<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Marks response to Howard (I haven't had the pleasure of meeting either of you, Hello) speaks to an urgent need (addressed to a degree by Nick Knouf and my own earlier post): if we hope to accomplish anything more than the advance of capitalist-technologies (and the advance of our own pleasures/careers) we require a more thoroughgoing account of exploitation than is generally available. One does not have to read even much beyond this list-serve to see that the old ideas about individual autonomy, choice, pleasure and yes, human nature -- ideas that properly belong to prior centuries -- remain operative.<div><br></div><div>After providing an example (of writing for Wikipedia) discussed with reference to exploitation in a kind of close-up, Mark writes:</div><div><br></div><div><div>When it starts to become tricky -- at least conceptually -- is when my work on Wikipedia (or tagging, or participating in other forms of UGC production) gets folded into the demographic/psychographic/geographic/(eventually biometric) forms of profiling that form the basis for the emerging online commercial economy. Still a meaningful conception of exploitation might help distinguish between the different productive roles of our online activity -- and between infrastructures that are more or less exploitative.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I agree with this statement with one caveat -- it is always already tricky. The autonomous user interfacing with the isolated media-event simply does not exist. The preconditions to both sides of that equation (user/technology) are nothing less than world history itself (a history that includes, racism, colonialism, patriarchy and genocide). One might wonder how participation in Wikipedia might leave most of that history (for which we ourselves are part of its living legacy) undisturbed, or worse, further buried in the unconscious of our digital high. And we might also want to wonder how participation in Wikipedia might actively redistribute the claims that a history of violence and exploitation makes on all of us in a way that makes its call more audible, more actionable. It is here, in this moment of wondering about the politics of our own production, that we might grasp the moment of the utterance, of the interface, as itself a political moment. Put another way, a particular user of an interface may have been conditioned to be satisfied with his/her wage of pleasure/recognition in exchange for his/her attention/virtuosity, but how does his/her cognitive-sensual labor attend to the 2 billion people on the planet that live on less than two dollars a day -- people who may not be too worried about global armageddon, because for many of them the worst thing in the world has already happened.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>For what it's worth, pretty much all of my work has endeavored to think about (and thus to transform) the dominant relationships between mediation and exploitation. I am attaching a 2003 essay I wrote which was later revised to become the introduction of my book <i>The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle</i> for anyone who might be interested. I should say that my sense of the priority of cinema has shifted somewhat from the time of this writing, but many of the analytical strategies utilized in this essay (including the attention theory of value that dates back to 1993 or so) I still find to be useful. Of course there is much more work to be done -- and I am very excited to see that it seems that together we are doing some of it.</div><div><br></div><div></div></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></span></div></div></body></html>