stacktivism

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We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It’s the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and former Canadian deputy foreign minister, Gordon Smith wrote in 2016 that the internet was becoming “the infrastructure of all infrastructure.” It’s how we organize, connect and build knowledge, even — perhaps — planetary intelligence. Right now, it’s concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic. 

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In this essay a new form of Internet activism is proposed: stacktivism. Building on hacktivist practices, this form of code and standard development as political struggle is envisioned to connect different layers of the techno-protological stack (also known as the Internet) in order build bridges between different, still isolated institutional levels and disciplinary practices such as grassroots wifi-access initiatives, interface design, geeks, computer scientists and governance experts. How do we envision a public stack that goes beyond the structures such ICANN, IETF and IGF that can take up the task to rebuild the Internet as a decentralized, federated, public infrastructure?

Principles of Stacktivism | tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society

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Observations of failure, breakdown and dysfunction are frequently made with reference to abstract and large-scale objects such as system, capitalism, planet, or climate. But numerous smaller-scale expressions may be found also when zooming in on the level of the mundane.

#FAILURES: WHEN THINGS DON’T HOLD: ANTHROPOLOGIES OF FAILURE, BREAKDOWN, AND DYSFUNCTION

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New deliveries of eggs to British supermarkets are being snapped up as quickly as the shelf stackers can get them onto the shelves.  At the same time, tons of eggs are going off in warehouses which currently hold massive stocks of food.  The unexpected reason for this situation, we learn from the BBC’s Farming Today programme on Wednesday, is that the UK is currently in the grip of an unanticipated egg carton shortage.  The entire of Europe is supplied by just three egg carton manufacturers.  None is based in Britain; and the nearest one – in Denmark – is closed for the next fortnight.  And so we have warehouses full of eggs and queues of shoppers asking for eggs, but no means of connecting the two.

Liebig’s law writ large

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“The goal was to test if the country's national internet infrastructure -- known inside Russia as RuNet -- could function without access to the global DNS system and the external internet.Internet traffic was re-routed internally, effectively making Russia's RuNet the world's largest intranet.“

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Not long after midnight on Wednesday, California's largest electrical utility started turning off the lights. Pacific Gas & Electric cut power to approximately 500,000 Northern California homes and businesses, with plans to disable service for another 234,000 later in the day and a tentative third phase of shutdowns that could affect 42,000. For the millions of affected residents of these communities and for California more generally, it's a big deal—but for everyone else, it's a warning of things to come.

The shutdown is happening because of concerns that the electrical grid could start another fire that would rival or even exceed the Camp Fire of 2018, which killed at least 86 people and destroyed the town of Paradise, CA. High winds are expected to batter northern California in the coming days, and conditions there are already extremely dry—perfect weather for sparks from a downed powerline to start another inferno. Hence the shutdown, which will affect 34 of the 58 counties in California to some degree.

The cuts, which include northern parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, are expected to last at least several days, but it's not easy to predict. "Once the weather dies down, we're still going to have to go out and inspect those lines visually, make sure that the lines are safe before we re-energize," PG&E spokesperson Tamar Sarkissian told KPIX last night. "If there's any damage, we're going to have to make repairs."

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Bees dying under 5G poles

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How can we create digital products and services that people can—and do—trust? It’s a question that’s integral to our work at IF. It’s becoming increasingly important as people become more aware of the possible consequences of data being recorded, joined up and used by organisations.

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“loose clicks sink ships“ - Antimega

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The Varieties of Corporate Power Corporate power isn’t a monolith. Rather, as the progressive crusaders of the past century recognized, it comes in several different forms. First, there is literal monopoly: the direct control over an entire good or industry by a single firm. But that’s only the most blatant kind of corporate power: there are other kinds of dominance that are far less obvious. One of these is control over infrastructure. Infrastructure can mean many things. It can refer to physical infrastructure, like highways and bridges and railroads, or it can be social and economic: the credit that forms the lifeblood of business, for instance, or the housing stock and water supply that provide the foundational necessities for life. These infrastructural goods and services combine scale with necessity. They are necessities that make possible a wide range of “downstream” uses. This social value in turn depends on the provision of these goods and services at scale to as many people as possible. Where a good or a service is essential and irreplaceable, the user depends on its provider—they are, by definition, in a vulnerable position. So if a firm controls infrastructure, it possesses arbitrary power over all those who rely on the infrastructure. But infrastructural power can also operate in a more diffused way. Much of the early debate around corporate power revolved around norms of nondiscrimination in serving travelers. The classic example was the innkeeper. The innkeeper is not a monopolist in the sense of massive scale and concentration. And yet, for the traveler in isolation, without other competing providers present, the innkeeper possesses a kind of localized dominance, with the ability to deny or condition service, placing the traveler at the innkeeper’s mercy. Indeed, this understanding of localized power played a major role in the development of public accommodations laws, which aimed to prevent this kind of diffused exclusion through generally applicable requirements of nondiscrimination.

The New Octopus

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Into the Red Stack

Gabriele de Seta on China’s digital entrepreneurs, infrastructures and platforms.

A vast majority of current discussions about digital platforms and their infrastructural ambitions focuses on the “Big Four” that are often earmarked under the acronym GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). In his Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek describes how these companies share the common trait of having transformed a single product (a search engine, a smartphone, a social networking service, an e-commerce website) into a platform offering free services and capable of generating revenue through the exploitation of network effects and the extraction of user data. In the Chinese context, the GAFA companies are commonly mirrored by the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) trio of local platform companies that currently dominates the national Internet market. Similarly developed into platforms from pre-existing web search, e-commerce or entertainment services, the BAT companies have consolidated their dominance through acquisitions and investments in domains ranging from big data and AI to logistics and finance.

Benjamin H. Bratton has extensively theorized “the Stack” as a model useful to navigate the vertical overlaying of infrastructures and platforms with the geopolitics of informational and national sovereignty. For Bratton, the Stack is the result of various sorts of planetary-scale computation, coming together to form an “accidental megastructure” that is also a new architecture of sovereignty. While Bratton rubrics the future configurations of this accidental megastructure under the looming image of a “Black Stack,” Tiziana Terranova proposes to reimagine a new nomos of the post-capitalist commons as a “Red Stack,” composed by the three transversal and nonlinear levels of virtual money, social networks, and bio-hypermedia.

The Stack model, along with its speculative mutations that attempt to prototype planetary-scale computation through color gradations (the opaque black of cybernetic black boxes, the sanguine red of post-autonomist politics), offers glimpses of sociotechnical assemblages to come and design futures that might never be. And yet, by grounding their claims in a largely Euro-American experience of infrastructural imperialism and platform capitalism, these formulations overlook a geopolitical site where a different sort of Stack is already consolidating its interlocking layers: China.

(via Into the Red Stack | Hong Kong Review of Books)

Extremely interesting stuff // JAY 

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On Roman roads and the sources of persistence and non-persistence in development

Although spatial differences in economic development tend to be highly persistent over time, this is not always the case. This column combines novel data on Roman Empire road networks with data on night-time light intensity to explore the persistence and non-persistence of a key proximate source of growth – public goods provision. Several empirical strategies all point to the Roman road network as playing an important role in the persistence of subsequent development. (via Roman roads and persistence in development | VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal)

Infrastructure and unending empires // JAY

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The demise of the nation state

After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete – and spasms of resurgent nationalism are a sign of its irreversible decline. By Rana Dasgupta

Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.

The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.

More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth.

Read more at: The demise of the nation state

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Brexit has hit the internet, and not in a good way. In an official statement Thursday, the European Commission announced it will cancel all 300,000 domains under the .eu top-level domain that have a UK registrant, following Britain's eventual departure from the European Union. "As of the withdrawal date, undertakings and organizations that are established in the United Kingdom but not in the EU and natural persons who reside in the United Kingdom will no longer be eligible to register .eu domain names," the document states, adding, "or if they are .eu registrants, to renew .eu domain names registered before the withdrawal date." Going even further, the EC suggested that existing .eu domains might be cancelled the moment Brexit happens – expected to be 366 days from now – with no right of appeal.

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin • The Register

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I’ve lost plenty of devices before, but this death feels different. When my old iPad is powered down, it seems practically new; when I turn it on, it feels instantly old. Tap the familiar YouTube app, and I am met with a pregnant pause: one, two, three, app. Ditto for the App Store, Podcasts, Netflix and e-books. Newer games are often out of the question, which wouldn’t bother me much if Safari, the web browser, wasn’t constantly overwhelmed by complicated pages. My attempt to install an alternative browser ended with this message: Firefox requires iOS 10.3 or later. My old iPad stopped getting updates in the 9s. I wouldn’t say my old electronics always aged gracefully, but their obsolescence wasn’t a death sentence. My old digital camera doesn’t do what some new cameras do — but it’s still a camera. My iPad, by contrast, feels as though it has been abandoned from on high, cut loose from the cloud on which it depends.

What I Learned from Watching My iPad’s Slow Death