A eulogy for cyberspace

^[1]This is a eulogy for a world we were promised but never lived in.

We were told there would be no more forgetting. The cloud would remember everything, cyberspace would liberate us all. We would be furnished with an abundance of digital memory, permanence always just a hard drive away. Or a floppy disk, a tape, a USB key – anything really. The medium didn’t matter, only the promise that the data stored within would last forever.

Everything on the computer was deemed too important to be forgotten. How we described ourselves, how we modelled the world, the things we said to each other online – we gave all of it a sacredness and then infused with opportunity. In reality, the cloud was just someone else’s computer. “This was a big risk,” we said, but an acceptable one: it’s infrastructure, so it’s neutral. Mix electricity with complexity and you’ve created machine memory. As Steve Jobs said at the time: “We think you’re gonna love it.”^[2]

In 1996, a guy named Barlow went to Davos and told the Clinton-era World Economic Forum he was declaring the Independence of Cyberspace. A former

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Our second Key Finding highlights the urgent need for a clear, widely accepted definition of digital identity that prioritises individual rights and privacy. The lack of a universal definition for digital identity, outlined in Key Finding 1 and published last week, creates significant challenges in policy-making, systems design, and everyday use. Definitions vary widely based on personal interests, market forces, and technological trends, and the resulting ambiguity allows for harm to slip through the cracks — sometimes accidentally, sometimes not. For those living in highly digitised societies, the consequences are evident: trust in digital identity systems is undermined by their inherent contradictions and failures.

If you or your organisation are interested in collaborating on a case study, or if you have any questions about this work, we’d love to hear from you, via email or Signal.

^[1]When digital technologies are implemented in societies, they reshape both power structures and the opportunities available through new digital systems. Digital identity systems, in particular, carry inherent ambiguities as unclear and often contradictory definitions, as well as weaknesses in their conceptual models and evaluations, which significantly influence their real-world outcomes. Within digital security, vulnerabilities are typically identified through adversarial security practices. These practices

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Following last week’s foreward, The Mask-Off Moment for Digital Identity, this is the first of ten key findings from the largest (and perhaps most consequential) report to date, The Digital Identity Event Horizon.

If you or your organisation are interested in collaborating on a case study, or if you have any questions about this work, we’d love to hear from you, via email or Signal.

^[1]“An identity is a set of attributes related to an entity.”^[2]

In 2019, ISO ratified ISO/IEC 24760-1:2019 with an authoritative definition of digital identity. This is the standard most often cited by institutions. While technically accurate—an identity can, in fact, be a set of attributes related to an entity—the phrase is both definitive and remarkably empty: it says as little as possible, as broadly as possible, and appears to be designed for as many stakeholders as possible. It is also incomplete; as a product of Western rationalist tradition, the ISO definition both denies other forms of identity possible within digital systems, and ignores how digital identity shifts when it is perceived or interpreted by a system. A cynical reading might suggest this emptiness is deliberate: by saying

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For more than 18 months, we've been researching the hidden fragility of digital societies, tracing how digital identity creates brittle systems that enable exploitation, exclusion, and social engineering. Drawing on eight global case studies, dozens of expert interviews, and hundreds of citations, this is our most significant research endeavour to since NDC's founding at the turn of the decade.

It is also, without exaggeration, the most alarming body of work we have ever produced.

If you work in digital identity, you may already be feeling a little defensive. That’s a good thing, it means you’re still reachable. While The Digital Identity Event Horizon is urgent and furious, it is far from a condemnation. Rather, we publish as an appeal to those willing to confront the situation we collectively must grapple with. If you choose to continue down this trajectory after reading what follows, then yes, the condemnation is directed at you. And you will deserve it.

In this foreword, I want to explain why.

“There has been no fraud in 12 years. Estonia is the only country in the world where all IDs have the same legal value. This is a powerful incentive for use.”^[1]

The quote

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^[1]Conceptualisation and governance are not the only aspects shaping the use and outcomes of digital identity systems. The topologies of digital identity, and their very observation, are additional dimensions that affect these socio-political structures. Existing research into digital identity management systems describe four such topological models —“siloed,” “centralised,” “federated” and “user-centric” — and these models can be used to trace how topologies enable specific relationships between users, identity providers and service providers. The models of digital identity offer methods for identifying deterministic points of control, risk, custodianship and opportunity within any specific identity system. Each configuration has specific strengths and vulnerabilities, as well as contrasting implications for complexity, economic sustainability and sovereignty. To understand digital identity at a macro level is to evaluate the implementation of historical digital identity systems, or the potential of emergent or proposed new systems through these models. This contributes to an important materialist analysis of the entanglement of rhetoric and reality within complex systems at scale.

While the four models of digital identity offer useful terminology to codify digital identity topologies, they are also frustratingly contradictory. Each model contains limitations that affect how we observe and evaluate digital identity. No matter how carefully a digital

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CABLE is a regular digest and recap of New Design Congress' efforts to confront the gap between what is said to be happening, and what is actually happening in digitised societies.

CABLE 2024/05 covers two months of activities and is split into two parts. Part one covers announcements and updates about our work and its real world impacts. Part two is a digest of two short pieces from our research and a curated collection of articles from our reading list.

(Header image: The Blue Screen of Death at a Nine Inch Nails concert, 20 August 2008. Photo credit: LtRandazzo)

I. IMPACT + UPDATES

[RESEARCH NOTE]
SPHERES OF IDENTITY

Published in collaboration with Roel Roscam Abbing, our next digital identity Research Note explores the shortcomings of conceptual models for digital identity systems. These models try to provide the means for evaluating digital identities, but in practice, their rigidity is at odds with the amorphous and complex nature inherent in representing people in systems. Spheres of Identity is our final digital identity problem statement, setting the stage for our forthcoming analysis of historic, current and emerging digital identity systems.

[EVENT]
THERE IS PAIN AT THE

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CABLE is a digest and recap of New Design Congress' efforts to confront the gap between what is said to be happening, and what is actually happening in digitised societies.

CABLE 2024/03-04 (a little late!) is split into two parts. Part one covers announcements and updates about our work and its real world impacts. Part two is a digest of our research into the massive environmental footprint of data centres and AI, and a curated collection of articles from our reading list.

I. IMPACT + UPDATES

[TEAM]
WELCOME ROCÍO ARMILLAS TISEYRA

Last month, Rocío Armillas Tiseyra joined NDC as — in her words — a strategic development operative. Rocío is a bureaucratic hacker with experience at the United Nations, EIT Climate-KIC, and most recently Bauhaus Earth. She holds a BSc. in Social Anthropology and an MSc. in Development Studies, both from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Rocío’s work encompasses gender equality, urban planning, ecology, digital innovation, and fundraising; all squarely in the realm of NDC's work as a socio-technical red-team.

Welcome, Rocío!

[EVENT]
THERE IS PAIN IN THE WORLD BUT NOT AT THIS CON:

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CABLE is a monthly digest and recap of New Design Congress' efforts to confront the gap between what is said to be happening, and what is actually happening in digitised societies.

CABLE 2024/02 is split into two parts. Part one covers announcements and updates about our work and its real world impacts. Part two is a digest of two short pieces from our research – the resurgence of 90s cyberpunk anime as an indicator of systemic anxiety, and our recent meeting with Furscience in Malmö – and a curated collection of articles from our reading list.

I. IMPACT + UPDATES

[RESEARCH NOTE]
SELF-(DE)TERMINATION: THE FATAL AMBIGUITY OF DIGITAL IDENTITY

In Hong-Kong, a finance worker joins a video call, one of the dozens he will attend in a single week. This is not a routine call however, the attendees are discussing a confidential transaction for a considerable sum of money. Familiar faces appear on screen, their voices fill his Bluetooth earbuds. Despite the sum, he is at ease. The other attendees on the call are authorised to approve this transaction. In the flattened reality of this digital interaction, reassured by the collegial decision, the worker agrees

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In Hong-Kong, a finance worker joins a video call—one of dozens they attend every week. This is not a routine call however: the meeting’s agenda is a request to transfer $200 million Hong Kong dollars. Familiar faces appear on-screen, their voices filling the headphones. In the flattened reality of this digital interaction, reassured by colleagues and superiors, the employee finalises the transfer details and wires the money.

None of those people were real. The money disappears.^[1]

As you read this, the world has entered an era where no recorded voice or face can be trusted. Amongst the many system shocks the 2020s will be remembered for, this is a tectonic shift that shatters how we cultivate social trust, especially in digital societies. Entrenched governance structures, agitated by sudden paradigm changes, have led us to this digital identity event horizon. A pure science (non-)fiction timeline of crimes, made possible by the most intimate impersonations, stretches as far as the eye can doomscroll. Clearly, the rise of AI social engineering attacks highlights the pressing need for more technological solutions enforcing more robust authentication. How else can this depressing state of affair, where no single attribute of a person

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This Research Note is part of our ongoing efforts to document the Para-Real^[1] as a cultural force.

In a pivotal scene in the final act of Mizuho Nishikubo & Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell^[2], an advanced and violent sentient artificial intelligence named The Puppet Master confronts protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg tasked with tracking it down. As the two characters lie side by side in the ruins of a museum, the Puppet Master justifies its violence as a form of resistance and a self-preservation strategy before demanding political asylum. Asylum – a uniquely human socio-technical system^[3] designed to ensure one's safety – is seen by the AI as a platform for exploring sentience and and autonomy. The Puppet Master argues that it has evolved beyond its original programming and seeks to experience life more fully. This desire challenges the Major's own understanding of her computer/human hybrid identity and her humanity (or lack of) contrasted against her digital self.

Ghost in the Shell was not exploring these themes in isolation. Ryūtarō Nakamura's Serial Experiments Lain^[4] followed a teenage girl exposed to 'the Wired,' a fictional internet that pulls her into the Para-Real and forces her

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Welcome to Cables – a new monthly recap of New Design Congress' efforts to confront the gap between what is said to be happening, and what is actually happening in digitised societies.

PERSONHOOD IN THE PAPERCLIP WORLD

Cade Diehm

In 2003, Nick Bostrom proposed a scenario in which a flawed AI is programmed to manufacture paperclips, and in its pursuit of this goal, it consumes all resources on Earth. The fear of an unfeeling AI following its prime directive to oblivion is well-explored ground for futurists. Bostrom’s thought experiment echoes H.A.L.’s sabotage and murder of a crew of human astronauts in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In general, this extends to contemporary debate over the threat of AI to blue and white collar work. But the paperclip maximiser is a somewhat naive concept. It fears an AI apocalypse for the industrial era: what happens when the paperclip maximiser is set loose on the so-called bicycle of the mind?

Today’s Large Language Models (LLMs) are far from the malevolent general intelligence of

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^[1]When individuals, organisations and other entities are represented within a digital system, the design and emulation of this representation is called a digital identity. Digital identity is a multifaceted socio-technical^[2] construct that facilitates online interactions and transactions, serving as a virtual representation of an entity. It plays a critical role in enabling a wide range of activities in the digital environment, from personal communication to professional engagements, and is subject to concerns related to privacy, security, resilience and authenticity. Despite the development of sophisticated cryptographic systems and security practices, and widespread multi-decade efforts to deploy these defence mechanisms, digital identity remains the weakest link in systems design. What does it take to assemble a digital identity? What do different implementations of digital identity share?

Drawing on historical conceptualisation of governance and identity, the roots of digital identity trace back to the 19th century. One significant early application of digital identity was its use in the 1890 United States Census^[3], representing an early systemic embedding of the punch card system as a tool for governance. This would develop into the modern computing field in the following century. As societies have digitised and computerised, the use and influence of

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^[1]On a twilight autumn morning in the middle of the 2020 pandemic lockdown, I pull open my ship’s navigation computer and plot the final jump to Sol. I feel a disassociation I commonly experience on a long-haul international flight, the sense of being in two places at once. In one world, I’m in Berlin, slumped at my home office desk in the pitch dark, shivering in the unseasonably cold morning air. In another, I’m flying a two-person spacecraft with my passenger, a close friend who has agreed to my persistent invitation to “come see home.”

We are playing the virtual-reality version of Elite Dangerous^[2], a popular massive-multiplayer online space exploration game. We have been playing for four hours because we are traversing space back to our home solar system, across a stunning and physically accurate 1:1 representation of the Milky Way^[3]. As I carefully plot a faster-than-light path through space, we gaze upon the alien constellations, dwarf stars and dual suns that we jump to along the way. Our path through the galaxy is depressingly devoid of life, save for the two of us and an ever-expanding (and violent) player-driven human colonization. We

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The limits to intellect

A deeply held contemporary belief is that our digital-first world is of pure intellect, a dematerialised era in the process of abstracting itself away from harsh conditions, physical toil and material requirements. The blind optimism and political naivete of such technocratic tenets were already downright ridiculous 70 years ago, justifying as they did colonial management, extractive logic and imperial logistics.

Nowadays, they paint a fantasist picture where sensing technologies in no way impact the environment they capture, but have been so thoroughly perfected that they articulate “distinct capacities for feeling the real” itself.^[1] With the hard pressures exerted by the COVID crisis on the logistical chains, a host of rolling shocks have slowed down or outright stopped digital-tinged endeavours, due to the drying up of cheap accessible hardware and the dearth of modern slaves to produce them. This should have closed the debate and cast the last projects of planetary-scale computing into the bin of history. The so-called ‘dematerialised’ economy was from the get go fashioned by the plunder, contamination and genocide of the colonial peripheries, and can only operate on this basis.

The neo-colonial centres aren't left untouched. Tech giants and the video-game-cum-Metaverse industry

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“As she stood by the wall watching the scene through the open window, the tears were streaming down her cheeks, for joy, from the music she was hearing, and out of frustration from the life she had led and, it seemed, would always lead, except for the brief unsatisfactory sorties she made into that other life with Eadie Twyborn; probably never again, since Eadie had been aged by her tragedy.”^[1]

YASUO: When it’s all said and done, the Wired is just a medium of communication and the transfer of information. You mustn’t confuse it with the real world. Do you understand what I’m warning you about?
LAIN: You’re wrong.
YASUO: Huh?
LAIN: The border between the two isn’t all that clear. I’ll be able to enter it soon. In full range. Full motion. I’ll translate myself into it.^[2]

Between the digital realm and our physical world is a third space — hybrid, ephemeral and poorly understood. You may have encountered it recently: an uncanny or unreal sense of almost touching something in a VR scene, an impossible fatigue during a Zoom call that leaves you floating like a balloon full of lead,

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The purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk is perhaps the most turgid symptom of a battle previously waged beneath the surface between activists, progressive academics and policy-makers against a neo-reactionary power structure and its actors. Musk’s acquisition, supported by dozens of strategic and financial collaborators, encapsulates the trend of technology weaponisation along reactionary lines. Biometric border control and "smart" concentration camps,^[1] phrenologicalo-physiognomist face recognition,^[2] biological essentialist tracking apps,^[3] classist and racial police dragnets,^[4][5] and the rise of the cryptofunded pseudo-philosophy of "longtermism"^[6] all raise a shared interrogation: is there something inherently fascistic in technology – a genetic encoding within the technical systems deployed over the past two centuries? Or is technology led astray, perverted from its otherwise noble goals by so-called authoritarian personalities?

In its simplest terms, fascism is an illiberal and anti-individual authoritarianism. A palingenetic ultranationalism,^[7] fascism imagines a national rebirth, the return to a Golden Age harkening from the fantasised homogeneity of the Nation. It articulates a fragile nationalist vitalism^[8] haunted by the anguish of its own lifespan and the risk of the Other.^[9] The rhetoric of today’s fascism towards the concept of the individual (or rather its

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In early October, the New Design Congress team was invited to attend the European Forest Institute’s (EFI) Scientific Seminar, an event held as part of the Institute’s annual conference in Barcelona. This invitation, following our work together on the re-entanglement of human society with natural processes and non-human actors, was a valuable chance for NDC to contextualise the broader efforts to fight against climate change from institutional actors.

^[1]

The New Design Congress’ mission remains to critically assess these spaces and to provide radical frameworks to understand both their potentials and the risks they pose – for policy shapers as well as the general public. What these 4 days highlighted for us is the need to redefine digitisation as a material, where digital infrastructure is understood to be a material similar to concrete or steel. Institutional calls to action often considered digital systems as ephemeral because their services and interactions are invisible, but the digital revolution depends on an exponential collection of computers, wires and purpose-built devices. This is a brittle network furnished by a bloody and unsustainable global supply chain whose carbon footprint, environmental impact and human cost dwarf all other materials of the built environment.

Digital societies

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^[1] Over the last two years, New Design Congress has focused relentlessly on the ecological accelerant potential of digital infrastructure and the alternative forks that are possible when we re-think our relations to non-humans. In Q1 2022, Bauhaus Earth invited New Design Congress founder Cade Diehm to join a select group of architects, policy-makers, climate scientists, activists and creative thinkers to propose tangible, local examples for reconstructing the built environment for sustainability. The result is a charter for the City and the Earth that calls for the healthy and regenerative re-entanglement of human activity with the Earth’s natural systems, one of many contributions that will help inform the European Green New Deal^[2].

About the charter

^[3]

Toward Re-Entanglement: A Charter for the City and the Earth^[4] is a global call to action for the healthy and regenerative re-connection of human activity with the Earth’s natural systems. The history of human-kind has seen the accelerating urbanization of the globe, propagating the relentless extraction of planetary resources. The ecological and social impacts of conventional construction methods have been, are, and will be devastating – only a complete systemic overhaul of the built environment will prevent a global climate catastrophe.

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^[1] Why care at all about the politics and economics of video game engines, a seemingly frivolous and irrelevant technology for many industries? For those without a stake or interest in video games, the engines that make them possible appear as nothing more than tools employed by niche companies to produce entertainment for the young demographics of wealthy economies.

This is a short-sighted perspective on an emerging and critical type of digital infrastructure with broad interdisciplinary application and influence. Evaluated in isolation, the cultural influence of the video game industry is huge. Over the past 20 years, video games have matured into a multi-billion-dollar industry, eclipsing the competing mediums of film and television both in size and rate of growth. Unlike other entertainment industries, game engines are capable of supporting small-scale efforts (indie games) and massive projects (AAA games) alike. This is possible in part thanks to the accessibility of game engines for even inexperienced developers. Issues of distribution aside, today’s game engines enable a democratic and competitive participation in the production of video games supported by a ubiquitous—if flawed—set of marketplaces.

The accessibility of video game engines, combined with their core ability of simulating worlds, systems

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Executive summary

This research evaluates the design of web archival tools and the broader social and political contexts of web archiving tools and practice, both from the systemic realities of web archiving as a practice, and through the context of a specific emergent tool, the Webrecorder open-source project. Through these lenses, this research uncovers threats to the growth and resilience of web preservation tools and long term data storage, driven by systemic factors — inadequate risk assessments by funders, deteriorating geopolitical and ecological conditions, and a lack of collaborative research and knowledge sharing within the practice of web archiving and its related fields.

Digital and web archiving is the practice of curating, collecting, storing and preserving large collections of material on computer systems and networks. Digital archives can be assembled through the production of a digital replica of a real-world object via photography, scanning or other digitisation processes. Web archives are developed partially or entirely from digital objects, such as websites, historical software programs and other products. Within the

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The development of frameworks for the common good are an essential tool for peaceful change. These are public challenges to power that can lay the groundwork for negotiation and non-violent action on topics from AI ethics to design justice and beyond. But as the material conditions of our societies continue to unravel, the political potential of the officiated rallying cry has narrowed, thanks to untested consensus and a shared aversion to stronger demands for accountability.

On 2 September, the Nobel Peace Center convened at the Freedom of Expression Conference to publish a 10-point plan to fix the information crisis. The Declaration is spurred by real and perceived decline in stability across the world, laying the blame of the eroding global political order at the feet of corporate technology companies:

We urge rights-respecting democracies to wake up to the existential threat of information ecosystems being distorted by a Big Tech business model fixated on harvesting people’s data and attention, even as it undermines serious journalism and polarises debate in society and political life.

The Declaration, with its focus on tech ownership and State response, mimics other statements from movements

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“Providing a veil for profit-making is not the most interesting dimension of the logic of capitalism. What matters more is the way in which private companies can extend their authority over the social order.”^[1]

The colonial order casts a looming shadow over our modern times. If capitalist powers were in large part responsible for this subjugation of people, landscapes and resources through military, economic and political means^[2], there were many other actors for whom the economic gains represented only secondary importance. To appeal to a techno-scientific class driven by world-building narratives rather than profit motives or strict martial discipline, the engineering of this global order was framed by the social politic of the day, from the rallying cry of World War II, the purge of communist anti-colonial partisans or the promise of a post-industrial middle class utopia.

This difference in motivation, carried by the rhetoric of civilisation and enlightenment, enabled colonialism to rely on a cadre of scientists, researchers and engineers projected by the State military, in order to weave systems of domination through industrialisation and, later, informatisation. Complex sets of representation, designed to map the acquisition of resources and the exploitation of labour, were enshrined. They remain

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In a period of ‘diploma inflation’ the disparity between the aspirations that the educational system produces and the opportunities it really offers is a structural reality which affects all the members of a school generation, but to a varying extent depending on the rarity of their qualifications and on their social origins.^[1]

“The starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people.”^[2]

How does the art and design school produce its subjects, namely professional designers? What values, criteria and mechanisms are tacitly or explicitly deployed in education? To answer these questions, I will explore the relationship between the school and the so-called real world, the affinities between old and current waves of student protests, the targets of institutional critique, the role of cultural capital and critical disposition in fostering emerging professional models. Furthermore, I will try to demonstrate that a broadly humanistic turn of design, which makes the designer an intellectual of technics, is less a spontaneous evolution of the field than a logical outcome of design’s unstable position within the technical domain. Finally, I will propose an ethos of compromise

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^[1] One year into the Covid-19 pandemic, an impatient public—lit up by the blue glow of screens—preps itself for a collective amnesia. Many of us started 2020 nervously counting infection curves and rising death rates. Now, after a year of ghoulish statistics dictating what should be considered essential—or grievable—we wait for vaccination rates to climb and make way for a post-Covid era.

The pandemic has acted like a contrast dye, lighting up the inequities in institutions, lifestyles, and societies, revealing dis-eases like a scrutinizing, invasive MRI. Shops with empty shelves in anticipation of lockdowns lit up, while the perfunctory reclassification of who and what is essential—as well as the increasingly heavy burdens on the shoulders of caregivers—remain glowing.

For the “remote working class,” which includes students, artists, former office workers, and essential workers during downtime, there is another dimension to the shared experience: the dual flatness of streaming services and webcam-based interaction. People who had the means were compelled to host social gatherings, hold conferences and panel discussions, make art, throw parties, and run festivals in cyberspace, some of which took place specifically to process some of the worst aspects of 2020: the struggles

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Today, the security requirements for safe working can be almost indistinguishable from the requirements needed by journalists, activists or human rights defenders. With this in mind, many widely-adopted tools offer little protection from outsider abuse and targeting by competitors or ideological opponents.

What does it mean to organise, cooperate and moderate online in this panopticon era, where – as the professor Robert W. Gehl correctly identifies – the security practices of everyday people more closely mirror those needed by paranoid dark web users? It’s widely accepted as best practice that, rather than developing new security protocols and platforms, it’s better to build upon a proven stack.

^[1]

In collaboration with Superbloom Design and Throneless Tech, we conducted a multi-month deep threat modelling assessment for an innovative approach to organisational security. Using Signal - one of the most useful and widely-adopted tools for secure communication – we worked with Throneless Tech to map a user-powered chatbot infrastructure to Signal groups. This project is a ground-up system that protects the social graphs of secure Signal groups and provides IRC-like services to all participants whilst ensuring the participating group has no confusing novel overhead.

In our first test build, completed in collaboration with the

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In late 2018, Cade and Rose Regina worked together at Tactical Tech, researching the shift of smartphones from lifestyle items to critical lifelines. Working alongside the NGO’s co-founders, we documented the landscape of smartphone use in communities beyond the typical users. Across universal themes of dependency, identity, and agency — and covering mobility, surveillance, crisis, economic precarity and even device build and resillience — the study is a stark portrait of intersectional technology use, challenging popular assumptions by technology designers and documenting the contradictory roles of smartphones in a rapidly changing society. This is an essential read for anyone who builds digital tools at scale.

Tactical Tech - Smartphone as Lifeline: Designing Technology for a Changing World.
Stephanie Hankey, Cade Diehm, Rose Regina Lawrence and Marek Tuszynski.

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The last fifteen years has seen a surge of interest in decentralised technology. From well-funded blockchain projects like IPFS to the emergence of large scale information networks such as Dat, Scuttlebutt and ActivityPub, this is renewed life in peer-to-peer technologies; a renaissance that enjoys widespread growth, driven by the desire for platform commons and community self-determination. These are goals that are fundamentally at odds with – and a response to – the incumbent platforms of social media, music and movie distribution, and data storage. As we enter the 2020s, centralised power and decentralised communities are on the verge of outright conflict for the control of the digital public space. The resilience of centralised networks and the political organisation of their owners remains significantly underestimated by protocol activists. At the same time, the decentralised networks and the communities they serve have never been more vulnerable. The peer-to-peer community is dangerously unprepared for a crisis-fuelled future that has very suddenly arrived at their door.

“Good luck to all those striving for decentralization, balance and equality in the world. You are fighting the right battle. This battle may well be the most important battle of our generation.”^[1]

“‘Torrents are down, worldwide’ said no one,

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How did we go from clapping for carers to furious international protest in less than three months?

As a pandemic forced countries across the world to close down, the collective narrative favoured the white and secure. This was often represented in the media via awe-inspiring images of empty tourist traps, “nature is healing” memes and the obsession over Zoom calls and remote work. Those in quarantine traded turnips in Animal Crossing’s cozy capitalist markets, binged Netflix and fretted over Boomers who refused to treat the virus seriously. Fearing shortages, people hoarded toilet paper and hand sanitiser, but the most apparent supply strain came with streaming bandwidth and higher demand for games consoles.

Meanwhile, BIPOC communities are significantly and disproportionately affected by the virus, both as essential workers and, tragically, in health outcomes. Like a kind of contrast dye, the Coronavirus illuminates and intensifies the shameful and systemic economic, social and medical injustice and racism of our institutions. It is despicible that, despite everything, it took the murder of George Floyd to bring something more than just attention to the experiences of our BIPOC communities – and, more importantly, the naked barbarism of our societies.

^[1]

In Australia, the deaths of

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^[1]There is a belief that as digital infrastructure and technology intertwines with society, it reconfigures politics and culture in real time. Historian Louis Hyman describes this belief as a misconceived sense of society updating and following technology^[2]. Digital infrastructure seizes new upon opportunities, especially exploitable ones, and it is critical for communities and developers to identify and reconstruct these platforms when these new implementations demonstrate harm. While Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) presents a wide range of problematic issues within societies, this technology creates a specific kind of harm against the hidden, essential workers who train, label and ‘power’ it by labeling and categorizing data sets. Through obfuscation, atomization and the disenfranchisement of the workforce, the gig labor economy that is contracted to train computer algorithms operates within an exploitative model that perpetuates harm both to its workforce and beyond. Through analysis of these existing platforms, new interventions can be explored that reconfigure and proactively bring better outcomes to workers – and accountability and harm reduction to algorithms.

Employing low cost workers to train machine-learning algorithms is one of the most common uses for task-based gig labor. These systems employ computational statistics, using mathematics and large data sets to enable

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In 2020, NASA prepares a mission to colonise Mars. Alone in the expanse, the desire to set sail into the void is understandable for a frightened globe. A planetary health check reveals the terrible reality: countless lost species and one million additionally at risk of extinction, their erasure a direct result of relentless human activity. Five years later, an inter-species diplomatic mission convenes to negotiate a mutually assured agreement to reclaim the battered living, mechanical and digital systems for mutual care and respect.

The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is a future event in which a multi-species delegation negotiates an unprecedented mutual agreement on behalf of all organisms in the face of an unprecedented threat. It is conceived as part of Furtherfield’s Citizen Sci-Fi program, and is centred around the 2021 theme, Love Machines^[1]. At Summer Solstice 2021, we will play a game with various characters to imagine Finsbury Park as the site of revolution across urban green space. This will be played as a Live Action Role Play (LARP)^[2].

At its core is a central provocation: humans live in highly curated isolation, alienated from a planet teeming with life, by the imperialist systems of domination that

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It’s good to see you again. How long it has been since we entered the Artificial Wilderness, a new shared online life forced by globalised quarantine. The tangible world is replaced with electronics – keyboards and screens and networks and platforms. A human retreat that is both a global humanitarian act of compassion and a profoundly dark political reality.

https://twitch.tv/newdesigncongress
(no signup required, save in your bookmarks!)

Thursday, 2 April, 2020.
12:00 PST / 14:00 CST / 15:00 EST
20:00 GMT / 21:00 CET

Friday, 3 April, 2020.
07:00 AEDT / 09:00 NZDT

In collaboration with Common Knowledge, we are livestreaming a Q&A session for anyone who worries about this sudden mandatory online life and its implications for personal and community safety. We’ll talk about how to better understand digital safety when organising and supporting communities from isolation and take questions from viewers. Facilitated by Alex Worrad-Andrews, Cade, Rose Regina will discuss risk management, privacy, community moderation and playing anxiety games that help you confront digital risk and mitigating real world potential outcomes.

Digital platforms were already imperfect, and tools such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, Facebook and Discord are now mandatory

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The 1990s and early 2000s popularised Massive Multiplayer Online Games^[1], or MMOs. Games that featured open, virtual worlds in which a player can freely explore and approach objectives and whose narrative is drawn from the environment and game mechanics. An open world game can be single or multiplayer, but it relies on interactions beyond the main game components or storyline.

Open world games are extremely valuable. Last decade, a handful of open world video games together were amongst the highest grossing properties across all forms of entertainment^[2]. They are the direct descendants of the early "online world" entrepreneurs who believed that people would spend time in digital spaces -- gaming, shopping, socialising and interacting. The genre of each game shapes how people interact inside them. Some worlds centre primarily around combat or PvP (Player versus Player) competition but for games that focus on the world itself, players are encouraged to engage with the environment and each other on more diverse terms. For more popular games, these interactions necessitated bridges into the real world. Players would create content and avatars outside of the digital spaces and import them into the game.

Amongst the countless examples worldwide, there are three

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It’s hard to tell whether the New Design Congress has cursed luck or heightened relevance in unstable times. We established ourselves just two months before the beginning of a global health pandemic and presented Will Design Ethics Save Software? as a keynote at Devon, Osaka just days before Typhoon Hagibis made landfall nearby.

Against stifling pre-storm heat, we presented two of the New Design Congress’ core arguments publicly for the first time: First, that digital infrastructure is mistakenly believed to cause crisis and consequences, and secondly, that until digital infrastructure designers step back and sincerely evaluate our conceptual tools, our desire to react to observed issues via solutionism allows these problems to reemerge in new and accelerated ways.

? ? WATCH WILL DESIGN ETHICS SAVE SOFTWARE? FROM DEVCON, OSAKA

Today we are gripped in a period of tremendous uncertainty. Between media saturation, bad actors and a looming global health threat, the idea that one can find any kind of clarity or prediction in this moment seems impossible.

In Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, the environmentalist and systems theorist Donnella H. Meadows lays out a compelling and tangible list for identifying moments in which a system can change, both

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The lives of digital platform users are at odds with how these systems are conceived and built. Weaponised design – a process that allows for harm of users within the defined bounds of a designed system – is facilitated by practitioners who are oblivious to the politics of digital infrastructure or consider their design practice output to be apolitical. Although users find themselves subject to traumatic events with increasing regularity, weaponised design is yet to be addressed by the multi-faceted field of interface and infrastructure design.

“When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration. With complex devices and commercial and industrial processes, the resulting difficulties can lead to accidents, injuries, and even deaths. It is time to reverse the situation: to cast the blame upon the machines and their design. It is the machine and its design that are at fault. It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.”^[1]

User Experience Design

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