This may be why the AKP pornstar bots desperately quote Hobbes: they are already sick of the war of Robbie Williams (IDF) against Robbie Williams (Electronic Syrian Army) against Robbie Williams (PRI/AAP), they are sick of retweeting spam for autocrats—and are hoping for just any entity organizing day care, gun control, and affordable dentistry, whether it’s called Leviathan or Moby Dick or even Flappy Tayyip. They seem to say: we’d go for just about any social contract you’ve got!20
Now let us go even one step further. Because a model for this might already be on the horizon. And unsurprisingly, it also involves algorithms.
Blockchain
Blockchain governance seems to fulfill the hopes for a new social contract.21 “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” would record and store transactions in blockchains akin to the one used to run and validate bitcoin. But those public digital ledgers could equally encode votes or laws. Take for instance bitcongress, which is in the process of developing a decentralized voting and legislation system (www.bitcongress.org). While this could be a model to restore accountability and circumvent power monopolies, it means above all that social rules hardwired with technology emerge as Leviathan 2.0:
When disassociated from the programmers who design them, trustless blockchains floating above human affairs contain the specter of rule by algorithms … This is essentially the vision of the internet techno-leviathan, a deified crypto-sovereign whose rules we can contract to.22
Even though this is a decentralized process with no single entity at the controls, it doesn’t necessarily mean no one controls it. Just like smartphone photography, it needs to be told how to work: by a multitude of conflicting interests. More importantly, this would replace bots as proxy “people” with bots as governance. But then again, which bots are we talking about? Who programs them? Are they cyborgs? Do they have faces or butts? And who is drawing the line? Are they cheerleaders of social and informational entropy? Killing machines? Or a new crowd, of which we are already a part?23
Let’s come back to the beginning again: How to separate signal from noise? And how does the old political technology of using this distinction in order to rule change with algorithmic technology? In all examples, the definition of noise rested increasingly on scripted operations, on automating representation and/or decision-making. On the other hand, this process potentially introduces so much feedback that representation becomes a rather unpredictable operation that looks more like the weather than a Xerox machine. Likeliness becomes subject to likelihood—reality is just another factor in an extended calculation of probability. In this situation, proxies become crucial semi-autonomous actors.
Proxy Politics
To better understand proxy politics, we could start by drawing up a checklist:
Does your camera decide what appears in your photographs?
Does it go off when you smile?
And will it fire in a next step if you don’t?
Do underpaid outsourced IT workers in BRIC countries manage your pictures of breastfeeds and decapitations on your social media feeds?
Is Elizabeth Taylor tweeting your work?
Have some of your other fans’ bots decided to classify your work as urinary mature porn?
Are some of these bots busily enumerating geographic locations alongside bodily orifices?
Is your total result something like this?
Welcome to the age of proxy politics!
A proxy is “an agent or substitute authorized to act for another person or a document which authorizes the agent so to act” (Wikipedia). But a proxy could now also be a device with a bad hair day. A scrap of script caught up in a dress-code double bind. Or a “Persuading the Debtor” detector throwing a tantrum over genital pixel probability. Or a delegation of chat bots casually pasting pro-Putin hair lotion ads to your Instagram. It could also be something much more serious, wrecking your life in a similar way—sry life!
Proxies are devices or scripts tasked with getting rid of noise as well as bot armies hell-bent on producing it. They are masks, persons, avatars, routers, nodes, templates, or generic placeholders. They share an element of unpredictability—which is all the more paradoxical considering that they arise as result of maxed-out probabilities. But proxies are not only bots and avatars, nor is proxy politics restricted to datascapes. Proxy warfare is quite a standard model of warfare—one of the most important examples being the Spanish Civil War. Proxies add echo, subterfuge, distortion, and confusion to geopolitics. Armies posing as militias (or the other way around) reconfigure or explode territories and redistribute sovereignties. Companies pose as guerillas and legionnaires as suburban Tupperware clubs. A proxy army is made of guns for hire, with more or less ideological decoration. The border between private security, PMCs, freelance insurgents, armed stand-ins, state hackers, and people who just got in the way has become blurry. Remember that corporate armies were crucial in establishing colonial empires (the East India Company among others) and that the word “company” itself is derived from the name for a military unit. Proxy warfare is a prime example of a post-Leviathan reality.
Now that this whole range of activities has gone online, it turns out that proxy warfare is partly the continuation of PR by different means.24 Besides marketing tools repurposed for counterinsurgency ops there is a whole range of government hacking (and counter-hacking) campaigns that require slightly more advanced skills. But not always. As the leftist Turkish hacker group Redhack reported, the password of the Ankara police servers was 12345.25
To state that online proxy politics is reorganizing geopolitics would be similar to stating that burgers tend to reorganize cows. Indeed, just as meatloaf arranges parts of cows with plastic, fossil remnants, and elements formerly known as paper, proxy politics positions companies, nation-states, hacker detachments, FIFA, and the Duchess of Cambridge as equally relevant entities. Those proxies tear up territories by creating netscapes that are partly unlinked from geography and national jurisdiction.
But proxy politics also works the other way. A simple default example of proxy politics is the use of proxy servers to try to bypass local web censorship or communications restrictions. Whenever people use VPNs and other internet proxies to escape online restrictions or conceal their IP address, proxy politics is given a different twist. In countries like Iran and China, VPNs are very much in use.26 In practice though, in many countries, companies close to censor-happy governments also run the VPNs in an exemplary display of efficient inconsistency. In Turkey, people used even more rudimentary methods—changing their DNS settings to tunnel out of Turkish dataspace, virtually tweeting from Hong Kong and Venezuela during Erdoğan’s short-lived Twitter ban.
In proxy politics the question is literally how to act or represent by using stand-ins (or being used by them)—and also how to use intermediaries to detourne the signals or noise of others. And proxy politics itself can also be turned around and redeployed. Proxy politics stacks surfaces, nodes, terrains, and textures—or disconnects them from one another. It disconnects body parts and switches them on and off to create often astonishing and unforeseen combinations—even faces with butts, so to speak. They can undermine the seemingly mandatory decision between face or butt or even the idea that both have got to belong to the same body. In the space of proxy politics, bodies could be Leviathans, hashtags, juridical persons, nation-states, hair-transplant devices, or freelance SWAT teams. Body is added to bodies by proxy and by stand-in.