computers-R-stupid

Paddy Johnson offers an eight-years-later look at a Rhizome online exhibition, "Professional Surfer," to see how it holds up. She thinks it doesn't, because (i) its premises weren't that well thought through to begin with, (ii) link rot plagues many of the sites included in the show, and (iii) search, and by implication, surfing the results, has moved to Facebook (really?).

[John Michael Boling's] “Lord of the Flies,” a video in which we see hundreds of cursors descending upon Google [Johnson writes], would make up for [the inadequacies of another Boling piece], though, were it not broken. [I was able to play the Quicktime but not the related MIDI file --tm] It’s a poignant reminder of the one time omni-presence of search. Much of our activity has migrated to Facebook, but the race for traffic and links that this piece implies remains a constant today. Oddly enough, it feels both historical and timely.

Johnson's criticisms (i) and (ii) in the first para above might have been remedied if Rhizome had done more to preserve and contextualize the sites in question. Nasty Nets was "99% archived" by Rhizome before the original disappeared but it was never officially launched as an ArtBase acquisition, i.e. with a front page cover story such as the one Vvork received. Several of us NN members received emailed questions about our involvement with the site but then the writer apparently spaced out and moved on to other pressing concerns. Documentation and Q&A was taken up by people outside Rhizome, such as the graduate student who did the PDF referenced here.

As for the Facebook "migration," it would be nice if Johnson and Rhizome would stop treating FB as an inevitable and necessary feature of "our" lives. Sure, lots of people use it, but there's also a lot of griping about it and seeking of altenatives. If you are on dump.fm or using IRC to have private convos or getting news via your browser or RSS you are closer to the world "Professional Surfer" describes than the social media dystopia being adduced by our thought leaders as the new norm. Just because Johnson has stopped using search engines doesn't mean everyone has.

Addendum: Facebook was held up by Johnson as the current internet standard in another paragraph of her post, concerning Travis Hallenbeck:

Meanwhile, Hallenbeck’s livejournal — a collection of links to niche music/computer sites, personal lists, and quizzes — proved satisfying to click through as well. (My favorite Hallenback find was a quiz that identifies your chemical type and offered an accompanying poem. Hallenbeck got “pheromone”.) None of this seems so dissimilar to Facebook updates now, so it’s hard to explain his importance past perhaps being a valued member of the nerdocracy. While this demographic no longer rules the web, it’s hard to understate the appeal of a indie-music art nerd in 2006. Hallenbeck did this better than anyone.

Possibly there are "Facebook updates" as interesting as Hallenbeck's Livejournal or Tumblr or Pinboard but why make that comparison? You could go the other way and argue that all the interesting stuff is happening outside of Zuck's world of surveillance and commerce.

I have an idea for a panel discussion on digital painting. It will not be held in a sleek museum but in an abandoned garage or squat somewhere. (Obviously somewhere outside of Greater New York.) Solar panels and batteries will be used to power the PCs and laptops of the panelists, as well as a projector. Use of phones or pads will be discouraged without a bluetooth drawing tablet for serious work. The event will not be "streamed."
The topic will be digital presets of paint programs, the philosophical baggage of "brushes" and the idea of the "canvas" or "neutral surface." Examples will be projected, and the panelists will demonstrate the relative merits of particular techniques. Not for technique's sake, but as a catalog of signifiers and the creation of chains of meaning out of same. Is this "brush stroke" skeumorphic? Does that matter? Is this one a gimmick? Does it matter if the software is "proprietary"? How does printing the image change it?
One ironclad rule: if any panelist uses the word "market" he or she will be excused and sent home.

One of the reasons I didn't sign up for Facebook back when everyone else did was its limitation on image formats.
For years Facebook's big innovation, which helped them "scale" this Ivy League college dating concept to world-dominating levels, was to take every image you uploaded and convert it to a jpeg. So if I was going to go on Facebook as an "artist working with animated GIFs" I would essentially have to say trust me, I know this frozen, mushy image doesn't look like much but if you click this link, over on my website you'll see it really animates in a cool way!
Years later, GIFs became a thing and Facebook had to deal with them. Initially they came up with a kind of fake GIF alternative, transcoding GIFs you uploaded to mp4 video files. If you had any variations in the frame rate that you built into your GIF, tough luck. More recently, Facebook partnered with a startup called Giphy (pronounced with a hard G -- just kidding -- they don't do that), allowing you to embed a GIF file hosted on Giphy. Either way, it's still treated like a frozen image until you click a "play" button. All this is ludicrous if you have a Tumblr account, or an "indie"-type blog, you just post a GIF and voila! -- it plays in anyone's browser without loading from elsewhere or requiring a plugin.

With all this as background, I read about Facebook's latest attempt to work GIFs into their formula, Facebook Testing GIFs on Page Post, Ads:

GIFs are slowly starting to creep into the Facebook News Feed. While GIFs have been supported (though not in auto-play fashion) for personal posts since May, the company is testing the feature on page posts. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed this to Facebook: "GIFs can be a fun and compelling way to communicate, so we’ve started testing GIF support in posts and boosted posts for a small percentage of Facebook Pages. We will evaluate whether it drives a great experience for people before rolling it out to more Pages."

Note the language, GIFs "creep" into the news feed. I had to do some research to understand that "personal posts" means content put up by you, the hapless "free" user, and "page posts" means "paid posts." GIFs aren't really supported in personal posts, for the reasons described above. And the GIFs creeping into ad pages are Giphy embeds.
Why does all this matter? It's funny to me that so much energy goes into taming an anarchic format, especially since we are being told by the art and technology websites that we must embrace the tamers because that's where The People are now.

Am still mulling over Dorothy Howard's call on Rhizome for radicals to embrace Facebook and start "groups" (where users create secret or non-secret circles of "friends" within the larger Facebook ecosystem). When commenters (including yrs truly) criticized this idea, Howard responded with a veiled ad hominem argument that we were "privileged" and therefore, presumably, compromised to speak. Here is a slightly condensed version of this colloquy:

pastasauce: ...rather than roll up your sleeves and learn HTML and make your own thing, you've instead chosen to "work within the system" and create another dumb Facebook group, add all your friends to it, and wait for the likes to roll in.

tm: Pastasauce's notion of sleeve-rolling and HTML-learning (if it rises to the level of a notion above hardcore trolling) is scary for many people ("what, just put up a site and wait for people to find me?") but that direction offers a hope of independence, as opposed to Howard's "learn to embrace the system" accommodation.

howard*: I personally don't think independence should be constituted by who can code. That would be derived from the systematic opportunities given to some privileged members of society to acquire such knowledge required to participate in resistance.

tm: I've been "indie" on the web for about 15 years but I don't consider myself a "coder." It's possible to host content on the web outside of Facebook without any specialized knowledge. There are many sites looking to host content, and bots crawling all of them for searchable information.

Howard's response employs a rhetorical strategy that has been called "privilege shaming." It's difficult to combat, because it creates an absurd race to the bottom to establish that both speakers have the same "street" bona fides. Let's look closely at the phrasing. Pastasauce didn't mention "coding," he (let's assume it's a he) suggested "learning HTML" as a way to put up web content without joining Facebook. That isn't actually necessary -- plenty of sites will host you without any HTML knowledge. And in any case the HTML knowledge to create a web page consists of handful of "tags" that can be mastered in an afternoon. Nevertheless, Howard translates "one who is learning HTML" to "one who can code," a substantial leap. From there, Howard decries the coder as having a "systematic opportunity" that non-coders lack. If we were racing to the bottom, we would point out that anyone who could write the sentence "Jürgen Habermas identifies the public sphere as a historical condition emerging in the late 18th century, spurred by the merger of state and private life under capitalism concurrent with the abolishment of feudal states" probably has had educational "systemic opportunities" that the rank and file Facebook user does not have. (Howard would then have to establish that she is an autodidact who came from nothing, and yet was not "privileged" by her own pursuit of knowledge.) Ugh.
But instead let's just point out that the Facebook owners "can code" and that Howard suggests we ignore this ultimate trump card control over all discourse on Facebook. If an offending word or image suddenly disappears from Howard's Facebook group discussion she can't change it back -- she must petition her feudal overlords for redress. In order to be "street" she must treat the owners of the roads as benign and invisible. That's just not very radical.

*Update, Dec 2015: Sometime after the discussion Howard's screenname was changed to Vaughn88, so this comment is no longer attributed to "Dorothy Howard."