[seda: i took out the paragraph on infrastructures, since i think we don't have the time and space to express what we mean by infrastructure, we can come back to the agency of tech]

Even for smaller projects like tools or applications, developers and designers are expected to build tools that can be picked up by anyone who has an interest in the relevant use. While the imaginary of the universal infrastructure and the universal user are admittedly seen as ideals, they are modes of thinking that allow engineers to abstract away from situated knowledge of a specific context, shifting the premises of development to the context of technology (here something can be said about path dependency in technology development as what becomes a primary concern once you abstract away other worldly complexities). 

In many cases, technical experts and security engineers are best equipped to understand the path dependencies and the affordances of existing infrastructures, and this gives unique knowledge through which they can labor over a new tool or protocol. More participatory modes of design propose to include "end-users" or other "stakeholders" in this process in order to "democratize" design, and also include these parties in the testing/deployment of system implementations. Even then there are limits and an inevitable division of labor due to specialization. [seda to do: check disalvo paper on participatory design andinfrastructuring, i checked it out shortly, and it prioritizes participation in a not so compelling way. Further, i should say something  about professional agency, specialization and delegation, maybe dourish].

A related matter is, what happens when the organization of political activities get meshed up with what we may short hand universalist systems of design and development. And, what happens, when the universalism is not limited to the "making" of the underlying infrastructures, i.e., when developers' ideologies used in the creation of artifacts also start guiding the ways in which collectives imagine themselves and affecting the way they organize their interactions with others in society.? Our objective here is not to make overly techno-determinist claims, but to inquire about the impact of entanglements of political projects in current manifestations of engineering ideology. For example, according to Johan Soderberg, one key notion in engineering ideology is that " nature and society are governed by laws that are accessible to human knowledge...and [it was] through the manipulation of nature's laws engineering could exercise influence over society".  So, we want to explore what happens to political collectives, when they start using apps developed for political problems of their interest, shaped by this understanding of society that is governed by natural laws legible to engineers?

Over the last fifty years, politically charged engineers, as well as computer scientists, have successfully tied universal liberal values to engineering practice. ThPost-Snowden, many sites [?] and initiatives make reference to UDHR, Article 19: the  universal right to freedom of opinion and expression [which]  includes  freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and  impart information and ideas through any media and  regardless of  frontiers. But already here we see a potential for tension: many political activists in different parts of the world would not subscibe to a western secular understanding of human rights, and would reject the human rights framing as a white washing or cover for western imperial interests [@miriyam, help me out here]. We suspect that the techno-universalism that underliess dreams of "universal access" and tools that scale globally inevitably brings about a flattening of politics and a selective attention to situated challenges that activist collectives face. 

Many engineers in the US and Europe have responded with great anger to the revelations that the Internet infrastructure and many of the applications that run above it are now leveraged by nation-states, and in particular by the US and the UK, to put most of the world under surveillance. This anger has quickly been followed by a "rational response", supported with economic arguments, as to how at least part of the problem, mass surveillance, can be engineered away. The problem definition here is short and simple: mass surveillance has become affordable and is now applied to everyone, this means that innocent citizens loose their privacy; solution idea: in order to re-instate our privacy we need to make mass surveillance expensive (it has become too cheap). And finally the solution: we are skeptical of bureaucrats and politicians ability to stop mass surveillance, instead mass-surveillance can be made more expensive by introducing encryption into the internet's underlying protocols as well as into the overlaying applications. Hence, as Snowden put it:
 
*"While I pray that public awareness and debate will lead to reform, bear in mind that the policies of men change in time, and even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it. In words from history: Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography. “ Snowden
*http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/edward-snowdens-other-motive-for-leaking/370068/
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This is an ideological conflict. What does it mean to conflate them.
Everybody  is equal, open for business/everyone. "Everybody should have privacy".  Universal rights: universally applicable, but not in times of war.

Soderberg: "I have advocated an approach where hackers’ faith in technological determinism is provisionally accepted. The inconsistencies of these  accounts can then be explored ‘from within’, and the discrepancy between  the ideas of hackers and their practices can be unravelled."


It can only talk about mass-surveillance, not about specific targets (gender/class/...)
Universalism makes it possible for activists, businesses, governments to employ same technologies
Has no space/time for hegemony ... make it work first, think laterUniversalism in moments of exception (are they needed, created to be validated through these moments?)

STANDARDS
and stakeholdism also about a standard experience that everyone can have easy/smooth access to

Zuckerman cute cat hypothesis could go here!
*is a prime example of flattening out politics: 
*miriyam's  table of temporality in action: moments of mobilization vs.  organization (where do the sites that we are analyzing fall: they are  also universal in their understanding of temporality and action!)
*also for debate/working out differences/awareness raising
*the  importance of penetration: higher penetration (internet part of mass  mobilization), lower penetration (elitist form of organizing and  engaging)
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WHAT  IS THE CONCRETE CONTEXT!!!: tipping point, uprising, discontent, revolution, political transformation. if we go with the language of  revolution, is it post, is it counter-revolution.

AT THE TIPPING POINT TIME IS VERY VALUABLE
AFFORDANCE: IS  A RELATIONAL QUALITY
WHO CAN AFFORD DESIGN/INVENTION/USING THIS TOOL (ALSO FROM A TIME PERSPECTIVE)
AFFORDANCES ARE IN THE TOOL IN RELATIONSHIP TO A PERSON
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miriyam  mentions in her project archiving action material, objects of  nostalgia, i know of of a similar initiative with gezi...maybe this  somehow fits with urgency vs. other temporalities (Jara: 15M?)
at  the tipping point numbers matter: then it would have been 5000 people  rather than 500.000 people and would have been crushed anwyays
we were discussing about collective practice as one entry point of discussing this phenomena
but changing our political economy, to think about situated practices
thinking of regional and class differences are important
the situated practice of a group in a society that has 40percent penetration vs. 80percent penetration
so situated practices, and not just collective practices
where literacy is very different

In moments of urgency activists navigate internet as a moment of corporate complicity: 
internet as place for government propaganda
and the mukhabarat makes use of these networks for their own means

DESIGN AND COLLECTIVES
design collectives / designing for collectives / collective designs

-- AGENCY
infrastructure as a political agent
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-- COLLECTIVE ACTION FRAMING
*femke is going to abuse mr. soderberg to do that
*the counter-surveilance community translates the surveillance problem into one of privacy and that into one of access to encryption:
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-- CONFLICT
engineering (and designing?) conflict away
engineering for dissonance

-- DISSENSUS: RATHER THAN THINKING ABOUT TOOLS THAT BRING CONSENT
roughness of tools, not smooth (workflow, language, interface, not being used to ...)
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