2011 was an exciting year with the Occupy movement, Facebook’s settlement with FTC’s charges, Europe versus Facebook, decentralized social media alternatives developing, critical social media art, more awareness about tracking and a significant wave of criticism after Facebook’s new changes. Moreover, the Unlike Us research network was launched at the Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, where the first conference was held.

Now in 2012, we are looking forward to Unlike Us #2 in Amsterdam. Artists, designers, scholars, activists and programmers will gather to analyze the economic and cultural aspects of dominant social media platforms and discuss alternative, decentralized social media software.

Unlike Us #2 will be a three day event: showcases of alternatives in social media on 8 March 2012 and a two day conference on 9, 10 March, 2012. Visit the program for more details. In addition to a second and possibly a third conference this year, the research network will produce publications derived from (conference) contributions. If you would like to get involved, please join our mailinglist and contact us.

Unlike Us - Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives from network cultures on Vimeo.

To contrast the overly positive business-minded ‘predictions’ for ‘social media’ in 2012, here is my take on what we could expect: ten ideas in no specific order.

1: The decentralization of everything
Decentralized social media software will grow in popularity and attract more users. ‘Search’ will be next; YaCy is a fully decentralized search engine that we can already use. Finally, regarding video sharing alternatives, Plumi will enable you to create your own video sharing site. These projects could very well be a sign of things to come. The sky is the limit, not the corporately owned ‘cloud’.

2: More and more people leaving Facebook
German privacy NGO FoeBuD is planning ‘Social Swarm’: a coordinated campaign, much larger than QuitFacebookday, to switch to a ‘good’ alternative for ‘Faceboogle’. @Not_On_Facebook will keep retweeting every ‘I-quit-facebook-tweet’ and selling ‘not on facebook’ t-shirts. With more users leaving, more convincing ‘this-is-why-I-quit’ blogposts will be written (outstanding example given). In 2012 leaving Facebook will be cool!

3: The survival of privacy
The age of privacy is far from over. In fact, we are still making sense of the private, the public, the entities that force us to lose control over our data and the ones that enable us to reclaim it. Meanwhile, Europe versus Facebook is winning, EPIC is working hard to fix Facebook’s privacy fail, and @privacycamp’s ( #privchat) is taking place weekly on Twitter. It’s going to be a great year for privacy advocates.

4: Hardware for private, secure and anonymous communication
The Freedombox project is working on a device that enables turnkey privacy, security and anonymity. FreedomBox is a personal server running a free software operating system and free applications, designed to create and preserve personal privacy by providing a secure platform upon which federated social networks can be constructed. This year we might be able to buy freedom out of the box!

5: An increased focus on mobility
With 40% of visits to Facebook coming from the mobile app and activists in need of mobile privacy/anonymity, software developers are challenged with finding new mobile solutions for (their) decentralized social media software. Although there already are a lot of great mobile apps out there, such as Orbot (Tor for Android), Vibe for (Occupy) activists and Textsecure for encrypted texting, mobile social media alternatives are just starting to develop.

6: Dataveillance revisited
Whether it is Facebook spying for free, tracking our Web browsing behaviour, or the Federal Government spying on social media (‘Face.Book.Intelligence.’), reeking surveillance practices should be disclosed and properly investigated. Dataveillance is likely to enter the political agenda in 2012.

7: Facebook free zones
2012 will be the year of Facebook-free-zones. Enter the first one here.

8: Internet Censorship legislation and its countermeasures
The draconian SOPA and PROTECT-IP censorship leglislation bills will soon clash with Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay, Yahoo, and Twitter who are considering to go ‘nuclear’ and go black in protest against the bills. Why bother, when hackers are building a distributed satellite ground station network? In other words, a SOPA Free Satellite Internet.

9: Code Year
Thousands of Internet users have decided to learn to code with Codeacademy in 2012 as their New Year’s resolution. 2012 is the Code Year!

10: Social media fatigue
It seems that we are growing tired of social media. For some, particularly Facebook has become too crowded and too chaotic. That is why nobody goes to Facebook anymore. Let’s redefine the ‘social’ and thrive on better network cultures .

Happy New Year!

Also see:

Geert Lovink:Unlike Us Network from Unlike Us on Vimeo.

We have just finished two and a half glorious days at the University of Michigan. Soon we at HASTAC Central will write a formal thank you blog to all the incredible planners, organizers, and participants of our fifth HASTAC Conference, Digital Scholarly Communications, sponsored by the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kidder Residency in the Arts, and led by two of our HASTAC Steering Committee members, Danny Herwitz and Julie Thompson Klein. And many others. Incredible event.Incredible people.

Now some overview thinking, not just about the #hastac2011 but about what it all means at this point in HASTAC’s history:

In 2002, David Theo Goldberg and I left a formal meeting of humanists who were determined “to take a stand against technology” because we knew that kind of stand would be the death of humanism and the impoverishment of whatever is meant by “technology.” That luddite stance also didn’t jive with the multidisciplinary passions of the students we were seeing in our classrooms and the brilliant colleagues we knew in so many different fields who understood the revolutionary implications of new forms of interactive communication and interaction. In 2003, we gathered our first groups of scholars, at UCHRI, at NSF, and then at Stanford and Duke, and among our founding principles was the idea that we could take the practices and principles of open web developers, the collaborative methods through which the World Wide Web was created, and explore the ways that those principles and methods could transform higher education.

Some basic other parts of this include these aims: to rebalance intelligence for the interactive digital age with emphasis on collaboration, on interdisciplinary crosstalk (“collaboration by difference”); by remelding the two cultures of arts, humanities and social sciences on one side and technology and natural and computational sciences on the other; by erasing the distinction between theory and practice, thinking and making; to think about all research as public (in process as well as in final product) and shared and sharable; to use historical perspective and the archive to substitute either “techno-utopianism” or “techno-apocalypse” with “technopragmatism” and “technorealism” based on hands’ on practice not punditry (most punditry is based on what I call the “baseline of nostalgia” — an imagined past from which declension can be measured); to meld research with teaching, and teaching with perpetual learning; to re-examine pedagogy; to challenge contemporary modes of assessment; and to realize that professional seniority often does mean privilege but does not necessarily mean excellence.

That is why HASTAC is largely a network of networks, why membership simply requires signing into the website, and why we work very hard to instill the idea of productive creativity moving forward rather than critique of one another’s foibles as the best basis for the “critical thinking” that we all prize. From the beginning our three areas have been new media (building it, using it, modding it, thinking about it), critical thinking, and participatory learning. I personally do not believe you can have participator, connected interactive learning without a generous view of critical thinking, where one learns from mistakes — one does not strive to humiliate others for making them. To me, a practice based on flaming others for their failures is inherently conservative. It means that you set your own bar only at “higher than that last stupid guy’s bar” and that, to my mind, is way too low.

Here’s another part of that: calculated optimism. That is, if everything around you is a disaster, if the future only looks bleak, if there seems to be some devolution from some (mythical) past that was free of problems, easier, where everyone who went before you had a “pass,” made it in a simple way whereas you have to deal with catastrophe at every turn, then, well, why bother? The past is never as simple or easy as we think it was — either through imagination or memory. The baseline of nostalgia is more like quicksand … we get stuck there, unable to move. It is self-defeating and self-undermining. (NB: if you are a theorist and haven’t read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, you should!)

I am very happy to say that, in paper after paper at HASTAC2011, I saw productive, collaborative, process-oriented, creative, imaginative, interdisciplinary, engaged, and critically optimistic thinking that began with its own goals and ideals as the high bar and didn’t waste a lot of time yapping about what some other random strawperson had done badly. The critical thinking was turned towards one’s own project, how to make it better, rich, full, and, well, critical.

I was mulling these thoughts when I went to Josh Greenberg’s excellent talk “Data, Code, and Research at Scale.” I’m going to take some of the basic insights from that talk and apply them to general and personal observations from my experience at #HASTAC2011. In this endeavor I am aided by the public notetaking of HASTAC Scholar Karen Petruska, from Georgia State, whose notes for all the keynotes are on the HASTAC site and are just brilliant. I have used hers to supplement my own. You can find them here. Some HASTAC Principles Going Forward (inspired by Josh’s talk and, needless to say, my own Now You See It ideas about how we got here and where we need to be going):

(1) Learning/research as Macroscope: “Telescopes let you see far, microscopes let you see small, now we are talking about a macroscope — that let’s you see big and complex.” One of HASTAC’s founding ideas is that, if individual achievement in highly specialized research on even more specialized topics as credentialed by a hierarchy of institutions is key to the Industrial Age project of task-oriented, quantifiable, measurable productivity, then what is key to our age? Learning as Macroscope is a good metaphor for the post-1993 Internet-inspired Information Age project of collaborative, self-publishable, collectively editable thinking that aims at thinking big and complex and developing better tools for that job. Over and over at #hastac2011 I heard talks that were doing exactly that.

(2) Code is Never Finished. Josh asked, “what if scholarship worked like code?” In code, there is version control, you release an idea time stamped and you can go back and revise it later. Code is always evolving. The whole point of the HTML that Tim Berners-Lee evolved for writing the World Wide Web is that it was open and anyone could contribute, including those he had never met whose credentials were unknown or located in their skill, not in their certification or degrees or reputations. A system grants its terms of access and anyone who meets that standard can then contribute. But everything you contribute has attribution, and what you contribute becomes your reputation — and your gateway to continued participation or denial of access. Version control: that means, in part, that if an editor is doing something that impedes the improving of the code, he or she might not be invited to edit in the future. In a loose way, that is exactly how we have structured HASTAC membership. You cannot contribute to the network, to the www.hastac.org website, without signing in, but once you sign in you can contribute as you wish, as long as you realize your contribution has attribution. You are responsible to the participatory community’s flourishing by your contribution. Trust is a key component of open web development, attribution is part of that trust.

(3) Ability to tell stories with data. In every field I know right now, the ability to make narratives, to tell stories of the massive amounts of data we now have access to is absolutely key. Collaboration by difference should be sending social scientists, computational scientists, and natural scientists into massive collaboration with humanists and artists right now — and vice versa — because it is almost impossible to be brilliant at story telling and brilliant at data mining all on your own. Macroscopic research is almost always collaborative and cross disciplinary because, despite our highly successful lifelong training as academics in, for, and by Industrial Age timed, item-response testing, reaching beyond those restrictive modes is the only way to succeed in the world we live in now. The ability to tell stories with data requires understanding where, how, why, and when that data is generated, to what purpose, and by what means. Very #hastac2011.

(4) Forking. In writing code together, sometimes there are crucial and key disagreements. You come to a fork in the code and one participant wants to go one way, one another. Forking allows you to mark the place of disagreement and get past it. You agree to follow one fork. If it isn’t working, if it isn’t giving you the macroscopic view, you can then go back to the fork, and try to pursue the other path. What is great about this method in open web development, is returning to the fork, having pursued the other one, almost always means that you disagree with your original position, and now pursue the opposite form but in a way that has been transformed by having followed the other path for a time. We do not have a built-in practice — yet — of forking scholarly discourse, but, in the many papers I heard, I was seeing this open web practice incorporated as an intellectual, collaborative practice.

(5) Building Better Tools Together. As Josh said, we do not yet have forms of scholarly communication that allow us to express collaborative differences and the divergent, forked modes of working out disagreement and profiting from it. We need better modes. Having written The Future of Thinking on an open Comment Press platform and having worked to create a potential Master’s in Knowledge Network on that platform, I am all to aware of its clumsy, frustrating, difficult, and clunky affordances — yet it is also helpful because it does allow line by line annotation by others without changing the original tesk and attribution is part of contribution. But we need better tools to serve our goals.

For now, #hastac2011 was the best possible “tool” for all these goals. I leave for the airport now, returning back to Durham, energized, inspired, grateful, engaged, and, well, fired up and ready to go again. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION AND CONTRIBUTION.

And next time, Toronto: I can’t wait. Our first international conference. Hosted by Caitlin Fisher (York) and Maureen Engel (Alberta). It is going to be awesome. I can’t wait for our reunion, can’t wait to see you all there, and to meet others new to our HASTAC network. Sixteen months from now, in Toronto, April 25-28, 2013, HASTAC’s 10th Anniversary Celebration.

When Valerie Lamontagne was ‘researcher-in-residence’ at V2_Lab, we dedicated two editions of the eTextile Workspace to the topic of ‘Performativity‘. We had intense discussions, and these notes try to give an overview of what has been said and thought on February 10 and March 10, 2011. To better follow this discussion, we will define the relevant keywords first, as we understand them. In between the text, we put statements and questions for the reader. We don’t have the answers; we just want to share our thoughts with the world and tickle your brain.

WEARABLES

What is a ‘wearable’? We define it as ’something designed to fit the body and to stay there when you are not actively holding it’ (as opposed to ‘portables’). The BODY is an essential component, a structure to hold it up, and to make a wearable ‘work’.

Statement: Wearables are intended to DO something.

This provokes the very important question: does it work?? And if not, did it fail as a wearable? (“do” can be both input and output. Input is things like energy harvesting, CO2 sensing, solar panels. Output relates to sound, light, visual change). Remark on the side, to test the definition: Is a piece of cloth still considered wearable technology if you put hundreds of LED’s on it, without including the battery? How is this different from a garment studded with Swarovski crystals?

PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY

In this context, performance is defined as an action or process of accomplishing a task, which sorts an effect to a human perceiver. How does performance relate to interaction and participation? KEYWORD: experience. Important: for who is the experience?

PERFORMATIVE WEARABLES

Performative wearables are pieces of clothing that are amplifying the body, adding a question of scale or adding layers of mediation.

Statement: If it is not mainstream, it is called a wearable.

A wearable is performative if some sort of transition/transformation is taking place, during a live demonstration. The notion of ‘live demonstration’ leaves us with another issue: wearables often have multiple lives. Real time (live) demonstration is documented by video registration and professional photography, and end up being displayed in several media.  Some wearables are famous as icons; most people only get to know them through visual documentation. The audience never experiences the pieces up close. Many wearables look great on pictures, but do not live up to the expectations in real life.

Question: can a wearable piece still have performative quality if it is represented on video or paper?

People like to see ‘how it works’. If you demo a work live, it can add to the appreciation to show the raw technology behind: “where’s the battery”? It might as well shatter the dream, but it contributes to the notion of something being ‘real’, another important criterion in considering performativity in wearable technology.

Nevertheless, considering the popularity even from visual documentation only, wearables have an appealing factor. Will eventual performativity come across to an audience from documentation only? If documentation is your end game, the concept should be very strong or it should simply look very good. This is a totally different exercise compared to showing an interactive/ participatory/ performative artwork.

DEFINING STAGES

Our definition of performance implies a ‘stage’ and an ‘audience’. We were trying to categorize wearables by different stages. Each stage dictates or prescribes specific properties the wearable must have. Thus different stages could bring different wearables.

1. Participatory (live demo, experience)
2. Prom dress (special events)
3. Red carpet (show off by celebrities)
4. Catwalk (fashion show, not intended to wear everyday)
5. Live entertainment (on stage, from distance)
6. Demo (in progress, plugged in)
7. Gallery (plugged in, don’t touch)
8. Film (documentary, special effect. Can be fake)

This list is ordered by ‘reality check’. Stage 1 needs to be fully operational and retard-proof to be successful, where as stage 8 can be completely fake or virtual. Again, crucial is the notion “does it work?” or “is it real”?

Observation: we do not wear wearables everyday. Why? Are wearables for special events? Are they simply a statement piece?

PERFORMATIVE TECHNIQUES

The whole point of considering performativity and wearables as an interesting combination is because we are looking for the effect it generates.

Therefor we did a second categorization attempt, this time focused on techniques. How do different techniques make you perform differently, when implemented in a garment or costume?

• Illuminated (turns you into a 2D display screen)
• Shape shifting (makes you freeze)
• Gesture based (interaction becomes an act)
• Networked (adds a virtual stage)

ILLUMINATED: WHY WEAR LIGHTS?

Two reasons: Look at me! (Show off) and See me! (Functional: Don’t run me over).

On a conceptual level, illumination does not have much to offer. Truth be told, LED’s or similar are popular because it is a stable platform (nature of the technology). However: if you ask fashion designers, with little or no knowledge of the technical constraints, to include technology in their designs, they will mostly come up with “light” or “movement”. So there is some natural attraction to it.

Question: does wearing light influence the behavior of the wearer/performer?

‘Barreleyes’ (Dattah + Evelyn Lebis) positions the dancers in a humble position, they are only the carrier of the light source.

Question: can you ‘wear’ light as such?

For example the Chunky Moves performers do not wear LED’s, but the light is following the body with projection mapping. Thus becoming the clothing in itself. This is balancing on the borders, stretching the definition of wearable technology. It is somewhere in between second and third skin. Check also the youtube video on face projection mapping.

Statement: if something is acting as a kind of skin, it is considered a wearable.

Or in other words: is the definition of a ‘wearable’ related to the distance between technology and the body?

SHAPE SHIFTING: THE WEARABLE IS THE PERFORMER

In most cases it will make you freeze, because you don’t want to disturb the fragile technology or you don’t want to withdraw the attention from the garment. The wearer becomes a live mannequin doll. Gliding scale: Who is the performer? Wearable versus wearer…

Statement: People want to touch.

People expect garments to be able to withstand a certain level of touch. They are used to clothing, so they should be able to feel it, explore it, without being anxious to ruin it. Live up to the expectations!! If you need a sign “Don’t Touch Me”, your wearable has a bad interface design. There often is a mismatch between what an audience expects and what (fragile) technology can handle.

Interesting to consider: what does “touch me” in a demonstration setting mean?

Statement: Most wearables are ugly.

If they are meant to do something, then it is about the effect. The effect should be meaningful and subtle. If the wearable is badly designed, it distracts attention. Don’t design for the sake of using lights or any other technology, but do something meaningful with it.

CONCLUSION

Performance and wearables are highly related, yet very difficult to define or to categorize. The main thing we would like to conclude from this discussion is that artists and designers can use performativity as a starting point for creating meaningful concepts. Tracing back from the audience to the stage to the technique to the garment itself. What story would you like to get across? Who is your target group? In what context will it be presented and what do you need to make that happen?

We believe it can be a powerful tool to start thinking from the perspective of ‘performativity’ rather then to be technology driven.

PARTICIPANTS

• Anja Hertenberger
• Jacki Dodemontova
• Melissa Coleman
• Ricardo O’Nascimento
• Lyndsey Housden
• Simon de Bakker
• Piem Wirtz
• Varun Vachhar
• Kate Armstrong
• Leonie Urff
• Nicky Assmann
• Valerie Lamontagne

Therefore the originality of Poser is not to be found in this invasion, but rather in the artist’s intention to inhabit contemporary technological devices, to become part of them and to understand their specific natures. However, Dullart’s work also raises some important questions about the boundaries between public and private space in our current culture of participation. The Dutch artist dramatically violates the privacy of a group that, in the act of posing, has made explicit its strong mutual bonds of belonging. But a picture published on the web tends to lose its original values and with them the identity and bonds on which it was based. Dullaart takes his advantage from this short-circuit between private reminiscences and the public imaginary to make a foray into the everyday lives of other people, which have become a globalized showcase and - as such - the place of choice of every contemporary artist.” Vito Campanelli, Neural.

1) eCLOUD Project: Installed in the San Jose International Airport eCLOUD is a permanent art work by Aaron Koblin, Nik Hafermaas and Dan Goods. It is constructed from polycarbonate tiles that fade in between transparent and opaque states and are controlled by real time weather from NOAA from locations around the world. This data is used to create a simulation representing weather from any of the international locations by turning the individual tiles on and off in a certain pattern. The simulation is visualized within the cloud sculpture as well as on a dynamic display placed at eye level in the terminal.

eCLOUD from Dan Goods on Vimeo.

View the process, technology and additional details about the project here.

2) Living Light:

Image: The Living

Designed by Soo-in Yang and David Benjamin of The Living where one of their overall goals is to provide architecture and facades that inform, are functional, and begin to use data to become more efficient. This project is placed in a public park in Seoul and was created with a skin of panels whose shape mimics the shape and districting of the city. Every 15 minutes, the neighborhood panels light up in order of best air quality to worst based on 27 real-time sensors provided by the Korean Ministry of Environment. Neighborhoods are also illuminated if the air quality is better on that particular day than the same time last year and individuals can text message in to check pollution data and see their interaction show up on the map.

Read more about the process and see some interviews from the creators here.

3) Light Bridge

Image: Andy Ryan Susanne Seitinger and Pol Pla

LightBridge is a project recently installed on the Harvard bridge by Susanne Seitinger a researcher in the Program in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and Pol Pla a graduate student in the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Susanne’s recent Ph. D. was titled Liberated Pixels: Alternative Narratives for Lighting Future Cities and explored the aesthetic and interactive potentials for future lighting and display infrastructures.

The LightBridge installation is made up of a 10,000 pixel display activated by a variety of sensors including proximity sensors, cameras, buttons, mobile phones, and microphones. The work also allowed for community participation by having people visit a website and design their own interactive light effects in advance and then experience the designs during its opening days.

4) Waves

Image: Matt Roberts

Matt Roberts is a new media artist specializing in real-time video performance and is currently the founder of MPG a Mobile Performance Group. This specific piece called ‘Waves’ responds to the current size and timing of the changing conditions of the sea. Every half hour the current ocean buoy station data from the nearest location to the installation is downloaded and the data is transformed into a low frequency sound wave. As the size and timing of the waves in the ocean changes so does the frequency of the sound waves which are made to shake a bowl of water sitting on top of a speaker and then projected onto a nearby wall.

View a video of the project in action here.

Learn more about Matt’s work here.

5) Aristotle’s Office

Image: Hollington & Kyprianou

Created by Tom Keene and Kypros Kyprianou Aristotle’s Office is an installation where a group of 9 objects can can be connected by the user (in pairs) through a patch-bay. Once connected, the objects begin to talk to each other and negotiate who’s in charge. Each of the objects (which include a light, a fan, a filing cabinet, and an office plant) has the ability to detect changes in the physical status of the objects they are plugged into, and, using simple rules, react accordingly to what is happening around them. The project seeks to ask questions like; How will the office plant respond to the advances of the fan? How does a water-cooler behave with an office light? and overall seeks to understand how our relationship with our objects will evolve as they slowly begin to talk in this coming age of the Internet of Things.

View more work by Tom and Kypros here.

6) Immaterials

Image: Touch Project & BERG

The Immaterials project was created by Timo Arnall, Einar Sneve Martinussen, and Jack Schulze from BERG and is part of the larger research initiative Touch that investigates and develops applications that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through new technology. The team has so far put their focus on engaging RFID, NFC, and WiFi and although they might not classify themselves as artists these projects suggest otherwise and point ahead to interesting visualizations and engagments with our digital environments.

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

If you would like to follow in their footsteps you can see how they made their ‘light painting’ devices over at the Yourban blog.

7) Listening Post

Image: Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen

Created by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin Listening Post is an installation that pulls text fragments in real time from thousands of chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums online. The text is then displayed across a suspended grid of screens and sung or spoken by a voice synthesizer. The art is “a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.”

View more of Ben’s work here.

8) Sensity

Image: Stanza

The British artist Stanza uses environmental sensors measuring, light, noise, sound, humidity, and temperature that are scattered all over the museum and in the surrounding city to make visualisations and sonifications in the gallery and demonstrate the current ‘emotional’ state of the city. With Sensity ‘Instead of adopting narrative threads from other media, I am interested in the currency that exists already in the city space. These works are focused on the wider picture of city experiences which are being played out in real time.

View more of his work here.

9) Green Cloud

Image: HeHe and Antti Ahonen

HeHe is a Paris based art and design studio by Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen and their project ”Nuage Vert” or ‘Green Cloud’ is using a city-scale light installation to alter perceptions on pollution and increase participation among the cities local population.

One of their projections takes place near Ruoholahti in central Helsinki. The Green Cloud uses the chimney emissions of the Salmisaari power plant which can be seen for miles as a canvas. A high power laser beam illuminates the plume at night with the size of the projection being determined based on the current energy usage of the local community.

A video of the project can be seen here.

See more of their work here.

10) Tele-Present Water

Image: David Bowen

David Bowen’s Tele-Present Water installation draws information from the movement and intensity of the water in real-time from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data buoy station 46075 in the Shumagin Islands, Alaska. It then displays this information on the mechanical grid structure in the gallery through the use of an Arduino mega running servo firmata and using an 11 x 24 volt dc motor with drivers.

With most demonstrations and street protests it’s hard to know exactly who hurled the first bottle. Amidst a sea of people engaged in a collaborative state of mind, the sense of anonymity generated can be very empowering. In the ever-congealing, international abyss of the iPhone (the networks, the users and the apparatus itself) anonymity in this perceived collective is curbed by a registered phone number and GPS coordinate tracking. Social networking-enthused developers have been finding more and more ways to implement existing social network platforms to enhance the usage and appeal of their applications.

The iPhone applications which engage in content and experience sharing, which no doubt offer a number of benefits, require new or pre-existing usernames, email addresses or often involve third-party requests for sharing through pre-registered accounts on social network platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. One of the key features of the application TinyRiot, which provides a cathartic soundtrack while its users shake out ‘tiny’ bouts of frustration, is that it does not require users to sign in or register to share.

As users record, title and approve videos, they are auto-uploaded to a shared YouTube account which acts as a sub-platform where users can share and watch each other’s videos in real time. In turn, videos appear embedded on the application’s homepage which also shows the GPS coordinates via a modified GoogleMap API, with lightning bolt icons showing where TinyRiots have occurred around the world.

Aside from location, what makes each video unique is how the iPhone’s audio and visual functions are exploited. With shaking as the guiding praxis, the application’s major functions benefit from two facets of the iPhone’s design — namely the relative positions of the camera and flash as well as the microphone and speaker. With the speaker only a few centimetres away, a howling, reverberating feedback is triggered as the internal microphone begins recording audio.

At the same time, as users shake their iPhones while taking video footage, the pulse of the camera flash is synced and since the lens is a few millimetres to the side, nanoseconds of blinding flashes and visual feedback appear on the user’s screen-cum-viewfinder. Aesthetically, what would be a normal video takes on a disorienting effect that is equal parts entertaining and blinding. The accompanying soundtrack draws on a number of pre-loaded samples and as users shake, a randomized assortment of heavy metal sounds emit.

A simplified, 8-beat format of guitar and drums was chosen for simplicity as the developers saw a similarity in the way teenagers once picked up their instruments and regardless of skill, started playing loud. TinyRiot is to apps what teenagers were to rock - just playing loud and shaking it all out. In doing so, the gesture-based method of sampling and remixing takes another step towards becoming its own platform. Seeing potential in the format, TinyRiot’s main developers Sembo Kensuke of media-art unit Exonemo and Taeji Sawai, who has worked extensively on music-enabling technologies with The Boredoms, teamed up with Atari Teenage Riot frontman Alec Empire and recently released Atari Tiny Riot as an application.

Users are able to play with loaded samples of the artists’ beats and rhythmic arrangements. Banner lyrics such as “Anonymous Teenage Riot” blare through the cacophony and align with a spirit the developers’ and the band champion. In terms of participation it’s in the tradition of mass movements and as a collaboration, the anonymous user videos are uploaded on the TinyRiot page where fans watching each others’ ‘riots’ has an infectious property. With uploading remaining anonymous, the application creates an international, anonymous collective.

As social networking itself no longer wrestles, but rather develops and intensifies its own imperative of increasingly constant and closer connectivity, the parameters of sharing and privacy have manifested themselves in the form of contentious issues for users. Users of TinyRiot find themselves no longer, or less, restrained by the (inadvertently) associated pressures or assumed embarrassment from the “friend” connections maintained on the social networks in which they participate. TinyRiot users can sidestep electing usernames or avatars, however, once a video is uploaded to the mutual YouTube account, the application’s developers have included a prompt for inclined users to further share their videos on existing social platforms.

The model of sharing anonymously or recording video publicly has re-emerged in recent years as an issue entwined with both privacy and ethics. Both have been highlighted in the media-wide coverage of Wikileaks and its submission policy and procedures, as well as in recent legislation in some states of the United States where it has become illegal to record video of law enforcement. Indeed, these issues will remain a nuisance as social networking developers move forward on an increasingly user-generated content and information-dominated superhighway.” — Vicente Gutierrez, Neural.

“For us, art is not an end in itself … but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism
of the times we live in.” Hugo Ball.

The challenge in trying to review a book like Mark Amerika’s Remixthebook, is the feeling you can only do justice to the text by doing the same with your review. The apparent simplicity coupled with the multifarious outcomes are intoxicating. You could be mistaken for believing that every possible remix would produce fresh and exciting outcomes. The key of course, is to have good source material in the first place. Also, to have developed a keen eye for what blends and meshes together and what doesn’t. Even the most disparate work requires judgment and prior awareness. Remixthebook asks us to consider the idea of remixology as part of the work of modern artists. The tone and style of the book is a blend of ideas, voices and thoughts with a myriad of concepts, which attempts be the very embodiment of the ideas it espouses.

Amerika explores various precedents for the remixological concept and draws on some known practitioners from the past: amongst them, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. He explores existing ideas and welds them into his own armoury. Their ideas considered as part of his own creative practice, brought back to the now with new life, in our contemporary networked culture.

“Food Remix” is interdisciplinary performance artist Michelle Ellsworth’s remix of Mark Amerika’s remixthebook. Video - http://vimeo.com/27221493

Other than just being a systematic breakdown of the different types of remixing and their potential outputs (or artifacts, as they might be better known in an art critical framework?) Amerika considers the pathways and theoretical underpinnings of remix culture. Having taken this beyond his own practice of the written word and web-based projects, he considers his recent and ongoing VJ work. Blending and collage-making with images during live music performances suggests some of the instinctive, instantaneous ideas that come out of a lifetime’s collecting, collating and absorbing of diverse imagery, words and cultural concepts. It’s within this process that he believes more novel outcomes can arise, against the constant flux of media creation and dissemination. It is the ‘becoming’ of the media artist that is revealed in the live remixing performance.

Rick Silva and Woulg remix Mark Amerika’s remixthebook. http://vimeo.com/27209266

Reflecting on this process of cultural assimilation Mark Amerika, situates remixology within a wider creative output and theoretical framework. This involves a cross hybrid of everyday, mainstream references with high art and ‘high’ theory, all written in his at once complex and convoluted, yet easily read and enjoyable writing style. But like remixology, what looks simple is the result of deep reading and heavy conceptual thinking. This isn’t to say that you won’t have trouble decoding the writing and getting to the heart of his thinking, but it helps if you spend time with the text and allow the rhythms and structures to become second nature to you. Close reading allows the text to fall into place. For example, consider the following extract from the section eros intensification:

Here is where we enter the realm of
what I have been calling intersubjective jamming
which is different than the idea of a Networked Author
or Collaborative Groupthink Mentality that preys
on the lifestyles of the Source Material Rich
and seemingly forever Almost Famous.

It is worth remembering that Mark Amerika is a creative writer first and foremost. He uses theory as a palette from which to draw out ideas and situations for further reflection and to help give some context to the point he is trying to make. The text of remixthebook is an example of his creative practice in action, as much as it is a personal reflection on his attempts to develop a thought process for it. Theory becomes entwined in critical reflection and creative output. You don’t necessarily come to remixthebook for philosophical answers and hard academic points of view, instead you ride the maelstrom of thoughts and conceptualizing to gain a better handle on a way of considering artistic practice.

Will Luers remixes Mark Amerika’s remixthebook http://vimeo.com/27186118

The website of the book (probably a ubiquitous extra for any media art-related publication these days) follows a natural path of inclusion and invites artists to take sections of the book and remix them according to their own aesthetic and remixological preferences. While some of the work brings in extra visuals and places itself in a flowing context of media streams, allowing different work to become part of the project, Rick Silva’s The Isarithm sources Amerika’s Sentences on Remixology 1.0 and explodes them out of the screen and into a layered and playful vortex of shapes and lines.

Will Leurs uses some captured footage taken directly off the tv screen for A Pixel and Glitch Hotel Room and combines it with some source material supplied by Amerika from several ‘lectures’ he has supplied. These lectures appear within several other contributors work as well. The point of some of these remixes and the varied forms they take (the collection includes some purely audio work) is that, as well as being interesting works themselves, they are exemplars and guides to even further potentials of the remixological principle.

Mark Amerika’s Remixthebook at times may leave you looking beyond it to the appendix or for any footnotes that would fill out spaces or help make conceptual leaps for you. That isn’t the point of the book. The idea is to take the book as a starting point and expand on your own creative process.  Possibly the best approach is to literally cut-up the book and try some experimentation of your own, Brion Gysin style. Flex the covers back and pull out the pages. Through destruction and reconfiguration, the book might be bent to your will and become something that you can use. Perhaps the sight of a ripped and destroyed book would strike horror into some authors. I can’t help thinking that Mark Amerika would take great joy in the image and say that he’d planned it all along.

Other Info Related to Remixthebook & Remixing Culture:

The remixthebook.com website
http://www.remixthebook.com

The remixthebook Blog
http://www.remixthebook.com/theblog

Remixology by OpenMedia.ca - a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization working to advance and support an open and innovative communications system in Canada.
http://openmedia.ca/remixology>

Society of the Spectale (A Digital Remix)
By Mark Amerika On August 16, 2011.
http://www.remixthebook.com/society-of-the-spectale-a-digital-remix

REMIXTAPE 2.0 //
Remixology is a music blog based in Paris (France) devoted to remixes friendly music.
http://remixology.tumblr.com/

REFF- Remix the world! Reinvent reality! exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery between 25 February and 26 March 2011. http://www.furtherfield.org/exhibitions/reff-remix-world-reinvent-reality

Visitorsstudio - an online place for real-time, multi-user mixing, remixing, collaborative creation, many to many dialogue and networked performance and play.
http://www.visitorsstudio.org/x.html

Brion Gysin. Essays & Stories, Interviews, Excerpts & Publications
http://briongysin.com

“Everyone now wants to know how to remove themselves from social networks. It has become absolutely clear that our relationships to others are mere points in the aggregation of marketing data. Political campaigns, the sale of commodities, the promotion of entertainment – this is the outcome of our expression of likes and affinities.” These are the opening words for the Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto written by Sean Dockray and first published in the iDC mailing list May 28, 2010. Dockray urges Facebook users to reclaim their lives and leave social networks by committing a digital suicide attack. Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto is exemplary of the emergence of slow media, which in the context of this paper is analysed as a form of politicised asceticism against the surrounding and all-consuming network culture permeated by different forms of capitalism.

This article approaches the problem of leaving Facebook focusing especially on two art projects Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine, both established in 2009 and both offering digital suicide from Facebook as an outcome.[1] These artworks are understood not as representational identities, but rather as nonhuman actors with both incorporeal and material capabilities to affect and be affected, create sensations and be sensed, to set into different kinds of relations with other forces and their capabilities (Parikka, “Ethologies” 116). This approach is used to trace a complex chain of political, economical and even legal questions digital suicide gives birth to. Concurrently, the research stance is media critical by nature. This, however, does not mean judging or valuating the research material from the basis of good and evil. On the contrary, critical media studies imply here strategies of thinking with the material and penetrating the predominant discourses of social media hype in order to understand the deep structures of our contemporary digital culture.

Our life from social relations, economy to interests is extensively tied into different kinds of social networks. The ubiquitous web produces what Félix Guattari calls “machinic subjectivities” (“Machinic” 158): it provides a sensation of “belonging to something,” of “being somewhere” along with the “sensation of forgetting oneself.” It is in these networks where we individuate ourselves according to pre-established categories such as age, profession or sex, for instance. At the same time these networks work on a level prior to any readymade categories and identities giving us sensations, affects and relations that are not yet individuated (cf. Lazzarato “Machine”). In the following, I will argue how Facebook’s production of machinic subjectivities is tied to the political economy of owning and using the data provided by the users of the service. This question is approached via techniques of disconnection.

Ulises A. Meijas has aptly noted that in academic studies of social media the question of democracy and civic participation often neglects the fact that most of the popular social media sites are privately owned businesses, which aim to maximise profit (604). The ubiquitous web is not neutral but brings along ideologies, desires and behaviour models. It is this over-commercial culture against which digital suicide as an anomaly seems to attack. Quite paradoxically it tries not to end “life” but separate it from “economics” and “politics” through suicide.

The theoretical basis for analysing digital suicide is found in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics developed in his lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76. While there have been various interpretations of biopolitics, I will follow Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s suggestion to use the concept in a very specific manner: as biopolitics of the network culture. Within the limits of this article two different emphases follow this positioning. Firstly, Facebook is considered as a technological environment. This means the life of the users is regulated and moulded via different kinds of practices designed inside the environment. Secondly, an interest is given to the politics of data mining and turning people into informatics.

Framing Digital Suicide

While Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Sucidemachine along with the Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto have gained a lot of attention in the media, this is not the first time avant-garde art has adopted suicide to reveal the underlying mechanisms of current society. Following the media archaeological traces of suicide machines we can point out a few illustrative examples. The idea of a suicide machine was already present in the (Unspeakable) Ultimate Machine built by Claude Shannon in the 1950’s. The Ultimate Machine was a simple wooden box with a switch on the side. When the switch was turned on, the lid of the box opened and a mechanical hand reached from the box to turn off the switch. Subsequently the hand retracted back inside the box leaving the box in its initial state. As one would expect from the “father of the information theory” The Ultimate Machine worked with Boolean logic having only two possible values “on” and “off.”

A more recent example is the case of the Luther Blissett Project, one of the most famous cases of committing a virtual suicide. In 1994, Luther Blissett became a multiple-use name (nom de plume) for a number of artists and activists around Europe. It was an open network but its core was in Bologna where a group of people had based the project. Numerous pranks were conducted under the name of Luther Blissett some trying to show the problems prevailing in the cultural ambience and others just for the sake of exploiting the gullibility of the press and people.[2] The project was planned to have a five year cycle and in 1999 it had reached the end. It was, however, not taken down quietly. In a letter dated September 6, 1999 the Luther Blissett Project announced that they would commit a seppuku, a formal Japanese ritual suicide, which often was performed in front of spectators. Did the people behind Luther Bissett kill themselves? Most certainly not, but they made a ritual performance out of the abandonment of their multi-use name identity. The pseudonym Luther Blissett was not to be used by the project anymore. The seppuku of Luther Blissett was in essence a virtual suicide. But as the Project members state, it was not an act of relinquishment or nihilism, instead they were choosing life. It was said to be a birth of something new (Luther Blissett Project).

One of the first actual digital suicide attempts was by Cory Arcangel, when in December 2005 he decided to delete his Friendster account as a part of the launch of the Dec/Jan issue of The Believer magazine. He called it a “Friendster Suicide.” Arcangel explained his urge for digital suicide with both personal reasons saying that he “just can’t take it [Friendster] anymore” and performative reasons inviting people to watch him do it online (Arcangel). Almost simultaneously a more political digital suicide emerged. It was targeted against social networks making profit with their users and shared content and exploiting real friend networks for commercial means. For example, MyOwnspace.fr published an Anti-MySpace Banner Wizard for users of MySpace. It declared “Good Karma: suicide yourself… from MySpace.” The idea was that the users would leave a site like MySpace, which aimed to make profit from the users, and join profit-free sites such as MyOwnspace (cf. Borelli).

These previous cases of suicide technology contribute directly or indirectly to the emergence of Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine in 2009. [3] It is remarkable how simultaneously both of these art works appeared. Seppukoo.com by Les Liens Invisibles was presented in November during the Turin Share festival and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine by moddr_ in December in Rotterdam’s Worm exhibition (Borelli). In fact, the similarities between these art works extend from their release dates to the ideology and background of both of the groups or collectives.

By way of illustration let us start with the Les Liens Invisibles, which is an Italy-based artist duo comprised of Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini whose work is openly political and controversial. Paraphrasing their own description Les Liens Invisibles has been infiltrating the global communication networks in order to join and expand the invisible connections between art and real life since 2007 (Les Liens Invisibles). Their main target has been both the hype of social media and the blind trust in online services. Moddr_ on the other hand was run by a group of alumni from the Media Design MA course, based at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. The idea was to form a place for young artists and hackers where they could create projects without restrictive and time consuming bureaucracy. Their practices involve modification (modding) and re-creation of already existing technology. They state that their mission is to display a critical perspective on contemporary media that is labeled “new” through artistic practices (Moddr_).

The ambition to expose and reveal fallacies and problems in digital culture via art refers to an openly ideological stance. The work of these two groups or collectives criticises, at least indirectly, the relations of money and power behind social media services but also the naivety of their users. However, more than the ideology behind these works I am interested in the methods and tactics moddr_ and Les Liens Invisibles are using: they manipulate and exploit the technology of the objects they are criticising. Both Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine rely on the vulnerability of Facebook and exploit its own practices and process of logging in and deactivating the account.

Since opening, both of these art projects have gained interest in media. [4] While the publicity and popularity of digital suicide grew it was no surprise that Facebook threatened both of these art projects with legal action. [5] According to letters from the Facebook representatives, published on Seppukoo.com (Seppukoo, “Re:”) and Suicidemachine.org (Suicidemachine, “Re:”), these art works solicit Facebook user login information, access Facebook accounts that belong to others, scrape content from Facebook and infringe Facebook’s intellectual property rights. These actions were demanded to be stopped immediately. In addition, Facebook tried and at least partially managed to block and remove Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine from their site. [6]

In a sense these cases demonstrate how avant-garde art uses different kinds of tactics to create breaks and blackouts in our daily routines in order for something new to appear. Often these tactics are reduced merely to vandalism, sabotage or illegal actions. Action such as this, according to Jussi Parikka, is a common take on software art (“Ethologies” 116): it “is often not even recognized as ‘art’ but is defined more by the difficulty of pinning it down as social and cultural practices.” Ideologically this is of course also the purpose of Facebook’s Cease and Desist letters. They do not acknowledge Seppukoo.com nor Web 2.0 Suicidemachine as artworks. Quite the contrary they are judged as harmful and illegal objects violating the rights of Facebook and causing a threat to privacy for Facebook users.

Now what we are dealing with here is exemplary of “bad objects” (Parikka and Sampson 11) or “evil media” (Fuller and Goffey 141). However, the idea is not to consider Seppukoo.com or Web 2.0 Sucidemachine from an outside vantage point and expose them to valuations of “good” or “bad” but to go beyond the claims of good and evil. It would likewise be biased to claim that these objects are harmful (the Facebook view) or that they are emancipatory (the activist view). Instead I propose following Parikka and Sampson (11) that we should look at the potentials of these objects. By way of illustration, this position means asking what kind of connections they make and how they express and are expressed in network culture. These objects are not external to Facebook but instead are built and constructed with and partly within the site. The mere existence and publicity of Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine point out that there is a need and interest for digital suicide. Simultaneously they reveal the role that digital networks play in human lives these days and how our life is interconnected with these networks to an extent that we can conceptualise our interactions with machines and technology with notions such as ‘life’,’ death’ and ‘suicide’.

Biopolitics & Business Models

Digital suicide points to a larger theoretical field of life, death and technology and their entanglements; what is living (and dying) in information networks. Following Galloway and Thacker (70) we need to understand how networks structure our views of the world. For Galloway and Thacker the basis for theory of the networks is to understand that networks are not neutral or democratised per se but instead their forms of organisation are in many ways politicised. Hence we need to analyse singularities peculiar to networks such as modes of organisation, power relations and different affects, relations and forces between human and non-human actors according to which their world is composed (Parikka “Ethologies” 116; Galloway and Thacker 70). To do this Galloway and Thacker suggest that we need to take the concept of biopolitics, discussed by Michel Foucault in his late writings and lectures, and use it in a very particular context of network culture.

Concentrating on the birth of biopolitics Foucault, describes how the biological came under state control. In particular he outlines how the focus of the state shifts from the threat of death towards a more subtle governing over life that is manifest, for example, in birth control and population management. Ever since biopolitics has been used in various contexts from discussing medicine to concentration camps and film philosophy. In the case of digital suicide we can extract two important and interconnected fields of what Foucault’s biopolitics approaches: environment and informatics.

Paraphrasing Galloway & Thacker (71), biopolitics is at least partly created by (new) technologies through which populations are governed and organised. Adopting their ideas, one can argue that one of these technologies is Facebook’s virtual environment. Foucault defines the role of an environment as one of biopolitics’ starting points. While Foucault’s brief example considers epidemics linked to swamps he emphasises that we need to extend the concept of an environment also towards the built and urban environment. Hence, for the biopolitics of digital suicide the starting point is the digital environment in which it appears.

Facebook is an environment, which according to the capitalist system, provides us subjectivities and assigns to various processes of identification via categories of identity, gender, nationality etc. (Lazzarato “Machine”). Humans inside this environment are defined as beings of “in-between, plugged into and connected to a variety of possible sources and forces” (Braidotti 41). The environment offers different possibilities for the users to choose from (cf. Lazzarato, “From Capital-Labour” 192). On a very basic level people share data of themselves including personal information such as sex, age, political and religious views. Many have their work and study records visible for others to see. On a second level users share photos, notes and interact with each other by writing wall posts or sharing links. On a third level users use applications which are not made by Facebook but which work in the environment and often use the private data of the users. These include, for instance, games and quizzes but also statistical information about who is connected to who or age demographics of users Facebook connections.

The user agency in social media in general and Facebook in particular is built around user created content, social participation and information.[7] José van Dijck has analysed how these boundaries are redrawn from the perspective of commercial firms whose interest lies less in the actual content and more in the “vertical integration of search engine with content, social networking and advertising” (42).  In his critique of the hype of participatory culture, users are seen as content providers and data providers. The positive potential of social media lies in content production, which enable, for example, the users to create cultural products without costs and sharing them for free, but in contrast the users have no power over their data distribution (Dijck 47, 51, 53).

Now as it is known privacy poses a problem for social networks. When one signs up to Facebook, one renounces one’s right to private information. According to Facebook the service is all about sharing information with others. These others, however, range from your friends and contacts to third parties affiliated with, not the user, but the company. In the Privacy Policy Facebook explains how it tracks the data and actions of its users. Everything is monitored from Facebook’s own functions to platforms created by third parties. One significant actor with and to whom information is shared are advertisers. Not only does Facebook provide information to advertisers but also mines it for them following users’ consumption habits. In the name of “useful social experience” Facebook also provides information for certain third parties when the user visit their sites (Facebook “Privacy”).

It is the shared data that becomes a key resource for biopolitics and simultaneously informatics rise as its core methodology of organising and regulating population. Forecasts, statistical estimates and overall measures, which Foucault (246) describes as mechanisms of biopolitics, are now used by private enterprises for commercial purposes. Thus, population ceases to mark a group of people defined by geographical location. Instead population is understood as a node or a cluster of people organised through individualisation and collectivisation (Galloway and Thacker 72). These notions imply that, while Facebook makes the user experience of the service as personal as possible, it is in fact, not interested in the single individual, but a mass comprised of individuals with similar interests. This is indeed a fine example of biopolitics and also in line with Web 2.0 business models analysed by Kleiner and Wyrick (72).  Web 2.0 services are interested in humans as a mass of individuals which comprise a chunk of data. Or as Lyotard puts it, “all phrase universes and all their linkages are or can be subordinated to the sole finality of capital” (171). An evident example of this kind of manipulation and control is targeted ads which appear on a user’s Facebook pages. According to Facebook (Facebook “Advertising”) these ads are based on a user attribute, such as age, gender, location, or interest. Individuals and their information are turned into demographics and audiences, or more crudely, masses whose desires and consumptions are manipulated and controlled.

Here we can see a neoliberal shift from the state control written by Foucault towards control executed by privately owned business ventures and IT corporations such as Facebook. Facebook represents a business model in which user-created value is captured and exploited by a private enterprise (Cf. Kleiner and Wyrick 2007, 3). In this business model social life becomes commodified and hence the social becomes a part of the economy instead of the economy being a part of the social (Mejias 607). Internet security company F-Secure sums the premises quite simply in their first tip for safer facebooking: “Facebook is a business. It exists to take your online activity and turn it into revenue. Facebook will always be free. But there is a cost. You’re paying by being exposed to advertising and allowing limited disclosure of your online activity.” (F-Secure.) Concisely, when you bring your life, that is for example social connections, political opinions, habits and likes, in Facebook’s environment, you simultaneously allow your life to become a subject of both potential and actual transactions.

Disconnection & Premediation

Facebook ’s biopolitical business model evolves with its users. It is based on moulding the environment according to the needs of informatics. As such it is a media ecology that constantly produces itself in order to create new forms of making money and keeping the users, their main product, on their website.  Kleiner and Wyrick have, quite polemically, argued that “Web 2.0 is not to be thought of as a second-generation of either the technical or social development of the internet, but rather as the second wave of capitalist enlosure of the Information Commons” (5). Following the trend of ubiquitous or pervasive computing everything is a potential node, everything from social relations to hobbies and interests are taken inside the network and transformed into commodities. As described by Parikka (“Digital”) and Sampson (Sampson) capital is a machine of capture trying to absorb everything inside its system, often successfully.

Figure 1. Facebook

The capitalist system of Facebook does not only satisfy the current demands of the users but also anticipates future demands and reacts to them beforehand, making them happen (cf. Lazzarato, “From Capital-Labour” 193). This is parallel to biopolitical regulation mechanisms, which aim to control masses and predict, modify and compensate for the effects of events affecting them (Foucault 249). Disconnection poses an ultimate challenge for both biopolitics and the capitalist system since it means dropping out from the system of control. The business model of Facebook is based on the communities who share and create content, and thus one of its key success factors is keeping the users inside its system. It must be ready to change its practices constantly according to the exigencies of a situation. Instead of building a total system, Facebook is in a constant state of being ‘under construction’.

Richard Grusin has recently described mediated actions of anticipating future possibilities and reacting to them in advance with the concept of premediation. [8] For Grusin, premediation works in two senses. Firstly, it produces specific future scenarios.  Secondly, it creates continuity with the present and the future to maintain their connection and to exclude disruptions in the flow of daily lives (Grusin 48.) One example would be excluding disconnection. Producing potential scenarios of the future at an accelerating speed, time compresses the future into a condensed present in which “the future is remediated at the very moment that it emerges into present” (Grusin 48; Mackenzie 1). Grusin argues that through ubiquity of interconnected media technologies everything becomes premediated, from social relations to non-human objects and their interactions.

Now disconnecting Facebook gives us a few different examples of how premediation works as a design principle. For the user who wants to leave Facebook, three different choices are offered. The first one is simple and used daily by most of the basic users. That is logging out. This operation is enabled simply by clicking the Account menu bar on the upper right corner of the Facebook page and simply selecting logout. This throws the user out from the personal profile Facebook page back to the front page where the user is able to sign in again. Quitting using the logout option on Facebook is not permanent. It is meant for users who do not want to leave their personal profile page open for other users. This may be the case if someone is using public computers for example. If the user chooses not to logout but only closes the browser the personal profile page opens directly without the necessity to log in the next time the user accesses their Facebook page with that browser. However, the logout feature does not actually equal quitting. The personal profile remains on Facebook and no one actually knows you have left. Logging out is just a method for a temporary break from the service.

A more drastic way to disconnect is to deactivate one’s account. A Facebook user needs to click on the account menu, located in the right upper corner of the Facebook frame. From there the user selects Deactivate Account and clicks deactivate. According to the Facebook Help Center, “if you deactivate your account, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service” (Facebook “Help”). What happens is that your personal profile page disappears. Your friends do not find you using the search function and Facebook promises not to use the information of deactivated accounts. However, the user’s personal profile does not disappear completely. Facebook saves the user’s profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if the user wants to reactivate the account at some point, it will look just the way it did when it was deactivated (Facebook “Privacy: Deactivating”). All the friend connections are saved and so is the content of the personal profile.

These two modes of quitting are easily accessed by the user. Both are found from the account settings menu and neither appears hidden. There is however a third way to quit Facebook. The user is able to delete the Facebook account permanently. This means that all the content of the user’s personal profile is removed permanently including pictures, friends, wall posts and messages. This process is irreversible; there is no option for recovering the permanently deleted Facebook page. Deleting one’s account permanently is not easy. For example, the user cannot find a “delete account” option from the account settings or any other menu. It is accessed through the Facebook Help Center. From there the user is able to find a link which directs them to a form by which the user requests a permanent deletion of his/her Facebook profile. Also, the profile is not deleted instantly but a reconsideration period is given for the user. The permanent deletion request may be cancelled anytime during this period by logging in to the user’s Facebook profile.

The described modes of quitting Facebook show how premediation is not neutral but in fact tied into the subtle mechanisms of control. While there may be various ways of quitting Facebook, only some of these possibilities are “encouraged by the protocols and reward systems built inside the game” (Grusin 46). Control is not about creating an object that can be controlled but for example anticipating the behaviour of the users and reacting to that beforehand (Savat 57). Indeed while premediation condenses time and gives different future directions it does not offer total freedom for the user nor total control of the user’s choices but works somewhere in the middle providing paths and links to follow, preferring some and pushing others back.

Maybe the most evident example that shows the premediation in actions happens when one tries to deactivate one’s Facebook account. After choosing to deactivate the account, the user is guided to a page where he/she has to confirm the deactivation. This of course is nothing new. Quite simply it is just a way to prevent deactivations by accident. However, the way the page is implemented is something remarkable. Not only the present situation of choosing to confirm the disconnection is mediated but also the future is premediated by showing a set of pictures of friends “who will miss you” after deactivating the account. Here premediation relies heavily on the affects created by profile pictures and names of the user’s Facebook friends. Notably these images are not limited to profile pictures but also posted pictures where the user appears tagged with a friend or a sibling may be shown.

One cannot stress enough the importance of the posted image next to the profile pictures among friends who are said to miss one after disconnection since it leads towards the logics of how Facebook works and also what many of the users who are afraid of losing their privacy dread: it is the content the users themselves create that is used for different purposes which escape their original intentions. Entering to the time of premediation means also entering to a time of databases and data mining, where any piece of data may be accessed and used at any given point of time (Savat 52-53). It is here where the subjectivity of the user starts to unfold. When entering social networks we move from being individuals towards the being of what Deleuze calls “dividuals.” In social networks we become codes, images, posts that cannot be reduced to our offline presence. [9] We begin to exist simultaneously in different databases, information banks and other technomaterial assemblages. This, in fact, is what many of the Facebook users fear and loathe: their data being used, distributed and exploited by third parties such as marketing ventures or central intelligence agencies. As Genosko writes, “offline individual” is merely one actualisation of the dividual because “nobody totally corresponds to their data double or silhouette” (101). The catch is that after logging in to a social network service there really is no return to the offline individuality. Even if we deactivate our account we remain in the databases of Facebook as a potential resource for exploitation.

Tactical Suicide: Seppukoo.com & Web 2.0 Suicidemachine

If our every action in Facebook is premediated and controlled by pre-emptive strategies, for which we ourselves provide the means by sharing content and information, how are we ever able to disconnect from these services? As discussed, even the ways of disconnecting, not only leave backdoors open for returning to the service and re-enabling our social contacts with one simple click, but also leave our content and information to be potentially exploited, used and circulated by the service and possibly third parties.

According to Rita Raley, in recent years we have seen various direct responses to the rise of digital capitalism in the field of new media art, information art, and digital art. With the concept of ‘tactical media’ she describes art forms that use practices such as hacktivism, denial-of-service attacks and reverse engineering.  If there is a combining factor for these practices it is the disturbance they create to the predominant system within they work. “In its most expansive articulation, tactical media signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible” (Raley 6).

Evidently digital suicide services Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine fall under the same category. Instead of being static art objects they invite users inside an event. The main theme of Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine is reclaiming one’s life through self-destructive actions in the digital world. Seppukoo.com seduces the Facebook user to commit a virtual suicide: “Discover what’s after your facebook life. We assist your virtual identity suicide” (Seppukoo “About”). The same kind of rhetoric is also found in the description of Web 2.0 Suicidemachine: “Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego” (Suicidemachine “About”).

To revise, what is important here is to understand that neither Seppukoo.com nor Web 2.0 Suicidemachine would exist without Facebook. Both of the services have specially emerged out of, and in direct response to Facebook. This, however, does not mean that Seppukoo.com or Web 2.0 Suicidemachine are oppositional to Facebook. Quite the contrary, Seppukoo.comand Web 2.0 Suicidemachine are forced to operate within the parameters of Facebook. Following Galloway and Thacker (81) we could say that tactical media does not even want to change its target but instead find and exploit holes and security breaches inside the system and project potential changes through them. In this sense, as also Raley (12) observes, tactical media reshape its target creating a temporary disturbance to the service instead of exiting the system entirely. As Parikka argues, “resistance works immanently to the diagram of power and instead of refusing its strategies, it adopts them as part of its tactics” (“Ethologies” 118).

To elaborate this more thoroughly we need to take a closer look at how Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine actually work. It is the protocol of username and password through which both Web 2.0 Suicidemachine and Seppukoo.com infiltrate Facebook.  The suicide starts by giving these sites a user’s Facebook username and password. In general, the password-username combination has become an order-word of network culture. Following Guattari we can say that they give out stop and start orders but above all activate the “bringing into being of ontological Universes” (Chaosmosis 49). Passwords and usernames transmit the user from one line to another, from one service to another, from one identity to another. With password and username we enter into different web services from Facebook to our banking services. According to Deleuze, passwords and codes define the key rules of control societies: the “digital language of control is made up of codes indicating whether access to some information should be allowed or denied” (“Postscript” 180).

Seppukoo.com uses the password to log on to the user’s Facebook account and then uses his/her information to create a memorial page on the Seppukoo.com site. The user is able to choose a skin and utter last words that are shown on the memorial page. The last words and a testimony of committing suicide are sent to the user’s Facebook friends. By using the viral strategies of contagions and distribution Seppukoo.com aims to get more people to commit virtual suicide. The pièce de résistance of the social suicide is the game implemented in the experience. One gets points and raises the rank according to the amount of Facebook friends who follow his/her lead and also commit Seppukoo.com. [10] The memorial page shows friends who have committed suicide and friends who are still on Facebook.

Figure 2. Seppukoo.com

Web 2.0 Suicidemachine on the other hand, uses the password to cut the offline individual from Facebook permanently. It does this by changing the password – the user is not able to log in anymore. Along with the password the identity of the user is vacated to the software. Digital suicide is made irreversible. In addition, Web 2.0 Suicidemachine changes the profile picture of the user into the Web 2.0 Suicidemachine’s noose logo and joins the user to a Facebook group named “Social Network Suiciders.” Simultaneously it starts to remove the connections to Facebook friends one-by-one at the time. The whole process is automated and visible to the user. The Facebook life is disappearing in front of the user’s eyes. Also, Web 2.0 Suicidemachine has a ranking system in which the more friends you got to join you before the suicide the higher you are ranked.

Figure 3. Web 2.0 Suicidemachine

Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine demonstrate quite clearly how tactical media emerges with its target. As Raley states, “tactical media comes so close to its core informational and technological apparatuses that protest in a sense becomes the mirror image of its object, its aesthetic replicatory and reiterative rather than strictly oppositional” (12). Both digital suicide services use Facebook’s own logic in order to function and spread. If the aim of Facebook is to envelop the user’s life inside the network, Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine do the inverse by affirming and embracing death.

Consequently, Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine’s connection to the environment of Facebook entails also their connection to biopolitics. It is phrased as a question in the Facebook Suicide Bomb Manifesto (Dockray): “When someone disappears from Facebook, does anyone notice?” The answer of course is yes. The suicide of the user is updated in his/her Facebook status, the user is added to the group of social network suiciders, even the profile picture is changed to remind others of the digital death of the user. As such Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine are not detached or freed from the biopolitical discourse. For digital suicide death is not a threat but a way to affirm life in tactical media. Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine control and guide the users to select another way of life, which is disconnected from the premediated workings of Facebook but never the less connected to the potentials and possibilities the service provides. For there would be no digital suicide without Facebook and without Facebook’s impressive machinery of attention economy no one would know about it. As Dockray puts it, “social networks need a social suicide.”

There is however another biopolitical side of digital suicide software related to our interests. From Dockray’s Manifesto we are able to find a question concerning data mining: “Does this software retroactively invalidate all of the marketing data that has been collected from the account?” To answer this question we need to elaborate on the model of resistance for tactical media.

If there is to be no direct oppositional positions in tactical media, what, then, is the possible model of resistance? First off, following Raley, we need to understand that tactical media does not adhere to the ideology of the Left or the ideology of cyberlibertarians. Paraphrasing Foucault she points out that there is no single locus of refusal but a plurality of resistances. Instead of replacing one ideology with another, tactical media supplements its targets with creative destruction (Raley 25-26).

If we consider digital suicide as creative destruction it seems evident that dying is something more than simply a termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. An alternative interpretation is provided by Deleuze to whom every death is a double. According to him on the one hand there is the very personal death of the individual, the I that dies, on the other there is the impersonal death, the one that dies, which refers to the virtual power of endlessly becoming other outside the forms and mould of the I or ego (Deleuze, Difference 137-138).

What, then, happens in digital suicide? Firstly, the access to the online identity and its data is given to software and its automated processes. When the password and user name are set, the suicide begins. In consequence the offline individual is cut off from his/her Facebook profile. A reference point here is the concept of dividual and its death. It is this very moment when the online identity loses its attachments to the moulding ‘I’ of the offline identity. Thus, the question is not what happens to the offline individual who is now cut off from Facebook but on the contrary what happens to the online identity. The online identity is the key to understanding how digital suicide exceeds, for example, Claude Shannon’s machine’s biased models of being either “on” or “off,” and affirms the double nature of dying as creative destruction. It is the impersonal dimension of death we are interested in, Seppukoo.com’s invitation to “rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone” (Seppukoo “About”).

I argue that the goal of Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine is to break the representational scheme between the online identity and the offline individual. Thus, the goal is not simply to help users quit but to introduce different potential ways to exist in social networks. What follows is that due to digital suicide, the online identity is given a non-existence that is full in the sense that it does not refer to any other subject than itself. Quite simply the very personal data of the user ranging from basic information to consumption behaviour data starts to exist independently without the user.

The identity that remains in Facebook after digital suicide becomes meaningless for the machinic subjectivation of capitalism: its data cannot be used for marketing, its consumption habits cease to exist. It is not representative for statistical analysis since it does not represent a population that exists. Simultaneously its actions cannot be anticipated and premediated since it does not have any. It remains in the network as passive and ascetic. In this sense it is non-existent and becomes absolutely irrelevant to controlling authorities (Galloway & Thacker 135-136). The most evident example of this non-existence is the group of “SNS - Social Network Suiciders” in Facebook created by Sucidemachine, which is a multiplicity of online identities cut off from their offline individuals. This group forms a mass of “generalized dynamics” that emerge when you extract “attributes, predicates, qualities or references from a large group of people” (Terranova 136). Quite bluntly this is what happens when one commits a virtual suicide through Web 2.0 Suicidemachine. Users’ private information such as email notifications, friends, groups and wall posts are removed. One ceases to be social. One’s data turns meaningless. The part of the dividual that remains on Facebook has no gender or class. It remains in the network, not as an individual but as a part of a multitude of others who have also committed virtual suicide.

Figure 4. SNS- Social Network Suiciders

Interestingly, digital suicide starts to appear as a passive rather than active form of resistance. If we turn to the online identity disconnected from the Facebook user, it reminds us of the death of Bartleby the Scrivener in Herman Melville’s short story whose refusal “I would prefer not to” resulted in the end in isolation from the surrounding environment and death by starvation (Melville “Bartleby Part 1”; “Bartleby Part2”). Quite similarly through digital suicide the user cedes power to Facebook but retains the power to withhold. The identity stays on Facebook but does not fit into its user representations or biopolitical models of data mining. The remnant does not affirm or negate anything particular on Facebook. It is an identity without reference or preferences (cf. Deleuze, “Bartleby” 70-71; Raley 25).

As an affirmation to Hardt and Negri’s (58) demand that it takes a network to fight a network, the group of social network suiciders aggregates these remnants without particularities. It is a group that works against data mining with its own logic. It creates a multitude of passive nodes, whose data is meaningless and cannot be exploited via commercial means. It is a multitude of virtual suiciders whose identity remains and continues its own life without the other half of the dividual.  They do not actively participate in Facebook’s normal activities such as writing wall posts, creating status updates, updating photos or commenting on other’s posts. Indeed these remnants of suicide become what Meijas (612, 614) has described as paranodes. They are nodes that do not conform to the logics of the network but instead occupy the space between active nodes and their links. Yet they are involved in the topological act of linking by being collapsed, bypassed or bumped into.

“Don’t become nothing, the singular point defined by an absence, become everything, with everyone else,” the Facebook Suicide Manifesto calls, and as we have seen, this is indeed just what Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine both do (Dockray). Committing digital suicide with these services does not mean disappearing from the networks or non-being in them. Instead it denotes the virtual side of reality, the creative potentiality to become something other outside actualised forms of being (Parikka, “Ethologies” 119). After the digital suicide masses have ceased to be a subject and cannot be given a subject position. Indeed the masses of suiciders are what Facebook really hates: passive identities who do not like any pages, do not share any information, do not allow their identity to become a product for consuming. They just remain on Facebook altering its development and also reminding that there are methods of disconnecting oneself.

Coda

Analysed from the perspective of leaving, Facebook appears as what Nigel Thrift has called the “cultural circuit of capitalism” (6). Facebook is developed for various means of governing bodies, objects and data for the sake of profit. New forms of commodity and commodity relations are built. Users are turned as consumers but also consumer products since they are involved in the act of consumption through sharing, collecting, experiencing and “in general, participating in all manner of collective acts of sensemaking” (Thrift 7).  Facebook’s media ecological environment is animate in the sense that it constantly forges new practices for users to create content and share information and most importantly, it adapts to the needs and desires of users in order to keep them under its influence. Paraphrasing Guattari, it works like a drug producing machinic subjectivities by providing sensations of belonging to something, or of being somewhere (“Machinic” 158).

Gary Genosko has argued that consumerism, which inserts subjectivity into incorporeal networks, sometimes requires “detox by disconnection” (93). What he basically suggests is that to escape the cultural circuit of capitalism, one needs to unplug. While the question of the possibility of actually unplugging oneself from these networks remains unanswered, Web 2.0 Suicidemachine and Seppukoo.com show how disconnection may also function inside the system, within the machinic subjectivities created by Facebook. Both of these art projects exist within the process of producing these subjectivities. As shown, in both cases committing digital suicide does not mean permanent or total exclusion from Facebook. Seppukoo.com lets the user log back into Facebook and repeat the suicide as many times as the user wants. Web 2.0 Suicidemachine creates a remnant of online identities that are left loitering around the Facebook servers.

Rather than detox, Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine could be described as doping by disconnection for the machinic process of subjectivation. Instead of disrupting these processes, Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine accelerate them to another speed and another level of being and belonging. To put it crudely, while Facebook aims to serialise and stratify users and their data into commodities and value, Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine take advantage of the same users in promoting “mutant singularities and new minorities” (Guattari, “Machinic” 161). Hence, digital suicide does not negate the being of and on Facebook but instead shows alternative ways of using the service outside its designed practices and uses. Paraphrasing Guattari, (“Machinic” 161) this can lead to either miserable exhaustion or the creation of unprecedented universes.
Acknowledgements

Thanks to the reviewers for excellent comments. I am also grateful to Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton) for many helpful advices regarding this article. I would also like to thank Olli Sotamaa (University of Tampere) and the group of Elomedia for comments and discussions.

Endnotes

1. <www.facebook.com>
   <www.seppukoo.com>
   <www.suicidemachine.org>.
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2. One of the most famous pranks was a book called Net.gener@tion, which to put it bluntly, was a book made of made up content. This book was published in 1996 by Mondadori, one of Italy’s biggest publishing houses and taken off the market quickly when the Luther Blissett Project revealed the hoax (Bazzichelli 50).
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3. While Seppukoo.com is targeted to Facebook, Web 2.0 Suicidemachine also disconnects other social media services such as Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.
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4. For example, the Web 2.0 Suicidemachine was reported by the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and TIME Magazine to name a few and Seppukoo.com was taken into the headlines for example by L’Express, Le Figaro and The Globe and Mail. In addition to the interest in media Seppukoo.com was also nominated for the Transmediale Award in 2011.Los Angeles Times. “Facebook fights back, disallows the Suicide Machine.” 04/01/2010. <latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/01/facebook-fights-back-disallows-the-suicide-machine.html>;The Guardian. “Facebook blocks ’social media suicide’ website.” 05/01/2010. <www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jan/04/facebook-social-media-suicide-machine>;

   TIME. “How to Disappear from Facebook and Twitter.” 19/01/2010. <www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1954631,00.html>;

   L’Express. “Suicide virtuel mode d’emploi.” 29/01/2010. <www.lexpress.fr/actualite/high-tech/suicide-virtuel-mode-d-emploi_845451.html>;

   Le Figaro. “Facebook interdit le «suicide virtuel».” 05/01/2010. <www.lefigaro.fr/web/2010/01/05/01022-20100105ARTFIG00551-facebook-interdit-le-suicide-virtuel-.php>;

   The Globe and Mail. “Social-media suicide.” 27/01/2010. <www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/social-media-suicide/article1446354/>.;

   Transmediale. 2011. <www.transmediale.de/seppukoocom>.

   All sites accessed April 20, 2011.

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5. This information is based on the cease and desist letters published on the Suicidemachine’s and Seppukoo’s websites. Official information from Facebook Inc. could not be retrieved.
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6. Despite the cease and desist letters from the Facebook representatives Suicidemachine and Seppukoo.com tried to keep up and running for a while. However, in February 2011 Seppukoo.com (Seppukoo “Front”) announced that “due to the paradoxical controversy between the giant Facebook and Seppukoo, our suicidal services are now useless.” Equally the Suicidemachine does not work anymore. The disturbance these art projects created for Facebook was temporary. What is important here however is the way they illustrated the mechanisms and ideologies behind Facebook and digital capitalism in general.
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7. While there has been discussion of the connection between mass media technologies, communication and capitalism since the 1970s (Smythe), new media technologies bring new actors and practices into these discussions.
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8. For Grusin (35, 41) the emergence of premediation is connected with the world after 9/11. It appears from the same mental ambiance as pre-emptive strikes that led to war in Iraq. Practically premediation means the tendency of media to try to predict and describe future events.
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9. This is described quite interestingly in South Park season 14 episode 4, where Stan Marsh is drawn inside the world of Facebook and needs to fight against his own Facebook profile.
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10. There are six different levels due which the points are given. The first level equals 32 points, which are given from every friend that commits Seppukoo.com. Level 6 equals 1 point and is given for each suicidal friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. The current leader of the Top 100 rank is Simona Lodi with 4,914 points.
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Works Cited