Suffering from Buffering?
Affects of Flow Control
WE SIT IN FRONT OF OUR COMPUTERS waiting for media to load. We stare at the familiar turning circle when a video buffers on YouTube. Buffering postpones the satisfaction of watching another cat play or learning how to assemble a new piece of furniture. At other times, bad connections cause our conversations to stutter into incomprehensible fragments. Distant friends and family cut out or suddenly speed up as the connection resynchronizes. Avatars perish in virtual worlds because of lag: a sudden pause, and we find ourselves staring up from the ground or floating above our digital corpses. Our communications online depend on responsive and reliable rates of transmission to such an extent that we suffer when we lose access. In our everyday internet use, we assume that transmission will be imperceptibly instantaneous. But common occurrences of waiting, frustration, and disconnection rupture this heedlessness, making us aware of transmission. Our cursors turn from a commanding arrow to a helpless circle spinning in an endless loop, so we have to wait a little longer. More packets need to arrive. There is too much “jitter.” We wait a little more. For what? Optimal conditions of transmission and a return to blissful heedlessness.
We might wonder as we wait. What bedevils us? Does the browser have a few bad plug-ins? Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer helps “enhance our experience” by ranking the delay introduced by its plug-ins, telling the user that, for example, a toolbar introduced a 0.07-second delay. Maybe the router should be restarted? New smart plugs allow you to power on and off your electronics remotely through a smartphone app or through Amazon Alexa voice commands. Should the internet service provider (ISP) be contacted to switch to a new service tier? Performance Internet can easily be upgraded to Internet Pro Plus for a fee. Diagnosis also turns inward. Did I cause the delay? What am I doing wrong? Did I download too much and blow the usage cap? Any or all of these worries and anxieties might run through one’s mind while waiting.
In these moments, computer screens usually display icons: spinning circles, pinwheels, or tirelessly turning hourglasses. They are examples of what Nicole Starosielski calls the “aesthetics of lag.” These icons also resemble “sigils,” an old word to describe symbols for demons. No sigil is perhaps more familiar than ouroboros, the snake forever eating its tail, now ubiquitous as the spinning loading circle. Staring at these sigils, users might wonder what bedevils their connection. The sigils give no answer. Buffering could be a by-product of a daemonic optimization. The affects of delay and buffering are a key influence of flow control, the power of daemons to create and distribute states of transmission. Such a result could be deliberate (in the case of The Pirate Bay discussed in the next chapter) or a mistake (as in the case of Rogers Internet discussed in chapter 7).
Where past chapters have explained the operation of flow control, this one analyzes the affective influence of daemons. “Affect” is a key concept for understanding media infrastructures, according to Starosielski and Lisa Parks. Building on this approach, I draw a link between the technical workings of flow control and the experience of communication online. As is well understood, lag and buffering create moments when we come into contact with the infrastructure, an awareness of being connected. The causes of buffering and delay are multiple: physical distance, “buggy” routers, obsolete computers. Whatever the cause, buffer is, according to Neta Alexander, an experience “on three different levels: as a temporary emotional distress, as a disruption that triggers various bodily reactions, and as an enduring and unrecognized affective response of anxiety.” Prior chapters have explained how daemons create these states; this one studies how avoidance of these experiences of delay and buffering comes to be desirable. How do the technical workings of daemons, in other words, come to be meaningful to us?
In this chapter, I trace a link between unarticulated affect and the feelings associated with buffering. Media theorist Taina Bucher, for example, interviews people about their lay understandings of algorithms. Her work traces the affective influence of algorithms and their relationship to human meanings. She finds an algorithmic imaginary: the ways people understand algorithms. Where her study captures a micropolitics of algorithmic control, I argue that larger systems of meaning for daemons circulate through advertising. Advertisements fill the silence left by sigils. “Internet not performing well? Time to switch to the fastest Internet.” “Why wait?” These advertising messages give meaning to the a-semiotic work of daemons.
While there has been some illuminating work interviewing internet customers about their lay understandings of the network, these advertisements succinctly articulate a range of feelings associated with flow control. In only thirty seconds or less, commercials appeal to popular feelings about internet use as a value proposition for why the public should pay for their services. These commercials cast optimization as something either frustrating or delightful. Advertisements distill feelings of speed, delay, being in sync, envy, and boredom. They also explain how these feelings exist in context, claiming that some customers feel superior because they do not experience delay like their neighbors. ISPs’ advertisements offer a rich source for articulations of the affective influence of flow control. I have selected five commercials to analyze as key testimony about the affective states and feelings inspired by flow control. These selections are intended to work as a means to think through these concepts rather than as a complete catalog of emotions felt when communicating on the internet.
Daemons, Affect, and Meaning
My interest in the felt experience of transmission resonates with what Patricia Clough has described as the “affective turn.” Affect has a much richer and contested history than can be discussed here, but it can be defined as “pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act.” The use of “pre-individual” points to that which circulates before people have feelings or meanings. Affects then are a plurality of conditions, commonalities, and habits or events that are folded into the human experience. Infrastructures have affects. The internet has what Susanna Paasonen, Ken Hillis, and Michael Petit call “networked” affects related to the conditions of communication and being in communication. As they explain,
Networked communications involve the circulation of data and information, but they equally entail a panoply of affective attachments: articulations of desire, seduction, trust, and memory; sharp jolts of anger and interest; political passions; investments of time, labor, and financial capital; and the frictions and pleasures of archival practices.
Adrian Mackenzie captures this affective influence of transmission in his concept of “wirelessness”:
[“Wirelessness”] designates an experience toward entanglements with things, objects, gadgets, infrastructures and services and imbued with indistinct sensations and practices of network-associated change. Wirelessness affects how people arrive, depart and inhabit places, how they relate to others and indeed, how they embody change.
Wirelessness is a kind of networked affect that preconditions how people relate to each other in connected spaces. These entanglements—humans on their phones attached to public WiFi and connected to their personal networks—have to be in communication and are made possible by the invisible ether of wireless signals. Daemons also live in these entanglements, and it is their particular affective influence that interests this chapter.
Internet daemons are a unique object through which to study affect. They are at the locus of the conditions of circulation and affective attachments. Their flow control creates frictions and disrupts tempos that register affectively. Flow control is an affective influence. It involves modulations of transmission, leading some networks to entangle better than others, often subtly so. This augments or diminishes a network’s capacity to be and a body’s ability to be networked.
Daemons’ influence is more communicative than informational. This distinguishes the influence of daemons from comparable studies of algorithms. Nick Diakopolous, in his foundational work on computational journalism, emphasizes how algorithms prioritize, classify, associate, and filter information. These algorithmic activities dictate what appears on screen, whereas daemons influence the responsiveness of the screen. Flow control resembles what Tarleton Gillespie describes as a “cycle of anticipation” in his own review of the “relevance of algorithms.” Social media anticipate user requests (for instance, autocompleting a search query) to ensure a better, by virtue of being more responsive, user experience.
Daemons’ affective influence on networks is a kind of “priming,” a concept developed by Brian Massumi, a major contributor to the theory of affect. Priming “orientat[es] a participant’s entry into a situation.” In other words, priming involves the preconditions of encounter, and online, these include the conditions of transmission: the waiting; the slight stutter; those moments spent wondering if the Wi-Fi router has to be reset, why the video chat cuts out, or how the last 10 percent of loading always takes longer than the first 90 percent. By modulating the conditions of transmission, internet daemons prime users for their experience on a network as being delayed, timely, or instantaneous. Their flow control assigns resources that enhance or degrade the act of networking.
Priming is felt, but not necessarily consciously. Individual feelings of frustration or delay articulate the broader affects of flow control. These articulations resemble Raymond Williams’s concept, foreshadowing the affective turn, of “structures of feeling,” which he describes as “a cultural hypothesis” that theorizes “a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominating characteristics.” Structures of feeling closely fit those individual experiences of staring at the familiar ouroboros loop when a video buffers on YouTube. Even though all internet users experience delay (the time taken to sit and wait for content), they often feel it as a unique personal experience. Where Williams focuses on the affective nature of “dominant systems of belief and education,” this chapter follows his logic to analyze the common feelings that ensue from the affective influence of flow control.
I use advertisements to track the articulation of structures of feeling from the affects of flow control. Advertisements are one part of a “circuit from affect to subjectively felt emotional states.” Zizi Papacharissi argues that advertising “engages potential consumers through the suggestion of a possible affective attachment they might develop for a product . . . [and therefore] directs audiences to produce particular affects that align with the advertised product.” The same logic applies to ISPs advertising their services. Their advertisements give the work of daemons an emotional charge and foster tangible feelings associated with the daemons’ influence: frustration at delay, angst from being out of sync, or delight in an otherwise heedless moment of uninterrupted surfing. Advertisements also connect daemons’ polychronous optimizations to broader structures of feeling and affects. Fast internet service connects to a more general desire for speed. Conversely, delay exacerbates the anxiety of falling behind or out of touch in a moment of social acceleration. This chapter traces a circuit that begins with the affective priming of flow control that advertisements attach to other affects and articulate in known structures of feeling.
We Own Faster: The Fast and the Non-faster
Waiting for the next bus to arrive, commuters seek some modest protection from the rain or snow in small shelters. Marketers have noted the prime locations of these shelters on street corners in urban centers and have begun advertising on their walls. Smart campaigns, like Comcast’s in 2007, take advantage of the shelters’ unique locations to target commuters. The poster copy reads in big print: “Legal Notice.” Below, a declaration also in bold, states “We Own Faster.™” Commuters, the ad continues, do not have to worry, because the bus, with “its many stops,” is a “non-Faster form of transportation,” so it does not infringe on Comcast’s ownership of “speed and swiftness.” The ad reminds commuters that their waiting can be avoided. You can pay your way out of the “non-Faster” internet by joining Comcast, just as you can buy a car and drive to work. The ad is particularly ironic given Comcast’s use of a bus metaphor to describe packet prioritization in chapter 4. Some packets had to wait to get on the bus while other packets got on immediately. As much as Comcast attempted to use the bus as a neutral metaphor to describe its traffic management, their advertisement reveals the cultural and affective feelings attached to taking the bus. Priority, in its many forms, is a privilege of speed.
The ad affectively attaches internet speed to privilege. Certainly, speed functions as a kind of heedlessness about the conditions of transmission. “Fast” implies that the problems of transmission over a distance never intrude on the user’s consciousness. The privilege of fast also allows users to enjoy the wider structure of feeling related to speed. By selling fast, Comcast aligns its internet service with a cultural “chronotopism,” a term John Armitage and Joanne Roberts use to refer to the business literature around the turn of the millennium that embraced high speed as a kind of utopia. Speed is valuable. Armitage and Phil Graham suggest high-speed networks have an economic necessity, since modern, or rather hypermodern, capitalism demands the negation of space and time so it can function on the global stage. The growth of high-frequency trading or algorithmic trading, for example, depends on almost zero delay. The Hibernian Express, a network link between New York and London, is currently being built at a cost of $300 million solely to reduce delay by five to six milliseconds. Chronotopism aligns with a widespread myth that political economist Vincent Mosco describes as the “digital sublime.” According to the proponents of this myth, the internet promised to annihilate time and space and would be fast enough to put the entire world in instant contact. This sublime feeling of speed, as Comcast reminds us, is not evenly distributed.
Though Comcast wants its customers to feel faster, not all internet users do. By contrasting the slow bus with the fast Comcast network, the ad signals the relationship between status and network performance. As Jonathan Crary notes in his work on the 24/7 society, “one of the superficial but piercing truisms about class society is that the rich never have to wait.” The rich (according to Crary) or the fast (according to Comcast) benefit from a faster internet in part because the slow suffer with annoying wait times and interrupted streaming. Comcast reminds those waiting for the bus that, if they had some extra income they could drive, just as those waiting for a download on its basic Economy Plus plan could upgrade for just sixty dollars a month to its Extreme 105 plan. Comcast claims that faster internet service will include faster loading of web pages (because “waiting for pages to load is an annoyance”) and uninterrupted streaming, so that “one can stream media without interruptions and long gone are the days of reloading videos or movies in the middle of watching.”
These different tiers of speed serve as a reminder that the existence of Fast depends on the existence of “non-Faster.” Inequity distinguishes speed, a logic that Paul Virilio considers in his dromology, or “study of the logic of speed.” For Virilio, speed functions as a new kind of class. Forms of incarceration like the poorhouse, prison, or shantytowns “solve a problem less of enclosure or exclusion than of traffic.” By containing their subjects, prisons move slowly, whereas highways and private boulevards afford faster forms of circulation. These two different speeds stratify society like classes. Comcast, similarly, implicitly divides users of the internet into two classes: the Fast and the non-Fast. By positioning itself as “Owning Faster,” the company appoints itself the governor of speeds, deciding who gets to luxuriate in fastness and who suffers in non-fastness.
The idea of “owning faster” can also suggest to users a need to accept polychronous optimization as necessary and accept that Comcast knows how best to optimize for speed. With the passing of the FCC Restoring Internet Freedom Order, these types of speed tiers might become more common. New incentives for marketplace innovation likely will lead to even better daemons to stratify bandwidth into ever more granular tiers and classes. In contrast to the United States, in other countries, flow control has become more regulated in recent years (as will be discussed in chapter 7). These network neutrality regulations still allow for reasonable network management. In Canada, ISPs cannot discriminate, but they still can manage transmission on their networks. Cathy Avgiris, executive vice president and general manager of communications and data services at Comcast Cable, explained in a company press release announcing its decision to end usage caps that Comcast is “committed to manage data usage on our network with a clear set of important principles designed to maximize the benefits of using our high-speed data service to access the Internet for all of our customers” (italics added). By associating itself with speed, Comcast self-justifies its network optimization as the best way to achieve fastness, essentially inventing its own standard for accountability. In its advertising, Comcast sends a clear signal that it knows how to ensure the broadest possible feeling of speed.
Differences in network performance, however, cannot be described by the feeling of fastness alone. Indeed, fast versus slow oversimplifies the affective influence of flow control. What is the inverse? If the Fast necessitates the non-Fast, what feelings manifest from unprioritized networks? The following two examples focus on the negative side of speed: the feelings of frustration and isolation due to delay. These feelings, as well as fastness and slowness, become part of complex network optimizations that draw on the affective influence of flow control.
Suffering from Buffering? Frustrating Attention
A video of a snowboarder approaching a jump begins to play on a Rogers Internet sales page; it stops just before the snowboarder launches off. A loading bar appears indicating that data must be buffered to provide smooth video playback. The bar appears for only a second before Rogers reveals the twist: the video has been loaded the whole time. Above the loading bar, the snowboarder turns to the viewer (breaking the fourth wall) and explains that customers of Rogers Internet no longer have to wait. Rogers’s high-speed internet is the cure for anyone “suffering from buffering.” But unlike other companies, Rogers Internet sells both the poison and the cure.
What does it mean to suffer from buffering? The malady, as diagnosed by Rogers, results from the awareness of delay, that feeling of frustration while waiting for the snowboarder to complete the jump, as much as from the delay itself. The loading bar symbolizes delayed gratification. The hoax’s power comes from acknowledging that delayed transmissions frustrate users in the same way any unresponsive system would. The snowboarder breaks the fourth wall just at the moment when the viewer expects the pay-off. The ad then knows the moment of peak attention, that emotionally charged time of anticipation, and uses it to deliver its message. In doing so, the ad tries to articulate these affective conditions of waiting as a meaningful emotion to viewers. It articulates the affects of transmission as feelings related to delay and frustrations of cultural expectations around computer use in addition to reasserting its important role in distributing these attachments through its internet service.
For as long as user experience has been measured in computing, delay causes frustration. Robert B. Miller, a pioneer in human–computer interaction, found that users disliked a gap between entering their command and receiving the response. He measured frustration by asking how long people would wait for a response from a computer. How quickly did computers need to respond to not frustrate users? He found users expected a System Response Time (SRT) of one tenth of a second, meaning that a user expected some response in less than the blink of an eye after entering a command. At the time, a response meant an acknowledgment of an input, rather than the actual output, for example the sound of a click when a mouse selects an object on screen. Users would wait a little longer for new information such as a next page or new frame. As Miller wrote:
The user—and his attention—is captive to the terminal until he receives a response. If he is a busy man, captivity of more than [fifteen] seconds, even for information essential to him, may be more than an annoyance or a disruption. It can readily become a demoralizer—that is a reducer of work pace and of motivation to work.
As computers developed, SRT became a measure of usability. A functional system, one that does not demoralize its users, lessened delay and met users’ response expectations.
Researchers in human–computer interaction continued to explore responsiveness long after Miller conducted his studies in the late 1960s. Compaq Computers interviewed over 1,250 workers about their experiences using computers in 1999. A quarter of those surveyed admitted to experiencing daily frustration with their machines (and three quarters admitted to swearing at their computers). Another study asked a class of thirty-seven students what about using computers caused them frustration, and delay online was a common cause. Frustration defined a significant portion of their computer experience. As much as “one third to one half of the time spent in front of the computer was lost due to frustrating experiences” caused by “error messages, timed out/dropped/refused connections, freezes, long download time, and missing/hard-to-find features.” Frustration led to anxiety, stress, and discomfort. These studies, while focused on computer use in general, demonstrate that computers affectively charge life on screen and that these affective attachments manifest in feelings or even physical outbursts (such as the Compaq study’s finding that 25 percent of workers under the age of twenty-five would occasionally kick their computers).
Delay still frustrates users today. In many ways, internet users may have become more impatient as the technology has accelerated. As a participant stated in a study of internet experience: “You get a bit spoiled I guess once you’re used to the quickness, then you want it all the time.” Contemporary networks certainly perform faster than early computers did. In 2014, the average latency (or round-trip time) between a command and its response was 0.04025 seconds in the United States and 0.0406 seconds in Canada, according to data from Measurement Lab (M-Lab). Deviation from responsiveness influences user behavior. Research conducted in 2006 found that viewers abandoned videos after four seconds of loading time. In 2009, users would not wait more than two seconds for a shopping website to load. In 2012, users began abandoning a video if it did not load in two seconds. User impatience concerns cloud computing services as well. Google Drive, Dropbox, and BitTorrent Sync have all been evaluated and ranked by their responsiveness. BitTorrent claimed when it launched its new Sync cloud service that it was sixteen times faster than its competitors. Sync took forty-one seconds to upload a 1.36-gigabyte video file, as opposed to DropBox, which took eleven minutes. While the results could be contested, BitTorrent’s performance of the test demonstrates the belief that delay threatens user satisfaction with cloud computing. How long is someone willing to wait to access a file in the cloud?
Through delay, flow control functions as a subtle influence on internet use by drawing on cultural expectations of responsiveness. This influence is reminiscent of Gillespie’s description of the effects of Digital-Rights-Management (DRM) technologies as a kind of “effective frustration.” He suggests that DRM has a certain power as a control technology that does not prevent unauthorized uses but makes transgressions frustrating enough to deter them probabilistically. Digital locks are not unbreakable, but they introduce enough of a delay to sway people from circumventing copyright law. Frigging around, so to speak, with a piece of software becomes a waste of time after a while. Effective frustration depends on digital media being valued because they save time. To put it another way, digital media work when users are in control, not staring at a pinwheel, rebooting the “damn thing” after it crashes, or wasting an hour only to realize it was never going to work in the first place. DRM needs to add only a little bit of frustration in order to discourage certain uses.
Where DRM frustrates users away from authorized use, flow control might frustrate users enough to switch from piracy to legitimate channels of content consumption. Flow control might delay certain networks as a way to discipline user behavior. (Discipline is not always necessary, as internet daemons can forever manage certain users or traffic without a need to modify behavior). Delay frustrates users away from illicit networks, perhaps toward more profitable ones that behave reliably. This relatively gentle pushing is an example of “nudge theory,” a popular application of behavioral psychology in which indirect cues reinforce certain behaviors. In the case of flow control, the effects of delay subtly guide users away from networks deemed too costly or risky by internet service providers. Enigmax, a writer for the news blog TorrentFreak, which is dedicated to covering Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and piracy issues, accused the cyber-locker RapidShare of using delay to deter pirates. Anyone using the site without a paid account (an unattractive option for someone accustomed to getting content for free) would experience reduced download speeds. Verizon, under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for its throttling of mobile users with unlimited data plans, admitted they used traffic management to “ensure that this small group of customers [who download large amounts of data] do not disadvantage all others.” Delay, in other words, affectively influences users to stop being so active without telling them to stop.
The Rogers ad also primes users toward feeling frustrated during the work of watching. Dallas Smythe argues that audiences work for their over-the-air television programs by performing the labor of paying attention to advertisements. Television channels sold advertisers audience commodities: aggregates of attention tied to specific demographics. While Smythe’s premise focuses his model on the broadcasting era, J. Macgregor Wise introduces the broader term of “attention assemblage.” Attention is not given, but assembled through a multiplicity of sociotechnical practices. Watching videos online involves an attention assemblage that is different from prime-time, popcorn, and a couch. Videos may capture attention either virally, “as a clip that spreads to the masses via digital word-of-mouth mechanisms without significant change,” or mimetically, in a form “that lures extensive creative user engagement in the form of parody, pastiche, mash-ups or other derivative work.” These distinct modes of attending (either as watching or as manipulating and remixing) require reliable transmission to ensure the appropriate information arrives at the appropriate moment of attention.
The commercial by Rogers Internet reminds viewers of the company’s influence over the distribution of delay. Disrupting the attention assemblage is a powerful influence, as considerable effort goes into capturing attention online. Netflix, in its 2012 annual report, acknowledges that their “reputation and ability to attract, retain and serve [their] subscribers is dependent upon the reliable performance of [their] computer systems,” and delay is a symptom of unreliability. If it is an ordeal to actually watch the show, if video always buffers, has the network negatively primed the user? By increasing commitment to its public stance in favor of net neutrality, one might conclude that Netflix worried that vertically integrated ISPs like Comcast or Verizon would compete with Netflix by delaying its traffic to frustrate its customers. With its repeal in the United States, Netflix vulnerability might be a new profit center for ISPs. These few examples, far from being exhaustive, demonstrate the ability of delay and lag to disrupt the attention assemblage of the web.
The commercial draws a link between the affective capacity of flow control to delay and the ensuing feelings of frustration. Internet daemons cause networks to be delayed (intentionally or not). Delay manifests as individual feelings of frustration and impatience that prime internet users: it both disrupts attention assemblages and alters the preferred networks of internet users. But delay causes feelings other than frustration as well: it can isolate and exclude certain users from being in communication with one another. These feelings can be discussed better in relation to the next advertisement.
Dancing by Myself: Feeling Left Out
A man dressed in a trench coat walks to the center of Grand Central Station. Commuters pass by as he stares at its iconic clock. All the noise of human commotion seems to pause as the clock strikes noon. The man pulls off his coat to reveal an all-black outfit. He begins to dance. His moves appear choreographed though no one else joins him. The longer he dances, the more he appears out of sync with the busy station. He begins to search for eye contact only to discover the glares of a small crowd in matching outfits, his peers. He stops and checks his cellphone, which displays a loading bar for a second then a message informing him that the “flash mob” has been pushed back to 12:30 p.m. “Don’t be the last to know,” an announcer warns before the AT&T logo appears. To put it another way, don’t embarrass yourself by dancing like a fool in public because you’re behind the times. AT&T’s reliable and fast mobile internet promises to keep you better in touch with your fellow dancers.
AT&T plays on such common experiences of disconnection and isolation to remind viewers that reliable transmission ensures better adherence to social tempos. A difference of a second past noon is long enough to distinguish a hipster in a flash mob from a fool dancing alone. “Information,” as Virilio writes, “is only of value if it is delivered fast.” Social coordination and cooperation depend on certain rates of transmission so that, for example, the flash mob can dance in formation. Temporalities, as stated above, are manifolds of past, future, and present. The ad assumes the dancer is part of one temporality. The scene in Grand Central presumably happened after a shared meeting to discuss the plan, set a time, and synchronize their watches. Up until the event, the dancers likely practiced their moves on their own in preparation for the event. They converged in the station, all in sync, but an email informs most of the participants of a delay. They adjust accordingly, except for the protagonist, who falls out of sync with his peers. He is behind the times just enough that his future entails dancing alone in front of his unamused friends. The public humiliation and regret of being the lone dancer stands in for the many real anxieties caused by being disconnected from social temporalities. The AT&T ad whispers subtextually that you need a fast network to keep up with the times.
These concerns are quite real. In the United Kingdom, for example, ISP TalkTalk misclassified the OnLive gaming service as P2P traffic. As a result, gamers experienced random disconnections and delay. They suffered, in other words, from being unable to participate in a virtual community, a subtle isolation caused by flow control. Though delays to BitTorrent and other P2P file-sharing networks have been well documented, concerns have also been raised that some ISPs shape internet telephone, or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), traffic. A joint investigation by the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) and the European Commission (EC) found at least one ISP that managed VoIP traffic on wired networks and twenty-seven mobile operators that restricted VoIP traffic to varying levels. To the end user, these disruptions may be both mysterious and frustrating when just trying to catch up with friends.
While the commercial expresses the anxiety of being disconnected, flow control might also create anxiety causing people to disconnect. Packet inspection daemons increasingly count usage, charging users a fee for transmitting data above these limits. Feelings manifest as a result of these caps. Participants in one study of bandwidth caps “struggled with understanding what mysterious processes or applications and websites were using up bandwidth.” Users worry that they will “go over their cap” and “have to pay more.” The threat of a high bill with overage charges compels users subject to a cap on their bandwidth to regulate their use accordingly. As one participant of the study put it: “I think [my daughter] is actually very sweet when she said she won’t have Facebook and all that because Facebook would suck [bandwidth]. And I used to Skype full time with my friends in the UK [but] now [I] stopped doing that.” These anxieties speak to how an awareness of overage might function as another disciplinary force on users. Fear that their ISPs watch their bandwidth consumption (no matter the accuracy of these charges) leads to an economization of internet usage in which users internalize the costs of bandwidth and regulate their behavior.
ISPs have devised a cure for these worries: zero rating, a technique used by ISPs to exclude certain services like their own movie stores, sponsored content, or internet telephony services from the data cap. Comcast offered an internet telephony service without a cap so users can talk away without worrying about overages. Naturally, its competitors’ VoIP services are not exempt from the cap. In Canada, mobile internet providers had tried to offer their own television streaming, charging by the hour rather than the megabyte, so subscribers to Bell Mobility can enjoy Bell Mobile TV for ten hours, but they have to worry about exceeding their data limit if they watch too much Netflix.
So far, advertisements have connected the affects of flow control with broader structures of feeling related to acceleration or feelings of being delayed. The AT&T commercial suggests another “digital divide.” Generally, divides exist between those who can afford access and those who cannot, the information “haves” and “have-nots.” AT&T draws a divide between those who can ignore the conditions of transmission and those who must be constantly aware, those who have to worry about whether they will receive the update about the flash mob in time and those who take the network for granted. These divides suggest how flow control has a relational influence. Experiences of delay and other network effects are always comparable. Slow permits the fast. Frustration makes relief all the more appealing. The next section analyzes how network optimization creates a broader structure of feeling that includes both the delayed and the accelerated.
You Can’t Get This with the Other Guys: The Optimized and the Disoptimized
Two men, a host and his guest, sit in front of a modern iMac computer. Something has prompted them to use the internet, though their motivations for going online, like the computer screen, are hidden from the audience. The action begins with the guest’s reaction to the speed of his host’s computer connection. “This is awesome,” he exclaims, as the scene cuts to an angle showing the computer screen playing a music video. When the guest protests, “but I have the exact same computer and mine is never this fast,” the host turns to the camera to explain: “The difference is I have Rogers Internet with their SpeedBoost technology. It detects when there is available bandwidth and it automatically turbo-charges stuff so it loads way faster.” As he finishes his pitch, his wife brings the two men cups of coffee. She has no speaking role and does not even acknowledge the guest. For approximately five of the scene’s twenty-three seconds, she lovingly caresses her husband and then walks off. All the while, the guest looks at them both, appearing jealous not only of the host’s wife but also of his superior internet. “That’s just not fair,” he laments, and the host agrees, “No, it is not fair.” The advertisement aims to convince Canadian consumers to subscribe to Rogers Internet because its SpeedBoost technology is something “you can’t get with the other guy’s network.”
The commercial further connects those feelings caused by delay with a broader social trend called “social acceleration.” This trend is a long-term and historic process distinct from, though related to, economic change (i.e., capitalism) and noneconomic factors by which people experience a loss or decline of the amount of time available for perception and decision making. (Concern over the fast pace of life dates at least as far back as Montesquieu commenting on the hurry of France and Alex de Tocqueville’s concerns over the restless American character.) Social acceleration includes accelerations in the rate of technological development, social change, and the pace of life. Less time is allowed for decision or reflection. Since these cycles of acceleration cause a loss, they provoke anxiety that there is no longer time to think, deliberate, or relax. Instead, people have to constantly react to keep up with the times. Crary describes this contemporary anxiety to keep up as “near irresistible because of the portent of social and economic failure—the fear of falling behind, of being deemed outdated.” Social acceleration might be seen to intensify those feelings of anxiety and isolation when desynchronized from the fast pace of society. Any moment spent doing anything other than interacting is wasted time.
Yet social acceleration is not an even process (not everyone accelerates). The Rogers commercial gestures toward this uneven distribution of acceleration. The ad articulates a sense of flow control as a process of uneven modulations that distribute feelings of delay, anxiety, and speed that closely relate to class and privilege. A future not evenly distributed. Some users feel frustration, and others exuberance. Some applications seem delayed, and others seem prompt and reliable. It is not just fast and slow, for as seen in the commercial, uneven flow control opens up a field of difference that allows a person to act smug and privileged. These commercials sell their services as providing privileged access to these feelings while reminding viewers that ending delay and isolation might be just a service tier away.
This tiered system resembles what Sarah Sharma, in her writings on time and power, theorizes as a “bio-political economy of time,” which she explains as “concerned with the multiplicity of time, the interdependent and inequitable relations of temporal difference that are compressed deep within the social fabric.” She gives the example of air travel, a relevant example here, since communication and transportation have been separate only since the electric telegraph. Air travel has its own economy of time, the time spent in a plane’s seats. Passengers can pay to travel first class and enjoy the trip in spacious seats or be forced to endure the constant innovations in economy-class seat design. Yet, this luxury can be justified only amid the demands of an overreaching work life. As Sharma writes, first class participates in the “normalizing of overwork by making it more palatable.” In other words, first-class travel makes overwork luxurious. By referring to these relations as an economy, Sharma emphasizes the relative values of different feelings, which resemble the different costs attached to service tiers by Rogers Internet. By seating them next to each other, Rogers draws a comparison between the host and the guest as symbols of different connection statuses. “The other guys” refers to those suffering from buffering, feeling out of touch and slow. Conversely, Rogers customers experience a lot more than fast: an attractive feeling for affluent households with no time to lose. The optimized and the disoptimized are on display.
In the commercial, Rogers Internet sells an accelerated temporality known as SpeedBoost, part of its broader polychronous optimization. SpeedBoost is a branded name for a quality-of-service configuration that accelerates short bursts of data, resulting in faster speeds for specific applications like YouTube. Faster, but contextually faster. Users pay to access boosted speeds to avoid waiting for videos or short bursts of data. SpeedBoost depends on daemons to choose these opportunities and select applications for boosting. Users experience a contextually faster internet with certain boosted applications chosen by configured algorithms and delayed applications like P2P file sharing.
Feelings of flow control, then, include moments of exuberance, and of the sublime, but also of frustration. While the guest character likely will return home to the disappointment of a slow internet, he experiences a moment of joy at being able to use a fast internet connection. He notices that awesome feeling that the host experiences every day. Suddenly the internet actually behaves according to cultural expectations of computing and chronotopism: everything is fast and users can be heedless of the conditions of transmission.
Rogers Internet further blends the value of boosted speed with male fantasies of being in the driver’s seat and being an object of desire. The lingering touch of the host’s wife serves to remind the audience of the inadequacy of the other guy. To the targeted masculine audience, a fast internet is a status symbol just like an attractive, subservient wife. The ad depends on convincing its audience that access to this boosted temporality is valuable enough to switch to Rogers and situates the wife as another object of desire as part of this status. The guest embodies “the other guy,” as he lacks the status of both speed and an attractive wife, but his exclusion is necessary because the value of a boosted temporality depends on the existence of an “other guy” who moves slowly and lacks status. Rogers attempts social stratification through describing the value of the boost in its advertisement and by enacting a less frustrating internet experience with its SpeedBoost technology. This stratification exemplifies one form of network optimization that regularizes relations and hierarchies within internet communications.
What can be done to resist this uneven distribution? Not much, apart from switching providers, according to these four advertisements. Each lacks any representation of audience reception and/or resistance to flow control. How do people respond to delay other than with frustration? Getting up out of the chair or doing something else seems like a more plausible response than passively waiting. A penultimate video suggests how a broader desire for speed may override such tactical responses. Perhaps it is easier to wait a little longer than it is to come to terms with the real issue. Desire for heedless transmission necessitated by capitalism, assumed by social acceleration, or mythologized by the internet may fold into home internet users’ willingness to wait a little longer rather than admit to being one of the non-Fast.
What Do We Do While Waiting?
A finger pushes down on a mouse, tapping out a rhythm to match the boredom of a man waiting in front of his computer. The commercial cuts to his computer screen showing another loading bar. Where the other commercials have alluded to the frustration of delay or have condensed it, this commercial dwells on delay for its entirety. The man has to find ways to pass the time until his download finishes. He bounces a ball then tries some stretches until eventually crying out to his offscreen partner to ask if their internet is slow. “Yes,” a voice replies back, and then the commercial turns back to the man’s face to show he has grown a thick beard whose length gives a very obvious cue to the viewers about how much time has been wasted. The screen goes black, and again an ISP, this time RoadRunner Internet, reminds its audience not to waste their time and to get faster service. The beard is a reminder that time spent waiting can never be regained. “Speed is time saved in the most absolute sense of the word,” according to Virilio, “since it becomes human time.” Each second spent waiting is lost, dead forever. Though the commercial never suggests an answer, the question is still: Why suffer from buffering? Could waiting be something other than a waste of time? Why wait longer? Why not get up and leave?
The protagonist comes close to unplugging but never does. Instead, he exemplifies what Linda Stone popularly called “continuous partial attention.” Stone devised the term to refer to the phenomenon of users paying attention to multiple media at once. The protagonist demonstrates this experience as he exercises and stretches but never stops partially attending to his computer. If he left the computer altogether, he would have rejected the tempo of the internet. Instead, he shows a much more troublesome aspect of how flow control folds with other social desires to enforce its influence.
The emotions described above help understand why we do not look away. Digital culture developed with a promise of both responsive machines and a better ability to manage society. Delay frustrates the desires of various computer cultures for users to feel in control. Perhaps responsiveness isn’t the issue: perhaps users simply seek the satisfaction of finishing a job, the work of attending. Or do the demands of capitalism compel users to endure waiting because the threat of leaving may be too costly? Do users wait in order to sustain the myth of the obliteration of time and space? Chronotopism has woven a strong desire for speed into society. Perhaps waiting is an extension of a technological fetish that David Harvey describes as when “we endow technologies—mere things—with powers they do not have (e.g., the ability to solve social problems, to keep the economy vibrant, or to provide us with a superior life).” The fetish creates a desire to wait in order to attain this superior life, and turning away might represent too painful an acknowledgment that it is a fantasy. All these possibilities represent only the start of a catalog of the desires imbricated with flow control, augmenting its influence.
The familiar ouroboros sigil seems to reinforce the desire to keep staring. Web design techniques, for example, attempt to extend the user’s patience by avoiding any indication of wait time. Most loading indicators mimic the ouroboros sigil rather than a more informative progress bar. The first browsers, like Mosaic or Netscape, set the trend by using a “throbber” animation at the top right of the screen to indicate a page’s loading. The throbber pulses, spins, or shows a dancing dragon until the page loads, but unlike a progress bar, it does not indicate wait time. If experimental research suggests that a progress bar lessens the frustration of delay, then why not substitute it for a throbber? Too difficult technically? Possibly, but a progress bar might also be too much of an admission of failure to be responsive for a firm like Netscape then, or Netflix now, to accept. Or perhaps adding a loading bar would disrupt the user’s attention too much (by allowing a glance away or another momentary tactic) to be permitted by the attention assemblage. If one knew the amount of time to wait, one could leave and do other tasks. A progress bar allows you to slack off or step away. Instead, the sigil eschews even the estimation of an outcome, and the uncertain delay of the throbber tempts the user to keep waiting, as a response could be a moment away.
Chronotopism and a need for speed translate into unattainable definitions of the optimal. A good network is a fast network even though a fast network cannot be good to all its customers. The realities of shared infrastructure imply that not everyone can be fast. Instead, daemons are programmed or have to manage bandwidth inequitably in order to maintain the status of speed, instant contact, and no waiting for those who can pay for these feelings. The challenge in a polychromous optimization is to find new ways to stratify users, to create value through the modulations of transmission.
Could other emotions be a speculative basis for another optimization? Could delay and lag be seen as a common, rather than individual, feeling? Instead of trying to one-up our neighbors, the limits of bandwidth could be treated as a shared concern and delay could become a cause for inclusion rather than isolation. Crary notes that waiting has a social dimension, as seen in the last moments of the Soviet Union as documented in the film D’Est by Chantal Akerman. The film includes long scenes of waiting, a common experience in this forgotten time. This waiting is a very different way to deal with issues of scarcity from what these five commercials propose. Crary writes, “mixed in with the annoyances and frustrations is the humble and artless dignity of waiting, of being patient as deference to others, as a tactic of acceptance of time shared in common.” Waiting, while frustrating, also becomes a moment of common connection and sharing time, a very different form of queue management. Of all the concepts discussed so far, perhaps these feelings remain the most abstract for today’s society. Perhaps the performance lost in nonsynchronous optimization might not be so bad after all.
The future of internet daemons might resemble one last commercial depicting people playing ping-pong and wearing virtual reality (VR) headsets. Imagine if a video feed from a camera strapped to the front of the headset replaced a player’s regular vision. Could people play ping-pong mediated through this apparatus? Would the feed be responsive enough for people to react in time? Or would it be a game of two people, each in solitude, swinging into the air and connecting with neither the ball nor each other? These questions are not far off from an emergent future of autonomous cars, augmented reality, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). These devices all require constant, instant communication, and the slightest delay might cause these interactions to fall out of sync. All these activities require daemons. These augmented realities—from ping-pong to smart phones—only increase their influence in mediating digital communication.
An augmented-reality ping-pong match is one of a few scenarios imagined by the Swedish internet service provider ume.net, part of Umeå Energi. The scenario figures in the company’s “Living with Lag” marketing campaign promoting its new gigabit internet service. Two commercials depict the ping-pong match and other attempts to perform everyday tasks while wearing a VR headset. In the ping-pong scenario, one player serves the ball, which bounces across the table toward the other player wearing the headset. The wearer swings late, well after the ball has bounced off the table. Whether these people succeed in their tasks largely depends on the state of the headset. The commercial explains that the headset’s video feed is delayed either by a third of a second in normal mode or by three seconds in lag mode. Wearers know they are in lag mode when a loading sigil appears in their video feed. The audience knows too. The commercial’s point of view switches to the video feed seen from inside the VR headset. During the ping-pong match, the sigil arrives to indicate lag mode, the steady bounce cuts out, and the player swings too late. These videos serve as a reminder that internet communication is not simply about sending messages, but about the ability to interact and take part in society, participation that suffers affectively because of slight lag or delay.
The “Living with Lag” commercial ends with a simple question: “You wouldn’t accept lag offline, so why do it online?” As always, the solution is ume.net’s faster gigabit service. This depiction of “lag mode,” like so many ISP commercials, articulates the affective influence of transmission, priming the player’s reaction to the ball. The ISP’s daemons coordinate to avoid lag mode or to relegate some networks to it. While I have largely focused on daemons’ relations to P2P networks and cloud computing, it is not difficult to imagine the work of daemons that would be required to enable and optimize the mediated experience of augmented reality networks. The internet daemons of tomorrow might optimize a world in which some people are more present due to the priority of their network connection while others seem out of touch.
The uneven influence of daemons will continue to demand critical attention, since they likely will not be in the service of everyone equally. As daemons become more intelligent, big data and the standing reserve of bits will offer new insights to include in their calculations. Currently the packet provides a tangible unit by which to understand daemonic calculations, but how will future daemons make decisions? For example, the ISP Cable One used customers’ credit scores to decide which service level to provide them. Will daemons optimize for physical location? Could service plans be based on lifestyle choices, for example a musical commuter or a late-night clubber? What other metadata might expand their gaze?
The affective influence of flow control provides a better understanding of the influence of control than the usual concerns about a nonneutral internet. Often, these concerns are framed as a cableization of the internet in which users pay for access to certain walled gardens (as in: do you enjoy social media? Access is another five dollars per month). Such warnings overlook the flexibility of flow control. It is a much more subtle influence that maintains an open internet while shaping, controlling, and disciplining use through uneven feelings of network performance. Flow control works through distinctions of experience, not in blocks or restrictions. ISPs use the affective influence of flow control to create a structure of feeling that might vary across their network or per application: some applications and users benefit from a boosted internet; the other guys sit and suffer and wait.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of considering the implications of “Living with Lag” is the idea that an outside view will continue to exist at all. The advertisement’s punch line relies on the ability of the audience to objectively watch, from their secure position in real time, a person struggle to live in lag mode. Manuel Castells warned about a timeless time when the local, natural sequence of time would be disrupted. While this notion takes the naturalness of time too much for granted, it does provoke questions about what temporalities might be called public? What times are shared? A polychronous internet might replace a default transmission experience, a minimum download speed for example, with an economy of transmission. In such an internet, there would be no objective experience by which to gauge whether a connection is fast or slow, no viewpoint outside the headset.
For now, the feelings wrought by the affective influence of flow control and captured in these five commercials include the pleasure of speed and instant communication, but also anxiety, frustration, isolation, and the boredom of waiting for the device to load. These feelings articulate the intentional and unintentional affective influence of flow control. Daemonically managed latency, prioritization, and congestion affectively charge online communication, which can lead to tangible feelings of exuberance or frustration. While these feelings seem so personal when we experience them, ISPs sell their services based on reliably delivering them. So often, internet use is a reminder of working within the confines and limits of a technology, rather than actualizing myths of freedom like the blue skies of Windows, the galaxies of Apple, or the instant world of the information superhighway. Could a shared acknowledgment that a common internet means a little waiting for everyone lessen the influence of flow control? Could there even be a pleasure in waiting together?
Polychronous optimization has not gone unchallenged, nor does it operate with absolute certainty. A key struggle over the internet now unfolds over the conditions of transmission. Internet hackers and pirates flaunt attempts to optimize the internet by enlisting their own algorithms to cloak or elude traffic management. The next chapter considers one reaction to flow control: the activism of The Pirate Bay (TPB). Since 2003, TPB’s website has been one of the most public symbols of a free and unmanaged internet—for better or worse. Part of their multifaceted struggle includes the elusion of flow control.