Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism

2. The Archive and the Processor: The Internal Hardware Logic of Social Media

The Archive and the Processor 2 The Internal Hardware Logic of Social Media Forget the browser; real-time is the new crack. —Geert Lovink, Networks without a Cause In 2008, during Mark Zuckerberg’s first profile on CBS’s 60 Minutes, he helped reporter Lesley Stahl create her own Facebook profile.1 He guided her through the template, even doing the work of typing in and selecting her “likes” for her. “Within a few minutes,” Stahl reports, somewhat surprised, “I got a friend request” from someone she had not talked to in two years. Moments of inputting data into Facebook thus resulted in the elimination of years of lost time. Stahl notes that the near-instantaneous connection to friends is a reason why Facebook is so “addictive.” Speed, the new, and immediacy appear to be at the heart of Facebook, along with nearly every other social media site. If we take them at “interface value,” such sites as Twitter, Google, YouTube, and Digg and such formats as the blog privilege newness over other forms of organization. These sites are exemplars of the “Web as platform,” where the Web is treated as an operating system, and social media sites are applications built on top of the Web. Judging them by their interfaces, these “apps” are dedicated to social connection and instant access to information, much to the delight of users, such as Stahl. And yet, pushing past the glossy, AJAX-driven interfaces of social media, we confront another element of this business practice. Social 42 Chapter 2 media sites are not simply surfaces dedicated to immediacy; they also comprise vast server farms with rooms of computers humming away. Of course, these servers provide some of the processing power that drives the immediacy of a social media site. But they also provide a function extremely necessary to any social media business plan: rationalized storage of vast amounts of data. In other words, while Stahl constructs her profile, Zuckerberg’s servers are busily storing her data: her demographic information, the time she spends on the site, and her growing social connections (called the “social graph” by Zuckerberg). Here, we confront a contradiction: the smooth interfaces that users enjoy appear to solely comprise immediate connections and instant information, but the servers powering them are maintained in large part because of their long-term archival potential. This contradiction is the motor that drives social media. If we open those servers, we see that the social media contradiction has its roots in the development of the modern computer itself, which is a synthesis of the immediate (in the form of the CPU or processor) and the archival (in the form of memory and storage of data). This fundamental architectural logic has informed the design of social media, and not just in terms of its technical facts. The social structures privileged by Facebook, Google, and Twitter also draw on the speed and storage dichotomy. The fundamental architecture of the computer is linked to the logic of social media, because a social dichotomy is at work on the basis of and reflecting (if not directly determined by) this architecture. In the hegemonic social media business model, users are encouraged to focus on the new and the immediate . They are expected to process digital objects by sharing content, making connections, ranking cultural artifacts, and producing new digital content, a mode of computing I call “affective processing.” In essence, this business model imagines users to be potential superprocessors . With enough users aggregated via network effects and presented with a smooth interface (preferably something simple and binary, such as a “Like,” “Tweet,” “+1,” or “Digg” button), they become a valuable source of digital-artifact processing. In contrast, the archival possibilities of computers are typically commanded by social media site owners. They monitor users’ every The Archive and the Processor 43 action, store the resulting data, protect the information via such artificial barriers as intellectual property, analyze it for clues about users’ desires and habits, and sell the data for profit. This mode of new media capitalism prompts site designers to build websites that are capable of inscribing user activity into increasingly precise databases. Because of many sites’ Terms of Service agreements, users cannot control these archives. These archives comprise the products of affective processing; they are archives of affect, sites of decontextualized data that can be rearranged by the site owners to construct particular forms of knowledge about social...