Afterblog

Information As Essence, Essentially As Information

Net neutrality is not a technical issue. It’s not a battle between telecom titans and online content providers. What’s at stake in net neutrality is not the future of social networking or the legal means to obtain multimedia. Net neutrality is an issue of modern selfhood and it’s shifting definition.

Warehouses of servers hum silently across the world, constantly updating data structures which aim to aggregate the personal preferences of individuals into monolithic demographics. An algorithm slithers through emails and quizzes on Facebook, linking data strings represented by avatars which have cups of coffee, dreams, and aspirations. As the shoreline of web 2.0 moves further inland on the consciousness of society, the internet becomes less an entity to which consumers “plug in,” and more of an organic extension of the individual self. Industrialization devolved human to consumer. Informationalization will devolve consumer to base components, like and dislike, impulse and basic need, and privacy will be given up at the first inkling of convenience and “progress.”

When information permeates every aspect of modern life, then at some level it ceases to be information. For instance, genetic information exists a priori to cognitive reasoning, which discovers it’s source at the molecular level. Once the genome is decoded, then it is re-encoded into human language, which is representational of the genome itself.  The discovery of the genome is a self realization of the genetic information which self replicates. Non-genetic information follows along these same lines. It self replicates recursively,  but finds it’s source a priori within another capacity. A final paper is composed of data, produced by keystrokes, which are made by my basic motor functions, which are controlled by my impulse to express my thesis, which is shaped by my prior experience and observation, which drew from the expression and thus experience of others, etc. In this way information is not only an expression of life and reality, but the source of it as well.

The ontology of the internet dictates that all information is capable of classification, and that all information when accessed, produces new sets of information deriving from the original set. Companies like Google, aggregate source information from content creators, then use access information to generate smart advertising revenue. This revenue is a byproduct of extensive storehouses of consumer access data, which build composite consumer identities of actual people. These are the true avatars of the internet, not self pictures taken at arms length. It is behind the scenes of the end user experience where value is assessed, where the economic engine of web 2.0 hums quietly. With every search of a subject, your online identity is more clearly defined, your personality more deeply entrenched in between lines of code. Every time a friend is contacted on a social networking sight, the connection between the two of you is scanned, analyzed, and mined for demographic data.

Numeric Strings and Patent Trolls

Personally identifiable data is protected by law. A breach of a system which nets a hacker the social security and credit card numbers of a company’s clients is very clearly against the law. Why does this data exist in a class separate from all other personal data on the internet? Why is it made so freely available to large private interests? Information and administrative access are apparently assigned precedence on the merits of their source monetary value. The social security number, in it’s capacity as American identification number, is a hot commodity on the internet. With a social security number a company has access to the inner workings of a person’s life. Medical and financial records, official business, address and name, all tied to a single easily identifiable string of numeric code. This string of digits links to a numeric value which denotes the financial trustworthiness of a person, the credit score. Banks lend capital based on this indexable single piece of data. Individual futures are shaped by this 3 digit string. The new information economy is not industry based upon information. Informational economy means that information is the absolute basis of all economic activity. Information is capital, and power is concentrated in those who know most.
American law protects private interests first and foremost in a lot of cases. By protecting private interest there is a utilitarian belief that the needs of more people will be met by the free market, that economic need is best served by the rampant success of a powerful few. In this model, for every innovative idea, there is a “Seldon patent,” where money changes hands and economic activity is artificially created by legislation without initiative. Apple, a company known for it’s proprietary technology, recently became the target of a  patent infringement lawsuit brought by a company known as “St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants.” St. Clair sued and won for $25 million dollar in damages from Sony in 2001 and $34 million in damages from Canon in 2003. The patents in question in all three cases involved technology used by digital cameras. The patented material includes:

1. 459: Take image contained within lens and store in some type of memory.
2. 219: Display the picture that will be taken in some type of display window.
3. 010: Push button in order to capture image.
4. 899: Make images contained within some type of memory and make them viewable in some sort of digital camera roll.

Patents like this are vague enough to be enforceable against any producer of cameras that use a digital medium, and they are. St. Clair has made in excess of $60 million dollars from court decisions and licensing fees since 1994. Patent trolls like St. Clair are one of many examples of the current system of intellectual property being broken. Under pretense of fair compensation for artists and inventors, intellectual property has become a means of perpetual control for established economic powerhouses. By patenting source code, vendors like Microsoft and Apple cut users off both from the ability to customize systems for which they “own,” as well as mask the operabitily of the means which their personal data is expressed. Open source development is hindered by the fact that Microsoft and Apple have entered into proprietary agreements with many hardware manufacturers, and thus have bridged the gap between copyright and patent. Property, in this sense, is a luxury of those who can not only afford it, but who can lobby best for it.

Code, In Closing, Enclosing Code

The law which handles information is the law which handles all other laws. Code is code. Code about code self referentially encompasses all other code. The law says do not kill. The code says do not kill unless. Applicability of code, both  in software and law, is a consequent of meta-information which wraps around the code itself. Codified law arises from need which remains unnamed in the actual law. The law implicitly deals with social need by explicitly codifying the extent to which the state can enforce protections of that need. Software code deals in the architecture of lesser code, setting boundaries by which information can be controlled to heed more refined code. These are separate branches of the same logical family.Both are self replicating processes, expressions of a dynamic and self replicating consciousness.

Many of the arguments set forth previously in this paper are not encompassed in a pure vision of net neutrality. Net neutrality as a cause deals only with the non-discrimination of data passing through networks, and the tightening of restrictions on ISPs when dealing with content delivery. It is the need which this type of legislation addresses, that warrants a reexamination of all the ways which we currently deal with information. The cataclysmic paradigm shift, caused by the explosion of information technology at the end of last century, is a revolution which can never be undone. The free internet is a direct representation of the collective consciousness. It is vast and organic, constantly evolving, both reflective of society and empowered to shape it. Personal identity will never be as personal as it once was, but it is a fundamental right of people to have the ability to shape their identity themselves.

If we consider the internet in it’s entirety, as an expression of humanity as a whole, then it becomes the most invaluable tool in all of history. The internet contains the informational essence of all of our accomplishment as well as our downfalls as a species. It contains our art as well as the secrets of our industry. Written into the very fabric of it’s code is logic which has progressed over thousands of years, beneficially evolving us more drastically than any other species on the planet. This logic is our human defense, our adaptation which propelled us beyond the niche given us by physical limitation. This same logic drove us to draft laws, to constantly struggle toward an equilibrium for all people. The internet can be the Utopian democracy for which we’ve always strived, or it can be another vulgar expression of our primal greed.