Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Hallo Ana Dear John I am not sure if we are talking in parallell ways. When I am talking potlach I am talking from an anthropologist view (I am a trained anthropologist) and we are definitely talking about exchanges both in the symbolical view and in the physical form. I understand that much of anthropological is involved in seeing the world from that material/semiotic split. I'd recommend a reading of Leslie White's (anthropologist) work (one source here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/663173 - Energy and Evolution of Culture) and maybe White, L.A., 1975. The concept of cultural systems: a key to understanding tribes and nations, Columbia University Press. If exchange has no perceived or real value to enhance individual or tribal viability, it cannot be sustained. Potlatch exchange is rooted in real (energy) viability questions which only later became somewhat (only partially) 'symbolic'. And as you were referring to real people in 'virtual' sweatshops, the expenditure of life-time which is correlated to life-energy, is not virtual at all -- it takes a certain minimum amount of calories to maintain a living body for a day, regardless of activity and when the day is done, whether you are a wall st. banker or a ditch-digger, you cannot get that day back. Virtuality is only the situation where some sensory/energy inputs to the body are attenuated, it does not erase the energized presence and negentropic energy consumption necessary for any and all life... The most gifts exchanged were not included in the tribe's economy but were burned in a very ritualized ceremony at the end of the exchange festival. Which particular tribal grouping are you speaking of? Of course there are many varying customs, but if viability is threatened, you can be sure that burning was not an option. Burning (destruction) of reserves can only take place in a glut / energy reserve excess situation. Okay, sure, when the perceived 'sacrifice' will bring more 'stuff' sooner than later, people who were locked into a set of tribal religious rules would do so, but if starvation becomes endemic, you can be sure that those gods so faithfully invoked would be quickly removed from their position of power! (a 'reversal of perspective: http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/7458 !!) cheers, John # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Dear Nettimers, I allow myself to weigh in on this very interesting debate with a side-note on the estimations concerning the valuation Facebook is set to achieve through the ongoing IPO process. I would argue that the enormous difference between current revenues and projected market value (Google only has a market cap of $200B despite much higher revenues and profits) can be explained, at least in part, by investor's somewhat cynical judgement that the winner takes all economics that George Stigler already pointed to in his classic 1961 piece on information economics, which have been escalating in the globalized marketplace that is the Web, can continue unabated. The example of Google has show that externality spillover (in the form of user labor, attention, etc.) for two-sided platforms with very high numbers of users (with 800 million FB users, the cost per user to keep the platform running becomes very low) can be so gigantic that all the monetization can be done on one side of the market (side one: users, side two: advertisers). This leads to ferocious competition: If we consider that people use Facebook because they perceive whatever kind of value in doing so (pleasure, social capital, etc.), potential competitors can only compete by providing a better service (better meaning a higher perceived value, which is difficult in a context where market penetration - i.e. your friends are already there - is itself a core part of why people join or stick with a particular platform) and not on price, because the service is already gratis. From a microeconomic perspective, in such a situation both economies of scale and network effects go through the roof and an initial advantage for one competitor quickly translates into market domination and near monopoly (specialized niche players have a chance to survive). My point is the following: from the perspective of current economic theory (of the economics department kind), it is to be expected that if unregulated, the social networking market will naturally tend towards monopoly because lock-in effects are simply overwhelming. This is the hypothesis investors operate on: that the Facebook IPO does not simply represent the value of a single business in its current state but of the social networking market on the whole. cheers, Bernhard # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Brian was criticized at the start of this thread for suggesting not enough thinking went into the critiques of Facebook's IPO. I would add not enough knowledge. For a valuation of $100 billion, at the normal rate accepted by the stockmarket in the US, that means Facebook needs to earn profits of $4-5 bn per year, or something like $20 or $25 per user. It will receive that, plus whatever running Facebook costs, I presume, from a combination of inputs, such as money spent by users on games on it, the pages it sells to brands, and the targeted ad sales that people are so upset about. Conceivably, it could also start charging a modest subscription fee, but I doubt that it will, since that would reduce membership. Also, the aggressive monetization that Mark A. proposes would reduce membership if not handled very carefully. If for instance ads become more annoying, that would have an immediate negative effect. So would ads that too aggressively make use of individual information. Users making posts that potentially get them the attention of their friends and, perhaps, through those friends' sharing, of others as well will remain the chief attribute of Facebook if it is to succeed. That is why the main result has to be understood as an enlargement of the attention economy, and not the money economy. It has been argued that it is advertising that has led to our consumer society, but that is simply a conjecture, essentially impossible to verify. An alternative conjecture, probably equally unverifiable but for which considerable evidence is available, is that the sheer numbers of different varieties of goods — both material and otherwise — that could be bought and sold increased consumerism. You can read about the love of shopping in Jane Austen's description in her first novel, Northanger Abbey, of Bath when capitalism was in its infancy and there was extremely little advertising beyond shop signs. Marx famously began Capital with an acknowledgement of the immense accumulation of commodities when advertising still was limited. Born to shop is a description some easily adopt for themselves, whereas born to heed advertising is not. Also of significance is keeping up with the Joneses. I don't recall seeing many bottled-water ads, and perhaps this is just my own blindness to them, but I certainly have noted that huge numbers of people adopted carrying around the fluid in those plastic bottles. Roughly 2-3% of GDP has been the ratio devoted to advertising in the US for a century, though it was more like 3 in the 1920's and less ever since. But in addition to the production of the ads themselves, that sum includes the media supported by those ads and of course all the payments to those who are involved in producing those media and who thereby get attention. http://www.galbithink.org/ad-spending.htm As GDP goes up, so do ads, more or less, but there is nothing to indicate that ads cause the rise in GDP, rather than the reverse. Advertisers have a much greater potential market in those who already buy their competitors' versions of something, as a rule, than in creating a general desire for a whole category of good where there was none before, and it wouldn't seem to be in the interest of any particular advertiser to create a market for any potential competitor as well as itself. Btw, I forget who it was on this thread who insisted that the vast majority of ads even on the Internet are for material goods such as cars and clothes, etc., but of course ads are for all sorts of intangibles ranging from education to bank accounts to medical care, etc. The majority of GDP is not manufactures, and that is true world wide. Would it be so terrible if people made a slight effort to obtain data and consider their meaning before making assertions? Best, Michael Best, Michael On Mar 6, 2012, at 10:57 PM, Mark Andrejevic wrote: Facebook's biggest problem, at the moment, is to live up to its reported $100 billion valuation -- a big challenge for a company whose material assets and actual revenues fall far short of warranting such a big number. So brace yourself Facebookers, for increasingly aggressive forms of monetization! # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
So, according to Michael's numbers, to live up to its valuation, Facebook will need to quintuple its profits fast -- without alienating users. That will likely be challenging, especially at a time when its aggressive tactics have drawn a lot more attention to its legally suspect strategies (at least according to some recent court decisions). His estimate tracks with others I've seen claiming that Facebook will need to double its profits each year for the next couple of years. A lot of people (or a few people with a lot of money) are going to have to believe targeted advertising is worth the price for that to happen. As for the history of advertising, I don't agree with Michael that the correct way to frame the discussion is as a contest between two conjectures: that advertising causes consumerism or that production automatically creates its own demand (I suspect this is really a version of the claim that the demand was always already there, waiting for the market to catch up to it). A lot of work on the history of advertising and marketing has been done (to name a few, see, for example, Roland Marchand's Advertising the American Dream, Schudson's: Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, Beniger's The Control Revolution, Ewen's Captains of Consciousness). The standard story is that as industrialization and the rationalization of production dramatically enhance the productive capacity of industry, the need emerges to ensure that there is a market for the new glut of relatively inexpensive, mass produced products. This leads to a focus on both distribution and marketing/advertising. Producers needed both to get the word out, and to find strategies for convincing people to change traditional patterns of domestic production and consumption. Eventually they sought to find ways to connect products with desirable lifestyles -- indeed to build the image of desirable lifestyles modeled around consumer goods (Marchand's book is great at documenting this process). This is not to say that advertisers are brainwashers, but rather to claim that they, along with the media they support, play an important (thought not exclusive) role in selectively representing society to itself, and in shaping this image to reflect the imperatives of those who craft it. It would be setting up a straw man to reduce this claim to the assertion that advertising single-handedly created consumer society. But I don't think we're left with the choice between saying that either advertising is solely to blame (or credit) or that it has no significant role to play. The historical accounts suggest that it had an important contributing role -- not so much in moving particular products as in helping to shape and publicize an ethos of consumption and the media environment that reinforces it. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
On 03/07/2012 12:57 AM, Mark Andrejevic wrote: If you boil it down, the valuation of Facebook is based on the promise of the power of the social graph and detailed forms of targeting and data-mining to do what? To serve the needs of advertisers. What needs? To move products and sell services. There may be all kinds of fascinating networking going on, but in economic terms, Facebook is about selling cars and iPads, mobile phones, diet supplements, beverages, and so on. Indeed. And to sell objects is, in our time, to directly command labor: both the labor of production in distant factories (often in Asia) and the closer labor of transportation, warehousing, delivery and sales, which accounts for an ever increasing portion of the hard, super-exploited work being done in and around the city where I live, Chicago. Because all six transcontinental rail lines cross in this city, it's the 3rd biggest container port in the US, an intershipment point for maritime cargo from both coasts. But almost no one knows this. Dazzled by Facebook and the like, people have simply forgotten about the manufacture of goods and the exploitation of largely undocumented labor forces. Last weeked at an event put on by the Occupy Chicago Education Committee, members of the fledging union OUR Walmart were joined by a guy from Warehouse Workers for Justice. He explained that the essence of Walmart's success lay in the military science of logistics. Through just-in-time distribution they are able to cut inventory costs while constantly maintaining the availability of commodities. Their ideal would be to deliver the product you want to the back of the store at the very moment you enter the front. What he didn't say was that to do so, they would also have to control what happens in your head and your heart and your sensorium - the famous flow of desire that Mark Stahlman was talking about. Or at least, they would need to be able to predict that flow. Which is where the Facebook data comes in. I understood what he was talking about for two reasons. One, because I have been out to Joliet, an hour outside the city, where many of the multimodal train-to-truck ports are, and where the vast non-descript warehouses sprawl over the landscape. In fact we're going out there again today, to a public hearing concerning the case of a woman who was raped by her supervisor, then thrown into jail for two weeks when she went to the police. But I also have a few notions of logistics and the emerging science of global supply chain management: an integrative system that links data about production, transport, sales and consumption into an ideally seamless world model. In a relatively short article, I tried to do a double genealogy of this system. On the one hand, the article retraces the fifty-year history of container transport and just-in-time production which has allowed the US and other rich countries to effectively displace the majority of their industrial working classes to Asia. And on the other, it describes the complex science of computerized tracking, representation and predictive modeling which serves to control the just-in-time flows, and which, as far as I can tell, was developed out of the theory of systems dynamics pioneered by JW Forrester back in the 50s and 60s. The text is called Do Containers Dream of Electric People? Here are some excerpts that point to the role that information garnered from social networking sites could and does play in such a system: With the advent of electronic data interchange (EDI), every aspect of production, transport, display and sales could be recorded, communicated, represented and analyzed, so as to continuously map out the position and trajectory of each single object being handled by a world-spanning corporation. The result is an “executive information system” that gives managers centralized access to a continuously evolving set of logistical data, bringing dynamic simulation over the line into real-time representation. This provides the unprecedented ability to rationalize labor at every point along the chain, accelerating the pace and squeezing workers for higher levels of productivity. Still it’s not enough for contemporary capitalism. As systems designer Paul Westerman explains, “Aggressive retailers (like Wal-Mart) will not stop there; they will continue until all company data is available for analysis. They will build an enterprise data warehouse. They give all this information to their internal users (buyers) and external users (suppliers) to exploit and demand measurable improvement.” Such is the formula of global supply chain management, in an information-age economy where the “push” of Fordist industrial production and state planning has been replaced by the “pull” of giant retail conglomerates. With enterprise data warehousing, the just-in-time machine becomes both extensively and intensively pervasive. EDI is correlated
Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
I apologize to go into the discussion so late but I am moderating this month's discussion at -empyre and it feels the time and the writing skills have indeed a limit :) I was a user of Second Life and remember the discussions about the virtual sweatshops where young Mexicans and Koreans worked for hours in dim or dark places enlightened only for the computers screens making virtual things or fighting wizards to get virtual weapons which could be sold in the real life for real world. Julian Dibell wrote a nice book about it, Play Money. I am myself reading Bataille The Accursed Share and the books by Marcel Mauss about the Gift. The concept of potlach is real interesting, the symbolical exchange of wares and goods which makes wars and conflicts with bloody consequences unnecesary or trivial. The exchange fullfills the symbolical needs of giving and takings. Ana On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.comwrote: On 03/07/2012 12:57 AM, Mark Andrejevic wrote: If you boil it down, the valuation of Facebook is based on the promise of the power of the social graph and detailed forms of targeting and data-mining to do what? To serve the needs of advertisers. What needs? To move products and sell services. There may be all kinds of fascinating networking going on, but in economic terms, Facebook is about selling cars and iPads, mobile phones, diet supplements, beverages, and so on. Indeed. And to sell objects is, in our time, to directly command labor: both the labor of production in distant factories (often in Asia) and the closer labor of transportation, warehousing, delivery and sales, which accounts for an ever increasing portion of the hard, super-exploited work being done in and around the city where I live, Chicago. Because all six transcontinental rail lines cross in this city, it's the 3rd biggest container port in the US, an intershipment point for maritime cargo from both coasts. But almost no one knows this. Dazzled by Facebook and the like, people have simply forgotten about the manufacture of goods and the exploitation of largely undocumented labor forces. ... -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15859 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Just a line to thank all the above for a great thread that could run and run. When combined with the other threads, Nettime has really hit a purple patch in the last week, a genuine symposium of intellectual politics or political intellectualism. And now Ana has served up three of my favourite authors and books in as many lines. My cup runneth over... Keith On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Ana Vald?s agora...@gmail.com wrote: I apologize to go into the discussion so late but I am moderating this month's discussion at -empyre and it feels the time and the writing skills have indeed a limit :) ... -- Prof. Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Haha, join -empyre if you want to have another cup! I enjoy Nettime and Empyre both, it's a great intellectual exchange! Ana On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 6:50 PM, Keith Hart ke...@thememorybank.co.ukwrote: Just a line to thank all the above for a great thread that could run and run. When combined with the other threads, Nettime has really hit a purple patch in the last week, a genuine symposium of intellectual politics or political intellectualism. And now Ana has served up three of my favourite authors and books in as many lines. My cup runneth over... Keith # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Dear John I am not sure if we are talking in parallell ways. When I am talking potlach I am talking from an anthropologist view (I am a trained anthropologist) and we are definitely talking about exchanges both in the symbolical view and in the physical form. The most gifts exchanged were not included in the tribe's economy but were burned in a very ritualized ceremony at the end of the exchange festival. Ana On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:06 PM, John Hopkins jhopk...@neoscenes.net wrote: Hi Ana -- The exchange fullfills the symbolical needs of giving and takings. ... -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15859 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime 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.ScheideggerSpiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime 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 nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime 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 patterns of social
Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Are we getting into the right issues here? The debate seems to have moved to the ethics of sites like Facebook and whether they are exploitative, whereas this thread started with the question of whether capitalism will survive a world of value abundance. To begin with this, my sense is that it will. See Kevin Kelly's essay Better Than Free at http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php While I do not agree with all that Kelly says, I concur with the thrust of the argument which is that in a world of value abundance a different set of activities will get monetized. So it is not likely that scarcity will disappear, it is just a question of what are the new activities that will be scarce. Moving on to the issue of where the thread has moved: I am not sure whether it is productive to see the problem in terms of labor. Lets imagine a couple of pre-internet physical-world instances to explore this further: INSTANCE 1: A well-known anthropologist, tenured at a famous university, publishes a study on the cultural life of a tribe on a little-known island in the Pacific Ocean. The study becomes widely known both in academic and general circles. The anthropologist earns substantial royalties from the book rights. The resultant fame creates highly paid opportunities on the lecture circuit, and also increases the wages that the anthropologist could demand at any reputed university. So you can clearly say that the anthropologist has profited very well out of this activity. Where does the life and labor of the Pacific island tribe fit into this? Have they been exploited? INSTANCE 2: There is a well-known coffee house in a large metropolitan city. A company realizing that many people frequent this place decides there is value in putting up a billboard advertising their wares on one of the walls of the coffee house, and offers the owner of the coffee house a substantive sum of money to do so. The advertisement is so successful that the advertiser offers the coffee house owner even more money for the right to place the billboard. Eventually the coffee house owner senses that advertising gains him more money, and begins to offer the coffee and other menu items for free so that more people will visit the place, and he can earn more from the advertisements. The basic activity in the room remains the same: people still enjoy the coffee and conversation here, which is why they visit; except now they no longer have to pay for the coffee. However the business model of the coffee house owner has completely changed. Now imagine this going one step further. The advertiser realizes that if he has more information about the kind of people who frequent the coffee house, then he can produce better advertisements and earn a greater profit. So he offers the coffee house owner some more money in order to construct and rent a high platform within the coffee house. He posts one of his employees to sit on this platform to watch the behavior of all the patrons of the coffee house, and draw patterns of information from his observations, which can be utilized to design better advertisements. How do the patrons of the coffee shop react when they see this man on the platform observing them? Each of these instances highlights some problematic issues. The instance of the anthropologist raises the question of opportunity symmetry. In any intersection of people within a space, do all the players involved operate with the same set of possibilities being offered to them? In this case the answer is no - and I would cite here Edward Said's argument of Orientalism where modernist scholars began to devote a fair level of attention to the Orient, and this might be seen as an ethical impulse to recognize the Orient. However this attention is found to be based on the portrayal of the Oriental as an exotic other who does not have a voice and therefore requires the Occidental scholar to speak on their behalf. The scholar enjoys all the freedom, mobility and possibilities that modernity offers. These benefits can be preserved only if the Oriental is retained as an exotic other, for the scholar's intellectual production depends on this. For this two operations are necessary. Firstly, the discourse is constructed in terms that only permit intellectual rationality, and any other mode of thought is dismissed as myth or folklore and therefore not worthy of entering the discourse; so an Oriental presence in the discourse requires another voice to speak on the Oriental's behalf. And secondly, the exoticism of the Orient is romanticized and portrayed as desirable, and therefore the Oriental should seek to preserve and remain within that world, and should not desire the options available to the modern Occidental scholar. The point of whether the Oriental finds his/her cultural world desirable is not the key point - what matters is whether he/she is given the option of remaining within this world or choosing other
Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
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. Thus is it not possible that facebook, and others, both exploits free labour and provides something that enables people to do something of their own? Why do we have to ultimately say it is just one or the other? Well, we don't. And the whole logic of the apparatus of capture, introduced by Deleuze and Guattari and developed into a veritable political economy by the Italian Autonomists and the Multitudes group in Paris, does something very much like that, though without using the concept of exploitation. For good reason, I think Jonathan, I don't know your work or your concerns, so it is quite possible and likely that my remarks in the previous post do not apply to you. What I have found very limiting in recent years, in the discourse around so-called web 2.0, is the use of Marx's notion of exploitation in the strict sense, where your labor power is alienated into the production of a commodity and you get an exchange value in return. Then you can quote Capital or (worse) build the academic simulacrum of a 1950s labor campaign around that model. For a while, as I recall, Christian Fuchs was trying to calculate the monetary value of the time people spend looking at other people's lolcats, or whatever. What gets lost in such an approach is exactly what Michel points to so perfectly in the second part of his article, the part that goes beyond Facebook itself. He points to, not just the possibility, but the *reality* of cooperative production using the tools that we now have, and indeed, using the accumulated material, intellectual and artistic wealth that is more or less ready to hand for many people in the world today, despite the crushing realities of poverty and expropriation. Most of the functions of capture and control that inhibit us from even talking about the use value to which Michel refers seem to depend on the simple suppression of this possibility of autonomy within the imagination of the user and within the collective imaginary. In the case of Facebook -- which I do use vicariously, through all my friends -- this has been demonstrated on a global scale with the Arab Spring and then Occupy. And it has been an impressive and welcome demonstration! Can we have an autonomous potential in any case? To me sounds like a potential outside of society, outside of organisation, or the interplay of chaos and structure. So again facebook might be good or bad. In my view, the quest for (and not some reified condition of) autonomy is the very essence, or rather the departure point, of all egalitarian politics. You know, it basically means the self (autos) trying to define its own operating system or law (nomos). The autos can be a group, it's fundamentally social, collective. When people try deliberately and consciously to define who they can become in the relation to others, either by just talking about it or more often by developing a project together, they break away from the dominant nomos (experienced as a binding norm) and attempt, well, to change life. This always leads to some thinking (maybe what Blanchot once called thought from outside). Of course in the process they/we end up confronting all sorts of unconscious detritus and buried compulsions, but in the best cases we also engage with some partial realization of those very beautiful dreams of a fuller and more satisfying existence from which one sometimes awakes in the morning with such a curious feeling, so hard to pin down. Cornelius Castoriadis has written wonderful stuff about the question of autonomy. I do find that in much academic discussion - weighted by certain shopworn but at the time justified polemics against the modernist claim to the autonomy of art - there is a simple refusal to think about the quest for autonomy. It's so much easier to talk about power. I do it too, quite a lot. I'm a repeat offender in that department. But usually at some point I get back, not just to the interplay of chaos and structure (a phrase which I quite like btw), but to those moments where particular people and groups make a move within that interplay. The reason for always returning to this is simple: that's what I find so passionately interesting in life. No accounting for taste, however. anyway, just some non-thinking. Sorry, Jonathan. I didn't intend personal offense, but sometimes launching a polemic is a good way to have a discussion. Thanks for this one. all the best, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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 #
Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Brian writes: What I have found very limiting in recent years, in the discourse around so-called web 2.0, is the use of Marx's notion of exploitation in the strict sense, where your labor power is alienated into the production of a commodity and you get an exchange value in return. I'll confess i'm not sure about Marx's terminology, but that is possibly irrelevant to this particular argument. 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. Ambiguity is important, just like paradox and not proceeding to clear up the mess of reality into exclusive definitions. Even if facebook users did consent, would the decision be autonomously made, or would it be in the form Everyone really needs to use facebook nowadays, and if i don't use it i have no hope of being autonomous, and i will be bypassed or left out? ie are they are bound by a degree of compulsion, fear and by 'the social'? Is facebook's profit the result of opportunistic exploitation by the owners and controlers of facebook? That depends on your definition of exploitation, I suppose. Personally I will claim it resembles exploitation. Just as in the peasant and lord example. My memory is that Marx thought the peasant and lord relation was in some (but not all) ways preferable to that between capitalist and worker, due to a degree of personal mutual responsibility and obligations. Whether the owners and controllers of facebook feel they have any obligation to their user/workers I don't know - but not much from what i have seen - perhaps just enough to keep them prosuming or in addiction or whatever metaphor you wish to use. Can we say people are autonomously exploited? Then you can quote Capital or (worse) build the academic simulacrum of a 1950s labor campaign around that model. For a while, as I recall, Christian Fuchs was trying to calculate the monetary value of the time people spend looking at other people's lolcats, or whatever. I've not read this work of Christian Fuchs so i won't comment on this, but another simple and inaccurate measure would be to divide the number of people who have made at least one post per week over the last year, into the amount to be raised by market capitalisation, plus the profit for that year. That would give a monetary value that facebook user/workers each did *not* get. We can then talk about whether the owners and controlers raised all that monetary value, autonomously or not. Again I think they needed the user/workers to do so. It strikes me that an imagined slave owner could be poor and actually share their wealth equally with their slave because that kept them both alive. The equality of income, and even the slave's consent, might not imply there was no exploitation. Same with Facebook. What gets lost in such an approach is exactly what Michel points to so perfectly in the second part of his article, the part that goes beyond Facebook itself. He points to, not just the possibility, but the *reality* of cooperative production using the tools that we now have, and indeed, using the accumulated material, intellectual and artistic wealth that is more or less ready to hand for many people in the world today, despite the crushing realities of poverty and expropriation. Well I don't have a problem with that, but does facebook do any of this? I don't use facebook very often, but collaborative production of the kind that is happening on Nettime, or in this process of moments between you and me, does not seem to happen there that often. And, even if it did, that does not mean there is no exploitation Again, to me, the argument seems to be insisting on either the 'good' or the 'bad' and not seeing the both together. Most of the functions of capture and control that inhibit us from even talking about the use value to which Michel refers seem to depend on the simple suppression of this possibility of autonomy within the imagination of the user and within the collective imaginary. And i guess who (or what) helps to supress this, and how, are important questions In the case of Facebook -- which I do use vicariously, through all my friends -- this has been demonstrated on a global scale with the Arab Spring and then Occupy. And it has been an impressive and welcome demonstration! Again i cannot claim to be informed about this, so please think of this more as a thought experiment, but my reading of some of those who used
Re: nettime The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Brian writes: For years I have been dismayed by a very common refusal to think. The dismaying part is that it's based on the work of European history's greatest political philosopher, Karl Marx. It consists in the assertion that social media exploits you, that play is labor, and that Facebook is the new Ford Motor Co. I'm not actually sure that saying people are refusing to think by disagreeing with you, is the best way of approaching the question. We could easily and shallowly argue that the idea that Facebook is a sponser of creativity and communication, that only incidently profits off the service it offers, is also a refusal to think. Certainly it is what facebook might like us to think.. 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. Thus is it not possible that facebook, and others, both exploits free labour and provides something that enables people to do something of their own? Why do we have to ultimately say it is just one or the other? Free labour itself is a complicated idea, perhaps descending from Toffler's idea of the 'prosumer', the fact that we all do work nowadays which used to be somebody's paid labour - such as filling a petrol pump, checking out goods in a store etc etc. Thus we all provide free labour, and that is now part of the structure of contemporary capitalism. It may or may not generate unemployment or free people of boring jobs - which ever you like - it certainly cuts costs for business and increases profits and upper management salaries. It has drives in both directions, but it would not seem to be something entirely outside of exploitation. Now, there are all kinds of things wrong with social media, and I don't even use it. But even I can recognize that it doesn't exploit you the way a boss does. But a boss is not the only form of exploitation, and indeed we could argue that in contemporary capitalism, your direct boss may also be exploited, even though they might think they are working 80 hours a week because they want to get ahead or something. Again the relation is complex. Perhaps a better way of expressing the facebook relation is tribute. Like you farm and give a certain percentage of your income to the Lord, because he enables you to farm - in theory. Facebook provides the farm, and skims off some money you never knew you had produced. It emphatically _does_ sell statistics about the ways you and your friends and correspondents make use of your human faculties and desires, to nasty corporations that do attempt to capture your attention, condition your behavior and separate you from your money. In that sense, it does try to control you and you do create value for it. Yes. Yet that is not all that happens. Because you too do something with it, That is not all that happens in a workplace either. We party, have love affairs, rivalries, express ourselves, sometimes sell results of our labour elsewhere and so on. Are people at google not wage labourers even with the beanbags, free form spaces, and day a week to officially do something interesting? The peasants under their lord also have fun days as well. But this might not mean that zero exploitation exists. something of your own. The dismaying thing in the theories of playbour, etc, is that they refuse to recognize that all of us, in addition to being exploited and controlled, are overflowing sources of potentially autonomous productive energy. By criticising facebook for 'exploiting' people and for enabling certain forms of contact, and restricting other forms of contact, what is precisely being recognised is that people have productive energy. No business could survive without people's productive energy. The whole point of a 'business organisation' is to harness as much of that creative and productive capacity for its own ends, and to make its ends the ends of the workers. If those workers don't get paid for it, all the better, as far as management and ownership is concerned. The business enables people to survive and produce things; it also exploits them. The refusal to think about this - a refusal which mostly circulates on the left, unfortunately - leaves that autonomous potential unexplored and partially unrealized. Not in my opinion, it recognises the difficulties faced for autonomous potential... Can we have an autonomous potential in any case? To me sounds like a potential outside of society, outside of organisation, or the interplay of chaos and structure. So again facebook might be good or bad. anyway, just some non-thinking. jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or
