Skitter Graph
= network flow and activity map by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego
Description
Brian Holmes:
"the “Skitter Graph” by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (Caida) – an academic offshoot of the military-industrial complex, based in the city of San Diego. This map shows a record of peering sessions between some 12,500 “autonomous systems” (basically equivalent to Internet Service Providers, or ISPs).2 To produce it, twenty-five different monitoring points run a “traceroute” program known as Skitter over a period of two weeks, following packets from over 1,100,000 IP addresses. The researchers analyze the path of the packet stream, which is only considered significant when it goes outside its autonomous system of origin. Information from the Border Gateway Protocol database is used to track each message back to a localized ISP. The graph displays the major link lines between the autonomous systems, and represents the quantity of outgoing connections per ISP, placing the lower values on the edges, in light blue, with higher intensities as you move toward the center, in dark blue, violet, orange and finally yellow. But to give all this data the form of a world map, it is also organized by the geographical location of the ISPs – or at least, their head offices – which are distributed around the circle according to longitude.
The autonomous systems fall into three major groups. At the bottom are those in North America — from San Jose and Vancouver to the Eastern seaboard — clearly dominating the Western hemisphere. Slightly further east are two exceptions: Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo/Rio, indicating the only significant connectivity in South America. Next comes Europe, with a great arc of ISPs stretching from London to Moscow; Pretoria falls in the middle, the one African city to be mentioned. On the upper left is Asia, with peak intensities in Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong, and lower values in Singapore, Perth and Sydney. Only in the 2005 version of this map does the immensely productive population of mainland China even begin to make a significant showing on this map of outgoing connections.
The Skitter Graph presents the raw facts of location and transmission: a geography of unqualified information flow. But what does it tell us about social relations? It can be compared to the map of “Centers and Peripheries,” elaborated by the geographer Denis Retaillé in 1992 and published in a 1994 volume on the “globalization of capital” by the economist François Chesnais.3 This map shows three things. First, a circuit linking the United States, Western Europe and Japan, the so-called “Triad” regions, which form a “global oligopoly” accounting for the majority of industrial and financial exchanges. Second, the major nodes of the world network, represented by densely outlined circles. And third, the hierarchical relations between the regions, as described with these categories: center; periphery integrated to the center; annexed periphery; exploited periphery; abandoned periphery. Chesnais performs a Marxist analysis, showing how globally fragmented production lines are coordinated through the computerized circuits of the financial sphere. His map describes the hierarchy of social relations in a post-national era, when no political formation can erect any substantial barrier to the dictates of capital. And it reveals the near-perfect correlation between the graph of virtual flows and the geography of human exploitation." (http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/network-maps-energy-diagrams/)