[Imc-makerspace] Fwd: Re: [hackerspaces] An interesting point of view : "On Feminism and Microcontrollers"

[Stewart Dickson]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [hackerspaces] An interesting point of view : "On Feminism 
and Microcontrollers"
Date: 	Sat, 2 Oct 2010 12:01:33 +0200
From: 	Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
Reply-To: 	Hackerspaces General Discussion List 
<discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org>
To: 	Alexandre Dulaunoy <a at foo.be>
CC: 	discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org



Some background on protocollar power and intentional design, taken from 
various sources:

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Alexandre Dulaunoy <a at foo.be 
<mailto:a at foo.be>> wrote:

    For sharing with you,

    Leah Buechley and Benjamin Mako Hill made an interesting
    comparative paper[1] about LilyPad and Arduino.

       [1] http://hlt.media.mit.edu/publications/buechley_DIS_10.pdf


Design is power: A review of issues around the concept of protocollary power

Michel Bauwens
3rd October 2010


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.

(See also, in the P2P Foundation wiki, our entries on the Architecture 
of Control and on Computing Regimes.)

Here is the description of the concept from Alexander Galloway in his 
book Protocol:

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

The following citations confirm the role of Design, and the intention 
behind it, as a function of Protocollary Power:

Mitch Ratfliffe:

“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.

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.”

Mitch Kapor on ‘Politics is Architecture‘

“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.”

Fred Stutzman on Pseudo-Govermental Decisions in Social Software

“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.

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.”

Here’s an example of the implementation of social Values in Technical Code:

“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:

“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).

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”

Armin Medosch shows how corporate-owned Social Media platforms are 
Re-introducing centralization through the back door:

“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.

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.

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.

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)

Harry Halpin insists that Protocols are Designed by People:

“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

Technologies are organs of the human brain, created bythe human hand; 
the power of knowledge, objectified.

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.”


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