Наверное был я бухой,
Мой адрес не дом и не улица,
Мой адрес сегодня такой."
-WWW by Leningrad
Words cannot express the sheer amount of epic contained in this picture:
I remember, way back in the summer of 2009, I had just finished my first degree at UMaine, and I was trying to find some theoretical framework or just an overall guidepost into the hazey crazy world of the Eurasian Internet. A little bit of digging around UMass' Computer Science and Political Science department web pages pointed me to Jane Fountain and her book Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change. In fact, it led me to a whole special issue of the Social Science Computer Review devoted to articles discussing said book. I remember seeing one critical view, Donald Norris' "Building the virtual state...or not? A Critical Appraisal", and thinking I'd read it and get started on the book before I came to UMass. I read through all of Norris' article (yes, I have to admit I still haven't read Fountain's book) and I got to this passage at the end:
"In addressing the Internet and the World Wide Web and their relationships to governmental organizations, Professor Fountain (2001) made a number of claims about their potential effects that are contrary to the relatively settled findings of the field. In particular, she argued that 'the reorganization of government as a consequence of the Internet signals an institutional transformation of the American state' (p. 10)...The predominant view from the social sciences, based on empirical research over a number of years, is just the opposite. Although IT may have the potential to be transformative, the history of IT and government shows that it has not been transformative. As Kraemer (1991) observed: 'Rather, information technology has tended to reinforce existing organizational arrangements and power distribution in organizations. Moreover, information technology will have the same effects in the future because of fundamental relationships between technology's use, control of technology, and interests served by the technology.' (p. 167)" (Norris p. 421-422)
Maybe American/first world politics is a different space where Fountain's claims hold or Norris was misrepresenting what she was saying, but when I read that (and not noting a key distinction I'll spell out at the end of this post), everything I had been reading about the Caucasus and Central Asia for the past year stood up and sided with Norris' take on the role of IT in government. Having finished Norris' article, I took a break, looked over the CNN website, and found Evgeny Morozov's TED Talk. I was blown away; he had, in the space of 10 minutes, spelled out everything I had been thinking for the past 4 hours in much more detail. So a few months ago I saw that he and Jonathan Zittrain, whose The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It I've waded a few dozen pages into were speaking at the Mass Humanities 8th Annual Symposium "Cyberspace and Civic Space: The Impact of the Internet on Our Democracy", I rented a car for that weekend and drove out to Boston with a friend. Now in past posts I've used American names for people in Central Asia when I'd rather not use their real names, so let's use Central Asian names here in America and call my friend Murat. Before we left, I figured that a conference like this would dearly need more of an international flavor, so I brought my Kyrgyz kalpak, a going-away present from my host family back in Bishkek, and I offered to loan Murat the Uzbek tyubiteika I bought at a museum in Khiva, which we both wore more or less throughout the conference.
After a mix-up with our Australian-accented GPS fairy, we finally made it to Robsham Theater at BC just as the first session, the one on the political impact of the Internet, was wrapping up. Thus I only have notes from the second session in its social impact and the third session on its cultural impact. Everything I have to say about the first panel (which, unfortunately, was the one with Morozov) comes from having only watched the video and not having been there in person. Rather than summarize the discussion, I'm going to walk through my reaction to what was said at each session, so go ahead and follow along as you read.
After everyone is introduced, Mike Klein starts talking about the Sunlight Foundation, and I don't have much to say about his spiel except that I think it ties back to the quote I wrote above from Norris. As Kline notes, a lot of this transparency work used to be done by investigative reporters, but now we have these shiny new applications that publicize the same information...and it is handled by the same old actors in American politics, and this point is a great transition to somebody like Morozov, who tells us that he's been writing for the past few years about how authoritarian governments have adapted to the challenges posed by these new technologies. I also don't have much to say about his opening statement, largely because I had already read and grokked The Net Delusion about eight months before this symposium, but I want to take what he said about how it might not be possible to use various web sites without providing information like your real name a step further. We already know that the Uzbek government rolled out their own social networking site a few months ago. If we even forget that and look at a more successful site like Vkontakte or Odnoklassiki, can you imagine localized alternatives to Spotify or Pandora or Amazon emerging in these countries and being used to gather data on the opposition and make predictions about potential future members of the opposition? I can't see any reason why this wouldn't happen if it hasn't happened already, but feel free to disagree with me in the comments. He then goes on to talking about how we need to think about what an Internet that meets the needs of citizens as well as consumers would look like. He seems to have dropped hints about this kind of thing in various speeches and talks on Youtube, stating that it will be the subject of his second book. All I can say is I hope I'm not in Bishkek when it's published.
Eli Pariser more or less sets the stage for Charles Steelfisher's remarks and boy do I have a rant about what he said, well, a few disagreements, well, a few quibbles. First, while the voter file doesn't say who you voted for, it can be reasonably assumed that if you have somebody who shows up to vote in primary, then they did vote for a candidate whether or not said candidate had an opponent. Yes, there is the phenomenon of "ballot fatigue" where voters sometimes vote in only a few races and leave the rest of the ballot blank, but you can estimate it by comparing vote totals. Second, access to the voter file varies according to state laws. In Maine, you can pay a fee to get a copy of the voter file, and the definition of the kind of organization you have to be affiliated with is so broad that you don't have to be affiliated with either of the 2 major parties to get it. The third quibble I have is with Steelfisher's comment that the use of "Big Data" for electioneering purposes means that you spend very little time actually talking to voters, or only to the specific voters you're trying to influence most. To this I respond:
Now I come from a very low-level background when it comes to electioneering. The largest campaign I've ever had a major role in was for a Maine State Senate seat with about 30,000 people. Maybe it's different in the Big Leagues, but in the Peter Bourgelais School of Political Organization, you use "Big Data" to prioritize the same ol' analog voter outreach tactics (canvassing, friendbanking, house parties, etc.) that have been used for decades, and you can get a spillover that doesn't occur online. Anyone who has canvassed a typical suburban or rural neighborhood for any appreciable amount of time knows that knocking on one person's door, even if they're home, does not always mean that you only talk with that one person. You can reach that person, their spouse, their kids (who might be of voting age or have teachers/friends of voting age, and teachers can be extremely useful for political organizing), and even the folks next door and across the street! On that note, I have said way too much about American politics on a blog that's supposed to be about the Eurasian Internet and the politics it lives on. It's only just now, having seen the video for this panel, that I realize the symposium was focused on the Internet IN AMURRICA. I still have some more things to say that, I think, are applicable outside the U.S., but none of them come from the remainder of this panel, so let's go to an intermission.
During the break, Murat and I met up with Kasym, another old friend from UMass. We shot the breeze for a little while until the second panel got started, and first Lois Brown, then Cullen Murphy, and then Kate Crawford started to put me to sleep. That's a little harsh. I'm sure they all know their stuff, but by then I was starting to figure out that most of the panelists were crafting their message to a very general audience, and not <nose position="raised"><accent type="British" class="Upper">those of us in the Techno-Intelligentsia</accent></nose>. Then Virginia Heffernen woke me up.
I want to respond to her statements by describing my formative experiences with the Internet, how it influences the problems I grapple with today, and how that affected my reaction to Kasym's question at the end of the panel. My first experience with the Web, although I'm not sure if it was outside of a proprietary network, was from roughly 1990-3. My mother had a Compuserve subscription with some Internet access for medical research on an IBM AT clone running MS-DOS 3.0, and every month I'd get an hour of play time on some simple text-based dungeon crawler games. There was a sense that the Internet was something you logged on to, spent a very limited amount of time on, and then disconnected from to retreat back to the world of hard drives and floppy disks. Then, from 1993-8, we got Windows 3.1 and Internet Explorer, and I began to get a sense of an outside Internet that had Web pages that took forever to load on a 28.8k modem, chat rooms and the trolls that inhabited them (yes, it was a simpler time and nobody thought of sexual predators), and, yes, at a young age, I mostly used it for games. Then, from 1999-2005, several things happened. We got broadband, with my new interest in programming I started spending some of my new found Internet time on sites like Qbasic.com and RPGDX, and one manifestation of the usual teenage clique nonsense was that all the kids I knew were on sites like IMDB as I was geeking out. Then, in the summer of 2005, just before my first year of college, somebody pointed me to Facebook, and it was only until much later that I really appreciated what had been diminished by that last transition into social media. On the one hand, if I had been in junior high/high school in the mid-late 2000's, I might have felt like a little less of an outcast than the other kids, because instead of spending all of our time on separate sites that dealt with different subject matter and never interacted, we would have swapped bad Youtube clips and bad song lyrics like the youngsters do these days on their Twitter-pods. On the other hand, I think I learned a lot from my old programming haunts, and if you'll forgive the use of an old 90's cliché, it was a lot easier back then to take an exit on the Information Superhighway and get on to a back road. Thus the way I've often thought about these problems of Internet censorship, surveillance, and propaganda have been in terms of creating "a space" where opposition activists can securely communicate and organize in the face of a Big Brother adversary that is interested in monitoring, stopping, and/or co-opting their activities. I can certainly understand what she means by "losing my fighting spirit", but I'm not as bothered by it. I don't care if Pandora selects the right song in my playlist, but I do care about how the SNB could make use of sites like Muloqot. I don't think that these spaces are "magical" in any way (and this, perhaps, is in part influenced by the fact that my old Internet haunts were involved in such "magic"), or that they can in any way greatly supercede many offline political/social/economic realities, but it is certainly important that they be preserved.
This is why I agree with Siva Vaidhyanathan that we need to collectively back off from the "Internet is Magic" hype, although I think he ultimately shot himself in the foot by praising the folks at Google so much. Wait, the Blogspot platform that this blog is hosted on is owned by Google. Uhhhhmmm....they're all brilliant wizards out there at Mountain View. I love Google App Engine! Praise be to Goooogle, Aaaaaaammmeeeeeennnn...
It was around this time I was really starting to disengage with what the panelists were saying. This wasn't because of the focus on the States, but because it was all just so much skimming over the surface. Yes, I know the Facebook like tag can be used to track users even when they're not on Facebook. Yes, I know about the iPhone tracking controversy. Oh ja ja ja, "attach big responsibilities to big data". I stopped paying attention to the discussion and had a look at the folks seated nearby. Sitting next to me on my right were Murat and Kasym. Murat had pulled out his laptop, and Kasym was fiddling with his iPhone. To my left was some hipster-looking guy (well, he had those black, thick-rimmed glasses associated with hipsters) doing something on a laptop. I remember my eyes wandering, and I caught a glimpse of what looked like Python or Ruby code. Who was this guy? Let's call him HipsterGlasses for now.
Anyway, I had a really visceral, reflexive reaction to Kasym's question, and so did HipsterGlasses. When Vaidhyanathan mentioned that protesters were being tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed in Tahrir Square, the mic didn't pick it up, but HipsterGlasses interjected "and shot!" as he was speaking. I looked over and enthusiastically nodded. While there was (and is) a community of nerds on RPGDX and the intense mystical experience of seeing the code I dream up manifested in the screen (often after a few hours of debugging), I still had a home and school life outside of it at least, and at most parallel to it. Likewise, there's some really good writing out there about how the overthrow of Mubarak can be explained as part of a movement over the course of millenia against the pharaohs and an excellent interview with Stephen Cohen on how the protests in Russia aren't just about Putin's long-term attempt to become a tsar, but also about the failure of privatization in the 90's. How do you get to a point where an address isn't a house or a street, but a website? Any talk of a "Facebook revolution" only serves to make Mark Zuckerberg look far more like a humanitarian than he actually deserves.
Scumbag Zuckerberg is no Internet Park Ranger.
Finally, and maybe this is just my 90's-centric view of the Internet talking, but I just don't see the big deal with the #Guyscallmethings tag. With that, we're at the end of the panel and another intermission sponsored by the Brisco Shortening Comedy Hour
Once we got back to the theater holy shit HipsterGlasses, aka Chris Csikszentmihályi was there on the stage! Then first Perry Wu and Charlie Kravetz started talking and I began to zone out again. For all the talk about how the Internet has transformed our culture, I kept thinking of online entities like 4chan *pause*, Anonymous *pause*, and OnionSpace. I also couldn't get the Avenue Q tune "The Internet is for Porn" out of my head, and my notes say "We're listening to Bach, just for the lulz". I could go on a long anecdote about how the facial recognition software Kravetz talked about could perhaps be used on the opposition in authoritarian regimes, but I think that dead horse has been beaten enough already, and I think a lot of dead horses were being beaten by this third panel. Here, I think, was a problem with the way this symposium was structured. I think whoever structured this symposium was going for a "Three Blind Men and an Elephant" approach: consider three different categories of influence on "meatspace" by "cyberspace" and put them together to grasp the all-important Big Picture. But with the format we were given, we kept getting a short introduction to the same problems with different window dressing over and over and over. If you'll forgive a tangent about political philosophy, in ancient and early modern political thought, none of these distinctions existed. There was the polis, which sometimes meant the ancient Greek city-state but more generally meant any community of humans living together, and all of the things we call "society" and "culture" were discussed as political phenomena, and it looks like one consequence of partitioning them out like this is that we get a superficial treatment of all. If I were the tyrant of the Mass Humanities board, I would have reorganized the whole symposium around a series of problems or themes like anonymity, dialogue, etc. But if I were the tyrant of Mass Humanities, I wouldn't be writing this blog post.
Thus it was no surprise to me when Chris C. got up and explained, it a lot of good, solid detail, that technological innovation is an inherently political act in the broad definition of politics that I just described, because it either inherently disrupts or (more often than not) reinforces the way humans live in community with each other.
Then we get to the final boss of the symposium, aka the Chuck Norris of Internet policy, aka Jonathan Zittrain. Zittrain starts to describe Amazon Mechanical Turk to us, and I agree with his prediction about its future use. I can, of course, see this exact technology used in various parts of the CIS, especially as smart phones become more affordable. Never mind whether a private investigator or the Boston Police use a gamified system. What if the SNB uses it? I think, at least in this context, you can't respond to that kind of development without at least a diplomatic response (setting aside the steaming pile of fail that is the State Department's Internet Freedom policy) that takes into account American technologies are being used in authoritarian regimes, and now I think I'm starting to bore myself. There were a lot of other things said during this panel, but I think I'm going to wrap up my discussion of the symposium proper, as I think the boredom I experienced while sitting through it has crept on to this blog post.
After the last session concluded, we all went out to the lobby, where we could buy the various panelists' books and get them signed. Murat bought a copy of The Net Delusion, and, as Murat mentioned to Morozov that I was "your biggest fan", Morozov signed two copies of his book, one from a kid in an Uzbek tyubiteika, and another already read cover to cover and extensively commented on by some long-haired twenty-something wearing the rare combination of the xkcd Linux cheat sheet T-shirt and a Kyrgyz kalpak.
Was that it? I had been trying to think of a good question to ask Morozov for a while before this symposium, and, especially having missed the political session, I guess I was too starstruck at the book signing to ask the one question I had. The book signing took very little time, and as best as I can recall, a little while later he was over near the entrance to the theater chatting with somebody. I walked over and said something like "Mr. Morozov, if you have a minute [he said he did], I've been a fan since the TED talk you gave back in 2009. I'm a second bachelor's student in Computer Science at UMass-Amherst, and I have a BA in Political Science already, and I've been trying ot work towarfds a career related to Internet censorship and surveillance in the former Soviet Union, and more specifically in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Now I'm not asking you for contacts, but I'm wondering if you have any advice on how I could turn this interest into a career path, and what kind of career path that would be given that the State Department is what it is." "Well, it's not so much the State Department, but first you should get a graduate degree," he said. "Would that be a law degree?" I asked. "Yeah," he said, "or something like Science and Technology Studies, or STS. You might have a little trouble explaining your interests, but that would be a good way to get the intellectual background necessary. As far as careers go, there are more or less two paths you could take. There's the policy analyst role at a think tank like the Brookings Institute, especially as Internet censorship becomes more mainstream. Then there's more of an activist role, in which case you work in the region." "So with an NGO like the Civil Initiative on Internet Policy?" I asked. He paused for a second. "Do youe mean Gipi?" he asked. "Yeah, " I said. "Гражданская Инициатива..." "Yeah yeah, " he said. "We fund them through Soros..." I mentioned that I was interning there next semester (stay tuned for updates on this starting in early February) and we talked about Gipi for a little bit. I thanked him, he wished me luck, and just as I was walking away, I passed Chris C., "I like your shirt", he said. Somewhere behind me, Morozov laughed and said "Yes, and he a hat from Kyrgyzstan as well." That moment alone made the entire trip worth it. After two years in the soul-crushing, bureaucratic meat-grinder that is UMass-Amherst (with a few exceptions), somebody had seen and, I'm sure, appreciated the importance of Computer Science inside the yurt. I've tried my best to keep the fanboy level of this post to a minimum, but what Kasym said when I went over to the exit to meet him and Murat was too good to leave out: "Dude, you look positively post-coital."
After sleeping over at Murat's place where I also shrugged off my peculiar strain of Beatlemania, we had an uneventful drive back to Amherst. As the car rental place was relatively close to the UMass campus and the buses were running on a weekend schedule, I took a good 20 minutes to walk back. On the way, I passed Gordon Hall. It's a relatively small building on the edge of campus and just a few doors down from Fraternity Row proper. There was a sign out front with a whole bunch of interesting-sounding research groups I had never heard anything from, like the "National Center for Digital Government", the "Center for Heritage & Society", "Something something Science, Technology and Society", and "General Specific's Secret Military Base"...on second thought that last one might not have been there, but it might as well have been there for all I'd heard from these places. Although it was Sunday, the front door was unlocked and I figured I'd have a look around. Most academic buildings on campus have all kinds of fliers for different lectures and talks related to what people are doing in whatever department is based there...and there was nothing. Maybe I just needed to go to a different floor, but all I saw was bare walls and a lounge with a giant plaque with a list of donors. I did, when doing some research for this post, look up the NCDG and some associated content, and I drew two conclusions from it. First, Jane Fountain doesn't appear to be what I interpreted as a "cyber-utopian". Most of her research appears to be focused on how IT operates "behind the desk", or how bureaucracies are affected by ICT. I'm not saying that that's bad, but my background is in Political Science, not Public Administration, and we do deal with separate questions. Second, even outside of that distinction, the dictatorships that researchers associated with the NCDG don't appear to be the same kind of regimes I'm studying. Their website has a list of "Recent Publications by NCDG Affiliates" which includes Phillip Howard's The Internet and Islam: The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Again, I haven't read the book, but he did give this talk where, just in the last two minutes, he says that the countries that don't fit his model are the ones that don't have an open Internet, but have taken steps to restrict it and use it as a propaganda tool. I'm here at UMass to get my CS degree, and after this spring I have one more semester left. Then I can't go back to the CIS soon enough.
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