S P EC I A L T O P I C

OCTO
OR HOW THE NET
WAS WON
Baruch Gottlieb, UdK Berlin IZM
Dmytri Kleiner, Telekommunisten

This paper was originally part of a keynote at Critical Alternatives 2015, accompanied by
some documentation of artworks through which we attempted to materialize many of the
considerations below. The OCTO P7C-1 premiered at the transmediale festival in 2013
and featured an extended Telekommunisten crew, including chief engineer Jeff Mann,
chief designer Jonas Frankki, chief performer Diani Barreto, chief communications
officer Mike Pierce, chief administrative officer Rico Weise, and chief curator Tatiana
Bazzichelli. The prototype was the Official Miscommunication Platform of the
transmediale that year, installed with a central station, eight “end-stations,” and about
1 km of DIN 80 plastic drainage tube throughout the entire venue, the Haus der Kulturen
der Welt. The pneumatic power for the P7C-1 came from two ordinary vacuum cleaners.
Besides offering the functional “labor theater” installation, the fictional company
OCTO was present as a dazzling new start-up that was going to bring the next physical
dimension of the Internet into every home and business on the planet. The P7C-1 was
thus presented as a taste of an inevitable and very desirable future, of course completely

T
monopolized by OCTO corporation. OCTO has presented several subsequent iterations of
the project, including the decentralized OCTO-APPS (Autonomous People's Pneumatic
System) in Athens and the Enterprise Security OCTO P7C-ES in Ljubljana and Skopje.

The development of communications spirit emerged because it was financed

technologies is not merely a neutral
process driven by discovery, progress,
and innovation; it is also
an intensely social and political
process, where choices are made in
ways that fundamentally influence
the reproduction of the class conditions
of the societies that produce these
technologies. Communications
technologies embody and perpetuate
the social relations of their mode
of production.
The illusion of the early Internet as a
panacea platform for the emancipation
of human intelligence and collaborative
for use value, not exchange value. Its
early developers were universities,
NGOs, hobbyists, and, prominently, the
military. The contributors to the early
Internet built the platform according
to what could be seen as a product of a
communist credo, “from each according
to ability, to each according to need.”
As Richard Barbrook described in
The::Cyber.Com/munist::Manifesto,
“Within the Net, people are developing
the most advanced form of collective
labour: work-as-gift” [1]. Information
and software spread freely across
the network. This, to many people,

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special topic
created the impression that a new
society was emerging. For instance,
in The Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow
stated, “We are creating a world where
anyone, anywhere may express his or
her beliefs, no matter how singular,
without fear of being coerced into
silence or conformity” [2]. Barlow’s
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
co-founder, John Gilmore, claimed the
“Net interprets censorship as damage
and routes around it” [3], implying the
Net existed beyond the jurisdiction
of states—or even the organizations
that operate it—as it can simply “route
around” those that would seek to
interfere with the freedom of exchange
on the network.
This might have held true to some
extent during the initial stages of
commercialization of the Internet,
because the first commercial ventures,
internet service providers (ISPs), did
not develop their own communications
technologies. Rather, they provided
access only to the public Internet and
the decentralized, open technologies
that ran on it, such as email and Usenet.
The exchange value these ISPs were
capturing was collectively created. Each
ISP was independently earning income
by being a part of a common platform,
not owned by anybody as a whole
but rather composed of the mutual
interconnections of the participants.
Though made up of parts owned by
public and private organizations,
the platform as a whole functioned
as a commons, a common stock of
productive assets used independently by
the ISPs and their users.
In parallel to the Internet, online
services like CompuServe emerged
from the capitalist imagination. They
were financed for exchange value by
profit-seeking investors, and as such
did not employ a mesh topology like the
Internet but rather a centralized or star
topology. Users could not communicate
directly with each other; they had to use
the operator’s central servers, which
could not be “routed around.” This was
The flowering of “Web 2.0” was Capital’s
re-engineering of the Web into an Internet-
accessible version of the online services
they were building all along.
34 INTER ACTIONS M A R C H – A P R I L 2 0 16
required by profit-oriented business
models, since control of user interaction
and user data was required to monetize
the platform, for instance, by charging
fees or selling advertising.
Part of what fed the illusion of the
emancipatory potential of the then-
possible Internet was the fact that the
platform made capitalist-funded online
services like CompuServe and AOL
obsolete. This happened largely because
of the explosive growth made possible
by its distributed infrastructure,
allowing the ISP industry to develop as a
kind of petit-bourgeois industry of small
producers. ISPs were a cottage industry
of mom and pop telecoms of sorts. The
design of the Internet allowed anybody
with a connection to the Internet to
provide a connection to others. Thus,
the barrier of entry to becoming an ISP
was relatively small—just an upstream
connection and some computers,
modems, and telephone lines.
During the early days of the public
Internet, the communistic petit
bourgeois ISPs prevailed over the
feudalistic haute bourgeois online
services, making it seem momentarily
that the superior technical architecture
of the Internet, combined with the
cultures of sharing and gift economies,
would be able to surpass and even
transcend Capital.
While ISPs invested in bringing
Internet access into households and
offices worldwide, they did little to
actually develop the communications
platforms used on the network. These
were largely developed within the
gift economy of the users themselves.
The ISPs were even less able to take
over the provision of long-haul data
transmission, which was dominated
by international telecommunications
conglomerates. Most ISPs got their
start by simply connecting shelves
full of consumer-grade modems to
consumer-grade computers running
free software, providing connectivity to
an upstream Internet provider for end
users who were using freely available
communications platforms.
Thus, while the emergence of the
ISPs and the rapid mainstream adoption
of the Internet were spectacular, they
were not able to capture enough profit
to scale up and take over the more
investment-heavy infrastructure of
Internet provision. The end was already
apparent in beginning. Well-financed
telecommunications conglomerates
would soon replace the mom and pop
ISPs by either buying them up or driving
them out of business by providing
broadband services. These services
delivered Internet to homes along with
telephone service, leaving the remaining
ISPs as just resellers, providing service
over telecom-managed circuits.
Rather than embracing the free,
open platforms like Usenet, email,
and IRC where net.culture was born,
Capital embraced the Web. Not as the
interlinked, hypermedia, worldwide
distributed-publishing platform it was
intended to be, but as a client-server
private communications platform where
users’ interactions were mediated by the
platforms’ operators. The flowering of
“Web 2.0” was Capital’s re-engineering
of the Web into an Internet-accessible
version of the online services they were
building all along.
The gift-economy model of software
development that created platforms
like email and Usenet was unable
to compete with a quickly growing
Venture Capital start-up scene pushing
Web 2.0 platforms [4]. Like the profit-
oriented online services before them,
these start-ups were also compelled
by the profit motives of their investors
to implement a star topology because
once again, the central control of user
data and interaction was required to
monetize the platforms. We have moved
from a world of CompuServe and AOL
to a world of Amazon and Facebook.
Scratch off the Facebook logo and you’ll
find the CompuServe logo underneath.
THE OCTO P7C
The Miscommunication Technologies
artworks by Telekommunisten illustrate
some of the real-world challenges
faced by anyone or any group that
would like to challenge the dominance
of capitalist models of production.
Miscommunication Technologies take a
light-hearted approach to an intractable
reality: Capitalism is not only the
system by which maximum value is
extracted from social production; it is
also the current global system that, in
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The OCTO P7C-1 pneumatic-tube network.
its unsatisfactory yet somewhat reliable
manner, provides vital services we
depend on every day. Any challenge to
capitalist hegemony must be prepared
to provide for the same social needs,
which will persist in any system.
The OCTO P7C series exemplifies
this problem. OCTO is a fictional
venture capitalist start-up promising
to build the next dimension of the
Internet: high-speed communication
of physical packets through a pervasive
pneumatic tube network. The utopian
OCTO rhetoric is exuberantly
cliché, promising all manner of
human empowerment and positive
transformation—and conveniently
leaving in the shadow of bold
promises the fact that this technology
will be completely centralized and
transfused with invasive security and
monitoring technologies.
OCTO P7C manifests the situation
on several parallel levels. First, the
actual working prototype, the P7C-
1, debuted at transmediale in 2013,
allowed visitors to send capsules
around the entire Haus der Kulturen
der Welt. The P7C-1 stations were
integrated everywhere at transmediale
and used by staff and visitors alike.
Use of the system was purposefully
complicated, with every capsule
having to be sent through a central
coordinating station and at the mercy
of the operators positioned there. P7C-
1’s cumbersome, labor-intensive, and
privacy-antagonistic factuality flew in
the face of the transcendent promises
DOI: 10.1145/2890642  COPYRIGHT HELD BY AUTHORS. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00
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unflaggingly issued from the fictional
directorship of the OCTO company.
The constant work of managing
the central station, end stations, and
tube network is labor theater. Unlike
the Internet, where the physical labor
is hidden, the labor in OCTO P7C-1 is
presented as a central theatrical aspect
of the work. The OCTO company
provided the second layer, the social
fiction, constantly driving home the
lesson that there is a price for the
convenience of every new technological
utopia under capitalism, and the price
will be extracted from those who are
promised to benefit.
General concern regarding
the censorship and surveillance
on commercial online platforms
is growing. These concerns are
opportunities to introduce political
topics by arguing that these features
are not unintended side effects of
these platforms, but rather are central
to their business models, and that
platforms that do not surveille or
control cannot and will not be financed
by capital, but only by collective or
public undertakings as expressions of
priorities that diverge from capitalism.
Once this becomes clearer, concern
over privacy settings on Facebook can
be directed toward capitalism itself,
instead of the idiosyncrasies of that
platform or its founders.
We have moved from administering
our own email to using the centralized
email services of giant entities like
Google and Yahoo, which, as part of
their mere functioning, parse and
analyse private contents. Massive
datasets have proven as useful for
optimizing AI applications such as
automatic translation as any contribution
from the (academic) information science
community. Access to these storehouses
of real-time contextual semantic data is
the ne plus ultra of contemporary Web
profit models.
The revolutionary Internet that
inspired Barbrook, Barlow, Gilmore,
and many others has become a dystopia,
a platform whose capabilities and
pervasiveness of surveillance and
behavioral conditioning and influence
surpass the wildest dreams of the
tyrants and technocrats of previous eras.
As we will see again and again, despite
claims that culture and economy have
gone “immaterial,” the rules of access to
the physical technology of the Internet
conditions the forms of services that are
eventually at the disposal of users.
Endnotes
1. Barbrook, R. The::Cyber.Com/
munist::Manifesto. 1999;
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-
cybercommunistmanifesto.html.
2. Barlow, J.P. The Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace. 1996;
https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/
Declaration-Final.html.
3. Elmer-Dewitt, P. First nation in cyberspace.
TIME International 49 (Dec. 1993).
4. Gagne, K. and Lake, M. CompuServe,
Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn
from Online 1.0. Compuworld.com (July
2009); http://www.computerworld.com/
article/2526547/networking/compuserve-
-prodigy-et-al---what-web-2-0-can-learn-
from-online-1-0.html
Baruch Gottlieb (@baruch) trained as a
filmmaker and has been working in digital art
with specialization in public art since 1999.
He is a member of Telekommunisten and
author of Gratitude for Technology (Atropos,
2009) and A Political Economy of the Smallest
Things (Atropos, 2015). He currently lectures
at the Institute for Time-based Media at the
University of Arts Berlin and is curator of the
traveling exhibition Vilém Flusser & the Arts.
Dmytri Kleiner (@dmytri) is the author
of The Telekommunist Manifesto, and a
contributing artist to the Telekommunisten
Network’s Miscommunication Technologies
series of artworks. Kleiner has published
the Peer-Production licence, a commons-
friendly Copyleft/Non-Commercial license
the author has described as CopyFarLeft, and
proposed Venture Communism, a mode of
worker-controlled production modeled on peer
networks and the commons.
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