Planetary Messengers
PV Schmidt
India’s most used chat software is Telegram. The messenger is legally based in the British Virgin Islands, operated from Dubai, and owned by Pavel Durov, a quadruple citizen of Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, the United Arab Emirates, and France.
In August 2024, 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 within Telegram. Out on a €5 million bail, he shortly afterwards harmonized Telegram’s data sharing with authorities worldwide, and cleared with moderators and ‘AI’ a lot of ‘problematic content’ and banned affiliated users. (Agence France-Presse)
A lot of social contact today, is preceded, facilitated or followed by chat, voice messages and calls over messengers. Operated on the internet, messengers appear as a technology transcending 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 barriers originate 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 life.
Messengers are developed and operated on said multilayered-platforms, novel jurisdictional configurations emerge. (Bratton) The concept of the ‘planetary’ helps to bring the physical infrastructure, the technology, together with the political into one to think about messengers; technology as inseparable from politics. (Hui)
The messengers are influenced by major legislation such as China’s Great Firewall. A juridical and technological arrangement enclosing the internet inside the country through the blockage of manifold traffic, and the overseeing of messages. Within the European Union, internet censorship is utilized similarly for websites, used inter alia to “influence political discourse and favour businesses”. (Ververis et al. 142) A discussed chat control proposal attempts to oblige messengers to make all communications disclosable within Europe.
Some messengers are end-to-end encrypted by default (Whatsapp, Signal, Viber and iMessage), without access to the terminal devices there is no way to inspect the chats. All the others are not encrypted at all (WeChat), or not encrypted by default (Telegram, KakaoTalk, Viber, and Facebook and Instagram messaging)—but can be enabled through additional configuration, usually with the compromise of fewer features.
A planetary account of messengers needs to consider 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. The planetary-discourse often considers technology as a to-be-managed challenge for grand transnational politics.[1]
But as there’s no universal face-off with technology, confronting it needs to always include the potentially suspicious—minorities and unreasonably prosecuted. The Snowden revelations taught us, that mass-surveillance and democracy are hardly reconcilable. (Lyon) With the messenger, personal sovereignty only materialises through strictly private communication by default. (Anderson 13–14)
Bibliography
Agence France-Presse. ‘Telegram’s Pavel Durov Announces New Crackdown on Illegal Content after Arrest’. The Guardian, 23 Sept. 2024. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/23/telegram-illegal-content-pavel-durov-arrest.
Anderson, Ross. Chat Control or Child Protection? 1, arXiv, 2022. DOI.org (Datacite), https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2210.08958.
Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Translated by David Fernbach, Paperback edition, Verso, 2017.
Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2015.
Hui, Yuk. Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking. University of Minnesota Press, 2024.
Lyon, David. Surveillance After Snowden. Wiley, 2015.
Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár. ‘The Limits of Anthropocene Narratives’. European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 23, no. 2, May 2020, pp. 184–99. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431018799256.
Ververis, Vasilis, et al. ‘Website Blocking in the European Union: Network Interference from the Perspective of Open Internet’. Policy & Internet, vol. 16, no. 1, Mar. 2024, pp. 121–48. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.367.
