Control and Freedom power and paranoie in the age of fiberoptics

Control and Freedompower and paranoie in the age of fiberoptics

Context • Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University • She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. • Chun, www.controlandfreedom.net

Introduction • Purpose • The internet as mass medium • Control and freedom • Sexuality in the age of fiberoptic • Beyondbefore in front of the screen • Fiberopticnetworks

Purpose • What does it mean to attribute in such causality to technology and link freedom to what are essentially control technologies? (p.1) • Control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics responds to this question by revealing how power now operates through the coupling of control and freedom. (p.1)

The internet as mass medium • Was or is the internet a tool of freedom or control? Does it self enable greater self-control or surveillance? Control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics argues that these questions and their assumptions are not only misguided but also symptomatic of the increasingly normal paranoid response to and of power. 3 • Control is based on the french ‘contreroule’, that copy of an account, of the same quality and content as the original. This control gives users greater access to eachother’s reproductions • Freedom is based on Frei (Sanskrit) meant all the heads of family So, those who are ones friends. And those who are no slaves. Liberty is linked to human subjectivity; freedom is not. (p. 10)

The internet as mass medium • Internet myth’s: (p. 5) • The internet as an unfailing surveillance device • Internet as an agency-enhancing marketplace • Internet as a storing-, accessing-, analyzing everything device. • These paranoid narratives of total surveillance and total freedom are the poles of control-freedom, and are symptomatic of a larger shift in power relations from the rubric of discipline and liberty to that of control and freedom (p. 6)

Control and Freedom • Digital language makes control systems invisible: we no longer experience the visible yet unverifiable gaze but a network of nonvisualizable digital control (p. 9) • Critic on Deleuze: • Deleuze’s reading of control societies is persuasive, although arguably paranoid, because it accepts propaganda as technological reality, and conflates possibility with probability. (p. 9) • Deleuze analysis unintentionally fulfils the aim of control by ascribing to control power that it just does not have. And by erasing its failures (p. 9) • Thus in order to understand Control-freedom we need to insist on the failures and the actual operations of technology. And we need to understand the difference between freedom and liberty since control is one half of the story. (p. 9)

Sexuality in the Age of Fiber Optics • layers of network- / new media: • Chun (p.16) • Hardware • Software • Interface • extramedial representation • Galloway: (Galloway 2004, p.41) • Application layer • Transport layer • Internet layer • Link layer • Manovich: (Galloway 2004, p.40) • Cultural layer • Computer layer • Benkler: (Galloway 2004, p.40) • Physical layer • Code layer • Content layer

Beyond, Before in Front of the Screen • By engaging between the four layers of networked media, this book seems to mediate between (Williams/McLuhan) • visual culture studies treats generally the interface, or representations of the interface, as the medium. Visual cultural studies critique archaeological media studies’ technological determinism and blindness to content and the media industry. (p.17) • media archaeology concentrates on the machine and often ignores the screen’s content. Archaeological media studies critique visual studies’ conflation of interface with medium and representation with actuality. (p.17)

Beyond, Before in Front of the Screen • Manovich analysis can work both sides. His five principles of new media (numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, transcoding) enable a formalist understanding of new media. all new media consist of two layers: Cultural, Computer • And because these layers are not equal, they must be put under software studies. (p. 17/18) • Chun: the problem with software studies: or transcoding, is the privileging of software as readable text; it ignores the hardware and extramedial representations, because it only moves between software and interface. (p.18)

Beyond, Before in Front of the Screen • Each OS in its extra medial advertisements, interpellates a different user. (p.20) • Mac users think differently (Einstein/ Martin Luther king), • Linux users are open-source power geeks, drawn to the image of a fat penguin. • Windows users are mainstream. • vmware ??

Why cyberspace? • Where is space? • Cyberspace now • Timeless space • Othering space • Gawkers • Controlling code • The power of touch

Cyberspace • This chapter examines the ‘weirdness’ of cyberspace by looking at the ways in which it, as a heterotopia, plays with notions of place and space. It then discusses the congruities and tensions between cyberspace and internet protocols in order to explore the ways in which the internet is public.(38) • Privatization: transformation of public/private to open/closed

Where’s the space • Coined in 1982 by William Gibson (sci-fi) • US judiciary’s Communcations Decency Act used it as a legitimate name • Includes configurations that do not necessarily link to the internet • Emphasizes the importance of user experiences rather than network technologies • Cyberspace mixes science and fiction: as a hallucinatory space that is always in the process of becoming, but ‘where the future is destined to dwell’. (43)

Cyberspace now

Cyberspace now • Space is a practiced place: do place • Cyberspace practices space • Loosens place • Loosens space from tours through navigation • Teleporting: locations in a new manner

Timing space • Television: organized around time • Internet: organized around space and memory • Despite the differences between surfing and zapping, using categories like flow, live and segmentation to analyze the internet offers new theoretical possibilities(...) All these differences and the importance of time is repressed by ‘cyberspace’. (50,51)

Othering Space • Outside all places and cannot be located yet it exists • Represents, contests, and inverts public spaces and places • Its mirroring function is not indexical • Cyberspace functions as a utopia because it enables one to see oneself where one is not. And it functions as a heterotopia because it actually exists. • Cyberspace enables virtual passing

Gawker • Flaneur sustain fiction of users as spectators, everyone leaves traces • Instead: Gawker • Not independent • Impersonal being: part of the crowd • Part of flood of information • Object of someone else’s gaze

Controlling Code • Internet is public because it is a protocol • The effectiveness of censorship depends on local configurations and routing protocols both of which have been dramatically affected by the privatization of the internet. (66)

Controlling Code • Lessig:perfect control signals the demise of democracy • Galloway:the principle of the net is control, not freedom • Chun: control and freedom are not opposites (...) control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness.

Controlling Code • Openness enabled by communications protocols can point toward freedom • Public space belongs to no one which garantees democracy • Private/public/political • Private/public - open/closed • Internet opens up possiblities for reimagining democracy and democratic structures.

Rather than explore the utopian possibilities of a space in which anything is possible, I argue that by refusing this myth, the Internet can enable something like democracy

Screening pornography • Exposed, or the walls of the home cannot hold • The Will to Knowledge • Pornocracy • In public

Screening pornography • 1995: Cyberporn became a pressing public danger • 1996: The Telecommunications Act: deregulated the telecommunications industry – allegedly opening access for all citizens to the Internet – and regulated Internet for the first time. • Time: “On a screen near you, Cyberporn: a new study shows how pervasive and wild It really is.” (Philip Elmer-Dewitt) -> the great internet sex panic of 1995 • Newsweek: “No place for kids? A parent’s guide to sex on the Internet.”

Screening pornography • I examine cyberporn’s role in addressing and negotiating the “public” as guardians of underage users (and thus guardians of “our future”) as well as a community of possible users. • Those arguing for Internet regulation as a necessary “civilizing” step saw no difference between the Internet’s pornographic content and the Internet itself. To them, the medium was the message, and the message was the pornographic invasion of the home. As drastic as this sounds, this understanding actually ignored the Internet’s ramifications, for it assumed that the Internet’s effect depended on content. • Yet as this chapter argues, if the Internet enables communication and transforms the home, it does so independent of content.

Exposed, or the walls of the home cannot hold • Elmer-Dewitt argued that public furor over cyberporn exposed a peculiar paradox: “sex is everywhere,” and yet “something about the combination of sex and computers seems to make otherwise worldly-wise adults a little crazy.” (82) • Elmer-Dewitt, maintains that the prevalence of deviant pornography stems from context and reveals fundamental truths about “ourselves” (83) • Hence, the “truth” revealed by Rimm’s “Marketing Pornography” thesis is that in private, without fear of contamination or exposure, sexuality veers towards the deviant; technology brings to the surface the perversity lying within us all. (84) • To assert this, both Elmer-Dewitt and Rimm assume that the pornography you download corresponds to your sexuality. As I argue more fully later, however, there is an important gap between download and identity, between looking and acting. (84)

Exposed, or the walls of the home cannot hold • In hearings and articles about cyberporn, lawmakers and others transform their own anxieties into concern over their children’s (and thus our future generation’s) sexual safety, whether or not they actually have said children. Online pornography intrudes into the home, circumventing the normal family disciplinary structure, subjecting children and threatening to create deviant subjects. (87) • Elmer-Dewitt: this breach must be stopped by renewed family discipline rather than state regulation: Pornography is powerful stuff, and as long there is demand for it, there will always be a supply. (87)

Exposed, or the walls of the home cannot hold • Although Elmer-Dewitt’s article ends by endorsing family discipline, its accompanying illustrations undercut this resolution by emphasizing the computer connection as breach. These illustrations do not reproduce online pornography but rather play with the tension between exposure and enlightment, between licit and illicit knowledge. The reveal that the fear of too much light, of too much exposure and uncontrollable contact, is what makes worldly wise adults a little crazy, if not paranoid. (88)

Exposed, or the walls of the home cannot hold • By focusing on pornographic images as the source of vulnerability, those hyping cyberporn perpetuate two “competing” visions of the Internet that are really the obverse of each other: “the sunny Information Highway and the Smut Expressway.

The Will to Knowledge • This “drive for knowledge” seems ingrained within all pornography, from early Renaissance “primers” about female academes to eighteenth-century confessions, from Victorian secret museums to twentieth-century porn films/videos/photographs, although the specificities of this drive differ from medium to medium, historical era to historical era. • Regardless of these differences, pornography portrays its protagonists and readers as voyeurs, who gain secret knowledge through their spying or “lurking”. (100)

The Will to Knowledge • Elmer-Dewitt argues evading public norms and downloading “deviant” pictures thus may be erotically charged, but not because these images necessarily correspond to one’s “sexuality.” Rather, these evasions and travesties perpetuate spirals of power and pleasure, spreading sexuality everywhere, making database categories – its basic units of knowledge – sexually charged. Power is therefore experienced as sexuality. (104)

Pornocracy • Faced with the privatization of the Internet backbone in 94-95, the U.S. government passed the CDA, an act key to understanding the Internet as both a threat to and enabler of democracy. (110) • Zoning laws: “Perfunctory onscreen warnings which inform minors they are on their honor not to look at this [are] like taking a porn shop and putting it in the bedroom of your children and then saying ‘Do not look,’” (111)

Pornocracy • Internet pornography – and by extension, its content in general – does not assault the viewer because the user must click and read. Because one usually receives textual descriptions before one receives an image, the random retrieval of indecent or pornographic materials is “highly unlikely.” (117) • Technology makes no distinction between decent and indecent materials. (118) • By emphasizing “imprecise searches,” the judiciary further highlights user control. The “facts” presume that precise searches do not uncover uninvited and extraneous sites. (118)

In public • In short, the Internet is public because it allows individuals to speak in a space that is fundamentally indeterminate and pornographic, if we understand pornography to be as Judith Butler argues, “precisely what circulates without our consent, but not for that reason against it.” (126) • Keenan: The public – in which we encounter what we are not – belongs by rights to others, and to no one in particular. Publicity tears us from our selves, exposes us to and involves us with others, denies us the security of that window behind which we might install ourselves to gaze. (126)

In public • In this sense, we are the child – vulnerable to pornography and not yet a discrete private individual. And this can be terrifying, yet without this we could have no democracy. • This chapter has outlined the necessity to deal with questions of democracy in terms of vulnerability and fear. Resisting this vulnerability leads to the twinning of control and freedom – a twinning that depends on the conflation of information with knowledge and democracy with security. (127)

Control and Freedom power and paranoie in the age of fiberoptics