Topology of the web

Most discussions of web topology occur at a technological level. While these discussions are important, as they undergird the behaviours that occur within the web, the nature of the discussion typically leads to banality due to the assumption of an unproblematic subject. Web technology is usually seen as free, democratic, and open. The assumption is that even if the technologies may be somewhat obscure to you, someone else fully understands them, and has put in place principles to ensure freedom, democracy, and openness. Further, even if you aren’t crafting the standards of the web, your behaviours are shaping it, ostensibly in ways transparent to you. With the advent of the so-called “social” web this process has been furthered democratized, such that to vote your voice of approval you simply link, like, tweet, digg, or whatever, thereby creating your own miniature web pulpit and voting box, all in one.

Bibliometrics predate the study of web topology. Search engine optimization (SEO), information retrieval (IR), content and network architecture, and data transmission are all explored in this mechanistic worldview. Human behaviours are terminal points for these studies, even if human-computer interactions (HCI) are the subject of study. The epistemology is realism, often infused with technological determinism/fetishism and a great willingness to create communities out of neoliberal hubris.

Instead of starting with the technology, making the technology the determining factor, let’s infuse our discussions with those nasty terminal points. People are political, ethical, and meaning-making. If you start from this assumption you quickly realize that an epistemological realism and a mechanistic ontology won’t get you very far into politics, ethics, and meaning (unless you try to tell a story about Descartes’ pineal gland). A kind of vitalism is necessary to create actants (Latour) out of mere objects. Networks are no longer flat, democratic and transparent. Digital networks, especially, are violent, opaque, and infused with power. On the periphery of the network exists the links, likes, tweets, diggs, and whatevers, while the core strangles competing networks, technologies, and human behaviours.

The core of the Web topology is both parasitic and subversive. The core is parasitic because it commodifies and actively shapes its inputs. The core is the periphery turned inside out: your behaviours are informed by the core strangling your meaning-making, and then commodifying your inputs. The core is subversive because it makes the information and then performs the most powerful and violent actions possible to create never ending antagonisms. With this information, the core operates like espionage, and turns known facts against themselves, subverting even semblance of truth. A link isn’t just a link in this topography, it is a pathway for crawlers, a digital and physical architecture of exclusion and meaning making. Semantics becomes what isn’t linked, what isn’t said, what once existed but was shown to no longer exist.