Compression, Encryption Index: Cultural and Aesthetic Transformations in Digital Circulation

我的论文试图阐明三种无处不在的数字技术的文化和美学功能：压缩、加密和索引。至少从20世纪90年代开始，数字技术就已经成为文化生产和流通的组成部分，但对于许多消费文化甚至研究文化的人来说，它们仍然模糊不清。这在一定程度上要归功于技术的复杂性和排他性的术语，但我认为，这也是因为它们的影响直到最近才开始固化。数字媒体的一个基本要素是它的互操作性：在代码的共享文本基础上，数字形式失去了它们曾经与其生产和流通技术之间的独特关系。以前，当“数字”被前数字形式的摹本所主导时，很容易把它想象成一种抽象，一种物质基础与形式之间的断裂。然而，渐渐地，数字的物质基础已经开始通过新兴的合成和形式、新的纹理和经济逻辑来维护自己。这些新的形式和逻辑是任何想要在当代流通中制作或理解艺术和文化的人所直接关注的。由于数字技术是跨形式应用的，它们代表了对既定学科区别（文学研究、电影研究等）的挑战，它们的美学必须通过类似的形式多样性来解读。他们的改革是持续不断的，所以我的分析结合了离散的协议和平台，形成了更普遍的解释。压缩、加密和索引并不意味着对数字流通形成一个详尽的或综合的说明。相反，它们提供了通往其无处不在、却往往难以理解的过程的途径。压缩是减少（代码、文本或对象）大小的过程。我认为，自20世纪90年代以来，数据压缩导致了流通时间的显著减少，并成为媒体丰富和感知文化加速（马克思称之为“时空湮灭”）的技术先决条件。从通信理论到压缩的应用方法，我将追踪它们的过程与更广泛的经济压缩之间的联系。与压缩一样，加密涉及到对数据的基本重写：使任何未经授权的用户都无法读取数据。如果说压缩是为了最大化文化生产和流通，那么加密则是为了引导和模糊其数据流。我认为，它允许了新的证券化流通形式，在这种形式中，获取和使用都是由专有逻辑编纂的。这对文物的商品地位产生了根本性的影响，这些文物不再被单独出售，而是被当作一种公用事业来对待，所有权写在数据的基本层面上。与此同时，加密是抵制做法和非法流通形式（如影子图书馆）的核心。搜索引擎现在是一个主要的网络访问点。但在他们提供结果之前，他们必须整合一个指数。从技术上讲，索引是整合和组织条目的过程。它形成了一个双重过程：爬虫机器人解析文本并将其转换为标准，然后用于组织结果页面。这两个过程都值得注意。爬虫识别、集成和抽象条目到记录中。对通用记录的追求导致爬虫（人和机器）将任何可能的东西集成到索引中。索引（尤其是谷歌）以结果页面的形式复制，运行着自己的美学体系，其价值判断主宰着数字空间。

My thesis seeks to clarify the cultural and aesthetic functions of three ubiquitous digital technologies: compression, encryption and indexing.Digital technologies have been integral to cultural production and circulation since at least the 1990s, and yet they remain obscured to many who consume or even study culture. This is thanks in part to technical complexity and exclusionary jargon, but also, I argue, because their effects have only recently begun to solidify. A fundamental element of digital media is its interoperability: in the shared textual basis of code, digital forms lose the unique relationships they once held to the technologies of their production and circulation. Previously, when "the digital" was dominated by facsimile reproductions of pre-digital forms, it was easy to imagine this as an abstraction, a rupture between material base and form. Gradually, though, the digital's material base has begun to assert itself through emergent syntheses and forms, new textualities and economic logics.These new forms and logics are of immediate concern to anyone looking to make or understand art and culture in its contemporary circulation. Since digital technologies are applied across forms, they represent a challenge to established disciplinary distinctions (literary studies, film studies, etc.) and their aesthetics must be read through a similar diversity of forms. Their reformations have been continuous, so my analysis joins discrete protocols and platforms to form its more general account. Compression, encryption and indexing are not meant to form an exhaustive or totalizing account of digital circulation. Rather, they offer routes into its ubiquitous and often poorly understood processes.Compression is the process of reducing size (of code, text or an object). I argue that since the 1990s data compression has caused significant reductions in circulation time and has functioned as a technical pre-requisite of media abundance and perceived cultural acceleration (what Marx called the "annihilation of space through time"). Working from communication theory to applied methods of compression, I will trace the links between their processes and wider economic compressions.Like compression, encryption involves the basic rewriting of data: making it illegible to any non-authorised user. If compression seeks to maximise cultural production and circulation, encryption seeks to channel and obscure its dataflows. I will argue that it has allowed new forms of securitised circulation, where access and use are both codified by proprietary logics. This has had a radical impact on the commodity status of cultural objects, which are no longer sold discretely but treated like a utility, with ownership inscribed at the basic level of data. At the same time, encryption is central to resistive practices and illicit forms of circulation, such as shadow libraries. Search engines are now a primary point of web access. But before they can offer results, they must consolidate an index. Technically, indexing is the process of integrating and organising items. It forms a dual process: a crawler-bot parses text and translates it into criteria, which are then used to organise a results page. Both processes warrant attention. Crawlers identify, integrate and abstract items into records. The pursuit of universal records leads crawlers (human and machine) to integrate anything they can into indexes. Reproduced as a results page, indexes (especially Google) operate their own system of aesthetics, whose value judgements curate digital space.