ABSTRACT

This article contrasts the dark with the electrified light of datafied life to bring into relief the impact of data surveillance upon social transformation. Our argument is that darkness remains fundamental to creative social experimentation and thus to a society’s capacity for change and sustained transformation. This argument might seem antithetical to the age of information. Yet, we find darkness encourages exploratory forms of engagement, intercourse and exchange, that electrified light forbids. We draw on Rancière’s considerations of politics and the police to suggest that the policing by digitally-electrified light extinguishes the politics of experimentation that test the make-up and limits of social interaction. Our work is structured by first explaining the baseline of the digital electric policing through the conceptualization of Facebook’s social graph, then switches to antithetical examples of politics enabled in the dark. We use the examples of the Dark Web, end to end encryption, and trustless infrastructures like Craigslist to illustrate generative tensions that are the signatures of what we understand as the dark social. We conclude that the dark social involves a decentralized capacity to experiment and transform what is social.

摘要

本文将黑暗与数据化生活的电光进行对比，以减轻数据监视对社会转型的影响。我们的论点是，黑暗仍然是创造性社会实验的基础，因此也是社会变革和持续转型能力的基础。这个论点似乎与信息时代背道而驰。然而，我们发现黑暗鼓励探索性的参与、交往和交流，这是电光所禁止的。我们借鉴朗西埃对政治和警察的考虑，建议通过数字电气化灯光进行警务，消除了测试社会互动构成和限制的实验政治。我们的工作首先通过 Facebook 社交图的概念化来解释数字电子警务的基线，然后转向在黑暗中启用政治的对立示例。我们使用暗网、端到端加密和像 Craigslist 这样的去信任基础设施的例子来说明生成紧张，这是我们理解的黑暗社会的特征。我们得出的结论是，黑暗社会涉及一种去中心化的能力来试验和改造社会。