nettime Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium, Part One, Section 5,
In the Facebook Aquarium, Part One, section 5, #3 ( end) Now, one will better understand what the real implication is of the statement attributed to Pierre Levy: No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in the Net(works). [22] This is a very treacherous aphorism indeed, both on account of what it implies, and due to its consequences. Hence, it demands our full attention. The articulation between 'no one', 'every one' and 'all' together amounts to a dialectical pea soup, nothing less. Indeed, overcoming individual boundaries (thesis: no one knows everything) happens by way of a positive reassessment of scattered knowledge (antithesis: everyone knows something), to arrive at the synthesis which equals a total tipping over into the external: all the knowledge is 'out there' (that is: all there is, period, if one's epistemological point of departure is that reality equals information). It sounds entirely reasonable: since everybody knows something, just have everybody spit out what sHe knows, and all becomes clear. To do the trick, let everyone reach out and help her/himself in the vast repository of knowledge 'out there'. In that sense, to be part of the construction of shared worlds looks like kids' play. But, as we will soon see in detail, everything, really everything, 'out there', has been the creation of individual minds, who are able to socialise, and then (and only then) to become something collective. The apparently innofensive idea to hoard knowledge 'out there' in order to exploit it to the tilt belongs to the belief in information as such [23] Well, we're sorry to say: there exists no information 'as such', unless it is meta-category intended to wipe off, as with a sponge, the complexity of communicative interactions. What is the substance of information? Intangible and ethereal, digital information needs heavy hard disks made up of metals, silica and rare earths as support. Engineering and industry are required to manufacture the circuits through which information flows around; electricity (obtained from coal, oil, nuclear fusion, the wind or the sun) is essential to make information available. Also, without extremely sophisticated data unbundling mechanisms, information would not at all be understandable to us. The digital world is not disembodied, it is material. And on the other hand, no support is external to us. Knowledge cannot be separated from the human brains producing it. To put it in more technical terms: minds are co-extensive to bodies, and bodies are co-extensive to minds. It may be that, some day, non-human bodies will be able to display conscious mental abilities, but these will not be of a human variety. Consequently, even if this type of external support (whether digital or otherwise) would exist for knowledge (as it already exists for information - but then, information is not self-conscious) it would not act in our collective interest. (The concept of) Automatic sociality run by machines is an absurdity. Even without going deeper into the argument, we are able to state with certainty that data in general, and Big Data in particular, is devoid of intelligence. Quantity of information does not in itself generate sociality. And the quantity of information generated by Big Data does not make it amenable to sociability. Big Data does not liberate or empower us, neither does it make us autonomous and happy, automatically. The collective network intelligence is actually a reactionnary dream of control. The collective imagination, when it stops looking at and reflecting about itself [24], gels, and engenders oppressive institutions. Institutions are of course necessary for social organisations, but almost always they will hide their historical origins. They do not operate for the good of people, but in order to perpetuate themselves and self-reproduce, sucking the life-blood of individuals in the process. It is not difficult to envisage that the institutions which would come out of the collective technological imagination will be even more more inhuman than the ones we have already witnessed in history. Just take the example of digital control, that is digital policing: whereas it is, generally speaking, always feasible to escape human domination, how will it be possible to rebel against the 'external' machine that has been entrusted with the task to ensure the law is respected? [25]. It is not by accident that institutions are step by step adopting the network model and thereby transform themselves in reticular (network/ed) organisations. In doing so, they unload the negative externalities onto the weak parts of the network, and manage to accumulate even more power in the process. And when institutions don't even have a public remit, or a quasi-democratic facade, but are blatantly governed by anti-social principles, such as are anarcho-capitalist private enterprises like Facebook, it should be easy to see that the social network being shaped is
nettime Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium, Part One, Section 5,
Part One, Section 5 (The Performance Society), #2 Enthusiast technophiles, evangelists of mass on-line participation would like us to believe that /distracted-attentive/ internauts are generating, by the sheer virtue of their numbers, a humungous surplus value, ready to be converted in cold, hard cash. It is true that in a knowledge economy, the more people bring in their own expertise, the more the common amount of riches increases. Yet it is just as fallacious to pretend that we have all globally become wiser. To know everything about a sitcom, about celebs, about the latest fashion trend in Soho when one lives in East Oslo, does not amount to know more (useful) stuff or to know it better. And one does not become a smarter person by being, up to the minute, on top of what our digital 'friends' are doing on Facebook, or by assiduously following our would-be 'fans' on Twitter. The sum total of this kind of knowledge serves one purpose only: to spin faster and faster the iddle machine of digital evolution. Raoul Vaneigem's jubiliation on being able to 'say anything, nothing's sacred' becomes dull as dishwater in view of the mass of banalities being circulated (on the social) networks. Thus, everything ends up being half serious and half trite, everything is relative, and 'equipollent' (equivalent in significance), because it looks like as if nothing new can ever be said. And yet not all knowledges are born equal. Not all is equivalent. It's true that my dotty old aunt Margareth will never be able to handle a smartphone or a VCR - though she might learn it if given personalised instructions. But she knows damned well how to live in her world, which continues to be the real world for the largest part of the world's population, and also for us, even though we tend to forget it when ensconsed in front of our screens. Is there so much difference between, say, repairing a leaking tap at home, or mending socks, or singing, dancing, biking, or even being able to listen to a friend's confidences, and to learn how to post messages on one's Facebook wall - and why is it called a wall, by the way? The latter maybe is because it is intended to be covered by graffitis - ad infinitum. So the two types of competences might have a comparable degree of complexity, but both are, in fact, very different. The first type makes individuals more autonomous, the second type is a knowledge-power that is entirely dependent on productions which are heteronomous (that is directed by others according to someone else's rules) vis a vis the world outside. This holds particularly true for those users who haven't got any clue about how Facebook works, technically speaking (and who have thus zero autonomy with respect to the tool), even though they make a compulsive use of it. This because when rules change, by virtue of 'default power', on Facebook, or on the platform I use to build up my identity, I become confused, and as a user I get lost since what I mastered has become useless knowledge which I now need to update. In a certain sense it's me that has become outdated and in need of an upgrade within this permanent education format where you learn strictly nothing save to know how to adapt to the system. When a tab moves, when the arrangement of the personnal account is altered by the service provider in order to enhance the user's experience it is the identity itself which is shaken up. What to do then against the programmed obsolescence of the expertise when nothing that exist in the format actually relies on us in any sense? The very concept of opposition and critical attitude becomes obsolete as well, just as the ability to seek alternatives. Thought's articulation is sucked away by the velocity of change, the escape velocity needed to flee the inconsistency of the sociality that is being created. In the next chapter, however, we will see that this new sociality is part of a very explicit ideological project: anarcho-capitalist fundamentalism, a project that totally resonates with a vision of technology as liberation and salvation. The words used to represent users' on-line experience tell all is needed about the hollowness of the myth of digital participation. ' I Like', 'FirstLink', 'Click Here', 'What Are You Thinking Right Now?': it's all about /stimuli/ which are not even binate, but unidirectional. Declaring one's tastes on Facebook is Okay, but to criticise doesn't make any sense. The most common rejoinder being: 'well, if you don't like it, why you would you go there? There's everything on-line, so you're entirely free to choose what you do like'. But freedom is not the same thing as the freedom to choose between black and white. It is a constructive process, which, when undertaken without necessary nuances, leads to absurd simplifications. 'Voting' procedures may sometimes be implemented, e.g. on Amazon reccomendations, or regarding the evaluation of Wikipedia entries. The pooling of these resources and their analysis
nettime Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium, Part One, Section 5,
Part One, Section 5,1. The Performance Society To sum up: opening an account with/on Facebook means sharing digital 'materials' which make up virtual identities. I am what my behavior on-line is. But spending time creating an on-line image of the self does bear consequences for (one's) life off-line. The virtual identities one is able to construct with the help of Facebook's tools are generally 'flat': they lack the depth characteristic of real identities, which are rich in shades and nuances. In real life, before commituing to utter what one 'really thinks', one takes time to think and weight in the fors and contras. One doesn't storm into the street to shout out that one has just been dumped - by way of a SMS - and is available again on the meat market. Facebook demands unfiltered action - and this maximum 'sincerity' often amounts to crass stupidity and guile. But human feelings are far more complex, not to say fd up. Literature, the arts, and creativity in general all show the extraordinary capicity of human beings to create shared worlds that enable to feel in harmony with others. The risk is very high that massive partaking in life on social network won't lead to 'collective authorship', but to a buzz-swarm of totally superficial interactions. As Michel de Certeau has convincigly argued [15] it is time, and time only, which makes it possible to shape the everyday world 'below'. When one does not have a place of one's own, one acts on someone else's territory; if one is unable to put a strategy in practice, one can resort to tactics. In theory, personal time can therefore be used to build up significant relationships, also within heteronymous contexts as are social networks, whose rules are not established by users themselves. But even when they attain a high degree of sophistication, subversive tactics in the use of the tools provided very rarely result in genuine zones of experimentation. The living time is next to always reapropriated by the digital spaces and diverted towards profit generation. Hence, an increasing number of people, and that include technolphiles, are beginning to understand that there is something badly amiss with the system. As artist Richard Foreman has phrased it: we've been pounded into instantly-available pancakes, becoming the unpredictable but statistically critical synapses in the whole Gödel-to-Google net.[16a] For sure, speed is a two-sided sword. The illusion of immediate search results on request (Google) and of immediate sociality on demand (Facebook) reduce the depth of book culture and also the possibility to build up a signification-rich shared world. Richard Foreman again: But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the instantly available. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritanceas we all become pancake peoplespread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. [16b] Individual interiority empties itself here in order to completely pour itself again into the vessel of digital exteriority. This process is related to external stress, that is the permanent pursuit of significant responses (in terms of knowledge) and worthwhile contacts (in terms of affect) seeked by individuals. The networks' responses, as they are given by mechanical appliances (computers, cables, infrastructures) and content devices (software programs), belong to the scientific domain. But as Feyerabend noted before, where science wants to impose a single truth, it displays the quality of the religious [17]. As the mother of technical thought and technological objects, it operates like a vapor saturating all discursive space, by imposing itself by way of the proselyting methods which have been invented and perfected by the world's most ancient and most effective universal hierarchy: the Catholic Church. Just as a good shepperd takes good care of his flock, so does the modern technocrat cater for all the needs of his sheep, provided they are docile and transparent, are sincerely declaring all their concerns, and welcome with fervor the (Holy) Gospel of the Digital Society. What is new is that the sheep now need to actively self-define themselves acording to the criteria that have been put at their disposal (#*). They do not constitute an indistinct mass, yet their identities differ only minimally, and these variations are defined by very clearly specified criteria. That is the only way digital technologies can offer a personalised and immediate truth satisfying all the users' wishes at the same time. Google, Facebook and the other small deities of the economy of search and attention, are hence all minor hypostases (underlying substances) with the help of which one celebrates the High Mass of Superior and Liberating Technology.
