----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com) wrote:
power does not know social justice, however we construe that term. it is just
power.
On December 10, 2014 at 11:37:36 AM, David Golumbia (dgolum...@gmail.com) wrote:
it is everywhere in the scholarship on social media in particular: "I'm going
to look exclusively at the thing I consider good and how social media
contributes to it, and put aside any consideration of the things I consider
bad." That's not scholarship: it's advertising.
Power does not know social justice and neither does algorithm or robot. Rather,
now, the power of Big Software - more or less explicitly overdetermined by
venal human desire - constructs systems of algorithmically driven robots in its
service. The robots are reactive and generative in the sense that they react to
symbolically structured cultural forms and then generate (more from less)
cultural forms which are fed back to human subjects and also to other robots
and systems.
Big Software now builds these networked computational systems chiefly and
massively to render commerce (not art or politics or culture or anything else
except perhaps the flourishes of 'entertainment media') as frictionless as
possible: by facilitating real tractions (between capital and its
(co-)subjects) and by advertising hyper-effectively on behalf of capital. Big
Software - McKenzie Wark's vectoralists - must make their income by charging
capital for 'services.' But they have also discovered (and I will only briefly
touch on this real, historical injustice) that they are easily able to steal
Big Data from people everywhere merely as an unregulated function of the
self-stated 'terms' of 'use' for these 'services'.
Social Media is perhaps the most important manifestation of this pathology of
sociopolitical economy.
In so far as we may no longer be able to 'build our own' systems of social
media, and in so far as the algorithms and robots of real existing social media
are designed by and in the service of this pathology, I believe that there is
an argument against Social Media as we know it. Social Media - in the form of
robots and algorithms - will tend, inevitably, to generate more and more in the
way of pathological cultural forms addressed to human subjects, regardless of
those subjects intentions in terms of social justice or its opposite or
anything else.
And this is quite apart from the historical fact of Big Data theft and
accumulation that is routinely and tacitly accepted as a function of the
pathology - our contemporary pharmakon as Bernard Stiegler has it - with and
within which we must try to live. The uses and values of all that 'data' (and
it's not really data anyway, its only everything that our devices can so far
collect) are all but entirely beyond democratic control, let alone beyond our
control as individuals or progressive institutions/collectives.
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