There is something about the internet that isn't working anymore.
And maybe it hasn't worked for a long time, and maybe it never worked the way I thought
it did.
I grew up with the internet very much evolving with me socially, and it's only been more
recently that I feel like the ideas and control of the internet have drastically changed, and
there's this awareness of who you are online can be found out and impact your real life.
A lot of people see the internet as like the last free frontier, but that's totally not
true.
We're so dependent on corporate infrastructure at this point.
Infrastructure is something that's sort of designed to be ignored, and it's something
that people tend to only notice when it's not working.
And in some very literal physical ways and in other kind of more abstract ways, there
is something about the internet as it is right now that is not working.
This week I would really like to try and figure out what that thing is and maybe figure out
what to do about it, and I feel like this is a group of people who might be able to help
do that.
Addie Wagonect first contacted me a few months ago with a mission statement she was developing
for an all-female collective of artists, hackers, journalists, and theorists.
People who are specializing in digital art and culture.
Deep Lab came together for a week-long residency in Pittsburgh in early December of 2014.
And so that was really, I guess, the thesis that I was playing with was how do we bring
women together who are already doing really amazing things and kind of push them and give
them the faith of like putting those thoughts out there.
I've never been around that many women who program.
Anybody who knows how to code will look at a situation that involves code and they'll
see more dimension to the problem.
I definitely think technology and data are weapons, so it's like how do you control what's
invisible, right?
We're all about kind of using technology to subvert power in ways that people don't normally
think of it being subvertible.
These are all women that I think Addie identifies with on some core level and also felt a really
strong desire to bring together in a collaborative environment so that we could form a sort of
team that would be stronger together than we could be on our own.
It's just really fun hanging out with badass smart women.
The deep web is the unindexed part of the Internet.
There are certain protocols that let you have hidden service websites where you can only
access them through things like tour.
There's no way of knowing who owns the server you're accessing.
In return, the server doesn't know who you are either.
Things like Silk Road and a lot of awful black market websites are now on the deep web.
Google crawls the Internet with all these bots and sort of indexes all their sites,
all the sites on the Internet.
There are certain sites that are currently unindexed, and it's actually the majority
of the web, I think.
If you imagine an iceberg, it's the visible web that we can search for on Google or Bing
or whatever is sort of that tip, and then there's this giant mass underneath.
That's the deep web.
So when I was in middle school, I was obsessed with reading hacker manifestos, I guess.
And I was like, oh, I want to be a hacker, I want to be a hacker, but I never learned
how to code until I was almost graduated from high school.
I think part of that was because it was really inaccessible to me as a 13-year-old girl
to be able to start programming.
I think it's still a little intimidating in some ways, but I think now I have more confidence.
I worked as a journalist and I saw where the world is going and it's going towards technology.
So if I wanted to have more agency in the world, these are things I needed to learn.
And that doesn't mean that this is where I want the world to go, but I want to have
power to move within it.
And so if the river is all flowing one way, I'm not going to be able to hold back that
river, but learning some tech skills and being able to navigate my way, for me, means that
I'm not relying on all of Silicon Valley to tell me how to live my life.
And Facebook is the biggest internet service today in terms of the number of people who
use it, and we feel like we have the social responsibility to help spread the internet
and all the goodness that comes along with that.
And it's possible to connect a billion people today because there are a billion people in
the world who have the internet.
I'm starting to realize how dependent I am on all of these sort of corporations to send
unaltered information to other people and also to store and sort of use my data, which
is actually, I mean, and that's starting to scare me more and more as I'm starting to
realize, especially, like, how much of this data is accessible to everyone.
Surveillance grows out of hand because people are ignorant of the repercussions of giving
away such power to other people.
If people feel like they're being watched all the time, they don't feel free to say
what they want to say, do what they want to do and associate with the people they want
to associate with.
And so privacy has become kind of a fundamental right that we need to have in order to feel
and be free.
I'm screwed.
You know, everybody in my generation is screwed because we've been dumping, like, so many,
I guess, selfies and, like, Facebook statuses and all of this information, and it's culturally
normalized at this point.
So, you know, if I'm not on Facebook or I'm not on Instagram or whatever, I'm a Luddite
and I'm seen as, like, crazy, but if I post all, you know, if I do choose to participate
in sort of these corporate structures or whatever, then I'm losing sort of the ability to protect
my data and to protect my information, which also is awful and then people, you know, reprimand
me for that, too.
So it's a catch-22 situation where I have to either choose whether or not I want to be
culturally relevant and sort of adhere to social norms and be invited to Facebook events
or if I want to be safe and sort of protect my information.
And I'm sure that the corporations that run the social media sites, they can sort of recognize
my face or they can analyze the way I write or even the way I, you know, scroll down on
their website.
Automatically, by the fact that you're browsing the web, you're leaving a lot of information
about who you are, which websites you're visiting, what you like and what you don't like.
By just using the internet, you are opting in to giving out all of this information about
yourself.
The same methods of control and surveillance that the government uses that we're so afraid
of, they didn't come up with those ideas themselves.
Those are ideas that they cribbed from companies like Google.
Those are ideas that they cribbed from advertising companies that do nothing but gather our data
in order to push more products upon us.
We're dumping all of this information into giant server farms in the middle of nowhere
run by the government.
They're definitely spying on people who are maybe perceived to be threats.
But I think that we don't actually know what the criteria is for that.
From reports I've read, you can write an email in another language and that sets up a red
flag.
But in some other cases, it doesn't.
Honestly, I had been interested in general in the superstructures of surveillance because
I was disappointed with the way that people were both talking about and visualizing and
illustrating what they thought surveillance was or meant.
A lot of the emphasis was more on the state and on the agencies.
I started looking more at where do these interceptions take place or where is the data
that is being taken anyway?
When people say they took your email metadata, they took it, it's like, well, where was it?
It wasn't really on my phone.
It wasn't really in my browser.
It's not as though they snuck in and put a thumb drive.
It had to be somewhere.
That got me thinking a lot about trying to understand data center geography.
Doors opened and closed and they were in the analytical wing.
Ahead of them rose impressive banks of equipment.
The data receptors and the computing mechanisms that studied and restructured the incoming
material.
Let's see...
So it went from cutting communication, to intercepting communication, to intercepting
communication, to targeting communication, to intercept, to this huge, multi-targeted,
vast, sucking maw of data that is enabled by a global internet.
It's definitely digital warfare.
The presumed identity of anyone on the internet is, you know, a straight white male.
And anyone who shows themselves on the internet or otherwise not to conform to that identity is put through a lot of scrutiny and a lot of criticism.
I mean, really, for no reason.
When we try to protect ourselves, we offer up solutions that anyone can pick up to protect themselves.
It seems to be that once one person starts trolling you, that more and more people start getting on your back, sending you angry tweets and direct messages and emails.
And waking up to, like, this inbox of hate can really emotionally drain you to either want to escape or just quit.
I think that's another thing, like, with DeepLab that's been interesting to me is being able to bounce that off other women and just talk about, like, how you deal with abuse.
Who do you approach?
Like, how do you get a reaction or illicit response from someone that will help you?
Think about the information that you have and the information that you've worked with over the past week, past three days.
And then think about how you would feel if all of this information was published on a Tumblr tomorrow.
A journalist had gone to Iran to interview a bunch of activists about the work that they do there.
Man had interviewed a lot of people and talked to a lot of people and gotten more names of people that he should talk to.
And then he was stopped on the border going home, and suddenly every single person that he talked to was at risk.
Iranian protesters with, you know, mobile phones and cameras, they just, they started to become citizen journalists.
This is Neda, one of the countless civilians who got shot and killed during the protests in Iran.
The authorities never actually switched off the internet entirely because they wanted to track down the people who upload these kind of videos.
I have also spent some time creating a list of journalists that have been arrested in Ferguson while covering the protests there.
What's been a little bit scary is watching all of that unfold and realizing like there are people in America who are still negotiating for their survival
and the rules for their survival and realizing that it's not an exclusively non-Western problem, but it's happening in Western places.
And I think that's why a lot of people are protesting as well, is realizing that the value of a person's life is still negotiable.
How do we live in this in-between period of being wholehearted and open and yet fighting this fight against this tremendous injustice in the world?
Yeah, that's where I'm trying to be.
I don't think we're ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways,
because we're in a rational dilemma, an either-or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality,
and neither the either nor the or is a place where people can live.
Will you choose freedom without happiness or happiness without freedom?
The only answer one can make, I think, is no.
Thank you.
