 So thank you for the introduction and thank you. I'm very excited to come here and speak here. I've been trying to follow the work that is coming out of here and very excited about seeing kind of very fresh ideas that are relevant to the work that we're doing. I'm teaching at the Schenkahl College in Lomitgan, which is just outside Tel Aviv. And I'm volunteering with an NGO called the Public Knowledge Workshop that is doing work on civic engagement and government transparency in Israel. Anyway, what I'm going to talk about today is a theme I've been working with for the last decade or so and developed through my years in New York. I spent five years in New York between 2005 and 2010. And this is kind of a theme that as a designer I've been working with for many years now. So I'm going to discuss the theme of interface and maybe the politics of interface through the communication cycle, the idea of protocols and then I'll try to suggest interfaces for resistance and ways for that to be addressed as well. When we're talking about life online, we have all of the euphemism. It's distributed, it's open, it's an interactive, participatory, democratic, social, emancipatory. At the same time, when we're talking about online life, we're talking about distracting, controlling, intrusive, abusive, repressive, shallow. All of these hopes, all of these concerns when it comes to online life, we meet them through the interface. So the interface is this point of interface between us and all of this technology. It's at the heart of the debate. So what is interface? So there are many definitions. The one that I find interesting is a common boundary or interconnection between systems, equipment, concepts and human beings. This is one of many definitions, but I think one part of it that I think makes sense and communicates specifically is this idea of common boundary and interconnection. And this idea of the interface being something common, something that we share, something that we connect through, implies some kind of relationship between these system, equipment, concepts, human beings. And it doesn't imply necessarily a level of control. It doesn't imply that one side should be stronger than the other or so on. And it has to do, this idea of commonality is something that has been discussed through media studies and before, for many years, this idea of mutuality and interconnectedness. And the core, this idea of the classic, the classic model of the communication cycle, we have, it's like in Sesame Street. I have an idea, I talk to you, you have the idea, you have an idea, you talk to me, you both have ideas. Now the two of us have two ideas. How great. So this is Stuart Hall. In 1980, he wrote a paper called Encoding Decoding. And at the heart of his paper was this critique of this communication cycle. He was saying that this is actually not the way it works. He called it, he said this is basically too simplistic. What is happening there is a bit more complex. He called this textual determinism. Because this idea that will be, that one side can plant ideas, kind of drag and drop into the mind of another person, that's not how communication actually works. And he tried to focus on the process of how communication happens. And he said, first of all there's encoding. I have an idea, I encode it into a different form in the case of this illustration into speech. So the idea is turned into sounds. So this body of knowledge is encoded into sound. And the sound is definitely not the body of knowledge. And as long as we have meaningful discourse, as long as you can hear me and understand my funny accent and so on, if you're in the back and you can't hear me well, then we don't have meaningful discourse in this room in the front. But the point is that this is assuming you can actually hear me and understand me to an acceptable level. And then there's the process of decoding. Decoding sound, for listening in this case, into a new body of knowledge. So if in Sesame Street it was like I had a triangle and now you have a triangle. So I have a triangle and what you have is not a triangle anymore. It's different. I don't know what it is. You don't really know what I had in my brain. This process, both the encoding process and the decoding process are creative processes. These processes where the information changes. And I was really interested in that. Stuart Hall was writing about television specifically. That was in 1980. That was the medium that was being researched and there were a lot of concerns about what does television do. And he referred to three types of code. He was saying one way of decoding is through a dominant or hegemonic code. So the recipient decodes the message using the same code it was encoded in. So as is, basically. So think whether or sports broadcast or certain type of radio hosts. That whatever they say is being accepted as is. So when I'm listening to the sports forecast, for example, I don't ask myself they said it was a touchdown but is it really a touchdown? It's not really relevant. In some cases it is relevant to question the message but the hegemonic code would be kind of accepting everything that is there. The negotiated code is more critical yet not completely dismissive of the reading. Think I guess the NPR. NPR claims it doesn't have a liberal bias. You know it has a liberal bias. But you see yourself as intelligent enough to spot it. But it's still useful. It's still useful to listen to it. You take what you can get. And then there is the oppositional code. So in the oppositional code the message becomes an opportunity to deconstruct the code. Think a feminist reading of a little red riding hood or the sex pistols God save the queen or the Hitler gets angry meme. So we know what the original message was supposed to be but we refer to the original encoding in a completely different way. Most memes actually are somewhat oppositional. And for me I'm really interested in what happens when it's not conversation or television. What happens when communication is structured through interface and specifically web interfaces? So when the message is encoded, when we see a message on the web, it's encoded through interface. So we all celebrate and enjoy how expressive the internet is and how expressive the tools of the internet are. But this expression is in the level of creating these web pages, right? When it comes to the decoding of these messages it's basically the same idea. You get the message, you decode it, you understand what you understand from it. So far pretty much the same model. The thing is what happens when we're trying to encode our message to the internet or to a web page. When we respond to the system or the website it is always through the system's dominant interface. So if interface is an important part of how we communicate online, we don't actually get to choose what interface to use. We basically work within the constructs of the interface that we were given. And I'll give you an example to make it a bit more, like, simpler to understand. So this is from a friend of mine, she's a Palestinian blogger and journalist. She tried to order flights, flight tickets on British Airways. And she, you all probably came across this drop down, what is your nationality? So she's looking down the list to find her nationality and under P there's no Palestinian nationality. And Dalia has been there. She's been there. Been there than that. So the interface demands this level of obedience. It's like, this is who you can be. But the interface actually also teaches obedience. Because if you come into a problem like that, you know, that's where you call, you call the company support, right? So she called the support of British Airways. And the person on the other side was saying, okay, I'm looking in my system. And in that person's system, there was another drop down menu with no Palestinian identity or nationality or passports or documents or whatever. So it's, even when you talk to a human, that conversation is kind of mitigated through the interface in that sense. So the same dominant interface was there as well. Lisa Nakamura, who's researching a lot of how race, race online basically, she calls it menu driven identities. Interfaces that limit and define what we are allowed to be. Think how many years it took for Facebook to accept different types of gender definitions. So it's the same thing. It's like, why is that a drop down menu? Why can I only be one of these things, right? So let's talk about protocol. To understand the role of user interface, we need to dive deeper into the communication protocol. This work is inspired by the work of Alex Galloway and other thinkers on this topic. But specifically, I'm trying to think what is different about the web in that sense. So when we're talking about traditional media, we're talking about centralized protocol, broadcast one to many. That's a consistent protocol. So television is always one to many, okay? Same with newspapers and broadcast radio. The fact that it's consistent means that the question of the interface in the television case is not that big of an issue. When you understood the interface of the television, you understood it's consistent, you can move on. Same with an interactive protocol like telephone, right? So this is a one to one, it's interactive, but it's still a consistent protocol. It's a protocol that doesn't change every time I pick up the phone. When we're going to digital media, we have different kinds of protocols. We have email, we have chat, we have networked games, we have voice over IP. And all of these, in this example, all of them actually have a consistent protocol. When I'm sending an email, I always need an address, it should be at something and so on. I'm not getting every email trying to ask myself, what am I supposed to do now? And when talking about protocols, there's the idea of the seven layers of the OSI model. So the OSI model is kind of technical, but the things we should care about, this is the protocol of the Internet, the different layers of the protocol of the Internet. We have the Internet protocol layer, that's where the TCPIP lives, that's basically how packet switching happens and basically everything that we know about the Internet being networked and so on happens there, I won't get too much into that, but the top layer of the OSI model is the application layer. So that's where we have our different applications like email clients, voice over IP, network games and so on, and also a browser. So when we open the browser, I think something slightly different happens because the browser's protocol is flexible. On the web, the protocol is basically a question of interface. Every web page basically adds another layer of protocol, another layer of possible control and I would suggest that the OSI model needs to be updated with another layer when we're talking about the web with a layer of interface, specifically user interface. If in the application layer we're using a browser, then we can get different kinds of applications that really change the way we should think about control and communication online. And we have to take into account the interface question is a governance question. It's a question of who sets the rules, who is supposed to be abiding by these rules? What is the process of making rules? So you've probably noticed that this is kind of a media studies inspired thing and I tried but I couldn't resist including Marshall McLuhan. So let's listen to what he has to say. We are in the middle of a tremendous clash between the old and the new. The medium does things to people and they are always completely unaware of this. They don't really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up. They think of the old medium because the old medium is always the content of the new medium. As movies I tend to be the content of TV and as books used to be the content novels used to be the content of movies. So every time a new medium arrives the old medium is the content and it is highly observable, highly noticeable but the real wrapping up and massaging is done by the new medium and it is ignored. That's his classic spiel. The old medium is the content of the new medium so the books have become the content of film. Film have become the content of TV and then TV have become the content of the web, right? Well not only, right? Basically there is a lot of things going on on the web. Not just the previous medium. Not just the old medium. So in a sense we can say this is what McLuhan meant by the medium is the message. But that's only true as long as the medium has a consistent protocol. I would say that the medium is the message when we're talking about the kind of media that we have today we can think about it as interface determinism. It kind of determines that by pointing at the medium we are also pointing at the interface. Maybe the interface is the message. Maybe that's what McLuhan actually meant. He just never thought of media having different interfaces which is what we have right now. So maybe the message and the rules that govern it becomes ambiguous when the interface kind of changes every time. And this is obviously kind of adopting from McLuhan can only go so far because I don't really share his technical determinism. But basically this is kind of a response to him. So I'd like to bring up another very important and influential thinker, Donald Rumsfeld, trying to make the case for the war in Iraq and referring to the question of WMDs. Rumsfeld went on an interesting philosophical statement that you probably remember. There are known knowns that are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns that we don't know but there are also unknown unknowns. There are things that we don't know that we don't know. Things that are so far from what we can even imagine and that's a good reason to go to war without proof of WMDs. Now when Slavoj Žižek came across this, it was too tasty for him to ignore and he enjoyed the rhetoric but he said basically this is great but Rumsfeld forgot the fourth option. There are unknown knowns. What about the things that we don't know that we know? So this is the real reason for the war. The subconscious, that's where ideology happens and Žižek actually writes about the fact that that's where design happens. That's how design works. Design uses the unknown known. The things that we don't know that we know. Things that work on us without us knowing. And I would add that's how interface works. So when it comes to user interface design and usability, I think Steve Krug would agree but the discourse in interaction design is trying to keep the unknown, to keep the known unknown. So the fact that we don't know that we know is kind of good for interaction design at least in the professional debate and Steve Krug wrote one of the Bibles of user interface and this is its title. Don't make me think. I'm sure some of you have come across it and it was published in 2000 and widely quoted and vastly translated book that has framed a lot of the discourse about the role of interaction design as lowering the cognitive load to a minimum. And that is actually, you know, let's put things in perspective. That is true to a certain degree. One of the terms that we speak about in interaction design is affordance. Affordance is how interfaces or how tools communicate what you are expected to do with them. But then the question that should be asked is, is it what attention do we afford or in the case of the web, how is our attention being afforded? Because when attention becomes the most real resource on the Internet, the attention is becoming something that we both use our attention, but our attention is being used. It's being afforded, it's becoming a currency on the web. So we've established that there are quite a few political issues involved and we are not as, when we're coming to the site, we're not too much in a position of affecting them. So how can we basically try to think of interfaces for resistance or resisting the paradigm of the interface? So I would suggest a division of tactical resistance, strategic resistance and logistic resistance. So the first, you know, the first, around the so-called web 2.0 in the middle of around ten years ago, there was a lot of excitement about user-generated content. They're asking us what we think, how amazing is that? And it's like authorship all of a sudden can happen, because all of a sudden the content of the web is not just content, it's also interfaces that would allow us to create content. That's when the interface is kind enough to allow, is kind enough to allow us to express ourselves. So I would call that the first depth of authorship. The second depth would be context. So user-generated context, think about mashups, embeds, and this is built into the web protocol. Think of taking, you know, Craigslist posting and putting them on a Google map. That was a big deal when it happened for the first time. And now creating the context of taking this and that and putting them together is a new layer of, kind of a new type of authorship. And it's, this kind of authorship is built into the web's protocol. The idea that I can take one resource and another resource and put them together, that's how the web works. And the same flexibility, it's the same flexibility that gives us also trackers and ads, and ad networks. So it's not necessarily used in our behalf, okay? And the third option I would suggest would be user-generated interfaces. This is also built into the protocol of the internet. Having users change what the site allows them to do. Usually by modifying the browser, mainly with the browser extensions. And that is the idea that you can come to, you can take your browser and you can change it and you can actually redefine what this browser can do is something that can extend what we might want to call interface literacy. This idea that it's not only about how do I read the interface in front of me or how do I lower cognitive load, but how do I mitigate this political question of governance that happens on the web. So one way of addressing that is tactical resistance. So the tactical resistance would happen on the interface layer. This is the subversion of the interface's use. I think the textbook example for that would be Google bombing. So this was around the time of the attack at the beginning of the war in Iraq. This was a parody of the lack of not finding weapons of mass destruction. When you search the web for weapons of mass destruction, you would get that as the first result on Google. And that happened by a concerted effort from different bloggers that opposed the war. They all wrote the words weapons of mass destruction and linked them to this page, which raised the Google rank for this page and made it the first result for weapons of mass destruction. So turning page rank into an interface. Page rank is not supposed to be an interface or a user interface. So what represents this kind of tactical resistance is this hit and run. It's limited in scope for better or worse. It's a limited investment for better or worse. A lot of hacking and culture jamming happening in this level of resistance. It's about learning how the system works and finding its vulnerabilities. Taking advantage of the interface's openness. So the interface is open to a certain degree. This is an opportunity. Kind of teaching the system something it didn't know about itself. And most of these cases are symbolic gestures of resistance. So protest action and political art is mainly tactical in that sense. The second type of resistance would be strategic resistance. And I would suggest that that's the kind of resistance that happens in the application layer. So that is basically saying, yes, we're supposed to be browsing the web through these softwares. Let's try to see how can we change that. How do we change the browser itself? So I deliberately chose an example that is not political but commercial. So this is Book Bureau. It's not active anymore but there are quite a few similar ones. What Book Bureau does is something that Amazon would never do. Tell you about, on each book page, where can you find the book for a better price? Online. And where can you find it in public libraries based on how far they are from where you are right now? So this, we look at that and say, oh, yeah, I need that. None of us would even think to, in the direction of creating an interface like that because that is what we need. Because it's completely submerged within the politics of interface that we are not a part of. We are not supposed to have agency there, right? Another example that is the most popular, anybody knows what's the most popular extension on both on Firefox and Chrome? Adblock Pro, definitely. Yeah. So at Block Plus, this basically, as soon as extensions became a thing on Firefox, this happened because we don't necessarily want to see ads and in some cases we don't necessarily want to be tracked by ads. This is arguably one of the reasons for the Google Chrome project. Adblock Plus was one of the biggest hurdles for Google AdWords from extending and Google had to be in a position of leverage in front of Adblock Plus. It was obvious that Chrome could not, with all of the euphemism around Google being a great supporter of open source, Chrome could not have started with no extensions and could not ignore Adblock Plus and say this is a browser with no Adblock Plus. But what they did because they're smart, they created leverage in front of Ad Block Plus' disruption and Google pays Ad Block Plus. How many of you know that? Most of you don't know that. So Google pays Ad Block Plus to change one thing about its interface. They've added, Ad Block Plus added a check box that says allow inobtrusive ads. So redefining the question of why do we not want ads? Do we not want ads because we don't want banners or do we not want to be tracked? It's completely redefined through Ad Block Plus now and one of the reasons, this is one of the reasons there are a lot of forks to the Ad Block Plus project that don't exist. This is also one of the things that makes the claim that Ad Block Plus is blackmailing Ad Networks true. How much money do we know? Undisclosed. I can talk about it later afterwards but this is one of the examples I can bring up is my project together with Helen Ysenbaum and Daniel Howe, Ad Nauseam. We basically created an extension that works with your Ad Blocker. Every Ad Blocked by your Blocker is clicked by Ad Nauseam. So we're clicking all of the ads on the web. Basically flooding the profiles that the Ad Networks are constructing and planting a lot of mistrust between advertisers and Ad Networks. I can talk about it later afterwards. So this approach is more of a hit and stay approach. It has larger scope for better or worse, larger investment for better or worse. It's about developing kind of alternative services. It's a deeper and less traditional reading of the protocol. The political value here goes beyond the symbolic. It's more than a gesture of resistance. It's a solid resistance to the interfaces demanded obedience. A concrete political power to be reckoned with. And it's harder to make an outcry out of that. Just a foyer. And the third layer is logistic resistance. And now we're talking about resisting the internet protocol. Changing the protocol is in kind of a deep technical protocol like the TCPIP. Either through slow bureaucratic processes or through revolution. That's how big protocols change. And a hegemonic protocol like the TCPIP require, if you get rid of that, you basically need to create a new hegemonic to replace it. It's a big political and powerful and often conservative process through standards committees. And when one standard is replaced with a new one, it breaks everything above it. So this is something that is kind of tough. And the example for kind of attempts to challenge the TCPIP protocol is this. I mean, I haven't seen any. We basically haven't seen serious attempts to say we can go beyond TCPIP. And maybe you are the crowd who can tell me no, you're wrong. There's this and this and that. And I'm waiting to hear that after the talk. But I've seen a lot of attempts for mesh networks and other things that are actually built on top of TCPIP. And none of the approaches that basically say whatever was invented back almost like basically half a century ago is not the way to go. Okay? So Evgeny Morozov, which is both, he can be seen as both an important and provocative thinker and an arrogant and violent troll. A bit of both, I guess. He defines it as technological defeatism. And this belief that since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms. And I think this critique is actually very valuable. There are things that we don't like about the protocols, the way protocols are working, but we don't see enough serious attempts to challenge them. It's like this concept that has been with us for 50 years and it's as if this is the way we're supposed to work from now on. And we're getting, so all of this critique of things that have to do with the internet, it's not like, it's only online, it's not real. Like what do we even need to worry about that so much. But just try to think how many hours do we spend in front of these screens? The more hours we spend in front of these screens, this is our real life. This is basically most of our day or most of our work days are in front of these screens and then we spend more and more time in front of governing interfaces. So our experience, I would say most of our daily experience in contemplating authority and new ruled systems is in front of web interfaces. Because when we're talking about the web demanding obedience, it's 24-7, right? It's every web page that I open has the subliminal question of what am I allowed to do here. And I don't even ask myself, this is the unknown. The fact that I'm constantly thinking about it, constantly or I'm constantly made not to think about it, that is the most profound experience of obedience that we have on a daily basis, on a page by page basis. So yeah, 24-7 around the clock and not only online. So these, we can say away from keyboard these dominant interfaces of control, they're not new. And to just put it in context we can see some example from for resistance to interfaces on control that are not technological or not digital. So for tactical resistance we can look at do you know this? So this is a response to the hegemonic code of the Iranian government as part of the Iranian uprising in 2009. The bills were, the money bills were used as a form of protest with the writings like death to the dictator and for freedom. It has become a real problem. More and more money bills are changing hands with political statements that are against so called counter-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary it gets complicated with Iran. But the money is not supposed to be an interface for protest. But they made it into an interface of protest and nobody is going to throw that to the garbage. Even though Ahmadinejad tried to say that every bill that would have a sign like that would not be accepted but the phenomena was so wide that they couldn't do that. We can think of strategic resistance and my example here is Rowling Jubilee which is a very strong hit and stay approach actually I should have updated this slide because it's much more the money that they've raised. What they do is they're basically bailing out the poor so the way death works you buy if there are high risk debts they are being traded between different banks and different companies and they're traded for much less than the debt itself so this is what Rowling Jubilee does they fundraise to buy debts and strike them and when this screenshot was taken just a bit more than half a million dollars abolished almost 12 million dollars in debt. This is reading the interface for the financial system and saying we are going to play that game but not in the same way that it's expected and this is changing things on the ground these are people who are getting their lives back and the third the logistic resistance is best represented by what's been happening in the Middle East sometimes it looks like this a very hopeful attempt to say we all plant something new in Tahrir Square and things would be different we'll get rid of that protocol and we have our ideas for a new protocol sometimes it looks like this a bit more gruesome and we've all seen much more gruesome pictures which I'm not going to show you here so my neighbors around the Middle East have had enough of the protocols that govern them Tunis, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and others got rid of their previous protocol and what we're seeing now can be seen as a protocol war redefining the rules of play so to conclude even though the conflict is unavoidable I find it very interesting and quite important to confront I address it in my academic and creative work through different tactics and strategies specifically I find the question of interconnectedness to be critical especially from my geopolitical perspective thank you thanks Mishon I'll open the floor to questions I think the liberty of starting so you've painted sort of this almost tiered or layered approach to thinking about sort of the strategic and the tactical the tactical strategic and logistic forms of resistance to the sort of the obedience that you've laid out as demanded I'm wondering whether and you sort of made a prompt at least in the online sense to say that or with the digital technologies to say that that the logistic you don't have good examples of or you sort of are looking for the good examples of it I want to push you to think about sort of why that is is one of them easier to do is one of them easier to understand is it a technology affordance or a sort of philosophical affordance I think it's both and beyond that it's the way the technological world is constructed the fact that we are led into new settings new political settings by companies who have their own interests there and they are the biggest players is a big problem and it basically puts us in a point of disadvantage I also think you're lucky enough to be in the US that controls the internet and we are like from my perspective not being an American citizen I'm not in a position of influence as you guys are we're seeing that with the whole debate around you know Snowden is the following American citizens like hey is it okay to follow me like it's the answer is yes because I'm like closer to terrorism potentially but it's constitution only protects the citizens it's definitely not online definitely not the technological governance that we built that is built from a certain ideology to serve certain ideology there's so much power involved but the problem is the reason that I referred back to on the ground physical activism or the financial system is because my concern is that if we don't resist the interfaces online then we don't expect to resist anything because that is where we learn how to interact and how to and that's where we learn what is expected from us on a civic level and that is concerning I can say that in the case of the way the technological governance works we've come across it actually with ad nauseam the project that I mentioned I can actually if you want I can play a three minute video for the two and a half minute video for that that actually addresses that point as well okay well folks yeah yes this is more just a resource question because you have many thoughts I'm interested in how the enforcement of the setting in of the demand for obedience tracks with things like decline in health advancement of problems with the environment advancement of things like diabetes and certain other kind of illnesses that are more you know sort of I'm looking at the epidemiology I'm just interested to know if there's any to kind of track on a very granular incremental level how the advancement of this kind of demanding obedience tracks with other things do you have any sense of what might be I don't know it's not my field so I wouldn't know how to research that exactly I'm making the statement I'm making is about political imagination to certain degree that is limited by our daily our daily experience of obedience so I'm concerned about our ability to imagine different relationships but I don't know how to quantify that let's say maybe someone else in the room I don't know with the interface well basically the definition of interface has to do with this connection between systems people we've experienced interface for so long now and so intensely through user interface that we forgot that we forgot that there is no implied hierarchy in the concept of interface there could have been a web where the power settings of site owners versus site users would have not been set as hierarchical so in its core interface is about relationship and about interconnectedness this point of that's the connection first that's setting a very high bar even internet engineering task force that wants to replace IPv4 or IPv6 has been structuring this for a decade even the people who control the mechanisms of thought and relativism can't change it when they want to but I would argue that there have been a large number of attempts successful to support it I would argue that content but does content filtering supporting TCP-IP because it's not letting packets that contain a certain method go through I would argue that distributed network service attacks that use characteristics of the IP protocol the anonymous is low orbit I don't care whatever you call it and the latest thing from China which seems let's take China in turn it's a denial service attack that's supporting the IP protocols things like DNS cache poisoning that will make a website out of domain name resolution and other people would talk about things like SOVA and PIPA which are legal efforts to get sites taken out of domain name system is a legal effort to support the way the IP protocol is developed I understand your point I just think at least the way I'm seeing it this is using the TCP-IP protocol this is what the TCP-IP protocol allows that is basically maybe not the way we would have wanted to use it but this is a use of that protocol this is a part of the problems with that protocol I would say the fact that privacy is not embedded into the protocol is another problem with that protocol beyond the problem of distributed denial service attacks or a packet sniffing this is the protocol this is what it allows if this is done within that context this is not challenging that protocol by saying here's another protocol it's maybe exposing maybe exposing the vulnerabilities of that protocol but not necessarily kind of directing another way for going beyond what the protocol allows or does not allow yeah yeah I would just put it in one of the layers above the TCP-IP layer but I think we understand each other I have to do with your speak of interfaces and affordance and I do a lot of UX and I do a lot of accessibility professionally for patients and people in healthcare and this is a question for you you said these interfaces ask us to obey they push in a certain direction well just like in a DDoS case I almost wanted some kind of protocol to save me from these thugs but I didn't have any because I have freedom quote unquote to define the interfaces that are bad or that are how shall I put it don't allow you to really do what you meant to do or accomplish the task you meant to accomplish which is what creates the relationship right I feel like a lot of that disconnect is sloppiness and not an agenda so the question for you just I deal with the US government right now who is forcing me to be very universally usable great right it sounds fantastic but it comes from the government as a mandate a set of rules I have to meet or somehow prove to have met but it's kind of opposite to my sort of natural inclination being a cyber child to say no no no I don't need you to make me tell me what to do I will surpass your requirements I'll do something very different this is a question of sloppy versus making it better for everybody individual choice versus a mandate so yeah this is a version of this question was made to me yesterday I gave a talk at MassArt about disinformation visualization or how to lie with the database and my argument was that we should not look at visualization like Edward Tufty claims we should look at it as beautiful evidence we should look at it as beautiful arguments and I think it's about it's about the argument it's not about like so there to grab us all kind of thing and I actually make me think book is actually good good in the sense that there is a problem with cognitive load and and it's a challenge cognitive load can it's a challenge for design but when when we are so obsessed about directing attention and and making our users not think we also forget that we are we are representing different interests the other interests of the site owners the interests of the users and I think the example of book bureau that's why I like it so much because the difference of interest there is so obvious when we are in a position of designing these user interfaces we are doing political work we are doing work that should be politicized so I'm not going to politicize you know bad interfaces like it's not about making you think about things that are not political it's not very I don't think people should make crappy user user experiences just so you think about the fact there's a crappy UX designer behind it but I do think that if what's embedded within a certain interface is something that should be politicized this should be we should change the way we think about what we are allowed to do online that's more of the critique that I'm making I mean there's a follow up to that I was just thinking like is this because this seems particularly important now versus say in like 2002 or something because of the consolidation and the sense of attention on the internet so it seems like this is particularly relevant when you're talking about like Amazon.com is really different than say politicizing my personal blog or something like that because so much of the attention so much of the data flows so much of the personal data that is captured and extracted on the internet flows to amazons and google and facebook and twitter and so on so I mean do you feel like that's part of this politics is this current sort of geography of attention and data on the internet? Yeah, yeah it makes a lot of difference but the basically the playing with context on the internet has changed dramatically as well out of the 100 most popular websites on the internet 97 of them report back to google about everything that you're doing and it's not like 97 out of the 100 most popular sites are google sites so even your blog has is exposed to these questions and they are usually hidden and they don't even expose a user interface it's just an implicit interface that by browsing the web you're reporting back to google and everything because people are using google analytics or youtube or google maps or whatever so I think we can't actually say these are only problems in the big sites yeah Yeah, I was just thinking like here the argument about interfaces sort of demanding obedience would be in a sense less problematic if there were or it seemed like you're saying there would be less problematic if there were more of us producing those interfaces like if the task of like who's owning the sites is more equally distributed amongst people I don't think that if all of us build our wordpress blogs everything would be fine which is happening less and less by the way and also mobile like there's nothing in there and there's internet of things which brings interface to a whole yeah and you know if we continue along the previous the content of the new think about mobile apps and how the web is becoming the content of them so yeah this is I think it has to do with literacy and I actually think it has to do with political imagination can we imagine a different relationship and I'm not making I don't think we can do that because we haven't thought of challenging the TCPIP protocol I think there's a lot to do even before we challenged the TCPIP and I'm not trying to challenge TCPIP I'm far from being in these levels of action or technological levels I think there's a lot to do with both tactical both tactics and strategies that are inspiring politically as well and technologically and UX and so on I have another one for just an example I thought one that really drives me insane in terms of modern development of design is so we've all known BBC a lot right we've used it maybe for news resources etc maybe it has an app it's mobile app I mean it is like back to TV land I feel even less engaged, less powerful less able to learn for example you can read the article but there's never related content or links to the embassy of Nicaragua and the embassy of US who are having issues and stuff like that there's no comments or even a name of the person who wrote it or a people who wrote it and I feel like here we are after the 90's and the first 10 years of 2000 after we've seen this culture explode, see this content being created by all of us, see some people percolate up and being new types of journalists whatever and now I feel like easily reversed so I have an answer for you that might actually address the answer that I haven't given you um I'm working on a client project and there's this I was this is public radio in Israel and when I was talking with the company that built the previous site that we're now redesigning I said we will need an API as a part of the new redesign and the same company was supposed to build the new site as well and they said we don't want to build an API for them if we build them an API they'll be able to get rid of us and I was like what? I can't believe you even allow yourselves to say that but it really the good news is that this company is not going to build it and but there is a future that we can get to that is not very far where we all instead of providing websites we would provide APIs so your blog would be exposing an API it actually was like that that was RSS it didn't I think when RSS happened and since it kind of died it we didn't understand it yet because technology wasn't there yet the AJAX the X was for XML it came after I think this is still valid and I think it's becoming valid again like 10 years or so after that now there is this need to expose APIs and and to allow other people to do other things with different interfaces over different data I think this is this is something that I can see a trend towards that and that would be a very interesting place for both for data literacy and interface literacy where do you think this idea so when you talk a lot about literacy there are assumptions or decisions or just sloppiness in these interfaces that restrict what I can do with it obviously the sort of personal response is build toolkits to allow people to build other interfaces which you've done now is that is that primarily an argument to response about literacy or an argument to response to say I was able to make my own interfaces and now I'm liberated from at least the top layer of restrictions that were imposed on me is this sort of an argument about utility or a meta argument about now I know how to build these things so I've become empowered in general to think about the assumptions and what I'm allowed and not allowed to do I think it's both you know the answer is both but I think the only way to get to the first assumption is utility because this might be an interesting debate to have but until it becomes an actual that's why I like about book bureau I need that I use that the fact that book bureau not only recommended other places to buy but actually sent me to my public library is super powerful it's super powerful because in I was in a consumerist mode and it sent me to a civic mode that is and there was value, financial value and civic value for me there so that is what same with ad block plus in a different way obviously civic value in ad block plus you wouldn't find as much but for it's solving a problem and while doing that it exposes the differences of interest between me and the site itself so so I think there should be there should be more initiatives that do think about services in that sense that are not only not only about literacy or a political statement about information but also about what do people want I mean this is the difference between your ad nauseam example and ad block plus ad block plus is providing utility for me and has none of these sort of like activist end points whereas your ad nauseam is providing utility if it does the blocking or feedbacks on the blocking but then it's making this aggressive stance to say hey I'm also going to try to disrupt the system that I'm checking out of rather than just checking out of it and I think a number of the tools that you mentioned are that I can think of in my head are more of the I'm checking out of this rather than the I'm checking out and I'm trying to like mess it up for everyone else so that's the problem that I have with a privacy debate it's super depressing like there's something it didn't go online to to hide we go online to communicate we go online to express ourselves to it's supposed to be we enjoy that it's fun it's social it's the whole privacy debate and it gets people to either hope for the best or know that you're being fucked but that's just how it is or you're you're tech savvy enough to encrypt every little thing that you do and to use exactly the right set of tools to circumvent any attempt of data being collected on you by someone who you don't know and there's something so so machoistic about this thing super depressing it's no fun I've never enjoyed protecting my data until we've started to go the complete other way with ad nauseam the whole idea is that we want to be expressive let's be super expressive let's celebrate it let's perform it and to tell you that if you want me to tell you that it's a solid way of avoiding data collection no it's not it's definitely it's not going to compete with the latest encryption algorithm in the next data security conference but it is trying to compete with this idea that security is something for kind of extreme activists terrorists or ubergeeks or whatever it's something we need to change the language around that and come from that point where people want to be that expressive point that is playful that is kind of it's not only protecting myself it's actually inflicting pain and getting back to the point of leverage which is what we're lacking there because the background of ad nauseam is the failure of the do not track standards committee so this is exactly the political process that did not give us a valuable or a valid solution well the solution is completely is there right the track is you can basically already on firefox you can already check a checkbox even in internet explorer you can check a checkbox that says you do not want websites to build a profile on you the only problem is that they don't respect that that's what the committee was built to set to set the rules of how is this to be respected but apparently three years after it started the company sitting on that committee are there to make sure it never it never leaves the ground okay so time's up so thank you Mushan for coming and speaking to us