Investigating the Invisible

Vladen Joler in his own words | A Network50 Spotlight

Mozilla Learning
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

By Vladen Joler

I was standing in the green grass field around 20 meters from the destroyed police station in one little town in Kosovo some 13 years after the war. According to NATO maps, somewhere around this building should be traces of radiation from depleted uranium bullets. It was like in the movie Stalker from Andrei Tarkovsky. Everything looked “normal” except for the fact that somewhere in the nearby earth, in walls or dirt there are probably small radioactive particles that can hit your cells and trigger some strange diseases, cancer for example.

The only thing that was able to help us to navigate around the area and collect data, avoiding those invisible particles, was one device — an open source device giving us ability to see the invisible. In that time my friend Bilal and I were into radiation hunting and mapping. He got one of the early Safecast devices from MIT to measure potential radioactive locations in Iraq and after we did a few measurements around Balkan I was hooked.

This was the first moment I realized that I want to investigate the invisible. A few months later we started to investigate what was possibly the biggest “invisible” structure human kind ever created — the internet. This is how SHARE Lab, our small group for research and data investigation enthusiasts, was born.

Over the next 3 years we explored and mapped many networks, invisible roads, and deep waters of information flow, gaining insight into black boxes, algorithmic structures, patterns and anomalies of the metadata universe. For us it was clear that somewhere deep under the layers of internet infrastructure and algorithmic machines there can be hidden new forms of potential human rights violations, new forms of exploitation and mechanisms of manipulation on a large scale influencing billions of people each day.

To investigate this we used a combination of data collection, analysis and visualization together with some methods of investigative journalism and critical media theory. Even though I am teaching at the University and running a foundation in Serbia, I mostly see myself as an explorer of the invisible infrastructures, detective of robots, machines and networks, or something similar to that.

Vladan Joler at Media Convention Berlin

Vladan Joler is a social justice advocate, activist, and a professor of new media at the University of Novi Sad and founder of Share Foundation, an organization that is dedicated to protecting the rights of Internet citizens. He is a member of our first cohort of “Network50.”

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