I had the pleasure to co-interview Finn Brunton with Camille Paloque-Berges for the #special issue of the journal Tracés, about Piracy. It was a delightful experience to work with these two great people, I hope you will enjoy it. Below is the introduction of the interview, the rest is available on the journal blog.
Finn Brunton begins his book: Spam. A Shadow History of the Internet (published by MIT Press in 2013, and Winner of the 2013 PROSE Award in Computing & Information Sciences) with a scene set at Pitcairn Island with a picturesque touch testifying of the piracy imaginary prevalent in Internet culture: a spam botnet (a type of software falling under the category of “malware”, taking over a computer network to use it for automated mass spam emailing) has taken hostage the computers of the few dozens islanders – the Pitcairn’s inhabitants, coincidentally, being themselves descendants from historical mutineers. Throughout the opus, Brunton keeps drawing from this narrative imaginary as an important component of the technological culture developed in the dark corners of the Internet. Brunton describes the spam as an important character of what he calls the “criminal infrastructure” of the Internet, along with computer viruses, network-automated scripts (“netbots”), “Evil Media” (Parikka and Sampson, 2009) and other manifestations of Internet subculture. Regarding this field of research, Tracés interviewed Jussi Parikka in 2009, one of the voices of the Media Archeology scholar and artistic movement, with whom Brunton shared the panel “Press Delete. The Politics and Performance of Spamculture”, at ISEA2010 – and Camille Paloque-Berges, who co-conducted the following interview, met them at this panel in which she participated as well.
Brunton is current Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University. He was previously a faculty at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, an important hub for the studies of Infrastructure. Paul Edwards, a Professor at this institution, defines the Internet as an “infrastructure-in-waiting“, that is, with a tendency to be organized as a network of “robust, reliable, widely accessible systems and services that are beginning to look in form and centrality like the digital equivalents of the canonical infrastructures of telephony, electricity, and the rail network” while remaining unstable and heterogeneous in practice (Edwards et al.: 2009 : pp.365-366). Within this framework, Brunton uses the spam to study the negotiation zones between community and infrastructure, and unravels the internal oppositions and ambiguities embedded in spamming. He presents this information technology though its role in shaping Internet’s attention economy (from user behavior to community cooperation and the quantification of audiences). In addition to spam, his current research reveals him as a close observer of technological exploits, such as cryptography or the difficult art of code and data obfuscation (making a code or an dataset as difficult to read and interpret by the human eye as possible, which purposes range from the most playful to the most political – Paloque-Berges, 2009): he is currently finishing a new book on the topic with Helen Nissenbaum, a fellow professor at NYU (Brunton and Nissenbaum 2013 and 2011 will give you a foretaste of what is to come). Brunton does not only observe and decipher the dark sides of digital culture: he is also co-responsible for a prospective project on the future of network architectures endowed by the National Science Foundation (“Values in Design for Future Internet Architecture”), a problem at the forefront of Internet governance, as shown by the interview of Jean-March Manach conducted by Francesca Musiani and features in the volume of Tracés about piracy.
To celebrate the release the issue n°26 of the journal Tracés about piracy, we wanted to hear Finn Brunton’s thoughts on the topic which we thought prevalent, although implicitly, in his Shadow History of the Internet. Rightfully so, as we learned he is about to fly to the European University of St. Petersburg to attend the International Conference appropriately called “Explorers and Pirates: Digital creators and the creation of value” (organized by the Center of Science and Technology Studies on June 18-19). Jean-Christophe Plantin and Camille Paloque prepared a series of questions which were answered in one block by Finn Brunton as an “epistolary response”: you will find the questions synthesized below, followed by his reaction and development.
It must be noted that following the critical success of Spam. A Shadow History of the Internet, Finn Brunton’s words has been featured in prominent French media platforms, such as Le Monde Diplomatique and the Radio France broadcast dedicated to digital culture Place de la Toile. A French and English review of the book written by Jean-Christophe Plantin is also available on the website Inaglobal.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.