and
reimagine
network
topologies
of
the
under
-commons
!
Hello, fellow net dweller (or internet user? or both?)
Welcome to this meet-us room!
Who is us? You might ask.
Us is you and me, a happy chance encounter or old friendship on the world wide web
Us is the emerging communal relationships amidst, above and below the alienating internet
Us is our physical bodies looking into each other’s eyes across potentially thousands of miles, through electric or light signals, from one computer to another
Us is the digital and material webs connecting your browser and this website, connecting your laptop or phone and the server that houses this website, takes care of it and opens the door when visitors drop by to take a look
In the telecom industry, data centers have a “meet-me room” for telecom carriers to physically connect to one another and exchange data in order to reduce transmission costs and disruption. The term revealingly characterizes digital communications and internet relationship-building as merely a series of “meet-me” processes where “clients” are expected to meet “servers,” “users” should meet their “operators,” and “subscribers” need to meet their “Internet Service Providers.”
Meet-me is a dictate, an order: meet me on my terms first and then you can apply for connectivity -- for $60 a month.
The meet-me room is symptomatic of the contemporary mainstream Internet, dominated by big tech companies, monopolized infrastructures, obscure jargons and insider languages, black-boxed mechanisms, government-corporate collusion, gatekeeping expertise, strict user-expert demarcation that seeks to infuse confusion and passivity in some, and maintain control by others.
How could we begin to defy this order? How could we hold up the space for our own meet-us room?
To meet us is to interrogate the purposefully-hidden power structures of the internet at the hands of corporations, experts and officials.
It is to attend to the small, minute, rich and complex processes and specificities that simultaneously underpin and disrupt the big Internet
It is to get to know - intimately and concretely - the machines, devices, mechanisms, people and things that weave the connection between us
To try to put our fingers - both literally and figuratively - on how, where, through who this digital cross-space-and-time connection is actually happening.
To make friends with the usually daunting-seeming signals, numbers, terminologies that live on this web.
In this meet-us room, we greet our digital neighbors.
We follow the paths of our data packets
We seek guidance and direction from our routers
We pass in and out of various ports - both metaphorical and physical ones
Our web comes into being as we take a walk on it
This meet-us room is an invitation for us: an invitation to look for the specific, relational, tangible web
To unpack, destabilize and hack the threatening abstractness and seeming anonymity of the big internet
to open up fractures and loopholes in the political-technological-economic black box, at a time when politics, technologies and economics are increasingly intertwined
To carve out a softer and friendlier space for us to inhabit, online, offline, and everywhere in between
To take a walk on our web and meet each other halfway
Hopefully, as we walk toward our meet-us room, we are also walking away from the big Internet with its meet-me rooms, carrier hotels and colocation centers
Maybe such an escape, abolition and alternative is always partial, temporary, imperfect.
That’s perhaps okay.
No resistance is complete. neither is domination
A meet-us romm is slow!
In the communications industry, packets of data and signals hop from one network to another. The hop count refers to the number of network devices through which data passes from its source to destination.
Engineers are typically asked to reduce a connection's hop count to minimize latency and optimize speed.
The faster the better.
That is the logic of the commercial internet, and its meet-me room.
A meet-us room seeks to slow it all down
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
to disrupt
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
to suspend
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
to examine
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
to pay attention
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
to notice
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
to observe
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to touch
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
to feel
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to smell
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
and more...
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*
Another point of our meeting might be something we are told to call the cloud.
The invention of the cloud metaphor to describe computer networks has been traced variously to the 1970s, the 1980s, and the early 2000s.
Whatever the origin, the rhetoric device operates along the lines of black-boxing digital mechanisms, mystifying technologies, and erasing the material, human and non-human underpinnings of the cloud.
Server devices help realize functionalities to client devices, which are normal computers, handsets or tablets like your and my laptops and smartphones.
Servers need specifically-designed operating systems for servers. These operating systems are different from the client-device operating systems — usually known as “desktops” — that we might be more familiar with.
For example, this site is running on a server that’s using a server operating system called Yunohost. It has a natural-language-based, graphical interface that could make things less intimidating to start with.
The operating system, as well as this site, are both living within a server-computer operated and maintained by Digital Ocean.
Let’s meet and learn more about our server friend here! LINK
If the cloud metaphor masks the material realities of servers, cables and energy consumption on the ground, these physical materialities — these “stuff you can kick” as media scholar Lisa Parks calls them — are also not as straightforward as they might seem.
Their seemingly tangible and easy-to-grasp physicality belie the layers of administrative rights, operating systems, technological protocols, and obscure configurations that continue to gatekeep access, skill and knowledge.
The adoption of ip addresses (instead of say, magical animal addresses) is the result of some complicated power struggles etc. TKTK
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What do these magical numbers sound like?
.・゜゜・✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*.✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*・゜゜・
The four bytes of an IP address have a descending order of significance. The first byte designates what used to be called a Class A network, wincing contains 16,777,216 unique IP addresses within it.
The second byte designates a Class B network, with 65,536 unique addresses. And the third byte designates a Class C network, with 255 available unique addresses.
The Class designation of network addresses has been scrapped since the 1980s. But the tilted power structure remains to this day.
Consider the following IP address blocks reserved for special purposes and entities — numbers of power and power deprivation:
17.0.0.0/8 — this is all 16.8 million IP addresses ranging from 17.0.0.0 to 17.255.255.255
This block has been entirely owned by Apple since 1990.
12.0.0.0/8 — these 16.8 million unique IP addresses are controlled by AT&T.
The U.S. Department of Defence owns 14 such blocks of millions of IP addresses. That is more than all the IP-address blocks assigned to the regional internet registries for Latin American and the Caribbean regions.
In contrast, the (formerly Class-B) block 192.168.0.0/16 is reserved for private network communications.
That means addresses in these ranges are not routable in the public Internet: they are ignored by all public routers.
Our laptops and smartphones connected to our home Wifi typically have an IP address within this range.
This means they can’t directly communicate with public networks, or the World Wide Web.
They would require network-address translation at a routing gateway in order to become visible in the public internet.
That routing gateway is typically our home router, provided, installed and connected by our Internet Service Providers that control everything from mobile phone call services to transatlantic communications.
What does it mean to not have a public IP address?
What does it mean to only be able to acquire a digital presence on the internet public sphere through the mediation of a corporate router-translator?
