Ubiquitous Precarity

Being An Exploration into The Origins of Human Botnets in 21st Century Recreational Urbanism

Presentation given at the 75th annual CounterSpectacle symposium hosted by the Institute of Applied Hapticity, Vienna, Austria, Prof. Dr. F. Disegno, MFA, B.A.O. (reformatted and typed by Fred Scharmen (for my brother, John))

In times of great intellectual debate, it is all too easy for those caught up in the argument to forget that their favorite players hadn't always existed. Those who shout the loudest are unlikely to remember a time before the words they rally around were coined. The present era is no exception. Political arguments between Strategists and Tacticians1 as characterized by, to use the most obvious example, the Persians and the Palestinians, are too easily reduced to simple dualities like Striated and Smooth2. Indeed the very reduction itself fails to be innocent of a kind of intentional Strawmannery that is at best unproductive, and at worst blatantly manipulative. Witness for example, the recuperation of the term "striated" by ideologues who have successfully purged it of its original pejorative connotations and positioned it as the more "together" alternative to the suspiciously loose and breezy "smooth". An Haptic approach to history and culture demands, of course, that one not merely "look beyond" the visible and obvious, but that we cultivate a feel for the hidden connections and sympathies that underly the apparent dualities of Spectacular Society. Whether one describes the Post-Contemporary cultural divide as a split between methods of Strategy and methods of Tactics, as an argument between Heideggerians and Deleuzians, or as an outright terrorist war between Dwellers and Nomads3 - an Hapto-historical approach to the problem would search for the exceptions and the hybrids in the early moments before the ideological split. Before extremists on each side sought differentiation, defining themselves in the terms of the not-other, a moment existed when the great protagonists of Culture Wars III were much more alike than dissimilar. This paper will attempt to find a space to expand in a particular historical moment surrounding the origination of Human Botnets. Taking the exploitation of Human Botnets, legal or illegal under UN Law, as a given on the part of both the political and extremist wings of the Dweller and Nomad parties, we will follow the structure and origins of Botnets, positing that they represent a kind of original and pure hybridity - true Meshworks in the Neo-Delandan sense4 - and that hybridity is partaken of by any structure that employs them. This original hybridity grows directly out of their origins in the convergence of four early 21st century memes - Locative Media, Network Telecommunications, Urban Exploration, and Precarity - a convergence that we will collectively address under the rubric of Recreational Urbanism.

Part I: Practice

Everyday practices in the Post-Industrial city have long been described in Neo-Situationist terms. To locate the origins of Human Botnets in their proper socio-economic context, we have to discuss the leisure activities of the urban middle class in conjunction with their activist counterparts. Algorithmic walking, Geocaching, and Street Art are meaningless without reference to the related complex of ideas and actions surrounding Open Source software, cheap distributed computing, and the movements toward social equity, whether feeding the homeless or "bridging the Digital Divide". To call Urban Exploration a kind of deríve5 is to forget that the people who were out "walking" in the city usually belonged to a particular socio-economic strata, and that those who they met on their walks belonged to a very different class altogether. Practices of urban walking are inextricable from grassroots political campaigns, activist photographic documentation, and outreach for the urban homeless. Graffiti artist William "Upski" Wimsatt has written about the his experiences as a white student walking in areas usually described as "the ghetto", traveling from city to city to visit the self-proclaimed "worst" neighborhoods in the country as part of his "Bet With America" tour6. Exploration on the ground, meeting people to work with, and looking for new places to paint helped Upski make the short transition from tagger to author, from graffitist to activist. Groups like ACORN and Food Not Bombs8 combined walking and exploration with specific political agendas, community mobilization, demonstrations, and public food giveaways. Similarly, street cycling in city centers can be seen as a "Spatial Practice" as in De Certeau9, (a method of high-speed "consumer production" of the city) but this context is irrelevant unless one also notes the activism of Critical Mass10. This organization, before the crises of Post-Peak oil, staged monthly bike rides in cities around the world to draw attention to the use of the bicycle as an alternative transportation mode and to agitate for the establishment of "Carfree" zones in cities - such as that which we have historically enjoyed here in Vienna.

The coming together of art, daily life and politics in the Post-Industrial city could tentatively be called an instinctive attempt to mitigate the social impact of first wave gentrification. Much work has yet to be done on the relationship between political activism, Street Art, and Unitary Urbanism in the Western cities of the early 21st century. It is enough for us here to point out that Post-Contemporary examinations of Neo-Situationist urban practices tend to treat them as a kind of extreme sport for the overeducated and maladjusted middle class college student, blunting their political edge. We argue that to emphasize the political aspects and intents of such acts is not only to remain closer to the original "Practice of Everyday Life" as theorized in the Situationist milieu12, but it also serves to clarify the convergence of activism and exploration in Recreational Urbanism. We will return to the thread of consumer production in Urban Exploration later, but for now this mix of political action and tactical urbanism will be fortified by the addition of another theme that characterizes this historical moment and catalyzes the condensation of the Social Meshworks that were the precursors to Human Botnets: inexpensive mobile computing.

That computing was once a resource subject to scarcity is difficult for us to remember or even imagine. Those of us old enough to recall such a thing (and we all know who we are), though we may make the study of the technosocial realm our chief occupation, seem to have intentionally blocked it out of our cultural memory for being too inconvenient to have ever been more substantial than a very uncomfortable bad dream. As unpleasant as it is to bring up, since the purpose of the present paper is to remedy precisely this type of selective amnesia, we will at least cite one example. In 2005 the computing power that is currently accessible to the average refrigerator was housed in a specialized box used only for typing, sound, and graphics production. This box cost about $2500 in 2005; adjusted for inflation, that number is equal to roughly $3,250,000 (725,000 EU) in today’s currency. Such comparisons are probably meaningless, however, any number will seem small when compared with infinity, or large when reckoned against null. Given that we are interested in this brief moment between computational nonexistence and ubiquity, a measurement based on social rather than economic standards is perhaps more apt to characterize it. In 2005, MIT Media Lab Chair Nicholas Negroponte made worldwide frontpage print news headlines when he announced a program to bring sub $100 (2005 dollars) wireless laptop computers to what was then called “the developing world”13, in the global South and East. Notable is the fact that Negroponte took pains to point out that the $100 laptop would exclusively run Open Source Software.

Of further relevance to the current narrative, that same year saw the initiation of the Interstix project by Yale School of Architecture student Meaghan Smialowski17. The Interstices were prototypical structures designed to fit into the vacant lots of troubled neighborhoods, filling the gap between a Post-Industrial negative population growth and an immediate need for housing infrastructure services for the homeless. One of many projects that might fall into the category of the Parasitic18, the Interstices had the unusual distinction of having been actually constructed on a large scale in test neighborhoods in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and North Baltimore. The Interstix pilot projects, funded by angel investors and maintained with advertising revenue, were never able to overcome the resistance of certain vocal neighborhood groups. Even after local papers in Baltimore revealed that these apparently grassroots community groups were actually funded by powerful real estate interests, the project seemed doomed to failure when a branch of the parent corporation, CoEvolution Baltimore, bought back its initial public stock offering and disappeared from financial scrutiny just as the Interstices themselves vanished from the empty lots they inhabited to be replaced by bland (but unusually sturdy) construction fences.

But my colleagues at the Institute of Applied Hapticity may suspect that what has vanished from sight may still be detectable by other, more subtle means. A map showing average monthly power bills for properties adjacent to former Interstix sites on Greenmount Avenue in Baltimore shows that in the two years following the public disappearance of CoEvolution Baltimore, these occupants are using up to 5% more electricity per month than similar sites that aren’t next to former Interstices. With this bit of data, and a few news clippings from the Baltimore Sun about utility company employees finding a line tapped with a fitting that seemed very professionally machined, we can conjecture that the Interstices had morphed from highly designed complex objects to camouflaged urban textures, changing their strategy of visibility to a tactic of disappearance.

Part II: Precarity

On May Day, 2005, issues on the minds of protesters in Europe and elsewhere included familiar 21st century themes like “Globalization” “Middle East Peace” and “American Imperialism”19. While the reduction of complex problem sets to these same nearly inescapable labels remains unfortunately common, one word introduced to discussions of global labor in this period has been regrettably unheard for quite some time, its fresh sound and suggestive connotations might merit its revival. That word is precarity.

From the Wikipedia20 Archive, May 1, 2005:

Precarity is a term used to refer to either intermittent work or, more generally, a confluence of intermittent work and precarious existence. In this latter sense, precarity is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.

The term 'precarity' (or precarite) -- linking a condition of work to a social condition -- emerged in France in 2000, around what was officially titled the 'Marches Against Unemployment, Job Insecurity, and Social Exclusion'. At the time and since, debates have occurred around the themes of inclusion / refusal of work / Social Europe / migration / and the equation of different kinds of work within discussions on precarity.

According to some perspectives, precarity is a condition of late-capitalism, as nations shift from manufactory to service and information based economies.

The term is not entirely unproblematic, of course, the most obvious fine point being the question of just who is precarious, exactly. One contemporary source22 points out that “In the UK, 30% of people of working age, are in temp, casual, part-time, freelance work or unemployed,” the source goes on to identify this as the precarious class. Possessing the luxury of distance from the subject allows us to recognize the quaintness of categories like freelance and casual, or manufactory, service, and information economies as an extension of early capitalist divisions. As Mcluhan pointed out, over 30 years before the term precarity was even coined, money has always been about nothing but information23. We can more productively, if more crudely, define precarity as the condition that accompanies the transition from being paid by the hour to being paid by the job. The irony of a protest that simultaneously demands an end to unemployment and the right to refuse work is the same irony of freelance workers asking for better working conditions on International Labor Day. Precarity was then, in one sense, the anxiety that labor felt when it realized it now worked for itself. If the 21st century will ever be called “Deleuzian32” one feels that it will be in spite of, and not due to, the current efforts of dogmatic ideologues. The feelings of the Institute of Applied Hapticity in regards to such disputes are well known, we prefer to deal with ideas that some may argue are mutually incompatible, like, for example being and becoming34, in the manner in which they are presented: as concepts, “things for thinking with”35. In this spirit we may perhaps be permitted to wonder if precarity is not then, at its most uncomfortable, the uncertainty that follows the change from a disciplinary working environment employing the technique of enclosure, to a controlled work environment using the methods of coding38. this complex has been remarked upon extensively by my colleague at the Institute, Dr. Tariq Opophilia. We will return to this theme as we follow the dissolution of the workplace in the convergence of Social Meshworking, Locative Media, and Recreational Urbanism.

Part III: Meshwork

With the concept of precarity in our toolkit we can reimagine the Post-Industrial urban homeless as the first wave of this condition’s victims. As CoEvolution Baltimore’s Interstices started to fade into the urban background, disguised as construction fences, the distribution of MIT’s $100 laptops to Baltimore’s homeless coincided with the failure of Mayor Martin O’Mally’s “Digital Harbor” urban renewal project. The combination of inexpensive, wireless enabled, open source computers, a large activist and arts community, a new influx of underemployed technically trained young people, a relatively big homeless population, and a network of hidden, small scale, quasilegal shelters was a complex and fertile enough matrix to birth the first locative Social Meshworks that, we will hope to show, eventually spawned the Human Botnets. The origins of many of these groups are shrouded in intentional secrecy, which is not surprising given their original semiofficial status and their later ties to International Terrorism, but a reconstruction of the encrypted websites archived in Google’s cache was recently undertaken by researchers here at the Institute. We have been able to recover two key documents that are worth quoting here in their entirety, and with the permission of our esteemed director Prof. Dr. Saaka De Moton, publishing for the first time. The first is a type of advertising brochure:

GeoTAZ is:

A Network of Oases for Global Nomads!

An Alternative Off-the-Grid Infrastructure for Activists and Others!

A Fun Use for all your Location Aware Wireless Mobile Devices!

A Weekend Hobby for Web Warriors and Code Jockeys!

A Job Finder for Knowledge Workers and Tiger Teams!

Membership in GeoTAZ includes access to:

The Oases: mobile, hidden quarters and supplies for living, working, resting and refueling in cities and parks throughout the Northeast.

The Secret Missions: weekend adventures for fun and profit. Hunt for caches, track and transport items across the country, around the world, or in your neighborhood. Discover a hidden city overlaid on the one you thought you knew, or get out of your well-worn groove and do some guided exploring. Attend a political rally, a house party, or a business meeting, and meet other like minded individuals.

The Meshwork: an array of bottom-up, emergent Human Resources and Project Management tools for software development work at any scale. Browse profiles and resumes, look for meetups and opportunities in your area, work remotely from home, or just travel from spot to spot, following the action.

The Locators: a system of software and hardware tools that is constantly aware of your location in space, and your role in various social and business networks that span the system. Reread and rewrite the landscape of the city, leave messages, find caches of resources and Oases in your area. Track your Tiger Team. Find people near you whose skills and backgrounds complement your own - socially and professionally. Today's projects demand availability and interactivity. Meetups and management can take place independently of location, but in life as in work, sometimes there's no substitute for face to face interaction.

One hardly need point out the highly significant tone here: Situationism by way of the Harvard Business School. As part of the larger Institute project of explicitness about the sources of rhetorical language, a detailed parsing allows us to feel the densely connected network of references that underlay this artifact, and a clear list of the references, intentional or not, is potentially valuable as an Hapto-historical touchstone:

“GeoTAZ” - This is only one of several groups operating in this way at the time, but this choice of names contains a reference to the TAZ or Temporary Autonomous Zone, a concept theorized by turn of the century social critic Hakim Bey39. The implication is that the parasitic shelters and the network of telecommunications devices that connect them compose a system of mobile free space, unbound by conventional political or social restraint.

“Global Nomads” - Architecture critic Reinhold Martin has identified a particular species of turn of the century technocrat as the “yuppies reading Deleuze”40. The Global Nomad could perhaps be called a subtype of this species. See the 2002 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum show “New Hotels for Global Nomads”41. The relevance to current Nomad/ Dweller political debates need hardly be mentioned.

“Off-the-Grid” - As Post-Peak Oil energy prices rose, the search for efficient, self-sustaining production and use of local energy became more urgent. As we have seen, the Interstices that occupied empty lots, rooftops, and later whole structures were parasitic, not sustainable, and unable to survive without their host.

“Location Aware Wireless Mobile Devices” - A late phase of the “New Media” computer art meme, “Location Awareness” comprised a set of ideas, practices, and technologies that produced artifacts like - “GPS Drawing”42: large scale artwork drawn with GPS devices recording travel paths across towns or districts. “Warchalking”46: marking the location of unprotected wireless network access points with chalk symbols reminiscent of the secret visual language of American itinerant workers or hobos47 in the early 20th century. “Physical Hyperlinks”: the use of camera phones to link data stored in remote networks with specific locations in the city (see Grafedia48 and [murmur]50). and “Spatial Gaming” (or “Augmented Reality”): using cities as arenas for video games played in real space and time (see GPS Pacman, Gridlocked, GPS Tron, etc...). Connections with the Situationist urban practice of the deríve were often invoked by contemporary writers and artists in this milieu. Also notable are the successive de- and re- territorializations inherent in a strategy like “Augmented Reality”. If Street Art could be called a response to the constant presence of advertising in the city, then the recuperation of the tactics of Street Art by advertising campaigns was an attempt to reclaim this new space opened up by the Guerrilla Ontologists who created tags and sticker campaigns to advertise themselves. Augmented Reality has followed a similar trajectory, first used by artists to link everyday urban life to the immersive quality of early 2D “video” games, Augmented Reality is now the arena of the third and fourth generations of those games themselves, having turned the tactics of the Culture Jammers and Guerrilla Ontologists back on them expertly.

“Knowledge Workers and Tiger Teams” - The phrase “Tiger Teams” is originally a piece of military jargon, used to name special groups of security experts that simulate covert attacks, safecracking and other security penetrations for training exercises. Bruce Sterling called the groups of hackers and the law enforcement specialists who fought them “Tiger Teams”. Alexander R. Galloway expanded the use of the term to mean any group that came together in an adhoc manner to solve a specific problem quickly, and it entered the IT and business worlds from there. Locative Social Meshwork systems like GeoTAZ actively recruited underemployed knowledge workers and “creatives” into these amorphous groups. The origins of the phrase in military intelligence and early computer crime circles is interesting given the relationship of these Social and Professional Meshworks to Human Botnets employed for more sinister purposes. Changing notions of “the workplace” are related to the amorphous network structure of Tiger Teams. In general, locative media and integrated telecommunications devices haven’t dis-placed the traditional office as much as they have re-placed it. Even in more mainstream work environments, data transfer systems like OzelBingol’s E-Mat and E-Strip tactile network infrastructure had the effect of emphasizing the connections between people (as foregrounded in the handshake, the backslap, the conference table) and downplaying the importance of shared space and surroundings. Again, as Deleuze points out in The Society of Control, the techniques of control involve coding and protocol, where the techniques of discipline are enclosure and confinement.

“The Oases” - In the police briefs section of the Baltimore Sun, Thursday, March 11, 2007, one can read the description of a structure found on the roof of a disused warehouse. It seemed to be an ordinary mechanical room from the outside and that’s what firefighters thought it was when they got the report from neighbors that smoke was pouring out of it. After cutting their way in through the locked door they were probably surprised to find that it was an inkjet plotter that was on fire. Once they had extinguished the burning print (a poster advertising a nightclub marked “for client review”) an examination of the room showed that it contained other office supplies, a greywater recycling apparatus and shower, a wireless network antenna and router powered by solar panels on the roof. The only piece of data ever recovered from any of the hardware was a 25 line script on a removable USB keychain drive that contained instructions for all the other drives to erase themselves if the door was forced. The story made it to the national press as part of the popular “News of the Weird” column.

“The Secret Missions” - Geocaching first appeared in 2000. One would find it difficult to imagine an outdoor sport better suited to a class of people who work with technology and computers than this. Geocaching requires access to the web and a $100 gadget accessory to play. Participants visited Geocaching web sites to download GPS coordinates for locations in their area where small containers filled with notes and trinkets were hidden. Often the coordinates led to parks and nature trails, but sometimes tours would be constructed as players were directed from location to location through cities, learning history along the way. Geocaching is a combination of lightweight outdoor exertion, socialization in small groups, and intellectual challenge - sometimes the clues to the location were coded or encrypted. For people who are used to playing with networks and technology, and who want a weekend hobby that gets them out of the office and into the park or the street, Geocaching has a lot to offer.

A little further towards the illicit end of the legal spectrum was Urban Exploration. At the confluence of Industrial Archeology, breaking and entering, storytelling, photography, and hiking, Urban Exploration was the unauthorized entry into abandoned buildings, subway tunnels, and other no-go zones. These pastimes recall the Situationist fondness for “... slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in catacombs forbidden to the public ...”. The connection between activist and exploratory practices has already been noted, Urban Exploration in the Post-Industrial city can be recognized as a way for the cultural producers in a highly mediated society to try to remain in touch with “the real” in the Zizekian sense. An essential component of Urban Exploration was the posting of trip diaries and photos on websites that were the focus of large communities of enthusiasts. Geocaching, Urban Exploration, bicycling, protests, activism and Street Art can now be seen as various modes of what we have been calling Recreational Urbanism. Social Meshworks were able to tap into the mystery and power in these ways of occupying the city and exploit them for their practical value. Geocachers and explorers were the couriers and real estate agents for these systems, searching for new places to set up shelters, maintaining the WiFi relayers and network infrastructure, and moving goods around. Once the Meshwork systems were compromised and turned into Botnets, several instances of Geocachers moving illegal drugs and software from cache to cache were noted, but rumors of drug distribution networks providing revenue to Meshworks in the earlier periods of their history may not be entirely unfounded.

“The Meshwork” - Manuel De Landa, in 1000 Years of Nonlinear History distinguishes between meshworks and hierarchies, and then immediately goes on to point out that (like the smooth and striated) both are always hybrids, they never exist in a pure form. One of the only flaws in this otherwise rigorous book, in our opinion, is the insistence on this term meshwork where most would prefer the term network. if, as seems to be the case, De Landa is referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and tree concepts, we prefer to read “meshwork” as “network” in De Landa. And to further add to the confusion, we choose to appropriate his term Meshwork and use it to denote any network/hierarchy hybrid that has more rhizome in it than tree: that is any network of hierarchies, or hierarchy of networks, in which the key relationships are interconnections that link any unit to any other. An ongoing project here at the Institute is the classification and taxonomy of these hybrid structures to try to sort out some of this confusion. The work done by Stephen Graham on the classifications of networks in global and urban environments has yet to be expanded on, and Graph Theory in mathematics is an untapped resource of metaphors and structures. The work that remains to be done, besides noting the importance of hybridity, and the recognition of associated misunderstandings, is regrettably outside the scope of the present paper.

It is enough to say that this use of the word Meshwork seems to coincide with the intent of organizations like GeoTAZ. A point by point comparison between the GeoTAZ Meshwork and the “Darknet” structures described in a paper released by the Microsoft Corporation in November of 2002, “The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution”, is instructive. Darknets are the means that users employed to share music, movies and other data in the age of lawsuits that preceded the Copyright Reform Act of 2015. A Darknet, according to Microsoft was “... not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks.” The classes of Darknet that are recognized by Microsoft include centralized databases, Peer-to-Peer systems with centralized indexing, fully decentralized structures (D & G’s rhizomes in perhaps their purest form), and “Small Worlds Networks”. Notable are the weaknesses identified in the purely decentralized networks. Internal pressures tended to shape the network to conform to power law scale distributions, most of the mp3s would end up on the harddrives of “super-peers”. The dense level of connectivity between users (the first principle of the rhizome is that any point can be connected to any other) demanded that each network node have its own unique address, sacrificing anonymity, and exposing the super-peers to lawsuits and attacks.

The structure of Microsoft’s “Small Worlds Networks” most neatly parallels the Social Meshworks. Significantly, these were precisely the types of Darknets identified as the most robust by Microsoft - because of the nature of their hybridity. Small World Networks are simply described as the set of all people with an mp3 collection that any given person knows well enough to talk about music with. Content was transfered between parties who are locally trustworthy, but globally anonymous. Because the transfers took place through the borrowing of CDs, the sharing of passwords that provide access to private databases, and the passing of DVDs and mobile devices from hand to hand through the “sneakernet”, distribution is relatively slow, but highly secure:

“In the absence of a global database, small-worlds networks could again become the prevalent form of the darknet. However, these small-worlds will be more powerful than they were in the past. With the widespread availability of cheap CD and DVD readers and writers as well as large hard disks, the bandwidth of the sneaker net has increased dramatically, the cost of object storage has become negligible and object injection tools have become ubiquitous.”

The strength of the Small Worlds Darknet, like the Social Meshwork, is that it is a type of patchwork Smooth space. One person may have certain connections at school, certain connections at work, and certain connections within the family, and it is the overlap of these diverse sets that allows material to move from one patch of space to another. So the Meshwork partakes of the social and the familial, as well as the professional.

“The Locators” - From reconstructions based on extant technology around the time of this brochure, it seems plausible that the GeoTAZ locative devices used the civilian GPS signal (the military signal had not been cracked yet), with RFID tags in the caches and in the devices of other group members to close the “20 foot gap” built into civilian GPS. The caches or “Oases” included, as noted before, Wireless LAN relayers and routers that, in the densest parts of Baltimore, were able to provide almost complete encrypted coverage. The important thing is that location was reckoned in relation to other team members and cache waypoints. Within the city, no reference to latitude or longitude is necessary. Similarly, time is used to determine location in GPS by comparing the discrepancies in the once-synced, ultrafast clocks contained in the handhelds and the satellites. Tiny delays due to lightspeed cause the clocks to move in and out of phase with each other in a direct relationship to distance. The difference between this patchwork time and patchwork space are clear when compared to absolutist, essentialist projects like the Heideggerian Clock of the Long Now.

The second recovered document is more directly informative, it seems to be a fragment, perhaps a work in progress, of a letter to potential investors:

The general idea is this: a network of locations with hidden supplies and living quarters (airstream trailers?). A network of password-protected webpages that list the current location and coordinates for these caches. A network of people, mostly knowledge and service workers, who have software on their mobile devices that allows them to recognize each other and linkup socially, for dates and parties, professionally in teams to work on creative projects like design and software development, and politically in groups to stage rallies and actions. The locations are used as urban hiking destinations for members of the group (geocaching), as temporary living quarters for people who move around to work on short and medium term projects, and as relays in a secret wireless LAN that only members of this group have access to. The social network software component can be used to find jobs, friends, dates, or all three, and it's tied to location-aware devices that recognize who's near and who's far, who's linked and who's not, and who's available for work or hanging out. The phone and text message component can also be used to motivate and coordinate large groups of people into "smart mobs" that can have a political effect, or "tiger teams" that can finish a creative or business project.

The interesting things start to happen when the system is stratified into at least three levels: the first tier are the Weekend Warriors, the bored, exploited knowledge workers, stuck doing semicreative labor for large corporations. They use it for weekend trips and cheap thrills, maybe segueing into a little side work. Once they quit their day jobs to do this full time they've joined the second tier, the Freelancers. The Freelancers work from coffeeshops and couches, move around the country at will, write code or create graphics for startups, and in general work for themselves in a kind of extended co-op. The freelancers can choose from assignments like "write some code that does this ..." or "design an interface for this game", or "build an e-commerce web site for this company". They earn money on a per-task basis. The third tier is the Project Managers, they form a network unto themselves, they initiate projects, and coordinate the distributed labor of the freelancers, keep the mobile Oases moving around, and generally see a bigger picture than the people on the ground. Any Weekend Warrior tourist can become a Project Manager if they've got a good idea, and can motivate their friends to work with them and make the project happen.

It is this stratification that affected the change from Meshwork to Botnet.

Part IV: Botnets

The bizarre and artistic cast of recent acts of “Poetic Terrorism” have obscured the fact that real global violence is once again on the rise. The environmental catalyst sprayed onto highways outside Houston, disrupting traffic with picturesque reefs of solid pollution and wispy carbon nanotubes (for which a Kwinteresque faction of NeoDeluzians have claimed responsibility), has distracted attention from the investigation into the death, by apparent poisoning, of the new Taiwanese Vice-President. One is also aware of the conspiracy theories that suggest the hacking and takeover of the Pepsi CurtainWalls in Dubai was not unrelated to the attempted military coup staged that same week by right-wing Heideggerian Dwellers. The Fedex Disaster Relief Network is nearly taxed to the limits of its capacity, and Amazon.com is dropping broad hints that it may withdraw from the program. The observation that large scale illicit public art projects require almost the same level of covert coordination as effective political actions or global terrorist attacks leads us back one last time to that tangled knot of Urbanism, Politics, and undercover Networks at the turn of the 21st Century.

The Social Meshworking organization arises to meet a need for distributed (tax-free) problem solving in the so-called “information economy”. Such systems turned out to be extremely good at taking a problem, breaking it down into its component pieces, and letting those pieces sort themselves into their proper place, with diverse skills meeting diverse problems. The analogy to distributed networked computing cannot be pushed too far. The very aspects that made it an effective and secure structure, its local transparency and global opacity, also turn out to make very good cells for terrorist and crime syndicates. The suggestion that urban Geocachers were actually moving stashes of illegal money and drugs has already been raised. If Geocachers were acting as unwitting mules for drug cartels or venture capitalists, it is due to the opacity between the level of control and the level of execution in the system. The Geocachers and Freelancers, receiving their instructions from encrypted websites and participating in a system that they already knew was quasilegal, were certainly not entirely innocent. But they can claim the kind of plausible deniability that is necessary for the execution of sensitive professional projects, activist politics, or international crime. If a Freelance coder is writing an algorithm with a clearly bounded input and output, she or he may never know if that algorithm is used to encrypt the guidance signal for Smart Missiles, the bank accounts of international currency traders, or the latest hardware corrections to the perpetually buggy Clock of the Long Now.

A paper released in March 2005 by a Group of German IT Security professionals called the Honeynet Project and Research Alliance is a summary of four years worth of field research into the behavior of Bots, or software robots. A contemporary weblog entry summarized the article:

Ever wonder why your computer is running so slowly? Maybe it's been taken over by bots. Bots are the malicious bits of viral code that infect vulnerable machines and allow them to be controlled remotely. Once compromised, your desktop computer can be used to send spam, host websites and other files without your knowledge, attack and bring down other organization's sites, and make more bots. The Honeynet Project uses networks of deliberately vulnerable machines to attract bots (sometimes it only takes a few seconds) and trap them, observing their behavior and communications with selective firewall filters. Know your Enemy is the result of four year's research into the behavior of bots and the people who write and control them. It includes a taxonomy of common bots and botnets, as well as stories about their uses and interactions. Networks of bots can be hired to perform Denial of Service attacks, sending thousands of requests to a webserver at once in order to crash it, botnets can be taken over and assimilated by rival botnets, communications between bots in a network and their controllers take place via Internet Relay Chat and can be monitored and exploited.

We will call Human Botnets any system that uses anonymity, distributed problem solving, and a disconnect between parallel networks of control and execution to create large scale, coordinated, covert change in the world. The particular large scale, covert change may be a simultaneous sit-in at all the locations of a big box chain store around the globe, it may be a new media distribution system, or it may be a political assassination. The key observation is that while the structure of a system is hardly innocent, it is rarely deterministic either. The case of Social Meshworking, Recreational Urbanism and Human Botnets is instructive as an example of Spectacular Society’s ability to assimilate and recuperate its own opposition, and as a reminder for those of us consciously engaged in the CounterSpectacle to remain mindful and adaptable in our roles as users and cultural producers as well.

Thank You.