{"id":4897,"date":"2019-06-26T13:31:52","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T17:31:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/?p=4897"},"modified":"2019-06-26T13:31:52","modified_gmt":"2019-06-26T17:31:52","slug":"jeff-stein-shaping-the-physical-assembly-and-constituting-a-virtual-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/jeff-stein-shaping-the-physical-assembly-and-constituting-a-virtual-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Stein | Shaping the Physical Assembly and Constituting a Virtual \u201cPeople\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jeff Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this post, I will claim that improvements to the speech environment are central to the projects that we\u2019ve been engaging with this year.\u00a0 I will argue that this conclusion follows from a text that ostensibly places the health of the speech environment (including online or \u201cvirtual\u201d publics) at the periphery of its argument: Judith Butler\u2019s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly<\/em>.\u00a0 Notwithstanding this feature of the text, I argue that its project depends on systems that enable productive speech that maximizes opportunities for mutual understanding.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Butler\u2019s illustration of the assembly, including its performative significance and temporal elements, prompts two observations that bolster my claim: (1) regardless of the assembly\u2019s unique importance, it is dependent on and intertwined with the larger speech environment; (2) if assemblies occur in \u201cvirtual\u201d public spaces, as Butler suggests, then we must investigate that nature of those virtual spaces to consider whether they will support \u201can assembly of the people on the grounds of equality.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Ultimately, I query whether the current speech environment will support Butler\u2019s conception of physical and virtual assemblies, given its many inegalitarian features.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Butler implores us to think of the assembly itself<\/em> as vital to any larger egalitarian project.\u00a0 For Butler, assemblies are \u201cassertion[s] of plural existence\u201d that \u201copen the way to a form of improvisation in the course of devising collective and institutional ways of addressing induced precarity.\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0 In their telling, assemblies allow for recognition, for presenting \u201ca public insistence on existing and mattering.\u201d[3]<\/a>\u00a0 Moreover, assemblies are the enactment of a \u201cwe\u201d that congeals \u201cprior to\u201d the articulation and vocalization of \u201cpolitical demands.\u201d[4]<\/a>\u00a0 \u201cThe \u2018we\u2019 voiced in language,\u201d Butler writes, \u201cis already enacted by the gathering of bodies, their gestures and movements, their vocalizations, and their ways of acting in concert.\u201d[5]<\/a>\u00a0 Crucially, while Butler admits that assembly and speech may bleed together, their thesis depends on the idea that \u201cthe assembly is already speaking before it utters any words.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This expressive performativity\u2014this assertion that we are a \u201cpeople,\u201d or \u201cthe people\u201d or \u201cstill<\/em> the people\u201d[7]<\/a>\u2014deserves analysis in its own right.\u00a0 But just as Butler is right to note that an assembly may \u201cspeak\u201d before words are uttered, any project that centers the power of assemblies must not elide the communication and organization that necessarily precedes the assembly\u2019s performance of precarity and solidarity.\u00a0 That is, verbal and visual communication, supported by physical and digital infrastructures, precede the assembly, just as the assembly precedes the political and social demands of \u201cthe people.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

Communications scholars have researched the \u201ccomplex ecology\u201d of speech production and its salient role throughout the life cycle of an assembly.[9]<\/a>\u00a0 For example, Professors Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson documented \u201ca complex intertwining of multiple online and offline spheres\u201d in relation to the January 25, 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations.[10]<\/a>\u00a0 Notably, Tufekci and Wilson found that nearly half (48.4%) of protestors \u201cfirst heard about the Tahrir Square demonstrations through face-to-face communication\u201d but that \u201c[i]nterpersonally oriented media,\u201d like Facebook (28.3%) and telephone (13.1%) \u201cwere the next most common first sources.\u201d[11]<\/a>\u00a0 Moreover, their research revealed that \u201ctexting \u2026 was rarely the means by which someone first heard about the protests (0.8%), even though it was used widely for sharing information about the protests (46%).\u201d[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thus, the assembly is directly shaped by the current infrastructures that mediate speech production.\u00a0 Even protestors who do not initially hear of a spontaneous assembly via social media platforms or messaging apps necessarily participate in an assembly influenced by those media.\u00a0 As Tufecki notes, Internet communications affect \u201call members of that society, whether a person uses the internet or not \u2026 Who is visible?\u00a0 Who can connect with whom?\u00a0 How does knowledge or falsehood travel?\u00a0 Who are the gatekeepers?\u00a0 The answers to each of these questions will vary depending on the technologies available.\u201d[13]<\/a>\u00a0 If the assembly is to be an expression of \u201cthe people\u201d \u2014who persist through precarity and experience new, improvised forms of being together\u2014then we must consider the visibility and connectivity of individuals before<\/em> they assemble.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Butler, for their part, claims that \u201cwe know that social networking produces links of solidarity that can be quite impressive and effective in the virtual domain.\u201d[14]<\/a>\u00a0 But there is good reason to believe that the dominant Internet communications infrastructures distort \u201cthe people\u201d who assemble in physical and virtual spaces.\u00a0 Social media platforms leverage their \u201cnetwork-making power\u201d[15]<\/a> (i.e., their ability to control the structure mediating networks) in ways that implicate offline and online assemblies: many platforms \u201cforce or nudge\u201d people to use real names, but primarily enforce such policies against political activists and journalists (in some cases, at the behest of governments);[16]<\/a> inspired by advertising, attention-seeking,[17]<\/a> and legal (i.e., intellectual property-related) imperatives,[18]<\/a> platforms use opaque algorithms to determine what content gets promoted, censored, or buried;[19]<\/a> complex and inequitably-applied content-moderation policies often result in oppressed minorities\u2014particularly women and people of color\u2014feeling unsafe and harassed when using platforms to communicate or consume media.[20]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Other features of online communications and infrastructure call into question the formation of a \u201cpeople\u201d through \u201cvirtual\u201d assembly.\u00a0 For some time now, the Internet itself has been a \u201csimulacrum of the Internet, where the only real things [are] the ads\u201d; at times, a majority of Internet traffic is simply \u201cbots masquerading as people.\u201d[21]<\/a>\u00a0 And even though activists use Facebook and other social media platforms, at least in part, \u201cas a coffee shop, which scholar J\u00fcrgen Habermas famously idealized as the cornerstone of a critical public sphere,\u201d[22]<\/a> these digital coffee shops are not connected by public thoroughfares; indeed, twenty years ago, scholars began to observe the disappearance of \u201csidewalks in cyberspace\u201d and the problematic nature of private ownership of Internet bottlenecks.[23]<\/a>\u00a0 Today, large swaths of digital infrastructure\u2014\u201cinternet service providers (ISPs), web-hosting services, Domain Name System (DNS) registrars and registries, cyber-defense and caching services (such as Cloudflare and Akamai), and payment systems (such as PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa)\u201d\u2014are privately owned.[24]<\/a>\u00a0 Thus, not only is the digital coffee shop exclusionary and manipulative in nontransparent ways, travel to the digital coffee shop is mediated by a series of private gatekeepers who are driven by capitalist imperatives and susceptible to government pressure.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Given these features of modern digital communications, I question the generative force of physical and virtual assemblies without a reassessment of the architectures and infrastructures that necessarily contribute to the formation of assemblies.\u00a0 Indeed, as Butler recognizes, \u201c[a]s long as the state controls the very conditions of freedom of assembly, popular sovereignty becomes an instrument of state sovereignty, and \u2026 the freedom of assembly has been robbed of both its critical and its democratic functions.\u201d[25]<\/a>\u00a0 This critique must be extended to the powerful private<\/em> entities that mediate offline and online assemblies.\u00a0 If assemblies are to do independent work in collective struggles for a more egalitarian future, we must tend to the inegalitarian online spaces and infrastructures that intervene before<\/em> \u201cthe people\u201d can improvise moments of being together, whether physically or virtually.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly 154, 181 (2015).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Id. at 16, 22.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Id. at 37.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Id. at 182.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Id. at 157.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Id. at 156.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Id. at 181.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> It is worth noting a temporary intersection with the ideas of Chantal Mouffe, who describes her project of \u201cleft populism\u201d as \u201ca discursive strategy of construction of the political frontier between \u2018the people<\/em>\u2019 and \u2018the oligarchy\u2019, [that] constitutes, in the present conjuncture, the type of politics needed to recover and deepen democracy.\u201d\u00a0 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism 5 (2018).\u00a0 Mouffe\u2019s hegemonic political project rests on \u201cthe establishment of a chain of equivalence among the demands of the workers, the immigrants and the precarious middle class, as well as other democratic demands, such as those of the LGBT community. The objective of such a chain is the creation of a new hegemony that will permit the radicalization of democracy.\u201d\u00a0 Id. at 24.\u00a0 Irrespective of the normative appeal of this project\u2014which some seminar participants critiqued as \u201cappropriation of Carl Schmitt for left emancipatory theory\u201d\u2014any formation of \u201cthe people\u201d and \u201cthe establishment of a chain of equivalences\u201d necessarily follows from the same complex speech ecology that Butler elides.\u00a0 See, e.g., Selya Benhabib, Brief Reflections on Populism (Left or Right), Praxis 13\/13 (Feb. 10, 2019), https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/seyla-benhabib-brief-reflections-on-populism-left-or-right\/; Jean L. Cohen, What\u2019s Wrong with the Normative Theory (and the Actual Practice) of Left Populism?, Praxis 13\/13 (Feb. 7, 2018), https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/jean-l-cohen-whats-wrong-with-the-normative-theory-and-the-actual-practice-of-left-populism\/.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Zeynep Tufekci & Christopher Wilson, Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square, 62 J. Comm. 363, 365 (2012).<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Id. at 376.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Id. at 370.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Id.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas 117 (2017).<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Butler, supra note 3, at 153.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> See Manuel Castells, Communication Power (2009); see also Anthony Cuthbertson, Who Controls The Internet?\u00a0 Facebook and Google Dominance Could Cause The \u2018Death Of The Web\u2019, Newsweek (Nov. 2, 2017), https:\/\/perma.cc\/Z98U-92ES (noting that \u201c[s]ites and services owned and operated by Facebook and Google-such as WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram-now account for over 70 percent of all internet traffic, compared to a joint market share of around 50 percent in early 2014\u201d) (citing Andre Staltz, The Web Began Dying in 2014, Here\u2019s How, Stalz.com (Oct. 30, 2017), https:\/\/perma.cc\/DB7N-DS9Q).<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> See Tufekci, supra note 18, at 142.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> See, e.g., Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016); Eben Moglen, Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright, First Monday (Aug. 2, 1999), https:\/\/firstmonday.org\/ojs\/index.php\/fm\/article\/view\/684\/594 (\u201c[W]hat\u2019s at stake is the control of the scarcest resource of all: our attention. Conscripting that makes all the money in the world in the digital economy, and the current lords of the earth will fight for it.\u201d).<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> See generally Matthew Scherb, Free Content\u2019s Future: Advertising, Technology, and Copyright, 98 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1787 (2004); see also Jean G. Vidal Font, Sharing Media on Social Networks: Infringement by Linking?, 3 U. P.R. Bus. L.J. 255, 267 (2012).<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> See generally Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (2015); Tufekci, supra note 19, at 159 (\u201cThe platforms\u2019 algorithms often contain feedback loops: once a story is buried, even a little, by the algorithm, it becomes increasingly hidden. The fewer people see it in the first place because the algorithm is not showing it to them, the fewer are able to choose to share it further, or even to signal to the algorithm that it is an important story. This can cause the algorithm to bury the story even deeper in an algorithmic spiral of silence.\u201d).<\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> See Emily Chang, What Women Know About the Internet, N.Y. Times (Apr. 10, 2019), https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/04\/10\/opinion\/privacy-feminism.html (\u201cIt isn\u2019t just that real-life harassment also shows up online, it\u2019s that the internet isn\u2019t designed for women, even when the majority of users of some popular applications and platforms are women. In fact, some features of digital life have been constructed, intentionally or not, in ways that make women feel less safe\u201d).<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> See Max Read, How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually, N.Y. Mag. (Dec. 26, 2018), https:\/\/nymag.com\/intelligencer\/2018\/12\/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html (\u201cStudies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was \u2018bots masquerading as people,\u2019 a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube\u2019s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event \u2018the Inversion.\u2019\u201d).<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> Tufekci, supra note 19, at 138; see also Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1737 (2017) (describing social media platforms as the \u201cmodern public square,\u201d and noting that \u201c[t]hese websites can provide perhaps the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard.\u201d).<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> See Noah D. Zatz, Note, Sidewalks in Cyberspace: Making Space for Public Forums in the Electronic Environment, 12 Harv. J.L. & Tech. 149, 207 (1998) (describing \u201cexisting bottlenecks in the organization of cyberspace: search engines and directories, the ISP of the target server, and the Domain Name Service (\u2018DNS\u2019) server of the audience member.\u201d).<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> Jack M. Balkin, Free Speech Is A Triangle, 118 Colum. L. Rev. 2011, 2014\u201315 (2018).<\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> Butler, supra note 2, at 163.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jeff Stein In this post, I will claim that improvements to the speech environment are central to the projects that we\u2019ve been engaging with this year.\u00a0 I will argue that this conclusion follows from a text that ostensibly places… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-11-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}