Hey everybody. Hey, yeah, my name is Nick Brees. I’m a new media artist. What that means is I make work with and also about the technology that’s come to define the age we’re living in. So I’m excited to kind of talk about some of my perspective, especially here. Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a very inspiring week. So just start off with an example. So this is a piece, a collaborative piece that I worked on with a bunch of folks in my agency, BrainJerBrees, and it’s called the Charge for Privacy. And it’s an iPhone charging station and sort of inscribed around the plexiglass are the terms and conditions for this charging station. Hard to read on the back of that panel, but this is what the back side says. This is actually taking word for word from Facebook. We just swapped their name for hours. It says, you grant BrainJerBrees an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully-paid, worldwide license to use, copy, publish, stream, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, any and all of the images received. So it says that because this charging station is free in the same way that so many of our online services are free, in that rather than paying with money, we pay with our data. So there’s a screen on the other side of this box, and when you plug it in, it says, phone detected, charging your phone, downloading all of your photos, projecting them in the gallery. And as you might imagine, not everybody reads the terms and conditions, so they’re surprised to see that their photos are being projected. So we glitch them and we blur them a little bit before projecting them. We’re not trying to invade anyone’s privacy, but we’re trying to get them to think about this stuff. That’s sort of the idea. So I hate terms and conditions, not just because they’re impossibly long and difficult to understand, but because of the actual terms that we’re agreeing to. So take Facebook, for example, and I’m oversimplifying here a little bit, but the deal ultimately boils down to this. They give us a platform to chat with our friends and upload photos, as though that isn’t something we can already do everywhere else. And in exchange, we give them all our data, like a lot of data. And this data is really valuable, and not just for targeted ads, which is what I think a lot of us are familiar with, but it’s today in the ages like machine learning and artificial intelligence, this data is used to train some of the most powerful algorithms that have ever existed. Our data is sort of like the oil that fuels these machines, and we sort of just hand it all over. I think that this is because we don’t totally understand the value of our labor, of our data, like we do our labor. If I asked you to come over to my house and mow my lawn, you’d probably say no, or maybe you’d say how much. And if I said, not going to pay you anything, but all your friends are there, right. I would hope that would be your reaction, but the same isn’t true when it comes to negotiating our data. We know how to negotiate our labor, right, because we know what it’s worth, but not so much our data. And when I talk about this sort of stuff, oftentimes people, you know, I get this reaction which is like, well, that’s fine, I get it, but I don’t care if Facebook and Google have all my data that doesn’t bother me. What I hear when I hear folks say that is, I don’t fully understand the implications of handing over all of my data, and the sort of the way that these platforms can now influence my behavior online as a result of all this data mining, the way that my feeds are different from everyone else’s, my options are different, how the prices I get are different, right. And, you know, as somebody who’s been working in this space for a while, I do think that generally we are starting to understand the implications behind this deal that we’ve signed on to more and more. I think the recent elections, the situation with Facebook has been a recent wake-up call. It used to be the case I used to ask folks, I also teach, I’m an instructor at the School of the Art and Student in Chicago, and I would always start some of my classes with students saying like, how does Google and Facebook make money, and people used to just stare at me blankly. Now I get a bit more informed answers. So things have gotten better, definitely. But still this exchange, far, far from perfect, right. When sort of artists and activists like myself make a big stink about privacy, it’s not because we have something to hide, right, which is often times something else I hear. It’s because we’ve noticed how our agency is slowly being eroded, how we’re losing this agency in our online lives when we’re participating in these platforms. And it’s sort of, when you look at it this way, that deal sort of makes you feel like a sucker. Mark Zuckerberg used stronger language, he calls us dumb fucks. I don’t know if folks are familiar with this exchange. This was early days at Facebook when he was chatting with a friend about how all the early users just trusted him with their data. Folks who are familiar with this exchange might say like, Nick, this isn’t totally fair. He was young, he was in college. Surely leadership at Facebook isn’t as insensitive these days. Then this happened, folks know about this. So taking sort of some low blows here. So ad hominem attacks aside. My point is just that we, I think it’s really important to think critically about our participation in these platforms online. We need to think, you know, why are we giving them this data? Who are we trusting our data with? What data exactly are we giving them? And again, what are the implications of all this? So, and you know, this is another area I’ve seen a lot of progress, right? I’ve seen a lot of folks recently leaving Facebook, sometimes quietly, sometimes making a lot of noise. And I think that’s become a little bit of a cliche these days. But four years ago when I left Facebook, I also made a lot of noise. I decided as an activist and artist I needed to turn it into an art project. And I made a video series where I talked about why I left Facebook, but also more importantly for our conversations today how I left Facebook. So when I decided to leave, I wanted to download all my data. I had seven very wonderful years with friends online on Facebook. And I didn’t want to lose all those memories. And Facebook gives you an option to sort of download some of your data, but not all of your data. And so that bothered me a bit. And then also I wanted to delete all of my stuff, but I didn’t want to deactivate my account, which sounds weird, but because of the work that I do, I had my account associated with a whole set of apps and projects that I had worked on for clients and other folks. And I couldn’t really compromise that. So I needed to sort of erase all my stuff off the surface of Facebook, but kind of leave the account, the shell of the account kind of there so that I could use it. And that also obviously isn’t an option on Facebook. So I sort of made that option for myself. I wrote a bunch of code that would allow me to sort of leave Facebook on my own terms and conditions. And so this is from that series where I show you how to use that code, should you want to leave on similar terms and conditions. So I wrote some code that would first let me download all of my data and then would sort of delete all that data off the surface of Facebook. So untag myself from all the photos I was tagged in, delete all the comments that I made, unfriend all of my friends, and just leave kind of like a ghost of an account. And this is actually from the video where I show you how to download all of the photos, including the photos that your friends tagged you in, which is part of the data that you can’t. Facebook doesn’t easily let you download. And that’s sort of what I’m calling tactical misuse, which is not a real term. It’s just something that I used to describe the way that I work sometimes. And with this kind of hyphenated version of misuse, what I mean is using platforms in ways they weren’t necessarily designed to be used, which sounds easier said than done, because we should ask ourselves, you know, like how do you misuse a platform that is so carefully designed to control the way you use it, right? Like a platform that was designed with users in mind, with a user interface designed with users in mind. So the trick is avoid this area in red. Just don’t mess with anything in Facebook. And instead focus on this area, the rest of the browser, which kind of disappears when we’re on Facebook in these platforms. But the browser as a digital artist, the browser is my absolute favorite app ever for like a whole list of reasons. Glad to get into that in the recess session. But one of them is because of how malleable the browser is. There’s a lot more you can do with this interface than we realize. So like take the address bar, for instance. Typically we just use that to request websites. You could actually inject code in there that interacts with the page. So that one liner will like change the page red, for example. Or like that set of code, you know, say you’re on a page with sort of uncomfortable imagery. You could, you know, replace it with something more pleasant. I don’t know if folks have ever been in this situation. You land on a forum with a post you want to read and you’re blocked with a gray wall that says you have to log in with Google or Facebook before you can read it. What I do is I right mouse click that box. I choose an option called Inspect Element, which opens up these developer tools. These are tools built into all of our browsers. You have this in there. It’s made for developers to debug their code, but you could also use this or misuse this in interesting ways. So for folks who know CSS, adding one little line of code, the words display none, which I’m about to do right there. It sort of magically makes that box disappear and then you could read the article you came to read. Similarly, I don’t know if folks have been in this situation where you want to download a photo from Instagram and, you know, unlike every other website, you can drag and drop a photo from Instagram or you can’t right mouse click and save it. But if you inspect that element and use those developer tools, you can just copy the URL to the image, open up a new tab, paste it in that tab and then save it from there. So this is sort of what I’m calling tactical misuse, right? Sort of using these tools, like these developer tools that are really meant for debugging, but kind of using them for our own alternative reasons and getting platforms like Facebook or Instagram to, you know, getting them to do things that we want them to do that they don’t necessarily want us to do. And that’s sort of how I did that entire Facebook project, just sort of tactically misusing these tools. So I’ll stop picking on Facebook and maybe talk about a few other platforms for a sec. So this was a collaborative piece I worked on with a long-time collaborator and my girlfriend, Anna Russet. And Anna has a fairly large following of young women and girls online and all the work that she does directly engages with them and their lives online. And one day she was showing me these tweets that fan girls make on Twitter. So it takes celebrities like Justin Bieber and the members of One Direction have these huge followings of kids online. And when they log onto Facebook, they’ll occasionally just sort of randomly follow one of their fans back or message them, almost as a kind of gift to their audience. And these fan girls know that. So as soon as they notice them go online, they just immediately start tweeting, please follow me, please follow me, please follow me, please follow me, over and over and over again to see if they could be that lucky one that one time. And what they’ve noticed is that Twitter really quickly just blocks them, right? Because they’re sending the same tweet over and over and over again. So they’ve gotten really clever. And what they started to do was use emojis and numbers to both make their tweets first much more like just a lot prettier and more noticeable to that celebrity, but also to add variation between the tweets to evade Twitter’s spam detection. So we thought this was absolutely brilliant. You know, young girls paving the way as they often do, changing the rules. And so we analyzed all of their tweets and we kind of like broke down the formula that they had kind of collectively created. And then we used this as an opportunity to teach them a little code and get them excited about this kind of tactical misuse. And we essentially sort of took what they were doing and turned it into an algorithm. And then we created a tutorial for them and we showed them how to use these browser tools and this code that we written and sort of following some simple rules. They could just kind of automate that process and then, you know, use their time to do something like learn a little bit more about code. I don’t know how many folks know this term API since our application programming interface. Like the browser developer tools, this is another tool that programmers use to build apps online. Specifically when they need some access to one of these platforms, either data or some other functionality. So these are tools actually produced by those platforms. So if you’ve ever seen an app that has like a Facebook connect, that’s using a Facebook API. If you’ve ever seen an app that uses like Google Maps integrated into the app like Glifter, Uber, that’s using the Google API, the Google Maps API. So those APIs could also be misused. So this was sort of like a weekend project, a little experiment. As you might imagine, it bothers me that Google reads through all my emails and all of my docs. And so I thought, hmm, I wonder if I could use the Google Docs API to create a separate app, my own docs app, where I can create my apps. And then before I upload it to Google Docs, I’ll encrypt it with a password. So all Google sees is a bunch of like jarable text. And then when I want to work on that doc, I just reopen it and decrypt it with my password and sort of keep going. And it worked. This is a little just weekend exercise in tactical misuse. So this is another project with Anna that Anna and I collaborated on. We’ve both been on YouTube since nearly since the beginning. We love YouTube, absolutely. So inspired by that community over the years, we’ve discovered some of our favorite artists on YouTube. But over the years, more recently, the algorithm that sort of YouTube uses to recommend videos, like when you land on the page, but also when you’re subscribed to other folks, has gotten worse and worse for so many reasons. I won’t get into details. But this article came out last week in The Guardian about the role that the Facebook, I’m sorry, the YouTube algorithm might have played in the last elections. As it turns out, PizzaGate conspiracy videos play better on YouTube than the alternative. So the algorithm has learned to sort of reward those and prioritize those, whether or not you follow those sorts of channels. There’s sort of a larger bias for those. And so I was chatting with Anna once and she was saying how these days when you upload a video to YouTube, it feels like you’re stuffing it in a bottle, throwing it in the ocean, and hoping it washes up on somebody’s shore. Oftentimes it just gets buried by the algorithm. So we decided to use the API to make that shore. So this is a project called Current Tube. The website is actually current.tube. And the idea here is we use the YouTube API to just bypass their algorithm altogether. So what you’re seeing here, so this is a real-time feed coming from the website, what you’re seeing here is every time somebody uploads a video to YouTube, a bottle falls from the sky. So those videos are being uploaded right now, this Friday morning. And you can click on them and then see what that video is. And then you can click on that thumbnail and watch that video. Who knows what these are, so I won’t click on them right now. But again, kind of like using our digital masters tools to dismantle their house, so to speak. Yeah, that’s the website. So that’s kind of the idea behind Tactical Missed You. So I just kind of want to end on this slide. This is a quote from Doug Rushkoff. He says, Ask any kid what Facebook is for, and he’ll tell you Facebook is here to help me make friends. No, they’re looking to figure out how to monetize people’s relationships. If you don’t know what the software you’re using is for, then you’re not using it, but being used by it. And the idea behind all this stuff is really just to kind of get folks to think about our platforms this way, kind of thinking critically about our platforms, and not be afraid to kind of play by our own rules and kind of experiment, and learn in the process, and hopefully reclaim a little bit of agency. So thanks, everyone.