As internet overtakes most aspects of modern life, the impact of internet protocols exceeds the limits of the virtual world and becomes intertwined with ethics and justice. As illustrated by Peter J. Wilson regarding the analog world (1991, p. 153), structures and architectures have direct effects on the power dynamics between the groups using them. In this presentation, we will show how internet protocols have the same impact on human societies as architectural elements (Vitali-Rosati, 2020), and shape disparity within communities of users.

Internet protocols can either involve equal partners or unequal partners. However, even when putting aside the physical infrastructures that support the Internet, most interactions between equal partners include a third and unequal party (Galloway, 2004, p. 142). Top-down and bottom-up structures imply vertical pipelines and the concentration of informational and structural power within select hands.

Furthermore, security concerns around such systems are split between two unequal players with widely different tasks. Few protocols such as BitTorrent, DAT, IPFS treat users as nodes without the overview of a corporation or government. All three of them are open source free protocols designed for sharing files from a client. These peer-to-peer standards allow one to make available for or to download files from many users at the same time, to reduce the uploading stress of users.

While DAT and IFPS prescribe a radical decentralization of the network by abolishing trackers -- which assist communication between peers in BitTorrent -- torrenting is by far the most widely used of the three. In fact, BitTorrent takes a non-negligible part of worldwide internet traffic. For instance, in 2013 (before the streaming burst), it represented 3.35 percents of all bandwidth (Paloalto Networks, 2013).

Hence, our presentation will put the emphasis on BitTorrent, its architecture and effects on communities of users, and its structural ethics.

Are peer-to-peer protocols a bottom-down alternative to the more usual top-down and bottom-up Internet traffic, as some research has argued since the early 2000s (Oram, 2001)? And if so, what are the implications of BitTorrent and its many clients (both open source and corporate) in terms of accessibility, equity and reduction of control? How to explain the impact of "what seems to many the intrinsic vitality" of a bottom-up approach on the organizations and culture that it supports (Terranova, 2004, p. 120)?

This presentation covers some of the most discussed issues on the subject, such as pirating and malware, but focuses mainly on the intrinsic and structural consequences of peer-to-peer protocols.

Bibliography

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol. How Control Exists after Decentralization. Leonardo. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

Oram, Andy, ed. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. Beijing ; Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2001.

Paloalto Networks. 2013. https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/app-usage-risk-report-visualization/#. Last consultation: 01/19/2023.

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics For the Information Age. London ; Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2004.

Vitali-Rosati, Marcello. « Pour une théorie de l’éditorialisation ». Humanités numériques, nᵒ 1 (1 janvier 2020).

Wilson, Peter J. The Domestication of the Human Species. Revised ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

How to understand the cultural impact of computer technologies? What theoretical tools does our humanistic tradition offer us? This talk will present the conditions for developing a hermeneutics of matter. Our reflections will then be applied to the analysis of one of the most used protocols for today's web services: the de-facto REST standard and its most popular applications, the REST APIs.

Milad Doueihi (2012) has shown that theoretical methods must adapt to the nature of their objects of study. In continuity with Doueihi's philosophy, we stress that rethinking the hermeneutic tradition is useful and necessary for the future of Digital Humanities and for our understanding of the intrinsic characteristics of contemporary information technologies.

Originating in ancient Greece, the hermeneutic tradition defines the interpretive act as a practice and method, or - starting from Heidegger - as a way of being, in the ontological sense. Emphasis is placed on the interpretation of human languages and artifacts, considered as cultural objects. According to the hermeneutic perspective, the impact of such objects does not depend on who created them, but on how they are understood, used, experienced, reproduced. Hermeneutics is about human inscriptions, in the broad sense of the term.

Similarly, protocols, computer languages and source codes are cultural objects (Marino, 2020) and exist as they are inscribed on a material support. As material and cultural entities, the same inscriptions affect our reality. They describe, model, thus define the analog world (Vitali-Rosati, 2020).

Consider the case of REST, which enables the production and dissemination of much of the information online. REST proposes to establish a difference between the resource and the representations of the same object. It forces us to think about the actual object (the resource), and to define its specifications (the representations). This modelisation clashes with the dominant tendency of the western thought which puts the accent on the identity of the objects and does not describe them as assemblages of traits and characteristics (Gracia, 1988).

Architectures such as REST depend on human needs and ideas, but also on the material nature of the machines that make them possible. Such systems are both human and machinic forms of thinking(Levy, 1999). It is therefore necessary to renew our hermeneutic tradition to make it a method of analyzing the agentivity of machines. To do so, I propose to integrate concepts from three methodological fields to philosophical hermeneutics: post-structuralism, which detaches the definition of text from human production; new materialism, which emphasizes the transformative agentivity of matter; and critical code studies, which stress the cultural significance of code. Starting with the case study on REST, the presentation will detail some principles for a hermeneutic approach adapted to digital technologies and their material and cultural influence.

“Code is speech!” From the Electric Frontier Foundation to the CryptoParty Manifesto, one of the rallying cries of cyberlibertarians is that machine speech—the algorithm, the google search, code—are protected by the First Amendment on Free Speech. My talk addresses the labyrinthine ‘culture war’ and multi-layered mosaic of arguments surrounding whether the Google search engine constitutes speech, and is therefore protected under the First Amendment. One theory in the affirmative is the “Editor Theory,” which argues that the search engine's editorial judgment is comparable to a newspaper editor's judgment. Lawyer Eugene Volokh portrays search engines as editors of content who enjoy the same shield extended by the First Amendment to editors of newspapers. In opposition to this, the Conduit Theory paints search engines as neutral digital architecture, merely existing as conduits "to carry the speech of others" with "little or no speech interests of their own." The Conduit Theory argues that search engines are assumed to be objective and thus are legally liable if they are tainted by bias. The Advisor Theory breaks the Manichean binarism and argues that there is both a denotative (neutral, fact-based) dimension to the Google Search as well as a connotative one (subjective) whereupon the Google search takes on a role akin to an advisor, and it is the latter that can claim the status of speech.

One case that Google won on this matter is “Search King, Inc. v. Google Technology.” The website Search King alleged Google maliciously decreased the ranking it had previously assigned to Search King. However, the court concluded that Google’s ranking of pages were subjective results that constituted “constitutionally protected opinions” entitled to “full constitutional protection.” Curiously, after years of insisting the Google search was unbiased and objective, Google now vociferously claimed the Google search was an expression of opinion, thus blithely dropping the bomb on the “objective Google Search” utopia.

However, many dismiss the argument that the Google search constitutes speech as naive folklorism. Derived from Thurman Arnold’s term “the folklore of informationalism,” it refers to the specious assumption that because communication generated by machines as part of functional processes meets a technical definition of speech, it is the same as other social practices involving speech and therefore merits the same constitutional protection. Finally, the dark side of the “Google Search is Speech/Code is Speech” doctrine is that it is emblematic of the neoliberalization of the First Amendment—that is, the weaponization of the Free Speech First Amendment into a pretext for capitalist deregulation. “Code is speech” is a runaway escape clause for corporations to avoid government regulation as long as the corporate actor takes action using programming code, leading to bizarre scenarios such as Apple being hailed as a civil rights hero for successfully litigating the “Code is speech” doctrine. Like the Citizens United case (i.e. ruling that corporations are people), it marks the pernicious expansion of corporate personhood and the coalescing of corporations as the foci point of constitutional rights.