Closing the Window to Open the Door

The sphere of digital media has become toxic. Exceptions exist, but in its dominant formations digital media are significantly contributing to the broader forces of social and environmental destruction under the paradigm of extractivist capitalism. Its recent technological innovations – cloud computing, blockchain, generative artificial intelligence – are extremely resource intensive, demanding ever greater amounts of computing power (‚compute ‘). This creates an escalating competition between the demands of the IT infrastructure and of people for even the most basic resources of survival, clean water.¹ At the same time, the demands of profit generation have turned the social dynamics online ever more anti-social. Optimized for engagement, data extraction and behavioural modification (among others, through an advertisement), social media are losing their primary function: social communication. Yet, their quasi-monopolistic position, fortified by high switching costs, assures their continued dominance, profitability, and further pursuit of this path of development.

Against this background, I want to reflect on two things. First, how can the existing exceptions, such as independent media archives based on sharing and collaboration, continue to follow a different social, organizational and material logic and avoid being overwhelmed by this toxicity and/or becoming a resource for extraction? This will require closing a few windows to actively exclude some processes and modes of access. But erecting new boundaries poses a dual danger. One is to create a gated community, a privatized island of conviviality within a sea of social chaos, the other is to fall into the anti-globalism trap of the right, with the return of (national) borders and regimes of exclusion. Thus, and this will be the second theme of this text, we also need to think about opening doors towards another way of being together.

Closing from …..¶

Historically, demands for transparency and openness were voiced in the struggles over democracy, embodying a bottom-up perspective. Citizens were demanding transparency from state institutions and openness to their own participation. Neoliberalism has turned them into methods of economic domination and exploitation by integrating them into a top-down view. Transparency has become a means of accounting, finding and quantifying opportunities, cutting costs and enforcing favourable rules, while openness has become a way of ensuring access aimed at extracting value.² In the sphere of digital media, transparency led to the erosion of individual and collective privacy by making users completely visible to the platform owners. Initially, this was sold as constituting horizontal sharing among users, but the sheen has worn off pretty thoroughly, as the adoption of the term “surveillance capitalism” in mainstream discourse indicates.³ Openness meant easy access to his data for efficient extraction. Perhaps the most obvious example is “Google Search documentation “, which provides website designers guidelines to ensure optimal readability by the search engine.⁴ The promise is to increase a website’s ranking in the search results, while the effect is optimal extractability of the content by Google for uses far beyond providing research results. In recent years, this generalized optimization towards machinic indexing has facilitated appropriating the entire internet as a resource of machine learning, leading to further concentration of power.

Against this background, it’s important to develop a new aesthetics and practice of opacity and restricted access. We can draw here onÉdouard Glissant’s defence of opacity. For Glissant, difference, the right to refuse the dominant mode, is an important first step in the assertion of singularity. Yet, it’s not enough. Because the colonial drive to transparency is a way of dealing with difference – by bringing diverse people and cultures into a unified system of measurements, against which comparisons could be made and, inevitably, hierarchies established. This is precisely what the Google index does and adopting its design principles means becoming an active agent in this process (for reasons valid and ill). To avoid this, a second act, beyond the instance of difference, is important. As he famously put it: “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity.” He saw very clearly that this would be critiqued from an enlightenment perspective as a return to obscurantism and reactionary demand for self-enclosure in some mythical form of authenticity. So, he hastened to add, that this is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly, one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. … The right to opacity would not establish solipsism; it would be the real foundation of Relation, in freedoms. ⁵

The demand for opacity here is expressing the insistence on not being reduced to a unified measure. Not being readable within the colonial matrix is the consequence of that, and a welcome one, but it’s not its primary motivation. The main motivation is to open up a different way of being, of relating in freedom.

In the context of digital media, the main means of transparency as a system of domination are algorithmic, as they enable to move away from a human scale to the entire Internet to be read and organized by centralized processes housed in data center demand ever higher inputs of natural resources and energy. Breaking this machinic transparency will reduce visibility within the dominant matrix (search results and other recommender systems), but this should not be the main focus. The main focus is to open towards different ways of reading and relating.

Thus, the question becomes, how to remain open to human relations while closing down algorithmic transparency, which leads to domination and extraction? UbuWeb seems to have understood this intuitively by placing a small file called robots.txt on its web server, which basically disallows web crawlers, including Google’s, to index the site. While there is no guarantee that crawlers honour this request, Google can no longer display information from UbuWeb in its search results. This also means that automated copyright bots have a harder time finding files hosted there. From a computer security standpoint, this is an extremely insecure measure, but enough to prevent most automated, thus the least context-sensitive, means of domination to function smoothly. For human users following a link, there is no difference. Everything is freely accessible. But the result of this closing the window for crawlers is to privilege human over algorithmic access, or, put the same slightly different, cultural over statistical logics.

A second example for enforcing a cultural reading. I currently serve as an admin/moderator of an instance in a decentralized social media network (tldr.nettime.org). In order to participate in any social network, one needs an account. In a decentralized network, one can choose among many different providers. As we are not about maximum growth, we can choose among potential users. Thus, we require people, when signing up, to write a sentence or two about why they want to choose this particular instance. This statement is reviewed manually by us. In practice, the hurdle is really low, 99% of people who try pass it. But establishing a hurdle at all, and enforcing a moment of cultural self-reflection, does make a big difference in collective culture, stopping obviously automated or otherwise relation-ignoring requests.

There are many other ways one could think of closing some aspects to strengthen an awareness of relations. For example, connecting a server to a solar panel, which then operates only when the weather conditions are favourable, breaks the illusion of independence from planetary constraints, which can only be created by extractivist overshooting. Ratherm it reconnects back to a specific place (or at least, time zone). Of course, this might reduce 24/7 accessibility, but depending on the character of the resource, this must not always be a bad thing. One attempt to re-establish this connection is the Solar Protocol project, which describes itself as “a naturally intelligent network. The website is hosted across a network of solar-powered servers and is sent to you from whichever server is in the most sunshine. “Last time I checked (06.05.2024 11:45 CEST), it was “a server called IDM Roof that is located in Downtown, Brooklyn, USA. “⁶

Opening towards …¶

There are two things I think we need to open the door more explicitly: time and sociability. With the aim of creating the conditions for a third thing: abundance. Digital media tends to produce a highly abstract time/space configuration that knows only two states: instantly present or permanently absent. Combined with capitalism’s ever-shortening product cycles, particularly endemic in digital media, where hardware is made obsolete every few years, this is an unsustainable, deeply anti-social and anti-environmental temporality. How can we think of temporality, a way of organizing time that takes its attunement to social and planetary rhythms as a strength rather than a failure to adhere to dominant standards of instantaneity? The Solar Protocol mentioned above is one, not just because of the transparent relation between server up-time and circadian rhythms, but also because of the enforced focus of the resource-efficient design, which by definition is more long-term oriented, thus reducing the overall extractionist violence necessary to maintain the infrastructure. And socially, time can be organized by redundancy, not so much as a means against technical failures, but as a means of smoothing transitions from one group to another. Again, UbuWeb might be seen as an example where mirrors – fully functioning copies of the entire website – might be a way of organizing the labor of care so that it can move from one group to the other. Also, this, as a design decision, reinforces a relatively simple design that can be moved and maintained easily, echoing demands for resource-efficient principles and against the increasing complexification of the entire digital landscape.

The closing off towards certain types of algorithmic access opens the way to think about new ways to encourage sociability as a means of accessing a resource. Boycotting recommendation systems and relying on “word-of-mouth “, that is, human relations and meaningful communication, is one way of opening up towards the social. Making transparent the labor of creating and maintenance is another one. This is a key principle behind the feminist server movement.⁷ Not surprisingly, UbuWeb, with one foot in the highly individualistic art system, has not been particularly strong in this regard, at least not from the outside. While it still appears as the work of one person, over the years, the work of maintenance has been much more distributed.

The point of stressing the work of maintenance is not just to ensure enough people are available and capable of providing this work, but also opening up the resources to slow transformation. In practice, production and reproduction cannot be clearly separated, and every maintenance is also an act of transformation and thus creation, possibly ensuring that the resource remains adaptive to changing needs and interests. This would open towards a more ecological understanding also of digital media, in the sense of what Achille Mbembe writes in Earthly Community: “The Earth can attain unlimited duration, but only if it is capable of fecundity and regeneration. In the absence of this capacity for periodic (re-)begetting, it amounts to no more than the darkened mask of a vast house of the dead.”⁸

Unlimited duration, fecundity and regeneration point towards the abundance of life itself. In the digital context, there has been a lot of talk about abundance over the last 20 years, based on the technical fact that copies of information can be done without loss and without cost. Digital information, it is often said, is non-rivalrous, meaning the use of information is not subtractive but additive. Afterwards, there is more of it. This leads to often naive, or disingenuous techno-deterministic ideas of progress.⁹ Yet, there is no direct relationship between technical properties and social formations. But technical properties are also not without consequences. They are potentials which can be actualized in various social formations. The properties of digital information, the absence of scarcity, allow the opening up towards forms that are not bound by the logic of commodities.

The overshoot of the planetary boundaries and the catastrophic consequences we are beginning to experience will force a path of degrowth. It’s simply impossible that the size of the economy continues to double every 30 years. This will mean less commodities. But to make this a progressive political path, it will also require the creation of new forms of non-commodity abundance.¹⁰