Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society
224
Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society
224Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745333663 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2015 |
| Series: | Digital Barricades |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.30(h) x 2.50(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Recursion
Information Eats Itself
Information is a difference that moves. Information also passes between entities and in that movement both enables and is affected by change; information may make a difference from itself. We can see that if the entities that move are also able to move, are also able to flow as information, then the flow is both constant and constantly contributing to further flows. Information can eat itself in this way to produce more information and this is a key underlying dynamic of information power and politics examined in this chapter. This dynamic will be called recursion in the ability of information to contain itself. The dynamic of recursion can be theorised by understanding the significance of the point at which a difference occurs, and examples of this process can be seen underpinning major digital institutions.
For example, one of the open secrets of the growth of digital industries, though now much repeated, is Google's position as one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world. Claimed in 2006 to be the fourth largest builder of computers, Google was by 2011 claiming to be the largest of all (Levy 2011: 181; Hansell and Markoff 2006). Google keeps these computers and uses them to power itself. This fact is often repeated to demonstrate that Google needs massive computing and storage power for its search service and all the other applications it offers. An important factor underpinning this need for computing resources is that Google's search is recursive and accordingly not only takes input from those who search and use its services but continually reuses its own data to refine future searches and future identifications of the nature of its users (and hence delivery of advertisements). For example, Google claims that only 15 per cent of Google searches are new searches it has not seen, which means 85 per cent of searches can be related to other searches refining the search results. Eighty-five per cent of Google searches produce information only by being applied to previous searches and in that way creating some kind of difference to those previous searches (and so new information) (Google 2013a). This means the majority of searches are used recursively and all the differences, however minor, can be taken and applied to existing searches. This utilises differences like each query's punctuation, the length of the query, the length of time on the Google page, whether the first result is clicked on, how soon a searcher returns to try again, the searcher's characteristics and so on and so on (Levy 2011: 46-8).
Google is able to apply a past search to its present and future searches, to refine and then reapply this information. It is able to create a system in which whatever is added to it contributes not just when added but can continue to help refine searches and advertisement delivery. Any user of Google will most likely have noticed the obvious effects of this. For example, when searching for a holiday in a particular region and then finding Google offering up future advertisements for that region. To do this on top of its initial and obvious services requires massive computing power, a problem Google solved by building its own bespoke data system and in the process becoming one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world. Facebook similarly takes the information individuals need to provide about themselves in order to present themselves on the social network and turn this into a form that allows recursions. The information can be returned back within Facebook's systems to, like Google, return certain advertisements to the user and then to use further information, such as which advertisements are clicked on, to affect and create yet more information within the system. Though Google and Facebook were clearly, in 2015, large gorillas in the digital jungle, nearly all digital systems embed some form of recursion, or seek to, and this chapter examines what this means.
It is clear that the provision of information, something held by the user, is taken over in a seamless fashion by institutions like Facebook and Google and becomes part of their systems. There are here shifts when information that may be freely given up has its results appropriated. Imparting information results in a relationship that places initial activity, like a search, in a reactive state when using the very services that elicited such information in the first place. Moreover, this may become an unequal relationship in which the provision of information leads to a transfer of ownership and hence the ability to draw from a range of other actors either greater information, wanted or unwanted solicitations to spend money and more revenue from advertisers. A complex body is formed here in which a range of active and reactive forces can be seen and in which recursion is a key dynamic. For example, if Google knows that someone who searches for Walt Disney World also searches for Harry Potter World and if they see enough of these correlations then they can start to predict that anyone searching for the land of Mickey Mouse might be happy to see an advertisement for the land of Harry Potter. Even if the information provided by searchers is anonymised this effect is in play – each search that is made can be fed back into changing future searches. If this can then be connected to someone's age, gender, location and so on, perhaps by that person being logged into their Google account while they search or because on Facebook this information will already be connected, then the targeting can be even more precise. This is a key example of recursion and the way its ability to take on digital information and then use it again and again to change other similar digital actions is key to the digital world.
Differences that are moving must have a point of 'difference-from'. Without a difference registering itself as 'different-from' another difference then no significant difference – no mark on a map – can occur, as the difference always then falls back into myriad undifferentiated and unrealised possible differences or into sameness. In addition, if information can be applied to information, then information becomes exponentially more productive of further information because it contributes to itself. Recursion further results in the privileging of those who can manage recursive information processes because any information, no matter who that information might be thought to belong to, that can be drawn into a recursive process contributes to that process and to the information reach of whoever controls it.
This chapter follows the idea of information into that of recursion, or the application of information to itself. This requires addressing existing theories of recursion of which there are two key sources. The most important is the theory of computers itself, with the foundational work of Turing, Church and Godel, though a useful beginning is in the use of recursion in linguistic theory and the work of Chomsky. This chapter will briefly examine recursion in Chomsky before turning to the basis of computation. The discussion that here leads to a theory of recursion may seem like it is based on technical matters concerning how mathematics is founded and how this relates to articulating a basis for creating electronic computers. However, this theory of recursion has immediate political and cultural ramifications when returned to the context of information politics in the twenty-first century. It should be no surprise, to anyone but the simplest technological determinist, that what seems to be a highly technical idea when embedded deep within a key technology of information turns out to have wide political implications. This chapter will then involve a shift from the concerns of linguistics and the philosophy of computation to the politics of information. This will be done by taking the theory of recursion and seeing how in digital environments it holds a dark potential for exploitation, as already prefigured in the example of Google and Facebook turning our personal information into profit by using recursions.
These are particular and striking factors about recursion that need to be understood in relation to information politics in order to understand both the extraction of information as a contributor to exploitation and the way this extraction leads to an exponential explosion in information. The latter will, in turn, lead to the second dynamic of information politics explored in the next chapter. However, before being able to grasp the meaning of exponential information increases, recursion needs to be understood.
A Theory of Recursion
A theory of recursion may be derived from two intellectual questions in which recursion plays a key role: the definition of computing and the definition of language. As noted, these may seem far from the concerns of exploitation and liberation in information technologies but they will nonetheless help articulate one of the key ideas of that politics in recursion. We can understand recursion by focusing on Church and Turing's reflections on the possibilities of computing and on Chomsky's claim that all languages are recursive. It is useful to start with Chomsky's idea of recursion in language because it introduces relevant concepts but the key discussion is to be found in Godel, Church and Turing's work and their understanding of recursion as a foundational concept for what became computing. After examining these two conceptualisations of recursion a general theory of recursion will be outlined. The final sections of this chapter will then explore the nature of information exploitation and liberation within recursion.
Recursion appears in Chomsky's work as part of his theory of generative grammar. It is not necessary to go into this theory in detail but it is useful to see that Chomsky frames recursion within his theory in the following way: 'The use of language undoubtedly involves many factors beyond the grammar that represents fundamental properties of the speaker's knowledge of his language. It is natural to suppose that models of the speaker and hearer will incorporate "competence grammar" as a basic element ... A generative grammar is a theory of competence' (Chomsky 1975: 7). In this sense, Chomsky calls his study of language and recursion's place in it a study of a particular aspect of human intelligence. Within that study he also conceptualises recursion. If we consider a sentence such as 'Chomsky believes in recursion' then we can use that sentence within another sentence or another sentence or clause within it: 'Jordan thinks that Chomsky believes in recursion' or 'Chomsky the American linguist believes in recursion'. According to Chomsky, this means that a key characteristic of recursion is that it allows the infinite to be created with finite means. Language is infinite in the sense that there are an infinity of things that can be said/heard but that infinity is built from the finite means of words, grammar and syntax (Smith 2004: 54-5; Hauser et al. 2002).
Several aspects of recursion are suggested even within this very brief recounting of a component of Chomsky's theory of language. The operating form is that recursion allows a particular process to use either itself or products or elements of itself back within that same process. We can take any sentence and use it within another sentence or we can add sentences to the sentence (or clauses to clauses) we already have. Recursion in operation can be initially understood abstractly as a kind of process which can be utilised within itself. The consequence of this is that recursion allows infinite results from finite means; here is where Chomsky explicitly refers to mathematics, in the form of recursive function theory, stating: 'There is a perfectly coherent sense to the notion of infinite use of finite means. This is what ended up being the theory of computability, recursive function theory and so on' (Chomsky 2000: 62; see also Smith 2004: 224, n. 17).
This introduces a second sense of recursion that is mathematical instead of linguistic and that is highly relevant to information politics because it leads directly to the general problem of computation. It is, fortunately, not necessary to fully enter the logical waters of recursive function theory to understand recursion in this context. The essential point drawn on here is the ability to use mathematical or logical arguments nested inside one another such that the original argument can be called from within itself. Most interesting for a general understanding of recursion is how this connects to Godel, Church and Turing's views and the meaning of computation. We can see this by looking in two directions from Turing's famous paper of 1936 that first introduced the idea of the Turing machine (Petzold 2008; Leavitt 2007: 30-67; Turing 2004; Dyson 2012).
Turing's paper is now often taken to be a foundation for computation and was written in response to a problem that both Godel and Church separately worked on in relation to a logical foundation for mathematics. This particular context is not relevant here except that it set up certain problems in logic that were attacked by Godel, Turing and Church, during which Turing's method of solving part of the problem (the famed to mathematicians and logicians Entscheidungsproblem) led to a definition of computation and to postulating a machine that could undertake computations. All three created quite similar logical solutions but Turing's method produced the clearest feed into the birth of computers as we know them by offering practical reflections. For present arguments it is important that within all three was embedded an idea of recursion first articulated by Godel (Leavitt 2007: 30-40; Copeland 2004: 40-54; Casti and DePauli 2000: 80-1). Recursion occurs within the definition of computation because that definition involves the use within various computing devices (some of them human) of the results of those devices. This reaches its clearest articulation in Turing's definition of the Universal Turing Machine. I will briefly recount the Universal Turing Machine to show the connection to computation, and hence how deeply recursion is buried within environments dependent on computers, such as the digital and the internet. Then it will be important to look more closely at Godel's understanding of recursion to conceptualise it further than Chomsky's sense of something that can be used within itself.
Turing was exploring a problem in the foundations of mathematics that required an understanding of what computation or computing meant. At the time he wrote the paper, 1936, a computer generally meant a human being who conducted whatever computation was put in front of them. Turing explored the then rather startling idea that a machine might be built to conduct a computation, though he can now be seen to have followed some lonely pioneers in this idea in Leibniz, Lovelace and Babbage. Turing offered practical reflections on how this might be done. Through his practical discussion Turing was able to define computation as a set of instructions that a machine can carry out to produce a result. A Turing Machine is then anything that can carry out a set of instructions (or an algorithm as it will become known) to produce a result (Copeland 2004: 15, Leavitt 2007: 59-60). The next move was to point to the possibility of a Universal Turing Machine that could include and undertake all the computations that individual Turing Machines might be undertaking. 'It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence' (Turing 2004: 68). In the early twenty-first century, when many people are using devices, and often more than one, with similar properties to a Universal Turing Machine, this might not seem such a startling idea, but in a period when a computer meant another person, this was innovative. It is also an idea involving recursion in that the functions of each Turing Machine are replicated within the Universal Turing Machine. This is rather like the 'Russian doll' idea of recursion in which something is able to keep a copy of itself within itself and to use that copy (Davis 2000: 139-45; Leavitt 2007: 82-3; Turing 2004: 68-9).
Recursion as a process is not new; as Chomsky's arguments make clear languages of many types have been using recursive processes for a long time. The form of recursion that is embedded in Universal Turing Machines underpins not just the theory of computation but has also been embedded within computers as we use and know them. So far I have touched on quite simple forms of recursion like the Russian doll, which is similar to the kind of recursion that occurs when a picture is placed inside a picture of itself (leading to an infinite repetition of the same picture). To develop a theory of recursion relevant to information politics it is worth looking at the foundation of recursion as articulated by Godel and embedded within computations and computerisation (Watson 2012; Davis 2000; Aspray 1990).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Information Politics"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Tim Jordan.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements1: Information as a Politics
Part 1 Theory of Information Power
2: Recursion
3: Technologies' Embrace
4: Network and Protocol Theory: Dis/Organising Information Power
Part 2 Platforms
5: Clouds: Platform 1
6: Securitisation of the Internet: Platform 2
7: Social Media Networks: Platform 3
Part 3 Battlegrounds
8 Battlegrounds
9 Information Exploitation and Information Liberation
Bibliography
Index