 for a while. And still, for many reasons Facebook has a tight grip on various communities depending on the platform for organizing, mobilizing and distributing content. This is also true for alternative culture's needs, but an opposition is rising. Our next speakers, Elle and Rosa Raef, will talk about approaches of activists and artists to use art against Facebook from graffiti and net art to calls for a Facebook exodus. Elle is an independent art historian from Berlin. He was a member of the Ninja Cater of the cult of the dead cow and hacktivismo. Elle is sharing the stage today with Rosa Raef, who are part of the Berlin Reclaim Club Culture Network. So let's give a warm welcome and applause to Elle and Rosa Raef. Thanks so much for being here. The topic of my talk is artful resistance against social media monopolies. Today I am presenting as an art historian. I report to you of some interesting conflicts between art and Facebook. I do this faceless and nameless. This is meant as an homage to basic strategies against social media. Around 10 years ago, we, the inhabitants of the digital industrial countries, started to rely heavily on mobile computers and so-called smartphones. This led to a growing importance of social media services. Suddenly they had a use. They were the ideal platform for capturing the time and attention of the always online users. Last week, Sascha Lobo neatly summed this up in his review of the digital decade. The rest is history. We entered the age of surveillance capitalism where a few big services process our expressions and activities as data. And they use it for the most elaborate advertising industry in history. It's the end of the decade and we can't imagine the system to fall apart. No world without Google, Amazon and Facebook seems possible. The social change fostered by these services is really a mess. Attention spans are down to a minimum. Journalism is under pressure. A whole generation is occupied with image feeds and headlines and to texts that no one reads. I completely agree with Sascha Lobo and many others that the new rise of right-wing movements and the horror clowns they elect is directly connected to the superficial feed services where propaganda statements circulate fast. For the new fashion for the new fascists, these feeds provide a means of propaganda and panic. For the rest of us, they serve as a system of governance to quote Caroline Wiedemann. She explains that the interface of Facebook serves as a tool of self-evaluation, self-control and competition, pushing out earlier uses of the net like playing with identities, collaborating, peer-to-peer sharing. With Sascha Natsubov and her book, surveillance capitalism, we can say that Facebook is a behavioral capture mechanism. So please, if you have a Facebook account, use it to dis-behave. As I want to show with this talk, art is here for you for inspiration and techniques, some of which can be used as open art technology like the Facebook gravity that I will show. I hope more tools will come out helping people to manipulate their attention here themselves. With my talk, Art Against Facebook, I invite you on a tour of contemporary conflicts around Facebook. My aim is to show you artful resistance against social media monopolies. These are open movements that rely on your support to grow and go viral. So what is the current conflict of art in Facebook? In my field, the field of cultural production, Facebook is very influential. Currently, Facebook has a tight grip on the cultural scene, on the one side with its events calendar and the other side with Instagram as a spectacular image feed. For example, the art market has merged with social media. If your painting is not online, it is as if it doesn't exist. Some collectors just buy after seeing digital images. The same for cultural events. Event organizers feel that if your event is not online on Facebook, you will not have guests. This is even true for spaces to try to stay under the radar in every other sense. For example, because they are very underground and don't even have a license. Both of these examples are very specific. But they show how Facebook has horrible effects on art and culture. Images and visibility in general are not negotiated outside the commercial space of hyper advertising anymore, but are directly wired to its cybernetic loops. It's a stage of cultural industry that seemed unimaginable not so long ago. So we need theory and practice against the social media monopolies and the harmful effects they have on our private life and on politics and culture. And my humble contribution today will be to document some forms of artful resistance that I saw. My talk has three parts. First example, there's graffiti in the ruins of Facebook. This is about how users can destroy the Facebook interface with unicode texts. It's risky, it's illegal soon and it's great fun. Then comes the intermission. Here we will hear a sermon to the users, a lamentation of hate against Facebook, an initiation to the movement against it. This will be a bit dry and lots of quotes. In fact, it is just quotes, so it's just a quick and dirty manifesto. But we need radical theory for our radical practice, which then will be followed by the second example, club culture against Facebook. How to organize the Facebook exodus of the cultural scene. How to break the monopoly of a global networked events calendar. Here we will have a guest appearance. The name is Rosa Raef, a radical raver from the future who will tell us how to get rid of our problems of the present. So exciting. The first example, there's graffiti in the ruins of Facebook. So Facebook looks like it's in ruins. After countless data scandals and a rising awareness of filter bubbles and psychological manipulations, it has lost its attractiveness as a host of intimate information to many. The service even has to resort to silly games and challenges like, 10 years have passed, upload your face twice, viral challenges to keep users engaged. The ruin look of the feed, so this empty boring feed is just a front. In fact, they don't need the users uploads that much anymore. Just browsing the feed or interacting with the many tentacles of the service throughout the net generates the necessary data for this advertising machine. The normality it produces and reproduces is still highly problematic. When before it was an open competition of beauty standards and distinction of social status, it is now a more and more subtle micro targeting machine to manipulate the always connected individual. How can we reach those individuals and interrupt this manipulation machine? I have a long interest in graffiti writing and the interventions of urban art in general. This wild art growing everywhere is of high significance in the conflicts around urban space. So I was highly delighted when one day something comparable started to appear in the feeds. Someday, there was something like a crack through my feet. From top to bottom, crossing images, text and video. Scrolling down some posts, I found a source. Some cryptic letters with little extra characters attached to them stacked on top of each other. Following the creators, I found out about groups where people collected the most effective letter combinations, recombining them into powerful little copy-paste interventions. I subscribed to all of them and enjoyed some months of completely destroyed feeds with waves of letters growing from posts, comments, notification boxes, menu bars and everywhere in between. This was only the first step. But let's pause for a second and explain what are we seeing here. So Facebook aims at being a global platform and therefore it supports large parts of the Unicode spectrum for letters, which means over a million different letters and special signs from all kinds of different languages and sciences. A lot of these have very specific rules. For example, they always go under the letter before. And it turns out a lot of these can be combined and being stacked on top of each other. So some curious artists found that with some small Arabic signs, you can actually combine more than a hundred signs on top of each other. Technically, you can combine many more, but then you reach a security limit of Facebook. Still, it is enough to traverse multiple posts with your digital graffiti. This is only one example. There are many more. Let's just look at some tendencies. So there's graffiti for humans. So digital graffiti for human readers only. You can write with signs that look like Latin letters, but have a different meaning. Shape catcher is a useful tool online to find such similar characters. You just draw your letter and it shows you a sign that looks like it. This means the cybernetic machine of Facebook is interrupted. You create content that is not meaningful to the server, but only to the user. A slogan that is only readable by users. Ascii art crossing the line. A lot of this reminds us of Ascii art. This means painting with letters like in the early days of the internet. You can actually use Ascii art to cross the social media interfaces. So cute and radical form of painting with text. Then we have text bombs. Also interesting are these very dense forms. I call them text bombs. In the middle of a lot of text is weaved into itself like a spray can scribble and then some kind of antennas reach out and grow through the feet. Or you can write outside the box. There are some cute little letters used in mathematics that can be attached to these antennas. That way you can write into the post next to yours. Style writing. This is more for the graffiti nerds. It's not only about crossing the feet, but you can actually do style graffiti in the feet. Graphity as an art movement relies on handwriting. But with 1 million different signs in this global system of digital letters, you can actually type graffiti online. Again, the tool shape catcher helps to find the right letters that you need. So while urban graffiti only circulates on trains, these graffiti can be forked. They can replicate, copy and paste and recombined. Again, for the tracking and analysis of Facebook itself, this will not be meaningful. This only has meaning as graffiti art. This one I call hybrid letters. In the combination of various techniques, often something powerful comes out. So this account uses upside down letters with some ornamental outlines. Patterns. A pioneer of this letter based feet art was the artist Glitcher. The rhythm of his interventions disrupted the feet in a very happy and powerful way. We don't really have the time to enjoy the piece, but once a musician friend of mine even used these patterns as notations and we could listen to it. We wing. One artist I follow likes to create patterns of high density. These sometimes even block out the interface completely. You can use techniques like this, for example, for digital ad busting. If you move it out of your post over the advertising. These are called destroy lines. There's one particular nasty form in urban graffiti. So in the old graffiti with the spray cans that it's used for quick destruction of large territory. It is to destroy line. So what what these people do is they walk past the building or stand next to a moving train and just draw one long wavy line with your spray cam, which is very nasty and very effective. So while many examples of digital graffiti that I did show, they're very going much along the feet, there's also beauty in these horizontal destroy lines. I like to think that they pull the user out of the linearity of the feet. Like in this old anti cybernetic slogan, please step out of the line now. So to sum up this first part, graffiti in the feed is about the digital distortion of letters using the wide typeface of the Unicode system. This system contains millions of diverse characters from global writing and notation systems, and is supported by platforms such as Facebook, due to their international consumer base. It is possible to decorate words in the digital platform platforms, the fragments of the Unicode spectrum, individual letter elements then grow in different directions, or intertwine with each other. This is a qualitative leap from ASCII art, or other ways to play with science like emojis, of course. The Unicode spectrum can be used to introduce digital graffiti and concrete poetry into the feeds. A special challenge for this digital gravity is to override the layout of Facebook. So to assemble letter buildings that exceed the existing frames, and Facebook is just really badly programmed because it would be so easy to stop this. This art form pushes the medium to its artistic limits at the medium Facebook. It is a clash between the aesthetics of the interface and wild forms of art. This circulating art adapts to the specific economy of social media, like posting, but is subverting and undermining it by breaking the rules, which means that it carries the potentials of art directly into the digital economy, and at the same time creates a radical break. Two years ago at this very conference, we did a little self-organized session about this phenomenon. The question was, how can we turn this thing from glitch art and text art into an open graffiti technology? We wanted to unlock digital gravity and vandalism for all in order to spread chaos and defeats and thereby generate some digital fog in the cybernetting system of social media, or just give people a tool to annoy fascists online. We call it net graffiti, and as I showed you before, browsing the hashtag is really great. Luckily, there were some friendly hackers at this conference that volunteered to write an editor that lets you combine some very effective symbols. We call it letter code, and you can find it on the URL here. As on then please use the hashtag net graffiti to mark your creation so others can remix them. So this is all for the topic of net graffiti. Now it's time for the intermission. Intermission. Why all the hate? Why this vandalism? What do these anti-Facebook extremists want? There are some remarkable texts against the current world of social media. In fact, they are countless. Some are particularly spicy. The following is a collage of some of them. It is a sermon to the users. Featuring net critique old-schooler patrols. Also featuring the invisible committee of the imaginary party for a coming insurrection. And furthermore featuring the apolitic collective. This is a sermon to the users. We, the users, are all suspects whose most intimate details must be known so we can satisfy our compulsive craving for new and immediately obsolete objects. The problem of privacy is endlessly discussed, but only enters the public discussion once it has already been violated. This issue is usually coupled with complaints about the immoral, immoral vt, sorry, of an authoritarian system that divides people into categories. In the era of big data conspiracies arrive. But the real problem is much more concrete and distressing, because it affects us all personally and not as an anonymous mass. While certain individuals want to be profiled for the others, whatever we do in order to avoid profiling, our digital footprint is incapable. There's no way we can opt out once enlisted in the army of the data suppliers. We no longer shape a discourse. Data is to have the last word. This is the camera of data driven society where the role of the human subject is practically irrelevant. The role of humans now is one of docile are Christians where we relinquish our ability to choose and desire. It seems a parody of the ancient epic Maxim know thyself. And instead, the messianic promise of the quantified self movement, self knowledge through numbers. Give us even more powerful machines, hand over all your data, be transparent and we can predict the future. The future of the market, of course. While cybernetic governmentality already operates in terms of a complete, completely new logic, its subjects continue to think of themselves according to the old paradigm. We believe that our personal data belongs to us, like our car or our shoes, and that we are only exercising our individual freedom by deciding to let Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon or the police to have access to them. The object of the great harvest of personal information is not an individualized tracking of the whole population. If the surveillance insinuate themselves into the intimate lives of each and every person, it's not so much to construct individual files as to assemble massive databases that make numerical sense. It is more efficient to correlate the shared characteristics of individuals in a multitude of profiles with the probable developments they suggest. One is not interested in the individual present and entire, but only in what makes it possible to determine their potential lines of flight. The advantage of applying the surveillance to profiles, events and virtualities is that statistical entities don't take offense and individuals can still claim they are not being monitored, at least not personally. Behind the futuristic promise of a world of fully linked people and objects, when cars, fridges, watches, vacuums and dildos are directly connected to each other and to the internet, there's what is already there. The fact that the most polyvalent of sensors is already in operation, myself. I share my geolocation, my mood, my opinions, my account of what I saw today that was awesome or awesomely banal. I ran, so I immediately shared my route, my time, my performance numbers and their self-evaluation. I always post photos of my vacations, my evenings, my riots, my colleagues, of what I'm going to eat and who I'm going to fuck. I appear not to do much and yet I produce a steady stream of data. Whether I work or not, my everyday life as a stock of information remains fully valuable. The social factory of Facebook as well as Amazon, Google and any other larger commercial online platforms will turn to a model of commodifying and monetizing data by feeding it value extraction methods that are run by machine learning algorithms. The underlying privatization of data is the central strategic point to attack. The discourse of regulatory law as well as ethical commissions will not prevent the next levels of alienation, surveillance and oppression that are coming with machine learning and big data driven AI. The economic inequality and the property relation should be the first common issue beyond all minority based struggles to connect various fights and not obey to the framings and neutralizing offers of liberalism. A more object oriented social network is possible with subject groups around issues, goals, projects, events and the individual is not just the ultimate product in the center of the social graph anymore. End of the intermission. So this was pretty dark, right? From the ruins of the feed and the new net critique, let's now move to the future. How to organize the Facebook Exodus. At the last cows communication camp this summer, the Berlin based network Reclaim Club Culture announced the campaign idea of a Facebook Exodus. They want to motivate the club and cultural scene to support free alternatives by moving their biggest digital capital, which are the events announcements. Once the information monopoly on events is cut through, maybe more people will make the step to leave the platform they don't even like anymore, because very often what you hear is that one central thing that keeps people on Facebook are the events. Today we have as a guest the party political spokesperson of Reclaim Club Culture. She's a raver from the future. Please welcome Rosa Raef. With this campaign we want to defeat the mass surveillance. We want to call for a human strike online. We are all Rosa. We want to have targeted ads to destroy Facebook. We want to try to shape a better future. We want to share our list of alternatives. Facebook makes good parties and bad parties. Facebook should not know where I am going. We want to get rid of the addiction Facebook. And now it says here because we are all Rosa's that the crowd should shout fuck Facebook, fuck Facebook, fuck Facebook, fuck Facebook, fuck Facebook. We want to use flyers and stickers because they are cool. We want all to check out the fatty verse. Don't be the consumer, be the producer. Don't be an Instagram DJ. Facebook stole my friends. You won't find me on Facebook anymore. We want to have a cruel dystopia where Facebook, the people who are on Facebook are zombies like him, perhaps. Find me on opium, not on Facebook. We want to join the movement. We have here some flyers because flyers are cool. Where you can like join the movement and there's an address. I'm going. Yes, thank you. Rosa for the sparkling intervention and we do have time for questions. Should you have any? Please use the microphones. One, two, three. And I asked the angel, I didn't know questions from the internet. What a surprise. Actually remarked maybe. No questions. Everyone convinced. Maybe one question in the room. Who will delete Facebook now? We do have a question on mic one. Sorry, mic one. Okay, then, please. Thanks for this great talk and the presentation. I just wanted to ask if I don't have Facebook anymore, which I don't. Is there a way to help destroy it, though? Absolutely, yeah. These interventions work, the graffiti works on any kind of internet service that is harmful for our life. And the campaign is hosted elsewhere. So please join the Rosa's campaign. Yeah. All right. Thanks. And now, Mike, one, please. Thank you a lot for the talk. Thank you for the idea. That's also something that I feel very relevant. I'm also from the art field. But I have another question. I heard someone a few years ago, I don't remember who, saying that actually the social medias could be put down as soon as we would look into the question of advertisement. And I was wondering, I mean, if we make credible that advertisement is not credible. That is as in work. I think that there's a good, also power in bringing down also those platforms through this means. And so I was wondering if there was any idea going into this direction, also. Thanks. That's a very central point, of course. And I try to quote some people that are really working only on this. What is this economically? What is this culturally? So the critique is there. Still Facebook has a lot of power. So I guess we have to continue on this and the artistic level on the level of theory and critique political campaigns. I mean, it's really, I'm just reporting from global movements that are actually really big and growing and very professional interventions and research are standing this way. So thanks for making this point. We now have a question from the internet. The internet asks why I hate specifically Facebook. Why not the other companies like Microsoft, Twitter and Google? I want to give an example. There was this service in some countries that don't have a stable internet and people actually could use Facebook there because Facebook is so friendly and more and more people in these countries believe that Facebook is the internet. And actually, I think that even in some Western countries, European countries, people actually or kids actually believe that Facebook is somehow the internet. So maybe we don't realize this, but for many people, this is the point. So it's a good point, a good starting point for an intervention. Question from Mike. Number two, please. Yeah, thank you for great and interesting talk. I was just wondering when you see graffiti in the urban space, there is no segmentation of it. When the tram comes by with graffiti on it, you were kind of forced to watch it. But on the internet, especially Facebook, you have these algorithms that sorts you into your interests. So how can you, as a net graffiti artist, escape the virtual algorithmic bubble to expose people that don't really have the same interests as you? Yeah, you should always write congratulations and happy birthday and everything in this post, because then they are more effective. You just have to research basic, the basic mechanism. So make really popular posts with videos and lots of seasonal greetings and write about food and love and life. And then that's how it works. Oh yeah, buy a lot of likes. All right, we have another question from the internet. Did Facebook try to fix the broken characters? Not yet. Easy answer. And then a question from Mike, number one, please. Yeah, thank you, Rosa Raves, for your enjoyable intervention. Could you maybe stress out a little bit how this exodus is planned or organized? Yes, we want to do a call in the Berlin Club scene that people that the clubs are like also use different networks. Yes, all clubs, all club culture in the world use news later, communicate with your community, with your friends, with a society, and then you can communicate the change in other platform or another way. And we want to also make clear that it's not that just that Facebook is something where I can promote my event or something like that, but that they are really that Facebook is really collecting data from the visitors or the participants from these events and like having this like political dimension in the campaign. Yes, fuck Facebook. Fuck all companies. I mean, Google too, but first fuck Facebook. And we have another question from Mike, number two, please. I tried to look at the Glitcher Twitter account, and I was disappointed that they fixed it so that the tweet, the text doesn't go, doesn't bleed outside the tweet section. By the way, I read that this weird text that you said human can read, but the computer cannot read, but actually it's a problem for voiceover, so the blind people cannot read the text. And I wonder if there's like accessible, accessible option for the net graffiti. No, because the second question no, it's a contradiction if the machine can't read it, people who need help reading text also can't. Yeah, so it's not possible. Yeah, but it's it's like a riot or something. It's not to spread information that is valuable to people. Of course, it will exclude people. The first question, yeah, of course, Glitcher is also not active anymore, but I wanted to give Glitcher credit for starting this all. And some of Glitcher's methods are outdated. Yeah, if you check the net graffiti hashtag, I can post some lines that are still working. So you can copy and paste them. All right, and another question for Mike three, please. Yes. How long can I and other people see this text for one hour for one second? How long does it take that Facebook? Yeah, we refresh the site and you can see it anymore. Yeah, it's a very specific question. I think the beauty of it is it actually crosses the whole feed. So if you're reading something else, suddenly there's graffiti in the other post. So yeah, you will scroll past it, but you will have seen it a long time before. So the temporality of it your concerning question is really kind of beautiful because it can be reposted, then it appears elsewhere, gets recontextualized, then you push it to somewhere where you need it, maybe on a fascist web post. So it's reusable. It's continuously, it's just text copy and paste. Can use it on the phone, on the computer and the individual post there like any social, useless social media post. It's only for some seconds, but it's very effective. So there was this number that the attention span is now down to eight seconds. But yeah, actually in eight seconds, you can do amazing things. OK, thank you. And another question, Mike, too, please. Thanks again for the great talk in the as well showing this new way of rebel against those big companies. My big wonder about it is if we do the exodus from Facebook and we try to open or build a different alternative community that inevitably will be part of the network or like online because this is where we go in today. We're not going to create more flyers. We're not going to print more stuff. It's probably will work in the digital sphere. How would you prevent a new forces raising exactly like Facebook? How the new generation of those companies to prevent them to repeat themselves and actually really managed to create online and alternative independent social network? Basically, this only can be part of a larger social political struggles to regulate companies that are this harmful for our personal life or psychological life. So it has to be a bigger struggle on different fields. And I mean, now it's even getting more serious because already kids are using these services. So they are affected much earlier on. So yeah, it has to be in every way possible. But the the role of art, as I see it. That's why I wanted to show artistic examples. It's really to to provide inspiration and to provide some fantasies of basically a world after Facebook and still have to believe in it. And artists may be helpful. Another question from Mike one. Hi, thanks for the talk. It's great. I'm not on Facebook. So I'm wondering if the Facebook graffiti is documented somewhere else, especially since I assume eventually they're going to ruin your fun. I want to see it somewhere forever. Yeah. Actually, I made these screenshots while not being signed in on the site. So you can browse it apparently. Yeah, so it works. You just use the hashtag net graffiti on Twitter and Facebook and without being signed in and you can view it. Yeah, you can have the fun of it without giving them your data. All right, I think that wraps it up. Let's again give a warm round of applause for L and Rosa Ray.