________________________________________________________________________________ BREAK THE LAW OF INFORMATION notes on search engines and 'Natural Selection'1 Matthew Fuller BACK UP There is no permanent back-up device for the internet. A number of institutions have made one-off synchronous copies of the web which claim to be entire for the duration of the period it takes their spiders to reach the furthest corners of the web.2 There are also systems which actively monitor every email or newsgroup message sent on behalf of the odder fans of political action and dissolution3. Both of these are partial of course. As what Gregory Ulmer has usefully called a pre-broken system, there is no centralised back-up. Copies of elements of the net are backed up across thousands of storage devices off and across itself. Were the whole lot to go down, putting back together the results of such disgraceful degradation would be an insane task. Inevitably, some large areas of the web would slide back into place with the efficiency of a file amongst filing cabinets. Others however, made on the fly, left without a double, would go missing. Still more would have their links tangled, lost - a mess of stringy, gloopy, gone data. Natural Selection4 is in a sense the result of this crash before it happens. It is the web, picked up in pieces by people who never made it, putting it back together in a way that makes more sense. It is obvious that the British Airports Authority site would 'want' to link to information about people getting killed by anti-immigration police5. It is obvious that someone looking for information on fertility treatments would want to find a site mixing the histories of different acts of racial 'improvement' into a corporate brochure. Just as it is obvious that anyone looking for traces of overtly racialised political activism on the net is going to want their browser to become infested by a fast-breeding Jamaican virus in the guise of a triple-consciousnessed poet6. BLACK BOX A search engine is a black box. That is to say, the relationship between its input and output is masked. The tension between making the a search engine usable, predictable and 'refinable' and the commercial necessity of maintaining its constituent algorithms and processes as proprietary information provides one of the key contexts for this project. Piracy of any electronic technology is usually carried out by reverse engineering: feeding it inputs, monitoring its output until a tabulation of its workings can be drawn up. The black box is not actually cracked open and scrutinised, but is fed line after line until it can be simulated. What is true of the search engine is also true of the user. When you use HotBot for instance your search-string and all the links you make from the results to your enquiry are logged and recorded along with your domain and IP number. This information is useful for many reasons and becomes increasingly so over time and repeated use. It allows the more accurate targeting of search results to specific enquiry entries (according to frequency of choice) and advertising, (according say to proportional interest from certain domains). Any impression that engines are there to provide a useful service financed by incidental advertising is of course pure 'company history', as Yahoo calls it. Just as the engine helpfully provides a field in which you can type in your search-string, the engine is also opening up an aperture through which the user can be interrogated. There are always at least two black boxes in this equation. The interface is where they meet and engineer each other. Natural Selection sits on top of any of the mainstream search engines, filtering their results and, if certain strings are fed to it, slipping in a result from the bottom of the deck. It is in producing itself as an interface to an interface between: the targeted engine, its interface on one side and the user's manifestation to the engine as a search string (with a history of others) and an internet location along with the need of the user to access relevant links on the other that Natural Selection is able to operate as a double-blinded bait and switch. It is this context, of the specific rules of formation, of the grammars of information put into play by various search engines that Natural Selection operates in and which this story hopes to open up a little. INFORMATION TRANSFERENCE Shannon7: The amount of information in a message is in proportion to its unpredictability. Of course, this definition of information defines it in strict relation to the context in which it is received. It is strictly relativist, (and provides one of the crucial problems for designers of search engines attempting to produce a machine-enforced dialogism, where the information derived from the net is the result of an ongoing process of discrimination - agents for instance). This has important implications for the construction of search engines. The search engine is absolutely unable to treat a word or any collection of symbols entered into it in a contextualised manner, there are ways of refining or narrowing down the search for sure, but the core of what it has to act upon is the string of characters that it has just been requested to find matches or correspondences to. One response to this has been to produce a situation where the user has the responsibility to do the thinking 'for' the engine. Yahoo for instance prides itself on its 'Ontology' - it's super-mainstream view of the world. Users too, as members of a conformist society are expected to have internalised this ontology, but also to be able to use it reflexively. That is to say, that the conformism of the user can be operated upon, tweaked, at the same time as it is being used in order to get to the required link. This is not to say that this internalised conformism has an open architecture in the case of either the user or the engine, but rather that what Natural Selection does is in a sense to make manifest the production of this double consciousness and open it to some form of reconfiguration. To great or lesser extents, non-directory-based systems avoid this conformism, largely as is examined later, to the degree that they attempt to ascribe, involve, or invent semantic meaning in the field which they operate on. To the degree at which it occurs, the refusal of making straightforward sense by the engine becomes the best tool by whose help the most secret components of the net can be opened.8 Here, the occurrence of information in Shannon's sense, veering towards its upper limit of utter randomness, is limited solely by the congruence of search strings - making a permanently locked on to its self-same narcissism an impossibility. At the same time though, their avoidance of overt taxonomisation of the world - their heightened level of information in this sense - means that the development of a search-consciousness, perhaps a temporary micro-subject thrown together by the agglomeration of strings, results and guesses into a briefly memorised sensorium, remains trapped at the level of articulation of that loaded bane of software culture - intuition. A more sustained, distributed, inquisitive or conflictual sensorium demands more difficult and supple ways to cohere. THE COPY JUMPED One other definition for the amount of information in a sentence, object, process and so on is the length of the set of instructions - the program - necessary to carry out in order to make a copy or model of it9. A game of cricket has more information than a game of knuckles. A cup has more information than a plain sheet of paper. By this definition at least, the internet is significantly high in information. To create a set of instructions to copy it would be just short of impossible. What this project does is, in a sense, just that. It turns the internet into a copy of itself. This denaturalised selection treats the net as a found object: mangy paint-dripped goat; soup can; planet. The instructions for its copying are found in every line of code that makes it up. However massified the net becomes, however much 'diversity' is attached Natural Selection will always add one more bit, one last line, that, instead of adding information to the net will always force the cognisance of its own grounding incompleteness. Thus at once, the copy will never be made - the thing has to be done for real. CONDENSATION The search string, the series of symbols tapped into the search field on the search engine, like the password for the hacker draws all the protocols and machines in onto itself as an act of condensation. In common with elements within indexes, search terms are words or numbers disengaged from direct social or linguistic involvement. The string of characters constructs itself as an aperture to alignment with a potentially infinite amount of interlocutions, the key around which a thousand locks ensconce their levers. For the second or so that it is typed, all of this potential is under pressure. From the moment that the search command is given, the moment, the string and its ramifications begins to extrude. An arbitrary wad of bits heats temporarily up into a larval plasticity that has it tonguing for the contradictory, the useless and the lost. What Natural Selection does is to maintain this sense of plasticity. When the search string is entered, it is under a pressure that is not let up as the results file up by percentages onto the page. Rather than each result providing a smooth transition from risk, from information, into assuredness it becomes evident that every link is articulated in many ways. The switch-tongue is in constant spasm. It is in this state that a politics of the switches and of the string can be made. FORMS One of the ways in which the world wide web has been found to be most 'useful' is in the ability to construct forms which can be filled out online. This again is the creation of a reading aperture into the user. Feeding into databases they "traverse and cancel the", already questionable "public/private distinction"10 by a literal interrelation. A question implies an incomplete picture of reality which an answer completes. In this case however, ticking checkboxes implies an addition to reality - an accumulatory combination of positives which individually and together combine to produce form in numbers. In "The Temple of Confessions" and their related techno-ethnographic internet work11 Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Suifentes use this use this shape-making facility of forms to entice the self-production of fear and desire about Chicanos and Mexicans in US art and net audiences. The confessions of fear and desire pour into a database where they form a switch tongue writhing in a perpetual glottal roar of confusion, hate and fantastical need. In comparison, Natural Selection takes this database composed of fear and desire as already pre-existing - as the entire net. One of the modes in which elements of Natural Selection operates is a reverse of what Gomez Pena calls the 'Dantean model of multiculturalism'12 in which the flaneur from the North descends to the South to sample the strictly localised flavour. Here, euro-american technoculture is exoticised and taken for the mumbo-jumbo status it hungers for but can never attain. The accumulatory combination of positives produces a weight in data, a gravitational pull that turns conceptions of what constitutes marginality inside out. ENTER A TOURIST. LEAVE A LOCAL Web work is endless. Why do something as text when you can do it as sound? Why do it as mere sound when you can do it as a realtime post-raster 3D walkthrough intentional community with badword filtering and ambient billboards? If the net is already a copy, then to double it demands a constitutional heterogeneity that is nothing if not a mess. The founding statements of Romanticism demanded a radical incompleteness, a cursed restlessness against the apparent foreclosures of industrialisation. This is at once the condition of work for all those who put bread on the table by shovelling content and code onto servers, and in a reversioned materialist form realised in the widely popularised conceptual device of the rhizome. Such refusal of finitude is both what forms an incomprehensible glimpse over the abyss for regulation and for those in need of the reassurance of 'critical understanding', as well as the excuse for extending overtime into your sleep. It is inherent to the texture and dynamics of the web and forms the swamp on which Natural Selection is grounded. This mess sprawls out in several ways: in terms of distribution across the net and position within different server-regimes; in terms of producing work for machine readerships; in terms of working many technico-aesthetic approaches simultaneously; and clearly, in terms of authorship. Much has been made of the potential on the web for small groups of people or individuals to develop equal visibility or presence as major companies or institutions, often to usurp vertical hold over their public image. This was especially the case in the early to mid nineties. Later as the web-design market restructured along rationalised lines and the corporate influx onto the net became an increasingly normalised procedure and new forms of software and increasing production times raised barriers to making ostensibly corporate sites, various groups developed ways of destabilising the apparent authorship of sites. Many of these remained strictly on the level of swapping zeros for ones and standing back to admire the - inevitably invisible - confusion and collect the letters from the lawyers. Others however knotted themselves more intimately and uncomfortably into the political and technical fabric of representation and communication13. When dealing with such a diffuse dynamic as racialisation, pressing attention solely on a specific target is not necessary. Being able to deal with it in as many ways and as many places it exists is. Inevitably this means relinquishing the appearance of 'clarity' essential to validation in terms of art in order to turn more than one kind of purism into more matter for mongrelisation. Doubling the web demands that glib coffee-table web design becomes an appearance along with default-grey file directories, that rainbow coloured, -heavy home-pages get bitten along with customer service oriented purchase opportunity provision included product information displays. At the same time as one mode of operation within Natural Selection is to produce a destabilisation of the apparent reliability of racialised sites by hooking their familiar routines into heritage free-fall, it is equally imperative that other dynamics come through. There are around twenty sites that sit directly after the first folderload in the mongrel.org.uk URL. They come from people working in different countries, different political, narrative and interactive angles. Many kinds of personal histories are in operation alongside approaches to users and interrelationships with elements of the web that they link themselves into or cut themselves off from. The Natural Selection front end, the doctored search engine is a specific technical and cultured intervention, a hack, into 'a culture that has no culture' - information science - in order to tease out what it represses and what it produces. Making this break into the net produces a surplus of possibility - we could do anything with it - that allows others to take it on as an opportunity. This surplus produced by a technical and conceptual break - what might happen if you could begin to sense the politics of algorithms whilst you used them? - allows a multitude of aesthetics, experiences, voices, flows, positions and lives to operate interconnected and in parallel without making them conform to any particular model of operation. Different kinds of energies, different speeds are also capable of mobilisation in a process of work that is not overdetermined by a finalised shape: energy from hate, from derision, communication, stupidity; programming energy; research. For a long while this meant that the some of it never climbed out of Beta, but it also means that it produces an extended period of experimentation that will potentially at least never be quite over. This drawn out, not quite programmatic dispersal of working over time that is inherent in all kinds of work on the web is also echoed in the distribution of the component sites across it. Natural Selection is composed of a many sites. All of the separate sites are accessible via the search engine, as they are via any other search engine. Only a proportion of them are pushed to be indexed on the ostensible front-end as 'Star Sites'. Forming a constellation of sites on and off the mongrel domain, with varying thicknesses of cross-linking it never appears as a whole, there is no complete index, no climbing up the URL to find the answer. Some of it may never get seen by users, but will be constantly read by crawlers and agents. In any work on the internet, machines both hard and soft are the primary audience. BRIGHT LATTICES OF LIGHT UNFOLDING AGAINST THE COLOURLESS VOID In one software millionaire's mansion, the walls are covered not with paintings but with flatscreen monitors linked to a voice activated database of images. Any time a conversation occurs in some part of the house the screens change to reflect it. The millionaire coos to his baby son whilst feeding him bottle and dictating a letter into an intercom phone. Some cracked up old madonna and child appears, a ball game, gouache cowboys, pulmonary cancer on ultrasound, then three-dee NASDAQ flows. A family snap taken on the lawn. Mummy herself enters to usher in a group of business associates and take baby away. Courbet's studio appears. The naked model is clad in a seasonally updated business suit. Something transcendental from National Geographic. Talk moves on, the computer reads every word uttered, flashing up a picture corresponding to any one of thousands of keywords from the database, everyone effects not to notice. The web sites produced as part of Natural Selection involve the mobilisation of words that have become crystallised forms of racialisation. Typing a search string into the Natural Selection search engine either allows you access to the net as per usual - or, should you enter one of several thousand keywords - clicking on an apparently transparent search result drops you into its double. Imagining into the lexical space of the fear, desire, hate, the will to control and define that composes racialisation allows the registration of a shape composed in crisis by language. The accumulation of shifting populations of terms of abuse, of jargons, of political or scientific code, of euphemisms, agglomerate into conceptual and signifying phase forms. Networks of pot-holes and caverns under the homogenised surface of mediatised language are opened up for re-articulation and engineering. This occurs not just as an incursion into enemy mind-space by a punitive band of artists with the oxygen-tent souls of angels but as an response to senses of what might be done and as the public development of models that might be taken further. .sitUATE Two models that feed into Natural Selection are conjoined by use of the same string of characters to mark kinds of poesis, making, that are attractive by both their livid intensity and their attempts at critical technics. For Guy Debord, writing before the formation of the Situationist International (SI), the construction of situations was "the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality".14 Situations were to be something produced in the city, in real space. For Donna Haraway, writing about feminist scientific practice, situated knowledge is equally "rooted in yearning, not an abstract philosophical foundation".15 Tensions exists between the two uses of the same sign. Debord insists on a practice that provokes the release of "primary sentiments".16 Haraway, involved in writing which still has to contend with determinist scientisms whose agenda is very much the 'discovery' (and political use) of such compulsive drives proposes instead the practices that are "suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried and hopeful".17 Writing later, after the foundation of the SI, and in a more complex manner about what is intended by situations, there is what might be taken as an almost literal description of certain aspects of Natural Selection: "We are not going to limit ourselves... ...with environments of mechanistically provoked surprises."18 Clearly, entering a search string and finding that it doesn't take you to the hoped-for homepage of the European Skinhead Army but to some pervert nonsense looking too much like the real thing to be quite reassuringly wrong enough for comfort is exactly that. You're tricked by a few lines of code. What can clearly be seen though is that in both the preparation and execution of this project is that, "...setting up, on the basis of more or less clearly recognised desires, a temporary field of activity favourable to those desires"19 is not quite so simple - this could be the description of a business plan. Situated knowledge is for Haraway something equally particular, but complicated by embodiment, by "sometimes painful" processes of building relationships, structures and accountability into the process. What unites both forms, the 'construction of situations' and 'situated knowledge', however is the urgency of and the possibility for establishing concrete freedoms via genuine experiment. Correctly understanding the 'merely empirical experimentalism'20 of the academic avant garde to be rigidifying and pre-determinate of outcome in the manner of heavily disciplined scientific procedure21, Debord criticises experimental work which seeks only to operate within pre-established conceptual categories. Haraway lives in an altogether trickier space, which (although it is at least partly in the grip of an academic feminism which has to make the most tortuous excuses before it feels permitted to crack a joke, but feels quite at liberty to punish the world with nauseatingly didactic allegorical paintism as book covers) seeks to establish intermeshing and conflictual fields of lived experience, scientific method, political mobilisation, diffusion of knowledges in order to go beyond and change them. The making of alliances, something which is inherent to the composition of Mongrel, demands concrete practices of learning and accountability in order to make the connections that it desires. For, "If they are not so bound, connection and coalition disintegrate into orgies of moralism."22 - something profoundly familiar to post-situationist shufflers. It is this thickness of connection in the work - a situatedness of lived relations instead of identity - rather than any access to primal realities, that we believe allows the combination of machines and people to make concrete both a refusal of slavery and access to life. INSTRUCTIONS In search engines using automatic indexing to produce inverted files - the number of occurrences of a word related to the number of occurrences of all words in the file - an apparent transparency is generated by the simple procedure of simply pulling the words directly from the sites that it logs. What is important, what is notable appears simply by virtue of being logged by the crawler. Inevitably, this flat perspective produces an outcry about quality control. For information science, "It is entirely possible that vast concatenations of information resources are just not susceptible to any really effective measure of control and access, at least not by any automatic procedures applied on a large scale"23 The web challenges not only the status of the document, the corpus, but of the index. This challenge is the result of an attempt to refuse, or at least avoid the burden of classification built into the architecture of the web. The Uniform Resource Locator, (URL) of the World Wide Web is an attempt to, "point to any document (or any other type of resource) in the universe of information"24 without a priori specification of the resource within any system of classification. Within this schema, anything that is digitizable can be stored, networked and located. The architecture of the WWW is an attempt to route round classification, or at least provide a situation were many such interpretative formations can operate without universalisation. This is embedded not just in the device of the URL but also in details such as the simple geek idealism of physical and logical styles, (where, in the latter, the site designer can specify that the individually determined settings of the user's browser can determine the way to display certain forms of text emphasis). The WWW attempts to produce a 'preconceptual'25 technology which in a similar way to a computer's memory storing both the data it uses and the programs the data is used with produces a field within which concepts coexist alongside the rules to which the field is subjected. Elsewhere there has been discussion of how particular modes of use of HTML have tended to lock down the potential of the network into an idealised form of paper-based media26. What is hoped to move towards here is a consideration of how the rules of formation that operate in the construction of search engines produce many particular overt or anonymous ways of making and using the web. It is not suggested that these are secret rules for the confabulation of the world beyond the magic gate internet into something that it is not, nor are they necessarily merely illusions, misinformation, bad habits of thought, but a series of perceptual devices which are themselves reliant on and interwoven with others - and which are as such open to reinvention. THE EATING Within computer science there is argument as to the verification of the accuracy of both hardware and software. Donald McKenzie whose work has focused on the sociology of 'proof' suggests that there are three identifiable positions in the debate: "...the formal, mechanised verification of programs and hardware designs; the denial that verification confers certainty akin to that conferred by proof in mathematics; and the advocacy of human, rather than machine, proof"27. There is a triangulation of tension here between the relative status of verification and proof and between mathematics performed by humans and by machines. Software and hardware are relied upon for matters, not just of life and death, but for financial and military operations. Inevitably then, the need to determine the correct expression of an accurate result - and within software, concatenations of millions of them - has produced, if not agreement as to what constitutes accuracy, at least variable standards of proof. (The Ministry of Defence for instance distinguishes between a 'Formal Proof' and a 'Rigorous Argument' in its specifications for the assessment of mission critical software28). These arguments are played out at a 'lower' level in the construction of search engines. However, the accuracy of results returned are impossible to check because of the proprietary closure of search engines' programming. They are also complicated by their interface between social and technical protocols. For users, getting sense out of search engines is empirically based, deductive rather than inductive. For search engines getting sense, or at least data, out of the web is based around three major strategies. Directories specifically trade on their particular take on the web. Yahoo! for instance gathers URLs, largely from people submitting their own web sites for classification, but also from their crawler. Each site is then classified by an employee who places the site into one of several thousand sub-categories. What started out as the ironically named 'Yet Another Hierarchically Ordered Ontology', but, being too revealing, swiftly became just another yelping logo.gif of capitalised joy, is able in this way to bunch results together into classes. Because the system refers to digital documents rather than books on a shelf it also allows the possibility of having sites stored in the cross-hairs of several different classifications. However, because they both sell themselves on and operate by a claim to be able to at once abstract the essence of all things and at the same time conform as accurately as possible to the expectations of their statistically idealised user, the terms on which they classify are rendered solely by a normalised idea of 'subject'. Just as search engines can only operate given the pre-standardisation of language and spelling already put into place over several centuries by printed documents, directories assume a conceptual normativity. The 'subject' or 'topic' of a web site is what it is really talking about, its essence. It is not classified by whatever conscious or unconscious machine propels its production; by its use of bgcolor #A5C679; by that which it makes allegorical reference to; or by that which forms the centre of its coming into existence but which it is unable to name. Constructing a directory is of course complicated by the existence of contradictory or completely incommensurable schemas, but this becomes a negligible problem after it is understood that the clear asymmetry between such systems and the world ensures that the only moment any directory becomes completely stable is also the moment that everything dies. One pact between terminal equilibrium and the sustained recursion of the-same-but-different is formulated as the theory of quality: of establishing a mechanism by which certain levels of scientific discipline; relevance; erotic intensity; rarity; legal, commercial or other forms of trustworthiness; timeliness and so on can be reliably guaranteed. Perhaps as simple would be to have search engines organised not by exactitude of match by subject, but by degree of absolutely determined irrelevance. If directories promise nothing less than the ultimate victory of common sense over difference, the two broad types of semantic network in use to produce search engines rely on far less explicit ways of codifying the web. Before establishing what these are, it is worth illustrating how a 'standard' search engine works. The Boolean approach to information retrieval is the most widely used. Links to documents are returned only if they contain exactly the same words as your query. Even if a site is related in some way, it would never be retrieved unless it contains the user's search string. In order to get better results from this, most search engines finesse things a little. The results from the inverted file are modified by factors such as: where the search term appears in the item - whether the string of characters appears in specially tagged areas such as titles or head, or whether it appears early in the body text of the html document; how close the search words are together, or whether they form an 'exact phrase'; the frequency of occurrence of search terms in the inverted file; whether the search terms appear as keywords in the metatags in the html file's head; how frequently the terms appear in relation to the document's length (greater frequency indicating a probable greater relevance). These techniques gradually move over into semantic analysis. For instance selection by the frequency of occurrence of words in general in which very uncommon words get heavier weight. (Although this is probably slightly unnecessary as their occurrence in the inverted file, coupled with its realisation in the search term is already 'unusual' enough). The two key methods of semantic analysis of the web are hierarchical- based on ordered word relationships defined by a database, or self-organising - based on the build up of evidence of search strings finding their correlates in practice. The most simple method of constructing a semantic network is to use a precodified arrangement of terms and their correlates - using a document like an expanded thesaurus to widen and clarify search possibilities29 by aiding query formulation through synonym relations between words and hierarchical and other relations between concepts. Whilst they come into being on the basis of automatic word sense disambiguation running the I, me, she, he, it, you, them, that, on things - the syntactical machine that allows and disallows conjugation with what word, with what it means - top-down, 'Hard' semantic networks aggravate polysemy in the sense that all 'Dictionaries advertise semantic discrepancies',30 which allow other diachronic and synchronic meanings, other takes to leak through. However, hard semantic networks are like dictionaries again in that even if effectively and constantly enriched by lexicographers, they still only really compose logs of past signifiance. At the same time, whilst their hierarchical organisation allows for an extremely coherent co-ordination of words from a single perspective they are unable to negotiate the variable status of words as they are used. Allegory, irony, metaphor, repurposing, the rich meshwork of language that mitigates against its petrification all go like woodcutters amongst the trees in the database, whilst utterly incommensurable figurations of language such as sacredness throw up errors, not just of computation, but of essence. One way of attempting to avoid as much disjuncture between the semantic model of the information referenced by the search engine and that of its users in the way commonly imposed by hierarchically organised systems is to assume that the words that are most commonly found together are actually related in some way. This is a technique that makes best use of machine rather than human interpretation of data. In Latent Semantic Indexing31 a set of documents is represented by a matrix whose entries are measures of frequencies of occurrences of terms in each document. The greater the frequency of co-occurrence, the greater the relevance. This matrix is then approximated by a sum of rank-one matrices determined using a singular value or related decomposition. This allows for great compression of the data and fast, relatively robust and encompassing referencing of sites. However, what is found to be the most related in terms of quantity doesn't necessarily match for each user, or each search. Latent Semantic Indexing finds a way of working the inverted file mined with homonyms, synonyms and routes to a thousand pointless choice trees that plays to the data processing strengths of computers and thus avoids the implicitly ontological nature of directories. However, these techniques are always caught in a self-organised conformism to the homeostatic pressures of what is statistically deemed, by frequency of use and by frequency of co-occurrence, to be the most relevant. Searching for the most relevant, the most related - simply rendered as the most linked to is another technique adopted by a variety of search engines in compiling their results from the inverted field. AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi32 rate sites higher in their list of search results if a substantial number of sites link to it. Google, usefully makes this process visible and useable, allowing backlinking from its results. Related to citation analysis - the scheme whereby the relative importance of scientific papers is accorded by the frequency of their being cited by other scientific papers - is another approach adopted in different ways both by the Web Stalker33 and by the 'Clever'34 project at IBM: "We have developed a new kind of search engine that exploits one of the Web's most valuable resources - its myriad hyperlinks. By analysing these connections, our system automatically locates two types of pages: authorities and hubs. The former are deemed to be the best sources of information on a particular topic: the latter are collections of links to those locations."35 'Authorities' are sites that are linked to many times, 'Hubs' are sites that contain many links.36 Despite their claims, Clever has no way of actually defining a topic other than by resorting to imposing hierarchical taxonomies. What it does do is - by defining a limited set of properties: links-to and links-from, as a way of organising an interpretation of the topological form of the web - use some of ways the web is actually put together to develop a representation of the emergent, unpredictable interplay of multipolar gravitational tendencies within the hyperlinked structure of the web. Some of these may be sufficiently closely clustered to be interpretable from specific perspectives as a topic. Other sites which might be highly pertinent from other perspectives might not link at all. What Clever has usefully done though is to distinguish the structure of the web from its content and use it as an organisational principle. What they collapse in their descriptions of the project is the distinction between the hierarchical pretence to objectivity and what they actually represent which is an aggregate of subjective decisions by the thousands of people making sites to incorporate hyperlinks. Here, 'objectivity is less about realism than it is about intersubjectivity'37 Self-organisation as a phrase may sniff like anarchist democratics, but it is in the choice of qualities, terms, devices, elements to register as the evidence for, or as the most consequential part of, the self-organisation of this data that the political choice - closed to scrutiny or reinvention - as to what is important on the web or about the web is made. It is a symptom of a self-reinforcing 'misplaced concreteness' that the mode of interpretation of processes becomes the means by which they are molded. Go to search engines of either sort and type in Jamaica. You'll get information on holidays coming up first -along with banner adverts for Sandals resorts. Type in Africa and you'll predominantly get wildlife and famine. Self-organisation of data is organised on the basis of what 'self' is determined to be important. This, at present, is something put into place by the demographics of internet use. How data is interpreted and processed, how (whether it is hierarchically ordered, or ordered according to emergent compositions of specified elements) the grammar by which the strings of symbols are sorted and ordered - what is possible to come into composition with what - particularly in a situation in which most of this work is done by a closed culture of proprietary specialists, has immense importance. Finding ways in which this process can be opened up to speculation and organisation by other forms of 'self' even more. Blah, click, Blah, click, Blah During the first batch of journalistic excitement over the web as a phenomenon there were many articles of the 'around the world in sixty minutes' variety. Someone sits at their desktop and links their way round the web. Despite the barest relation of geography to the act of calling up HTML files on a computer it did speak of the enthusiasm generated by a device that could incorporate the most distant elements within one interface. Most of these articles were written at a time when there were no search engines, (the only thing that came close at this stage were, sometimes vast, lists of ordered and annotated links) so the 'travel' had to be done by linking from one site to another by links that had been constructed on a site-by-site basis. The fascination generated was that solely by virtue of this meshwork of links, and even in the early stages of this technology, a path could be constructed through extremely distant resources. The distance in this case was supplied by geography. The distance now which provides the most amazement is that of subjectivity. ASCII is text in its mobile form. The standardised procedure of writing as a sequence of claim-argument-conclusion becomes extraordinarily distributed, messed with. The consequentiality of sequence becomes, not unimportant, but subject to a richer field of influence. This offer of suprise or detail or resource, this at least potential, richness produces the condition of the link, how it is arrived at, what it articulates. Safeways Establishing gateways between different elements of networks is an essential part of communications practice. From the development of interactive interfaces to mainframes, to the subnetwork of Interface Message Processor nodes that enabled the establishment of ARPANET and on to the creation of every hard and soft device and protocol, the history of network computing is that of increasing the circle of inclusion of hardware, software and data-types. How that connection is managed, what protocols channel it are the focus of antagonism in debates that see themselves as being primarily technically oriented. However, of course, although the crucible that these conflicts come to heat in is that of technics they are doped with many other traces. What interfaces allow, what they bring to bear, what elements they move into proximity or remove from the chance of coming into composition, what assumptions they make about the formations that move through and with them, what patternings they imprint into the way in which things are ordered or establish terms of composition, all exist and establish conditions at the logical, semantic, syntactic, social, economic, aesthetic and political levels. Just as, within an economy of increasingly immaterial labour, and within a logistical context of just in time delivery the gateway to the factory is where much of the inward and outward processing of information and materials is now done; or where the interface to companies has been stripped down to a telephone number connected to a database by a voice (a voice that, even though itself coming into being through a stripping away of commerce from the street, will become increasingly redundant as sales carried over the internet increase), the point of access becomes crucial on the nets. Search Engines work on the basis that they can turn any site into something only one click away from their search results, almost a subsidiary section of themselves. The development of portal sites is a way of turning the internet from a distributed network into a centralised one. Hierarchies such as the Name Space, or its categorical inverse on Usenet were relatively late in interpelating the meshwork, allowing every object on the net to have a unique address accessible from a central root-node. Node power is intensified the higher you climb. This remains practical and unproblematic, so long as the system is open, with location and structure visible and interrogable, at every point. However there is an increased tendency for the visibility to be locked up. (On a small though crucial scale, some shows of net-based art have blocked the display of URLs from the link status messages at the bottom of the browser window and in the location bar. On a larger basis though, compelled by the same drive to increase dependency of users on portals, browsers are being developed that tie in to specific search engines and built-in results to enquiries on 'key' topics. (Equally there is the potential once the industry 'matures', with the formation of effective cartels, for limits to be placed on the speed of accurate linkage to maintain multiple retutns to the portal within one search session). The possibility of capture of such root nodes becomes not just a matter of control but, on a temporary basis, also one of decontrol. Slipping the wrong signal into the centre of a hub - such as when, in early July, Ivan Novkovic famously spiked TV coverage of the Germany v Yugoslavia football match with a call for demonstrations against Milosevic in his home town of Leskovac - offers immense possibilities for cutting away the appearance of order. At the same time, it is pretty much the same tactic used by sites that spam search engines to climb up result hierarchies by including reams of invisible keywords, (the same colour as the background for instance) or have multiple editions of a site with different metatags and spam content. network of stoppages Control over the way in which links occur, the way in which they are interpreted, has become a key issue for web design. A list of ways in which it is suggested that sites should use links echoes the approach which is becoming widespread: "Guidelines for effective linking - Links cannot create content, but they can ruin it - Links should reinforce your message, not replace it - Most links should point into your site, not away from it. - Most links should appear as footnotes, away from the main text - Links to outside sites should open a new browser window - Every link is a maintenance issue, link sparingly if at all"38 Each web site is to become its own portal, feeding only into its own. Every site an intranet. Whilst on the web we are urged at once that 'Everything must be published!' any form of external conjunction must be done with immense prophylactic care. (The Clever project's mapping of clusters of pro-abortion and anti-abortion web sites showing their close self-interrelation and extremely rare cross-linking provides a good example of this). Of course this reads as pretty much the exact inverse of most attempts to invest links on the web with various kinds of poetics. Read it through again, but kind of backwards. Make a web site that does exactly the opposite of what the list instructs - top art mate. Guaranteed. It is at the same time the very limited nature of the link within Hypertext Transfer Protocol that makes both takes on its use possible. The link in normal use is extremely narrow in terms of the information it allows about itself or in the transition from one anchor to another - both allowing the actuation of the link to result in a suprising conjunction, or one that is completely expected. A link in a web site places it in a material not automatically allusive, or even referential, conjunctive relation to other documents on the web. Steven Johnson sharply places its particular role "The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries.'39 Being, within HTTP at least, simply a form of punctuation frees the link up from some of the portentous baggage strapped to it. Much has been eleborated on the basic theme of hypertextual linkages as at once a form of augmentation of text but also of readerly poaching of inventive power over the text. However it is clear that the technology has additional possibilities. Rather than hypertextual ceding of control to the reader there is the chance to establish the power of contextualisation, the power to follow and establish in advance any argument or use of the text that strays. To establish that the author has already 'gathered' that these allusions or threads of argument could be made. No association by the reader need worry about going unprecedented within the matrix of this neurotic urge to completion. It is clear from the gluttonous expansivity of the leavings of some writers on the web that hypertext can become as richly detailed and engulfing as Piranesi's fantasy prisons. However, if we start with an acknowledgement of the simple way in which links are formed and the very restricted nature of their movement from one anchor to another rather than an imposition of a literarily inspired compulsion to recapitulate particular models of thought as fact, things have the chance to free up a little. In most browsers there is a pop-up menu which allows links or other resources to be opened, saved, forwarded and so on. This itself is a start at making some form of expanded range of modes of use available - including of course expanded terms of readership, composition, re-use and storage familiar from hypertextual theory. Whilst links are only one of the range of objects that the menu operates on, it might be possible for instance to expand this range of uses to include some expanded sense of what links might be. Presently though, what the list of constraints on 'good' linking above suggests is that as the degree to which meaning can be attached to or implemented by a link - at its simple level of conjunctive punctuation - how much it brings together, to what extent it vears towards fragmentary 'disassociation' or togetherness between both anchors depends on the degree of framing of the link. The link works along a paradigm of expectation from shock to the already anticipated. This paradigm is drawn along the line of indexicality. The common use of Frames to index sites perhaps sits at one end of the paradigm: with every subsequent link being kept within the tutelage of the primary indexical frameset. Somewhere near is the indexical link from a to b, internally within documents, or to external sources. These unilateral associations however immediately become complicated when there is a difference in any of the various ways the sites are formulated. This can be in terms of design; of technical level (which browsers of plug-ins they demand); on ideological grounds, or at least those of public appearance: for instance the politely racist conservative Southern League provides, for the benefit of users linking from the openly Neo-Nazi Stormfront, a disclaimer of its white suprematism in favour of just wanting things the way God ordained down South. At other times you can see something similar when cozy simple homepages showing pictures of a family's house, the people in the house and snaps of what they look like and like doing include portentious links to 'the search engines we recommend'. There are links operating on the basis of providing routes through sites; hypertextual uses of links based on allusion or the choice of progressive pathways through multilinear naratives; malign links; antagonistic links; supportive links; links on par; links to gain status by association; psychopathic links - you can be anything, the link could be to everywhere; links traded between sites solely to boost the appearance of advertising revenue in annual reports. All of these are, because of the limited nature of the link, based on a dialogue between the interpretation of the two conjoined elements These are rather 'Hot' uses of the link though. Their use may equally be blasé, shut off. The relatively withdrawn process of the search hijacked by Natural Selection is just as much run on indifference - in the same way that link actuation is a quick way of avoiding downloading immense gifs or applets. One use of links that acknowledges this, but also punningly overcomes it, is the use of links to create innuendo. (Steven Johnson describes this particularly well with regard to Suck) The perpetually tripped up slapstick of meaning also forms the basis by which much of the work in Natural Selection operates40. Somewhere further towards the latter along the expectation-suprise paradigm, it works on an aesthetic of addition, the piling up of multiple threads of implication, double-entendre and self-undercutting that forces the user, if they can be arsed, not into a smooth plateau of inference and lovingly fondled argument iterated in abundance, but something thicker, something that is more prone to, whilst attempting to shoot itself in the foot, blow off its head41. Information transference interrupted Earlier, the possibility of using software or types of use of software or of searches could be developed as a form of exploratory laboratory illness was suggested. Transference, the displacement of affect from a repressed condition onto the artificial figure of the analyst, synthetic stress produced as a means to operate at a more abstract level on the underlying problem. "The transference thus creates an intermediate region from illness to real life through which the transition from one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention."42 As a technique it encourages the same investment of emotion and involvement that allowed Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA43, a sentence generator that famously mimicked the responses of a nondirectional psychotherapist, to convince users that they were effectively undergoing an initial psychiatric interview. Transference is marked by an absence. It can be a substitute for an experience, a 'something' which cannot be expressed, that blocks comprehension, the analyst investigates what is inexpressible - allows a latent conflict to become a current one under experimental control that can be interrogated. This in its 'positive' form is the very 'unsayable' living truth that Weizenbaum later mobilises against instrumental reason, the mental strictures of a technocracy which claims that, "The only reason we have not yet succeeded in formalising every aspect of the real world is that we have been lacking a sufficiently powerful logical calculus."44, as an ineffable human quality also moves in the opposite direction as the very means of locking people into rules, habits, obedience. A recursive phenomenon, transference was the mechanism by which Freud hoped to make of psychoanalysis a science.45 At the same time, the possibility of effecting transference was reliant on the authority vested in psychoanalysis under the sign of Science. ELIZA's ability to effect transference to itself equally relied on the idea that it was "ŠClothed in the magic mantle of Science and all of Science's well-known powers may be attributed to it."46 Once properly in the hands of the analyst, whose attention, whose favour is so much desired the supposed difference between ordinary suggestion and analytic suggestion is the calculable and controllable version of the latter. The patient can be induced, by its virtue, to specify their desire by exact phrase, by name of person, to constrain within certain languages or dates, to search only for certain pre-ordained data-types, to associate from any of the specified words. The pen on the pad turns the dial of the mental radio being tuned back in to the Voice of Oedipus. Whilst the analyst is therefore supposed to be able to remain outside the scene that their role creates, using this device in order to deny and ward off the fragmentary and incomprehensible fullness of the world through an identification with the Master, with the Law. His brain is become as an interview room. A single bulb shines down on two chairs across a bite-marked table. As Freud acknowledges in 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable' transference was an idealisation, a fictional tool that provides a way of working through messy life. It is the resistances, skids of meaning, clarifications, pun-loops that provide transference with its opening chance, but also its interminability, that we can take as something more, as the material for composition. Information transference here becomes a kind of laboratory sickness in which conceptual, disciplinary, juridical, cultural, political and other 'norms' or expectations of meaning and linkage - the switch tongue bound, made orderly - can also be adopted. Each search, but also each piece of software can usefully be approached as a transferral, a synthetic agglomeration of knowing, sensing and doing. When you drive a car your mind fills out to the space occupied by the vehicle. You sense its shape in order to manoeuvre safely, or however. Equally, conceptual proprioception can be elaborated in order to negotiate the multiple levels of meaning making in a search. The user mobilises and becomes infested with, composed through, flocks of sensoria, a billion symptoms, neurosis at the service of knowledge, or a simple sticky or slimy crawl of the switch-tongue at the point of slipping away into babble and the learning of language 1 http://www.mongrel.org.uk 2 There are also archive of sections of the net - the search engine DejaNews is working towards an archive of all usenet posts going back to its inception in 1979. 3 see info on the Echelon system http://caq.com/CAQ/CAQBackIssues.htm 4 http://www.mongrel.org.uk. This project (Coordinated for Mongrel by Harwood and MF) essentially presents itself as a straight search engine. When however any of several thousand words which are either directly racist or which have racialised connotations are entered as search strings, the Natural Selection search engine returns innocent looking results (those from whichever search engine it is currently sitting on top of) that when the link is actuated drop the user into one of the over thirty other sites on and off the mongrel domain. Collaborators in producing the work include: Hakim Bey, Byju, Critical Art Ensemble, Stewart Home and Daniel Waugh, Mervin Jarman, Richard Pierre-Davis, Dimela Yekwai, and others 5 http://www.mongrel.org.uk/BAA a site produced by Mervin Jarman 6 http://www.mongrel.org.uk/Venus a site produced in collaboration with Dimela Yekwai 7 Claude E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27 p379-423, 1948 8 Sigmund Freud, 'Transference', Introductory Lectures on Psychanalysis, the Penguin Freud Library vol 1. eds. Angela Richards and James Strachey, trans. James Strachey, Penguin, London, 1991, p. 482 9 G. L.J Chaitin, Algorithmic Information Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987 10 Mark Poster, The Second Media Age, Polity Press, Cambridge 1995 p.86 11 The Temple of Confessions website is at: http://www.sfgate.com/foundry/pochanostra.html 12 Guillermo Gomez-Pena, interviewed by Mildred Thompson in Glenn Hapcott ed. 'Interventions and Provocations', State University of New York Press, New York 1998, p6. 13 McSpotlight's (http://www.mcspotlight.org) most successful element was its use of frames to directly comment on the official McDonald's web-site. Irational (http://www.irational.org), renegade teletubbies fans and other groups such as the Barbie Liberation Front produced ostensibly 'real' sites on behalf of the companies and culture products they loved the most. Whilst even honest to goodness fan-sites are often compelled to mark themselves as 'unofficial', some catalogue-sites have been known to stage 'hacks' of themselves in an effort to gain press-coverage. 14 Guy Debord, 'Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organisationa and Action', in Ken Knabb ed. and trans. 'Situationist International Anthology', Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 1989, p.17 15 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse, Routledge, London 1997, p.199 16 Debord, Ibid, p23 17 Haraway, Ibid,p3 18 Situationist International, Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, in Ken Knabb ed. and trans. 'Situationist International Anthology', Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 1989, 19 Situationist International, Ibid 20 Situationist International, Ibid 21 The couple which have become charmed suitors in the institionalised narrative of 'electronic art'. 22 Haraway, Ibid, p199 23 Frederick W. Lancaster, Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice, 2nd Edition, London Library Association, London 1998, p.313 24 Tim Berners Lee, www: Past, Present and Future, Computer 29, October 1996, vol.29 no.10, p.69-77 25 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans, A.M. Sheridan-Smith, Tavistock, London 1972, p.62 26 see A Means of Mutation, notes on I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker 27 Donald McKenzie, Negotiating Arithmetic, Constructing Proof: the sociology pf mathematics and information technology, Social Studies of Science 23 1993 37-65 p.56 28 McKenzie p.57 29 Visual Thesaurus, a good example of a visualisation of this process can be seen in all its ludicrously rigid beauty at: http://www.thinkmap.com This project is an interface to the WordNet lexical database at http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/. WordNet operates basically by constructing hierarchically ordered sets of synonyms. see Christiane Fellbaum ed. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database, MIT Press, 1998 30 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, the technologizing of the word, Routledge, London 1982, p.46, 31 Latent Semantic Indexing, see: http://superbook.bellcore.com/~remde/lsi/ 32 source: http://www.searchenginewatch.com - a recommended site for a basic introduction to search engines 33 http://www.backspace.org/iod The Web Stalker by contrast, avoids these problems by its representation of the network as a flat aggregate of links and nodes composing itself on the screen rather than retranslating it into an ordered list. The Web Stalker does not assign importance or greater degree of relevance to sites, merely relaying the greater number of links to them by increasing luminosity of the node. Clever is more sophisticated however in terms of its mapping simply by the analytical tools it is able to bring to bear on the information. 34 http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/k53/clever.html 35 Hypersearching the Web, The Clever Project, Scientific American, June 1999 or at: http://www.sciam.com/1999/0699issue/0699raghavan.html 36 J.Kleinberg, Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment, in Proceedings of ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998 37 Haraway p.198 38 Patrick J. Lynch, Sarah Horton, Imprudent Linking Leaves a Tangled Web, Computer, July 1997, Vol. 30 No. 7, p.115-117 39 Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: how new technology transforms the way we create and communicate, HarperEdge, San Francisco, 1997, p.110 40 see the work by Critical Art Ensemble: http://www.mongrel.org.uk/Biocom, or by Stewart Home and Daniel Waugh, http://www.mongrel.org.uk/Skrewed 41 see for instance: http://www..mongrel.org.uk/NSA or http://www.mongrel.org.uk/Agent 42 Sigmund Freud, Remembering, Respeating and Working Through, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 11 p.155 43 Weizenbaum, Ibid 44 John McCarthy, cited in Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, from judgement to calculation, Pelican, London 1984, p.203 45 Isabelle Stengers, Black Boxes, or Psychoanalysis a Science? in Power and Invention, situating science, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997 46 Weizenbaum, p.191 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org