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  • Zachary Loeb – Shackles of Digital Freedom (Review of Qiu, Goodbye iSlave)

    Zachary Loeb – Shackles of Digital Freedom (Review of Qiu, Goodbye iSlave)

    a review of Jack Linchuan Qiu, Goodbye iSlave: a Manifesto for Digital Abolition (Illinois, 2016)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    With bright pink hair and a rainbow horn, the disembodied head of a unicorn bobs back and forth to the opening beats of Big Boi’s “All Night.” Moments later, a pile of poop appears and mouths the song’s opening words, and various animated animal heads appear nodding along in sequence. Soon the unicorn returns, lip-synching the song, and it is quickly joined by a woman whose movements, facial expressions, and exaggerated enunciations sync with those of the unicorn. As a pig, a robot, a chicken, and a cat appear to sing in turn it becomes clear that the singing emojis are actually mimicking the woman – the cat blinks when she blinks, it raises its brow when she does. The ad ends by encouraging users to “Animoji” themselves, something which is evidently doable with Apple’s iPhone X. It is a silly ad, with a catchy song, and unsurprisingly it tells the viewer nothing about where, how, or by whom the iPhone X was made. The ad may playfully feature the ever-popular “pile of poop” emoji, but the ad is not intended to make potential purchasers feel like excrement.

    And yet there is much more to the iPhone X’s history than the words on the device’s back “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” In Goodbye iSlave: a Manifesto for Digital Abolition, Jack Linchuan Qiu removes the phone’s shiny case to explore what “assembled in China” really means. As Qiu demonstrates in discomforting detail this is a story that involves exploitative labor practices, enforced overtime, abusive managers, insufficient living quarters, and wage theft, in a system that he argues is similar to slavery.

    illustration
    First published by Greenpeace Switzerland

    Launched by activists in 2010, the “iSlave” campaign aimed to raise awareness about the labor conditions that had led to a wave of suicides amongst Foxconn workers; those performing the labor summed up neatly as “assembled in China.” Seizing upon the campaign’s key term, Qiu aims to expand it “figuratively and literally” to demonstrate that “iSlavery” is “a planetary system of domination, exploitation, and alienation…epitomized by the material and immaterial structures of capital accumulation” (9). This in turn underscores the “world system of gadgets” that Qiu refers to as “Appconn” (13); a system that encompasses those who “designed” the devices, those who “assembled” them, as well as those who use them. In engaging with the terminology of slavery, Qiu is consciously laying out a provocative argument, but it is a provocation that acknowledges that as smartphones have become commonplace many consumers have become inured to the injustices that allow them to “animoji” themselves. Indeed, it is a reminder that, “Technology does not guarantee progress. It is, instead, often abused to cause regress” (8).

    Surveying its history, Qiu notes that slavery has appeared in a variety of forms in many regions throughout history. Though he emphasizes that even today slavery “persists in its classic forms” (21), his focus remains on theoretically expanding the term. Qiu draws upon the League of Nation’s “1926 Slavery Convention” which still acts as the foundation for much contemporary legal thinking on slavery, including the 2012 Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery (which Qiu includes in his book as an appendix). These legal guidelines expand the definition of what constitutes slavery to include “institutions and practices similar to slavery” (42). The key element for this updated definition is an understanding that it is no longer legal for a person to be “formally and legally ‘owned’ in any jurisdiction” and thus the concept of slavery requires rethinking (45). In considering which elements from the history of slavery are particularly relevant for the story of “iSlavery,” Qiu emphasizes: how the slave trade made use of advanced technologies of its time (guns, magnetic compasses, slave ships); how the slave trade was linked to creating and satisfying consumer desires (sugar); and how the narrative of resistance and revolt is a key aspect of the history of slavery. For Qiu,  “iSlavery” is manifested in two forms: “manufacturing iSlaves” and “manufactured iSlaves.”

    In the process of creating high-tech gadgets there are many types of “manufacturing iSlaves,” in conditions similar to slavery “in its classic forms” including “Congolese mine workers” and “Indonesian child labor,” but Qiu focuses primarily on those working for Foxconn in China. Drawing upon news reports, NGO findings, interviews with former workers, underground publications produced by factor workers, and from his experiences visiting these assembly plants, Qiu investigates many ways in which “institutions and practices similar to slavery” shape the lives of Foxconn workers. Insufficient living conditions, low wages that are often not even paid, forced overtime, “student interns” being used as an even cheaper labor force, violently abusive security guards, the arrangement of life so as to maximize disorientation and alienation – these represent some of the common experiences of Foxconn workers. Foxconn found itself uncomfortably in the news in 2010 due to a string of worker suicides, and Qiu sympathetically portrays the conditions that gave rise to such acts, particularly in his interview with Tian Yu who survived her suicide attempt.

    As Qiu makes clear, Foxconn workers often have great difficulty leaving the factories, but what exits these factories at a considerable rate are mountains of gadgets that go on to be eagerly purchased and used by the “manufactured iSlaves.” The transition to the “manufactured iSlave” entails “a conceptual leap” (91) that moves away from the “practices similar to slavery” that define the “manufacturing iSlave” to instead signify “those who are constantly attached to their gadgets” (91). Here the compulsion takes on the form of a vicious consumerism that has resulted in an “addiction” to these gadgets, and a sense in which these gadgets have come to govern the lives of their users. Drawing upon the work of Judy Wajcman, Qiu notes that “manufactured iSlaves” (Qiu’s term) live under the aegis of “iTime” (Wajcman’s term), a world of “consumerist enslavement” into which they’ve been drawn by “Net Slaves” (Steve Baldwin and Bill Lessard’s term of “accusation and ridicule” for those whose jobs fit under the heading “Designed in California”). While some companies have made fortunes off the material labor of “manufacturing iSlaves,” Qiu emphasizes that many companies that have made their fortunes off the immaterial labor of legions of “manufactured iSlaves” dutifully clicking “like,” uploading photos, and hitting “tweet” all without any expectation that they will be paid for their labor. Indeed, in Qiu’s analysis, what keeps many “manufactured iSlaves” unaware of their shackles is that they don’t see what they are doing on their devices as labor.

    In his description of the history of slavery, Qiu emphasizes resistance, both in terms of acts of rebellion by enslaved peoples, and the broader abolition movement. This informs Qiu’s commentary on pushing back against the system of Appconn. While smartphones may be cast as the symbol of the exploitation of Foxconn workers, Qiu also notes that these devices allow for acts of resistance by these same workers “whose voices are increasingly heard online” (133). Foxconn factories may take great pains to remain closed off from prying eyes, but workers armed with smartphones are “breaching the lines of information lockdown” (148). Campaigns by national and international NGOs can also be important in raising awareness of the plight of Foxconn workers, after all the term “iSlave” was originally coined as part of such a campaign. In bringing awareness of the “manufacturing iSlave” to the “manufactured iSlave” Qiu points to “culture jamming” responses such as the “Phone Story” game which allows people to “play” through their phones vainglorious tale (ironically the game was banned from Apple’s app store). Qiu also points to the attempt to create ethical gadgets, such as the Fairphone which aims to responsibly source its minerals, pay those who assemble their phones a living wage, and push back against the drive of planned obsolescence. As Qiu makes clear, there are many working to fight against the oppression built into Appconn.

    “For too long,” Qiu notes, “the underbellies of the digital industries have been obscured and tucked away; too often, new media is assumed to represent modernity, and modernity assumed to represent freedom” (172). Qiu highlights the coercion and misery that are lurking below the surface of every silly cat picture uploaded on Instagram, and he questions whether the person doing the picture taking and uploading is also being exploited. A tough and confrontational book, Goodbye iSlave nevertheless maintains hope for meaningful resistance.

    Anyone who has used a smartphone, tablet, laptop computer, e-reader, video game console, or smart speaker would do well to read Goodbye iSlave. In tight effective prose, Qiu presents a gripping portrait of the lives of Foxconn workers and this description is made more confrontational by the uncompromising language Qiu deploys. And though Qiu begins his book by noting that “the outlook of manufacturing and manufactured iSlaves is rather bleak” (18), his focus on resistance gives his book the feeling of an activist manifesto as opposed to the bleak tonality of a woebegone dirge. By engaging with the exploitation of material labor and immaterial labor, Qiu is, furthermore, able to uncomfortably remind his readers not only that their digital freedom comes at a human cost, but that digital freedom may itself be a sort of shackle.

    In the book’s concluding chapter, Qiu notes that he is “fully aware that slavery is a very severe critique” (172), and this represents one of the greatest challenges the book poses. Namely: what to make of Qiu’s use of the term slavery? As Qiu demonstrates, it is not a term that he arrived at simply for shock value, nevertheless, “slavery” is itself a complicated concept. Slavery carries a history of horrors that make one hesitant to deploy it in a simplistic fashion even as it remains a basic term of international law. By couching his discussion of “iSlavery” both in terms of history and contemporary legal thinking, Qiu demonstrates a breadth of sensitivity and understanding regarding its nuances. And given the focus of current laws on “institutions and practices similar to slavery” (42) it is hard to dispute that this is a fair description of many of the conditions to which Foxconn workers are subjected – even as Qiu’s comments on coltan miners demonstrates other forms of slavery that lurk behind the shining screens of high-tech society.

    Nevertheless, there is frequently something about the use of the term “iSlavery” that seems to diminish the heft of Qiu’s argument. As the term often serves as a stumbling block that pulls a reader away from Qiu’s account; particularly when he tries to make the comparisons too direct such as juxtaposing Foxconn’s (admittedly wretched) dormitories to conditions on slave ships crossing the Atlantic. It’s difficult not to find the comparison hyperbolic. Similarly, Qiu notes that ethnic and regional divisions are often found within Foxconn factories; but these do not truly seem comparable to the racist views that undergirded (and was used to justify) the Atlantic slave trade. Unfortunately, this is a problem that Qiu sets for himself: had he only used “slave” in a theoretical sense it would have opened him to charges of historical insensitivity, but by engaging with the history of slavery many of Qiu’s comparisons seem to miss the mark – and this is exacerbated by the fact that he repeatedly refers to ongoing conditions of “classic” slavery involved in the making of gadgets (such as coltan mining). Qiu provides an important and compelling window into the current legal framing of slavery, and yet, something about the “iSlave” prevents it from fitting into the history of slavery. It is, unfortunately, too easy to imagine someone countering Qiu’s arguments by saying “but this isn’t really slavery” to which the retort of “current law defines slavery as…” will be unlikely to convince.

    The matter of “slavery” only gets thornier as Qiu shifts his attention from “manufacturing iSlaves” to “manufactured iSlaves.” In recent years there has been a wealth of writing in the academic and popular sphere that critically asks what our gadgets are doing to us, such as Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together and Judy Wacjman’s Pressed for Time (which Qiu cites). And the fear that technology turns people into “cogs” is hardly new: in his 1956 book The Sane Society, Erich Fromm warned “the danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots” (Fromm, 352). Fromm’s anxiety is what one more commonly encounters in discussions about what gadgets turn their users into, but these “robots” are not identical with “slaves.” When Qiu discusses “manufactured iSlaves” he notes that it represents a “conceptual leap,” but by continuing to use the term “slave” this “conceptual leap” unfortunately hampers his broader points about Foxconn workers. The danger is that a sort of false equivalency risks being created in which smartphone users shrug off their complicity in the exploitation of assembly workers by saying, “hey, I’m exploited too.”

    Some of this challenge may ultimately simply be about word choice. The very term “iSlave,” despite its activist origins, seems somewhat silly through its linkage to all things to which a lowercase “i” has been affixed. Furthermore, the use of the “i” risks placing all of the focus on Apple. True, Apple products are manufactured in the exploitative Foxconn factories, and Qiu may be on to something in referring to the “Apple cult,” but as Qiu himself notes Foxconn manufactures products for a variety of companies. Just because a device isn’t an “i” gadget, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t manufactured by an “iSlave.” And while Appconn is a nice shorthand for the world that is built upon the backs of both kinds of “iSlaves” it risks being just another opaque neologism for computer dominated society that is undercut by the need for it to be defined.

    Given the grim focus of Qiu’s book, it is understandable why he should choose to emphasize rebellion and resistance, and these do allow readers to put down the book feeling energized. Yet some of these modes of resistance seem to risk more entanglement than escape. There is a risk that the argument that Foxconn workers can use smartphones to organize simply fits neatly back into the narrative that there is something “inherently liberating” about these devices. The “Phone Story” game may be a good teaching tool, but it seems to make a similar claim on the democratizing potential of the Internet. And while the Fairphone represents, perhaps, one of the more significant ways to get away from subsidizing Appconn it risks being just an alternative for concerned consumers not a legally mandated industry standard. At risk of an unfair comparison, a Fairphone seems like the technological equivalent of free range eggs purchased at the farmer’s market – it may genuinely be ethically preferable, but it risks reducing a major problem (iSlavery) into yet another site for consumerism (just buy the right phone). In fairness, these are the challenges inherent in critiquing the dominant order; as Theodor Adorno once put it “we live on the culture we criticize” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 105). It might be tempting to wish that Qiu had written an Appconn version of Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, but Qiu seems to recognize that simply telling people to turn it all off is probably just as efficacious as telling them not to do anything at all. After all, Mander’s “four arguments” may have convinced a few people – but not society as a whole. So, what then does “digital abolition” really mean?

    In describing Goodbye iSlave, Qiu notes that it is “nothing more than an invitation—for everyone to reflect on the enslaving tendencies of Appconn and the world system of gadgets” it is an opportunity for people to reflect on the ways in which “so many myths of liberation have been bundled with technological buzzwords, and they are often taken for granted” (173). It is a challenging book and an important one, and insofar as it forces readers to wrestle with Qiu’s choice of terminology it succeeds by making them seriously confront the regimes of material and immaterial labor that structure their lives. While the use of the term “slavery” may at times hamper Qiu’s larger argument, this unflinching look at the labor behind today’s gadgets should not be overlooked.

    Goodbye iSlave frames itself as “a manifesto for digital abolition,” but what it makes clear is that this struggle ultimately isn’t about “i” but about “us.”

    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently working towards a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ideologies that develop in response to technological change, and the ways in which technology factors into ethical philosophy – particularly in regards of the way in which Jewish philosophers have written about ethics and technology. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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    Works Cited

    • Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. 2011. Towards a New Manifesto. London: Verso Books.
    • Fromm, Erich. 2002. The Sane Society. London: Routledge.
  • Jürgen Geuter — Liberty, an iPhone, and the Refusal to Think Politically

    Jürgen Geuter — Liberty, an iPhone, and the Refusal to Think Politically

    By Jürgen Geuter
    ~

    The relationship of government and governed has always been complicated. Questions of power, legitimacy, structural and institutional violence, of rights and rules and restrictions keep evading any ultimate solution, chaining societies to constant struggles about shifting balances between different positions and extremes or defining completely new aspects or perspectives on them to shake off the often perceived stalemate. Politics.

    Politics is a simple word but one with a lot of history. Coming from the ancient Greek term for “city” (as in city-state) the word pretty much shows what it is about: Establishing the structures that a community can thrive on. Policy is infrastructure. Not made of wire or asphalt but of ideas and ways of connecting them while giving the structure ways of enforcing the integrity of itself.

    But while the processes of negotiation and discourse that define politics will never stop while intelligent beings exist recent years have seen the emergence of technology as a replacement of politics. From Lawrence Lessig’s “Code is Law” to Marc Andreessen’s “Software Is Eating the World”: A small elite of people building the tools and technologies that we use to run our lives have in a way started emancipating from politics as an idea. Because where politics – especially in democratic societies – involves potentially more people than just a small elite, technologism and its high priests pull off a fascinating trick: defining policy and politics while claiming not to be political.

    This is useful for a bunch of reasons. It allows to effectively sidestep certain existing institutions and structures avoiding friction and loss of forward momentum. “Move fast and break things” was Facebook’s internal motto until only very recently. It also makes it easy to shed certain responsibilities that we expect political entities of power to fulfill. Claiming “not to be political” allows you to have mobs of people hunting others on your service without really having to do anything about it until it becomes a PR problem. Finally, evading the label of politics grants a lot more freedoms when it comes to wielding powers that the political structures have given you: It’s no coincidence that many Internet platform declare “free speech” a fundamental and absolute right, a necessary truth of the universe, unless it’s about showing a woman breastfeeding or talking about the abuse free speech extremists have thrown at feminists.

    Yesterday news about a very interesting case directly at the contact point of politics and technologism hit mainstream media: Apple refused – in a big and well-written open letter to its customers – to fulfill an order by the District Court of California to help the FBI unlock an iPhone 5c that belonged to one of the shooters in last year’s San Bernadino shooting, in which 14 people were killed and 22 more were injured.

    Apple’s argument is simple and ticks all the boxes of established technical truths about cryptography: Apple’s CEO Tim Cook points out that adding a back door to its iPhones would endanger all of Apple’s customers because nobody can make sure that such a back door would only be used by law enforcement. Some hacker could find that hole and use it to steal information such as pictures, credit card details or personal data from people’s iPhones or make these little pocket computers do illegal things. The dangers Apple correctly outlines are immense. The beautifully crafted letter ends with the following statements:

    Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.

    We are challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country. We believe it would be in the best interest of everyone to step back and consider the implications.

    While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.

    Nothing in that defense is new: The debate about government backdoors has been going on for decades with companies, software makers and government officials basically exchanging the same bullets points every few years. Government: “We need access. For security.” Software people: “Yeah but then nobody’s system is secure anymore.” Rinse and repeat. That whole debate hasn’t even changed through Edward Snowden’s leaks: While the positions were presented in an increasingly shriller and shriller tone the positions themselves stayed monolithic and unmoved. Two unmovable objects yelling at each other to get out of the way.

    Apple’s open letter was received with high praise all through the tech-savvy elites, from the cypherpunks to journalists and technologists. One tweet really stood out for me because it illustrates a lot of what we have so far talked about:

    Read that again. Tim Cook/Apple are clearly separated from politics and politicians when it comes to – and here’s the kicker – the political concept of individual liberty. A deeply political debate, the one about where the limits of individual liberty might be is ripped out of the realm of politicians (and us, but we’ll come to that later). Sing the praises of the new Guardian of the Digital Universe.

    But is the court order really exactly the fundamental danger for everybody’s individual liberty that Apple presents? The actual text paints a different picture. The court orders Apple to help the FBI access one specific, identified iPhone. The court order lists the actual serial number of the device. What “help” means in this context is also specified in great detail:

    1. Apple is supposed to disable features of the iPhone automatically deleting all user data stored on the device which are usually in place to prevent device thieves from accessing the data the owners of the device stored on it.
    2. Apple will also give the FBI some way to send passcodes (guesses of the PIN that was used to lock the phone) to the device. This sounds strange but will make sense later.
    3. Apple will disable all software features that introduce delays for entering more passcodes. You know the drill: You type the wrong passcode and the device just waits for a few seconds before you can try a new one.

    Apple is compelled to write a little piece of software that runs only on the specified iPhone (the text is very clear on that) and that disables the 2 security features explained in 1 and 3. Because the court actually recognizes the dangers of having that kind of software in the wild it explicitly allows Apple to do all of this within its own facilities: the Phone would be sent to an Apple facility, the software loaded to the RAM of the device. This is where 2 comes in: When the device has been modified by loading the Apple-signed software into its RAM the FBI needs a way to send PIN code guesses to the device. The court order even explicitly states that Apple’s new software package is only supposed to go to RAM and not change the device in other ways. Potentially dangerous software would never leave Apple’s premises, Apple also doesn’t have to introduce or weaken the security of all its devices and if Apple can fulfill the tasks described in some other way the court is totally fine with it. The government, any government doesn’t get a generic backdoor to all iPhones or all Apple products. In a more technical article than this on Dan Guido outlines that what the court order asks for would work on the iPhone in question but not on most newer ones.

    So while Apple’s PR evokes the threat of big government’s boots marching on to step on everybody’s individual freedoms, the text of the court order and the technical facts make the case ultra specific: Apple isn’t supposed to build a back door for iPhones but help law enforcement to open up one specific phone within their possession connected not to a theoretical crime in the future but the actual murder of 14 people.

    We could just attribute it all to Apple effectively taking a PR opportunity to strengthen the image it has been developing after realizing that they just couldn’t really do data and services, the image of the protector of privacy and liberty. An image that they kicked into overdrive post-Snowden. But that would be too simple because the questions here are a lot more fundamental.

    How do we – as globally networked individuals living in digitally connected and mutually overlaying societies – define the relationship of transnational corporations and the rules and laws we created?

    Cause here’s the fact: Apple was ordered by a democratically legitimate court to help in the investigation of a horrible, capital crime leading to the murder of 14 people by giving it a way to potentially access one specific phone of the more than 700 million phones Apple has made. And Apple refuses.

    Which – don’t get me wrong – is their right as an entity in the political system of the US: They can fight the court order using the law. They can also just refuse and see what the government, what law enforcement will do to make them comply. Sometimes the cost of breaking that kind of resistance overshadow the potential value so the request gets dropped. But where do we as individuals stand whose liberty is supposedly at stake? Where is our voice?

    One of the main functions of political systems is generating legitimacy for power. While some less-than-desirable systems might generate legitimacy by being the strongest, in modern times less physical legitimizations of power were established: a king for example often is supposed to rule because one or more god(s) say so. Which generates legitimacy especially if you share the same belief. In democracies legitimacy is generated by elections or votes: by giving people the right to speak their mind, elect representatives and be elected the power (and structural violence) that a government exerts is supposedly legitimized.

    Some people dispute the legitimacy of even democratically distributed power, and it’s not like they have no point, but let’s not dive into the teachings of Anarchism here. The more mainstream position is that there is a rule of law and that the institutions of the United States as a democracy are legitimized as the representation of US citizens. They represent every US citizen, they each are supposed to keep the political structure, the laws and rules and rights that come with being a US citizen (or living there) intact. And when that system speaks to a company it’s supposed to govern and the company just gives it the finger (but in a really nice letter) how does the public react? They celebrate.

    But what’s to celebrate? This is not some clandestine spy network gathering everybody’s every waking move to calculate who might commit a crime in 10 years and assassinate them. This is a concrete case, a request confirmed by a court in complete accordance with the existing practices in many other domains. If somebody runs around and kills people, the police can look into their mail, enter their home. That doesn’t abolish the protections of the integrity of your mail or home but it’s an attempt to balance the rights and liberties of the individual as well as the rights and needs of all others and the social system they form.

    Rights hardly ever are absolute, some might even argue that no right whatsoever is absolute: you have the right to move around freely. But I can still lock you out of my home and given certain crimes you might be locked up in prison. You have the right to express yourself but when you start threatening others, limits kick in. This balancing act that I also started this essay with has been going on publicly for ages and it will go on for a lot longer. Because the world changes. New needs might emerge, technology might create whole new domains of life that force us to rethink how we interact and which restrictions we apply. But that’s nothing that one company just decides.

    In unconditionally celebrating Cook’s letter a dangerous “apolitical” understanding of politics shows its ugly face: An ideology so obsessed with individual liberty that it happily embraces its new unelected overlords. Code is Law? More like “Cook is Law”.

    This isn’t saying that Apple (or any other company in that situation) just has to automatically do everything a government tells them to. It’s quite obvious that many of the big tech companies are not happy about the idea of establishing precedent in helping government authorities. Today it’s the FBI but what if some agency from some dictatorship wants the data from some dissident’s phone? Is a company just supposed to pick and choose?

    The world might not grow closer together but it gets connected a lot more and that leads to inconsistent laws, regulations, political ideologies etc colliding. And so far we as mankind have no idea how to deal with it. Facebook gets criticized in Europe for applying very puritanic standards when it comes to nudity but it does follow as a US company established US traditions. Should they apply German traditions which are a lot more open when it comes to depictions of nudity as well? What about rules of other countries? Does Facebook need to follow all? Some? If so which ones?

    While this creates tough problems for international law makers, governments and us more mortal people, it does concern companies very little as they can – when push comes to shove – just move their base of operation somewhere else. Which they already do to “optimize” avoid taxes, about which Cook also recently expressed indignant refusal to comply with US government requirements as “total political crap” – is this also a cause for all of us across the political spectrum to celebrate Apple’s protection of individual liberty? I wonder how the open letter would have looked if Ireland, which is a tax haven many technology companies love to use, would have asked for the same thing California did?

    This is not specifically about Apple. Or Facebook. Or Google. Or Volkswagen. Or Nestle. This is about all of them and all of us. If we uncritically accept that transnational corporations decide when and how to follow the rules we as societies established just because right now their (PR) interests and ours might superficially align how can we later criticize when the same companies don’t pay taxes or decide to not follow data protection laws? Especially as a kind of global digital society (albeit of a very small elite) we have between cat GIFs and shaking the fist at all the evil that governments do (and there’s lots of it) dropped the ball on forming reasonable and consistent models for how to integrate all our different inconsistent rules and laws. How we gain any sort of politically legitimized control over corporations, governments and other entities of power.

    Tim Cook’s letter starts with the following words:

    This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake.

    On that he and I completely agree.


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    Jürgen Geuter (@tante) is a political computer scientist living in Germany. For about 10 years he has been speaking and writing about technology, digitalization, digital culture and the way these influence mainstream society. His writing has been featured in Der Spiegel, Wired Germany and other publications as well as his own blog Nodes in a Social Network, on which an earlier version of this post first appeared.

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  • Flat Theory

    Flat Theory

    By David M. Berry
    ~

    The world is flat.[1] 6Or perhaps better, the world is increasingly “layers.” Certainly the augmediated imaginaries of the major technology companies are now structured around a post-retina vision of mediation made possible and informed by the digital transformations ushered in by mobile technologies – whether smartphones, wearables, beacons or nearables – an internet of places and things. These imaginaries provide a sense of place, as well as sense for management, of the complex real-time streams of information and data broken into shards and fragments of narrative, visual culture, social media and messaging. Turned into software, they reorder and re-present information, decisions and judgment, amplifying the sense and senses of (neoliberal) individuality whilst reconfiguring what it means to be a node in the network of post digital capitalism.  These new imaginaries serve as abstractions of abstractions, ideologies of ideologies, a prosthesis to create a sense of coherence and intelligibility in highly particulate computational capitalism (Berry 2014). To explore the experimentation of the programming industries in relation to this it is useful to explore the design thinking and material abstractions that are becoming hegemonic at the level of the interface.

    Two new competing computational interface paradigms are now deployed in the latest version of Apple and Google’s operating systems, but more notably as regulatory structures to guide the design and strategy related to corporate policy. The first is “flat design” which has been introduced by Apple through iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite as a refresh of the aging operating systems’ human computer interface guidelines, essentially stripping the operating system of historical baggage related to techniques of design that disguised the limitations of a previous generation of technology, both in terms of screen but also processor capacity. It is important to note, however, that Apple avoids talking about “flat design” as its design methodology, preferring to talk through its platforms specificity, that is about iOS’ design or OS X’s design. The second is “material design” which was introduced by Google into its Android L, now Lollipop, operating system and which also sought to bring some sense of coherence to a multiplicity of Android devices, interfaces, OEMs and design strategies. More generally “flat design” is “the term given to the style of design in which elements lose any type of stylistic characters that make them appear as though they lift off the page” (Turner 2014). As Apple argues, one should “reconsider visual indicators of physicality and realism” and think of the user interface as “play[ing] a supporting role”, that is that techniques of mediation through the user interface should aim to provide a new kind of computational realism that presents “content” as ontologically prior to, or separate from its container in the interface (Apple 2014). This is in contrast to “rich design,” which has been described as “adding design ornaments such as bevels, reflections, drop shadows, and gradients” (Turner 2014).

    color_family_a_2xI want to explore these two main paradigms – and to a lesser extent the flat-design methodology represented in Windows 7 and the, since renamed, Metro interface – through a notion of a comprehensive attempt by both Apple and Google to produce a rich and diverse umwelt, or ecology, linked through what what Apple calls “aesthetic integrity” (Apple 2014). This is both a response to their growing landscape of devices, platforms, systems, apps and policies, but also to provide some sense of operational strategy in relation to computational imaginaries. Essentially, both approaches share an axiomatic approach to conceptualizing the building of a system of thought, in other words, a primitivist predisposition which draws from both a neo-Euclidian model of geons (for Apple), but also a notion of intrinsic value or neo-materialist formulations of essential characteristics (for Google). That is, they encapsulate a version of what I am calling here flat theory. Both of these companies are trying to deal with the problematic of multiplicities in computation, and the requirement that multiple data streams, notifications and practices have to be combined and managed within the limited geography of the screen. In other words, both approaches attempt to create what we might call aggregate interfaces by combining techniques of layout, montage and collage onto computational surfaces (Berry 2014: 70).

    The “flat turn” has not happened in a vacuum, however, and is the result of a new generation of computational hardware, smart silicon design and retina screen technologies. This was driven in large part by the mobile device revolution which has not only transformed the taken-for-granted assumptions of historical computer interface design paradigms (e.g. WIMP) but also the subject position of the user, particularly structured through the Xerox/Apple notion of single-click functional design of the interface. Indeed, one of the striking features of the new paradigm of flat design, is that it is a design philosophy about multiplicity and multi-event. The flat turn is therefore about modulation, not about enclosure, as such, indeed it is a truly processual form that constantly shifts and changes, and in many ways acts as a signpost for the future interfaces of real-time algorithmic and adaptive surfaces and experiences. The structure of control for the flat design interfaces is following that of the control society, is “short-term and [with] rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (Deleuze 1992). To paraphrase Deleuze: Humans are no longer in enclosures, certainly, but everywhere humans are in layers.

    manipulation_2x

    Apple uses a series of concepts to link its notion of flat design which include, aesthetic integrity, consistency, direct manipulation, feedback, metaphors, and user control (Apple 2014). Reinforcing the haptic experience of this new flat user interface has been described as building on the experience of “touching glass” to develop the “first post-Retina (Display) UI (user interface)” (Cava 2013). This is the notion of layered transparency, or better, layers of glass upon which the interface elements are painted through a logical internal structure of Z-axis layers. This laminate structure enables meaning to be conveyed through the organization of the Z-axis, both in terms of content, but also to place it within a process or the user interface system itself.

    Google, similarly, has reorganized it computational imaginary around a flattened layered paradigm of representation through the notion of material design. Matias Duarte, Google’s Vice President of Design and a Chilean computer interface designer, declared that this approach uses the notion that it “is a sufficiently advanced form of paper as to be indistinguishable from magic” (Bohn 2014). But magic which has constraints and affordances built into it, “if there were no constraints, it’s not design — it’s art” Google claims (see Interactive Material Design) (Bohn 2014). Indeed, Google argues that the “material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion”, further arguing:

    The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts… Motion respects and reinforces the user as the prime mover… [and together] They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus (Google 2014).

    This notion of materiality is a weird materiality in as much as Google “steadfastly refuse to name the new fictional material, a decision that simultaneously gives them more flexibility and adds a level of metaphysical mysticism to the substance. That’s also important because while this material follows some physical rules, it doesn’t create the “trap” of skeuomorphism. The material isn’t a one-to-one imitation of physical paper, but instead it’s ‘magical’” (Bohn 2014). Google emphasises this connection, arguing that “in material design, every pixel drawn by an application resides on a sheet of paper. Paper has a flat background color and can be sized to serve a variety of purposes. A typical layout is composed of multiple sheets of paper” (Google Layout, 2014). The stress on material affordances, paper for Google and glass for Apple are crucial to understanding their respective stances in relation to flat design philosophy.[2]

    • Glass (Apple): Translucency, transparency, opaqueness, limpidity and pellucidity.
    • Paper (Google): Opaque, cards, slides, surfaces, tangibility, texture, lighted, casting shadows.
    Paradigmatic Substances for Materiality

    In contrast to the layers of glass paper-notes-templatethat inform the logics of transparency, opaqueness and translucency of Apple’s flat design, Google uses the notion of remediated “paper” as a digital material, that is this “material environment is a 3D space, which means all objects have x, y, and z dimensions. The z-axis is perpendicularly aligned to the plane of the display, with the positive z-axis extending towards the viewer.  Every sheet of material occupies a single position along the z-axis and has a standard 1dp thickness” (Google 2014). One might think then of Apple as painting on layers of glass, and Google as thin paper objects (material) placed upon background paper. However a key difference lies in the use of light and shadow in Google’s notion which enables the light source, located in a similar position to the user of the interface, to cast shadows of the material objects onto the objects and sheets of paper that lie beneath them (see Jitkoff 2014). Nonetheless, a laminate structure is key to the representational grammar that constitutes both of these platforms.

    armin_hofmann_2
    Armin Hofmann, head of the graphic design department at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design) and was instrumental in developing the graphic design style known as the Swiss Style. Designs from 1958 and 1959.

    Interestingly, both design strategies emerge from an engagement with and reconfiguration of the principles of design that draw from the Swiss style (sometimes called the International Typographic Style) in design (Ashghar 2014, Turner 2014).[3] This approach emerged in the 1940s, and

    mainly focused on the use of grids, sans-serif typography, and clean hierarchy of content and layout. During the 40’s and 50’s, Swiss design often included a combination of a very large photograph with simple and minimal typography (Turner 2014).

    The design grammar of the Swiss style has been combined with minimalism and the principle of “responsive design”, that is that the materiality and specificity of the device should be responsive to the interface and context being displayed. Minimalism is a “term used in the 20th century, in particular from the 1960s, to describe a style characterized by an impersonal austerity, plain geometric configurations and industrially processed materials” (MoMA 2014).

    img-robert-morris-1_125225955286
    Robert Morris: Untitled (Scatter Piece), 1968-69, felt, steel, lead, zinc, copper, aluminum, brass, dimensions variable; at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Photo Genevieve Hanson. All works © 2010 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

    Robert Morris, one of the principle artists of Minimalism, and author of the influential Notes on Sculpture used “simple, regular and irregular polyhedrons. Influenced by theories in psychology and phenomenology” which he argued “established in the mind of the beholder ‘strong gestalt sensation’, whereby form and shape could be grasped intuitively” (MoMA 2014).[4]

    The implications of these two competing world-views are far-reaching in that much of the worlds initial contact, or touch points, for data services, real-time streams and computational power is increasingly through the platforms controlled by these two companies. However, they are also deeply influential across the programming industries, and we see alternatives and multiple reconfigurations in relation to the challenge raised by the “flattened” design paradigms. That is, they both represent, if only in potentia, a situation of a power relation and through this an ideological veneer on computation more generally. Further, with the proliferation of computational devices – and the screenic imaginary associated with them in the contemporary computational condition – there appears a new logic which lies behind, justifies and legitimates these design methodologies.

    It seems to me that these new flat design philosophies, in the broad sense, produce an order in precepts and concepts in order to give meaning and purpose not only in the interactions with computational platforms, but also more widely in terms of everyday life. Flat design and material design are competing philosophies that offer alternative patterns of both creation and interpretation, which are meant to have not only interface design implications, but more broadly in the ordering of concepts and ideas, the practices and the experience of computational technologies broadly conceived. Another way to put this could be to think about these moves as being a computational founding, the generation of, or argument for, an axial framework for building, reconfiguration and preservation.

    Indeed, flat design provides and more importantly serves, as a translational or metaphorical heuristic for both re-presenting the computational, but also teaches consumers and users how to use and manipulate new complex computational systems and stacks. In other words, in a striking visual technique flat design communicates the vertical structure of the computational stack, on which the Stack corporations are themselves constituted. But also begins to move beyond the specificity of the device as privileged site of a computational interface interaction from beginning to end. For example, interface techniques are abstracted away from the specificity of the device, for example through Apple’s “handoff” continuity framework which also potentially changes reading and writing practices in interesting ways and new use-cases for wearables and nearables.

    These new interface paradigms, introduced by the flat turn, have very interesting possibilities for the application of interface criticism, through unpacking and exploring the major trends and practices of the Stacks, that is, the major technology companies. I think that further than this, the notion of layers are instrumental in mediating the experience of an increasingly algorithmic society (e.g. think dashboards, personal information systems, quantified self, etc.), and as such provide an interpretative frame for a world of computational patterns but also a constituting grammar for building these systems in the first place. There is an element in which the notion of the postdigital may also be a useful way into thinking about the question of the link between art, computation and design given here (see Berry and Dieter, forthcoming) but also the importance of notions of materiality for the conceptualization deployed by designers working within both the flat design and material design paradigms – whether of paper, glass, or some other “material” substance.[5]
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    David M. Berry is Reader in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. He writes widely on computation and the digital and blogs at Stunlaw. He is the author of Critical Theory and the Digital, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age , Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, editor of Understanding Digital Humanities and co-editor of Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation And Design. He is also a Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab.

    Back to the essay
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    Notes

    [1] Many thanks to Michael Dieter and Søren Pold for the discussion which inspired this post.

    [2] The choice of paper and glass as the founding metaphors for the flat design philosophies of Google and Apple raise interesting questions for the way in which these companies articulate the remediation of other media forms, such as books, magazines, newspapers, music, television and film, etc. Indeed, the very idea of “publication” and the material carrier for the notion of publication is informed by the materiality, even if only a notional affordance given by this conceptualization. It would be interesting to see how the book is remediated through each of the design philosophies that inform both companies, for example.

    [3] One is struck by the posters produced in the Swiss style which date to the 1950s and 60s but which today remind one of the mobile device screens of the 21st Century.

    [4] There is also some interesting links to be explored between the Superflat style and postmodern art movement, founded by the artist Takashi Murakami, which is influenced by manga and anime, both in terms of the aesthetic but also in relation to the cultural moment in which “flatness” is linked to “shallow emptiness.”

    [5] There is some interesting work to be done in thinking about the non-visual aspects of flat theory, such as the increasing use of APIs, such as the RESTful api, but also sound interfaces that use “flat” sound to indicate spatiality in terms of interface or interaction design. There are also interesting implications for the design thinking implicit in the Apple Watch, and the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality platforms of Oculus Rift, Microsoft HoloLens, Meta and Magic Leap.

    Bibliography