Distributed Denial of Service Actions and the Challenge of Civil Disobedience on the Internet

Last week, I had the honor of speaking on one of the plenary panels at the Media in Transition conference at MIT.  I talked about an idea I’ve been playing with, identity versus presence in the online space. People seemed interested in hearing a little more, so here are my thoughts on the subject right now.

The theme of the conference was public and private media, and there were lots of amazing panels talking about, in one way or another, performances, manifestations, usurpations, and repurposings of identity online.  The presentations were brilliant, but as I’m coming down off of writing my masters thesis on activist DDOS actions (ten days till final submission!), I found myself thinking about the concept of “presence,” and how the online space, and the civic space in general, is and is not structured to allow manifestations of presence over performances of identity.

Collective actions, like marches, sit-ins, occupations, and activist DDOS actions, don’t primarily rely on the discreet, performed identities of participants to be effective. Rather, they rely on manifestations of “presence,” which I’m preliminarily defining as anonymous or named manifestations of individuals or communities without many of the performative or explicative aspects we associate with (online) identity.  Ricardo Dominguez of the the Electronic Disturbance Theater often described their activist DDOS actions with appeals to the concept of an observing group, or as he put it with regard to the toywars action in 1999, “the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.“  Activist actions which invite the participation of the public, like marches or petition drives, invite that participation on the level of largely undifferentiated collections of people who are performing one or two functions: witnessing a wrong, standing against injustice, showing interest in a cause or question.  Who these participants are at an individual level is not really relevant to the purpose they serve by being there.  The anonymous vote is similar, the identity of the vote should not be relevant to the fact that they cast a vote (though vote ID laws may be chipping away at this).  It is the manifestation of presence, not identity of the individual participant/voter.

The online space as it has developed, with its current emphasis on constructed/generated profiles, individual-level social networking, and the variety of social rankings that accompany it, is skewed to favor performances of individual identity.  This is useful for many things, and is certainly desirable by the commercial entities which currently dominate that space.  But though it is easy for an individual to create an identity performance online and to engage in a myriad of individual speech acts, it is difficult for that same person to simply add their presence to a online-based collective action (and I thank Biella Coleman for pointing this out in one of her comments on my thesis).  This discourages certain types of civic and activist action online.

I see identity and presence not as oppositional concepts (the title of this blog post notwithstanding), but rather as points on a continuum of ways of being in the world.  Right now I see the emphasis on identity online crowding out presence, though it is there if you look.  Search and popularity algorithms incorporate the presences of millions of users to determine search and “what’s hot now” rankings.  Clicks, views, and likes are manifestations of presence once collected and presented as an artifact’s modifying statistics, though they may be performances of identity for an individual clicker or liker.

I’m left with a giant pile of questions, and few answers.  Is “presence” primarily something that is observed from the outside?  Can the same action be a manifestation of presence AND a performance of identity?  Is there a space for this concept of “presence” on the internet as it currently exists?  How does data privacy and anonymization fit in with “presence”?  How can collective action and other “presence”-based civic activities be enabled online?

What do you all think? If you’ve got questions or comments (or recommended reading!), please leave them in the comments.

UPDATE: Thesis defense successful! Wooooooooo!

That is all.

The Platonic ideal of self promotion is something along the lines of Austin Kleon‘s “Do good work and share it with people.” But I think a lot of the time people view “self promotion” or people who are seen to be good self promoters with a mix of admiration and squicky distaste.  It just feels so awkwardly self-centered to talk about your work and how awesome it is (even if it is TOTALLY AWESOME).  Maybe this is because as a culture we discourage people from declaring their own awesomeness independent of outside confirmation. Maybe it is because people (especially women) are socialized away from drawing attention to ourselves and our own achievements.  Maybe it’s because we don’t think our work is that interesting or useful, and don’t understand why people would want to hear about it in the first place.  Or maybe it’s because we don’t think we should be speaking publicly about something unless we know EVERYTHING about it because if we don’t know EVERYTHING about it we’re obviously not experts and only experts get to speak in public about things, right?  Or maybe it’s a totally different reason.

Whatever the reason is, the result is that horrible squirmy feeling in your guts whenever someone gives you a compliment, that stops your from posting that story or applying to that program or talking to that Kickass Person Whose Work You Admire or something.  It is getting in your way. It is Impeding Your Awesome. So I’m going to offer you some tips on how to defeat the squirmy guilty feeling, and some strategies you can use to share your work with the world.

HERE IS YOUR GUILT-DEFEATING UTILITY BELT!

1. Trust other people’s ability to decide what is awesome for themselves.  You may not think this thing you did is so great. Maybe it was just an experiment or a doodle or maybe it’s unfinished or you’re unsatisfied with it.  That’s fine. You can totally have those feelings about your work. You can even be straight up conflicted about your work. But if someone else really really likes that ugly duckling of yours? Trust them that they really like it! Trust them that they can figure out what they really like for themselves! Don’t try to talk them out of it. Just say, “Thank you, I’m glad you liked it.”

2. Don’t be held back by wanting things to be perfect. Things will never be perfect.  You will never be perfect.  If you wait for things to be perfect before you put them out in the world, you will never actually produce anything.  Someone (maybe Da Vinci?) once said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”  Other people (I think Voltaire started this train) say, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  Make stuff, and put it out there.  If it’s not perfect, don’t feel bad. Neither is anything anyone else is doing.

3. Recognize other’s goals and how you can help them.  Sometimes people will ask you for advice or help or a quote for a story they’re writing.  You first instinct may often be to shy away from that attention because you feel you’re unqualified or not the best person for the job.  But, similarly to trusting other people’s ability to decide what is awesome for themselves, trust that other people are asking you for help or input for a reason: because they think you can help! When I was younger, people used to ask me for computer help, not because I was super awesome at computers, but because I *was* super awesome at explaining how to operate computers in an accessible, approachable way.  When, for example, a reporter emails you looking for a quote on Something Related to Something You Work On, they’re not necessarily looking for the World’s Greatest Expert On That Something. They’re looking for a quote because they have to make their deadline. You could provide that quote! After all, they emailed *you.*

4. Have a friend read the comments. People can be jerks on the internet (NOT NEWS). So if you are shy about putting yourself out there because you’re concerned about the negative attention you could attract, ask a friend to screen your comments for you. They can tell about all the nice/constructive ones while at the same time protecting your from that one pointlessly negative ad hominem attack that would have distracted you for a week to no purpose.

5. Be generous! There is so much awesome stuff out there! Promote other people’s work! Amplify people who don’t think are getting enough attention, and give shout outs to the work of established practitioners who inspire you.  And if you see other people promoting your work, say thank you, because that would make your mother proud. There are lots of forms this kind of generosity can take, like blogging people’s talks at conferences, in depth book/movie/game reviews, or just simple tweets and shares.  Do whatever feels right to you at the time.

I DON’T FEEL GUILTY ANYMORE! SO WHAT ARE SOME THINGS I CAN ACTUALLY DO????

1. Be visible! Before you can go about showing people how awesome your work is, you need somewhere for them to find your work! Have a website, have a Twitter, have a Tumblr, have all three if you like.  And for the love of god, please keep them updated.  Try, if you can, to have a consistent handle across all your internet presence.  Make it easy for people to find you. (As long as you don’t try to do this all at once, it is way easier than it sounds.)

2. Own your achievements – don’t deflect praise. When someone compliments your work, your instinct can be to minimize your awesomeness: “Oh, I did in an hour, it’s not that great,” “That’s not finished yet,” “That could have been longer/funnier/faster/better.” Don’t do this! Own your achievements! You did them, you deserve to feel good about them. If this is still hard for you, try saying, “Thank you, I’m glad you liked it” and then stopping. That’s all you have to say!

3. Ask for things. For the most part, people are nice, and will try to help you if they can. The trick to this is that they can’t help if they don’t know what you need.  These things can be jobs, publishing or speaking opportunities, links, references, advice, damn near anything. Be specific with your ask, be gracious if the person says no, say thank you if they say yes.  Seriously, it is totally ok to ask for things. Don’t let yourself be held back by the fear of the Worst Thing in the World, because the worst thing that can logically happen is that the person you’re talking to will say no. And then you’re no worse off then you were before you asked! So ask for things.

4. Don’t be an asshole. I think the fear of being seen as an asshole holds most people back from doing more self-promotion. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution for this: Don’t be an asshole! Really, it’s as simple as that. You probably spend most of you life not being an asshole anyway. So promote other work you think is awesome in addition to your own. Follow up with people who say nice/constructive things about your work. Own your mistakes as well as your triumphs. Be gracious. Say thank you. Don’t be an asshole.

5. Share, don’t sell. Chances are, you are doing what you are doing because you think it is awesome and it makes you happy. So don’t think about promoting your work as “selling” or other awkward capitalist metaphors that make you feel like you are somehow taking advantage of the people around you.  Think of it as sharing this thing that you enjoy because you hope others will enjoy it too.  This is a good philosophy to have even if you are ultimately hoping to exchange the fruits of your labor for money. Promote your work with a spirit of sharing, not just a spirit of having to pay your rent.

Post Script: In Defense of the #humblebrag

When I was working on this writeup, my friend Nathan pointed out the shaming culture that is associated with the #humblebrag hashtag, and asked me to address it.  Recently, #humblebrag has started being used in some parts of the internet to call out what some people see as inappropriate self-centeredness or bragging or self-promotion, and to shame those people engaged in those activities into silence.  A mirror-related point came up during the workshop I led: some of the attendees were really pushing the idea that the most “appropriate” or “best” way for your work to be promoted was if *other people* were doing the promoting.  While I think it’s great and gratifying when other people recognize your work, the philosophy that this is the only socially acceptable to promote your work has an air of magical thinking about it.  How exactly are these people supposed to discover your work in the first place if you don’t show it to them?  Similarly, the #humblebrag shaming tactic promotes the idea (in a sideways way) that success just *happens* and that working for it (because let’s face it, getting your work out there can be fucking hard) by promoting yourself is crass.  This is dumb. It’s bad for communities and it’s bad for practitioners.  It smacks of the toxic myths of the Lone Genius Struggling Virtuously In A Vacuum and Lana Turner Discovered at the Soda Fountain By Magic. Neither of these myths are particularly effective ways to either get attention for your work or to promote the existence of vibrant creative communities.  Creative communities should be encouraging folks to talk about the neat things they work on, not shaming them into hiding and hoping to be “discovered.” I love it when popular blogs make a space for self promotion (John Scalzi over at Whatever calls these Open Pimp Threads).  I believe people should be encouraged to take pride in good work, and to have good feelings about that pride, not shamed into thinking that those good feelings can only come from other people.

HERE ARE SOME HELPFUL LINKS!

The concept of “Stock and Flow” as articulated in this Snarkmarket post is great for how to plan your work flow to be steadily producing things of interest
Ze Frank’s “An Invocation for Beginners”, and “How to Public Speaking” are great pieces of advice for how to get over fears of working and speaking in public.
Ill Doctrine on how to overcome nasty non-productive thought cycles: Beating the Little Hater
Vi Hart’s Guide to Comments
Biella Coleman on the challenges on working in public: Anonymous and I
Nathan Matias with more on working in public: Tinker Marker Enquirer Expert
John Scalzi on how he sold his first (completely amazing) first novel: The Offer on Old Man’s War
Ethan Zuckerman has a great guide to conference blogging, which is a great way to promote other people’s work.
Diana Kimball is amazing at creating communities of interest around her work and the work of others (she was also super helpful with the planning of this workshop – thanks, Diana!)

Do you have any thoughts on self-promotion? Leave your tips, stories, and helpful links in the comments!

I’ve talked about Aaron’s case before, how it represents (represented) an obscene overreach on the part of a government pushing an agenda of systematic control over the internet and information technology. How it reflected a popular paranoia of the technologically gifted that you can see promoted in any film about “hackers” made in the last 30 years. I should have been louder.

I didn’t know Aaron. I dearly wish I had.  Those who did know him are broken-hearted and upset and angry and far more eloquent than me.  You should read what they have to say. I have linked to a few below, but there are so many more.

And you should be angry, too.  You should tell people that what happened, this case, was wrong. You should believe that we can do so much fucking better.

Larry Lessig’s Prosecutor as bully
Cory Doctorow’s RIP Aaron Swartz
Alex Stamos’s The truth about Aaron Swartz’s ‘Crimes’
danah boyd’s Processing the loss of Aaron Swartz
Ethan Zuckerman’s Goodbye Aaron
Quinn Norton’s My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved

For those who like their “This Is The Year That Was” Reviews in list form, you can find that under the cut. And for everyone reading along at home, I hope your 2012 was also filled with good discoveries and happy realizations.  I hope your new year is filled with good food and kind faces, that you find something and learn something, that you share something and make something, and that if you discover you need help, you also discover your world is filled with friends who can.

This year in Professional Life:

-Delivered talks and papers at five different conferences (SXSW, PCA/ACA, HOPE, NewsFoo, 29c3), got to moderate a super fun panel at ROFLCon with Dan Sinker, Latoya Peterson, and Biella Coleman, and got to talk about the apocalyptic potential of AI with Stephen Levy and others at the Doomsday Film Festival

-Attended nine conferences all together (all the above, plus DEFCON and the Global Voices Summit in Nairobi). This involved way more travel them I’m used to, and I’m not sure that was entirely a good thing.

-Published three non-academic articles (In Media Res, HiLowBrow (one of the top 25 posts for the year!), The Atlantic, and my article on DDOS tool design was accepted by a peer-reviewed journal

-Helped facilitate the Harvard-MIT-Yale-Columbia Cyberscholars Forum and the Berkman Fellows Hacker Culture Reading Group, which are both made up of super-cool people whom I’m delighted I get to hang out with on a regular basis

-Interned at the EFF, where I learned a lot, met amazing people, and was a member of the highest-ranked legal trivia team of interns! Wooooo!

-Applied to a million PhD programs (ok, less than that. Fingers crossed!)

This year in Personal Life:

-I moved! Twice!

-Lived in a new city by myself for three months without starving or getting crushed by something heavy. Yay for San Francisco!

-Learned double sided knitting!

-Completed an entrelac scarf!

-Added three new stamps to my passport (Kenya, Germany, Switzerland)

-Visited five states, two for the first time (Texas, Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, Nevada)

Goals for the next year:

-Blog more: Right now I blog approximately once a month. It takes me a long time to write a blog entry I’m comfortable posting, and I favor length and polish over incomplete or experimental thoughts. In the spirit of “working in public,” I’d like to get better at writing and posting quickly, and posting less polished pieces with the goal of starting conversations rather than making statements.  If I could get up to posting once a week, even small 100-500 word items, I would be super happy.

-Collaborate more: I often say that my favorite work mode is sitting in a corner by myself with my books and the Internet. While I haven’t been unsuccessful operating in this mode, Working Well With Others is a skill I’d like to improve in the coming year. Some collaborations are already in the works with friends and colleagues at the Berkman Center and at MIT. I’m really looking forward to these projects, especially as they will represent a break from the solitude and subject matter of my Masters thesis.

-Revise more: This has to do with improving my workflow.  Working with Zeynep Tufekci on the review and editing process for my DDOS tool design article was a really enjoyable and enlightening experience. In the next year I’d like to make more time in the initial stages of projects for review and reflection. This will mean making and keeping to regular writing schedules, and respecting internally-imposed deadlines.

-Knit more: This is code for “do things that aren’t related to school or the internet more.” Knitting, cooking, reading sci-fi novels, singing, and drawing/painting all fall into this category. It’s been said that my work/life balance maybe isn’t as great as it could be.  Next year I hope to have a little more “life” in the mix.

29c3 is wrapping up. I had a really excellent time here, and had once of the best speaker experiences I’ve had at a hacker con.  As usual, the hallway track was fantastic: I got to hang out with the “friends I only see at cons” crowd, and meet some awesome new people.

My talk on the ethical analysis of activist DDOS actions in now online (and please do stay for the question session, this was a highly informed and enthusiastic audience who had great input).  The other talks I saw were all fantastic. I highly recommend watching them if you have the time. You can find all 111 (!!) hours of talks here.

This con was entirely run by a volunteer contingent of “Angels.” They did a brilliant job.  And Hamburg is a great town! I’m very glad to have gotten to visit and participate in 29c3.  Next stop, Switzerland!

Sometime between the power outage Thursday night that left most of Cambridge in the dark and severely messed with my ability to construct my Ignite slide deck, and getting up at 5AM to catch a taxi to the airport, I started to have serious doubts about whether I should go to NewsFoo at all.  Reading over the guest list (NewsFoo is a by-invitation conference) was an exercise in “Oh God, everyone is so much more awesome than me.”  NewsFoo also fell on an end-of-the-semester weekend packed with PhD application deadlines and final papers I should really be working on.  I was plagued with anxiety about my Ignite talk crashing and burning, being too shy to talk to any of the  big name journalists and tech heads in attendance, and generally being the most awkward person in the room for three whole days.

You guys, it was so not like that at all.

NewsFoo attendee wall. Photo by Elise Who

NewsFoo was seriously the best conference I have ever been to.  Hands down.  As someone at the beginning of her career doing all this internet-academia stuff, the enthusiastic acceptance and encouragement I got from the organizers and attendees was mind-blowing.  Even though I was a first time attendee, I got to both lead a session (on depictions of science on procedural crime dramas on television) and give an Ignite talk (on the changing representations of “the hacker” in news media), both of which were very well received.  Though a lot of the attendees were experienced journalists and successful members of the politics-and-tech community, I didn’t once feel that someone was pulling rank on me, or dismissing me because I was “just a grad student.”  I was delighted to see among the attendees several undergraduates from the Cronkite School of Journalism (whose excellent campus we were crashing for the weekend).  The organizers did a great job putting newcomers on the invite list and making sure everyone was able to be fully involved in the conference.

One factor that led to this feeling of hyper-inclusion was the size of the conference. With only 120 or so attendees, it’s really hard to get lost in the crowd.  Another factor is that everyone was just really frickin’ nice and eager to engage, pretty much all the time.  I had conversations with some awesome people on topics ranging from That Time I Had a Panic Attack in a Cab in Nairobi to how Monet’s Japanese bridge paintings showcase the passage of time to how to enable more protest actions in the online space.  I went to sessions on epic fails, the internet vs governments, the Obama 2012 campaign, and TOS violations.  I also played way too much Werewolf, which is basically gamified social trauma, and is seriously too much fun.

Dan Schultz and me rocking Werewolf at 2AM or some ridiculous hour. Photo by Sean Bonner

For people looking to construct their own NewsFoo type event, here are some take-aways from my first NewsFoo experience:

- Have a well-curated guest list, with attendees from different parts of the world, professional sectors, and levels of professional attainment

- Encourage active participation for all attendees – first timer? Lead a session! Because, seriously, why the fuck not.

-Don’t force “relevance” or “expertise.” I saw sessions for new parents, talking about recipes, walking around Phoenix, and porn.  And without the expectation of “expertise” on the part of the session leaders, it was easy to have great conversations with balanced participation from everyone present.

-Have protocols in place for people to talk about confidential/controversial topics.  Where the general philosophy of active participation encouraged first-timers to participate, the “FrieNDA” concept used at NewsFoo and general de-emphasis on tweeting/blogging/otherwise publicizing the sessions allowed people who might otherwise have been constrained by confidentiality or professional concerns to fully participate in conversations.

FrieNDA in action. Photo by Sean Bonner

I’ll be posting the video of my Ignite talk as soon as it becomes available.  Here’s the video of my Ignite talk, “What You Say Is What You Get: Why Using ‘Hacker’ as a Synonym for ‘Criminal’ is Killing Political Speech Online.” And a big thank you to O’Reilly, the Knight Foundation, and all the other attendees for putting on such a great event and letting me be part of it.