Wikifuror

So, the Wikipedia furor fascinates me. First, there was the initial backlash against the site, treating it as the downfall of knowledge and truth with the academy at its foundation: the problem was that just anyone could edit webpages, and well, it could just be anyone. The second wave concerns the project wikiscanner, which tracks the IP address of people editing Wikipedia pages, and subsequently identifies to the best of their abilities the identity of whoever edits. I think this has a few implications

One- understanding the death of the author may also require understanding cultural authorship. I don’t realize why direct corporate authorship of articles on Wikipedia matters so much. The author has died, indeed: it is impossible to identify any one writer as the authentic author of a work of the mind. To some degree, we always rely on the work of others to make ideas legible. However, that erasure of a single genesis point does not leave writing as a random process, floating in an ideological vacuum. Power relationships shape the meaning of ideas and how they are deployed, and it is a useful task to trace ideas employed in a work to a corporate or political source. Basically: with companies like Anheuser-Busch already controlling advertising and political campaigns both, who’s to say they aren’t authoring posts written by writers from other IP addresses? The person doing the typing matters less than you may think.

Two- The IP address as the new code for identity and authorship. To the extent that online discourse shapes political events and our understanding of the world, IP addresses are the one true link to individual agency remaining for analysis. IP addresses have several features that distinguish them from other forms of identity. They are explicitly regulated as on offshoot of corporate power. They are given out and assigned by companies with the power to reveal your identity, turn over records to law enforcement agencies, or really do whatever the crap they wanted. They function as a passcode: access is not denied at any point, but rather you trade in true anonymity and leeway for the ability of companies to track you. Part of that regulation and tracking involves implicit barriers to access established by class and race barriers. Other delineations of power involve technical knowledge: as an advanced and developed technical system, the Internet has running it an elite class of people with the technical knowledge to bend it to their will. That knowledge is the product of scarce and narrow education, as well as an acculturation into technical practice from a young age.

Duncan