Magnus Lawrie TRASH VERSIONALITY FOR POST-DIGITAL CULTURE APRJA Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014 ISSN 2245-7755 CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Magnus Lawrie: TRASH VERSIONALITY... Media Trash continual re-writing of the standards affect- ing social and network-based encounter. The processes renew shared conceptions RHETORIC and pictures, prompt self-refection and pose Following a 14-day visit to parts of the UK, the questions, “whose truth?” and, “whose the United Nations’ special rapporteur on value(s)?”. adequate housing Raquel Rolnik, issued an end-of mission press statement.[1] She INDISPENSABILITY recommended immediate suspension of As quickly as attention has switched away controversial reforms affecting social hous- from the aforementioned episodes, they offer ing tenants.[2] Researched according to us a snapshot of a media landscape in which UN protocol (Gentleman), the advice was trash, as dispensable news and information, however vehemently rejected by the UK is merging with public opinion and political government; the rapporteur’s personal and rhetoric. The combination of booming mass professional credibility were then attacked in culture and creativity produces a variety of the media and elsewhere.[3] images — including data images — which are These changing dynamics, between not easily locatable within the apparatus’ of public and political spheres are especially political, social and economic assemblages. visible online, where social media is infu- Consequently, these images (whether per- encing many areas. In one instance a court sonal or institutional) are open to conjecture. trial was abandoned after new evidence, Their position on the continuum between obtained from a disused Twitter account, media, platform and network transport ren- came to light. Details of the accused were ders them equivocal — ambiguous entities, nevertheless reported in print and on the where identity, trust and authenticity come Web.[4] Elsewhere, legal proceedings have under review. been derailed because of jurors’ activity on- These are issues which are problema- line (Davis). Incautious tweets have resulted tized in an artwork by Kripe, Schraffenberger in prosecutions for libel (BBC News). and Terpstra; The Formamat (2010) inves- This article attempts an overview of tigates the value individuals place on data phenomena, which exemplify informational they have stored on their mobile devices. The and conceptual instances (or ‘versions’) work is a vending machine, “which returns characteristic of current ‘post-digital’ condi- candy in exchange for the deletion of [an tions. By counter-posing a variety of mate- individual’s] digital data”. The authors, “invite rial, I aim to explore the role and position of people to experience the joy of deletion in a different kinds of images (foremost social public space and encourage them to think and visual) as they constitute post-digital about the value and (in-)dispensability of relations. These are relations in which the their fles while also researching the subject primacy of computerized digital objects is in a broader sense by storing and analysing moot. The versions presented in this text are their deletion-behavior.” (Formamat) the social, cultural and organizational confu- ences which fnd expression in differing data REVISION formats — originals and copies subject to With the hindsight of just a few years, The fuctuating, moment-to-moment alteration. Formamat can also be seen to capture Together with the growth in communica- uncertainties — of ownership and iden- tion and exchange, these versions imply a tifcation — in our relationship with data. 43 APRJA Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014 Our understanding of the work encounters was created to manage all the code for the an unexpected revision, reformulating the Linux kernel. It solves problems of ownership question, not of which, but of whose fles are and responsibility with its own purpose built going to be deleted. Taken together with the command: git-blame.[8] The command fnds Internet’s long memory — from the Internet the author of an edit or addition and reports Archive’s Way Back Machine[5] to play- when changes were made. This is one way fully macabre, assisted Facebook-identity in which Git addresses the techno-social suicides[6] — this observation underlines problems of making and releasing new ver- the attention now being given to choice and sions of the kernel image (the core of the control of data. Here, Nissenbaum’s ‘con- GNU/Linux operating system; a large-scale textual integrity’ is relevant. It advocates the project with more than nine million lines of individual’s right to manage the fow of their code). personal information, rather than exert ab- The Git software was created with solute control (Nissenbaum). The emphasis security, authentication and traceability as seems to be on the subjective way we value paramount concerns. Contributors to any information, where one person’s waste can Git-maintained project are encouraged to become another’s livelihood. advance development by regularly com- Such perspectives might be welcomed mitting smaller changes into a main line of by the Sunlight Foundation, known for co- development. Additions and revisions can ordinating crowd sourced analysis of US be written and tested in isolation before be- government records. Transparency initia- ing introduced to the main line or ‘branch’. tives like this commonly use Wikis to man- Copies of this branch become distributed age document revisions made by multiple as changes are written back to the comput- authors (Sifry). In the case of Wikipedia, ers of other developers as they also submit software for ‘version control’ becomes the their work. Files ‘checked out’ from the main image of a community and its knowledge, a development tree can be added to newly cre- refection of that community in code: ated branches. Typically, these development threads are later merged into the project’s People can and do trust works main branch or abandoned. In some in- produced by people they don’t know. stances, new branches diverge substantially The real world is still trying to fgure out from the main development effort. This is how Wikipedia works…Open source basically the concept of project forking. It is produced by people that you can’t might be apparent from this summary that track down, but you can trust it in very talk about governance in Git is necessarily deep ways. People can trust works also a discussion about technical operation. by people they don’t know in this low Issues of governance are also dealt cost communication environment. with in creative projects which utilize and (Cunningham qtd in many2many) discuss version control. Simon Yuill’s Social Versioning System [9] and Matthew Fuller VERSION CONTROL and Usman Haque’s Urban Versioning Other types of version control system System 1.0 [10] concern the relevance of (VCS) are useful, especially in co-ordinating Free Software principles to consensus and software development groups. The Linux co-operation in design practice: kernel project is one example. For this, a very specifc VCS was conceived: Git [7] 44 Magnus Lawrie: TRASH VERSIONALITY... Figure 1: “Benevolent dictator workfow”. Illustration. Figure 2: Marcosleal. “Matryoshka dolls in street fair n.d. Distributed-workfows, git-scm.com. Web. 29 Sep. – Budapest”. Photograph. 2008. Matryoshka dolls in 2013. Budapest.jpg. Wikimedia Commons. Web. 29 Sep. 2013. one of the most interesting aspects Social overload of open source software is the continuous interleaving of production, implementation, usage and repurpos- ETHICS AND ETIQUETTE ing processes, all of which can and Besides the sense of community that data sometimes must be open — not just an sharing in this way inspires, proliferating “open design” that then gets imple- codes also produce tensions. Where levels mented in a closed manner. (Fuller of interest from the public increase, the scale and Haque 17) and relative value of contributions can in turn challenge a project’s direction. WikiLeaks’ Soon after Git was released, GitHub [11] release in 2010 of hundreds of thousands appeared. Using the apparatus (the ‘plumb- of classifed US Army feld reports (the so- ing and porcelain’) which comprises the Git called Iraq War Logs) is an example where software, GitHub establishes a web-based the relevance and reliability of material have repository for software projects whose been key considerations (Domscheit-Berg). source code is released in the public domain. In other guises, this problem of managing GitHub has been adopted by a huge and contributions has been encountered in pro- rapidly expanding user community, as a plat- jects from Community Memory (an electronic form for developing and publishing software bulletin board), through to contemporary and a range of other creative works. GitHub hacker spaces and Open Source tech com- provides a large-scale, distributed means munities. In all these instances, it seems that to recognize and pin point different stages mutual agreement — whether or not this has in the production of these works. It has also been explicitly defned — is a central issue. become home to a mass of never changing, Arguments often focus on leadership, per- user-generated software confguration fles. sonal style and the possibility of ‘benevolent In GitHub these can be Git confguration dictatorship’ (Lovink). Though positive feed- fles, stored in a Git repository, on a platform back generated by self-enhancing ‘recursive built using Git. geek publics’ is not without drawbacks (Kelty), neither is it clear how this energy can work best — in the case of the Debian 45 APRJA Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014 Software Project there is the Debian Social apparatus’ (as well as the methods by which Contract,[12] enshrining free speech and they constitute one another) have gained enough hierarchy to manage the fow of con- visibility. Journalistic reporting of this data at tributions. Free speech has been central to frst underlined governments’ ability to track the development of Free-Libre Open Source and target individuals at will (for example, Software (Turner), as it has to the protocols by following calls and data from mobile and conduct written into projects such as phones).