<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; ">I want to second Mark's comments here -- he hits the nail on the head. It is precisely this <i>schism</i> between the experience of users pursuing their own liberatory relations, entertainments, career paths or politics, and the generalized capitalization of their practices that needs to be registered in the strongest possible terms -- and Mark's reading of that NYTimes essay does exactly that. Just as the cinema in an earlier moment dilated time, expanded space, elaborated race and gender and engaged fantasy in myriad new ways that shifted the character of sociality while still capturing and capitalizing the attention of audiences, the digital enclosure of the forms of fantasy, intellect and aspiration generated by culture represents a new order of alienation.</span><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">While it may not make sense to some on this list to speak of alienation (particularly if you no longer think that there is anything/one to be alienated) the radical schism between the form of the interactive fantasies of users and their infrastructural conditions of possibility provide evidence that the real organization of biopower and the forms of consciousness this organization generates may not always correspond. The form of display does not indicate the form of the operating system. In other words the terms of the age old divisions between mind and body, intellectual and manual labor, etc., may be shifting, but capitalist geo-politics continues to organize what we could still call bodies, what Hortense Spillers in an evocation of the pre-symbolic situation of the slave-body calls "the flesh." That so much of this flesh is taken as media for the expression of ideas, fantasies and practices that in their very constitution eschew an awareness of their dependence on the organization of the global bio-mass strikes me as the very problem we must learn to speak more about if we are to ask the most penetrating and therefore the most important questions about social justice. In what way has what for numerous reasons should no longer (not yet?) be called humanity itself become a medium?</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">As Mark says, "the server farms might better be described as server "factories" -- spaces where the productive aspect of monitoring is separated out from the range of monitored activities. The fact that these spaces are private, commercial ones, is neither natural nor necessary, but is the legacy of historical forms of enclosure -- the continuation of enclosure as a form of separation (of users from their date, data producers from the means of data processsing), what Massimo De Angelis has described as a process of continuous enclosure." We need to recognize that this legacy of enclosure is inseparable from the legacy of dispossession and impoverishment that has today reached apocalyptic proportions. The fact that so many do not recognize that for much of the planet the apocalypse has already occurred is at once part of the problem that is ours to overcome and a symptom that, read properly, might begin to reveal the nature of the solution. One thing is clear: no statement audible here (wherever that may be) escapes participation in the exploitative logic of media-capital. </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">As far as I am concerned, this statement also answers one of the major methodological questions pre-occupying this list serve -- the one that would focus solely on the specifics case-studies and would do so in an effort to imply that there are certain non-exploitative forms of interactivity. For the moment it seems that progress is not foreclosed, certainly, not all agency or organizational practices are the same -- by no means-- but it seems to me that none are entitled to a free pass, none of us are going to get off the hook so easily.<br></span></font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></div><div><br style="font-size: 16px; "><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-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; font-size: 16px; "><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-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><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Jonathan Beller</div><div>Professor </div><div>Humanities and Media Studies</div><div>and Critical and Visual Studies</div><div>Pratt Institute</div><div><a href="mailto:jbeller@pratt.edu">jbeller@pratt.edu</a></div><div>718-636-3573 fax</div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="4" style="font-size: 18px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px; "><br></span></font></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" style="font-size: 16px; "></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br><div><div>On Jun 25, 2009, at 10:34 PM, Mark Andrejevic wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>'Don't talk about data centers'" -- this from a piece on data centers/cloud computing in the NYTimes architecture magazine (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?sq=data%20centers&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?sq=data%20centers&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all</a>). Yes, it's a bit over-dramatic and conspiratorial, but I think it usefully highlights the tendential omission of (infra-)structural issues in some of the discussions of the status of online activity. The repeated comparison in the article is suggestive: data centers are to the digital "revolution" what factories are to the industrial one. These are structures populated not by people, but by data about them ("We used to think that owning factories was an important piece of a business’s value...Then we realized that owning what the [social?] factory produces is more important.”). What I find striking about the article is the portrait it paints of the emergence of galloping privatization -- the commercial enclosure of information hithero unavailable (or stored in other forms), non-existent, or too expensive to systematically capture and sort. The energy statistics help to provide some indication of the scale of this rapidly expanding digital enclosure ("From 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity."). </div> <div> </div> <div>The servers, of course, provide convenient and useful services, including the email application I'm using to compose and circulate this post. They also represent the privatization of the products of our communicative, social, and transactional data on an unprecedented scale. What economists call the "non-rival" character of this ownership (at least in some instances) creates a distinction in control over the product of our information-generating activity vis a vis industrial forms of production (one of the several reasons contributing to the growing salience of intellectual property law in the digital era). Obviously the fact that Facebook knows who my friends are doesn't mean that I don't. However, Facebook also has access to aggregate forms of data (as well as, increasingly, the means of sorting, searching, and manipulating the aggregate). At issue here are what might be described not just at a significant portion of the means of communicating, transacting, and accessing information, but also the means of data processing, of making sense of tremendous amounts of data, including conducting ongoing, large-scale, controlled experiments and interpreting the results. These means of data processing or sense-making (albeit in instrumental fashion) are inaccessible to the producers of the raw data, and the products they produce are equally inaccessible (I may know who my friends are, but I have no notion of the significance my pattern of interaction takes on against the background of millions of other patterns, the controlled experiments that generated them, and the results of aggregating, sorting, and querying this data). In this regard, products are generated based on the aggregate activity of data producers that remains inaccessible to them. The question of whether the data-producing activity is understood by participants as work, play, consumption, etc., while an important one in many regards, may not illuminate the complex process whereby private ownership/control of the means of interaction relates to private ownership of the technology, datasets, and algorithms for transforming the raw data into information products inaccessible to producers, products that appear to them only in forms that render their original contribution indistinguishable, invisible, untraceable. </div> <div> </div> <div>The enclosure movement and the eventual forms of real subsumption and technological transformation that accompanied it (the shift from expropriation of surplus product to that of surplus value, the rise of waged labor and the eventual transformation from piece-work rates to hourly wages) favored the emergence of factory space, not just to aggregate worker activity, but also, significantly to monitor and eventually rationalize it. In this regard, the server farms might better be described as server "factories" -- spaces where the productive aspect of monitoring is separated out from the range of monitored activities. The fact that these spaces are private, commercial ones, is neither natural nor necessary, but is the legacy of historical forms of enclosure -- the continuation of enclosure as a form of separation (of users from their date, data producers from the means of data processsing), what Massimo De Angelis has described as a process of continuous enclosure. </div> _______________________________________________<br>iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)<br><a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a><br>https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc<br><br>List Archive:<br>http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/<br><br>iDC Photo Stream:<br>http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/<br><br>RSS feed:<br>http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc<br><br>iDC Chat on Facebook:<br>http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647<br><br>Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</blockquote></div><br></div></div></body></html>