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-------- Original Message --------
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">Subject: </th>
<td>Re: [hackerspaces] An interesting point of view : "On
Feminism and Microcontrollers"</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">Date: </th>
<td>Sat, 2 Oct 2010 12:01:33 +0200</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">From: </th>
<td>Michel Bauwens <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:michelsub2004@gmail.com"><michelsub2004@gmail.com></a></td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">Reply-To:
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<td>Hackerspaces General Discussion List
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:discuss@lists.hackerspaces.org"><discuss@lists.hackerspaces.org></a></td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">To: </th>
<td>Alexandre Dulaunoy <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:a@foo.be"><a@foo.be></a></td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">CC: </th>
<td><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:discuss@lists.hackerspaces.org">discuss@lists.hackerspaces.org</a></td>
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<br>
<br>
Some background on protocollar power and intentional design, taken
from various sources:<br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Alexandre
Dulaunoy <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:a@foo.be">a@foo.be</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;
border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">For
sharing with you,<br>
<br>
Leah Buechley and Benjamin Mako Hill made an interesting<br>
comparative paper[1] about LilyPad and Arduino.<br>
<br>
[1] <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://hlt.media.mit.edu/publications/buechley_DIS_10.pdf"
target="_blank">http://hlt.media.mit.edu/publications/buechley_DIS_10.pdf</a><br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Design is power: A review of issues around the concept of
protocollary power<br>
<br>
Michel Bauwens<br>
3rd October 2010<br>
<br>
<br>
Protocally Power is a concept developed by Alexander Galloway in
his book Protocol, to denote the new way power and control are
exercised in distributed networks. <br>
<br>
(See also, in the P2P Foundation wiki, our entries on the
Architecture of Control and on Computing Regimes.)<br>
<br>
Here is the description of the concept from Alexander Galloway
in his book Protocol: <br>
<br>
“Protocol is not a new word. Prior to its usage in computing,
protocol referred to any type of correct or proper behavior
within a specific system of conventions. It is an important
concept in the area of social etiquette as well as in the fields
of diplomacy and international relations. Etymologically it
refers to a fly-leaf glued to the beginning of a document, but
in familiar usage the word came to mean any introductory paper
summarizing the key points of a diplomatic agreement or treaty.
<br>
<br>
However, with the advent of digital computing, the term has
taken on a slightly different meaning. Now, protocols refer
specifically to standards governing the implementation of
specific technologies. Like their diplomatic predecessors,
computer protocols establish the essential points necessary to
enact an agreed-upon standard of action. Like their diplomatic
predecessors, computer protocols are vetted out between
negotiating parties and then materialized in the real world by
large populations of participants (in one case citizens, and in
the other computer users). Yet instead of governing social or
political practices as did their diplomatic predecessors,
computer protocols govern how specific technologies are agreed
to, adopted, implemented, and ultimately used by people around
the world. What was once a question of consideration and sense
is now a question of logic and physics. <br>
<br>
To help understand the concept of computer protocols, consider
the analogy of the highway system. Many different combinations
of roads are available to a person driving from point A to point
B. However, en route one is compelled to stop at red lights,
stay between the white lines, follow a reasonably direct path,
and so on. These conventional rules that govern the set of
possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system are
what computer scientists call protocol. Thus, protocol is a
technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent
environment. <br>
<br>
These regulations always operate at the level of coding–they
encode packets of information so they may be transported; they
code documents so they may be effectively parsed; they code
communication so local devices may effectively communicate with
foreign devices. Protocols are highly formal; that is, they
encapsulate information inside a technically defined wrapper,
while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of
information contained within. Viewed as a whole, protocol is a
distributed management system that allows control to exist
within a heterogeneous material milieu. <br>
<br>
It is common for contemporary critics to describe the Internet
as an unpredictable mass of data–rhizomatic and lacking central
organization. This position states that since new communication
technologies are based on the elimination of centralized command
and hierarchical control, it follows that the world is
witnessing a general disappearance of control as such. <br>
<br>
This could not be further from the truth. I argue in this book
that protocol is how technological control exists after
decentralization. The “after” in my title refers to both the
historical moment after decentralization has come into
existence, but also–and more important–the historical phase
after decentralization, that is, after it is dead and gone,
replaced as the supreme social management style by the diagram
of distribution.” <br>
<br>
The following citations confirm the role of Design, and the
intention behind it, as a function of Protocollary Power:<br>
<br>
Mitch Ratfliffe: <br>
<br>
“Yes, networks are grown. But the medium they grow in, in this
case the software that supports them, is not grown but designed
& architected. The social network ecosystem of the
blogosphere was grown, but the blog software that enabled it was
designed. Wikis are a socially grown structure on top of
software that was designed. It’s fortuitous that the social
network structures that grew on those software substrates turn
out to have interesting & useful properties. <br>
<br>
With a greater understanding of which software structures lead
to which social network topologies & what the implications
are for the robustness, innovativeness, error correctiveness,
fairness, etc. of those various topologies, software can be
designed that will intentionally & inevitably lead to the
growth of political social networks that are more robust,
innovative, fair & error correcting.” <br>
<br>
Mitch Kapor on ‘Politics is Architecture‘ <br>
<br>
“Politics is architecture”: The architecture (structure and
design) of political processes, not their content, is
determinative of what can be accomplished. Just as you can’t
build a skyscraper out of bamboo, you can’t have a participatory
democracy if power is centralized, processes are opaque, and
accountability is limited.” <br>
<br>
Fred Stutzman on Pseudo-Govermental Decisions in Social Software
<br>
<br>
“When one designs social software, they are forced to make
pseudo-governmental decisions about how the contained ecosystem
will behave. Examples of these decisions include limits on
friending behavior, limits on how information in a profile can
be displayed, and how access to information is restricted in the
ecosystem. These rules create and inform the structural aspects
of the ecosystem, causing participants in the ecosystem to
behave a specific way. <br>
<br>
As we use social software more, and social software more neatly
integrates with our lives, a greater portion of our social rules
will come to be enforced by the will of software designers. Of
course, this isn’t new – when we elected to use email, we agree
to buy into the social consequences of email. Perhaps because we
are so used to making tradeoffs when we adopt social technology,
we don’t notice them anymore. However, as social technology
adopts a greater role in mediating our social experience, it
will become very important to take a critical perspective in
analyzing how the will of designers change us.” <br>
<br>
Here’s an example of the implementation of social Values in
Technical Code:<br>
<br>
“In a paper about the hacker community, Hannemyr compares and
contrasts software produced in both open source and commercial
realms in an effort to deconstruct and problematize design
decisions and goals. His analysis provides us with further
evidence regarding the links between social values and software
code. He concludes: <br>
<br>
“Software constructed by hackers seem to favor such properties
as flexibility, tailorability, modularity and openendedness to
facilitate on-going experimentation. Software originating in the
mainstream is characterized by the promise of control,
completeness and immutability” (Hannemyr, 1999). <br>
<br>
To bolster his argument, Hannemyr outlines the striking
differences between document mark-up languages (like HTML and
Adobe PDF), as well as various word processing applications
(such as TeX and Emacs verses Microsoft Word) that have
originated in open and closed development environments. He
concludes that “the difference between the hacker’s approach and
those of the industrial programmer is one of outlook: between an
agoric, integrated and holistic attitude towards the creation of
artifacts and a proprietary, fragmented and reductionist one”
(Hannemyr, 1999). As Hannemyr’s analysis reveals, the
characteristics of a given piece of software frequently reflect
the attitude and outlook of the programmers and organizations
from which it emerges” <br>
<br>
Armin Medosch shows how corporate-owned Social Media platforms
are Re-introducing centralization through the back door: <br>
<br>
“In media theory much has been made of the one-sided and
centralised broadcast structure of television and radio. the
topology of the broadcast system, centralised, one-to-many,
one-way, has been compared unfavourable to the net, which is a
many-to-many structure, but also one-to-many and many-to-one, it
is, in terms of a topology, a highly distributed or mesh
network. So the net has been hailed as finally making good on
the promise of participatory media usage. What so called social
media do is to re-introduce a centralised structure through the
backdoor. While the communication of the users is
‘participatory’ and many-to-many, and so on and so forth, this
is organised via a centralised platform, venture capital funded,
corporately owned. Thus, while social media bear the promise of
making good on the emancipatory power of networked
communication, in fact they re-introduce the producer-consumer
divide on another layer, that of host/user. they perform a false
aufhebung of the broadcast paradigm. Therefore I think the term
prosumer is misleading and not very useful. while the users do
produce something, there is nothing ‘pro’ as in professional in
it. <br>
<br>
This leads to a second point. The conflict between labour and
capital has played itself out via mechanization and
rationalization, scientific management and its refinement, such
as the scientific management of office work, the proletarisation
of wrongly called ‘white collar work’, the replacement of human
labour by machines in both the factory and the office, etc. What
this entailed was an extraction of knowledge from the skilled
artisan, the craftsman, the high level clerk, the analyst, etc.,
and its formalisation into an automated process, whereby this
abstraction decidedly shifts the balance of power towards
management. Now what happened with the transition from Web 1.0
to 2.0 is a very similar process. Remember the static homepage
in html? You needed to be able to code a bit, actually for many
non-geeks it was probably the first satisfactory coding
experience ever. You needed to set the links yourself and check
the backlinks. Now a lot of that is being done by automated
systems. The linking knowledge of freely acting networked
subjects has been turned into a system that suggests who you
link with and that established many relationships involuntarily.
It is usually more work getting rid of this than to have it done
for you. Therefore Web 2.0 in many ways is actually a dumbing
down of people, a deskilling similar to what has happened in
industry over the past 200 years. <br>
<br>
Wanted to stay short and precise, but need to add, social media
is a misnomer. What social media would be are systems that are
collectively owned and maintained by their users, that are built
and developed according to their needs and not according to the
needs of advertisers and sinister powers who are syphoning off
the knowledge generated about social relationships in secret
data mining and social network analysis processes. <br>
<br>
So there is a solution, one which I continue to advocate: lets
get back to creating our own systems, lets use free and open
source software for server infrastructures and lets socialise
via a decentralised landscape of smaller and bigger hubs that
are independently organised, rather than feeding the machine …”
(IDC mailing list, Oct 31, 2009) <br>
<br>
Harry Halpin insists that Protocols are Designed by People:<br>
<br>
“Galloway is correct to point out that there is control in the
internet, but instead of reifying the protocol or even network
form itself, an ontological mistake that would be like blaming
capitalism on the factory, it would be more suitable to realise
that protocols embody social relationships. Just as genuine
humans control factories, genuine humans – with names and
addresses – create protocols. These humans can and do embody
social relations that in turn can be considered abstractions,
including those determined by the abstraction that is capital.
But studying protocol as if it were first and foremost an
abstraction without studying the historic and dialectic movement
of the social forms which give rise to the protocols neglects
Marx’s insight that <br>
<br>
Technologies are organs of the human brain, created bythe human
hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.<br>
<br>
Bearing protocols’ human origination in mind, there is no reason
why they must be reified into a form of abstract control when
they can also be considered the solution to a set of problems
faced by individuals within particular historical circumstances.
If they now operate as abstract forms of control, there is no
reason why protocols could not also be abstract forms of
collectivity. Instead of hoping for an exodus from protocols by
virtue of art, perhaps one could inspect the motivations,
finances, and structure of the human agents that create them in
order to gain a more strategic vantage point. Some of these are
hackers, while others are government bureaucrats or
representatives of corporations – although it would seem that
hackers usually create the protocols that actually work and gain
widespread success. To the extent that those protocols are
accepted, this class that I dub the ‘immaterial aristocracy’
governs the net. It behoves us to inspect the concept of digital
sovereignty in order to discover which precise body or bodies
have control over it.”<br>
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