Page 250 - The Black Box Book

In response to the dystopia of global corporate surveillance megas-
tructure and geopolitical architecture, which Benjamin Bratton entitled
The Stack (Bratton, 2016), Waag | technology & society formulat-
ed a mission for digital public spaces called the Public Stack in 2019.
The difference between the Stack and the Public Stack lies in the core
values embodied in the principles the latter rests upon, and the de-
sign process it encourages. The Public Stack departs from the private
and state-centric conception of The Stack described by Bratton. While
The Stack is built upon closed design processes resulting in proprietary
technology, the base layer of the Public Stack orbits around common
values of fundamental rights and socioeconomic considerations, which
are embodied in the open design processes involving all stakeholders to
provide democratic governance of digitalisation. The resulting tech layer is
open-source and ethical. There are no users, but digital citizens. A broad
coalition of media and academic institutions was also formed in the Neth-
erlands under the name Public Spaces, supporting public transition to
an open software, whose operations are based on civic values.
Waag Society for old and new media (lately renamed as
Waag Futurelab) in Amsterdam was founded in 1994. It is informed by
the ethos of the feminist hacker movement, as Marleen Stikker, its direc-
tor, is one of the founders of The Digital City (De Digitale Stad, 1994),
the first virtual community introducing free public access to the internet in
Amsterdam. In the 1994, The Digital City was one of the first free internet
providers and also the site where political parties and newspapers made
their first digital steps. The municipality of Amsterdam opened its entire
administrative information system, becoming the first open government.
(Baumgärtel, n.d.) With The Digital City, as well as other online commu-
nities, the line between public infrastructure and art project is unclear.
In 2011, archival work was started under the name of re:DDS project to
make the heritage part of the Amsterdam Museum. (de Haan, 2011) Trying
to retrieve as much as possible of the early days, being hardware, code
and files, and media headlines as ‘web archaeologists excavate a digital
city’ the gathered material became part of the permanent collection of
the museum. (Teffer, 2014) In 2016, under the name The Digital City Re-
vives, the search for old material and the preservation of digital heritage
continued and the case study was honored with a Digital Preservation
Award. (The Digital City revives)
250
Examples of online digital communities that merge art, activism,
cultural infrastructures, and community care, such as The Digital City,
The systerserver, Node9, and many others, have existed on the internet
for more than 20 years, long before the corporate services we use today.
Memory institutions can learn considerably more from their modes of
operation and resilience for their digital cultural infrastructures and pres-
ervation initiatives than from corporate models. Given the fluid nature of
networked art, Annet Dekker speaks of “authentic alliances”. (Dekker,
2018, p. 14) The net creates an environment in which communities are
formed of real people, constituted through technical, social and cultural
matter. From the perspective of the conservator and other professions
involved in the preservation process, it is necessary to work with spec-
ulative and procedural approaches and “ becoming part of a ‘network
of care’ in which a collaborative approach is important to comprehend
the complexities of net art”. (Dekker, 2018, p. 164)
NEAR FUTURE TRANSITIONS
I N D IG I TA L C U R ATIO N
Private big-tech platforms’ responsibilities and rights to moderate con-
tent, as well as the trade-off between censorship and free speech, have
been the subject of a contentious political debate in recent years. We are
in the situation of internet, still as emerging medium without regulation,
brings back an example from history of the telecommunication industry
during its maturing days in the 1970’s. At some point, only phones de-
vices manufactured by the telecom operators themselves could connect
to their network. The same way users of YouTube cannot talk to users of
Facebook because it does not fit the interest of corporations. Imagine if
broadcasters utilized proprietary signals to compete, requiring different
TVs for each TV station. Consider a situation where we were unable to
dial a phone number from one network provider to another. Public institu-
tions and their policies should be more concerned about the situation of
the open internet turning in large part into a proprietary domain.
251