Another one of
my postings to the Institute for Distributed Creativity's mail-list, leading up to
the Digital Labor: internet as factory and
playground conference in New York this month. It's a little
embroiled in debates, but I've provided links to most of the references - and I
think the main points stand. I'm debating a very brilliant and very radical
thinker called Brian Holmes:
Brian you talk of the "tawdry narcissism of networked environments organized to promote the delusion of transparency and community". Is this part of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the DiLampudesa strategy - the power elites of globalised capital "changing everything, so that nothing changes"? You tend to think so. But Wallerstein says clearly that it's democratisation, over the pass of the last two centuries, which has been instrumental in re-addressing basic allocations of wealth and accumulation of capital.
I do value your hands-on accounts of avant-garde network activisms which are prefigurative of a future society (David Graeber) and are 'expressively' democratic, in Negri's terms. That countervailing pressure is required. But like Michel Bauwens, I do despair of the panoptical trance that you and other critical theorists on this list get into when looking at corporate social-media networks.
Can't we be a bit more capacious than that? Can't we BOTH support the field of autonomous system-and-tools-making that Michel so brilliantly maps out, AND use the passions and commitment of hacker values to keep a civic pressure on extremely user-sensitive commercial networks? And maybe deploy them, as far as one can take them, to keep up that democratic pressure Wallerstein talks about? You can argue for better libraries, AND leech off the coffee-driven commons on your local Borders to read and take notes on your latest political tomes: I do it all the time. Isn't it the enduring power of the public sphere that shapes both these private and public enterprises? And doesn't that map over to social media?
As I go about my daily wage/rent-labours, I'm standing in the ruins of two industries - news journalism and the music business - and am utterly aware of how intrinsically decommodifying open digital networks are. Music will take care of itself: like play, it's an anthropological constant. But now disconnected from its classified-ads scam by our good friend Craig Newmark, the funding of a newsroom - which could help us maintain a beady eye on those victims and perpetrators of neo-liberal economics - is a really moot issue. This is not to say that journalism was perfect - too much of it was PR-driven automatism, it needs a Coaseian organisational shake-out and a return to its best professional ethics, as Clay Shirky says.
But the net-driven crisis of journalism is an example of how we need transitional as well as radical strategies to make the most of the new societal ontology of networks. What comes after the net destroyed the newsroom isn't just a moment for anarchistic fecundity - though it should be - but there should also be space for thinking about how a revenue stream might fund future 'afflictions of the comfortable, and comforting of the afflicted'. Seymour Hersh brought us the Abu Ghraib pictures - Western power's enduring semiotic wound - out of the bowels of Conde Nast, via the New Yorker. Future tricky alignments of capital and ethics - around philanthropy, tax breaks, company law - will be necessary to maintain that kind of journalistic process. I can't, and won't, eschew them because they have a corporate locus.
In order to multiply and ramify that democratisation process Wallerstein talks about, we should be confident enough in our analysis (and consciousness) to use any tool necessary - however tainted by data-tracking or commercial behaviourism (which, as Goldhaber correctly says, is often hubristic and presumptious in the extreme). Yes, we have to encourage those roving posse comitatus, Brian - the times are too fluid and open to constitutive power for creative activism not to flourish. But on the same savannah, some of us would like to use existing institutions/organisations to get towards new institutions/organisations. And in any case, one has to praise a space like iDC for demonstrating that conversations can happen between avant-garde and reformist elements in a movement.
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