Taking Back Our Commons: Social Media APIs as Subversive Tools

Our actual internet landscape is dominated by a handful of private actors we use on a daily basis: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, amongst others. These actors, in constant search of an optimization of their data transmission processes and user experiences, all share the same political agenda: obfuscate the way their services operate (Wu, 2003) and gain control of our data. By doing so, their will is to turn their platforms into blackboxes (Hertz & Parikka, 2012) we, as users, passively observe from afar. This short paper argues for the pertinence of using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) outside of their primary market-based usage in order to regain control of our data and, ultimately, turn our social media platforms’ data into commons we, as makers, can reappropriate to enhance our critical technical practices (Dourish, 2004). In the context of critical art and design inquiries, this short paper investigates moreover the importance of interacting with these social media APIs in order to turn our data as inputs for the creation of alternative infrastructures (Dragona & Charitos, 2018); infrastructures from where we can deconstruct our mainstream understandings of the internet. As entry points from where we can detour the way these platforms showcase our transmit our data, this paper argues that critically interacting with these APIs offers then, inside a commoning perspective, an innovative way to reappropriate our data as commons to foster citizen engagement and awareness towards how the internet is perceived (Wyatt, 2021) and used. The pertinence of using APIs as a commoning practice to extract and reappropriate how our data manifests online will be supported along this short paper by the case study and analysis of the 2XTWEETSXMODEMSXTEXTXTWEET (Khalatbari, 2020). In this critical making (Ratto, 2011) prototype and analog/digital installation that is site-specific to the Twitter platform, our data streams are being accessed and inputted to a dial-up modem. This turns these silent processes into explicitly audible signals; signals we can then decrypt back to their digital format. In opposition to the way the internet is depicted by Twitter and other private stakeholders of our internet, this case study subverts the opacity of the technological blackbox. It echoes moreover with a more community driven approach to extract and reappropriate our data as commons in order to enhance our critical reflection practices.