[iDC] Re: A critique of sociable web media
pat kane
playethical at gmail.com
Mon Apr 9 10:21:52 EDT 2007
Hi all
Trebor: I like your three-point plan for the 'communal unshackling'
of the multitude from commoditizing social-web apps. I'm only
reminded from Kirkpatrick Sale, in his book on the Luddites, Rebels
Against The Future, that they weren't automatic loom-smashers, but
that they objected to the next textile technology when it clearly
"did not benefit the commonality". So many of their specific demands
were for better quality products against shoddy mass manufacture, and
a planned reduction or curtailment of working hours, given the new
productivity of the machines. I think there might well develop a
political consciousness amongst those doing joyful, self-chosen
labour in the digital fields - not so much that they claim a share of
the ad revenue (which is still, say, 95% of Google's revenue), but
that they begin to make a general case that society should recognise
the collective benefits of such ubiquitous productivity, and regulate
the market accordingly.
Which might return us to a recognisable Luddite agenda: 30-hour work
weeks, state support for every citizen's 'creative' domain.
Interestingly, a 'social wage' is about the only recognisable policy
prescription that comes out of Negri and Hardt's Empire, the great
hymn to 'communal unshackling' of our age. Of your two other two
points - what are you doing with our info, and decentralising
'context providers' - the first one is surely being pursued
vigorously by the EFF's and Lessig's of this world, there's a lot of
light being shed on this at the moment. And the second is surely
about the vigour of digital social enterpreneurs as much anything
else - where is our next Linux coming from? Out of what student dorm,
or slacking IT expert?
Julian: I hear your charge - play is the new work - and I only half
accept it. Sutton-Smith's rhetorics of play (which you quote) really
attempt to show how play should not be confined in its meaning to
"fun, spontaneity" - it's a principle of social cohesion and social
evolution as well. To the question, 'so what *isn't* play then?', I
often answer that 'care' isn't play. Play keeps us in a permanent
mode of dynamic engagement with others - but it requires energy and
vitality, what Sutton-Smith calls a "neonatal optimism". I think we
should also be allowed to be exhausted, to be fragile and respond to
fragility, to attend to our mental and physical finitude as much as
exult in our semio-technological infinitude.
I've recently become aware of just how Enlightenment my position is -
indeed, Scottish Enlightenment: the Adam Smith of the Wealth of
Nations (or as Benkler might update it, the Wealth of Networks),
arguing for the upheaval and transformation of social and economic
relations - and the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a
necessary corrective. Play as the wealth of networks/nations/markets,
care as the basis for a new theory of moral sentiments. Now we can
have a long argument - with Chomsky as my back-up - as to how Adam
Smith has been misread over the years... maybe not here....
My only other objections to your points on game-labour, is that it
surely depends on whether the relations and means of ludological
production (hi Karl) have been made sufficiently explicit and
politicised. The only person I know who's doing this for games is the
Scot Simon Yuill, in his Spring_Alpha project, which is a test-bed
for building up his Social Versioning System, which aims to tie the
creation of game-worlds to community education and activism. http://
www.spring-alpha.org/pages.php?content=about. Any other examples more
than welcomed.
Micheal: agree with most of what you say, as ever. I do think
business is parasitic on the 'communicational multitude producing in
its commonality' (Negri), and I suppose I do have a faith (despite
Lessig's panoptical fears in Code 2.0) that this multitude will keep
being fecund in its generation of open, common networks. However I
think those who are interested in the development of P2P platforms
should begin to be as adroit about getting public or foundational
funding for it as conceptual artists have been over the last thirty-
forty years. I also note the rise of something in the UK, from the
media regulator Ofcom, of something called a PSP - no, not that, but
a 'Public Service Publisher', where concievably web enterprises of a
social, non-market, public-service orientated nature can pitch for
funds (see http://technology.guardian.co.uk/games/story/
0,,2002884,00.html, http://blog.okfn.org/2007/03/26/response-to-
ofcoms-public-service-publisher-consultation/).
best, pk
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
I've been lurking so far, but Trebor's latest post struck fairly
close to home, so I would like to make a couple of comments, from the
perspective of a play theorist. In my own work, I am interested in
conflation of play and labour in new media contexts, particularly the
digital games industry. I have used the term 'playbour' in the past,
but I am not sure how far cute neologisms will take us.
The core of the problem, as I see it, is an 'ideology of play' that
underpins many phenomena of virtual capitalism, or whatever you want
to call it. I'll come right out and say that I think Pat Kane is one
of the people propagating this ideology, even if he means no harm.
I've outlined my reasons for this on my blog a while back, here:
http://particlestream.motime.com/post/235766. Pat responded to this
critique here: http://particlestream.motime.com/post/237389.
What is the ideology of play? I could say much about this, but I'll
restrict myself to a brief outline. I think it has its roots in
hacker culture, and became widespread for the first time during the
dotcom bubble. So, first of all, it means that the lines between
leisure and labour begin to blur. You don't actually differentiate
between your private life and your working life, because most of your
friends work where you work, or in a similar area.
Because more and more work is becoming 'creative' a lot of your
actual work will take place not in a work setting but during a meal,
while watching TV, in the shower. All of a sudden an idea will pop
into your head and you will grab a pen and paper and jot it down.
This also means that you will feel justified to play solitaire or
World of Warcraft while you are actually at work, i.e. in your
office. Because you just saved the company a couple of thousand
dollars with an idea you had last night just before you fell asleep.
But then of course what you do in World of Warcraft is not so
different from what you do at work. You do a lot of boring repetitive
stuff in order to 'level up'. You join a guild in order to meet the
right people. You buy low and sell high. So the world of work and the
world of play become increasingly blurred. The fact that you can
actually make money playing WoW or Second Life is secondary to the
fact that work becomes ever more similar to play, and play is
becoming ever more similar to work. Both work and play, however, are
becoming increasingly effective, performance-oriented, self-managed.
And both work and play take place on the same machine - the digital
computer. This might seem trivial but it isn't. The fact that we use
the same technology to fill out spreadsheets, and to play World of
Warcraft, and that we can easily Alt-tab between the two apps merges
the spheres of work and play even more solidly. And once you have
played WoW for a while, you will actually start filling out
spreadsheets to track your progress. And you will start thinking
about business strategies in terms of raids, loot, and mobs.
Now along come Web2.0 apps like YouTube, Flickr, and del.icio.us. And
you will start playing with them. It will seem like a game, because
these sites are actually structured like games. You earn symbolic
capital in the form of friends, favourites, diggs, kudos, whatever.
And you devise strategies for getting more of that stuff. In Flickr,
you join a couple of groups in order to increase exposure for your
holiday snaps. You put a risqué video of yourself on your MySpace
page in order to get more friends. You publish your del.icio.us links
on your blog.
All the while, you don't think about the fact that you are doing the
work of people that other people used to do - journalists,
photographers, programmers, and most importantly: marketers. And why
should you? It's all just a game, isn't it? It's like Trebor said:
it's like having a job, "while at the same time getting lots of
dates, making friends, establishing some micro-fame, and becoming
creative." This sums up what we do in our jobs as well as what we do
in our leisure time.
And it's exactly what we do when we play World of Warcraft - or any
other game for that matter. Because it is in computer games that our
performance is constantly assessed and measured, until it feels like
a natural part of play. It's one of those 'rhetorics of play' which
Brian Sutton-Smith identifies in his book, "The Ambiguity of Play".
And it takes root in our brains, and our hearts, and our souls, and
it connects us to the great production machine through play technology.
---
Trebor asks: What is to be done? "What would lead us to 'communal
unshackling'?" And his answer is the same that has been given by all
progressive thinkers in history: we need to raise awareness. Play-
labourers need to become aware of the exploitation inherent in the
technologies and practices of play. But somehow I am not convinced.
Because we all play along all the same. Although we are aware that we
are being exploited. We post our work on blogs or we publish in
scholarly journals. We use Web2.0 apps because it is convenient. We
play World of Warcraft because that is what everybody does.
I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as that. The
idea that we just need to raise awareness in order to elicit change
betrays its roots in Enlightenment thinking. We are theoretically
aware that the ship of modernity has capsized, even if a couple of
splinters still float on the surface of the stormy sea. But somehow
we refuse to let go of the idea that a better world is possible by
appealing to reason, by explaining the world to people. I don't think
this is a feasible way to go anymore. And of course this is not even
a new argument.
So what is to be done? The simple answer: I don't know. The
complicated answer: If all the world is a game we need to learn how
to cheat. We need to deploy this technology in a way that is non-
exploitative, non-binary (us vs. them, play vs. work, Empire vs.
multitude), radically anti-modernist. Maybe it's time for a new
situationism that targets the spectacularisation of the self inherent
in 'sociable' media. So it becomes a question of identity politics, a
question of refusing the subject positions offered by YouTube, MeTube
or TheirTube.
The name I use for this is deludology. Ludo, I play - deludo, I
cheat, I delude. It's just a label, but it becomes a powerful way of
thinking about possibilities for breaking the rules established by
the ideology of play. If autonomous marxism's solution to the problem
of industrial labour exploitation was the refusal of work, the
solution for the problem of post-industrial playbour exploitation
might well be a refusal to play, to play along, to collude. But as I
said before, I don't know. In any case, I agree with Trebor: we need
to "believe in the possibility of societal alternatives to this
rotten system."
On 9 Apr 2007, at 09:27, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> Hi Trebor,
>
> I still have serious problems with your point of view.
>
> As I see it, we have sharing platforms, operating largely outside a
> monetary circuit, and the attention being monetized in order to
> fund the platform and make a profit. Focalising all your critical
> and militant strategies on convincing volunteers that their very
> act of sharing is alienated, is a losing proposition, especially in
> the context of the larger context of real and terrible exploitation.
>
> You seem to imply that the very act of owning a platform is
> immoral, and in my opinion, this equates markets with capitalism.
>
> In case of communities for shared individual expression,
> characterized by generally weak links, where a minority might be in
> the game for gain, revenue sharing is a legitimate, but not an
> obligatory issue, since it destroys the non-reciprocity and thereby
> the highest motivations. So in effect, you want to capitalize sharing.
>
> A better strategy is to defend the commons against the bad
> practices of the ''owners'", while at the same time, mobilizing
> peer production projects to build distributed platforms without
> central ownership. But it is far from certain these will be more
> efficient and competitive with the hybrid projects.
>
> In case of real peer communities involved in common creation, lots
> of them have their own platforms, and the real issue there is how
> to make the projects sustainable without direct link between the
> production and the income.
>
> In the specific case where the production is for the market, and
> cannot be qualified as non-reciprocal peer production, cooperatives
> are a natural and well tested format to operate with equity,
>
> Michel
>
>
> On 1/1/70, Trebor Scholz <trebor at thing.net> wrote:
> In Internet time I'm far behind, I know. Pat Kane argues, and I
> agree, that ads are often secondary to the social online
> experience. Let's just see the thing with all its
> complexities.
>
> Pat quoted Virno: "Contemporary capitalist production mobilizes to
> its advantage all the attitudes characterizing our species, putting
> to work life as such." [1] That's it: leisure,
> fun, and all that affective activity are commoditized to multiply
> the wealth of the very few on the backs of the very many.
>
> The paradox is that those who are getting used, get a lot out of
> it. It's like working a McJob while at the same time getting lots
> of dates, making friends, establishing some
> micro-fame, and becoming creative.
>
> Or, take Benkler's argument that the act of becoming a speaker (on
> blogs) is an empowering experience, which may lead to political
> involvement in real life. At the same time
> that this person is politicized, the corporate context-provider is
> getting richer of this very speech act.
>
> Most American teenagers could not care less about all this because
> for them capitalism is inevitable. Such thinking inside the box, in
> my opinion, does not make the core sites
> of the sociable web (Google, Del.icio.us, Yahoo, eBay, LastFM,
> iTunes, Skype, Technorati) any less amoral.
>
> The exploitation of labor, mind you, is not transhistorical; it is
> exactly not some gene that we are born with. Capitalism is surely
> not a human inevitability. There is nothing
> natural about it. [2]
>
> What would lead us to "communal unshackling"? First of all, there
> needs to be an awareness of the fact that we are being used.
> Currently, I do not see much protest or even
> conflict in this regard. But that will change soon. Geographically
> spread communities will ask for 1) an appropriate share of the
> created monetary value of their creative labor, 2)
> transparency of the rules of the game: Who owns the uploaded
> content? (Give us control over our content.) What exactly do you do
> with the data we provide in our profiles?,
> and 3) support decentralization of giant context-providers. [3]
>
> Whether or not you are with me on this, will largely depend on your
> belief in the possibility of societal alternatives to this rotten
> system.
>
> ts
>
> [1] http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?
> sid=06/01/17/2225239&mode=nested&tid=9
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhistorical
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Data
>
> Howard Rheingold pointed me also to this post on Buzzmachine
> http://www.buzzmachine.com/2005/10/26/who-owns-the-wisdom-of-the-
> crowd-the-crowd/
>
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>
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