第七届网络社会年会｜Nevermind the Web3，Here’s the P2P！

中文｜English

🔗 AGENDA

🔵 10 keynote speakers, groups of organizers from 7 cities, 40 artists, and 18 young scholars enrolled. A dialogue between the city ethos and the communities.

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🔵 INTRO

Professor Huang Sunquan

For the 6 years, the former 6 Annual Conferences of Network Society, “Forces of Reticulation”（2016）, “Another Walk with Lefebvre: Critique of Urbanism and Everyday Life in the Algorithmic Age”(2017), “Intelligent Urban Fabric”(2018), “Netizen 21: Beyond Personal Account”(2019), “The Web of Phronesis”(2020), and “Instantly Reciprocal：The Moments for Cooperative Life”(2021) has formed a unique academic network of worldwide experts on Network sociological studies.

The Seventh Annual Conferences of Network Society, “Nevermind the Web3, Here’s the P2P” is going to critically look back at the P2P(Peer to Peer), one of the most inspiring social technology throughout Tech history. This provocative proposition stems from our criticism of the development of Web3 that is tokenizing everything.

Today, Web3 is taking a progressive stance in linking technological finance to personal values, while evolving the self enlightenment and anti-establishment gesture of the 1960s of “turn on, tune in, drop out” into a high-intensity libertarian drive for individual investment: “all in” and “drop out (from large companies)”. Turn to P2P, a network technology and network topology, has so far developed various communities of interest in cyberspace; the spirit of sharing of copyright and academic production and its ethical and complex debates; the shape of the collaborative economy, etc. In the past 60-year tech history, people used personal computers and networks to communicate, to independently connect, however, today’s technologies have made people interested in technology more than in communities, trusting in code more than in social coordination. As Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Society of Technology at MIT, indicates: the closer people get to the machines, the further they get from each other, and the technology makes people alone together. 

The technical strategy, the ethics and the ideals of federalization adopted by P2P are clearly different from Web3’s blueprint of decentralization. P2P creates small and light-weight communities, while some Web3 projects are monetizing (yes, this is an ultimate goal), getting increasingly expensive, complex, and technology-dependent, with high failure rates and more energy consumption. We are not willing to see the individuals hiding behind anonymity and security, never disconnected, constantly distracted, reduced to objects or a string of hash values that can be browsed, paused, and instantly accessed by each other. Instead, we care about the relationships between individuals, especially how people gather together and communicate as groups.

Moreover, it is noticeable that some ongoing Web3 project has neglected the rich legacy of social movements including free software, Indymedia, open government data, digital democracy cities, participatory budgeting, creative commons, etc. Without the vision brought about by the democratic digital technology movement, there could be only evolutions of new technologies rather of society or culture. Since then, to criticize Norbert Wiener‘s cybernetics is to criticize today’s Web 3. In Wiener’s cybernetics, the analogy between man as machine and creature, where the shocking dilemma of information transmission and feedback to be solved has strangely made technological development theorists keep talking about what machines can be, rather than what machines can do for people.

At an earlier time, the sense of community the P2P generated was absolutely broad. In 1999, when Napster was found, 70-90% of network traffic on US university campuses was P2P. Around the year 2000, when the anti-globalization movement was on the rise, the Seattle Indymedia site integrated nodes from 120 cities through RSS technology, creating the News Agency of the People. It has been widely recognized as a symbolistic case of grassrooted space of flows, being built from the bottom up in the form of People-City-Global”. Web2 netizens are very familiar with this scenario, While Web3 netizens refurbishes old technologies, rhetorically packaging decentralisation and free trade as the ultimate answer to political-social-cultural development. Should we all in this game? The Seventh Annual Conference of Network Society tries to gather people who cares about the issues, to critically and creatively review the rich community culture constituted by the P2P thtough seven City Panels and one Young Scholar Forum.

In the conclusion of Texts/Contexts Of “Other Spaces”, Michel Foucault says: “In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.” Now, its time for us to question in the future where negotiation and conflict are being replaced with the procedure and public property with proof of individual property.

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🔵 CITY PANELS

From the 1960s onwards, computers were no longer purely computational functions. It became a tool for acknowledging, communicating, and collaborating across disciplines.

Within a circle of almost five and a half miles, the Mid-Peninsula region of San Francisco, California, is home to the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center (AHIRC), headed by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute; the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), headed by John McCarthy; the People’s Computer Corporation (PCC) on the Kepler‘s Book; the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which created the first personal computer; the CIA-led psychedelic experiment, and the company’s global headquarters and network, Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. The techno-culture developed in this area, as represented by bands like The Grateful Dead, included student movements, anti-war, psychedelic, spiritual liberation, hippie, etc. At the time, hundreds of thousands of young people marched to the rural frontier, forming a new communitarian faction that parted ways with the political New Left. When the New Left concerned with political reform, the young people concerned with freeing the individuals through technologies, to keep away with the establishments and fight the grip of the military-industrial complex (to some extents, they all believed in Technological Optimism). Accordingly, it is not too much to say that city ethos has shaped computer and Internet culture.

In the 1960s, the dream of developing personal computers and connecting each other came to fruition. The information networks brought by computers became a “common world” in which people thought, communicated, expressed themselves and acted socially. Everything frozen and impenetrable was then “transparent” as if a frictionless world.

There is a time lag between the invention of technology and the application of its transmission. Technology, as a unity of space and abstraction, is realized through the ‘translation’ of place and community. According to the mainstream tech-history, electricity and steam engines in the nineteenth century, and informatics and computers in the twentieth century were not transmitted from the centre to each place fluently, but were reformatted by the regime, society and culture of the places. Each technological practice was reconfigured by the “ethos” of the city.

The City Panels at the Seventh Annual Conference of Network Society are both fieldworks and questions about socially extended discourse on the conference theme. Today’s technological art is becoming increasingly homogeneous. Artists demonstrate new technologies a lot, paying little attention to who, especially the places, the technologies are made for. We believe that the ethos of cities are sets of values universally recognized by their inhabitants. When nations are becoming increasingly global, cities could become bases of counter-globalization, through constructing local cultural identities. Since then, We are curious about the way the city ethos works, especially about how they effect technological art maker based in different places. Therefore, the city panels invited curators and artists from seven cities, to set their own themes of concern, and express the possibilities of cities as “multi-species gardens”

🔵PANELISTS

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