soberania_tecnologica_v2/en/content/09irc.md

# Keeping technological sovereignty: The case of Internet Relay Chat

## Maxigas

New technologies sometimes manifest a critique of the existing conditions, but
their empowering affordances are often lost as their features are
progressively integrated to the requirements of capitalism during their
subsequent development.  The history of chat devices is a textbook example of
critique and recuperation in technological cycles.  However, the social history
and contemporary use of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) proves that such historical
logic can be – and is – resisted in some exceptional cases.  This case study
does not necessarily recommend IRC as a medium of communication for activists,
but rather seeks to put forward some theses on the history of technology that
could be found useful in certain situations.

The systematic study of such cases may contribute to the refinement of a taste
for critical technology adoption practices in communities who wish to keep
control over the technologies that mediate their social relations.  Therefore,
an appreciation of critique and recuperation in technological cycles may help
to further technological sovereignty (Haché 2014) over longer time frames,
where local efforts could potentially become part of capitalist regimes of
oppression and exploitation over time.  A corollary observation is that
technical features may result in crucially different technological affordances
depending on their context of use: this shows that pure techniques should
never be promoted or rejected in themselves.

## Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat is a very basic but very flexible protocol for real time
written conversations.  It was first implemented in 1988, one year before the
World Wide Web.  IRC reached the height of its popularity as a general purpose
social media during the first Gulf War and the siege of Sarajevo
(1992-1996).  At this time it performed various functions that were later
fulfilled by specialised programs and platforms, such as dating, following
friends or file sharing.  As the population of the Internet grew and market
consolidation set it on the turn of the millennium, IRC faded from the public
view.

However, it is known from seminal studies of contemporary peer production
communities that free software developers (Coleman 2012), hackerspace members
(Maxigas 2015), Wikipedia editors (Broughton 2008) and Anonymous hacktivists
(Dagdelen 2012) use primarily IRC for everyday backstage communication.  While
the first group has always been on IRC, the latter three adopted it after the
apparent demise of the medium.  “Why [do] these contemporary user groups –
widely considered as disruptive innovators and early adopters – stick to a
museological chat technology despite its obvious limitations within the
current technological landscape?” Currently popular social networking
platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, offer similar features and appear to
be a more obvious choice.  I propose that while IRC use can seem retrograde, it
is actually a critical technology adoption practice that empirically evades,
and analytically highlights the pitfalls of mainstream social media
monopolies.

## Recuperation

Critique and recuperation in technological cycles is a process of integrating
societal demands into the capitalist system.  New technologies sometimes embody
a demand for a better society and a critique of the existing conditions.  While
such demands are typically addressed by subsequent versions of the same
technology, the same technology is also made to conform to the two main
requirements of the capitalist system.  These latter two are the preservation
of social peace (i.e.  repression), and the intensification of exploitation
(i.e.  capital accumulation).  It happens that the implementation of these two
requirements neutralises the societal gains from the demand originally
associated with the technology.

One aspect or form of recuperation is commodification.  Commodification is when
something at some point becomes a commodity to be brought and sold on the
market.  Commodification targets authentic things, which are often already
perceived to be valuable – for instance as a moral good – but not yet
recognised as an object of monetary exchange.  The loss of authenticity through
commodification produces anxiety in consumers, which can be diagnosed as the
affective trace of capital’s violence.

To summarise, critique addresses a social problem as a demand.  Recuperation is
the implementation of the demand, but in the same movement also the
transformation of the technological context in a way that neutralises the
critique.  The requirements that the implementation of the demand has to
paradoxically fulfil are (a.) keeping social peace (repression) constant while
(b.) increasing exploitation (capital accumulation).  Commodification is an
aspect or mode of recuperation that often happens in technological
cycles.  Commodification targets authentic goods which are outside of the
market, and integrates them into the circulation of commodities.  Anxiety is
the byproduct of commodification as the affective trace of capital’s violence.

## Chat history and other examples of recuperation

Recuperation as a historical logic can be seen at work in a wide range of
technologies, from the history of chat to the development of personal
computing.  I concentrate on the history of chat devices because this is the
context of the IRC story.  While the history of chat devices is a textbook
example of critique and recuperation in technological cycles, the story of IRC
is a counter-example that shows the possibility of resisting the historical
logic of capitalism.

Chat devices answered a basic human need to discuss arbitrary topics
informally in a real time environment.  After a long and parallel history of
chat devices, in the 1990s they consolidated into IRC (more or less as a
corollary to the consolidation of Layer 2 networks into the Internet).  The
next generation of chat devices were Instant Messengers (Maxigas 2014).  On the
backend (Stalder 2013), IMs used proprietary protocols and centralised
infrastructures, instead of the community defined protocols of IRC and its
federated model.  On the frontend (Stalder 2013), IMs were organised around
private conversations, in stark contrast with IRC’s concept of topical
channels (itself taken from Citizens’ Band – CB – radio).  Later, as the World
Wide Web took off, chat features were integrated into Web 2.0 social media
platforms.

Eventually, surveillance came to be the key means for both maintaining social
peace and deepening exploitation on social media platforms.1 Everyday,
informal, even intimate gestures are captured and stored, sorted and mined for
the purposes of both targeted advertising and targeted repression.  Such
revenue is indispensable to the capital accumulation mechanisms of a growing
section of capital, while the intelligence gained by authorities who share
access to the information flows is essential to the maintenance of social
order in both dictatorships and democracies.  All this hinges on successful
platformisation: the ability of a vendor to install themselves as an
obligatory passage point for generally mundane and often minuscule social
interactions (Gillespie 2010).

The anxiety experienced by users stems from the fact that a supposedly
informal space of social interaction is mediated by capital and overseen by
the state, through mechanisms that look obscure, arbitrary and partial from
below.  One can remember that the two defining characteristics of a healthy
civil society that can support technological sovereignty are its independence
from capital and separation from the state (Haché 2014).  It is privacy in a
structural and collective sense that can be reclaimed through technological
sovereignty initiatives, but only through the continuous struggle of users for
taking the technological mediation of their social life into their own hands.

It is important to realise that neither chat (Latzko-Toth 2010) nor personal
computing (Levy 1984) were “inventions” in the sense that a good idea was
implemented and socialised through commodity circulation.  Both found a
foothold in the market only after a relatively long period where fringe
elements fought for them, often breaking existing laws, regulations and social
norms.  Society then slowly tamed these technologies – and now they are used to
pacify society itself.

## Backlogs

### As a Human-Computer Interaction limitation

IRC is different from many other chat devices in that users can only follow
conversations as long as they are logged in.  If a particular user is not
online, there is no way to contact her.  Conversely, when a user logs back to a
channel, she has no idea what she missed while she was offline.  Due to the
flexibility of the medium, there are many workarounds for the lack of
backlogs, but the fundamental fact remains that solving this problem is out of
scope of the IRC protocol.  Network operators could solve the problem if they
wanted, but in practice users are – literally – left to their own devices.

### As a classic affordance

When IRC was conceived (1988), the lack of backlogs was not a particularly
unique property of IRC - the feature was absent from several other chat
devices.  However, by the end of the decade – when the population of the
Internet exploded – it took on a particular significance.  While purveyors of
various other services had to look for a business model in order to ensure the
sustainability of their operations – IRC operators were not forced to
commodify their services.  Why?

Because keeping track of backlogs for each user would mean that resource
utilisation scaled exponentially with the number of users, whereas if the
server only broadcasts new lines as they arrive and then forgets about them,
connecting more users results in little overhead.  This is more or less true
for both processing power and storage capacity: the two essential computing
costs to be taken into account when operating services.  Similarly, keeping
backlogs would increase the complexity of server software, translating into
increased costs in terms of development and administration work hours.  Thus,
the lack of backlogs arguably makes IRC more simple and efficient.

How these factors played out historically was that workers at Internet Service
Providers or academic outlets could just let a spare server running in the
corner, without having to justify the expenses to funders or answering too
many questions from their superiors.  Under-the-counter IRC hosting can be
thought of as the détournement of fixed capital by users, rather than the
recuperation of users’ demands by capital.  Again, in the beginning of the
decade it was usual practice for the Internet community to run popular
services on a volunteer basis, or for institutions to contribute to the
running costs of public infrastructures.  However, by the end of the decade the
dotcom bubble was in full swing and users flooded the networks, so that
operating media comparable to the popularity of IRC was serious business.

“Scaling” became a buzzword of the era.  It referred to the architectural
problem of designing technologies that given enough resources could answer an
arbitrarily large amount of requests, following the growth of the user base
without collapse.  The lack of backlogs allowed IRC to keep up with the radical
increase of Internet users and become a mass media of its own.  IRC came to be
the most popular dating application before dating websites went online, music
sharing software before the rise and fall of Napster, and micro-blogging
service before Twitter cashed in on hashtags.  Users saw nothing geeky or
techie in IRC in the 1990s: it was as commonplace as the ubiquitous GeoCities
home pages.

An anecdote illustrates the relationship of IRC to the burgeoning IT
industry.  It was already 1999 when Microsoft included an IRC client in the
default installation of its popular Windows operating system, taking note of
IRC’s mainstream appeal.  In the first major attempt to recuperate IRC, the
software was developed by the company’s Artificial Intelligence research unit,
and the application connected automatically to the company’s own IRC
servers.  Ironically, the Comic Chat IRC interface was never popular with
users, and the only artifact that went down in history from the whole
enterprise was the Comic Sans font, which is still the laughing stock of
Internet users.  Microsoft never figured out how to make money from the largest
online chat phenomena of the time.

### As a modern affordance

The lack of backlogs came to mean a very different thing in the age of mass
surveillance.  For instance, take a sticker from the Riseup collective (the
largest anarchist/activist email provider) on my laptop.  It is advertising
their services with the slogan “No Logs, No Masters”.  They can disperse with
keeping logs because they are based in the United States: in Europe, the
implementation of the EU Data Retention Directive requires communication
service providers to keep logs.  Ironically, IRC is not included in the scope
of the legislation, probably thanks to its obscurity.  As I explained earlier,
surveillance (technically based on the analysis of log files) is not only seen
as indispensable for national security, it is also generating the
advertisement revenue of companies like Google, accounting for 89% of its
profits in 2014 (Griffith 2015).2 The kind of digital milieus where average
Internet users chit-chat nowadays have been variously described by scholars as
enclosures, walled gardens and social media monopolies (Lovink and Rasch
2013).

In contrast, IRC networks are made up of federated servers run by otherwise
unconnected actors, from individual geeks through academic institutions to IT
companies or even criminal organisations.  So much so, that upon logging in to
a mainstream IRC network today, it is actually hard to find out who is
sponsoring the resources behind the server.  The model of Internet-wise,
community-run, community-policed and community-developed communication
resources may seem atavistic today, when even starry-eyed activists think that
it is impossible to change the world without becoming entrepreneurs and
finding a “sustainable” business model.  However, running the infrastructure as
a commons works for IRC just as well as in the 1990s.  It allows users to
understand and control the media they use to share and collaborate: an
essential condition for nurturing technological sovereignty.

The late Fidel Castro said that “a revolution is not a bed of roses.  A
revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.” Here, we could say
the past and the present.  Like Cuba, despite IRC’s relevant affordances that
answer to the burning questions of the day, both are increasingly
anachronistic in the context of the contemporary technological and political
landscape.  Using, maintaining, and developing IRC became increasingly
cumbersome: like building a veritable time machine that can bring back
techno-political conditions from the past.

The same feature that allowed IRC to become a mass media in the 1990s actually
prevents it from mainstream adoption in the 2010s.  Users dropping into a
channel, asking a question, then leaving in frustration 20 minutes later are a
case in point.  These lamers living in the age of mobile connectivity cannot
keep their IRC clients logged in for hours on end, like the owners of desktop
computers once did, and IRC users who have access to always-on servers do
today.  Now, only relatively sophisticated users get the full IRC experience,
and feel part of the chat channels community.  Such elitism excludes less
motivated users, but keeps the conversation within the circles of those “who
care about the quality of the material”:3 active members of peer production
communities.

## Conclusions

It seems that technical deficiencies can have positive social
consequences.  The same limitation – the lack of backlogs – that allowed IRC to
become a mass media in the 1990s, prevents its mass adoption in the
2010s.  However, it also poses problems for data mining and surveillance, which
eventually forestalls its recuperation.  As a user-controlled technology, it
now plays an important part in the media ecology of the Internet, as the
everyday backstage communication platform for peer production communities.

These relatively sophisticated user groups benefit from the simplicity,
flexibility and open architecture of the medium, which allows them to
customise it to their needs.  Conversely, most Internet users are used to be
served by corporate social media platforms that cater to their needs
effortlessly.  The contrast between the two approaches to technology adoption
begs the question whether it is more desirable to work for the democratisation
of knowledge or merely the democratisation of technology.

The lack of backlogs helped to build technological sovereignity for Internet
users for a decade and later sheltered peer producers from the capitalist
requirements of exploitation and repression.  Those who care about IRC had to
navigate a terrain of changing social conditions – including rifts in the
technological landscape and paradigm shifts in political economy – which
recontextualised the significance of technical features and limitations.  The
contemporary use of IRC is based on properties and patterns of the medium that
were commonplace in the 1990s but were superseded by more capitalist media
since then.  Therefore, it can be conceptualised as a time machine which brings
past technological and political conditions to the present, with surprising
consequences.4

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