[iDC] A critique of sociable web media
pat kane
playethical at gmail.com
Mon Apr 2 07:14:26 EDT 2007
Great piece, Trebor, but just a few semi-naive questions I want to
throw in:
* What about the civil liberties dimension of omnivorous data
capture? I just finished reviewing Lessig's Code 2.0 (the updated
version) http://theplayethic.typepad.com/play_journal/2007/03/
the_fair_cop_in.html , and I've been chilled to the bone by his
prescription of an 'digital identity passport', as a solution to
spam, and a means of managing information privacy vis-a-vis the state
and corporations (though he sets out some really surprising threat-to-
state preconditions for legal disclosure of digital identity).
Google's revelation that it's only going to keep 18 months of your
websearching only makes you realise how much they *were* keeping -
and when Google told the Feds to butt out, when they wanted to look
at their user archives to research porn use, it makes you realise
that we should be replacing 'in God we trust' with 'in Google we
trust' on the dollar bill. That seems far too much civil
responsibility for one shareholder-driven corporation to bear. But
Lessig's 'ID card' vision of the net - all derived from his vision
of the net as a constitutional phenomenon, an 'architecture of value'
- feels far too grown-up for me. But I think I'm going to have to
grapple with it. Adam Greenfield's musings on 'a jurisprudence for
everyware' are also interesting here (use yer cached, http://
tinyurl.com/3bw7la).
* But isn't there also something about advertising on the social web
that, at the very least, puts it in its proper place - ie, as
secondary to the social experience? We can bemoan and drum our
fingers at the interstitials that stand in the way of us getting to
that Salon article - but let's be honest, how many of us fulfill the
advertiser's aspiration and click through to a website for yet
another stylish people carrier, or post-colonial alcoholic spirit? In
terms of an old-fashioned (and yeah, ok, social-democratic)
Habermasian framework, this feels to me like the "system" (or various
systems) very much being rebalanced in terms of the values of the
"lifeworld" (or community). But maybe I'm being too politically
boring here...
* ... Because I'm also an avid reader of the autonomists, and there's
a recent interview with Virno that really focuses the political
question of how immaterial labour might or might not become a class
for itself, as much as in itself: http://info.interactivist.net/
article.pl?sid=06/01/17/2225239&mode=nested&tid=9
"The global movement ever since Seattle resembles a half-functioning
voltaic battery: it accumulates energy without rest but does not know
how and where to discharge it. We face a marvelous hoarding to which
no adequate investments correspond at this time. Or do we face a new
technological apparatus, powerful and refined, for which we, however,
ignore the instructions? The symbolic-media dimension has been at
once a propitious occasion and a limit. On the one hand, it has
guaranteed the accumulation of energy; on the other, it has hindered
or deferred to infinity its application.
"Every activist is aware of this: the global movement does not yet
manage to have an effect—I mean, to have an effect with the grace of
corrosive acid—on the current capitalist accumulation. From where is
the difficulty born? Because neither the profit margin nor the
functioning of constitutive powers have been disturbed more than a
tiny bit by the new global movement? To what is this paradoxical
“double bind” due on which basis the symbolic-communicative sphere is
both an authentic springboard and the source of paralysis?
"The impasse that seizes the global movement comes from its inherent
implication in the modes of production. Not from its estrangement or
marginality, as some people think. The movement is the conflictual
interface of the post-Fordist working process. It is precisely
because, rather than in spite, of this fact that it presents itself
on the public scene as an ethical movement.
"Let me explain. Contemporary capitalist production mobilizes to its
advantage all the attitudes characterizing our species, putting to
work life as such. Now, if it is true that post-Fordist production
appropriates “life”—that is to say, the totality of specifically
human faculties—it is fairly obvious that insubordination against it
is going to rest on the same basic datum of fact.
"To life involved in flexible production is opposed the instance of a
“good life.” And the search for a good life is indeed the theme of
ethics. Here is at once the difficulty and the extraordinarily
interesting challenge. The primacy of ethics is the direct result of
the material relations of production. But at first glance this
primacy seems to get away from what, all the same, has provoked it.
An ethical movement finds it hard to interfere with the way in which
surplus value is formed today. The workforce that is at the heart of
globalized post-Fordism—precarious, flexible border-workers between
employment and unemployment—defends some very general principles
related to the “human condition”: freedom of language, sharing of
that common good that is knowledge, peace, the safeguarding of the
natural environment, justice and solidarity, aspiration to a public
sphere in which might be valorized the uniqueness and unrepeatability
of every single existence.
"The ethical instance, while taking root in the social working day,
flies over it at a great height without altering the relations of
force that operate at its interior. Whoever mistrusts the movement’s
ethical attack, rebuking it for disregarding the class struggle
against exploitation is wrong. But for symmetrical reasons, they are
also wrong who, pleased by this ethical attack, believe that the
latter might put aside categories such as “exploitation” and “the
class struggle.” In both cases, one lets slip the decisive point: the
polemical link between the instance of the “good life” (embodied by
Genoa and Porto Alegre) and life put to work (the fulcrum of the post-
Fordist enterprise)."
--- I think it's so productive to muse on this Virno passage, both
for where it might be right and wrong. To what extent are we
'ignoring the instructions' of these new technological apparatuses -
or testing them to their limits (ie, if YouTube gets too censorious,
where do we go next to 'become the media')?
His point about the "symbolic-communicative sphere" being both "an
authentic springboard and the source of paralysis" is also acute -
anyone observed how the New Tories in the UK are radically embracing
the social web (http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/george_osborne/
2007/03/the_internet_is_changing_the.html, http://
www.webcameron.com)? And how they're also combining that with a
explicit politics of the 'Good life' - General Wellbeing (GWB)
instead of GDP as the index of progress for societies, etc? (See
http://theplayethic.typepad.com/play_journal/2006/05/
well_beings_or_.html ). Now, if anything looks like an "ethical
instance" flying over the conditions of the 'social factory' without
'altering the relations of force that operate at its interior', it's
going to be the British Tory Party 2.0.
Thoughts?
Pat Kane
+44 (0)7718 588497
http://www.theplayethic.com
http://theplayethic.typepad.com
http://www.newintegrity.org
http://www.patkane.com
All mail to: patkane at theplayethic.com
On 2 Apr 2007, at 02:47, Trebor Scholz wrote:
> Perhaps this exchange could lead us to deepen our earlier debate
> about possibilities for a radical critique of sociable web media.
>
> If you agree with Paolo Virno's and Maurizio Lazzaroto's theory
> that argues that "virtuosic performance" and "the act of being a
> speaker" is the new immaterial labor [of the
> North], then yes, the sociable web is the new "factory without
> walls." I, for one, don't sign off on the fucked up naturalization
> of the exploitation labor that is so dear to
> capitalism. Where are the people who care if big profits are made
> of their distributed creativity? Most participants are not
> conscious of their embrace of market-based behavior.
> The most central sites of the World Wide Web create massive surplus
> value and small startups are frequently bought out by the Walmarts
> of the Internet (NewsCorp, Yahoo,
> Google) the very moment that they attract sufficient numbers of
> page views. People spend most time on the sites of these giants and
> not in the "mom and pop stores." Almost
> 12 percent of all time spent by Americans online is spend on MySpace.
>
> Nicholas Carr pointed out that forty percent of all web traffic is
> concentrated on ten websites (www.sina.com.cn, www.baidu.com,
> www.yahoo.com, www.msn.com,
> www.google.com, www.youtube.com, www.myspace.com, www.live.com,
> www.orkut.com, and www.qq.com).
>
> Most of these sites owe their popularity to the wealth of content
> generated by the visiting net publics that spend significant
> amounts of time on these very, very few sites thus
> creating wealth for a handful of corporate owners. What pulls
> people in?
>
> In a recent interview with Forbes Video Network, Jay Adelson (CEO
> of Digg.com) was asked "What's going to keep people to come back?"
> Adelson responded:
>
> "Community is what really keeps people coming back. These people
> are passionate about what Digg has done for them. The user
> experience they get from being part of that
> community is only getting better each day."
>
> Attention translates into concrete monetary value and community is
> the product. Crude offline capitalism is replicated online, much
> against the hopes of early cybernetics and
> the linked back-to-the-land, countercultural aspirations of the
> late 60s and early 70s that Fred Turner talks about.
>
> The dynamic of-- being used-- may hold much less true for
> peripheral websites in the concentric hierarchy of the
> participatory web. The online "mom and pop store" has a much
> more benevolent ratio of participant benefits versus the company's
> running costs. And then there are also the two or three non-profits
> like Archive.org and Craig Newmark's
> initiatives holding up 'Fort Hope.' They are, to be sure, not
> dominating the read/write web.
>
> The immaterial, "affective labor" of net publics produces data.
> Contributors comment, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post,
> link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate,
> favorite, write; flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, and
> learn. They fill in profiles: 120 million people shared detailed
> personal information with NewsCorp, for example. 18
> million students shared personal details in their Facebook profiles
> with Yahoo. They share information about their favorite music and
> clubs. They are not shy to list the books
> they are reading and the movies they are watching. They detail
> their sexual orientation and postal address complete with hometown,
> phone number, and email address. They
> share pictures, educational history and employment. Profiles, even
> if only visible to their buddies (and well, Yahoo), they list their
> daily schedules, general interests, and friends.
>
> It seems obvious that all this channeled networked sociality
> represents monetary value. Post-dot.bomb, the Google zars would not
> buy a very young video website like YouTube
> for the price of the New York Times Company if there would not be a
> clear monetary value.
>
> The dicey ethics related to property issues and exploitation of
> labor of *the core of the sociable web* becomes apparent if we look
> at Yahoo's privacy policies for Facebook.
>
> "Facebook may also collect information about you from other
> sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and
> other users of the Facebook service through
> the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide
> you with more useful information and a more personalized experience."
>
> That is a dream come true for any market researcher. But it does
> not stop at bizarre privacy policies, Yahoo also claims rights over
> the content on Facebook:
>
> "By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically
> grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to
> grant, to the Company an irrevocable,
> perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide
> license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly
> perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in
> whole or in part) and distribute such User Content..."
>
> The picture of net publics--being used--is, however, complicated by
> the fact that participants undeniably get a lot out of their
> participation. There is the pleasure of creation and
> mere social enjoyment. Participants gain friendships and a sense of
> group belonging. They share their life experiences and archive
> their memories. They are getting jobs, find
> dates and arguably contribute to the greater good.
>
> The scale and degree of exploitation of immaterial labor is most
> disturbing when looking at the highest traffic sites. The sociable
> web makes people easier to use and this
> dynamic will only be amplified by the increasing connection of
> mobile devices to the big social networking sites.
>
> Trebor Scholz
>
> PS: I'll add the necessary references to this text and post it on
> my blog.
> http://collectivate.net/journalisms/
>
>
>
>
>
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