Gloss 1

What the hell?

The text of this theatre is a fragment that might (or might not) be sample code for the US National Security Agency’s XKeyscore search and analysis software. The leak was subsequent to, and independent of, the documents provided by Edward Snowden.

What makes this text an Imagined Theatre?

Code is written for humans, not computers.

Code is written to be performed, not read. The residue of these performances appears on the screen.

Code acts within a network. Adjoining layers in the software stack play the roles of Latour’s actants.

Code is vibrant, consisting of automata that both execute and observe performances within the network.

When I write code I imagine my audience—my users—and choose words to shape how they think. I also employ code written by others, imagining those writers—their values, goals, and blind spots—as I conjure a performance combining their work and mine.

I can’t read code.

Yes, I know. It’s called the third rail of interdisciplinarity.

Gloss 2

Why isn’t this theatre a computer science problem?

In a career of reading code I have felt delight, annoyance, rage, bafflement, and a few times, joy. Here, I was surprised at my admiration—and envy—for how clean, elegant, and expressive it appeared. But, for the first time, I also felt nausea.

The discipline of computer science doesn’t give me the tools I need to talk about how my world changed once I imagined a theater in which that fragment performed.

What’s so special about this code?

Taken at face value, the code shows how to parse internet searches, web addresses, and HTML pages that refer to the The Amnesiac Incognito Live System (TAILS), an operating system ostensibly “advocated by extremists on extremist forums.”

The example shows how to capture the behavior of anyone on the Internet, in this case, people looking for TAILS information in Linux Journal.

That’s me. Along with many fellow computer scientists, I’ve played around with TAILS. And I’ve read the TAILS coverage in Linux Journal.

Surveillance gets a lot more real when they’re looking at you.

Gloss 3

How does nonmaterial performance help me understand this theatre?

The concrete performance of code has a physical dimension—electrons, waste heat, pixels lighting up on a display—but focusing on the material stuff obscures what the XKeyscore authors imagined: a world in which human activity can be abstracted to the point where mass surveillance becomes feasible, thus fulfilling their ethical imperative.

To engage with this new world, we focus on the unseen, abstracted, imagined—the nonmaterial—networked performances of vibrant code.

Nonmaterial performance provides tools for the laity to pry open a system that captures every text message, financial transaction, internet search, and email.

Gloss 4 

Why does this theatre matter?

The act of imagining has consequences.

The authors of XKeyscore wanted to prevent bad people from doing bad things. Because code is vibrant, this fragment also perturbed the world in unintended ways, changing the performance of people—bad and not—who understood XKeyscore’s implications.

I shifted from being an unwitting actor to becoming a self-conscious performer and spectator within a vast rhizome of performances. And my behavior changed.

This fragment does not perform in isolation; it draws its power from the intertwined networks of code in which we are all embedded.

And, delightfully, the fragment is vibrant: an actant achieving a life independent of its origin. What perhaps started as a hurried note from a classified presentation has become part of the global conversation about ubiquitous, state-sponsored surveillance.

Nonmaterial performance employs performance studies, actor-network theory, and vibrant matter to critically engage with the cultural construction of code, exposing its embedded values, goals, and blind spots.