Finn Brunton

Political and ethical perspectives on data obfuscation

Our chapter, like all the others gathered in this volume, is written in light of the fact that computer-enabled data collection, aggregation and mining dramatically change the nature of contemporary surveillance. Innocuous traces of everyday life submitted to sophisticated analytics tools developed for commerce and governance can become the keys for stitching disparate databases together into unprecedented new wholes. This data is often gathered under conditions of profound power imbalance. What can we do when faced with these demands, which are often trivial but whose implications are profound, and which we may not be in a position to refuse? Being profi led is the condition of many essential transactions, from connecting with friends in online social networks to shopping, travelling and engaging with institutions both public and private. Nor, as we shall discuss below, can we rely on law, technology or the scruples of the data gatherers. What we propose is an alternative strategy of informational self-defence, a method that acts as informational resistance, disobedience, protest or even covert sabotage – a form of redress in the absence of any other protection and defence, and one which disproportionately aids the weak against the strong. We call this method obfuscation and, in this chapter, we will argue for the political and ethical philosophy it expresses and embodies. Obfuscation is the production of misleading, ambiguous and plausible but confusing information as an act of concealment or evasion. It is a term we use to capture key commonalities in systems ranging from chaff, which fi lls radar’s sweep with potential targets; to the circulating exchanges of supermarket loyalty cards that muddle the record of purchases; to peer-to-peer fi le sharing systems such as BitTorrent, protecting their users from legal action by producing records of many IP addresses, only a few of which may be engaged in fi le sharing. Through these and other cases we can begin to clarify obfuscation among the other forms of resistance to surveillance, whether that surveillance takes the form of consumer data aggregation (for supermarkets, or by

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ABSTRACT I will discuss the digital materials that we do not want to archive, or that do not want to be archived, that are particular to Internet history: the trash, cruft, detritus and intentionally opaque hoard of documents and artefacts that constitute our digital middens. Middens are pits of domestic refuse filled with the discards and by-products of material life: the gnawed bones, ashes, fruit stones and potsherds, shells and chips and hair and drippings which together constitute the photographic negative of a community in action and an invaluable record for archaeologists. Using this analogy, I will discuss two from my own research: the archives of spam, which we would all rather forget, and the records of the communities and marketplaces of the so-called “Dark Web,” which would prefer to be forgotten. I will also address the challenges of research with other kinds of eccentric, troubling or speculative archives, like blockchains, ephemeral imageboards and doxxes. I will close by discussing ways that we can think of digital historiography, in particular, in terms of these accidental, unwanted, averse archives.

Une histoire du spam : Le revers de la communauté en ligne

Cet article etudie l’etrange et vaste domaine du spam et son role dans l’evolution des communautes virtuelles et de la gouvernance d’Internet. Il developpe l’idee selon laquelle le spam opere en exploitant la tension entre les communautes virtuelles et les infrastructures technologiques qui les sous-tendent. Les exploits du spam eclairent a la fois la relation complexe entre les communautes virtuelles et les gouvernements dans lesquels elles interferent, ainsi que l’evolution des politiques de l’attention en ligne.

Summa Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 448 pp.

For purposes of argument, let’s lay science fiction (SF) as a genre out on an axis that runs from SF about tools to SF about ideas (this is a facile split, but bear with me). On the tools side of the axis, we have science fiction that speculates about stuff: stories of airships, tricorders, and ice rays. At the far end of this side of the spectrum are documents that act as near-term, plausibly speculative engineering and design proposals—the Memex, and Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” is this kind of proposal, complete with some extrapolations into the future following the Memex’s introduction, with the new profession of “trailblazers” building associative links through the corpus of knowledge. The polar opposite to this mode, the ultraviolet to the infrared of video telephones and invisibility suits, is the science fiction of ideas and nothing else, and at the end of the line in that austere, high-altitude country lives Stanislaw Lem. Lem is one of the world’s most highly regarded science fiction writers. His work includes numerous short story collections (most notably The Cyberiad, written from the sardonic perspective of super-human machines) and several novels on subjects like artificial intelligence and humanalien communication, including Solaris, which has been repeatedly adapted for film by directors including Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. He is science fiction’s closest equivalent to Jorge Luis Borges, using his genre to push the limits of the thinkable. If the SF of tools is always about to turn into an actual product proposal, patent application, or manufacturer’s spec, the SF of ideas is always on the verge of tipping into pure philosophy. It asks questions of ethics and politics— what responsibility do we owe to beings with modes of cognition that do not resemble our own? For purposes of contact with aliens, who actually “represents” the human species? Of course, it asks questions of ontology (Philip K. Dick being exemplary here): how do we determine and engage with what is really real? In Lem’s case, it asks epistemological questions: How do we know what we know? How are we certain? How do we assess salient information? And how, on this basis, do we make judgments? This last is the sting in the tail of many of Lem’s observations, both in his fiction and in the book discussed here. Bush was concerned that vital discoveries were going unrecognized in the mass of material—“I suspect,” he wrote to F.P. Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation in 1939, “we now have reincarnations of Mendel all about us, to be discovered a generation hence, if at all” (Nyce & Kahn, 1989, p. 215). Lem is indeed troubled by this as a practical matter, but his larger concern is the ways decisions are made based on what we know, or think we know. “If we ask for a boon from them,” wrote Norbert Wiener of Cold War-era automated nuclear defense technologies, “we must ask for what we really want and not for what we think we want. If we program a machine for winning a war, we must think well what we mean by winning. . . . We cannot expect the machine to follow us in those prejudices and emotional compromises by which we enable ourselves to call destruction by the name of victory” (Wiener, 1961, p. 177). Lem— who cites and discusses Wiener a number of times over the course of the book—turns this question, and questions like it, over and over. As human capabilities begin to encounter the limits of our comprehension, Lem asks us to weigh our goals and our criteria of value. What is the victory of a nuclear stalemate? What is the freedom of a society of powerfully predictive big data analysis? What is the identity of the person whose humanity is artificially maintained? How do we evaluate conclusions presented by information systems too complex for humans to understand? Hence this book. Its reception disappointed its author—it “sank without a trace” (p. xx)—and it has remained remarkably obscure and untranslated for decades, given that the bulk of Lem’s work has been in press in dozens of languages since his career began flourishing in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, the reasons for this book’s neglect are clear once we begin reading. Despite a lucid, brisk translation by Joanna Zylinska, who helps to untangle Lem’s intricate sentences, the book as a whole can be slow going, full of table-setting as Lem describes the contemporary state of cybernetics, computing research, astronomy, and sundry other subjects to make the case for his thought experiments. Science fiction can provide a great liberty of thinking, permission to hand-wave the gritty intricacies so the author can get to the questions and implications. Lem was always particularly good at this; his works that seem most purely and idiosyncratically his are reviews and introductions he wrote for books that don’t exist, freeing him completely from the tedium of dialog or explaining how such-and-such a device works. (He called these pieces “apocryphs,” a neologism which deserves wider usage.) Here, there are some long walks, through sections sometimes repetitive and sometimes

34.95 (hardcover) (ISBN 978-0816675760)

Culture Digitally is a cadre of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig on Twitter. This is the next in the series of Culture Digitally’s ‘‘dialogues.’’ On occasion, we invite two or more of our participants to engage in an intellectual back-and-forth, on a theoretical point of interest that emerges from discussions at our meetings, around blog posts, or based on evident, shared interests. In these dialogues, they are encouraged to grapple with theoretical questions, but to do so quite a bit faster than the glacial pace of publishing typically allows. We imagine them as the digital equivalent of the scholarly exchange of letters between pre-eminent gentlemen scientists. The thinking is meant to be raw and provocative, a chance for the dialogue participants to prod each other beyond their own certainties. This dialogue was inspired by Kevin Driscoll’s insightful book review in the L.A. Review of Books, of Finn Brunton’s superb new book, Spam: The Shadow History of the Internet. I asked Kevin if he would use a bit of his review to begin a dialogue with Finn; the conversation moved quickly to the methodological challenges of studying the elusive. Tarleton Gillespie, co-organizer of Culture Digitally