Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The Clouds (part 3 of 3)

Episode Date: May 6, 2013

Our series concludes with some revelations. Metahaven uses the story of Wikileaks to show us the infrastructure of the cloud and its super-jurisdictional powers. The BBC’s Paul Mason takes us on a wild tour of China in his novel Rare Earth. And a pile of iPhones brings your host a moment of clarity. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. The following installment is called The Clouds, Part 3. The cloud makes one of its first appearances in a nondescript diagram in a 1996 MIT research paper. It's a simple visual, a series of routers linked together by internet protocol give birth to a cloud of networks. Today, this diagram is woefully inadequate. Almost everything we do, both online and offline, connects to the cloud. In many ways, what I set out to do with this radio series was to update that diagram, flesh it out,

make the immaterial material, make the incorporeal real. In part one of this series, we learned all about cloud technology, how it works and what it does. And we learned that when computational power is offered like a utility, virtually anyone can plug in. I tried to get a tour of the cloud itself, but I learned that the cloud data centers, the sites where all our information is physically stored,

are off-limits. They're closely guarded trade secrets for companies like Amazon, Google, HP, and Apple. But I discovered another way into the cloud, through the earth. In part two of this series, we learned that rare earth elements like neodymium play a major role in the infrastructure of the cloud. Our iPhones, iPads, and personal computers, all the devices we use to access the cloud, require rare earth. And the custom hard drives we would find in a cloud data center, if we could get inside, use rare earth as well. In fact, many of these data centers now depend on wind turbines packed with rare earth magnets for energy.

So when I learned that China controls a staggering 95% of the rare earth market, I decided to go there. I had this crazy idea that if I could see what China was doing with rare earth with my own eyes, then all of my questions about the cloud would be answered. Even though I made it to some rare earth mines, even though I got to hold some rare earth in my hands, no insights or answers ever materialized. The landing from the digital onto the material is hard. It comes with a cruelty and intensity we haven't even begun to properly understand. Winkerkroek is one half of Metahaven, a Dutch design collective that studies the relationship between the material and the immaterial, the real and the digital, the earth and the cloud,

the concrete and the abstract. There is a sense of abstraction to what's actually going on inside the cloud. It's a name that is purposefully evasive. It's a kind of brand. Daniel Vander Velden is the other half of Metahaven. The abstraction of the cloud is, to a large extent, why it's so successful. It's basically saying it works, and it always works, and it's super convenient, but don't ask what's going on inside. I came across Metahaven via a three-part essay they recently wrote

for the online journal eFlux called Captives of the Cloud. But Daniel and Vink have been studying the connections between the digital and the material for years in their museum shows, design work, and collaborative projects. We're interested in bringing it back to really basic questions about where information actually is and under which laws and what is the infrastructure in which the information moves. There's a fair amount of dense theoretical language in Captives of the Cloud, but the essays also contain a number of Metahaven's delightful signature, easy to understand

infographics. We are a little bit bored with data visualizations that try to kind of speak about a very, very complex topic in one graph. You know, of course, this is completely impossible. So with these illustrations, we were really looking for an aesthetic that kind of plays with this data visualization and almost makes it into a kind of cartoon or comic strip. A number of these cartoons focus on the story of what happened when Julian Assange's WikiLeaks

used the cloud to leak U.S. State Department cables in late 2010. The assumption that WikiLeaks made as its working model was set up was that they were uncensorable, off-limits to sovereign power. What the model was not prepared for was a sort of an extra-legal form of coercion that is much more about, as we say, like, than it's about law. One of these cartoons is called Extrajudicial Dislike. On November 30th, 2010, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman publicly requests a WikiLeaks blockade.

Metahaven shows us a smug Joe Lieberman giving WikiLeaks a Facebook-style thumbs down. In another cartoon, Embargo on Demand, we get a timeline. So on the timeline, there's a cloud. And out of this cloud, different companies emerge. Amazon, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America, Apple, and Western Union. It was actually the whole financial and internet cloud of U.S., you know, U.S. businesses who all stopped providing service to Wikileaks. Wikileaks no longer could host their website on Amazon or on every DNS. Payments were no longer possible by using PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, Bank of America to Wikileaks.

And Apple blocked the Wikileaks app from their iTunes store. With this image, we're really trying to show that this abstraction of the cloud, when you start breaking it down, it's not as abstract as you think. It's actually very real. November 30th, 2010, just might be the birthday of the cloud as we know it.

The day the infrastructure and the power structures reveal themselves for all to see. But what Metahaven wants us to see is that this America-centric infrastructure not only makes it easy for the U.S. government to pull the kill switch, it also gives the U.S. government super-jurisdictional powers. The U.S. Department of Justice is creating speculative forms of connection of U.S. jurisdiction with actually other jurisdictions and actually creating power for the U.S. to enact its laws in other countries.

For example, Birgit Jonsddottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian, whose Twitter account was subpoenaed. The U.S. government subpoenaed Twitter for Birgitta Jonsdottir's personal information, login codes, IP addresses, because on Twitter, she's not an Icelandic parliamentarian. She's a citizen of the cloud.

The FBI would not have been able to sort of access her physical home in Iceland without, you know, considerable, you know, collaboration with Icelandic entities. But there's ways that the U.S. enacts jurisdiction on these entities anyways. So the cloud is part of a sort of future political geography. Metahaven maps out this convoluted story for us in their cartoon Twitter Trace. And in a way, all of their cartoons are maps that help us make sense of this new cloud geography. My favorite though just might be the one that says in simple large type, apple.gov. Well, what you see here is basically it only says between quotation marks apple.gov and the O in the gov extension is the Apple logo.

Apple's famous for deleting games and apps like the one that visualized drone strikes from its online app store. But for me, this satirical slogan is an acknowledgement that we are all now citizens of the cloud, subject to rules and laws that are abstract, invisible and incomprehensible. So if we allow the companies that we work with, that we are customers of, to decide for us how our environment looks, then we might end up not knowing about certain things that are going on. And we might end up giving away the choice of whether we took me to China because I had become convinced that these rare earth rocks would help me somehow make sense of the incomprehensible,

make the abstract real, make the invisible visible. Obviously, I was deluded. I mean, China is like the real-world equivalent of the cloud. In China, all of the rules are abstract, arbitrary, and invisible. But I'm not the only delusional maniac. Over the past few years, Rare Earth has pulled scores of journalists and seekers into China. These minerals are key elements not just for clouds and drones, but for stories. Stories about politics, business, technology, international relations, and the environment. The BBC's economics correspondent Paul Mason took a stab at the story after stumbling across rare earth while travelling in China just after the Olympics in 2009.

But his book is a novel. On the last night of the trip, I sat down in my hotel room in Beijing and I just thought, there's no way of telling the story of China through fact. You just aren't able to get close enough to the real facts. And what I mean by that is not just to be in the right place with a camera or the notebook at the right time, but to be able to talk to enough people with enough depth and background who actually know what's going on. Because one of the problems of a repressive society, a society that represses and monopolizes information, is that you can talk to people, but they don't even know what's going on.

Now, I've read a lot of reportage on rare earth and China before and after my trip, and Paul Mason's novel is the best thing that I've read. I've learned more from this book than any piece of journalism. And I'm not just saying that because I identify with his preposterous hero. The story of my novel Rare Earth is basically the story of an old school English journalist, a bit washed up, a bit drunk. He's made a few mistakes and he's been sent to China because they can't trust him with Middle East reporting anymore. And by complete accident, not out of his own skill, complete accident, he stumbles upon a story.

Paul Mason's protagonist, Brough, stumbles upon the story of Rare Earth and Inner Mongolia, just as Paul Mason did. Almost everybody we meet in this novel is a fictionalized and hyper-realistic version of the people I have actually met in China and elsewhere. But Rare Earth is most definitely a work of fiction. There are ghosts and car chases

and an all-female motorcycle gang who kidnap Brough and force him to have sex. I had to give him something to make his life worth living. Brough stumbles from one ludicrous situation to the next. One of my favourite scenes is when he meets this high-ranking party figure, General Guo, who tells him that he is not the first journalist to try to get the Rare Earth story out. General Guo plays my correspondent Brough. All the intercepted phone calls of Western journalists who've tried to convince editors to run stories about rare earth.

And while Brough isn't able to get his story out, he does learn the truth about China. He manages to run into, almost in an epic form, a series of tribes and situations that to me symbolise what China is all about. He finds constantly everywhere he goes, illegality and informality and mobsterism. He runs into the pro-capitalist communists and he runs into, finally runs into the true ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, which is get rich quick,

but repress everybody. And he can't really get his head around it. As I say in the book, you know, he's argued at gunpoint with Islamic fundamentalists, crazy Serbs in the Balkans, Aymara separatists in Bolivia, but he's never met anybody like this. And he just can't get his head around it. At the end of the novel, one of the female motorcycle gang members takes our hero to this very exclusive establishment filled with journalists, Chinese business leaders, beautiful women, and almost everyone, well, besides the journalists, is insanely rich. Brough is introduced to a table of young capitalist communists. Some Chinese businessmen who've wanted to take a position in the rare earth market in the hope that it will that the the index for rare earth

investment will will rock it once brough's story comes out in whatever form it manages to come out on the tv station what's important to understand here is that these men don't care if the story is positive or negative any story will do this might might be a novel, but Paul Mason is really the only person I've read who points out just how bogus this China versus the West framework is. These rare earth rocks have become crucial not only to some of our most advanced technologies like the cloud, but there are also fundamental elements in the invisible and immaterial networks of global power.

And I thought I'd give, in the novel, a little bit of a glimpse into that world. It's a world most Chinese people don't know exists, and actually, funnily enough, it's a world most Western people don't realize exists. On my last night in China, I met up with an old friend, Kenny. Kenny is a Chinese entrepreneur. I first met him in 2006. He had founded a blog company,

and we traveled to southern China together to attend a conference. He was absolutely one of the most ambitious, driven, and talented people working in the Chinese digital space. But when I told him this, he replied he didn't want to run the best Chinese internet company. He wanted to run the world's best. A few years later, Kenny passed through New York, and we went out to dinner. He told me he was frustrated with the blog business, and that he was giving it up. In fact, he was on this trip to figure out his next move. He was determined that this time, he would do something tangible, something real.

A few months later, Kenny emailed me a link to his new online mail-order business. Items like wedding dresses, iPod cases, and leather jackets could be ordered directly from Chinese factories and shipped anywhere in the world. When I landed in Beijing, I got in touch with Kenny, but he told me he was too swamped to meet up. I phoned him again after my trip to the mines, and when I told him it was my last night in China, he insisted we have dinner at a restaurant at one of the San Luton Towers. For some reason, it never even crossed my mind that Kenny might

now be a very important and insanely busy executive. Over dinner, he told me all about his online mail order business, 900 employees, one of Google's biggest AdWord customers, and products shipped to every country on the planet, including North Korea. After dinner, Kenny took me to a bar, an establishment exactly like the one Paul Mason describes in his novel, an establishment filled with journalists, Chinese business leaders, beautiful women, and fabulously wealthy people, like my friend. I tried to explain to him why I went to the rare earth mines, and even though Kenny once

told me about his desire to make the immaterial material, as I mapped out my obsession with the cloud on a cocktail napkin, he just stared at me with his mouth open, aghast. Eventually, some of his friends came over to rescue him. I remember noticing the number of iPhone 5s piling up on our table as everyone sat down, but then it gets a little hazy. Now, people are proudly displaying their trendy, expensive cell phones in bars all over the world, but at this moment, at this bar in Beijing, this particular exhibition lifted a veil.

It was like something extremely important took place right before my eyes, my illusions hardened into disillusionment, and the abstract became concrete. But it was a fleeting revelation. I couldn't hold onto it. As much as I tried to focus, all I had was a pile of iPhone 5s. And so I said my goodbyes and stumbled out onto the street. A few weeks ago, I realized that there was something I'd never asked Kenny. And so I texted him. What do you use for the back end for your online mail order business?

Amazon's cloud, he texted back. What else is there? This series was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and I had some editorial assistance from Karen Frohman. Bill Bowen did the sound design, and John Barth and the PRX Global Story Project made it possible for me to go to China. The Theory of Everything's new home is toe.prx.org. You'll find an archive and links, and that's where you can subscribe to the podcast. you've been listening to benjamin walker's theory of everything

this installment is called the clouds part three radiotopia from prx called The Clouds, Part 3.