Disruption Network Lab

DEEP CABLES: Uncovering the Wiring of the World. The 8th event of the Disruption Network Lab. Panel: Cable Breaks. The Powers Below the Surface with Ingrid Burrington (artist and researcher, USA), Helga Tawil-Souri (associate professor Middle East and Islamic Studies NYU, Palestine/USA), Gabriele "Asbesto" Zaverio (sysadmin, co-founder, MusIF, FreakNet MediaLab, IT). Moderated by Jacob Lillemose (postdoctoral researcher and curator, Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, DK). If the Internet is material at its core, based on an infrastructure of physical cables, it is in principle also victim to the same laws of physics as other material entities. Rather than understanding the Internet as a given thing, almost like a second air, the emphasis indirectly suggest that the Internet is a thing that like so many other things could one day break or disappear. While there is certainly reason to criticise the Internet when it works at its worst as a control mechanism there is just as much reason to be critically aware of the instances when it might not work at all, when it breaks down and our dependency on – and trust in – it is exposed, in some cases with catastrophic consequences. This panel is dealing with "cable breaks" as a metaphorical concept, showing that the Internet is a result of political and power alliances – andtherefore subjected to vulnerabilities and interruptions related notonly to its physical materiality, but also to cultural and political dynamics. It wants to investigate various blackout scenarios by inviting respectively an artist focusing on submarine cables and the confluence of local and global politics and history in specific US landingsites; a media scholar and documentary filmmaker expert on Internet breakdown and vulnerabilities during conflicts, analysing the digital occupation of Palestine; and a computer programmer working with "breaks", digital-divide and off zones in Italy and Sicily. www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables (http://www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables) Photo: Maria Silvano Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

DEEP CABLES: Uncovering the Wiring of the World. The 8th event of the Disruption Network Lab. Keynote: The Internet, Really. Behind the Scenes of Our Everyday Lives with Andrew Blum (writer & journalist, USA). Respondent: Bernd Fix (computer security expert, Wau Holland Stiftung, DE). In the book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (German title: Kabelsalat), journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet's physical infrastructure, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. What is the Internet physically? And where is it really? The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Connecting a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, from the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan as new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers, Andrew Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet's development, explains how it all works, and takes the first ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments. Is the Internet in fact "a series of tubes" as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet's possibilities if we don't know its parts? www.andrewblum.net (http://andrewblum.net/) www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables (http://www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables) Photo: Maria Silvano Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

DEEP CABLES: Uncovering the Wiring of the World. The 8th event of the Disruption Network Lab. Panel: Dirty Cables. The Technology & Politics of Network Infrastructures with Moritz Metz (radio journalist, DE), Marc Helmus (network operator and engineer, DE), Anne Roth (net activist, senior advisor for the German Parliamentary Inquiry on Mass Surveillance for the group Die Linke, DE). Moderated by Anna Biselli (journalist, Netzpolitik.org, DE). This panel investigates the materiality and hidden infrastructure of land and undersea network cables, tracing a path from the first submarine cables to today's worldwide fiber-optic network, and presents the real but hidden world of the Internet, where big data is linked to geopolitical surveillance. The participants will speak about the existence of secret data warehouses where our Internet selves are stored, the geographical architecture and functioning of land and undersea cables, the secrets of the network infrastructure, showing what the Internet actually is and its consequences for our online everyday life, both in its public and private aspects. Expert of the hidden Internet world Moritz Metz, network operator and engineer within the cable industry Marc Helmus, and member of the working team of the German Parliamentary Inquiry on Mass Surveillance Anne Roth, will enter into a dialogue to reflect around the materiality of the wired network and its historical and geopolitical dimensions. Starting with an analysis on the physical network infrastructure both on land and on sea (with Moritz Metz and Marc Helmus), the panel will culminate with an analysis of the discourse of data interception and surveillance on cable infrastructure, and what we know so far (with Anne Roth). http://www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables (http://www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables) Photo: Maria Silvano Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

DEEP CABLES: Uncovering the Wiring of the World. The 8th event of the Disruption Network Lab. Keynote: Network Exposed. Charting the Invisible with Henrik Moltke (investigative journalist, DK/USA), Trevor Paglen (artist and geographer, USA). Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (artistic director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE). Note: Trevor Paglen's presentation is not recorded. In August 2015 Henrik Moltke and a team of journalists from Pro Publica and the New York Times revealed intimate details of the National Security Agency's decades-long partnership with the telecom giant AT&T. A seemingly innocuous detail in a random document allowed the team to pin down the elusive collaboration, referred to by codename in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. A cable severed by the 2011 earthquake in Japan caused an outage, after which NSAs 'collection' - or tap - on the cable resumed. The date matched the repair on the northern leg of the Japan-US Cable, one of a handful of main arteries connecting Asia and the US. At the end of the cable is an anonymous looking industrial building, far off on the Mendocino coast of Northern California. The cable station is operated by AT&T. Under the motto "Follow the cables", Henrik Moltke recounts how he retraces the physical footprint of deep state secrets. In this presentation, Henrik Moltke and Trevor Paglen will trace a link between the imaginary concept of "The Internet" and the present configuration of geopolitical wired structures, where big data, cloud computing, mass surveillance, and the monopolies of big corporations are intertwined. By disclosing through photography the development of transatlantic and undersea fibre-optic cables, and reconnecting the past with the present by charting the hidden infrastructure of information technology, this event will expose the inner functioning of the modern business of cable infrastructures, showing the global dimension, as well as the invisible sites of the physical Internet. http://www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables (http://www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables) Photo: Maria Silvano Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

Mustafa Al-Bassam (https://twitter.com/musalbas) (alias Tflow, former core member of LulzSec, UK), Jean Peters (https://twitter.com/jeangleur) (co-founder Peng! collective, DE), M. C. McGrath (https://twitter.com/shidash?lang=de) (founder of Transparency Toolkit, USA/DE), Andrea Natella (http://www.andreanatella.it) (former Luther Blissett conspirator, creative director of guerrigliamarketing.it and KOOK Artgency, IT). Moderated by Ruth Catlow (http://furtherfield.org/user/ruth-catlow) (co-founder of Furtherfield, UK). Following the thread of creating unexpected consequences in economical, social and political systems, this panel reflects on the practice of political stunts and data dumps by provoking intelligence disruptions, virality interventions and corporate hijacking. The panel brings together Tflow, former core member of LulzSec (Lulz Security), the computer hacker group responsible for several high profile attacks in early 2011 to corporations and governments (i.e. CIA and Sony Pictures); Jean Peters, co-founder of Peng! (https://www.pen.gg), the German collective known for intruding into business conferences, producing corporate fakes and pranks, as well as for their recent campaign "Intelexit" , an initiative that helps people leave the secret service; M. C. McGrath, founder of Transparency Toolkit (https://transparencytoolkit.org), a project that uses open data to map the intelligence community and uncover secret surveillance programs as well as investigates human rights abuses and find perpetrators; and, last but not least, Andrea Natella, former mythmaker of the Italian Luther Blissett Project, founder of Guerrigliamarketing.it, and creative director of KOOK Artgency (http://www.andreanatella.it/kook/), an unconventional agency specialised in designing and manufacturing viral, street and digital marketing. The panel is moderated by Ruth Catlow, co-founder of Furtherfield, an online community and distributed network active since the 1990s in UK and on the net, focused on digital arts, experimental poetry, critical texts, and anarchic creativity. Source: http://www.disruptionlab.org/stunts/ (http://www.disruptionlab.org/stunts/) Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

John Law (original member of the Suicide Club and the Cacophony Society ((http://www.cacophony.org)); co-founder of the Billboard Liberation Front and of the Burning Man Festival, USA). Moderated by Marie Lechner (journalist and researcher, FR). How everything started in San Francisco Rumors of pie wielding assassins and a cryptic invitation to explore the miasmal underbelly of the urban landscape seen in a hippy free university calendar in 1977, was enough to enflame the curiosity of seventeen-year old John Law. A subsequent initiation into the secretive Suicide Club propelled Law into a thirty-eight year "career" amidst the hidden world of pranks, urban exploration, counter culture, 'Culture Jamming' and creative mayhem. Fight Club, Burning Man, SantaCon, media hacking, urban exploration, street art, flash mobs and more - these are some of the cultural phenomena that were initiated or somehow influenced by the Suicide Club, and the subsequent sub-cultures that Law was fortunate to have fallen into as a teenaged juvenile delinquent. This presentation reveals some of the genesis & history of these groups including a brief survey of their precedents and influences on through the present day iterations, spin offs and 'fellow travellers'. The idea we hope you take away from this presentation is simply this: this strange, obscure world is available to anyone who can appreciate the concept that "you may already be a member". Source: http://www.disruptionlab.org/stunts/ (http://www.disruptionlab.org/stunts/) Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

PiggyBankGirls: Erotic Crowdfunding for Girls Short video with Sascha Schoonen (CEO, PiggyBankGirls, DE) This video shot specifically for our conference event presents and introduces to the public the new-born platform "PiggyBankGirls", the first erotic crowdfunding platform for girls, where women get into the erotic business for a specific goal, trying to get their ideas and projects funded by supporters via their online porn performances. The CEO of the platform, Sascha Schoonen, introduces the main mission of the project, as well as brings some specific examples of projects that got funded. Furthermore she reflects on what it means to be a female CEO in the mostly male-dominated sex and porn business. Source: http://www.disruptionlab.org/porntubes/ (http://www.disruptionlab.org/porntubes/) PiggyBankGirls (http://www.piggybankgirls.com) Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

A keynote with Carmen Rivera (Mistress and Fetish-SM-performer, DE). Moderated by Gaia Novati (net activist and researcher on indie porn, IT/DE) In this special event, Carmen Rivera will share with the public the "secrets" of her carrier as a Mistress, being since many years involved in the field as erotic photographer and fetish model, dancer, and erotic show moderator. Founder of one of the first SM communities in Germany in the 1990s, she will share with the public her background in the show business and porn entertainment as TV show moderator (Beate-Uhse.TV and other productions) as well as Fetish-SM-performer (including an open-air show in Italy in front of 30.000 visitors). As independent manager of her own video-production series "Carmen Rivera Entertainment" which made a name in the international fetish scene she will also present one of her recent projects: "Wunschvideo" where her fans are offered the opportunity to make a video completely and individually based on their script. Furthermore, the event will discuss on the practice of working professionally with pornography, reflecting on the transformation of the porn & erotic industry in the last years. Source: http://www.disruptionlab.org/porntubes/ (http://www.disruptionlab.org/porntubes/) Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

Panel: XXXPLICIT. From Porn Tubes to Online Sex Working This panel investigates the evolution of the sex and porn business, from the early days of webcam work to the creation of porntubes and commercial contemporary online porn platforms (PornoTube, RedTube, YouPorn, etc.). From one side, this development will be analysed technologically by highlighting the transformation in the field of pornography of the major adult-only platforms, presenting new disruptive business models of sharing porn; from the other side, the panel will bring a critical perspective on how roles and conditions of sexworking are changing with the use of online technology for porn and beyond it, questioning if User-Generated-Content models are bringing more sustainability or less participation in terms of community building. Furthermore, this panel will reflect on the transformation of the erotic and porn imaginary with the emergence of new pervasive sharing business models, social media platforms, as well as new audience. Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com

Strategies for Resistance Jørgen Johansen (https://twitter.com/jrgenjohansen) (researcher on resistance studies, civil disobedience and whistleblowing, NO), Jaromil (https://jaromil.dyne.org/) (hacktivist, IT/NL), Sophie Toupin (https://twitter.com/stoopt) (researcher and feminist techno/activist, QC/CA), moderated by Valie Djordjevic (https://twitter.com/validd) (net activist, DE). What does it mean today to speak about "resistance" on the net and beyond more than two years after the first of Edward Snowden's disclosures? In the past years the world at large has been shocked by revelations about state surveillance networks and their prevarication over citizen's rights. Such a scenario is not new to hackers, but more than ever today is extending a grim aura over our capacity to imagine a better society. By going beyond fear and paranoia of surveillance, this panel reflects on the impact of the Snowden case, and on the upcoming frontiers of action and awareness for hackers, activists and artists in the present context of geopolitical powers. Without undermining the need of encrypting our data, and protecting our physical and online existence, this discussion aims to go beyond the current state of paranoid-affairs and crypto-angst into the development of shared forms of post-digital resistance, in search of positive alternatives and horizons for the kind of consciousness cultivated by hackers and activists. Source: http://www.disruptionlab.org/samizdata/ (http://www.disruptionlab.org/samizdata/) Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com