mobility edicts or laws judged 'unfair' or 'unjust'.  The current generation of data serfs putter along without these tools or techniques, in effect declaring through their sustained cultivation of the data self the idea that both our data and ourselves belong to the platforms.  This is a dangerous position to be in, something Horning notes towards the end of Advertising and the Health of the Internet when he states,

"If our public lives are underwritten by our value to advertisers, our public selves will end up indexed to that value for everyone, and our private sense of ourselves will be to a degree dictated by the boundaries of the sensorium marketers can create around us with increasing specificity."

In Social Graph vs. Social Class, Horning follows his 'boundaries of the sensorium' concept to its natural extension by examining how Facebook's 'Social Graph' articulates both social organization norms enforced by social media and how those norms reinforce class-based analyses that are supposedly absent in the data platforms construction/execution.  Many people understand the 'networked' concept of social media platforms, yet fewer probably view their connections, in Horning's words, in terms of 'lines of competition as well as mere affiliation."  Asymmetrical power relations are inherent in data platforms just as they are in life.  Yet while many can accurately and articulately define those asymmetrical relationships in their personal, face to face interactions, they more easily gloss over the subtleties of such relations when using data platforms.  

"The social graph purports to passively record social arrangements that emerge organically and thus reflect some sort of true and undistorted account of how society works," states Horning, yet I would contest this point by saying that data accrued through cultivation of low-mobility sources cannot be organic- it is anything but organic.  Real communities, ones that establish possibilities for membership to make meaningful changes, exist on a mix of low and high mobility constructs.  They are chaotic, changing entities.  The lords of the data platforms, knowing the pains previous landed lords went through, sought circumvention of this community aspect through their algorithmically defined user interface.  Horning believes that social media makes identity construction fluid and able to be revised in real time- I believe it creates identity stasis as the constant accumulation of low-mobility statements continually weighs down the lived self with the constraints of the data self.

But how do we escape this serfdom?  Russian peasants were largely unsuccessful in their quest to achieve freedom, so why hold them up as paragons for a 'second' serfdom now occurring with the rise of data platforms?

The answer to both lies in finding ways to integrate high-mobility potentials into the data platforms on which our data resides.  While not a perfect example, Twitter has shown how this can be accomplished.  The retweet and hashtag features did not initially debut with the system- instead they evolved through user-centered invention and innovation, becoming an official part of the Twitter UI only in mid-2009.  These were not strictly high-mobility constructs shining through, rather they represented the exploration of potential space the Twitter platform allowed through the boundary-pushing behavior of users not engaged in a tightly defined algorithmic experience.  The inclusion of oral testimony as a primary source for use in Wikipedia articles, something I've written about, represents another potential mixing of high and low mobility sources, though not without some compromise.  Just as Russian peasants challenged edicts and textual dualist norms espoused by Tsarist authorities through use of 'augmented' oral constructs, so too do we need to find methods by which the low-mobility nature of data platforms have to contend with high-mobility critiques generated by an authentic community of users.  

It goes beyond voting on potential privacy rules on Facebook- this means putting the actual creation of privacy regulations in the hands of the users themselves.  Of course, this would mean threatening the stability of data reaped by data platform lords, not to mention an acknowledgement of a general consciousness on the value of the self to the process of data gathering.  If we fail to do so, we risk becoming serfs on a scale greater than that imagined by the most ardent Russian landowner.

My First Meme

Well, I've done it.  I've created my first 'meme'.  Inspired (well, more provoked) by Sherry Turkle's latest opinion essay in the New York Times titled, 'Flight From Conversation', I chose to highlight her argument through the classic 'Downfall' scene so often used for various internet commentary.  Enjoy!

(Note: I haven't written any posts recently, and that's due mainly to the incredibly busy schedule I've had as of late.  I have some ideas in the 'cooker' as we speak, so should hopefully have something more long-form up here soon. -- JA)