master class // Critical Infrastructure Studies, from Interface to Network

28May
by Lori Emerson

In preparation for today’s workshop I suggested you read excerpts from Reading Writing Interfaces. A couple other readings I’ll be drawing on today are “Against the Frictionless Interface! An Interview with Lori Emerson” and “What’s Wrong With the Internet & How to Fix It: An Interview with John Day.”

I hope to use these readings as the baseline for a discussion that will roughly unfold as follows:

  • I’ll begin by discussing why “critical infrastructure studies” might be a useful term to open up a new field of study, especially a more expansive way of thinking about the place of Digital Humanities
  • Then I’ll move on to talk about the key ideas in Reading Writing Interfaces and how the Media Archaeology Lab shaped my thinking in that book
  • How my research continues to focus on a crucial period of 1982-1986 but with a shift to looking at the history and pre-history of the Internet, especially TCP/IP
  • Then I’d like to move to the present and discuss what it currently means to be on the Internet for many people and how you a couple tools that make it alarmingly clear the way in which profit and capital saturates every single one of our clicks online.

At this point in the discussion, I’d like you to download a couple revealing extensions to your Chrome browser and/or an add-on to your Firefox browser to clearly visualize what’s happening when you’re on the web; I use both browsers so I encourage you to download both but it’s also fine if you just want to play with one.

  • open up Firefox and install Lightbeam – an add-on that “shines a light on who’s watching you” by way of interactive visualizations that show you the first and third party sites you’re often unwittingly interacting with on the web
  • now open up Chrome and install Disconnect – a browser extension that stops major third parties from tracking the webpages you go to
  • have any of you used these tools before? anything revealing or surprising?

With this groundwork, I would like to use the rest of the workshop to think as expansively, broadly, and imaginatively about what an alternative Internet might look like – one that we built ourselves, imagining for the moment that we can build whatever structure we dream up.  Here, then, are some contemporary examples of Other Networks I would like you to explore and/or experiment with:

Because Tor has become synonymous with criminal activity, for the sake of educating you, here is a bit more on what Tor is and why you might like to use it. Tor is primarily a privacy network that allows you to access the surface Internet without being tracked; it also allows you to access the deep web/darknet – any site or material that’s on the Internet but not indexed by search engines; keep in mind that most of the deep web/darknet is dedicated to innocent forums, blogs, essays and so on; because of the protection it offers, the darknet is attractive to activists in oppressive regimes as well as government agencies.

Why use Tor? While the Tor browser will work much slower than Chrome or Firefox, if you value privacy or if you would like to find a way to circumvent the online tracking we discussed earlier, you might like to give it a try. You might also give it a try if you would like to become a more informed, more active Internet user.

Some warnings:

    • not surprisingly, Tor does not guarantee perfect anonymity; if you don’t use a Virtual Private Network in addition to Tor, people can still see you’re using Tor even if they can’t necessarily see what sites you’re visiting; hopefully it goes without saying that you shouldn’t use a university VPN – instead consider purchasing the very inexpensive IPVanish and take a look at tips here and here to understand better how VPN works with Tor
    • don’t Torrent over Tor and especially don’t use BitTorrent and Tor together
    • according to the Tor website, avoid opening  .doc and .pdf documents while on Tor as there seems to be a way to reveal your IP address once you do this
    • try to use HTTPS versions of websites; Tor encrypts your traffic to and within the Tor network but to ensure encryption at your final destination, try to also use the HTTPS Everywhere extension
    • to make sure you’re not tracked down if you inadvertently visit a website that’s criminal in nature, turn off scripts and plugins in the Tor options (according to their website, you do this by clicking the button just before the address bar).
    • be very cautious about clicking on links on Tor – try to only use known directories to reach authenticated destinations.

Here are a very few safe Tor links that have worked for me:

  • search engine TORCH at http://xmh57jrzrnw6insl.onion/
  • search engine DuckDuckGo at http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/
  • the first issue of a Tor-hosted literary journal, The Torist (pdf) at http://toristinkirir4xj.onion/issue1.pdf
  • and, surprisingly, Facebook! at https://www.facebookcorewwwi.onion

If you’d like to continue thinking about these issues post-workshop, one place to start is to think about the repercussions of the underlying structure of the Internet – especially in the context of how the structure might create a certain power dynamic that excludes (women, minorities, underprivileged communities, those who are less technically savvy) more than it includes. Questions I’ll leave you with:

  • What does a cooperatively owned Internet look like and why might we want one? If you need help getting started, consider checking out Platform Cooperativism.
  • What does a non-profit, non-commercial network look like?
  • What does a feminist network look like? Can the Internet be feminist? These 15 “Feminist Principles of the Feminist Internet” might help you get started.  You might also like to look at this interview with Jac sm Kee who has been deeply involved in the Association for Progressive Communication’s (APC) Women’s Rights Programme; Kee states that “to start, a feminist Internet is one where everyone has universal, equal and meaningful access to an open and transformative Internet to enable the exercise of all of our rights, to play, to create, to form communities, to organize for change, in freedom and pleasure.”