ml Immaterial Aristocracy Slides

The Hidden History and Dangerous Future of the Web

Harry Halpin, <H.Halpin@ed.ac.uk>

Textorized Parthenon

Paper Presentation, Cambridge, April 2006

Introduction

Thesis

While its effects have been scrutinized, the Web itself has received little inquiry. The composition of the governing networks that control the infrastructure of the Web have only recently been engaged with by activists with ICANN affair and the WSIS protests. The Web is governed by a network that is composed of an "immaterial aristocracy" of radical democratic "hackers", corporations such as Google and Microsoft, and non-governmental organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These networks continually negotiate between the needs of global capitalism and the desires of immaterial labour on the Web.

An Archaeology of the Web?

Certainly online surfers can relate with the stance of the monad: though plugged into a universal network of servers, we stare into our terminal screens as solitary individuals, hoping that the logic of the network will ensure that our perceptions accord and our messages make it through.
Erick Davis

Why the Web? Why not an archaeology of television? Or public radio? Or FTP?

The Web defines the hegemonic mode of production, unlike the above.

Who Controls the Web?

A class I term the immaterial aristocracy, a fluid and changing network of institutions with little formal connection to the traditional nation-state.

The material aristocracy's (CEOs, stock brokers, attorneys, nation-state officials, doctors) power comes mostly from their material basis of power They have the ability to move bits of matter about the surface of the earth.



In contrast, the immaterial aristocracy is nonetheless aristocratic because they have powerful ideas, ideas that can change the world when given flesh in the form of technology. To do this requires

The Commons of the Immaterial Aristocrats

Open Standards and Open Ideas

The immaterial aristocrats hold domain not over the analogue world, but the digital world. The digital world is the realm of biopolitics defined by the use of computers.

These ideas are a common, and are defined as open standards to be held in a perpetual common by the digital world, and without them the digital world would fragment. These ideas let capitalism flourish by creating decentralized and universal spaces for the flows of knowledge and currencies (and cybernetic control of the production and measurement of consumption).

The Intergalactic Network

J.C.R. Licklider was first head of Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA, and used his funding to promote his idea of a linked network of researchers working on interactivity and man-machine symbiosis.

JCR Licklider

He called the researchers his Intergalactic Network

His successors Taylor and Roberts got a contract for BBN to install the hardware for ARPANet

in 1971, but let the software be totally unrestricted and in the hands of grad students...

Bootstrapping Human Intelligence

Augmentation Project at SRI was one of the first nodes on the Internet, and it's NLS system foresaw much of the Web and modern computing, including the mouse

Doug Engelbart

Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity....

by "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.

Living the Future

Former ARPA head Bob Taylor moved to Xerox to set up their lab, Xerox PARC.

children

Hired the best and brightest computer scientists, and ended up creating Ethernet, personal computing, laser printing, and the PUP protocol, which heavily influenced TCP/IP

Unlike Engelbart, they wanted real users (Alan Kay even wanted children) to be able to use computering - thus the graphical user interface

Later spread outside PARC to the People's Computer Center and the Homebrew Computer Club...

Plato's Revenge

Artificial Intelligence

As von Neumann's gambit mutually assured destruction became policy, the problems faced by Cold War capital became not one of death but one of life. Indeed, the economic coercion of forcing people to do repetitive tasks was getting expensive, for if wages (social re-compensation) were kept down, the mass worker would threaten revolt - yet without the mass worker, the simple machines could not continue production.

Artificial Intelligence as originally conceived was the height of the Platonic project: the definition of all of intelligence as pure rationality.

Machines Rush to where there are strikes

Everyone will learn how to program. That is how we will speak to the servants.
John McCarthy

Disembodied Intelligence?

The View from Nowhere



The Failure of AI

"Forget intelligence completely, in other words; take the project as one of constructing the world's largest hypertext system, with CYC functioning as a radically improved (and active) counterpart for the Dewey decimal system. Such a system might facilitate what numerous projects are struggling to implement: reliable, content-based searching and indexing schemes for massive textual databases"
The Owl and the Electric Encyclopedia: Brian Cantwell Smith, 1991.

The View from Nowhere

The Rise of the Hacker

While their professors, who were by nature philosophers and mathematicians, tried to determine if mechanization of the human was possible, their students fell in love with the computers themselves

Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed hair and unshaved faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move," for they only exist "only through and for the computers
Weizenbaum, Computer Power in Human Reason

The root of this new social subject was not a rejection of humanity, but a community and practice of joy: It was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly can hacking, because you just don't want to stop
Stallman, as cited in Free as In Freedom

Foundations of the Internet

Principles of the "Galactic Network" or "Network of Networks"

The Rise of TCP/IP

How TCP/IP works

Data is subdivided into packets that are all treated independently by the network. Any data sent over the internet is divided into relatively equal size packets by TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which then sends the packets over the network using IP Internet Protocol.

At the recipient end, TCP at the recipient of the packet collects the incoming packets and then reconstructs the data. In essence, by defining the minimal architecture needed for people to share information in a decentralized fashion and a way of information to be sent through many possible routes, the perennial architecture of the network-form was born: decentralization, redundancy, and possibility.
Leiner, Cerf et. al, History of the Internet

Absolute Democracy: The IETF

In particular, creating standards and maintaining the infrastructure was given to the Internet Engineering Task Force. With research scientists no longer at the helm, the people who had committed the most hard-time and labor to making the Internet, the "hackers," soon were the main participants in the Internet Engineering Task force.

IETF Credo (Dave Clark):We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.

The View from Nowhere

IETF Organization

Voting does not even have to be consensus or even majority, but only a rough measure of agreement. IETF members instead prefer actual implementations, and arguments are decided by the effectiveness of practice rather that ideological debate.

The IETF is subdivided into Working Groups on subjects such as "atompub" and "smime" where most of the work of hashing out RFCs(Request for Comments,i.e Open Standards) takes place.

There are no membership lists, and individuals may only participate as an individual, but only participate voluntarily. There are no requirements, anyone may join, and "joining" is defined only in terms of activity and contribution.

Leadership is Informal: A weekend is when you get up, put on comfortable clothes, and go into work to do your Steering Group work.

Anarchists on the Internet

Ian Heavens was a singular revolutionary force within the Scottish anarchist movement, and a key organizer of the Scottish Anarchist Federation. He also was a well-travelled, and he combined his love of Latin samba and Scots punk to create the hybrid punk samba band Bloco Vomit.

Famous for finding "bugs" (errors) in TCP/IP that had not been noticed for years, and authored a IETF RFC 2525: "Known TCP Implementation Problems."

Ian in Bloco Vomit

The First Casualty

They printed an article about him and Spunk called Anarchists use Information Highway for Subversion. Besides the outlandish claims linking Spunk.org to non-functional terrorists groups like Direct Action in France, it then proceeded to proclaim Ian Heavens the mastermind behind the use of computers by the anarchist movement.

We have been amazed at the level of organization of these extremist groups who have appeared on the Internet in a short amount of time.
Sunday Times

Ian Heavens

Universal Information Space

As a software engineering consultant at the nuclear physics plant CERN, Tim Berners-Lee was bedevilled at how to keep the myriad machines and information "linked" together - except in a universal information space.

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics and complex extra facilities.
Tim Berners-Lee

For people to share knowledge, the Web must be a universal space across which all hypertext links can travel. I spend a good deal of my life defending this core property in one or another.
TimBL

URI: Uniform or Universal Resource Identifiers

On the Internet there was no universal way to identify the objects of every protocol. Tim Berners-Lee had a number of key concepts:

  1. The resource, of any thing that someone might want to communicate over the Internet.
  2. The a universal resource identifier (URI), "to emphasize the importance of universality, and of the persistence of information."
  3. The idea of simplifying hypertext as the emergence human-readable standard.

Partly due to the number of endless philosophical rat holes down which technical conversations would disappear. John Kelsin, IETF Applications Are direct, was to angrily disband it.

The Web Takes Off

I was surprised at how totally different the feeling was. It was immediately obvious that the introduction of graphics with text would make a big difference and that it was a new phenomenon. Terry Winograd on the Internet

In the corporate rush, suddenly the immaterial aristocracy of the IETF lost sovereignty of the Web - The Browser Wars between Microsoft and Netscape.

It was in the long-term interests of both the corporations and the users of the Web to have a new form of digital sovereignty, Berners-Lee decided to reconstitute digital sovereignty in the form of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

W3C Logo

Representative Democracy

The competitive nature of the group would drive the developments, and always bring everyone to the table for the next issue. Yet members also knew that collaboration was the most efficient way for everyone to grab a share of a rapidly growing pie.

Return of Universality: The W3C's mission was to expand the reach of the Web to everyone, everything, everywhere.

Sneaking Hackers In the Backdoor let the hackers back in as Invited Experts and as Staff...and by keeping costs cheap and the entire process open.

Yet as Chair the W3C is actually authoritarian, with all power being entrusted formally to Tim Berners-Lee.

But it's a Mess!

Too many standards - and No Search Engine

Picture of Too Many Standards

From Allende to Google

Project Cybersyn in Allende's Chile: decentralizing, worker-participative, and anti-bureaucratic network that allowed each worker to communicate to others, and in manner ahead of its time allowed a worker to contribute both physically and mentally to the production process.

Fernando Flores fled to Palo Alto, met with Terry Winograd, who then taught Larry Page - who co-founded Google.

Cybersyn Control Room

The Hegemony of Google

Pageranking

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value
Larry Page, Google

In essence, the Taking Technological Advantage of the Social.

Google followed rules of human-centered design, such as keeping their search engine homepage uncluttered with advertisements in order to keep users happy and to have the page load quickly.

Google Logo

The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web, a web of meaning. Give URIs to but everything, including dogs and cars.

TimBL's Semantic Web Service Stack Picture

AI Returns...

The problem with knowledge representation is that these systems are designed around a central database...the Web , in contrast, does not try to define a whole system, just one Web page at a time. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web

Good Old Fashioned AI in the form of knowledge representation is back on the Web. Ian Horrocks Pat Hayes Jim Hendler

Google

Do No Evil to Closed World: To maintain its hegemonic position Google to restrict open flows of information from within its company to the outside world - Dark Fiber, Google Maps, Wireless

Social Software: Tagging and free space, but data is locked-in private databases for data-mining.

Microsoft is preparing for war on Google...no doubt Bill Gates is back on the helm.
Slashdot, today

Digital Sovereignty in Crisis

IP Address Assignment: Post the death of Jon Postel, assigned to non-profit cooperation ICANN(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Last public meeting in Accra, Ghana decided to reduce public participation.

Verisign Crisis: Verisign given by ICANN control of .com addresses who then started a redirect service, breaking the Web.

Internationalizing ICANN from the U.S. through the WSIS (World Summit for Information Society) - and W3C wanting a judicial framework for domain names.

WSIS Protest in Geneva: The Polimedia, a lab set-up to be a open lab for communications, shut down by riot police.

Socieites as Complex Systems

Complex systems escape the Second Law of Thermodynamics by harnessing increasing energy throughput

The two factors that determine phase transitions from stable state to another are energy throughput and connectivity between components

When either of these change, there is like a perfect storm for complex systems to change state - including societies

.

Ecological Crisis and Augmentation

The vision of Douglas Engelbart was to "amplify" intelligence not in order to increase productivity but to solve crises.

The ecological crisis (popularly known as climate change) is by far the largest crisis faced by human-kind as the logic of infinite expansion of capital cannot be maintained on a finite planet.

Ranging from Norweigans in Iceland to Mayan civilization, in general civializations collapse when ecological crisis forces reduction energy thoroughput. But never before global

However, connectivity - in particular as given by the Web - allows even small changes to propagate very quickly, and so may be last best hope of countering ecological collapse.

Lenin in Silicon Valley

Then perhaps we would discover that "organizational miracles" are always happening, and have always been happening.
Mario Tronti, Lenin in England

Lenin's Electricity and the Soviets to The Web and the Multitude.

The Global Ecological Crisis may derail Lyotard's vision, and so the Web may Global Noosphere that can help the survival of the species.

The defining situation of the multitude, a universal antagonist for Empire, is reflected in the universal information space of the Web.

The crisis of digital sovereignty approaches, there is an opening for antagonism and recomposition of the immaterial aristocracy - perhaps a move back towards absolute democracy.