{"id":25312,"date":"2011-08-05T10:52:14","date_gmt":"2011-08-05T09:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=25312"},"modified":"2017-03-28T16:46:15","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T15:46:15","slug":"barefoot-into-cyberspace-a-conversation-between-tech-utopians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=25312","title":{"rendered":"Barefoot into Cyberspace"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Barefoot
\nJournalist and activist Becky Hogge’s<\/a>\u00a0Barefoot into Cyberspace\u00a0is an inside account of hacker culture and the forces that shape it, told in the year WikiLeaks took subversive geek politics into the mainstream. It asks how free the internet will make us, and if we can ever live up to a utopian vision of technology’s (and its users’) potential. It also questions whether the outpour of information online will in fact enslave us to powerful corporate interests. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Below is an excerpt of the book, in which Hogge interviews\u00a0Ethan Zuckerman<\/a>, long-time fellow and researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society<\/a>\u00a0and co-founder of international blogging community Global Voices Online.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

“The reason I think internet freedom is interesting and potentially\u00a0useful,” Ethan explains, “Is not because I believe some sort of\u00a0Marxist-Leninist revolution is round the corner based on IT. If\u00a0anything, I think a sort of an Anglo-American revolution might be long\u00a0around the corner.”<\/p>\n

For a moment, I have no idea what he is talking about. Ethan smiles at\u00a0me. “I mean when we broke free of your shackles, through the long\u00a0arduous public debate process of trying to figure out what a better\u00a0government would be than the lousy one we had.” I realise he’s talking\u00a0about the 18th century. I feel slightly embarrassed, but Ethan lets it\u00a0go with a wave of his hand.<\/p>\n

Ethan is worried that the virtual places we’re creating online to\u00a0foster such a debate are not what they seem. “That forces us to think\u00a0about how we create public spaces. [With the web] we think we have a\u00a0free and open space to communicate in. Well maybe we don’t. Because it\u00a0is owned and controlled, and because of that it’s possible that\u00a0certain types of speech actually get very difficult.”<\/p>\n

When the WELL went online, the internet was very much a network of\u00a0ends, and for that reason people believed that the ‘net, and later the\u00a0web, had a radical potential to refresh public discourse. No longer\u00a0would debate be led by media oligopolies brokering access to a one-way\u00a0pipe. The consolidation of media, epitomized by Rupert Murdoch’s News\u00a0International empire, could not happen over this network. Or so went\u00a0the theory.<\/p>\n

In fact today, according to a company called Arbor Networks who have\u00a0access to a significant majority of the world’s internet traffic,\u00a0about 60% of all web traffic terminates at about 150 companies, and\u00a0about 30% of all web traffic terminates at about 30 companies. 6% of\u00a0web traffic is the result of just one company: Google. Consolidation\u00a0in cyberspace has already happened, and in a remarkably shorter\u00a0time frame than the consolidation of print and broadcast media. Just\u00a0like our local high street, a once-thriving marketplace of independent\u00a0ventures is being taken over by familiar and deodorised corporate\u00a0giants – Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube. How has this happened?<\/p>\n

“The rhetoric of the internet early on was this massively\u00a0decentralised network where every point routes to every point,” Ethan\u00a0explains. “It doesn’t matter if you cut the wires, it will re-route
\naround it and everything is sort of an independent end node, right?\u00a0Technically things are fairly independent as end nodes. You can do\u00a0ludicrous things with just a PC attached to this network. And the\u00a0whole rise of peer-to-peer [filesharing] demonstrates how ludicrous\u00a0you can be just doing peers.<\/p>\n

“The first thing to note is that it’s nowhere near as resilient as we\u00a0promised ourselves it was. You know, when a cable goes down in west\u00a0Africa it has very real, very significant consequences. But what turns\u00a0out to be most interesting, at least for me, is that we thought all\u00a0the services would be at the edge of the networks. Which is to say\u00a0lots of people would have their own web servers under their control,\u00a0their own mail servers under their control. And what’s been happening\u00a0gradually over about 15 years is everyone has said, ‘that’s really a\u00a0pain in the ass and I really don’t want to do that.'”<\/p>\n

Much like the sixties communards who gave up farming the land after\u00a0one season showed them how hard it was, communicatory self-sufficiency\u00a0turned out to be a bit of a drag. “I think it changed first because of\u00a0spam,” Ethan says. “Basically, if you run your own mail server these\u00a0days the amount of time you have to spend training your spam filter is\u00a0just insane. And so I would say 80% of the sort of hardcore geeks I\u00a0know just moved over to Gmail, and have just sort of said, ‘It’s fine.\u00a0You know? Yes, now Google controls my email. If I really am worried\u00a0about it I can always encrypt on top of it, but the pain I’m going\u00a0through to maintain my own mail server just isn’t worth it anymore’.”\u00a0Ethan and I both use Gmail.<\/p>\n

“After that,” Ethan continues, “we started to see consolidation of web\u00a0hosting. And similarly that’s more of a cost issue. Web traffic is\u00a0really spikey. And what you really want to do is to be able to turn up\u00a0the bandwidth to your server. Or potentially put another server in if\u00a0you’re having a good day and suddenly everyone’s paying attention to\u00a0you. That’s really hard to do if you’re off on your own running your\u00a0own box. So a lot of people have moved to using hosted web services.\u00a0Those web services tend to converge and so you end up with companies\u00a0like Rackspace which now control large percentages of the independent\u00a0web.<\/p>\n

“Where this has really gotten crazy is in social media. Social media\u00a0is almost by definition heavily centralised.” Ethan says the reason\u00a0for this is “it’s a namespace problem”, which is a short and rather\u00a0technical way of saying that we need directories like Facebook and\u00a0Twitter to make it easy for us to find our friends online among the\u00a0sea of people who share their names. Just as the Screen Actors Guild\u00a0and Equity stipulate that no two of their members may have the same\u00a0stage name to avoid confusion, Facebook and Twitter make sure no two\u00a0of their users have the same handle or identifying code, meaning you\u00a0can always find the exact Ethan Zuckerman or Becky Hogge you’re\u00a0looking for.<\/p>\n

What all this means is that although the rhetoric behind the ‘net was\u00a0one of radical decentralisation, disintermediation and the chance at a\u00a0truly plural public sphere, the reality of it pens us into what are\u00a0essentially a handful of corporate pseudo-public spaces.<\/p>\n

“It’s terrifying,” says Ethan. “And the reason it’s terrifying is that\u00a0much of the thinking that we’ve done about the internet is thinking\u00a0about open standards, autonomous agents, all able to make our own\u00a0decisions. But if you are using a social media platform or a blogging\u00a0platform to publish your thoughts, you are within one of these large\u00a0spaces. At a certain point, you are dependent on their rules of the\u00a0road for your continued existence.”<\/p>\n

Ethan found himself thinking about this problem for the first time\u00a0when friends of his in Zimbabwe, a human rights organisation called\u00a0Kubatana, were told by their hosting provider Bluehost, one of the\u00a0largest in the US, that they had to go. When\u00a0Kubatana asked Bluehost why, the response was simple but shocking:\u00a0“because you’re Zimbabwean.”<\/p>\n

What had happened was this. The US Department of Trade maintains a\u00a0list of sanctioned individuals in Zimbabwe with whom US companies are\u00a0prevented from doing business, and the penalties for violating those\u00a0sanctions had been slowly ratcheting up over the last few years. At\u00a0some point Bluehost’s lawyers had apparently decided that, legal\u00a0niceties aside, it probably wasn’t worth their while serving any\u00a0Zimbabweans. The edict had gone out “Get rid of the Zimbabweans.\u00a0They’re not worth it.”<\/p>\n

“So what happened,” Ethan recounts, “was well after Kubatana had\u00a0signed up to their account, Bluehost changed their terms of service.”\u00a0Most ‘net companies reserve the right to change their terms of service\u00a0at any time, often without notifying the users who unwittingly agree\u00a0to abide by them. “Their new terms of service state, ‘I am not a\u00a0Zimbabwean’ or Syrian or Cuban or any number of other countries. And\u00a0so my friends were being kicked out for being Zimbabwean. Now, if\u00a0you’re a human rights activist in Zimbabwe, this is a pretty easy\u00a0fight as far as they go. So they decided to start a fight. They got\u00a0the US Embassy in Harare to call the Treasury Department and have the\u00a0Treasury Department call this company and say, ‘You idiots, fix this’.\u00a0And so three weeks later after much nasty email exchanges there was an\u00a0apology from the CEO inviting them back.” At which point, according to\u00a0Ethan, they said what they had intended to say all along, namely, “Go\u00a0fuck yourself.” They now host with Verio.<\/p>\n

The Open Net Initiative published a report in 2010 detailing the\u00a0practices of five major social networking and blogging platforms –\u00a0Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Blogger – and the effects these\u00a0practices were having on free speech. Based on these investigations,\u00a0the report speculated that Facebook was using a crude, numbers-based\u00a0system for policing its content, automatically deactivating accounts\u00a0and group pages if a threshold of complaints was met. It also\u00a0identified specific Facebook groups who were gaming this system, for\u00a0example a group of Arab Muslims whose stated aim was to get the\u00a0account of every atheist Arab deleted by Facebook’s automated system.\u00a0Although YouTube was found to offer better avenues of redress to users\u00a0who felt their content had been removed unfairly, ONI discovered\u00a0anecdotal evidence to show that it too set the threshold of permitted\u00a0speech far higher than one might expect of, say, serious broadcasting.
\nYouTube had deleted a number of human rights videos – mostly from the\u00a0Arab world – on the basis of the violence and illegal activity they\u00a0depicted, rather than the context in which those depictions were being\u00a0communicated. Flickr too, had come up against human rights activists –\u00a0this time in Romania – angry at content removed from their streams.<\/p>\n

The ONI are not anti-capitalists. They make clear in the introduction\u00a0to their report that they understand that corporations who provide\u00a0services like YouTube and Facebook are working under competing\u00a0pressures: the pressure to create a viable business, to keep their\u00a0services available in countries with restrictive laws, and the\u00a0pressure to avoid politically-motivated cyber-attacks on their\u00a0infrastructure from groups keen to suppress ideas through force.\u00a0“Negotiating this terrain often means compromising,” they write,\u00a0“sometimes at the expense of users”.
\nNonetheless, the ONI also rightly identify the current state of\u00a0affairs as deeply precarious. Because the platforms they investigated\u00a0are beginning to dominate online communications, the efforts these\u00a0platform operators make to police their own content will have a\u00a0substantial and growing impact on free expression and public\u00a0discourse:<\/p>\n

As users flock toward popular social media sites such as Facebook and\u00a0Twitter, they are effectively stepping away from public streets and\u00a0parks and into the spaces similar in some ways to
\nshopping malls – spaces that are privately owned and often subject to\u00a0stringent rules and lacking in freedoms.<\/p>\n

As Ethan puts it, “it’s sort of like saying, ‘let’s go have a good\u00a0public argument about this. And we’ll do it at Terminal 5 at\u00a0Heathrow’. If what’s interesting about internet freedom is this idea\u00a0of creating digital public spaces where we can debate whatever issues\u00a0are relevant. And if what’s exciting about internet freedom is that\u00a0countries that don’t have conventional public spaces could now have\u00a0digital public spaces, then we have to recognise, those aren’t public\u00a0spaces. Those are private spaces; those are corporate-controlled\u00a0spaces.”<\/p>\n

In No Logo, Naomi Klein details exactly what’s wrong with the\u00a0real-world emergence of the pseudo-public space in corporate America:<\/p>\n

“The conflation of shopping and entertainment found at the superstores\u00a0and theme-park malls has created a vast grey area of pseudo-public\u00a0private space. Politicians, police, social workers and even religious\u00a0leaders all recognize that malls have become the modern town square.\u00a0But unlike the old town squares, which were and still are sites for\u00a0community discussion, protests and political rallies, the only type of\u00a0speech that is welcome here is marketing and other consumer patter.\u00a0Peaceful protestors are routinely thrown out by mall security guards\u00a0for interfering with shopping, and even picket lines are illegal\u00a0inside these enclosures.”<\/p>\n

It’s ironic that a technology that gave citizens the ability to take\u00a0back public space and public discourse from corporate control could\u00a0have turned so quickly into the anti-globalisation movement’s worst\u00a0nightmare – a virtual corporate beast a hundred times more efficient\u00a0than anything in the real world at exploiting the citizen-consumer’s\u00a0own expression and desire in order to sell advertising. Why did things\u00a0pan out so differently from the way early geeks expected them to?<\/p>\n

“This was such an anti-corporate space when a lot of people were\u00a0starting to play with it for the first time,” says Ethan. “If your\u00a0first internet experience was the WELL, you might have asked, ‘Who the\u00a0hell’s going to make money off a bunch of Grateful Dead fans?’ My\u00a0first experience was Usenet. And the notion that someone was somehow\u00a0going to make money off that cesspool seemed utterly ludicrous. Back\u00a0then, I’d always assumed that when we were promising investors that\u00a0we’d do good things with their money that, you know, we were probably\u00a0going to lose money hand over fist. So it’s never made any sense to\u00a0me.”<\/p>\n

Ethan is thinking back to his Tripod.com days, before the big sale to\u00a0Lycos. “In the nineties, we were these scrappy little youngsters in a\u00a0house in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with no affiliations to big\u00a0companies. And the companies that were big, and that we admired, had\u00a0silly names like Yahoo! and their founders rode around on skateboards.\u00a0So it was hard to think of this as the big corporate consolidation. It\u00a0looked like the internet was this space where anyone could do anything\u00a0with very few resources and a very low start-up cost. And in fact that\u00a0does seem to continue to sort of be true. You know, Twitter was able\u00a0to become Twitter pretty damn fast. So I think maybe it is still a\u00a0pretty open space. In that, if you can create a platform and convince
\npeople that they want to be on it you are free to do that. But I think\u00a0it is a space that naturally consolidates. And I think it consolidates\u00a0because of brand.”<\/p>\n

So much for No Logo. Ethan explains, “When geography no longer\u00a0matters, brand matters a lot more. I remember people saying in 1998,\u00a0‘I want to be the number one retailer in the online pet and pet food\u00a0space.’ It turns out that there is no online pet and pet foods space.\u00a0There’s an online retail space, Amazon is number one at it. Being\u00a0number two at it isn’t very helpful. But I think that was hard to\u00a0call. And I think it was hard to call, because the myth of the garage\u00a0entrepreneur doesn’t seem like it is about centralisation.”<\/p>\n

Though we started with water, Ethan and I have moved on to beer, and\u00a0I’m feeling a little bold. What, I ask him, does this tell us about\u00a0us? After all, evil forces are not at play here. The internet actually\u00a0resisted regulatory interference from the old order in quite an\u00a0amazing way, at least in its early years. Were we always unlikely to\u00a0match up to the net’s potential?
\nEthan takes a sip of his drink and thinks. “We’re sitting near the\u00a0heart of a city of, how many million people?”<\/p>\n

I tell him ten, although I’m none too sure.<\/p>\n

“That’s a lot of people…” he says.<\/p>\n

“That is a lot of people,” I reply.<\/p>\n

“And they’ve decided to get together in a fairly close environment.\u00a0The real estate here, the permission to use this piece of land we’re\u00a0sitting on, it’s a whole lot more expensive than in some other parts\u00a0of this country. Human beings like being together. And we have this\u00a0natural tendency to get together. In fact we’re watching this happen\u00a0across the world right now. We’re urbanising and we’re urbanising very\u00a0quickly because when people get together there’s more opportunity,\u00a0there’s more excitement. You know there’s just more, the closer you\u00a0get together. I think centralisation is in the human spirit. And I\u00a0think what’s interesting is this. You know the reason why London\u00a0doesn’t have one giant Sainsbury’s? It’s geography. We couldn’t all\u00a0get to it. And if we could, we couldn’t all get through it, right? You\u00a0know, we’d all end up fighting over the iceberg lettuce and you’d\u00a0never get to the rocket. And there’d be a big, big problem. The\u00a0internet lets us all go to \u00a0Sainsbury’s at the same time, and we can\u00a0all get our lettuce at the same time. And at a certain point the\u00a0question then becomes, well why not just have one Sainsbury’s?”<\/p>\n

Like Frontline’s founder, Vaughan Smith, neither Ethan nor I live in a\u00a0city. He lives in rural Massachusetts with his wife and son, a\u00a0three-hour drive out of Boston. I live in an area of Cambridgeshire\u00a0that produces a significant proportion of the vegetables Sainsbury’s\u00a0stocks on its shelves. But we’re the exception, not the rule. In\u00a0global terms, we’re ludicrously wealthy – in the top 1%. We’re running\u00a0off to rural areas because we believe that when we get there, we’ll be\u00a0free. Perhaps for the same reason, we both fell prey to the excitement\u00a0of decentralisation promised by the ‘net.<\/p>\n

“We’re Utopians,” Ethan says.<\/p>\n

Buy the Kindle edition on\u00a0Amazon.co.uk<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Buy the\u00a0print edition on\u00a0Amazon.co.uk<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

More ways<\/a> to buy, beg, borrow and share the book.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An extract from Becky Hogge<\/strong>‘s new book, asking if the web can really set us free<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[584,581],"tags":[3604,3602,3603,64,722],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25312"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88645,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25312\/revisions\/88645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}