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<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Noto+Serif:400,400italic,700,700italic' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />
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<body><h1>
Meeting the Alternatives:<br>
Notes about making profiles and joining hackers<br><br>
</h1>
<h5>‘But that’s no better than Facebook!’ was the response from the audience to a small
research project on alternative social networks and their default settings.<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup>
By looking at the defaults, the ways to get connected to a network, and how to ‘manage’ one’s
profile, our team aimed to sketch out the different environments that social networking
platforms had to offer.<sup><a href="#fn2" id="ref2">2</a></sup> Most of the decentralized, non-corporate platforms we chose to investigate had profile pages set to ‘public’ by default, even those that manifested a high level of privacy awareness. Given the severe criticisms against Facebook for opening up profile pages to the public, that finding surprised us. However, it also suggests that the priorities of alternative social networks lie elsewhere, beyond issues of profile management. These notes present some of my findings to the question: what are the issues being put forward by alternative social networks?<br><br>
Debates about social media monopolies are often framed in terms of surveillance, data
privacy, and user control. The collection, analysis, and trade of personal data are said
to be the very condition of what we have come to understand as social media.<a href="#">3</a> Meanwhile, activists and developers have been working on social networking technologies
using alternative methods. ‘Alternative’ social networks are not widely known – let
alone commonly used. Some criticasters blame this on their non-usability while defenders
note they are still in an experimental phase.<a href="#">4</a> Still others suggest that successful adoption of social networks depends on achieving social, economic, and regulatory
alignment. For such arguments, Narayanan et al. provide interesting insights as in their
research they have encountered about 80 decentralized networks.5 But focusing solely
on the success factors of alternative social networks risks biasing the comparison towards
the issues associated with existing social networks. The work that follows tries
to look at alternative social networks from a different angle by asking what a number
of relatively new, experimental technologies might have to offer in the debate on social
networking in terms of conceptual input. By turning away from the big platforms and
turning towards projects that try to do things differently, a more significant array of issues can be added to the conversation. If centralized social media are conditioned by
a business model of surveying and monetizing personal data, then what kind of models
do experimental social networks rely on? How do they position themselves in this debate
– if at all? What do they do with personal – and potentially useful – data? Do they
throw data away or use it for the common good, or maybe something creative? What
do alternative social networks want to achieve and for whom?<br><br></h5>
<h1>End User Meets Decentralized Social Networks at the Interface</h1><h5><br>
Diaspora and Lorea are known as decentralized federated social networks. ‘Decentralization’
is a contested term: here it means that data is not stored on the servers
owned by one central actor, but on federated servers. For instance, you can start your
own ‘Diaspora-pod’, a sub-network hosted on a server of your choice, or a ‘node’
to connect up with the Lorea network. Diaspora has been broadly announced as a
‘privacy aware’ alternative to Facebook.6 I looked at how Diaspora was generally introduced
and I registered for an account at joindiaspora.com. Within the Lorea Network
I registered at N-1 (at n-1.cc), a platform that has been used by protesters of the 15M
Movement in search of an online place to assemble and organize7 – and later by several
occupied squares in the winter of 2011. The comparison took place in January
2012 and many things have changed since then, still, I hope it serves as a description
of what it feels like for a lay user first encountering alternative social networks.
How do these platforms define themselves and what are their core concepts? I’ll start
off with Diaspora, which is ‘[…] a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service’, where the project is about social freedom: ‘[…] a fun
and creative community that puts you in control’.8 Diaspora announced its agreement
to abide by the Computer Freedom and Privacy’s Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights,
which has a strong emphasis on data ownership, control, the right to self-definition,
and the right to withdraw.9 There are three important key terms: ‘choice’, ‘ownership’,
and ‘simplicity’ (Fig.1).<br><br>
In contrast, Lorea does not present key points but, whilst referring to the influence of
the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari,10 declares itself to be ‘a “hotbed” of social
networks on an experimental field land’. The description goes as follows:<br><br>
Permanent Assembly of the Lorea Project: Its aim is to create a distributed and federated nodal organization of entities with no geophysical territory, interlacing their
multiple relationships through binary codes and languages [...]11<br><br>
Their ‘about’ page makes clear that Lorea aims to ‘create a distributed and federated
organization of autonomous entities’ and focuses on specific groups: ‘We are developing
social software for activist networks, we desire visibility but not to give up our
privacy and security’.<br><br>
Let’s hold on to Diaspora’s key terms: ‘choice’, ‘ownership’, and ‘simplicity’. ‘Choice’
refers to being able to label your contacts, with the help of certain ‘aspects’, to ensure
that you share your stories or pictures with the right people, such as friends, family, or
colleagues etc, but also categories that users can define themselves. N-1, which offers
options to ‘circles’ of friends, enables you to do the same. You can share with ‘friends’
and ‘friends collections’, but you can also join ‘groups’ defined by yourself or others.
Diaspora’s second key term ‘ownership’ highlights more differences between the two.
Both platforms are non-corporate, but they show dissimilar ideas about how connections
between users, their data, and the network should be organized. In Diaspora, data
ownership is said to be with the user that posted the data. With ‘ownership’ Diaspora
means that the user retains control over the data in the sense that they decide who to
share, or not share, it with, such as a corporation that sends your data to third parties.12
<br><br>
One could argue that N-1 offers similar settings, however, the language used reveals
more loosely articulated connections to one’s data traces: it does not stress ownership
as such. One can also see this in the functionalities, such as N-1’s database of profile
themes where inhabitants are invited to share their profile images. When I was trying
to construe a new background for my profile page (a ‘theme’) to cheer up the default
black profile page, N-1 turned out to have an enormous amount of profile templates:
carefully designed images, including very personal ones, don’t always stay with its author, but they are there for common use (for an example see Fig. 2). Therefore,
modifying one’s profile page in N-1 is more than decision-making about what a person
shows about him or herself (‘who/what am I in what circles’), it also includes adding
something to the network, in order for it to be re-used.<br><br>
One of the future plans for the Diaspora project is the ability to export your data and
take it with you (Fig. 3). In this way, Diaspora aims to provide you with a high degree of
mobility for your ‘data body part’ in relation to the network, and to be able to travel on.
<br><br>
In their language and options, Diaspora and N-1 provide us with different imaginaries
about how to relate to one’s profile: dropping a part of your profile in the network or
keeping it close with you. The point here is not that the respective platforms would be
technologically unable to design the options the other one is offering, but that they
present us with different ideas of what social networking could be about. A similar
thing is noticed in the way they talk about privacy. In Diaspora this is related to the
third keyword: ‘simplicity’. In Diaspora decision-making about sharing should be ‘clear
and easy’, especially when privacy is concerned. This means: no confusing pages with
endless options. As such, ‘privacy’ in Diaspora must be something easily managed.
What is privacy and simplicity for N-1? After logging in, at the bottom of the page,
‘privacy’ leads you to a Spanish page saying ‘Estamos en ello [...] por ahora puedes
leer Acerca de N-1’, which means: ‘We’re on it [...] for now you can read About N-1’.13
The ‘About N-1’ page states that privacy is something the contributors are concerned
about. Privacy is not to be ‘given up’, and self-managed servers for individuals and
activist groups are stated to be key for guaranteeing better security and privacy. For N-1,‘privacy’ seems to be understood <h6>in the context of data storage</h6><h5> and an issue
of trust in collectively managing the storage, and less, as in Diaspora, an issue of
self-managing your presence. Moreover, decision-making about sharing on N-1 is all
but ‘clear and easy’. The default sharing option is sharing with logged-in inhabitants.
Changing settings must be done for every widget separately, which includes pages,
blogs, wire-posts, agenda, activity, message board, and more (Fig. 4). Widgets are
present on the homepage and on the profile page: does that mean that one needs to
reconfigure them twice?14, questions that can be posed in the developers’ forum. On
N-1, privacy, at least for beginners, is not to be decided about in a clear and easy manner,
but requires some effort and participation.<br><br>
These two social networks could be analyzed in terms of their push of different (political)
agendas: Diaspora being closer to a liberal notion of the individual subject and
manifesting a legal understanding of how to organize human rights within the social
networking world, and N-1 expressing a more rhizomatic point of view of the world in
which various experimental nodes can be productively interconnected and in which the
status of the individual and the law is less explicitly defined.15 At the same time,
however,these social networks do more than simply draw on different available agendas:
they also attempt to reformulate what is at stake in social networking. The work on
‘participatory objects’ by Noortje Marres is useful here, as it proposes to focus on how
technological practices facilitate certain matters of concern.16 According to Marres, we
should not evaluate technological objects as solving issues of engagement, but look at
how they reformulate different understandings of engagement and its impact. To give
an example, in her work on practices of carbon accounting, Marres encounters different
repertoires of engagement. One prevalent idea is that engagement should be made
‘easy’ and ‘effortless’, a specific liberal trope and an articulation of engagement in which
technology helps you to be engaged with no disruption to your everyday practices.17
She also highlights an alternative articulation that makes explicit the labor that comes
with carbon accounting: the hassle, the failures, and the way it changes everyday life.
Freely translating her input, the question posed about experimental social networking
platforms becomes not whether they solve problems of ‘privacy’ or ‘data-monopolies’,
for instance, but how they provide terms in which such problems can be couched.<br><br>
By looking closer at Diaspora and N-1 two different understandings of privacy are emphasized: privacy as the self-management of profile-sharing, and privacy as related
to trust in a collective that takes care of data storage.18 The social networks are also
experimenting with user data attachments. Should data be carefully ‘kept’ with the
one who produced it? Is it valuable, or usable, and to whom? The one emphasizes
ownership and the mobility of profiles, the other works with a model providing spaces
for common profile elements. In that way they work out different ways of dealing with
data traces in the network. Finally, there are also different repertoires of engagement
at play through the ways Diaspora and N-1 relate being on these networks to social
life. Similar to the two articulations of engagement in Marres’ work, we find in Diaspora’s
promise, that its privacy design entails no further disruption of one’s everyday
social life, an appeal to an idea of easy engagement. Privacy at N-1, on the contrary, is
a matter of active involvement. Not only does N-1 point out the hard work on the server-
side, but the widgets on your dashboard also keep reminding you of the fact that
you relate to others in different ways for different activities, and in that way, its design
refuses to reduce privacy to easy decision-making but makes it a continuous task.<br><br>
<h4><img src="img/pinguin.jpg"><br>image description some info blablabla<br><br></h4><h5>
As such, Diaspora can be understood as pitching the idea of mobile data, or the ability
to pack up parts of your data body, whereas N-1 offers shared profile themes and
stresses the need for safe data storage. These are valuable ideas to explore further:
Should the mobility of data become an individual right? Which data should belong to
individuals, which data should be common? And how should the safety of the server
infrastructure be taken care of? Can this be taken up as a general goal by broader
social movements? Moreover, if we think about ‘privacy’ as a concept that has been
endlessly defined, contested, and reconsidered,19 could the notion of participating
objects be useful for privacy debates as well? Can we extend our discourse about
‘privacy by design’, which suggests that privacy has a certain shape or demands to
be ‘embedded’ or ‘implanted’ in a technological architecture, to a repertoire concerned
with ‘privacy-aware technology’, those technological practices which make
one ‘do’ privacy?<br><br>
<h1>Distributed Networks Working Together<h1><h5><br>
The issues sketched above – interface design, profile options, philosophies – all relate
to what alternative social networking platforms present front stage. The second Unlike
Us conference, in March 2012, was an opportunity to get to know a few of these projects
better. For me it was an incentive to spend more time with developers and have a
closer look at what is happening backstage with these alternative networks, and come to terms with the ambitions envisaged by those involved in their development. Last
May I got the following invite by SecuShare:<br><br>
We are setting up a hackathon event together with our friends from TheGlobalSquare
on the topic of Distributed Social Networks. The plan is to sit down together and
synchronize our development efforts; to distribute tasks, share code and reduce
duplication. Hereby we want to invite you to hack with us.<br><br>
Even though I was not familiar with the practice of hackathons, I decided to join anyway.
Wanting to know what the targets are of these alternative social networks, what could
be a better place than an event aimed at discussing the differences and commonalities
of distributed architectures? According to Bruno Latour, contexts of ‘innovations’ are
promising sites to study the ‘social’ being enacted.20 With that idea in mind, I spent four
days in one of the Berlin hacker spaces. Regular attendees were Secushare, The Global
Square, Briar, Lorea, and GNUnet. Many others popped by for a day or so, including
DeepaMehta, Project Danube, and Bitcoin, amongst others. Even people that were not
in Berlin were included in the discussions through the IRC channel.<br><br>
To summarize the goals of the hackathon I rely on a collaborative pirate pad that was
used and on personal correspondence with the participants. The general goal was
to work on decentralized solutions that were fast and secure, and more usable than
centralized ones. At the hackathon, ‘decentralized’ had another meaning than that
expressed with the discussion of Diaspora and N-1 above: the decentralized solutions
the hackers were working on referred to distributed architectures, and not federated
servers, which were considered as vulnerable. The ‘architectural goals’ of the hackathon
can be summarized as follows:<br><br>
– No central points of failure<br>
– Resilience against attacks<br>
– Unbreakable event distribution<br>
– Resilience against legal attacks<br><br>
A distributed architecture is expected to be more powerful: it will be more flexible, and
diminish the chance for system breakdown, but it will also provide a better environment
against censorship or aggressive (state) intermingling. With regards to wanting to
offer protection but reach large groups at the same time, one of the common problems
discussed was ‘multicast encryption’, which deals with how to encrypt information
between a group of trusted peers, and also how to (re)configure the exchange of keys,
in case of flexible group membership. For example, a use case could be: how to reorganize
keys if one group member, that initially had a key, is excluded from the group?
How to code this without having to start a new group? This also sparkled questions
such as whether the history of the group stays visible for new members, and whether
not just humans, but also the protocol itself, could leak group IDs. In other words: who
communicates and who is included and excluded? Through such topics, the developers
scrutinized and improved each other’s methods.<br><br>
What this discussion about multicast encryption clarified for me was not the technicalities,
but the imagined publics and the potential users for the participating platforms.
As it turned out, there are a lot of differences between these several projects. The Briar
project is less concerned with big groups, and more with highly secure one-to-one
encryption. Briar focuses on designing a protocol that enables people to run existing
applications in an encrypted way. Therefore, Briar aims at much more specific user
groups than the other projects in the room because it wants to support people under
heavy surveillance that need to communicate in a restricted network in which they already
know each other. The mode of transport is not (necessarily) internet-based, but
can be through USB sticks, Tor, TCP, and dialogue modems. Being dependent on the
equipment that is available, Briar tends to be more device-centered. This makes Briar
different than the other projects present at the hackathon that tend to work according
to a format in which there is a protocol that ‘grounds’ the rest: a base on top of which
other applications can be attached. For example, GNUnet is a peer-to-peer framework
developed by an international network of developers that serves as a platform for
many decentralized applications. Hence, social networking applications could be built
on GNUnet. GNUnet and SecuShare are currently exploring collaboration. SecuShare
would enable encryptions from many-to-many, which is currently lacking in other social
networks. According to them, ‘SecuShare dives into depths of encryption and privacy
protection unheard of in chat and social platforms so far, so it is just what it takes to really leave Facebook behind. Federated social networks won’t do’.21 Lorea, as discussed
earlier, is such a federated social network, providing the possibility for sharing messages,
profile updates, and collaborative work. One outcome of the hackathon was that
Lorea, in the future, might also be able to operate on top of GNUnet with SecuShare
as an intermediary and make the move from the federated web to a distributed base.<br><br>
The idea for ‘The Global Square’ (TGS), the final project to be discussed here, arose
from from the Occupy Movement. Central goals include enabling mass collaboration,
and ensuring open and public knowledge. The platform will be conditioned by
Dispersy, a peer-to-peer architecture being developed by a research group from the
University of Delft.22 The platform aims to offer a communication infrastructure for the
inhabitants of (previously) occupied squares and assemblies. It also wants to provide
a niche for a real-time uncensored knowledge repository that will be made accessible
through an Android app. At the hackathon, we spent an afternoon talking about user
scenarios. TGS is being designed from scratch: that means that distinctions need
to be made between different units and practices, such as Squares (places where
people meet), Concentric User Groups (groups organized around a certain topic) and
Systems (creations or instances of mass collaboration on topics of global interest).
One prominent example of a ‘System’ is the ‘News Commons’. The News Commons
is an idea that was pitched in June 2011 by Wikileaks Central, an unofficial WikiLeaks
resource site, which envisioned a combination of a crowdsourced news platform and
a forum for citizen government:<br><br>
[…] we wanted a place for a collaborative effort, but a very dynamic, Twitter speed
effort, to handle all important information and news (the news we require in order to govern ourselves). We would then take that information, analyze it against what we
already know, match that to relevant law etc., and create action to stop corruption.23<br><br>
This idea is going to be implemented in TGS. One challenge for TGS is enabling the
dissemination of ideas through all of the different places and channels. Stigmergy,
which indicates spontaneous self-organization through (indirect and) mediated effects,
plays an important role in their philosophy. Therefore, in terms of potential user groups
or publics, TGS seems to envision a self-organized vigilant public. As we see here, just
as in the comparison between Diaspora and N-1, the various projects have different
expectancies of the level of involvement of the people that will use these technologies,
varying from a more pragmatic approach of motivating people to enhance existing devices
already in use, in the case of Briar, to a higher anticipation of public engagement
by providing a space for a whole new form of social networked journalism and action,
in the case of TGS.<br><br>
<h1>Decentralized Networks and their Publics<h1><h5><br>
The question at hand is, of course, whether a larger public will become more familiarized
with these networks – will they remain in an experimental phase or can they
become part of everyday life? The issue of scalability is an important concern for developers, something everybody is aware of. I think Lorea’s N-1 serves as a useful case
study because it is an example of a social network that actually managed to grow by
linking up with the 15M Movement. Yet, this did not happen without investment: the
N-1 team organized workshops to familiarize people with this new technology, just as
there were other kinds of workshops on the square.24 That means that starting to use
N-1 was part of a broader context of learning practices and also that its use had aims
larger than the social network technology itself. N-1 is of course only one example
of a network that has expanded in a particular context, in this case in the middle of
persistent Spanish mass protests. But the other projects at the Berlin hackathon are
concerned with particular issues as well, which could potentially bring in specific publics.
It isn’t probable that any will become ‘the privacy aware alternative’ to Facebook.
However, it might even be more productive to not want them to fulfill this role, and
instead look at them in their engagement with particular issues. Precisely here also lies
potential for alliances with the public.25 One example of such a move is given above:
TGS’s News Commons, a space that is not just for friending, but also for practices of
analysis and journalism.<br><br>
At this moment, there seems to be no ‘public’ for privacy in the context of social
networking – at least not for privacy only. Perhaps this is because there is nothing to
share through a notion, that in general, only appeals to the protection of the individual,
despite all academic efforts of nuancing, socializing, or contextualizing the concept.26
But the alternative social networks have much more to offer, both in their concepts
of what social networking means to individual users, and in their ideas about what
technologies could provide to collectives. At the same time, they express high expectancies
from, and requirements of, potential users and publics. It is crucial to think
through these requirements, and in that way, support these networks to push forward
significant issues of our time.<br><br>
<i><h5>With many thanks to the participants of the ‘Hackathon somewhat related to the Berlin
Biennale’. (IN-Berlin, 14-17 May 2012). Special thanks to Spideralex, Christian Grothoff,
and Martin Boeckhout for their critical and useful comments.</i>></h5><br><br>
<h6><br></h6>
<h2>
<sup id="fn1">1.<b>Bennett, Colin J.</b> <i>‘In Defense of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime’</i>, Surveillance & Society 8.4 (2011): 485–496.<a href= "#ref1" title="jump back to footnote 1 in the text."> ↵ </a></sup>
<sup id="fn2">2.<b>Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari.</b> <i> A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,</i>, London: Continuum,2009 (1987).<a href= "#ref2" title="jump back to footnote 2 in the text."> ↵ </a></sup>
<sup id="fn3">3.<b>Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari.</b> <i> A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,</i>, London: Continuum,2009 (1987).<a href= "#ref3" title="jump back to footnote 3 in the text."> ↵ </a></sup>
‘Facebook Alternative Diaspora Goes Live’, BBC, 24 November 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
technology-11828245.<br>
Kleiner, Dmytri. ‘Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12’, @dmytri, 8 November 2012, http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/.<br>
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.<br>
Marres, Noortje. ‘No Issue, No Public: Democratic Deficits after the Displacement of Politics’, PhD
diss., University of Amsterdam, 2005.<br>
______. ‘The Costs of Public Involvement: Everyday Devices of Carbon Accounting and the Materialization of Participation’, Economy and Society 40.4 (2011): 510–533.<br>
Marsh, Heather. ‘Needed Now: A News Commons’, WL Central, 6 November 2011, http://wlcentral.
org/node/2330.<br>
McDonald, Aleecia M. ‘Footprints near the Surf: Individual Privacy Decisions in Online Contexts’, PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2010.<br>
Narayanan, Arvind et al. ‘A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures’, Cornell University Library, 21 February 2012, http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4503.<br>
Nissenbaum, Helen F. ‘Privacy as Contextual Integrity’, Washington Law Review, 79.1 (2004): 119-158.<br>
Stalder, Felix. ‘Autonomy beyond Privacy?’, Surveillance & Society 8.4 (2011): 508-512.<br>
</h2>
<h6><br></h6>
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