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A proxy is “an agent or substitute authorized to act for another person or a document which authorizes the agent so to act” (Wikipedia). But a proxy could now also be a device with a bad hair day. A scrap of script caught up in a dress-code double bind. Or a “Persuading the Debtor” detector throwing a tantrum over genital pixel probability. Or a delegation of chat bots casually pasting pro-Putin hair lotion ads to your Instagram. It could also be something much more serious, wrecking your life in a similar way—sry life!
Proxies are devices or scripts tasked with getting rid of noise as well as bot armies hell-bent on producing it. They are masks, persons, avatars, routers, nodes, templates, or generic placeholders. They share an element of unpredictability—which is all the more paradoxical considering that they arise as result of maxed-out probabilities. But proxies are not only bots and avatars, nor is proxy politics restricted to datascapes. Proxy warfare is quite a standard model of warfare—one of the most important examples being the Spanish Civil War. Proxies add echo, subterfuge, distortion, and confusion to geopolitics. Armies posing as militias (or the other way around) reconfigure or explode territories and redistribute sovereignties. Companies pose as guerillas and legionnaires as suburban Tupperware clubs. A proxy army is made of guns for hire, with more or less ideological decoration. The border between private security, PMCs, freelance insurgents, armed stand-ins, state hackers, and people who just got in the way has become blurry. Remember that corporate armies were crucial in establishing colonial empires (the East India Company among others) and that the word “company” itself is derived from the name for a military unit. Proxy warfare is a prime example of a post-Leviathan reality.
Now that this whole range of activities has gone online, it turns out that proxy warfare is partly the continuation of PR by different means.24 Besides marketing tools repurposed for counterinsurgency ops there is a whole range of government hacking (and counter-hacking) campaigns that require slightly more advanced skills. But not always. As the leftist Turkish hacker group Redhack reported, the password of the Ankara police servers was 12345.25
To state that online proxy politics is reorganizing geopolitics would be similar to stating that burgers tend to reorganize cows. Indeed, just as meatloaf arranges parts of cows with plastic, fossil remnants, and elements formerly known as paper, proxy politics positions companies, nation-states, hacker detachments, FIFA, and the Duchess of Cambridge as equally relevant entities. Those proxies tear up territories by creating netscapes that are partly unlinked from geography and national jurisdiction.
But proxy politics also works the other way. A simple default example of proxy politics is the use of proxy servers to try to bypass local web censorship or communications restrictions. Whenever people use VPNs and other internet proxies to escape online restrictions or conceal their IP address, proxy politics is given a different twist. In countries like Iran and China, VPNs are very much in use.26 In practice though, in many countries, companies close to censor-happy governments also run the VPNs in an exemplary display of efficient inconsistency. In Turkey, people used even more rudimentary methods—changing their DNS settings to tunnel out of Turkish dataspace, virtually tweeting from Hong Kong and Venezuela during Erdoğan’s short-lived Twitter ban.
In proxy politics the question is literally how to act or represent by using stand-ins (or being used by them)—and also how to use intermediaries to detourne the signals or noise of others. And proxy politics itself can also be turned around and redeployed. Proxy politics stacks surfaces, nodes, terrains, and textures—or disconnects them from one another. It disconnects body parts and switches them on and off to create often astonishing and unforeseen combinations—even faces with butts, so to speak. They can undermine the seemingly mandatory decision between face or butt or even the idea that both have got to belong to the same body. In the space of proxy politics, bodies could be Leviathans, hashtags, juridical persons, nation-states, hair-transplant devices, or freelance SWAT teams. Body is added to bodies by proxy and by stand-in. But these combinations also subtract bodies (and their parts) and erase them from the realm of never-ending surface to face enduring invisibility. In the end, however, a face without a butt cannot sit. It has to take a stand. And a butt without a face needs a stand-in for most kinds of communication. Proxy politics happens between taking a stand and using a stand-in. It is in the territory of displacement, stacking, subterfuge, and montage that both the worst and the best things happen.
A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition
This is an image from the Snowden files. It is labeled “secret.”1 Yet one cannot see anything on it. This is exactly why it is symptomatic.
Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal. Information is passed on as a set of signals that cannot be picked up by human senses. Contemporary perception is machinic to a large degree. The spectrum of human vision only covers a tiny part of it. Electric charges, radio waves, light pulses encoded by machines for machines are zipping by at slightly subluminal speed. Seeing is superseded by calculating probabilities. Vision loses importance and is replaced by filtering, decrypting, and pattern recognition. Snowden’s image of noise could stand in for a more general human inability to perceive technical signals unless they are processed and translated accordingly.
But noise is not nothing. On the contrary, noise is a huge issue, not only for the NSA but for machinic modes of perception as a whole.
Signal v. Noise was the title of a column on the internal NSA website running from 2011 to 2012. It succinctly frames the NSA’s main problem: how to extract “information from the truckloads of data”: “It’s not about the data or even access to the data. It’s about getting information from the truck-loads of data … Developers, please help! We’re drowning (not waving) in a sea of data—with data, data everywhere, but not a drop of information.”2
Analysts are choking on intercepted communication. They need to unscramble, filter, decrypt, refine, and process “truckloads of data.” The focus moves from acquisition to discerning, from scarcity to overabundance, from adding on to filtering, from research to pattern recognition. This problem is not restricted to secret services. Even WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange states: “We are drowning in material.”3
Apophenia
But let’s return to the initial image. The noise on it was actually decrypted by GCHQ technicians to reveal a picture of clouds in the sky. British analysts have been hacking video feeds from Israeli drones since at least 2008, a period which includes the recent IDF aerial campaigns against Gaza.4 But no images of these attacks exist in Snowden’s archive. Instead, there are all sorts of abstract renderings of intercepted broadcasts. Noise. Lines. Color patterns.5 According to leaked training manuals, one needs to apply all sorts of massively secret operations to produce these kinds of images.6
But let me tell you something. I will decrypt this image for you without any secret algorithm. I will use a secret ninja technique instead. And I will even teach you how to do it for free. Please focus very strongly on this image right now.
Doesn’t it look like a shimmering surface of water in the evening sun? Is this perhaps the “sea of data” itself? An overwhelming body of water, which one could drown in? Can you see the waves moving ever so slightly?
I am using a good old method
