Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
On 03/03/2012 08:22 PM, Jonathan Marshall wrote: Let me put it this way, if you will allow. People using facebook, or any other source, engage in labour. The question here is do they get the full return on that labour? The answer is, I believe, 'no'. Do they get anything from that labour, yes of course, just as they do with most other forms of labour under capitalism. > > Do they > autonomously consent to the amount of extra value being made out of > their labour by facebook, and then (perhaps) that value being used > against them? Do, they, in many cases even know about this profit > being made from their labour? These points are perhaps more > ambiguous. Understanding how society works, how its subtler forms of domination work, is quite an important thing. And I believe that's what you're trying to get at Jon, so I follow you there. Here's the thing maybe I can add: Facebook clearly needs the *users* to generate, not just the daily activity of the network, but above all its huge valuation on the stock market and the actual revenue it gets from selling statistics, which are its raisons d'etre. So one should best start with the nature of the phenomenon, this fact of "using Facebook." What is the *value* of using Facebook? Now, if you want to find out what usership is - and if you want to distinguish between use value and what Arthur Kroker acidly called "abuse value" (or what you call exploitation) - I think you can gain clarity by leavving the notion of work and workers out of the picture, or more precisely, by locating their place elsewhere in the larger picture. Predatory relations in the financial economy are not directly about work, except for the work of the financial agents themselves. They are about extracting pools of accumulated money-capital from those who have acquired them, most often by working. For individuals, this accumulated money-capital is called income or savings; and it is augmented by a very strange form of savings-in-reverse called "credit" (borrowing against future income). Predation comes after the work is done, or even via credit, without any work at all. Indeed it happens in what is called leisure time. However, by saying all that, I don't mean to completely separate the two, and I guess this is what you're trying to get at also, so on that I wholly agree. Consumption - along with its *ambiguous* double, use - is part of capitalism (part of the circuit of capital, an essential part) . Marx (who does have some pretty interesting stuff to say about all this) considered consumption and/or use a distinct "moment" of the processual circuit of capital, and the interesting thing about that is, you get another understanding of the whole circuit when you look at it from the specific perspective of consumption/use. So what's the conceptual difference between consumption and use, even if the two are ambiguously related and never appear in pure form? In my view, consumption tends to integrate one to the circuit. Consumption names this integration, and it is oppressive. This is what you are talking about I think. Autonomous use, on the other hand - to the degree that it is possible - tends to distance the user from the imperatives of the circuit. Concerning the initial argument against using the word labor to describe the process of integration, I could put this in stronger terms: Nobody gets paid to be ripped off. You wouldn't say someone was *working* if they were walking down the street at the moment when they got robbed. Well, when data about people's preferences is coerced out of them and then used by another party to feed them back an enticing offer that will result in their money leaving their wallet or bank account, it's not labor either. The big question is, what kind of society is it when people *enjoy* getting ripped off while walking down the street? For that we have to call in Jodi Dean and Zizek, because since Baudrillard, they are probably the ones who have done the best work about it. Concerning the relation of social media to the Arab Spring, the movements of the squares, and Occupy Wall Street, I see it pretty much exactly like you. I was just pointing out that, contrary to my own expectation up until that point in time, there is some use to be made out of social media! As to the way the Internet operates first as an enabler of grassroots communication (in real time), then as a surveillance function (because, alas, not only do they survey it in real time, but they also troll through the records of the past), yup, many of us already learned that in the course of the counter-globalization movement. This quest for automomy would seem to be the basis of capitalist libertarianism - and that is not meant to be an accusation or branding of you, but simply pointing out the ambiguity of such quests for autonomy. Especially an autonomy that does not explicitly recognise the importance of others, and of the patt
Re: Political-Economy and Desire
Keith: Thanks for your thoughtful and generous reply. My fascination with the Germans is certainly driven in part by my inability to read the language (plus some potential ancestral linkage) and, alas, my French isn't proficient enough to read Dumont in the original but I'll gladly look to him in translation. Mandeville and Marx sound like fascinating bookends for an understanding of "classical" political-economy. The history of "ideas" is certainly inadequate, for the simple reason that much of the history of industrialism(capitalism) was never expressed publicly but rather persisted in "secret" protocols. Georg Simmel's 1906 "The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies" is a welcome (albeit quite incomplete) companion to Weber's "Protestant Ethic," describing aspects of these developments that Weber likely didn't have the "courage" to discuss. _http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Simmel/Simmel_1906.html_ (http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Simmel/Simmel_1906.html) As best I can tell, the "robber barons" got their *occultism* from the Germans (rather than the English/Scots) and given the apotheosis of German "masonry" in the intertwined 20th-century expansion of the SS and the invention of LSD (by the rival Anthroposophists), I find myself asking what exactly Hegel and his roommate Schelling were "taking" in those heady late 18th-century days of "idealism." By the time we get to Nietzsche, there can be no doubt that powerful psychotropics were involved -- likely starting in his early student days in Leipzig and culminating on the streets of Turin. Given what we now know about the hallucinogenic origins of the Athenian DEMOS, you do have to wonder if the Illuminati (yes, a critical, if fleeting, group of German "Freemasons") were also interested in replicating the Mysteries, as their code-naming of their headquarters in Ingolstadt as Eleusis might indicate. I was hoping that my mention of MAGIC would have stimulated some recollections and Binswanger is certainly a fruitful place to start. Yes, money is magic. And, the "secular" is often a disguise for the "gnostic truth." At least two books appeared in the effort to better understand the "origins" of Nazi "ideology" which focus on 18th-century German "masonry" -- Ronald Gray's fascinating 1952 Goethe The Alchemist: A Study of Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe's Literary and Scientific Works (Cambridge) and Heinrich Schneider's 1947 Quest for Mysteries: The Masonic Background For Literature in the 18th Century (Cornell). As a fan of Hegel (and Marx) you might also benefit from John Milbank's 1990/2006 Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (particularly Chapters 6 and 7, respectively for-and-against each of these two Germans), which is, alas, one of the few recent treatments I could find that tries to critically examine the assumptions of political-economy, as well as sociology. Yes, by initiating this thread, I was trying to find a few more. And, hopefully, this acquits me of some measure of error for not telling people something they don't already know. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Political-Economy and Desire
Mark, There are two types of error: telling someone something they know already and not telling them something they don't know. I would rather commit the first type of error, but most of the people I know commit the second. So here goes. Louis Dumont is best known for his work on India. He wrote a book, Homo Aequalis, on western notions of the economy. This was translated into English as From Mandeveille to Marx. He wrote the foreword to the French edition of Polanyi's The Great Transformation in 1983. Vincent Descombes recently published an article on Dumont as a political thinker: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Louis-Dumont-comment-penser-le.html?lang=fr. I was struck reading your two posts by the possible relevance of H.C. Binswanger's Money and Magic (A Critique of the Modern Economy in Light of Goethe's Faust). There's a review by Herman Daly here: http://www.jayhanson.us/page71.htm. Obviously there are many ways of approaching the idea that we are at a turning point in human history. For some time now, I have been pursuing a line that is closer to Felix's in the Facebook thread (posted today). This is that the old and the new spend some time together and are never completely separated. In particular, the decay of modernity since the 70s (I prefer to call it national capitalism) involves to some extent a reversion to what it originally claimed to supplant. Thus "neoliberalism" reverts to the Old Regime with its addiction to rentseeking behaviour while hiding behind the smokescreen of the free market (an issue raised by Lorenzo Tripodi in the other thread). This raises the question of whether a history of ideas is enough, given the confused social reality. I respond to this situation by supposing that Rousseau, Kant and Goethe have something to tell us because of their understanding of that previous transition which we repeat even as something unheard of also emerges. I like Hegel a lot and don;t think he deserves the bum rap Marx tried to pin on him. Moreover, he is the godfather of national capitalism (most explicitly in The Philosophy of Right). But he put the boot into Kant and this move has been repeated by all his epigones. Yet, for all the luminous moral/political philosophy and anthropology of Kant's last years, his crowning achievement was his third critique, the Critique of Judgment, which has a claim to having been the most influential book in the 19th century. So even if we stick to the history of ideas, there is the problem of radical shifts in fashion concerning what is important. In any case, for the question you raise about a revival of moral politics, I would feel obliged to start with Hegel's revolution against Kant when the categorical imperative was dismissed as bourgeois individualism. In my book The Memory Bank, I started out with a hypothesis not a million miles from yours conerning the rebirth of humanity in the digital revolution. I imagined that the impersonal society of the twentieth century was being replaced by the new scope for personalization offered by cheap information. But long before I finished the book, I realised that I was not describing a radical switch from impersonal to personal, but rather exploring how the relationship constituted by the personal/impersonal pair was changing under contemporary conditions. I think this is still important, but it grabs the attention less readily than my initial formulation. Maybe more pople will read your book than did mine. that's a consideration too. Best, Keith On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 4:42 PM, wrote: > Brian: > > > Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go. > > Thanks. Here's some more . . . > > > The key question, I believe, is what happened to VIRTUE in these > socio-economic transitions. > > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Dear all, thanks for the stimulating discussion. Let me add some reflection from the point of view of an urbanist which considers media and ICT as undistinguished and integral part of the urban field. In my idea, to a marxist reading of Facebook as a place of labour exploitation, it would be rather preferable a parallelism with the exploitation of rent. The "citizen labourer", who through his everyday-life practices builds the city identity - while in the meantime creating its exchange value - is in fact the agent who produces the rent which the capitalist "rentier" exploits. It is in great part the product of a "free labour" which in my opinion has always existed, that of the citizen strolling in a commercial street, consuming, 'colouring the space with vibrant neighbourhood life' (a copy'n'paste refrain of urban marketing), etc. In the same way, Facebook's users build the exchange value of the "site" through their everyday practices while enjoying the use of its 'public space' , creating ' rent value' (exchange value) in favour of the corporation which can sell aggregated information by commecial purposes. They both respond to the (non exclusive) role of prod-user. An epitome of such dynamics in urban terms is gentrification process, where consciously or not (more so...), creatives and 'urban pioniers' through their social and cultural production (mostly in their non working activities) raise the value of the land, indirectly favouring the diplacement of disadvantage population. Which however does not happens with facebook. Yet, the parallel is not complete, as the value of land is strictly connected with its finiteness and the impossibility, in principle, of coexistence in the same place of bodies / activities. The concentration of activities and buildings in urban spaces implicitly builds scarcity, which is not the case of digital information stored in the internet, tendentially replicable and accessible ad infinitum. In this sense, the creation of a great amount of surplus profit from its use derives more from artificlally induced scarcity given by the exclusive right to sell access to aggregated data of facebook (and google etc.), than from a material progressive scarcity of resources. The issue here is if we have to consider facebook as the corresponding of a private developer earning money from renting its spaces, or the manager of a public space which retain taxes to manage it for the best public profit, which should be in my view a more correct way to approach the question. Above all, i believe that the struggle for preserving the nature of the internet as a commons, as common wealth, is of the same nature of the struggle of activism for public space. Rent in material terms is constituted over the state apparatuses endorsing the system of norms ruling property under capitalist regime. The internet enhanced a far less monopolistic role of the state as the ruler of a virtual territory, differently from urban territories that fall univocally under its normative power (but not uncontested by multiple kinds of autonomy claims). This means on one side that there is not a definite player as "the state" to define rules for accessing and producing such a 'public space', which can be also seen in terms of a step towards a more libertarian or anarchic organization. On the other, that there is not such a player which can univocally and legitimally claim for the defense of the implicit public nature of those spaces of communication and social interplay, if not the 'multitude' itself of its produsers. This moves the question from "if facebook" exploits labour", which is true as it always has been in every spatial edification, to: 1) how can we defend its public nature from the speculatory exploitation of financial capital (it's all about this). 2) how can we imagine and implement better alternatives to facebook and similar logics... lorenzo On Mar 2, 2012, at 7:34 PM, Brian Holmes wrote: > > On 03/01/2012 08:23 PM, Jonathan Marshall wrote: > >> To me, the problem is the complexity of what is to be thought, and >> a general refusal to allow paradox - ie that something can be both >> good and bad, that it can have contradictory drives - to exist >> within the same thought. > > I'm generally on board with that. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
. On 03/04/2012 03:22 AM, Jonathan Marshall wrote: People using facebook, or any other source, engage in labour. The question here is do they get the full return on that labour? I don't think it makes sense to pose the question like this, for the reasons that Michael's text, which started this thread, emphasized. There are fundamentally different kinds of labor, different kinds of value and hence different kinds of returns. However, how these different kinds of labor/value relate to one another is really the key issue. And, to a large extend, unknown. We are only at the beginning of this story, which reveals a basic contradiction within contemporary techno-culture. Forget PIPA, SOPA, ACTA, and the like, for the moment. These are ugly fruits of the tension between the old Fordist paradigm in the information industries, which is based on mass produced products distributed through impersonal/abstract markets (think DVDs at Walmart), and the new networked paradigm which is based on the modulation of contextualized information flows. It's a messy story, but the general outcome is relatively clear. Copyright-as-we-know-it will not survive. But within the networked paradigm lurks this contradiction between the social logic of cooperation (peer production, if you will) and the commercial logic of knowledge monopolies (proprietary personal profiles, predictive knowledge, means of granting access). At the moment, this contradiction is still underdeveloped. In part, because in the fight between the Fordist and the networked information economy, both are on the same side, so, at the moment, there are easy coalitions between them. In part, because both are still in an expansionary phase, so they can grow without stepping on each other's toes. That won't last, however. Perhaps the IPO of Facebook is the turning point. Who knows. Yet, one way or the other, the differences between a social economy (or, human economy, as Keith Hart calls it) and the commercial economy within the networked paradigm will become contentious. How this will play out is very hard to say. But my hunch is that the owners of the infrastructure enjoy considerable advantages and that, in effect, it will be impossible to fully develop a social economy on a commercial infrastructure. The question is, are we capable of developing other types of infrastructure can deliver the kind of networking that the commercial providers do, while embedding it in a different social relationships. It's not impossible, Wikipedia has shown that you can develop large scale projects that run as a social economy, but it's by no mean a given. Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com --- books out now: *|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studien. 2009 *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
The ARPANET Dialogues Vol. IV
The ARPANET Dialogues Vol. IV ARPANET Test April 1976 with Jim Henson, Ayn Rand, Sidney Nolan & Yoko Ono Published on 4 March 2012. Presented as a contribution to Roundtable Issue 1, a journal for the 9th Gwangju Biennale. Featuring guest contributor Natalya Pinchuk, an artist based in Pittsburgh, USA. Background: 17 April 1976 – The transcript presented here records a conversation between four figures from the broad spectrum of culture: puppeteer Jim Henson; Russian-American writer, philosopher and playwright Ayn Rand; painter Sidney Nolan; and artist and musician Yoko Ono. A few months after the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, The Agency’s tests with the ARPANET convened these four individuals, each with a distinct sense of, as well as the potential means for, a competing world-view. These individuals, who cross different hemispheres, were to help with considerations towards the viability of broadly implementing Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Go to this link to read: http://www.arpanetdialogues.net/vol-iv/4/ About the ARPANET Dialogues Project: In the period between 1975 and 1979, the Agency convened a rare series of conversations between an eccentric cast of characters representing a wide range of perspectives within the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu. The ARPANET Dialogues is a serial document which archives these conversations. Even more unusual perhaps was the specific circumstances of the conversation: taking advantage of recent developments in telecommunications technology, the conversation was conducted via an instant messaging application networked by computers plugged into ARPANET, the United States Department of Defense’s experimental computer network. All participants in the conversation were given special access to terminals connected to ARPANET, many of them located in US military installations or DOD-sponsored research institutions around the world. Excerpts from each session will be published as they become available. The ARPANET Dialogues is an ongoing research project by Bassam El Baroni, Jeremy Beaudry and Nav Haq. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Mute article on Bitcoin
On 04.03.2012 16:50, Jaromil wrote: hi Josie, The Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society and Scott Len take the currency seriously but ask, how exactly does it differ from 'real' money? A rather quick conclusion, comprehensible since it takes some knowledge of cryptography to understand that Bitcoin is less than what you are talking about, while what might come next is the most interesting part. BitCoin is nothing more and nothing less than electronic specie. Sure, the cryptography behind has some interesting possibilities, like Namecoin. But BitCoin is like digital gold coins, it's main advantage over gold is that it can be electronically transfered, however, it also has disadvantages, it can't be made into a gold tooth, and earring or a pimpin' belt buckle. In terms of electronic commerce, this can be quite usefully, but macroeconomically the significance of electronic specie seems quite negligible, taking it place among various less interesting, non-decentralized, exchangeables, including pre-paid telephone credit and online shopping gift codes. It's main advantage over these is it utility for unsanctioned economic activity, which certainly is critical for some undertakings, but hardly disruptive to the economy as a whole. I'd very interested in a co-herent argument otherwise. Best, -- Dmyri Kleiner Venture Communist # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
