Cybernetics Of The Spectacle - An Interview With Ben Ditto PT I)
Seven Story Hotel
***LEAKED***
Seven Story Hotel ***LEAKED***
Ben is a creative director specializing in the execution of uncanny utopian concepts that embrace beauty and technology. Working across platforms such as Dazed Beauty, he directs moving image, C.G.I., creative coding projects, augmented reality, V.R., print, and live experience. Ben is also a chronic shit-poster with a proclivity for hyper-violent, hyper-sexual, and politically extreme imagery. His accounts have been shadow-banned and deleted, and he has issued an open letter to Instagram demanding policy reform. We talk Big Tech, censorship, A.l. geopolitics, psyops, the psychology of transgression, and the deranged magick of symbolism. - Cori Hart
C.H. - What are the major points you want addressed in terms of policy?
Ditto - The three major points are transparency, account verification, and account disabling. I'm sure most people know somebody who's had their account taken down with no idea as to why. Initially, it was just happening to sex worker friends (which sucked), but I could understand how they might be dancing around regulations. But then I started seeing more and more journalistic accounts being removed for things such as mentioning certain Islamic groups by name. I mean, there's a war in Gaza, and you can't mention Hamas on a fucking journalism page. It's crazy, and the rules are constantly changing. I've spoken to people who work for Twitter, and everybody agrees the regulations are completely opaque. I'm not saying these tech companies need to be democratic, but if you operate within a democratic system, just be transparent and tell us exactly what the rules are.
During the storming of the capitol, I posted that viral photo of the man peeking through the window with handguns trained on him, but the man was replaced with the "cheesed to meet you" mouse... which is a meme. That photo got taken down for "hate speech," which led to my account being deleted. I want to know who's making these decisions and why.
C.H. - So, do you believe that the employees who are flagging this content are being advised from up high, or is it totally subjective?
Ditto - I don't think they have much autonomy at all. The rules are so detailed and intricate that even they find them completely confusing. You and I or anyone else trying to operate on those platforms stand no chance. So the primary thing is simple transparency to publish the rules..
Secondly is account verification, the blue check that means approval by tech companies. It's completely arbitrary. You get musicians with 1K followers who are verified, while some of my very serious journalist friends with 300K followers have no verification. Stuff like that makes me angry. I propose that anybody should be able to voluntarily verify if they are willing to submit identification. That should keep you from being deleted unless you do something really horrendous.
And that leads to my third point, which is introducing account disabling. If you do something bad, have your account disabled for a specified amount of time. How much harm can you do if your account's disabled every month? Those three main points serve as an umbrella and will apply to any micro-policies that may be specific to journalism, sex work, art, comedy, or whatever else.
C.H. - I can only assume there's an element of corporate capture within these companies with biases this blatant. Accounts are removed for mention of the Taliban, and there seems to be a bias with regard to the Israeli / Palestine conflict as well.
Ditto - 100%. Narrative analysis is something I'm very interested in. An easy way to spot bias is to look at the approved GIFS. Not to make any political judgment, but if you search the stickers for Donald Trump, for example, you won't find much complimentary. Those have been selected specifically by Instagram. I'm not being pro- or anti-Trump, but how does half your country feel if it's that obvious what the bias of a massive global tech company is? Speaking as a British person, it seems there's a very neoliberal sort of "Ha! We're obviously right about this, guys, don’t be stupid" attitude. It's a very pervasive groupthink within tech.
In the example of Palestine, there’s obviously a very pro-Israel bias. Otherwise, you wouldn't have people's accounts being removed for simply discussing Hamas in a non-partisan way. You don’t get accounts taken down for hashtagging IDF. Again, I'm not being pro or anti-anything, but it's obviously partisan. So that beckons back to that American Democrat "friends of Israel" intersection, and it applies to many other issues as well. I'm not an "anti-vaxxer," for example, but there’s very little on the platform challenging the dominant narratives.
C.H. - Yeah. Not to get too deep into the vaccine debate, but Bobby Kennedy Jr. is arguably the most important critic of vaccine industry corruption and the health regulatory agencies, and he was recently removed from Instagram because of his work. "Misinformation" seems to be the new proxy for censorship.
Ditto - Yes, and again just to stress, I'm not anti-vaccine, but I am definitely pro-critical thinking, and time and again, there's been examples of things that should have been discussed in an open democratic way that just aren't, because of censorship. For example, is that authoritarian lockdown really necessary in the Australian state of Victoria? It's very hard to have that conversation currently.
More on the topic of censorship. I've sat in on panel talks between Facebook and U.S. politicians where they talked in very broad terms about preventing extremism. They are thinking, "How do we stop this tide of Qanon bullshit, or this tide of ISIS recruitment?" Fair enough, but they aren't thinking about the effect this has on journalists. There has to be some intelligence there. It can't just be banning any mention of Hamas. That's fucking stupid.
C.H. - We often underestimate the influence these companies have on the public zeitgeist and geopolitics at large. We caught a glimpse of that power during the horrors of last year’s Myanmar incident. Whether it was intentional or a fluke of the algorithm, Facebook’s A.l. played a key role in instigating the genocide of the Rohingya people. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Ditto - So one of the subjects that came up in those talks was Myanmar. Something people should realize is that the staff for Instagram is extremely tight, but the staff for Facebook is somewhere in the tens of thousands. But does Facebook have a large department in Myanmar that's done a thorough analysis of all the local nuances? No, not at all. You have a handful of people making big decisions and an algorithm designed by people who post yoga and avocado-brunch photos. It's the same basic algorithm that says, "Ditto likes 70’s metal, let's show him more of that." It's that stupid. The standard for artificial intelligence algorithm building is very poor, but humans are complex, so when you put that basic information in the hands of an algorithm that wasn't designed for Myanmar's delicate tensions, that's what happens: siloing to a massive degree, violence, chaos.
CH. - You have intimate experience with algorithm and facial recognition A.I. through your art department. How do you feel about these tools being exploited by Big Tech for surveillance purposes? A big example is the recent announcement of Apple's new picture-scanning software.
Ditto - Yeah, CSAM scanning. So up till now, Apple's facial recognition was contained within the hardware. You can use facial recognition to organize photos in albums, but it’s not connected to any online database. With CSAM, they are attempting to try and combat child exploitation by scanning images on the way to iCloud, which effectively jailbreaks Apple’s hardware. The only reason I really like Apple is because they've always been very good about not collecting and selling our data. Facebook, on the other hand, has been doing this stuff for years and has caught thousands of pedophiles, which is great, but we all know Facebook is watching us. I know anything I post on there will be analyzed, used to serve me adverts, and fed into massive machine-learning databases. Same with Google. But with Apple, we had faith the images on our personal device would stay private.
So now, with the noble aim of fighting child exploitation, they’ve opened a back door to any oppressive regime who may want to use this technology to detect (for example) images related to protest or anti-government interest. It's hard to predict the ways this may be abused, but now they've opened that door, it will be very hard to close it.
C.H. - I can't help but feel a sense of deja vu. It calls to mind the Patriot Act. Radical protocols of surveillance are set up under the pretense of a noble cause, like preventing terrorism, and then become exploited in massive ways by those who implement them. It takes a level of cognitive dissonance to think this won’t be the case here.
Ditto - Exactly. That's a really great example because we just theoretically lost the great war on terror, so the Patriot Act is now redundant. Why aren't they repealing it? Because as everybody knows, the Patriot Act had very little to do with terrorism. Al-Qaeda was not a threat in the U.S., that's bullshit and everybody knows it. It was all about overreaching state control by exploiting political tensions, and that’s what’s happening with COVID. My opinion is that it's natural.
The state, the police and the secret service will always try to make their jobs easier, but in a democracy, that will be challenged. The U.K. is quite good at challenging that stuff as we have a pretty robust civil liberties lobby, the U.S. much less so, and in places with more nefarious governments like Turkmenistan, all that goes out the window. The point is — the states will always attempt to seize more control. It's all about the robustness of pushback.
C.H. - So as surveillance becomes more sophisticated, do you feel the need to come up with more sophisticated methods of defense? Is that something you concern yourself with or have you resigned yourself to our technocratic overlords?
Ditto - In a way. Something I'll say though is that I am a surprisingly law-abiding citizen.
C.H. - That is surprising.
Ditto - *he laughs* I have some esoteric interest, and I enjoy some challenging imagery, but I'm extremely law-abiding. So I wonder if I'm even the right person to answer this because I'm a goody-two-shoes who doesn't do anything wrong.
C.H. - I guess what concerns me is retroactive surveillance. When the Chinese government uses data mining to punish political dissidents and anti-authoritarian speech, I fear that in a future regime change our governments could potentially do the same, and they’ll have this large pool of data to pull from.
Ditto - Oh, 100%. I was being ironic. I don’t worry about this stuff on a practical level, but actually, it worries me a hell of a lot. But I'm less concerned about our government than I am about the overreach of these tech companies, the privatization of the internet, and what that means in real terms. For example, we don't have China's social credit system, but if I get de-platformed like Alex Jones, my career is over. My only option would be to go onto Parler and Gab and join all the other fucking nutcases. But unfortunately, that's what happens if you're a free-speech advocate, you get lumped in with all the lunatic fringe of the right. That's depressing as fuck.
So it worries me a hell of a lot but for different reasons than China. Though some of the things I saw during the protest last summer in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder terrified me in an authoritarian way. People having their cars marked by police, being followed home and taken. It's scary stuff, and technology enhances it.
In the past, spy agencies had to rely on leaks and espionage, but now with open-source intelligence, there's an awful lot of information you can collect by using open sources available to anyone. It's good for us because we can see in maps of China where they are building labor camps for people in the western provinces, but it also means the state can track us in pretty terrifying ways without doing anything illegal.
CH. - Right. So it's kind of trite to reference 1984, but it's always so fitting. I often think about how the protagonist, Winston, resorts to writing in a journal to avoid detection from "Big Brother." As a publisher that's printed tons of important and provocative material, is our only hope for freedom of speech a return to the printed media underground?
Ditto - Some parts of the German secret service have returned to using pen and paper because of how leaky electronic media is, so it's a problem on the state’s side as well. I use things like Telegram and Discord which are a lot more secure in terms of privacy. But as to publishing, for me, a successful physical book would reach 2-to-5 thousand people, but now with digital distribution, I can reach 300k or 400k easily. I think it's easy to forget how good that is. So realistically, do I think printed matter is the best way to distribute important disruptive ideas? Honestly, my heart says no. It's just too exclusive, and you need to have a serious logistics network to distribute on a large scale. I worked with a guy who was arrested for criminal damage and wrote an amazing guidebook on surviving prison. We printed it as a zine and distributed it to lawyers’ offices, outside courtrooms, that sort of thing. It was a really useful piece of work, but it may have reached several thousand people, whereas digitally, it could reach an unlimited number for free.
I'm actually more keen to embrace the next World Wide Web, one that's out of the hands of tech companies. A more decentralized internet is coming.
C.H. - I want to talk more about disruption, since you obviously have a place in your heart for transgressive media. Coming out of punk and hardcore, I've always believed transgression to be an effective tool for instigating change. But what even still qualifies as "transgressive" in a contemporary culture so oversaturated with images of sex and violence? What is the rock we throw through the window in 2022?
Ditto - So, I was never a punk or a communist or any nameable politic, though I have a view for sure. For me, the function of transgression is purely aesthetic. I don't mean visually aesthetic, but every level of aesthetics. I'm more of a George Bataille than a Sid Vicious.
C.H. - I'm admittedly not too familiar with the work of Bataille.
Ditto - He wrote a lot of philosophy about transgression, the power of the image, and the relationship between media and culture. I think the same with Baudrillard or Debord, Society of the Spectacle. For example, I love the feeling of knowing where a meme comes from in subculture. Like maybe it's born from far-right subculture, gets manipulated by communists on Instagram, fucked around with by incels somewhere, and it just becomes this thing that we all know and understand. It just gets loaded with this energy, and on top of that, there's humor.
So seeing that next to some extreme BDSM porn, next to ISIS footage of an execution, all these things together do something to my brain, and I like the way it feels. I’m not going to pretend that I'm doing it for some greater moral, political reason. I do it because it gives me a lot of joy in my brain to put this stuff together in a stream of consciousness, like Videodrome or something.
C.H. - That's funny because in my notes it says, "Ask Ditto about his favorite Cronenberg film."
Ditto - Probably Scanners because it's the first one I saw, but I love him, same with J.G. Ballard. I love all that stuff because it’s where I come from. I'm a child of the ‘80s and '90s, the era when we started to have our brains fried by this over-saturation of imagery, industrial music, MTV, all of that stuff. My interest now is in how it feels to be exposed to all this extreme stuff. It simply gives me pleasure. Shit-posting gives me a tremendous amount of pleasure.
I don't do it because I have to; I do it because I love it, and it's the most natural thing to me. I love the idea that you and several thousands of others will be flipping through my content laughing, thinking deeply, getting horny, feeling disgusted, yet thinking it's beautiful at the same time.
That's my practice, and I love creating that feeling.
