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 What do you think about .art?
Art traditionally ends up in the wrong hands, there is no inherent problem with this. Thinking ahead, it will be so much more amusing if Dow or Mattel snatch .art (barbie.art is worth $200K by itself), than some 'body' composed of pompous internationally-recognized benevolent and independent selfless art experts (which would be only pathetic.) There might be many applicants and I would hate to see .art go into the wrong hands (the ones with deepest pockets that would win it in the auction phase). # 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 What do you think about .art?
IMHO one should never call oneself an artist, .art is .kitsch Only onthers may call one an artist. Well, it could be a space of art-dealers (behind bars!), but that would give it some drive into .art and not.art, which could ne the most important domainname, that I claim here and now as a creativ work, may other reserve themselves the retro net.art. Art is a no.word, let others like it, dont support it in any case, H. Am 07.03.2012 19:19, schrieb Desiree Miloshevic: Armin - thanks for helping out here and explaining I was going with my email. Ted, it's been a while, but I hope you still have time to follow ICANN let us know what you think of the latest ICANN gTLD process. As I've been working on .art for some time - am interested to see if we could mobilize artists to pledge: a) written support b) crowd source donations for the application fee (185,000 USD), c) between 10-100 USD per person or any close number to 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 What do you think about .art?
I don't think the domain name system is the place to be fighting for the small, independent artist. Leave it to go to the enormous corporations, and create stuff whereever; in the cracks, the unseen places, darknets etc, as well as wherever in the public. Names are as valuable as what they represent. I don't think a co-operative controlling and charging for particular domain names is a very good system of artist funding. pgpIAG5IOjJ8n.pgp Description: PGP signature # 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 What do you think about .art?
If Desiree's idea takes shape, and if a bid is successful, there is scope for a successful registry with a balanced model :) On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 6:37 AM, Morlock Elloi morlockel...@yahoo.comwrote: Art traditionally ends up in the wrong hands, there is no inherent problem with this. Thinking ahead, it will be so much more amusing if Dow or Mattel snatch .art (barbie.art is worth $200K by itself), than some 'body' composed of pompous internationally-recognized benevolent and independent selfless art experts (which would be only pathetic.) There might be many applicants and I would hate to see .art go into the wrong hands (the ones with deepest pockets that would win it in the auction phase). # 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
nettime Seminar on Political Organization Essex March 12th
Seminar on Political Organization Essex March 12th Essex Centre for Work, Organization and Society Seminar Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Political Organization Rodrigo Nunes, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do Sul March 12th, 4PM-6PM @ University of Essex Room 5N.7.23 With the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, Occupy and so much more, 2011 is likely to go down in history as a very special year – perhaps even the beginning of something. But what would that something be? This presentation attempts to draw some conclusions about the present state and future of politics and organization by examining the practices of the movements that erupted in the last year. Thinking beyond their usual representation by the media, trying to avoid either describing them as something entirely new and unheard of or as manifestations of an ultimately non-political culture, what can be the lessons of 2011? Bio: Rodrigo Nunes is a post-doctoral fellow at (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil, with a PNPD/CAPES grant. He has a PhD in philosophy from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is a member of the editorial collective of Turbulence (www.turbulence.org.uk). His writing, on philosophy, art and politics, has appeared in such publications as Radical Philosophy, Deleuze Studies, Transform, Mute, ephemera, The Guardian, Z and others. -- Stevphen Shukaitis Autonomedia Editorial Collective http://www.autonomedia.org http://www.minorcompositions.info Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master's rule. - subRosa Collective # 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 What do you think about .art?
I absolutely agree. .art is simply ridiculous, who wants to be called .art? Only those who are trying hard, or amateurs without real passion. From the other side, .art is a perfect package for a meta-conceptual artist to acquire and do yet another one of those pseudo-dada art operations. In either case, its totally uninterested and better to be left to the regular market. Ps: I also believe that the classic- and realistic- domainname extension for art, is simply .Com Miltos Manetas Sent from my BlackBerry? smartphone -Original Message- From: Heiko Recktenwald heikorecktenw...@googlemail.com Sender: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:33:28 To: nettime's_roving_reporternettim...@kein.org Subject: Re: nettime What do you think about .art? IMHO one should never call oneself an artist, .art is .kitsch ... # 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
