Digital Identities Patterns in
Information Flows Talk given at the Intermedia
Departement, Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest February 22, 23, 2000,
edited and updated: July 2000 © Felix Stalder
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Identity is, in large parts, dependent on communication.
What one can be and what can be one is determined in
interaction. If this interaction takes place through communication
media, it consists primarily of exchanges of information. The shapes of
such identity-building exchanges are molded by the media in which they
take place. If these media change, then the possible and actual shapes
of identity change with them. This essay explores the conceptual
framework of informational identity in regard to some the emerging
shapes developed by cultural activists within interactive media
environments. But first, a flash back. |
Turkle, Sherry (1995). Life on the
Screen. Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon &
Schuster
Steven G. Jones (ed.) (1997) Virtual Culture:
Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. London: Sage
|
Prologue: In the summer of 1556 a man walked
into a small village in the French Pyrenees. He declared himself to be
Martin Guerre, the very same who had disappeared without a trace 8 years
before. A controversy ensued. Was the man really the person he claimed
to be, or was he an impostor assuming someone else's identity? The man
could recall intimate details about Martin Guerre's life, but he seemed
to look a bit different to what most villagers remembered. How much
could a person change in eight years? And how accurate were personal
memories in a time where there were no pictures of average people? |
Zemon Davis, Natalie (1983).
The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press |
After some initial dispute the village life settled back
to normal, with Martin Guerre as one of its members. Until the day he
decided to sell some of his properties. This was too much for Martin's
younger brother who, suspicious from the beginning, brought him to
court. A long case began. One after another, the villagers were invited
to testify. Most of them had no reason to distrust his wife, Bertrande,
who had accepted him as her husband. However, doubts remained. The local
shoemaker, for example, still had a model of the foot of Martin Guerre,
taken before he had left the village, and the feet of the man who
returned were undoubtedly smaller. This was unheard of. But was it
impossible? |
Abstract
of Zemon Davis's book. |
In the meantime some people had been found who claimed
to recognize the man, but not as Martin Guerre, but as Arnaud du Tilh a
man of ill-repute from Gascony. The local judge was confused, whom could
he trust? There were claims against claims. Eventually, he sent the case
to Toulouse, the nearest major town. There a new judge examined more
than 150 witnesses. Most important were the facts that Bertrande was a
woman of good reputation, and that Martin actually bore a physical
resemblance to his sisters. While there were people who claimed to know
him under a different name, the judge decided that it was better to
leave unpunished a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one. Just
as he was about to clear all charges, another man appeared who also
claimed to Martin Guerre. Comparing the two, all memories were refreshed
and even Bertrande had to admit that this was her real husband. Arnaud
du Tilh was convicted and hanged. |
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Identity an informational approach: The
case of Martin Guerre illustrates a number of aspects which underlie the
dynamics of the shaping of identity in general. Identity is dynamic and
unstable; it is the result of negotiations between claims and
counterclaims; it reflects and defines the relationships between
individuals and their environment; and, the way identity is built or
deconstructed is deeply dependent on the communication technologies
available. Identity, then, is not primarily an intrinsic property of the
person or the thing identified, but a social characteristic emerging
from interaction. The media that shape this interaction shape the
possible forms of what can emerge. Arnaud du Tilh could assume, at least
temporarily, the identity of Martin Guerre because he lived in a
face-to-face culture and the only available means of reliable
identification continuous interaction had been interrupted
long enough to make it unavailable. There were no established
technologies or techniques photographs, signatures, or finger
prints that would have allowed the bridging of a gap of 8 years.
Even what we nowadays might accept as an objective identifier the
shoemaker's model was of uncertain reliability for Guerre's
contemporaries. There was no agreement on how to interpret the fact that
the new Martin Guerre's feet were smaller than the model created from
them more than a decade earlier. Maybe it was possible that feet could
shrink? Perhaps the shoemaker himself was unreliable? |
McLuhan, Marshall (1964).
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York:
McGraw-Hill |
But what is the stuff that identity is made of? There
are at least as many approaches to this question as there are
disciplines of thought. Psychologists tend to relate identity to
self-awareness: who one believes to be in relation to others. For
sociologists, identity, in the classic formulation of Peter Berger
(1963), is "socially bestowed, socially maintained and socially
transformed." It is sometimes analyzed in terms of behaviour that allows
to recognize someone as a member of a specific group. Identity, then,
exists simultaneously on an individual and a group level. In a
philosophical tradition, identity relates to the problems of permanence
(amid change) and of unity (amid diversity). How can we know that one
thing is still the same, even though it has changed, and, how can we
know that certain things belong together, even though they are
different? For cybernetic theorists, identity is a communicational ideal
in which messages are received exactly as sent: identity is created by a
signal without noise. |
Berger, Peter L. (1963).
Invitation to sociology: a humanistic perspective. New York:
Doubleday. |
For the present purposes an exploration of new
shapes of identity in media environments we can combine the notion
of a social construction with an interest in the relationship between
permanence and change. Identity, then, can be understood as a pattern
arising from mediated information exchanges. This pattern, though
flexible, needs to be permanent enough to be recognized across time and
space. The informational pattern includes two separate but related sets
of information. The first one concerns the internal unity of the entity
identified. This patterns makes it possible to recognize that entity is
indeed one consistent thing, and not two or more. In other words, the
thing identified can be called an single entity, and is not just an
assembly of different people or things. For a set of information to
create a distinct pattern, rather than randomness, it must be ordered by
some characteristics shared by all elements. A group of people standing
at a street corner waiting for the light to turn green in order cross
the street has no identity. The commonality waiting at a street
light is too ephemeral to create any unity among the people
waiting which would allow their common definition them across time and
space. |
Castells, Manuel (1996).
The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture, Vol. I. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK:
Blackwell |
While one set of information creates patterns in terms
of inclusion, the other creates patterns in relation to exclusion. For
an identity to emerge, it must not only be clear what belongs to it, but
also, what doesn't. Exclusion allows differentiation between the thing
identified and its environment. Cultural identity, for example, is often
created by exclusion of some, while it is often somewhat elusive what
exactly is the commonality. Anglophone Canadians often answer the
question about who they are with: "We are not Americans!" |
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Identity, then, is a pattern that emerges from the sum
of all the information which defines what something - a person, an
organization, an artifact is and what it is not. As a pattern that
is recognizable as a whole, it serves as a short-cut to deal quickly
with large amounts of information, and reduce it to its seemingly
essential qualities. In this sense, identity can be understood as
meta-information. Information about information. Whereas the American
anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1973) famously defined information as "a
difference which makes a difference" we could say the same thing about
identity. Identity is a pattern (inclusion) that makes a difference
(exclusion). What form this informational pattern takes on, and what
differences can be made, is deeply shaped, though not determined, by the
media through which the information circulates and in which the pattern
emerges. |
Bateson, Gregory (1973).
Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballentine
Books |
The case of Martin Guerre illustrates that, if direct
physical continuity is interrupted, the relationship between the
informational pattern identifying and the physical entity identified is
problematic. Layers of mediation make it difficult to assess the
character of the relationship between the physical entity and the
communicated identity. At least four types of relationships between the
physical and the informational are possible. |
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Physical and digital
identity Building on the work of the Australian privacy
scholar Roger Clarke (1997, 1996) we can differentiate between four sets
of relationships between physical entities which could be
individuals, groups, organizations, animals, robots etc. and the
informational patterns they create: anonymity, identification,
pseudonymity and collective identity. |
Clarke,
Roger (1997). Chip-Based ID: Promise and Peril. Invited Address to a
Workshop on 'Identity cards, with or without microprocessors: Efficiency
versus confidentiality', at the International Conference on Privacy,
Montreal, 23-26 September 1997 |
Physical Entity <=> Informational
Pattern |
Type of Identity |
No recognizable relationship |
Anonymous ID |
One to one |
Full ID |
One to many |
Pseudonymous ID |
Many to one |
Collective ID | |
Clarke,
Roger (1996). Privacy in Smart Card Applications in The Retail Financial
Sector. Paper prepared for the Centre for Electronic Commerce, Monash
University and The Australian Commission For The Future
|
r2c1 |
|
For an identity to be anonymous, it must not be possible
to create a link between the informational pattern and the physical
entity which created it. At the moment, this is relatively easy to
achieve on the Internet. Using services such as anonymizer.com, an
anonymous remailer, it is possible to post to the Internet email
messages that are, in effect, untraceable to the source of their origin.
Similar are services such as hotmail.com, which are designed so that
anyone can sign up for an email address without proof of identity, and
geocities.com, where anyone can sign-up for webspace and host an
Internet website. Both reveal their electronic origin, but this does not
necessarily provide a link beyond the digital. Such tools put the means
of relatively anonymous communication into the hands of everyone.
However, conceptually, this is not much different from classical
literary nom de plume or anonymous publishing made possible by
the printing press. While it has been relatively difficult to remain
anonymous in physical space, it is much easier on-line. Hence, it has
become a standard option of communication. Hackers are one of the groups
that are proud of their well known digital identities, kept carefully
separate from their physical ones. Some are virtual superstars, giving
interviews while remaining anonymous. Their stories can be found in mass
media almost daily: "Maxim" who stole the credit card data of 300.000
people and tried to sell it off over the Internet, or "Mixter" who wrote
one of the programs used in distributed denial-of-service attacks on
websites, but who in interviews denied all responsibility for them. |
Anomymizer Mixter
interview with ZDNet (10.02.2000) |
The inverse to anonymity is full identification. Full
identification makes the link between the physical person and the
informational identity stable and unambiguous for all contexts
concerned. For centuries, artifacts have been developed that helped to
create and maintain such a relationship. Passports, including the name,
the signature and the photo of the person and, sometimes, fingerprints
and identification numbers, are such artifacts. To tamper with them,
that is, to weaken the link between the information they contain and the
person described, is universally outlawed. On the Internet, we can
distinguish between "weak" and "strong" identification. Weak
identification is used for communication where trust can be assumed.
Most people send emails under their own name and in most cases there is
no reason to doubt the veracity of the identification. We simply trust
that the person who sends us the email really is the same as she appears
to be. However, such trust cannot be assumed everywhere. Strong
identification refers to the fact that means are available to check the
accuracy of the identification, either through a third party or through
technical means (e.g. electronic fingerprints). As the Internet becomes
more and more an environment of commerce, new technologies are being
introduced to create new ways to deal with creating, or avoiding, full
identification. Usually, the question arising from the struggle around
this type of identity are framed in terms of privacy (e.g. control of
personal data) and authentication (e.g. digital signatures). |
Schneier, Bruce. Biometrics: Uses and
Abuses. Inside Risks 110, Communications of the ACM, vol 42,
n 8, Aug 1999.
|
Somewhere in between these two extremes of the
relationship between the informational pattern and the physical entity
lies the concept of pseudonymity. A pseudonym is an identifier which
makes it possible to create several parallel identities that allow
identification of limited aspects of the person in a particular context
but makes it impossible to create full identification across all
contexts. Different Pseudonymous IDs can stand along side to one
another, each identifying aspects of the same person, but unrelated to
one another. A person can use several independent identifiers, each
revealing truthfully certain aspects of her physical identity. The same
person can be identified in one context as a person with AIDS and in
another context as a qualified engineer looking for employment. Each
informational segment strongly to creating an identity for the person,
however, there might be good reasons for wanting to keep these two
identities separate. |
Zero Knowledge Freedom.net |
An artists who is active in several fields may choose to
develop distinct identities to make it easier for the audience to assess
his products. DJs, for example, routinely release material under several
names, one for each style in which they create music. Effectively, they
become known to different audiences as different artists, thus avoiding
the distortion of the coherence of the informational pattern that is
their identity. A distortion that would ensue by releasing overly
heterogeneous material. For DJs, working under different names does not
necessarily mean disguising who they are, but creating the freedom to
experiment while maintaining easily recognizable identities. |
DJs
and their pseudonyms |
The inverse of one person creating several identities is
several people creating one single informational identity. A Collective
ID is a single coherent pattern that represents any number of people.
The relationship between the collective identity and the individual
identity can vary. In some cases, the Collective ID is dependent on
particular individuals. A rock band, for example, usually survives only
a limited number of line-up changes. In other cases, the informational
pattern of a Collective ID can take on life of its own and become more
or less independent of any individual member, though, of course, not of
members as such. The football team AC Milan has a distinct identity
which it maintains through a constantly changing line-up. |
|
Each of the types of ID has very different dynamics in
terms of stability and flexibility, each type is based on different
technologies and embroiled in different political tensions and
represents different cultural potentials. The Anonymous ID is highly
flexible but intrinsically unstable. For an Anonymous ID stability is
the seed of its own deconstruction because it is based on an internal
contradiction. On the one hand, for an identity to emerge certain
predictable patterns must be created. However, the clearer the patterns
emerge, the more information they reveal about their creator(s). The
richer the patterns become, the easier it becomes to identify the same
pattern in a different context, one which, perhaps, makes it possible to
identify the person(s) creating the pattern. Theodore Kaczynski, for
example, kept his Anonymous ID, the Unabomber, for almost 17 years, but
was identified after publishing a lengthy manifesto in the mass media.
His brother recognized his particular pattern of argumentation and
called the police. Effectively, any code can be cracked with sufficient
attention, and the more famous an ID becomes, the more it focuses
attention. For a hacker, then, fame is a double-edged sword. Equally for
artists. Only very few noms des plumes have proven to be impenetrable.
The most famous case is, perhaps, the person who maintains the identity
of Thomas Pynchon. Although his or her novels are highly acclaimed and
read around the world, the person who actually writes the books remains
unknown. On the Internet a number of attempts try to seriously restrict
the ease of using anonymous communication, both through legal means, for
example by requiring services such as national versions of hotmail.com
or geocities.com to establish a Full ID for their users (as currently
discussed in France) as well as through technological means (tracing).
|
Thomas
Pynchon The
Unabomber's Manifesto |
A Full ID, on the other hand, is very stable but of
limited flexibility. Particularly if such an ID is maintained by
organizations that are built to create stability, for example,
governmental organizations, then changes on that level become near
impossible. The Internet has created additional limitations for people
who are fully identified to reinvent themselves. Entered into searchable
data bases are records of even casual communication. For example posts
to an archived email list, or to a news group, can be accessed
effortlessly for, possibly, a long time by anyone with even the most
basic knowledge of search engines. The effects of this are largely
unexplored. |
Nettrace:
Finding people |
More flexibility than the Full ID but more stability
than Anonymous ID characterizes the Pseudonymous IDs. They are flexible
in the sense that any number of such IDs can be created and exist
parallel to the earlier versions. They are stable in the sense that they
are not prone to the same internal contradiction as the Anonymous ID.
|
|
The type of ID that is the most stable and the most
flexible at the same time is the Collective ID. It can take on any kind
of form, since it need not, but can, represent identified individuals.
On the other hand, since it can be independent of any particular person,
or entity, it can be more stable than any of the (potentially changing)
physical entities it depends on. Due to the potential of simultaneous
flexibility and durability, it can take on any shape that is made
possible by the particular configuration of communication technologies
through which its patterns are created and maintained. Due to the high
flexibility and stability and the still not yet fully explored
possibilities of media spaces some of the most interesting and
innovative experiments of cultural activists involve the creation of new
shapes of collective IDs. |
|
Digital Identity: two
shapes In the following, I want to look at two projects
the Luther Blissett Project and ®TMmark
(pronounced art-mark) in terms of how they use the particular
characteristic of media spaces to create specific types of identity.
Both projects are highly adapted to the environment of interactive
media, and as these environments expand in scope, importance, and
familiarity, I believe these types of identity will also become more and
more common. |
Context: Resources to
Net.Art
References (Tilman Baumgaertel)
Metascene
net.art
Natalie
Bookchin's History of net.art
nettime Mailing List
Syndicate Mailing
List |
The Luther Blissett Project Luther Blissett is
a British football star of Caribbean descent. He is currently coach of
the football team in Watford, Ireland. In the early 1980s, he was one of
the first black British athletes to play in the Italian Major League.
However, he did not prosper there and after a disappointing season with
AC Milan, he went back to England. His lack of success made him the
target of racism from disappointed fans and the press, who ridiculed him
as "Luther Missit". All in all, he played an unfortunate though rather
minor role in the history of Italian football and is in no way involved
in the project that bears his name. |
Luther
Blissett plays in Italy. |
To the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence that
the name Luther Blissett was used by anyone other than this football
player before the autumn of 1994. Since then Luther Blissett has
appeared several hundred times, mostly in Italy but also in several
other countries, he has developed a large Internet and mass media
presence, published several books, became involved in court cases and
was even fined for using public transport without valid tickets. |
"Official" Luther Blisset
Site |
One of the first national appearances of Luther Blissett
was in January 1995. "CHI L'HA VISTO?" (WHO HAS SEEN THEM?) is popular
Italian family TV show with a particularly aggressive right-wing bent.
Its searches for missing people, including runaway children and even
draft dodgers. Alerted by reports in the local press, the show began to
shoot an episode on the missing performance artist Harry Kipper who was
said to cross Europe on his bike in a route in the shape of an "A". He
was last seen in late 1994 in Northern Italy heading into Yugoslavia. In
some of his performances, Kipper used the name Luther Blissett as a
pseudonym. The TV crew went around to interview the people who had seem
him last. It went to England where it was shown the house of Kipper.
Shortly before the show was to be aired, it was revealed that Kipper and
Blissett never existed and the episode had to be pulled off the air to
the great embarrassment of the producers. This prank served a double
purpose, first it demonstrated how easily the media are manipulated, and
second, it introduced Luther Blissett as a figure that lives entirely in
the media space. In one swift move, a myth was created and its roots
cut. He became widely known as someone who doesn't exist. |
|
Luther Blissett is a media creature. He lives entirely
in the media space. There is no group behind him, even though dozens of
people have claimed to be Luther Blissett and hundreds, perhaps even
thousands, have acted in his name. Luther Blissett, however, is not a
group, he is a special case of a Collective ID. On one of the "official"
sites of LB, one can find the following statement: "Luther Blissett is
not a 'teamwork identity' as reported by the journalists; rather, it is
a MULTIPLE SINGLE: the 'Luther Blissetts' don't exist, only Luther
Blissett exist[s]. Today we can infuse ourselves with vitality by
exploring any possibility of escaping the conventional identities." |
Luther
Blissett |
Luther Blissett, in a sense, is a Memetic Identity. A
meme is an idea that is passed from one human to another. It is the
cultural equivalent of a gene, the basic element of biological
inheritance. The term was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his book
The Selfish Gene. The term itself is a contraction of memory and gene.
Unlike a virus, which is encoded in DNA molecules, a meme is nothing
more than a pattern of information, one that happens to have evolved a
form which induces people to repeat that pattern. A contagious
informational pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human
minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the
pattern. An idea or informational pattern is not a meme until it causes
someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. Memes spread as
long there is some reason for them to be copied. Some because they are
true or useful, others are copied because they are false, others, such
as Luther Blissett, because they are neither true nor false, but a myth.
|
Dawkins, Richard (1976).
The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University
Press
Resource Website: Memes, cultural
viruses
Wilkins, J. S., 1998; What's
in a Meme? Reflections from the perspective of the history and
philosophy of evolutionary biology. Journal of Memetics -
Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
Blackmoore,
Susan: Meme,
Myself, I, New Scientist, March 13, 1999 |
The prank of "CHI L'HA VISTO?" planted a meme, a pattern
of information that could be used by anyone who thought it was useful
for what s/he wanted to do. And many people thought it was a very
positive identity to take on. Luther Blissett sightings started to
become more frequent. On June 15, after the police had terminated a
performance in a public bus in Rome, four people were arrested. Each of
them claimed to be Luther Blissett. As an explanation of why they
adopted the Luther Blissett name, Checchino Antonini, an editor at Radio
Cittą Futura offered: "The group considers identity to be the prison of
the self. Identity and fixity are the enemies of communication and have
to be combated by nomadism and collective identity. When the conductor
asked for their tickets, they replied that a collective identity does
not travel with a ticket." Luther Blissett went on to write a number of
books, two of them became bestsellers, one, published as essays of
anarchist theorist Hakim Bey, was later revealed to be a fake written by
Luther, the other, a historical novel called Q, was so highly acclaimed
that people began to speculate that it was Umberto Eco who had written
it. |
Blissett, Eco and
"Q" (in italian) |
While Luther Blissett was also seen outside of Italy,
this is where he became most notorious. One of the reasons for that is
this media landscape is particularly suitable to sustain such an
identity. In Italy there is much less a distinction between "serious"
newspapers and "trashy" tabloids than in other European countries,
partly because politics, crime news and gossip blend in one integrated
spectacle, an eternal Watergate-like improvised scandal. Likewise,
peculiar events in Italian history blurred the distinctions between
"serious culture" and "popular culture" long before Post-modernism and
Trash Culture became the talk of intellectuals. |
|
However, the media landscape is simply the environment
which makes certain things more likely and others less. Luther Blissett,
though made possible by the state of media in the late 1990s, draws from
a number of much older sub-cultural sources: for example, from
situationism and related movements. Consequently, one of the many
apocryphal stories of why the name Luther Blissett came to be used
involves Ray Johnson (1927-1995), founder and central agitator of the
Mail Art movement. From an Italian correspondent Johnson once received a
press cutting which mentioned him. On the reverse of that clipping was a
piece on the national football league containing the sentence: "Even
Luther Blissett would have scored such a goal!". And Johnson wrote back:
"Who the hell is Luther Blissett?" Like anything surrounding a myth,
truth is secondary. |
An introduction to Ray
Johnson.
Blissett on Ray
Johnson |
While the Memetic Identity of Luther Blissett most
prominently subverts the spaces of mass media, the Internet plays an
important role in the spread of its pattern. The Internet is the ideal
media environment for memes because they can move freely and quickly. As
the Internet is set up at the moment, information, and memes, can travel
without having to pass the gate keepers of the mass media, who, even if
they can be subverted by elaborate pranks, still exert a certain control
over the flow of information. Furthermore, the Internet, as an open
interactive environment, is well suited for the cooperation of people
who do not know one another. Its primarily horizontal and transnational
structure offers the potential for autonomous, decentralized
organization of informational patterns. The relative ease and privacy of
communication on-line also facilitates the organization of real-life
events which then are fed back, through the Internet or the mass media,
into the information flows. These flows, though they are shaped by the
characteristics of the environment in which they circulate, are not an
independent reality but a distorted mirror of other levels of reality.
The Internet can be used by independent groups to coordinate their
actions inside and outside the networks, thus, effectively, recreating
what is essentially informational pattern LB in the physical
space 4 people who are all LB standing in front of an judge in
Rome. Before the advent of easily accessible communication media, the
ability the mold the physical space according to informational flows has
been the privilege of large organizations have relied on streams of
mediated information for a long time. |
|
A memetic identity has several defining "limitations".
First, it needs a host. Without someone or something willing to
replicate the pattern, it remains inactive. If everyone loses interest
in Luther Blissett, then the informational pattern disappears. It needs
to be constantly recreated to stay visible. Second, as a pattern, it
needs a certain degree of internal coherence. If suddenly too many
different people start to appropriate the identity for radically
different ends, the pattern would start to get distorted, in the extreme
case, to a degree where it can no longer be recognized. The pattern
disappears into randomness, losing its usefulness, and thus its ability
to propagate. On the other hand, as pattern than needs a host to be
activated, it needs to be flexible enough to be of use in different
contexts. If it authoritatively defined what it is and under what
circumstances it could be used, it would loose its ability to "infect"
different hosts in different places. It can no longer propagate. Any
authoritative version of Luther Blissett would be the end of its
enormous power to infect, that is inspire, people. Consequently, even
the semi-official website starts out with: "This could be a fake,
although a very nice one!". |
|
®TMmark ®TMmark's
name is a pun on registered (®) trade mark () and art. Legally,
®TMmark is a for-profit corporate entity. It
is a business, founded in 1991 and based in New York City. Its area of
activity could be called "cultural sabotage" and the profits it seeks
are cultural: the change of the social environment in which we live.
®TMmark aims to yield dividends in form of
published media reports of the work it sponsors. As a corporate entity,
it benefits from "limited liability" just like any other, which gives it
the freedom to act as a brokerage firm for such sabotage. The sabotage
it brokers is not so much the outright destruction of property but a
symbolic one: the informative alteration of corporate products to expose
their hidden messages. |
®TMmark |
One of the first projects of
®TMmark that yielded the envisioned dividends
was carried out in 1993 by a group called Barbie Liberation
Organization. This group had acquired 300 G.I. Joe and Barbie dolls,
switched their voice boxes and placed them back into the stores.
Unsuspecting consumers who bought the altered dolls suddenly had a
sparkling Barbie huskily intoning, "Dead men tell no lies", while a
combat-ready Joe squealed, "Want to go shopping?" The goals of the
project were to question stereotypes built into dolls by switching
gender roles. Consumers were at first confused, but then amused (hardly
any dolls were returned); Mattel, the company that manufactures the
dolls, was outraged nevertheless; and the media loved it (Derry, 1994).
The idea for the action came from an electronic bulletin board (bbs)
operated by ®TMmark, which also provided the
necessary funds to carry it out. |
THE BARBIE
LIBERATION ORGANIZATION
Derry, Mark (1994). Hacking Barbie's Voice
Box:'Vengeance is Mine!'. New Media, "Technoculture" (May)
|
A similar business deal was achieved in 1996 with a
programmer who worked at the computer-software company Maxis, which
produced a game called SimCopter, a shooting game similar to DOOM, but
with particularly macho overtones. If the player was successful a barely
dressed babe would come up to the player's screen character and kiss him
as a gratification a smacking sound included. In one version,
however, several scenes had been altered and instead of a hot babe,
macho fighter would come up for a kiss. The manufacturer of SimCopter,
Maxis Inc., discovered the programmer's provocative hack only after more
than 50,000 copies of the game had been shipped. The company was
outraged, it immediately fired the programmer responsible for the
alteration, but the media loved it. Again, the idea came from an
®TMmark bbs and the business plan also
included the compensation of the worker who got fired. |
Silberman, Steve (1996) Boy
'Bimbos' Too Much for Game-Maker Maxis. Wired News (3.12.)
|
®TMmark is a brokerage firm,
and like any other brokerage firm, its main function is to bring
together different parties. Like a venture capital firm, it connects
ideas to people who can bring them to life, and raises the necessary
means. In the first half decade of the company's existence, the platform
through which it aimed to establish these kinds of links were electronic
bulletin boards, but while the system worked, as the various
successfully completed projects show, it worked very slowly and was
encumbered by the difficulty of reaching the necessary number of people.
As ®TMmark explains: "We started in '91 with a
dial-in bbs, and we didn't use to publicize ourselves except by word of
mouth. We acted like anarchists, all hush-hush and earnest. We had this
elaborate system for checking out potential new saboteurs, and we only
let a few people have access to the bbs." Consequently,
®TMmark had a very low profile, a bad thing
for a fledgling brokerage firm. |
Email Interview with
®TMmark by Joab Jackson |
This changed in 1997, when
®TMmark went above ground and opened an
Internet website. Like any company, its website sports a logo, a
distinct corporate identity, a company slogan currently: corporate
consulting for the 21st century , sound bytes and products. The
products are called "mutual funds". They perform much the same function
as their financial counterparts: by facilitating investment based on
general areas of interest, they allow investors to participate in what
is essentially unpredictable behavior without the need to fully
understand its nature or to become too deeply involved. A typical mutual
fund starts out as an idea for a project, seeking both qualified people
and investors interested in the dividend, coverage in the mass media
and, perhaps, a change in corporate culture. |
The mutual funds
model |
The mutual funds vary considerably in the skill and
investment necessary. But most of them are focussed on what one could
call "semiotic subversion". They are non-violent, they are focussed on
the level of symbols the changing of code to reveal its subtext
and they work as direct experience, rather than theoretical
analyses. |
|
However, most of the projects are not carried out by
®TMmark itself. Its role is most often limited
to that of a broker, raising money, propagating the ideas, bringing
people in contact with one another. It works as a middleman, or, more
precisely, as an interface. In a technical sense, an interface is a
shared boundary where two or more systems people, institutions,
machines meet. For ®TMmark these are the
various parties necessary for successful completion of a project. Like
all interfaces its purpose is to facilitate this communication in order
to accomplish something as effectively as possible. Like an interface it
is only as good as what it connects. If there is nothing on one side or
the other, then the best interface is helpless. But for
®TMmark there is a lot on both side. People
with money willing to invest, a resilient discontent with corporate
culture, a well-known practice of "culture jamming" disgruntled workers,
and media eager for scandalous stories.
®TMmark could not work outside this particular
American context. |
Adbusters |
An interface, of course, is not passive. A well designed
interface can make things possible that a poorly designed interface
could not, and by making things possible, the interface changes what is
on both sides. Thus, the interface is the place where communication is
shaped, because it translates, and thus shapes, one thing into another,
an intention into an action. The way this translation takes place is
highly influential for the quality of the translated. Like any
interface, it has a double character. It reveals certain things, those
that the designer chooses to highlight in order to create the
functionality, but it hides away all the rest, which are made invisible
so as to not distort the clarity of the interface. The entire complexity
of a program or a machine can be reduced to a few buttons. These buttons
channel the interaction with or through the machine or program |
Steven Johnson, Interface
Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
(1997)
Britannica.com on the Graphical
User Interface |
®TMmark has perfected its
identity as an interface. Its surface is highly polished and its inner
workings are hidden. ®TMmark, through its
website, is highly visible, but it is not published who
®TMmark is. It is not anonymous,
®TMmark operates through spokespersons who are
a kind of human interface. They are messengers, not the author of the
message. A spokesperson speaks for someone else who is absent.
Consequently, one could call what ®TMmark is
establishing an Interface Identity. It serves as a highly visible
conduit for ideas which, for the most part, come from outside itself and
which are carried out through money and labour that it raises through
the parties it connects. |
|
The Internet is the ideal media environment for an
interface identity. The more complex and flexible the connection between
different elements are, the more important the role of the interface in
channeling them. On-line, the potentials for connections are endless and
consequently, the need for interfaces that help to establish these
connection is higher than ever. For an interface it is essential to
define precisely what should be connected and establish these
connections efficiently. The clearer both aspects of the interface are
defined, the stronger its identity emerges. |
|
Identity in media
environments Identity is meta-information. It is made up
of huge amounts of information which can be assessed very quickly as a
interconnected pattern. It offers a condensed form that is essential in
media environments characterized by information overload, that is, by
more information available that can ever be absorbed by anyone. Identity
as an informational pattern, then, allows one to deal with this overload
by reducing the amounts of information necessary to assess the character
of an entity. Without an informational identity entities people,
institutions, projects become undetectable in the noise of the
ever rushing information streams, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
The specific character of these information streams on-line makes it
possible to construct new patterns, or to raise already existing
patterns to a higher prominence. Two of these new patterns have been
discussed one as Mimetic Identity and the other as Interface Identity.
What the contents of these identities are, however, is not determined by
the media environment. Both the Luther Blissett Project and
®TMmark work within specific cultural contexts
from which they take the content of their specific identity. Without
those roots, their identities would remain hollow, a mere media
construction. It is their grounding in real lived (counter)culture which
makes them interesting, it is the media environment in which they are
established that gives them a particular shape and potential. |
Identity
and Deception in the Virtual Community
|