Planetary Messengers
PV Schmidt
We write a love note to a person far away, organise a political meeting in a particular place, or arrange a lunch, with the usual carrier of communication today: The messenger. Social contact today is preceded, facilitated or followed by chat over software such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Viber, or the Messaging-function of Facebook and Instagram. Every day arrangements on the planet happen through text chats, voice notes or digitalised calls.
We think of the internet as a global phenomenon, as it's everywhere, as a technology without borders. In theory, we can seamlessly reach everyone with an internet connection through a messenger. A pledge of a sheer infinite reach is already constrained through obvious inequality in accessibility of technological infrastructure, and capped at many points beyond. The origin of the barriers range from state and supranational legislation, over to app store rulings, or to the service's own moderation. The messengers unveil the delicate state of the open internet, as they’re central to contemporary digital life.
In the People's Republic of China, the Great Firewall, a juridical and technological arrangement encloses the internet inside the country through the blockage of manifold traffic, and oversees messaging. Within the European Union, internet censorship is utilized similarly for websites, used inter alia to “influence political discourse and favour businesses”. (Ververis et al. 2024, 142) A discussed chat control proposal attempts to for services to make all messages disclosable within Europe.
All mentioned messengers rely on being available in the software stores of Apple and Google, to reach the customers confronted with the quasi-duopoly of iOS and Android. Developers are subordinated to the companies audition for every update on their apps. To be able to stay inside the valuable markets of the respective states, they have to comply to state rulings.
In August 2024, Telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested at an Airport in France and held for four days in custody, with the accusation of facilitation and participation in criminal activities through the lack of moderation. Out on a €5 Mio. bail, Durov shortly afterwards harmonized Telegram’s data sharing with authorities worldwide, and cleared with human moderators and ‘AI’ a lot of ‘problematic content’ and banned affiliated users. (Agence France-Presse 2024) Outspoken intention of governing messaging are, among others, copyright violation, hate-speech, sexual exploitation, and prevention of drug trafficking and terrorism. Policies such as chat control look like a trade-off, but as with all mass-scale surveillance—before and after the Snowden revelations—crime is not necessary out of the way while privacy is cornered. (see Lyon 2015)
But how can the messenger (1-to-1) be governed, when secrecy of correspondence should not be in question? Some messengers are end-to-end encrypted by default (Whatsapp, Signal and Viber), without access to the terminal devices there is no way to inspect the content of communication. All the others are not encrypted at all (WeChat), not encrypted by default (Telegram, KakaoTalk, Viber, and Facebook and Instagram messaging)—offering it through additional configuration, entaling usually fewer features. The privacy paradox is a myth. Just because users don’t explicitly choose to have privacy, it doesn't mean they shouldn't have. (Solove 2021) Abandoning the possibility of it is nothing more than abandoning the rule of law and thus the basis for democracy. (Anderson 2022, 13–14)
The planetary as an entity to grasp a bigger picture joins the ranks with contemporary 21st century theory terms alike the Anthropocene. (Falb and Avanessian 2024) Both conceptualise the world as a whole, which lead with the Anthropocene more often than not to a negligence of power relations.[1]
This suggests, there is no user base as a whole, and the actual technologies behind the Planetary Messengers matter. The planetary is the moment to see technology as inseparable from politics. (Hui 2024a) As described, the messengers differ in encryption, which makes—even without present knowledge of a respective user—a big difference for privacy and its governance throughout. That privacy cannot merely be a privilege, is obvious to those who, under duress, rely on it. Constantly changing political configuration, the acceleration of inequality and a rightward shift in the West, for instance, will indisputable produce more persecuted requiring it.
Benjamin Bratton's theory of ‘planetary-scale computation’ presented contemporary politics as mainly driven by governments, transnational organisations and big firms, but left no space to breathe for the margins. (Bratton 2015) Yuk Hui’s recent philosophical project of Post-Europe reminds us that planetarisation is inevitable, “And to overcome planetarisation is to reorient ourselves, in order to redefine a locality or a situatedness.”, especially in relation to technology and its advancement. (Hui 2024b, 27) The planetary-discourse until now considers technology mostly as a to-be-managed challenge, and neglects its generativity for people’s every day life. Manifold iterations of theory produced on the Anthropocene instruct for discourse about the planetary, that despite resemblance, similarity or equivalence, there is no universal face-off with technology. In literature on the planetary, sovereignty is only discussed in relation to the nation state. The individual, or democratic subject, is overlooked. Sovereignty materialises with the messenger only through strictly private communication by default.
The brief threads on The Great Firewall of China, the EU’s discussed chat control’s and the detention of Telegram’s CEO only begin to localize the different construct’s around the messengers. Pavel Durov, a quadruple citizen of Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, United Arab Emirates and France, operates Telegram as a company registered in the British Virgin Islands and in Dubai, fled Russia because of the state’s influence on his previously run social network, V-Kontakte. A planetary account of technology needs to shed light on the geographies of developers and operators as well as users within their respective jurisdiction and local realities, including (geo)political dependencies and disparities as well as local and international inequalities.
Messengers provide us with the most immediate communication and hint to the very own conditions that we, and the technology itself, exist under on the planet.
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[1] Simon 2020 gives a brilliant overview over the development of the Anthropocene-narrative in theory. Malm and Hornborg 2014 provides a short pressing argument on how the Anthropocene helps to “…abandon the fundamental concerns of social science, which importantly include the theorization of culture and power.” (62) Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017 provide a very detailed account for the Anthropocene’s overall force to depoliticise.
Bibliography
Agence France-Presse. 2024. ‘Telegram’s Pavel Durov Announces New Crackdown on Illegal Content after Arrest’. The Guardian, 23 September 2024, sec. Technology. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/23/telegram-illegal-content-pavel-durov-arrest.
Anderson, Ross. 2022. ‘Chat Control or Child Protection?’ arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.08958.
Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2017. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Translated by David Fernbach. Paperback edition. London New York: Verso.
Bratton, Benjamin H. 2015. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Software Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Falb, Daniel, and Armen Avanessian. 2024. Thinking Planets: Hyper-Anticipation and Biographical Deep Time. Zeppelin University. https://zu.ub.uni-freiburg.de/data/11816.
Hui, Yuk. 2024a. Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2024b. Post-Europe. First. New York: Sequence Press.
Lyon, David. 2015. Surveillance After Snowden. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Wiley.
Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. 2014. ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’. The Anthropocene Review 1 (1): 62–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019613516291.
Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár. 2020. ‘The Limits of Anthropocene Narratives’. European Journal of Social Theory 23 (2): 184–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431018799256.
Solove, Daniel J. 2021. ‘The Myth of the Privacy Paradox’. George Washington Law Review 89 (no 1).
Ververis, Vasilis, Lucas Lasota, Tatiana Ermakova, and Benjamin Fabian. 2024. ‘Website Blocking in the European Union: Network Interference from the Perspective of Open Internet’. Policy & Internet 16 (1): 121–48. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.367.
