Voice messaging sends prerecorded audio messages via messaging apps. Users can mix and match audio messages with other media such as text or visual.  Voice messaging allows people to get around the flatness of textual communication, adding tone and nuance. It requires greater intensity of engagement at the other end. The receiver has to listen, not just glance. Zoomers have a reputation for fearing the phone call and voice message allows a less demanding but still personal way of interacting.

In every way voice messaging is its own communication media. It has specific interactional characteristics that set it apart qualitatively from text messaging, one to one calls, and other modes of communication. Yet almost every article I read on digital society namechecks textual, audio call and video communication. None mentions voice messaging, one of the most significant changes in communication media in recent years. It is completely under the radar of digital sociology even as part of our standard list everyone uses of ‘this is how folks interact now’.

Voice messaging has some fascinating characteristics. Zhang (2028) reports that in Chinese professionals consider it ‘obnoxious’ and only tolerate its use when it is sent from a senior to a junior person. The reasons are probably the same for both parties: it has limited information density and resists rapid, easy consumption. A voice message conversation appears just as a list of audio links. There is no simple way to parse or prioritise content without having to listen to the whole thing. It is a demanding medium for the receiver, but not the sender. In business/professional worlds it is a statement of who is time rich, who is time poor, and who matters more. Effectively, ‘I couldn’t be bothered to type this out’.

As well as shifting or exposing power relations in one set of communications, it may shift them in another direction in a different set of interactions. It opens up some possibilities for people who are unable to use text, or find it difficult. Its use can signal the presence of intimacy and care. It allows users to signal the content and intent of their communication. Here is a longer message I would like you to be more involved in listening to. It moves us away from a literal understanding of literacy as textual aptitude. As a mode it also highlights the attentional context of consumption. A voice message makes it harder to prioritise one’s attention in consuming communication, but on the other hand displays a greater commitment to the interaction.

On the next point, does our not bothering with voice messaging indicate we are too text focused in both method and critique? Textual sources and modes of analysis are simpler in many ways. There is a lot of textual data, and using text allows us to avoid or obfuscate some ethical questions around data reuse and anonymity. Voice messages tend to just be private so are not immediately accessible. There are practical reasons but also our theoretical tools are designed around the bloodless written word and we suffer for it.

Zhang, Zara. 2018. ‘Sending WeChat Voice Messages Is a Status Symbol in China’. Quartz.

Just adding to the rash of ‘stop thinking disinformation is the problem’ takes out there. The high cultural capital crew like to imagine there to be a bright line between illegal and illegal, organised and opportunistic, rational and emotional. And also that they know which side of the line they would be on. Likewise, information manipulation. Disinformation is the cosy mug of horlicks that the information saturation set reach for to explain democratic events they do not like. Why, if only those damned twitter bots did not spin constant lies and rile up the little people then we wouldn’t have to deal with events, which are inherently tiresome. On the other hand, maybe lots of people just do not want to lie in the bed you have created for them. 

Challenge: what’s the difference between propaganda, political campaigning, advertising, and information operations, if there is one? Why is it okay when our side does it? There is a long history of fake news and election manipulation. In an early example of cancel culture. the ostrakon was used to expel citizens from Athens and was highly open to manipulation. The Soviet Union placed a fake news story in an Indian newspaper about AIDS being a US developed bioweapon. Many governments engage in shaping public opinion, from the health (cigarettes be bad) to the attitudinal. Plenty of institutions engage in astroturfing, other manipulation of civil society. What is new in the current climate is the global reach of nationally motivated hacker groups, not all of which are or need to be centrally coordinated.

It is a powerful propaganda tool used by nationalist regimes to suppress civil liberties, undermine opposition and simply swamp out opposition or independent information and as a tool of international relations. But also itself become a go-to tool for strategic de-legitimation (you used the fakes!). There’s a fear of institutional fragility which speaks of a moral uncertainty in liberal elites. More neutrally, an information economy and polity is exposed to attempts to manipulate information for strategic ends as opposed to everyday annoyances.

The narrative around disinformation feeds into the narrative that certain choices can be objectively deemed false. Discussions of Brexit always implies there is something false to it: Cameron called the vote for cynical party management reasons and Johnson falsely posed as an anti-EU populist. Falsity lets us off the hook of doing proper material, historical analysis.

Disinformation strikes at a number of question at the intersection of information science, sociology of markets, sociology of technology and the philosophy of knowledge: how can disinformation be defined, recognised and how can systems be made resilient against it. There are several thorny ontological and epistemological questions between the politics of knowledge, preference falsification, technical and social verification and conceptual space theory. We don’t easily know what disinformation is when we see it so we need agreement that we are in fact talking about the same thing.

There are a number of developments in the organisation of information markets that are live right now and which mean the problem isn’t just open to immediate technical or oversight solutions: financialisation of disinformation, the vertical integration of political campaigns with new media, and the development of a distributed labour infrastructure which is agile and available. There is also a collective effervescence to disinformation action. When Russian hackers take out Estonia’s infrastructure or Chinese internet activists DDOS US government websites, this is partly for the joy. Therefore we should consider this as a type of national political action and participation, not just a wily propaganda ploy.

If you see the ‘No user serviceable parts inside’ notice as a challenge, I am with you. I am in the class of people most open to the right to repair movement so I want to introduce some reflection on what it means and whether it is the right way to frame what we want. And what we want is knowledge and control over the material technologies of our lives, and to resist the constant ramp towards platform lock in that now pervades the physical as well as the virtual realm.

A right is just a desire, along with the capacity and willingness to exercise it. You do not have the right to vote. You can vote if some conditions prevail (you are an adult citizen, mentally capable, not in prison, able to get to the polling station, give a toss etc). Likewise, the right to free speech, property, right to life etc. Any right you mention can be terminated. Please do tell the nurse switching off your ventilator about the European Convention on Human Rights Article 2. Trust me, she’ll do it just to save on the electricity. The whole thing is a massive scam, like dishwasher tablets. I’ve never bought them. It cleans just as well without them.

When we campaign for rights we really just mean: we want this not to be just the province of affluent, high cultural capital, centrally approved sort of folk.It just means nobody else will. Alcohol might be banned in Saudi Arabia but wealthy, male Saudis exercise their right to get merry very easily. A right to intoxication would mean allowing people the legal and actual capacity to buy and use alcohol or other drugs. Maybe the Saudis would have had more luck banning alcohol if they just let Apple sell the stuff but lock it to people who had phones running iOS 16.

Okay, I put that a bit strongly, naming rights helps organise and codify them. Right to repair is a set of requirements that are primarily about returning control of technology to users and the communities they belong to. This is a laudable goal, which will only be met in a very limited way with an actual right to repair. We should understand why this shift happened and why some technologies appear to be repairable in the first place. The reason I say this is that otherwise it is very easy for a company to throttle a right to repair just by ceasing to make the relevant parts. As someone who finally got the part they need for my 10 year old Canon EOS 5D (see picture) I know that it is easier to observe in theory than practice. And the Canon is super-repairable. I could get right into the guts of it but still need to replace the expensive shutter unit, rather than the cheap shutter itself. And I can afford the time to do all this.

The ability to repair old bangers exists only because: for many of us, we couldn’t afford new ones; and some are worth it to keep roadworthy but are essentially useless. Software locked tractors massively impinge on the ability to maintain a significant fixed capital investment but that is quite a specific type of use case. Can we analogise from that to Apple’s penchant for soldering everything onto the motherboard, and gluing everything that can be glued?  Likewise, PCs are not more popular than Macs because they are sometimes repairable and upgradable. They are more popular because they are more popular, they fit more use cases, and can do more stuff – especially but not only games. What the r2r movement is objecting to is the centralisation and concentration of the supply chain and the damage that does to communities’ ability to adapt technology to their needs. I believe that we need to expand this attitude to every technology where it has happened, which is most of them, from pharmaceuticals to bicycles. I also think this logic is tending towards each of these technologies acting as part of an integrated system – e-bikes, smart drugs, they all function as parts of an integrated whole. R2R is one way of pushing back against some of the more damaging elements of that. So my main angle is really that it is the starting point to go beyond the valuable use cases that it invokes to a broader take on the infiltration of technology into social life.

Computer security is the culmination of a series of subversions. Just as policing evolves in response to crime, so computer systems evolve in response to threats. When it comes to malware, while the code is clever, the social engineering is more persistent, and more depressing. Malware designers evolve their products through testing and tooling to find out what works best. What wording will mean that more victims click on that ransomware link? Do people trust social media messages more than emails? More and more, malware evolves in response to human social and economic systems, and organisational/geo-political priorities, rather than to technical vulnerabilities.

Technological histories exist, recording major developments – the first Worm, the first RootKit, the first ransomware and so on. The social history is more dispersed and is yet to be written. Elements of a theory of malware could focus on: Where was it developed, for what purpose, who by, and how? How have victim and perpetrator characteristics evolved with the systems they use? What ethical and political questions are raised by it? For example, do we have the right to destroy self replicating computer programs, and how should malware be preserved for future study? My sense is malware history is somewhat separated from other kinds of crime historiography.

We would need to begin with a basic taxonomy. Here is my first sketch of the social history of malware: First stage: technically focused malware. Often created to prove a point, or by accident, like the first computer worm. Second stage: payload. Malware delivers a technical form that does something else, like modifies a computer system, or locks you out of it. Third stage: organisational. Malware becomes an object of economic and political activity. There is a high division of labour. Stuxnet and NotPetya encode geo-political priorities. Markets like Dark0de trade and systematise it.

Methods should set out the relevant fields. Studying evolving malware means studying the evolving computer security industry, its capacity for threat detection and horizon analysis, and the back and forth between malware operators and industry personnel. Constructs to be examined include changes in how costs are calculated and understood – from direct economic losses to reputation damage, lay perceptions of malware, and popular discourse and cultural representations of the topic. There is an opportunity for theoretical innovation here, for example considering QAnon as a mimetic virus.

Early in my career I researched smoking in areas of multiple deprivation in Scotland. At the time these were places where the social, economic and physical fabric had been severely weakened due to overlapping stressors. High crime, low income, low economic activity and widespread health problems were multiple challenges for people who lived there. That is what I think of as intersectionality. Smoking was often quoted by people I interviewed as being their one reliable pleasure. The rising cost of cigarettes and tobacco was an irritant but not often an incentive to quit. Though under strain at the time, there was a strong neighbourhood environment in many places.

One set of relationships that was sustained throughout was the illicit cigarette market. Taxes were spiking and there was a wide opportunity for people who wanted to import tobacco products cheaply. As with many illicit importing operations a tricky bit is the last retail step. Shipments need to be broken into units that will be affordable and available and this needs a staged operation with sometimes multiple ‘final miles’ involved. Several competing approaches were applied. Tobacco could be sold in pubs, under the counter of existing shops, or delivered directly. In the last case pizza companies were set up as fronts for tobacco delivery.

The level of entrepreneurial innovation going on here alerted me to the aspirational nature of illicit markets. Some illicit operations are attractive because they are the only game in town, sometimes participating in them offers purpose, income and aspiration and something resembling a career. While that was going on many others in the community rejected this as a route. They viewed illicit work as harmful to the community, attracting dangerous criminals and damaging its reputation. These markets were contested, and meaningful. Therefore when they are interdicted we should be aware of the fallout, positive and negative, and the absences left behind by them.