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<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text>Grant,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text>Respectfully, your proposal - without
the "expertise to envision any solutions" - is disconcerting. Money is
the global medium/vehicle for the accounting of obligation. It's ubiquitous. As
such, in effect, you are proposing to globally alter obligation. Easy, only if
you don't have any and don't care for eating.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text>That aside, you do make an important
point: the Internet zeitgeist is fundamentally anti capitalist and anti market
economy. Regrettably, this is NOT an extension of our current global system.
It's a contradiction and a dangerous one at that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text>Anyway, before we rationalize the
failure of money and the negation of obligation, let's please understand the
consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text>- Amanda<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=lw-text> </span><span style='font-size:
11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>
grant.wythoff@gmail.com [mailto:grant.wythoff@gmail.com] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Grant
Wythoff<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Sunday, June 07, 2009 3:38 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> Amanda Chapel<br>
<b>Cc:</b> idc@mailman.thing.net<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'>Amanda-<br>
<br>
One would think that with the events of the past year, "money" would
not be so easily equated with mortgage debt. A first step in thinking
through the new tools and practices I referred to is to consider how we can
stop equating "money" with its contemporary modalities. Late
19th, early 20th century utopias proposed replacing money with
"credit" (esp. Bellamy's "Looking Backward"), a proposal
which should of course seem laughable today. <br>
<br>
But neither can money be a valuable object or substance in itself, since it
serves as a token for exchange. Money is and has always been an
abstraction of value.<br>
<br>
What I was getting at is that practices of production, exchange, and
consumption have developed on a mass scale *within the specific context of
digital networks* that currently cannot be ported back into or reconciled with
the traditional money economy. These practices are the subject of this
conference, and what I think we all should be considering is what models,
alternatives, reflections the production of value within the information
economy provides in the current economic climate.<br>
<br>
It's beyond my expertise to fully "envision" any solutions, but for
one of the most, I think, productive examples, check out Charlie Stross on
'venture altruism' in the novel Accelerando. <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(book)">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(book)</a><br>
<br>
-Grant<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Amanda Chapel <<a
href="mailto:chapel@strumpette.com" target="_blank">chapel@strumpette.com</a>>
wrote:<o:p></o:p></p>
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<div>
<p>Grant,<o:p></o:p></p>
<div>
<p> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>"I believe is evidence that we have the tools and experiences at our
disposal to entirely rethink the circulation and standard of money as well as
the value of work with the digital realm."<o:p></o:p></p>
<p> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<p>The mortgage is due the first of the month… what do you envision?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'>- Amanda<o:p></o:p></p>
<p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;color:#1F497D'> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<div style='border:none;border-top:solid windowtext 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in;
border-color:-moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color'>
<p><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'> <a href="mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net" target="_blank">idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net</a>
[mailto:<a href="mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net" target="_blank">idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net</a>]
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Grant Wythoff<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Sunday, June 07, 2009 1:22 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:idc@mailman.thing.net" target="_blank">idc@mailman.thing.net</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> [iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory</span><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
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<p> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'>Hi All-<br>
<br>
My name is Grant Wythoff, and I'm currently a PhD candidate in the Department
of English and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton. My work
is situated at the intersections of media theory and science fiction, exploring
the various types of worldbuilding, estrangement, and utopianism that bubble up
from moments of epistemic shifts in media technologies. Other areas of
interest include new media culture and the rhetoric of "content,"
television studies, media archaeology, 20th century American theater and film,
and Frankfurt school aesthetics.<br>
<br>
As Howard pointed out, we are in a situation in which we must entirely redefine
our notions of labor and play, and I think this conference will be a really
exciting forum to begin thinking along these lines. One can go as far
back as Benjamin in locating an alignment of labor and play within industrial
apparatus--his notion of "Spielraum" (playspace / room for play)
seems particularly apt in our own context as it gets at the truly revolutionary
(if not utopian) possibilities opened up for new fields of action within the
very same profit motives of commercial agents. Yes, information
aggregators have proved immensely powerful tools of cognitive mapping through
both graphic means--witness Google's flu trends or twitscoop--as well as good
old fashioned research methodologies--i.e. wikipedia and wikileaks. But
at the same time, we are left with an incredibly difficult set of questions,
since the space for play the media opens for us has almost always been one that
fundamentally does not belong to us. And here I can't help quoting the old
Playstation motto, "live in your world, play in ours."<br>
<br>
Perhaps we can come back to this topic of profit motives intersecting with
useful "public" goods and enjoyable "private" behavior
raised by Howard and taken up by Trebor--and here I will just briefly jump across
a few interrelated ideas.<br>
<br>
To take a case study, Eric Schmidt swears that things like flu trends, google
maps, and semantic searching are the primary business of Google while the
harvested clickwork of their targeted ads is only a necessary evil, the fuel
powering these larger ambitions. For argument's sake, what if (and this
is a big 'what if,' used only for the purposes of a productive science
fictional tension with the real) what if through some process of natural
selection the "private" profit motives of web 2.0 companies and the
creative industries are gradually replaced (displaced? superseded?) by their
useful "public" functions? In other words, what kind of *value*
does the public at large attribute to the information economy?<br>
<br>
In business circles, web 2.0 is spoken of as being a failure since it "has
no business model," since there is no way to monetize it on a large
scale. To take a second case study, we are at a crucial juncture in the
information economy, with widely publicized talk of new agglomerations of news
media (spearheaded by the AP) and new forms of control over
"content." But this talk of "monetizing" freely
linked, traded, and read online news content (a discussion that has been
disseminated through the tubes of the media themselves) has revealed in so may
fascinating ways just how regressive such proposals are. The sense of
disbelief everyone feels--grounded in their everyday techniques of screen
reading, their presence online--I believe is evidence that we have the tools and
experiences at our disposal to entirely rethink the circulation and standard of
money as well as the value of work with the digital realm. <br>
<br>
The question of newspapers and the loss of local voices is of course one to be
taken up by a different thread. Leaving this aside and turning to the
topic of properly digital labor: our work is unpaid. But do we want
remuneration? <br>
<br>
If the biggest challenge to a critique of digital labor is the fact that the
mass of clickworkers simply doesn't care, that they enjoy their free labor
(let's face it, who doesn't)--then perhaps a possible secondary line of inquiry
would bring us into the potentialities of digital networks foreclosed by their
current configurations. Television always promised a world represented as
system--channels, flow, live feed, etc--a rhetoric which has been notoriously
difficult for cultural critics to satisfactorily engage with. In what
ways has our image of the world evolved from that given to us by
television? In what ways is the potential for political critique and
"pleasurable learning, cheerful and militant learning" (Brecht)
foreclosed by the current, digital configuration of the world picture? Further,
in what ways is this foreclosure itself representable (on a mass or systemic scale)
within the digital networks themselves? (The February flare up over Facebook's
new terms of service provides somewhat of an illustration).<br>
<br>
Rambling first thoughts. But I'm eager to see these and others bounced
around.<br>
<br>
Best-<br>
Grant<br>
<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Grant Wythoff<br>
<a href="http://twitter.com/gwijthoff" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/gwijthoff</a><br>
<br>
Princeton University<br>
Department of English<br>
McCosh 22<br>
Princeton, NJ 08544<o:p></o:p></p>
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<br>
-- <br>
Grant Wythoff<br>
Princeton University<br>
Department of English<br>
McCosh 22<br>
Princeton, NJ 08544<o:p></o:p></p>
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