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INTERFACE AND INFRASTRUCTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Jeremy Hunsinger
Operation Electronic Leviathan was started in 2012 by the Pirate Party of Canada as an informational campaign that would programmatically resist warrantless surveillance, oppressive intellectual property regimes, and internet censorship that are embedded in bills in the Canadian Parliament. However, the operation also recognizes that the government is not the only participant in the creation of the electronic leviathan; there are also private companies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, amongst other more secretive firms, that have elements that could feed into the electronic leviathan, such as Blue Coat or The Gamma Group. The information and programmatic campaign of the Pirate Party was later renamed Operation Encrypt Everything. This new name de-emphasized the transformation of the neoliberal state into the neoliberal surveillance state. The foundational idea of these campaigns was to leverage social mediaâsuch as wikis, Facebook, and Redditâto inform people about the many possible dangers of using the internet and social media. These campaigns were especially engaged in warning the public about using the internet without using the proper tools to protect themselves and their representations online. In short, the idea was to teach people to use the internet and social media safely.
The idea of the electronic leviathan places politics back in the leviathanic body, which in Hobbes was thought to be the Sovereign and its state, but in contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the locus of the leviathanic body is no longer only embodied in the Sovereign, but is also found as corporations and post-statist organizations (Dosse, 1998; Foucault, 1979, 2008; Hobbes, 1994). This new nature of the leviathan arose because the sovereign entityâwhether it is a person, a virtual person like a corporation, or a stateâexists as the mode of centralization and enclosure of power. In neoliberal capitalism, while the state still exists, it is arguable that the main centralizer of power is not the old form of leviathanic, centralized state, but instead is the plurality of corporations that constitutes that state, including those that exist or operate outside of that state, such as social media corporations.
Arguably, social media and the internet tend to decentralize power and disseminate it through the network. This decentralization caused conflict with the statist model of the leviathan, because the power embodied in the state seems to appear to disperse, recede, or even disappear in trans-statist social media. As the new corporate leviathans were enclosing the power of the internet and social media, states saw an opportunity to leverage those corporations to new ends. These new ends beget the theory of the electronic leviathan, which is a leviathanic body managed by corporations in service to the state interests, where the state interests are also remarkably centered on corporate interests. The electronic leviathans derive from state-tied social media corporations and seem to be able to concentrate and demonstrate sovereign power by providing a new means of censoring, behavior monitoring, and thus modulating that behavior in the population (Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, ⌠Zittrain, 2011; Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, ⌠Zittrain, 2008). This reconcentration is resisted by the democratic side of the general will of the population, and this resistance is supplemented by their technological capacity. The general will need not always be democratically oriented. As we have seen clearly in the past, the general will has been led toward both fascistic and authoritarian directions (Guattari, 1995; Rousseau, 1997). As social media might be thought of as a manifestation of the general will, perhaps we are heading down these dark paths once more.
There is an imagination of a public good that is driving the creation of these new regimes of surveillance and repression, and that is an imagination of a public serviced by market-driven corporations. As an example of this relationship, in the construction of these regimes governments are making some currently legal social media and internet practices into questions of torts, and thus into finable offenses, and transforming the legal relationship surrounding established internet practices into new profit centers for corporations who can now sue for the tort fines. This change of the law generates the new illegality. In attempting to curb this newly illegal action, our governments create a statutory system through which other parties can profit. This transformation of the legal system transforms the nature of sovereign-subject relations by mediating it with the interests of profit-centered content production on the internet. With that change, when you contribute your material to a social media corporation, who then claims rights to that material under contract with you, you could theoretically be sued for your own use of your own intellectual products in a way that is deeply problematic for you as a producer of intellectual property via social media. This problematization of your online actions comes into being because of the new regime the government is constructing and to which you, as a citizen, are consenting.
Our consent is also generated from our use of social media. Social media corporations develop the interfaces through which many people access internet services, but also access their friends, communities, and social networks. These social media interfaces become familiar and comfortable to us. These interfaces become so comfortable that when major changes happen, some users quit, rebel, or complain. These interfaces have become standardized and normal in our social media worlds. Similarly, the install base of internet infrastructures, such as the internet protocols, copper and fiber-optic networks, computers, server software, and networking hardware like hubs and switches, all tend not to change their operating parameters quickly, or at all. These systems and their software become standards and standardized in interface and infrastructure. This standardization provides for the possibilities embodied in the systems, but also provides for the system's limitations. That standardization is also what allows for the manifestation of the general will within and through the systems, and it is also what allows the creation of the electronic leviathan as a will toward governmentality generated between the sovereign will of the state as our consent to be governed and the market-driven will of the social media corporations as our consent to participate in social media.
This chapter is about how the interfaces and infrastructures of social media constrain and envelop our internet experiences. Throughout this chapter, we confront questions about the nature of the social media as interface and infrastructure that lead us to more strongly consider the necessity of actions such as Operation Electronic Leviathan.
The Nature of Internetworks, the World Wide Web, and Social Media
It is important to realize how the internet works at a basic level in order to understand the implications of social media interfaces and infrastructures in our everyday lives. The internet is a network of networks to which a computational device connected to local networks can send data encapsulated in a protocol to another computational device connected to a remote network (Cerf ⌠Kahn, 2004; Virilio, 2000). These networks might be comprised of physical things, like copper wire or fiber-optic cabling, or they might be radio, laser, or, in humorous cases, they might even be comprised of pigeons (RFC 1149). To initiate the internet communication, the first computer creates an outgoing port by connecting the software that wants to connect to the remote machine to the networking protocol software stack on the local machine. This protocol stack starts with transmission control protocol (TCP), which takes the data stream from the application and breaks it into number chunks, which, combined with header information, are then encapsulated and addressed by internet protocol (IP). This TCP/IP data is then sent as a packet to the remote computer, which then receives it with its own incoming port. This port is connected to its TCP/IP stack, which is connected to the software trying to communicate to the remotely hosted software. This remote software to which we connect is usually called a daemon or a server. The TCP/IP stack upon initial receipt of the packet sends an acknowledgement of the receipt to the originating device. As the data travels from one machine to the other, and it is acknowledged and other data is likely sent back, it first passes through the local network that might be Ethernet, television cable, phone line, or fiber-optic cabling to its first point of connection to the internet. This connection is usually provided by the internet service provider (ISP). The internet service provider provides the initial destination routing information that allows the packet to travel along the internet backbones to its final destination. It provides the destination address using the domain name system (DNS), which also allows computers to translate from human meaningful names like zombo.com to its IP address 69.16.230.117. However, what happens on the server side does not necessarily map onto the physical IP address to where the packets arrive. Once it arrives at the IP address, the packet may be routed along a whole subnet of real and virtual machines. These machines may provide the information that allows the originating machine to construct the data that it requests. Frequently for social media sites, the huge virtual machines represented by their domain name, such as Facebook.com or Google.com, cut across geographic locations, national boundaries, and all kinds of other situatednesses that make it hard to understand all the implications of the data arriving at the requesting computer. What is clear though is that the connection between the receiving computer and the sending computer is not a direct connection, but a highly mediated connection that not only passes through the ISP and backbone networks of the internet, but passes through many different middle stations. These middle stations may manipulate the data, or otherwise change it, delete it, copy it, or log it, but also frequently do not. It is said that the internet routes around problematic networks, such as censored networks, and it does, but that does not mean that the internet infrastructure alone allows us to overcome those barriers in everyday life (Elmer-Dewitt, 1993).
We should not just think that this traffic is passing unnoticed either. Each machine that social media traffic passes through is owned by someone or some institution. Traffic on the internet is constantly monitored by both humans and machines. That monitoring feeds into a management regime that seeks to ensure that quality of service is guaranteed for those that can pay for those guarantees. It also seeks to manage the internet in order to prevent the design of the internet, which is fairly open, from lending itself to being exploited for malevolent use, or it even sometimes seeks to prevent the internet from being used for political, economic, or social dissent. This management of the internet should not be seen necessarily as the neutral management of apolitical businesses or professional engineers, because the neutrality is only an ideological construct floating in relation to the contexts of the medium. If you change the legal landscape, you can transform those businesses and engineers into police and political operatives. This is not what anyone would prefer until something causes it to become a political necessity, which would be the case in the creation of the Electronic Leviathan. Thus we can posit the generation of an electronic leviathan scenario of corporate or state-based internet surveillance and control, but need we?
Most social media exists within this realm of questioning and worry. Social media exists mostly on the World Wide Web (WWW), though some of it operates through applications on mobile devices. There are a few social media systems that are older than the WWW or function differently than the WWW, such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Skype. These are applications in their own right operating outside, though sometimes through, web browsers. Generally though, the web browser is the front-end interface of the WWW, which runs over hypertext transfer protocol (http) and connects to the http server, which is usually an Apache webserver (wwwÂ.apÂachÂe.oÂrg). Much of the WWW is generated from data from a wide variety of sources compiled on the fly or cached on the webserver. In social media, much of this data is generated by the users and then served back to them and their friends. In the beginning of the WWW, this dynamic content generation was very basic and not as interactive as social media has become. It is the interactivity that generates the sense of presence and thus community that enables most people to engage with social media. However, it is also this interactivity that encourages people to use it with their friends and communities.
This interactivity that is generated by the connection between computers is mediated in the interfaces of social media as the interfaces are mediations of data mediated by webservers to browsers, or via a similar process. Social media interfaces engage us through interactivity and the appearance of co-presence, community, and, in the end, the appearance of social connection. The interface, whether it is a computer screen, a terminal, or a mobile device screen, is the center of the appearance of personal and group interaction online. It is the center of the constructions of our subjectivity online and our distributed subjectivities online. In other words, the interfaces are places that we inhabit and that inhabit us as we imagine ourselves in them and using them, and their designers imagine us doing the same. This social imagination varies amongst groups but is important to note, because it is the interfaces and infrastructures of social media that now enable significant parts of our social imagination and with that significant parts of our social memory. The control of our social memories is control of us at a very basic level (Calvino, 2009).
Users might mistake the use of an interface and the knowledge of an interface with the use of a computer or computational literacy. However, it is more than literacy with social media and the internet; it is more than knowing and using; it is also a question of being. The focus on literacy is problematic, because while there are standards for interface design for each major operating system, there is no necessity for the familiarity with those interfaces to traverse all the possible software that could be run on the particular platform. Indeed, some software, such as keyloggers, viruses, or trojans, might not have a human accessible interface at all. The lack of a human accessible interface for many computer operations demonstrates that we need to be more aware of the computer's operations than just what is represented to us via the interfaces that we have. Social media primarily relies on the appearance of the human accessible interface as the mode of becoming complicit in the provision, sharing, and exploitation of the users' identity and online life as represented by their data. Users of social media provide their data to the social media services to share amongst their networks of users via that interface, but that interface is not the only place the data then exists, nor is it the only place that the data is changed and manipulated. However, that interface is the only interface that the user sees and interacts with, and, as such, the rest of the interfaces and infrastructures of social media are invisible to them (Hunsinger, 2009a; Star, 1999; Star ⌠Ruhleder, 1994). The visibility of the human interface frequently occludes the imaginations of the other interfaces of the computational device, but those interfaces are just as important.
The centrality of the interface to human experience of computation not only allows us to portray data in compelling ways, but also allows us to hide data in interesting ways (Dourish, 2004). Social media industries rely upon the collection of large amounts of data that the users never see, but the human experience of social media is all about the presentation of social interaction online and thus the provision of data by users to other users through the social media service. Users co-construct their ignorance of the industry side of social media much like they co-construct their ignorance of other cultural industries (Adorno, 1996, 2001). According to Adorno, users construct a relationship with the image on the screen for cinema and its production techniques that allows them to ignore the work that produced that image. This ignorance of the âhiddenâ operations of social media parallels the ignorance toward other interface/screen technologies. The knowledge present behind the interface, but through the interface, is precisely what this chapter is meant to address. However, even gaining the knowledge of the infrastructure and interfaces of social media frequently fails to overcome the willful igno...
