Notes

Chapterι

1 The archiving of software and code and digital media more generally is currently being actively engaged with in fields such as software studies, critical code studies, digital humanities and new media.

a temptation to think of the software as a discrete 'object' or package, forgetting that software and code are extremely networked and cannot function when taken away from this software ecology. Here, I am thinking of the platform that supports the software/code, such as the particular hardware, software, operating system, network connections, etc. It is certainly clear that currently emulated environments leave a lot to be desired when interacting with previous software and code. Unlike books which are relatively self-contained objects (Foucault notwithstanding) software/code is not readable in the same manner. Merely storing the software, and here I am thinking particularly about the executable binary, will not be enough to access, read, execute and explore the package. Neither will storing the source code be enough, which requires particular compilers, platforms and processes to reanimate it. In some instances one can imagine that the totality of technical society would need to be stored to adequately reanimate software/code - for example, highly networked software, like zombie botnets, cascading database systems, networked gaming systems, massively parallel virtual worlds, etc. which runs through and across the internet might be an example of this. Perhaps in the future we will have to be content with accepting that the only way to archive some software systems will be to leave them running in a domesticated virtual scene captured temporally and looped in eternity. The longer the loop of code/ecology, the better the ability for future historians to explore and understand their use and meaning.

2 Part of a critical project towards the digital will have to involve a means of translating and offering cognitive maps for the comprehension of these gigantic values.

3 See, for example, Memoto Lifelogging Camera, which is a small wearable camera that takes continual photographs which are automatically uploaded to the cloud. It is claimed to be a tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory. http://www.memoto.com

4 A great response to this issue is given by Mazieres and Kohler (2005) where they attempted to express their irritation of email spamming of their mail accounts by submitting a paper to the responsible conference with the title 'Get me off your f—g mailing list' consisting solely of ten pages of the repeated phrase 'Get me off your f—g mailing list' together with helpful diagrams. Unfortunately they 'never received official notification of whether the paper was accepted or rejected'. See also Hughes (2010) for a humorous parody of compactant and web-bug data collection.

5 This is very similar to the experience of Thomas Peterffy, an algorithmic trader on Wall Street, who in 1987 was forced by Nasdaq to disconnect a purely digital connection which gave his rapid buy and sell orders to their computer system. Instead, he was told the terms and conditions of a Nasdaq terminal meant that orders had to be typed via the keyboard and screen. As

a result he was forced to build a robotic screen reader and keyboard typist that could algorithmically enter data rapidly into the terminal - which although now met the Nasdaq terms and conditions did not exactly enamour him to them (see Steiner 2013: 11-18). Later, of course, Nasdaq was forced to abandon these archaic restrictions and open their data feeds to their clients.

6 Capitalism's uncanny ability to absorb criticism and defuse its opponents is well noted, as indeed the difficulty of positioning such work within such a system (see Jay 1973: xiii). But there is the added difficulty that critical work should always be cognizant of Yeats who reminds us 'The intellect of man

is forced to choose between/Perfection of the life or of the work' and as Jay comments, 'when the radical intellectual too closely identifies with popular forces of change in an effort to leave his ivory tower behind, he jeopardizes achieving either perfection.

7 As Liu argues in relation to the importance of taking account of the digital in relation to the literary, 'let me first address the why? question. In general, as I have taken to saying to colleagues suspicious of all the buzz about digital technologies, the stake for literary studies in the digital age is not first of all technological. It is to follow the living language of human thought, hope, love, desire—and hate too—wherever it goes and wherever it has the capacity

to be literary, even if the form, style, or grammar of such literariness does not always conform to canonical standards' (Liu 2013). Equally, it seems to me that we are now beyond a knee-jerk technophobia in relation to understanding the digital in relation to the multiple disciplinary traditions within the university.

8 Founded in the early 1990s, the cypherpunk movement has been most active during the 1990s 'cryptowars' and following the 2011 internet spring. The term cypherpunk, derived from (cryptographic) cipher and punk, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 (Assange 2012).

9 See uBiome at http://www.ubiome.com and 23andme at https:// www.23andme.com

10 For example, Morozov asserts that one should not speak of the 'Internet' because he claims it is not fixed and unified. Unfortunately this betrays a certain lack of understanding of conceptual thinking, indeed a tendency towards the non-noetic and an empiricism that is a hallmark of the very instrumentalism he so disparages in Silicon Valley. Following his logic one cannot speak of the United States of America, nor of the European Union, nor indeed of the British police force. This admonition is a limitation on thought that cannot be helpful for a critical project to renew thinking.

11 See http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/

Chapter 2

1 Due to limitations given by space and time I have had to limit the range of critical theory I was able to discuss here.

2 Morozov suggests, a 'moratorium on using the very term “Internet” and instead going for more precise terminology, like “peer-to-peer networks" or “social networks" or “search engines,"' (Morozov 2013: 44), none of which, to my mind, are any less fraught with multiple interpretations, than the polysemy of 'the internet'.

3 As the novelist and writer Ernst Junger argued 'the age of technology individuals are no longer concerned with the liberal futurity of progress but possess a new modesty in relation to historical temporality and to the power of the infinite as manifested in the precision and perfection of technological design, distribution and use. As such, for Junger the twentieth century is the first century “without history',' a century that, as Manuel Castells was later to point out, will ultimately reside within a “timeless time" conditioned by the precision of the self-absorbed immediacy of technological activity. As such, the era of technology for Junger represents the radical forgetting of historical time and it is the job of the thinker to forge a connection between the, eternal, technological present and the ideas and hopes of the ancient historical past in order to make the former authentically thinkable and inhabitable' (Turnbull 2009: 15).

Chapter ç

1 See also the presentation of Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz's 'Cultural Differences' engine here as a video given in 2012, http://www.vimeo. com/40651117

2 There are examples of 'twitter art' which use Unicode characters to create small ascii-type images in the stream, see, for example: https://www. twitter. com∕tw1tt3rart and https://www.twitter.com/search?q = %23twitterart

3 The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today they hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office and websites of Members of Congress (Raymond 2010).

4 Starting 10 October 2010, Twitter began transferring all public tweets to the Library of Congress for archiving. Tweets that are 24 weeks old (6 months) or older will be saved forever, and the user will no longer be able to delete them. By using the hashtag #NoLOC.org, the user will continue to use Twitter like normal, but when the tweet turns 23 weeks old, it is deleted automatically (NoLOC 2011).

5 In contrast to other social networks; Diaspora, for example, is a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Twitter and Facebook. See also Briar, Crabgrass, Freedombox, Lorea, Secushare, Social Swarm, Thimbl Unhosted, FB Bureau.

6 Two years before the introduction of the ticker in New York City, there was a short-lived attempt to introduce an alternative technology in Paris, called the pantelegraph (Preda 2005). This technology, however, was quickly abandoned and was never used on financial exchanges other than the Paris Bourse (Preda 2005: 777, fn 2).

7 In places like China, the character restriction plays out different as the Chinese script allows quite long message (on Sina Microblog, for example, as Twitter is banned in China). This means that newspapers and corporations are increasingly using Sina Microblog (sometimes referred to as Sina Weibo) as a means of distributed communications.

8 'Agencement is a common French word with the senses of either "arrangement”' “fitting” or "fixing” and is used in French in as many contexts as those words are used in English: one would speak of the arrangement of parts of a body or machine; one might talk of fixing (fitting or affixing) two or more parts together; and one might use the term for both the act of fixing and the arrangement itself, as in the fixtures and fittings of a building or shop, or the parts of a machine.' (Phillips 2006).

9 'It should be noted here that in the USA and in Britain, at the time of the ticker's invention, several efforts were under way to develop machines for making speech visible.

of better telegraphic devices and tried their hand (though unsuccessfully) at a telegraphic machine fitted for financial transactions. Alexander Graham Bell's father was among those making such efforts' (Preda 2005: 777, fn 8). It would be interesting to have a Twitter to speech 'radio' with an automated text to speech system (see VoiceForge).

10 It is also an interesting observation that in a similar way in which stock tickers, data feeds and financial markets are visualized, there are also many competing Twitter visualization systems, including Visibletweets.com, tweepskey.com, Twitter StreamGraphs, isparade.jp, toriseye.quodis.com, revisit, twistori, MentionMap

11 The term software/code is used to highlight the dyadic structure of software and code (see Berry 2011).

12 See https://www.marketcetera.org for a high-frequency trading system that is released as open source software, meaning the source code is easily accessible for inspection and change.

13 An interesting example of this presentation of computational risk is the iPhone application ASBOrometer which computes the risk factor of a particular UK location through the use of government data, see http://www.asborometer.com/

14 Open source software is source code that is openly developed and distributed upon the internet (see Berry 2008).

Chapter 4

1 An n-gram is a list of 'n' items from a given sequence of textual materials or speech. The basic units can be letters, words, syllables, etc. Google n-gram viewer is a good example of using this technique to search textual corpora: http://www.books.google.com/ngrams

2 Whether by accident or design Bogost compiles lists of seemingly gendered, 'male', items of interest: gears, machinery, Mexican food, digestive issues and computer technology. It is also notable that certain items repeat and certain themes are easy to discern. This may be an ironic move, but it also reveals the partiality of the list-making method.

Chapter 5

1 Indeed, the constellation is modelled on the human use of language, Adorno explains, 'language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions. Where it appears essentially as language, where it becomes a form of representation, it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centred about a thing. Language thus serves the intention of the concept to express completely what it means. By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the objects interior. They attain, in thinking, what as necessarily excised from thinking' (Adorno 2004a: 162).

2 An example of pre-computational collection of data about the self as a lifestream is represented by Roberts (2004). One of the criticisms that recur in the peer-review section is that Roberts fails to account for his own anticipation of his experimentation and previous experimentation colouring his results. Nonetheless, this kind of self-knowledge through collection is made both easier, and arguably more rigorous by the collection through compactants. Especially if the collection is of wide, rather than narrow width, therefore enabling a post hoc analysis and hypothesis surfacing to occur. Clearly, compactants also make the collection far easier with mobile devices.

3 Wolfram further writes: 'It's amazing how much it's possible to figure out by analyzing the various kinds of data I've kept. And in fact, there are many additional kinds of data I haven't even touched on in this post. I've also got years of curated medical test data (as well as my not-yet-very-useful complete genome), GPS location tracks, room-by-room motion sensor data, endless corporate records—and much much more.... And as I think about it all, I suppose my greatest regret is that I did not start collecting more data earlier. I have some backups of my computer filesystems going back to 1980. And if I look at the 1.7 million files in my current filesystem, there's a kind of archeology one can do, looking at files that haven't been modified for a long time (the earliest is dated 29 June 1980)' (Wolfram 2012).

4 These include HTTP cookies and Locally Stored Objects (LSOs) and document object model storage (DOM Storage).

5 'Cookies are small pieces of text that servers can set and read from a client computer in order to register its “state.” They have strictly specified structures and can contain no more than 4 KB of data each. When a user navigates to a particular domain, the domain may call a script to set a cookie on the user's machine. The browser will send this cookie in all subsequent communication between the client and the server until the cookie expires or is reset by the server' (Mittal 2010: 10).

6 Ghostery describes itself on its help page: 'Be a web detective. Ghostery is your window into the invisible web - tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity' (Ghostery 2012a). See also https://www.disconnect.me/

7 Also see examples at: (1) Chartbeat: http://www.static.chartbeat.com/js/ chartbeat.js; (2) Google Analytics: http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js; (3) Omniture: http://www.o.aolcdn.com/omniunih.js; (4) Advertising.com: http://www.o.aolcdn.com/ads/adsWrapper.js

8 For an example see, http://www.static.chartbeat.com/js/chartbeat.js

9 For example, the page-scraping of data from open access web pages using 'robots' or 'spiders' in order to create user repositories of data through aggregation and data analysis. Interestingly this is the way in which Google collects the majority of the index data it uses for its search results. This is also becoming a digital method in the social sciences and raises particular digital research ethics that have still to be resolved, see https://www. issuecrawler.net/, http://www.socscibot.wlv.ac.uk/, http://www.webatlas.fr/ wp/navicrawler/

10 See these commercial examples of user control software for controlling user public exposure to trackers, web bugs and compactants, although the question is raised as to why you would choose to trust them: https://www. cloudcapture.org/register/ and http://www.abine.com

11 A computer worm is technically similar in design to a virus and is therefore considered to be a sub-class of a virus. Indeed, worms spread from computer to computer, often across networks, but unlike a virus, a worm has the ability to transfer itself without requiring any human action. A worm is able to do this by taking advantage of the file or information transport features, such as the networking setup, on a computer, which it exploits to enable it to travel from computer to computer unaided.

12 One of the ways in which the Stuxnet attack target was identified was through a close reading of the computer code that was disassembled from the worm and the careful analysis of the internal data structures and finite state machine used to structure the attack. Ironically, this was then matched by Ralph Langner with photographs that have been uploaded to the website of the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and confirmed the importance of the cascade structure, centrifuge layout and the enriching process by careful analysis of the accidental photographing of background images on computers used by the president, see http://www.president.ir/ en/9172 (see Peterson 2012).

13 Offensive Security Research is a term that covers research security work around the intent to attack IT systems, much of it related to finding and publishing zero-day exploits either in the public domain or through various private channels (DeepSec 2012).

14 The timestamp in the file ~wtr4141.tmp indicates that the date of compilation was 03 February 2010 (Matrosov et al. n.d.). Although there is suspicion that there may be three versions of the Stuxnet code in response to its discovery: 'Most curious, there were two major variants of the worm. The earliest versions of it, which appear to have been released in the summer of 2009, were extremely sophisticated in some ways but fairly primitive in others, compared with the newer version, which seems to have first circulated in March 2010.

A third variant, containing minor improvements, appeared in April. In Schouwenberg's view, this may mean that the authors thought Stuxnet wasn't moving fast enough, or had not hit its target, so they created a more aggressive delivery mechanism. The authors, he thinks, weighed the risk of discovery against the risk of a mission failure and chose the former' (Gross 2011).

15 Although there are some criticisms that this link may be spurious, for instance Cryptome (2010) argues: It may be that the 'myrtus' string from the recovered Stuxnet file path 'b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\guava.pdb' stands for 'My-RTUs'as in Remote Terminal Unit.

16 After having performed detailed analysis of the Duqu code, Kaspersky Labs stated that they 'are 100% confident that the Duqu Framework was not programmed with Visual C + +. It is possible that its authors used an in­house framework to generate intermediary C code, or they used another completely different programming language,' (Evans 2012).

17 Zetter (2012) states that Duqu's specific form of code that allows it to be identified as using: 'object-oriented C to write the event-driven code in DuQu [which] reveals something about the programmers who coded this part of DuQu - they were probably old-school coders.... The programming style

is uncommon for malware and is more commonly found in professionally- produced commercial software created ten years ago, Raiu says. The techniques make DuQu stand out 'like a gem from the large mass of “dumb” malicious program we normally see'.... Kaspersky researchers note' (Zetter 2012).

18 See http://www.quantifiedself.com/

19 Of course some aspects of self-tracking are non-computational, as Hill (2011) describes 'a woman entrepreneur, who wishes to remain anonymous, drinks her first stream of urine every morning as a “natural form of tracking” in order to remind herself of what she ate and drank the night before. A help desk analyst at a corporate law firm started monitoring his spending after racking up five figures in debt on iTunes and buying CDs. Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell keeps an audio recorder running all day and takes digital photos every 30 seconds - with the idea of outsourcing his memory to a computer. Psychology professor Seth Roberts eats a half stick of butter every day because, he says, it speeds up his ability to do simple math problems by 5%'. However, increasingly the data generated by these activities will inevitably be uploaded to computers systems and subject to computational analysis and even real-time data capture.

20 Some examples of visualization software for this kind of lifestreaming quantification and visualization are shown on these pages from the Quantified Self website: Personal Data Visualization, Jaw-Dropping Infographics for Beginners, A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo, Visual Inspiration.

21 Individuals that supply data into the networks at a large scale have been described as Terabyters. A terabyter is a person who produces more than a terabyte of new information every day (Frey 2010).

22 See http://www.open.sen.se/for a particularly good example of this: 'Make your data history meaningful. Privately store your flows of information and use rich visualizations and mashup tools to understand what's going on' (Sense 2012).

23 Computational actants, drawing the notion of actant from actor-network theory.

24 Of course compactants are not just 'internal' data collection agents. They may also be outside of your data resources and networks probing to get in, this kind of unauthorized access to personal data is on the rise and has been termed the industrialization of data theft (see Fulton 2012). Indeed, Fulton argues that 'scripts, bots, and other non-social means for obtaining access [to data] remains statistically more effective than direct, personal contact - although even these automated means remain astoundingly simple' (Fulton 2012).

25 For example, see Bamford (2012) who writes about the Utah Data Center that is being built for the National Security Agency: It is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' programme created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy' (Bamford 2012).

26 What we might call 'outsider code' or 'critical code' is an interesting development in relation to this. A number of websites offer code that data scrapes or screen scrapes information to re-present and analyse it for the user, some examples include the (1) Parltrack software, which is designed to improve the transparency of the EU parliamentary legislative process, http:// www.parltrack.euwiki.org/ (2) TheyWorkForYou, which screen scrapes the UK Parliamentary minutes, Hansard, http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

27 See, for example, the Stanford Program on Liberation Technology (Stanford 2012).

Chapter 6

1 The original panel description read: 'Slowly, but increasingly definitively, our technologies and our devices are learning to see, to hear, to place themselves in the world. Phones know their location by GPS. Financial algorithms read the news and feed that knowledge back into the market. Everything has

a camera in it. We are becoming acquainted with new ways of seeing: the Gods-eye view of satellites, the Kinect's inside-out sense of the living room, the elevated car-sight of Google Street View, the facial obsessions of CCTV.... As a result, these new styles and senses recur in our art, our designs, and our products. The pixelation of low-resolution images, the rough yet distinct edges of 3D printing, the shifting layers of digital maps. In this session, the participants will give examples of these effects, products and artworks, and discuss the ways in which ways of seeing are increasingly transforming ways of making and doing' (SXSW 2012).

2 Here we might consider the growth of computational high-frequency trading and financial systems that are trained and programmed to identify patterns very quickly.

Chapter 7

1 This in part explains the attack on the universities current monopoly on knowledge by both the state and the information techno-capitalists. It also shows why the state is under such pressure to release its own reservoirs of information in the form of the open access movement, with notable examples being the US data.gov and the UK data.gov.uk. For a good example of this see the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

2 'Consider the social pedigree of the leading lights on both front benches today. Cameron, Clegg and Osborne went to private schools whose fees are more than the average annual wage. More than a third of the current Commons was privately educated, three percentage points up on that elected in 2005, reversing a downward trend over several generations.... The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, went to Oxford from affluent north London, graduated in philosophy, politics and economics - or PPE, an apprenticeship scheme for budding pols - and was soon working for Gordon Brown. The defeated David Miliband went to the same Oxford college (Corpus Christi), also did PPE and was soon advising Tony Blair.... The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, is another Oxford man, who also graduated in -yes- PPE and also ended up working for Brown. At Oxford he met his future wife (and current shadow home secretary) Yvette Cooper, which should not be a surprise, because she too was reading PPE' (Neil 2011).

3 If this reminds you of the statements of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, it should. They draw from a similar vein for their critique: 'Its not only in Vietnam where secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight (“truth and lots of it”).' (Assange 2006).

4 Although a nascent universalization is suggested by the notion of the 'common' as used by movements like the Creative Commons and open source software groups (see Berry 2008).

5 These are offered as a first draft of the kinds of skills iteracy might require. They remain very much a work in progress.

6 There is an interesting question about whether we can read code without any recourse to notions of computation. Personally I do not see any reason why code cannot be read as a self-standing or even historical text. Reading within the horizon of the program itself might be very productive, particularly for large-scale systems that are extremely self-referential and intertextual.

7 Naturally this reminds me of Hegel's notion of History as a spiral. It is also evocative of notions of dialectics as a means of learning and education.

Chapter 8

1 Horkheimer further argues, 'The imperialism of the great European states need not envy the Middle Ages for its stakes. Its symbols are protected by more sophisticated instruments and more fear-inducing guards than the saints of the medieval church. The enemies of the Inquisition turned that dusk into the dawning of a new day. Nor does the dusk of capitalism have to usher in the night of mankind although today it certainly seems to be threatening it' (Horkheimer 1978: 17).