is twitter a nation state?

For my thesis, I've been creating tangible artefacts that can inform my viewers about the invisible affordances of the cyberspace; and to engage with my materials deeper, I started looking at the question is twitter a nation-state? The interrogation translated in my position which is:

One way to understand the dynamics of citizenship of cyberspace is to design for the invisible participants of that space. 

I focused on Twitter, which is a system of formalised actions. When I started interrogating the space I discovered new parts of it. As a former user experience designer, I was intrigued and scared at the same time by the nuances I had missed out while designing interfaces earlier. I never thought, the users I refer to as trolls, bots, and nationalists were a part of hidden economies that are embedded on the network. Starting from Google slippages, data brokers, farmers, buying likes and followers, to social media establishments being ad companies… the internet is riddled with participants that I— as a user and self proclaimed tech savvy person— didn’t know about. I may be interacting with a fake account or a bot, and I may not know it. For my thesis I started learning more about Account and Click Farms who are pretty invisible, and engaged with account creation process for my making research. Now, these farms are not entirely manual or solely run by bots. They are both a combination, and need manual triggers to start. 

The nature of participation and citizenship on the network turned malleable to me, when I saw, read and learnt more about the invisibility of account and click farmers. Before mid-terms I materialised the Twitter Sign Up, by juxtaposing it with the California voter registration form. Where this artefact highlighted a moment in my interrogation, it also provided its viewers a reference to imagine the nature of twitter signups. After which I was blank, I had the design question: 

how will I physicalise the key moments of my interaction with twitter and its system?

Since I was so interested by the farms, that I decided to become a click farmer myself. As a click farmer, I needed a workspace that could help me organise my tools while taking into consideration, that a click farmer is watched by their manager at all time. I used the design question to drive my key decisions and table structure: How can I use a table to physicalise the chronological timeline of account creation, and represent the key moments of the activity? 

Account farms are often situated in apartments, and farmers use interior furniture instead of cubicles. After sketching variations and building cardboard models for reference, I decided to use a linear structure. Which captures the step-by-step process, while giving me an illusion of being in a comfortable environment. The table grows outwards because the account creation is the core part of this process. Each angle is derived from the number of mins the activities take up, where reading the client brief takes only 2 mins, and looking for your sim to verify your social media account can take you way longer.

The most interesting part of this process is the bulk of sim cards used everyday by farmers, but only one phone. To create a high fidelity fake account a farmer needs a unique contact number for each account. On one hand you can’t buy more than 3 simcards online in United States and only 9 simcards in person in India… on the other, an account farm with 8 workers would use approximately 1080 simcards a day. Physicalising this volume was important to me, as it seems absurd that there are 100 simcards but only one phone. The proportionality of these tools play a significant role in setting up a tangible frame of reference. Hence, I designed, cut, folded packets and laser cut sim cards to demonstrate volume and commodification of contact information.