"The More You Know"

By referencing Foucault, it seems Robins and Webster made available wider implications for their argument on how education (re)produces social class. By using Foucault’s relationship between knowledge and power (which for Foucault, are reciprocal and contingent upon one another, I believe) they actually turn the rhetoric surrounding the value of “knowledge” on it’s head.

Embodied in public service announcements we are all familiar with, knowledge, i.e. skills, is advertised as the ultimate in empowering solutions, a way to individualize one’s self and realize autonomy. Knowledge is power for the student.

By using Foucault, Robins and Webster, quite nicely, I think, flip this rhetoric, “making visible” the fact that knowledge is indeed power, but power over the subject – a disciplinary system shaped to reproduce social class, and thus, in the larger picture, maintain capital relations.

Knowledge is power in a more straightforward sense: knowledge of people’s practices, patterns, behaviors, etc. But one must also conceive of knowledge not as a collection tool but as a system – a system that naturalizes, sometimes explicitly and sometimes tacitly, capitalistic values, a system that categorizes people based on their perceived aptitude (the criteria of which are market-driven).

This is not a "pipe"

Incidentally, the disorder with the highest treatment success rate for cognitive behavioral therapy is panic disorder with agoraphobia (~95%). Clinical agoraphobia is defined as a set of avoidance behaviors that develops in response to panic situations (I stop walking down the street because I had a panic attack once when I was walking down the street, for instance).

As the title to this post indicates, I'd like to reply to both Perry and Niko. I think there's a profound link between desire and surveillance that has perhaps been left undertheorized this semester. The current success of cognitive behavioral therapy is related to the decline of symbolic efficiency: the "other-supposed-to-know" that was once represented by a flesh-and-blood doctor has been externalized into a set of autonomous processes. This goes hand-in-hand with our wish to understand the mind increasingly in terms of computer processes. It is comforting to have a model, a sense of mastery. If an impersonal structure can carry this out, so much the better--less chance for error. But this is only part of why CBT works.

There is also what I am tempted to call "claustrophilia," the opposite of agoraphobia, the pleasure of encapsulation. The fantasy of cyberspace is not to be able to go anywhere, do anything, etc. We were already able to do all that stuff if we really wanted. Truth is, most of it is boring. The fantasy of cyberspace is to do everything just as we have always done it, but from the comfort of our own homes. I want to shop, converse with others, read, write, be entertained, etc.--the totality of quotidian life--without leaving my bedroom. Why?

Surveillance and Enclosure can be very enjoyable. As Joe Pantalioni said, "Put me back in the Matrix!" Niko is right, there really isn't anyone saying that material reality is disappearing. And the fact that one finds the same straw man argument repeated over and over again is proof positive of the argument he runs in the second half of the post: that reality is organized as a matrix of circulating images. Noticing this should in no way lead us to claim that this is not a fantasy--a symptom strategy--that keeps a trauma from emerging fully into consciousness. What is that trauma? Niko says it is "the desire for structure" but I would rephrase it slightly as "the terror of structurlessness" (the difference is minimal: in each case we recognize the social as lacking). We DO have structure, but it is threatened by a rapidly accelerating culture that exceeds all attempts to impose regulation. In order to stave off the disintegration of humanity we believe on behalf of the structure (the big Other), we act as if it's still there (God is dead, but no one told Him). And sometimes acting like something is there is good enough, like a psycho who thinks his dead mother is still alive. Why don't I run stoplights when no one is around? Why don't we use discarded abortions for stem cell research?

After reading all this stuff I still can't come up with a good reason why one wouldn't want to be put back into the Matrix. I don't care if it isn't a pipe, as long as I can smoke it. "Claustrophilia" is a powerful fantasy.

Robins, Webster and Cheney

Not Dick, but Lynne. The Harvard core currliculum report was intended to refocus the American educational system on the "classics" as the insurgence of post-modern academic practice in the post-war and Vietnam periods. The issue of credentials in the American context is political, for Cheney and others involved with the report anti-vietnam course work, deconstructon, poetry and a host of other things were destroying the basis of American identity, which was apparently really unstable in the 80's, I guess the Wonder Years didn't work. Robins and Webster clearly are writing about the British context, their history flows from a "skills" movement in the 80's. This is quite different from the culture war context in the US, however it is similar in that the meaning of education is definitely in flux. My question seems to roll this way, the university systems of England were apparently creatures of capitalism by the 80's, the problem with the post-modern university as such is that it's flux is part and parcel of capitalism. To use a really obtuse argumentation term, there is no uniqueness for this argument. What is the real danger if the forces of capitalism have already gotten control?

A second ticky-tacky thing, is there really that much of a difference between an appreciation of disorder and post-modernism? These folks want to play the Goldilocks and the Three Bears game with order to get the best of fragmentation while keeping fundamentalists and other various capitalists out in the woods. To conclude I want to invoke Nilo on the death drive issue, a conversion to some variant of radical democracy is boring. Embrace the possibility of destruction, the capitalists don't play fair in any democratic dialog, so why even try to live with them? The hard Zizek answer that would come out to most of these questions can be found in his reasoning, only by doing the hard, painful, delicious work of total refusal of capitalism in as much as it will destroy us with apocalyptic fantasies. So a few things to take away from this argument; first that anti-post-modern arguments are often quite similar to those on the right, that revolutionary marxism is interesting and that we need to pass plenty of cool points around.

More google...

I hope this isn't getting redundant, or obsessive. This is just another useful article on Google and data collection - "As Ask Erases Little, Google and Others Keep Writing About You"

Practice at Self-Surveillance

Okay, while it is true that more people go to school than to psychotherapy, you probably know more about your own behavior than do your teachers. Just when did you start working on that paper, anyway? So while Robins & Webster make a good argument for education as a method of social control, psychotherapy is an even better example. Cognitive therapy, both with a live therapist and through self-help books, teaches its clients how to use self-surveillance to become more "rational" and, therefore, happier. Classical psychoanalysts sit behind and out of sight of their clients, then debate whether or not it is proper therapeutic procedure to apologize to your patient if you fall asleep during the session--put that in your Foucaultian panopticon and smoke it.

I wanted to post a cognitive therapy "mood log" here so that everyone could download it and begin working on their own self-surveillance immediately. As you will note from my previous posts, however, my best protection against anyone ever figuring anything out about me via surveillance of this blog is my technical incompetence, which prevents me from linking half the stuff I want to put up.

I will bring everyone their own cognitive therapy mood log to class tomorrow, so that self-surveillance and rationality may reign supreme during this exciting time of the semester.

This is not a "post": materialism and other "weightless" fantasies against "post"-modernism

This is a late post from last week's reading. Forgive this basic distinction, but it begs to be made evident:

I realize that the Huws piece is perhaps somewhat of a straw person argument, a bit easy to pick apart and therefore not in need of a corrective. However, there are small curious slippages that we grad students fall into sometimes and the devil of poor theorizations seems in these details. Huws performs this problem I think. Specifically, Huws notes, as some other commentators do, that "a consensus is emerging;" this agreement is one about the postmodern condition of the economy and our reality. Huws notes, "the world as we know it is becoming quite dematerialized..." Obviously, Huws is right to critique this. To say that the world is becoming dematerialized is absurd on its face. As Mark and others point out, "real" material reality exists... planes, trains, automobiles, etc...

However, I would like to know who utters the specific phrase that material reality is "disappearing." This is the "real" straw man argument. Postmodernism, if there is such a "thing," does not hold this view. It is far more accurate, ethical and productive to aver that "postmodernism" (or theorists writing in this vein) claims that people increasingly understand the world as becoming dematerialized, or rather, through the conceptual matrix of an understanding which is perhaps so mediated it is ontologically removed from reality. This is not to say that reality does not exist.. just like say "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" is not to say that there was no attack, death and destruction. Obviously there is; the point is the organization of reality not just through imagery, but as imagery itself. This is the more literary postmodern perspective (Lyotard, Baudrillard, etc...). Postmodern economists, those believing optimistically in a post-fordist economy, might exalt the dematerialization of labor; Huws might have an argument there. But to lump these people into the academic guild of postmodern theorists is highly suspect and shows little regard for theoretical distinctions (obviously, the postmodernism of Baudrillard is somewhat different than Danny Quah's of the London School of Economics).

The real desire "beneath"all this is of course the desire to preserve the groundwork of "beneath-ness" itself (Mark, this shout out is for you and the other materialists out there). How else do we explain Frederick Jameson's contradictory reading of the post-structuralism of Derrida and others? We have with Derrida, an account of the ever "present" logical gap of the structure of inquiry that produces the center term at its root - deconstruction in a nutshell; "the center will not hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Though this radically questions the possibility of depth hermeneutics to produce a truth, a depth and a center through structure, Jameson and others read Derrida and post-structuralism as symptomatic of our postmodern era. In another nutshell I suppose, Jameson reads Derrida and says: "a ha, I see what you are saying, you are a product of the postmodern times and I am getting at the structure that produces people and work such as you." In effect, Jameson reads the critique of depth hermeneutics in terms of a depth hermeneutics. Fascinating, frustrating and flabbergasting.

So why might someone pull such a stunt? Why would someone perform such a basic contradiction? Perhaps we should start turning more inward and apply this problem of a paradox to the problem of a tautology (Derrida once echoed Lacan - "as always, coherence out of contradiction expresses the force of a desire"). What is the desire of stating the tautology? "It goes without saying"... why are you saying it then? "The real is real, it is really real." Really? Because "really" implies like the real, not qua real. What is your investment in stating something should be more like what it is?

The desire here is one for structure, similar to the one Jameson did not want to cede. But desire is not a fantasy one can cast away, and this forever complicates the structure we seek to know apart from our own desire to know it. You cannot desire the real, have it and then be done with it. The desire is the constitutive force manufacturing the real as it moves. This is why fantasy is more real than real - it is the manner in which reality becomes to us. This is the sublimated or forgotten link to Althusser and ideology that is constantly omitted; we have an imaginary relationship to the conditions of our reality. The desire for the real, to have the real as ground and solid structure, expresses the desire to rescind our fantasy structure, to rid ourselves of ideology and get beneath the world of appearances. Speaking like Kant's double from the other side of noumenal realm does not accomplish this though.

Much like the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the knowledge of others' experiences of exploitation will never be fully known or appreciated at the same time. It is somewhat foolish to stop the atomic theory of individualism and say "But I see this individual particle and see its tragic trajectory right here." Yes, but the speed, its history, is lost. We cannot know it all at once. We do not feel another fully but can only imagine or fantasize that we might one day in a fuller, better, more literary (not literal) mode of real yet uncertain kind of experience.

Immoral, Illegal, or Fattening?

When Robins and Webster discuss the effect of ICTs on panoptic control, the language is very reminiscent of the move that Bogard makes with the ‘simulation of surveillance’: “What the computer has achieved is the extension and intensification of panoptic control; it has rendered social control more pervasive, more invasive, more total, but also more routine, mundane and inescapable. On the basis of the new technologies, surveillance becomes continuous and encompassing, a diffuse panoptic vision...We can speak of ‘a cybernetic society, in which the moral principle of democratic societies – individual autonomy – becomes more and more anachronistic and is replaced by technical imperatives handed down from the administrative economic spheres’”(Robins 180). This seems taken straight from Bogard, particularly this shift from individual autonomy and authoritarian, centralized prescriptive control to a more diffused, preemptive, soft control: “A landscape of surveillance without limits – everything visible in advance, everything transparent, sterilized and risk-free, nothing secret, absolute foreknowledge of events...Surveillance without limits is exactly what simulation is all about. Simulation is a way of satisfying a wish to see everything and to see it in advance, therefore both as something present (or anticipated) and already over (past)...Dreams of omniscience, omnipresence, mastery, and security – in short of control – are of course nothing new in the history of technology” (Bogard 15).

This is similarly echoed later on when charting a shift from intuitive to prescriptive to algorithmic thinking: “This approach privileges rational procedures, goal-directed behavior and cognitive structures. It emphasizes that problem-solving skills entail solving problems through ‘algorithmic thinking’, which according to one writer ‘is the third stage in problem solving that began to succeed the intuitive and prescriptive stages even before the computer era’” (Robins 188). I wondered if we can map intuitive thinking and individual autonomy to sovereign power; prescriptive thinking to disciplinary societies, and algorithmic thinking and soft control to the “societies of control.” This might be a bit of a stretch, especially considering that this last ‘stage’ entails that always elusive concept of biopower.

But both Robins and Webster as wells as Bogard use language that is highly suggestive of this biopower. When Robins and Webster speak about the ‘therapeutic state’, the language was very reminiscent of what Hardt calls, “the power of the creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” (98). “Such areas of life as physical and mental health, childcare, moral behavior and even sexuality are subjected to surveillance and administrative documentation. Lasch described the shift from an authoritative to a therapeutic mode of social control" (Robins 179). If soft control and the simulation of surveillance were to require initial programming that allows for complete surveillance (and, ideally, predictability); it would seem to necessitate some very particular ways to create life and train/educate (ultimately what Robins and Webster are arguing in Chapters 9 and 10).

I then thought a bit about ways to resist, if such a thing were possible. Which brought me to this quote from Bogard that has really been bugging me: “And that’s why labor organized by Capital is always a deterred death, a graduated, measured violence against the worker, a managed economy of little deaths, even as the logic of Capital propels it toward a totalization of death. Engineering the death of living labor, always however with an eye to reproducing it minimally, is Capital’s constant preoccupation” (102). I started to think about biopower and the ability to govern and maintain life and/or defer death. Is the best way to resist Capital to undermine this deferral of death and this strict governance of our bodies? I thought of that random quote: “All the things I really like are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.” Are doing these unhealthy things which bring pleasure a possible way to undermine Capital?

I’m not sure if this makes sense. Perhaps I’m just looking for a way to justify what I’ve done this weekend.

Google frees up your IT

Talk about "cloudware". Google's latest offer to businesses and higher education is to take care of their email, chat, calendar, and other office applications. At University of Iowa, for example, the University has decided to get a license to use Microsoft Outlook Software. Server space for our emails (to the best of my knowledge) remains physically on University of Iowa servers, not at Microsoft. In this latest Google "freebie," the email for your organization is the one and only Gmail, with all its surveillance capabilities.

Here is the offer (Basic/Free is on the left side and Premium/$$$$ is on the right):

Applications
Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Page Creator and Start Page
- 99.9% uptime guarantee for email**
- Email storage		5.552502 GB / account		25 GB / account
- Relevant text-based ads alongside email		Standard		Optional
- Conference room and resource scheduling

This is a major turn in the redeployment of the server-client model. Sometimes I wonder if I am making a big deal out of nothing. After all, I have a few domains with emails attached to them. The emails physically reside on the domain hosting service's servers. I also use Yahoo! for personal email applications, but in light of our recent conversations about intellectual property rights and enclosure, I am just a little freaked by the concept that Arizona State University adopted Gmail as their new e-mail platform. Proctor and Gamble signed on as well.

I would hope that a major public university like ASU would have bargained to make sure that their professors' and students' emails remain their intellectual property.

To check out more you can visit this page - Google Apps

p.s. I can tell from the marketing video that Google has adapted the free "OS" platform for the way the home page works for one's organization with Google Apps. Clicking and dragging content around is an innovation provided through work done by open source peeps. For more about this stuff do a search for Joomla or Word Press.

Spies like Flies

From Utne blogs:

The US government has been accused of sending out tiny, dragonfly-like drones to spy on anti-war protesters. People claim that mechanical insects have been sent by the government to hover over anti-war protests and collect information, reports the British newspaper the Telegraph.

Primitive Accumulation Demonstration

Say what you will about the current administration, but it is trying its best to contribute to our learning experiences in this class. Below is a link to a Wednesday NPR story on the "Cap and Trade" system for controlling and reducing carbon emissions. This is primitive accumulation in action, right before our eyes! One major aspect of the debate, as the news story explains, is whether the national government is going to make corporations pay for the initial carbon credits, or whether the government might just give these away at first. A similar giveaway system in the EU resulted in some major monetary windfalls for some European corporations when they sold their credits to other polluters.

Drat this immaterial labor! I can never get these links to work! Anyway, the story is at www.npr.org. At the "programs" label near the top click on "morning edition." You are looking for the Wed., 12.5.2007 story entitled, "Senate Committee Mulls Cap-and-Trade System."

More Concerns About the Commons...

Hop into your way-back machines because I'm going to bring us back to Hardt and Negri's work assigned on October 9th. Concerns about the diminishing commons seem to be a point we continue to come back to in this course. Lessig and Boyle most explicitly talk about these concerns, but Hardt and Negri have a bit in the "Informatisation of Production":

"We want to ask, rather, what is the operative notion of the common today, in the midst of postmodernity, the information revolution, and the consequent transformations of the mode of production. It seems to us, in fact, that today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism. The fact is that we participate in a productive world made up of communication and social networks, interactive services, and common languages. Our economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships. Producing increasingly means constructing cooperation and communicative commonalities.

The concept of private property itself, understood as the exclusive right to use a good and dispose of all wealth that derives from the possession of it, becomes increasingly nonsensical in this new situation. There are ever fewer goods that can be possessed and used exclusively in this framework; it is the community that produces and that, while producing, is reproduced and redefined. The foundation of the classic modern conception of private property is thus to a certain extent dissolved in the postmodern mode of production."

The Grassy Commons

Boyle is interested in the potential of creative, collaborative groups or communities (such as those that grow around open-source projects) to expand or serve as the structural model for social and political communities. One thing he in fact needs to assert to run his argument is that immaterial goods such as an MP3 file are non-rival and non-excludable. I think it might be worth running these assumptions up against Comcast’s (alleged) throttling of P2P users. This is worth pointing out for two reasons I think. One, it is an example of the legal system governing IP, as restricted as it might, being worked around. Boyle gets so caught up with the power of the formal legal framework and the power it has to “throttle” information, he neglects the possibility of such cases as Comcast, which is arguably more totalitarian than the legal, albeit superfluous, regulation through legal methods. The second point is the realization that, again, there is an infrastructure under the immaterial, giving it life. Boyle is so quick to draw distinctions between “the grass commons” and the “informational commons,” I think it’s worth pointing out there will always be a grassy commons relevant to that of the informational. Google’s server farms take up space and use resources, finite resources.

Free Labor Materialized?

Many of you might have skimmed over the piece in last Sunday's NYTimes about the illustrator Linzie Hunter, who used subject lines from spam she received to practice hand lettering. She posted some of her attempts on the photo sharing site flickr.com. After being noticed by the greater design community (and being mentioned in the traditional media Times), she found a non-Internet, material world publisher for her spam subject line illustrations. Makes a great Christmas gift?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/linzie/sets/72157602417089145/

The NYTimes article, free but with lots of unavoidable banner ads, is at

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/magazine/02wwln-consumed-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The NYTimes archive, which used to require a subscription, has recently joined the "free, but with banner ads" crowd.

Discussing Facebook with my undergrad students (all of whom, 100%, have Facebook pages), it became clear that they have developed, or think they have developed, the ability to absolutely ignore advertisements. Several students disputed the contention that Facebook carried advertising at all. So the Internet is either helping folks to develop a new, highly adaptable skill of ignoring details in one's environment (increased processing efficiency, unless what you don't process is an approaching hungry tiger or an oncoming bus), or it is cleverly developing its own capacities to by-pass the higher mental functions and to inject ads straight into the unconscious. The return of the hypodermic model of media effects! I knew it would come back around if I waited long enough.

The point I was trying to make...

(holdover from last week...this week's post will be under separate cover)

Re: Baudrillard and the street

I think my point got lost in my unfortunate choice of example. But what I wanted to ask was: given what Baudrillard argues as the limits of technology juxtaposed against his seeming desire for something more like the street (with its simultaneous, instantaneous creation of meanings), I'm wondering if this, necessarily, means that media has no place in the latter? Or, more specifically, what would a media technology look like that could realize Baudrillard's vision?

The Prior Question of Enjoyment

The movers and shakers in the content production industries have killed the law. Lessig is a radical because he believes in the possibility of a pluralistic society where difference is celebrated, this world lives onto life. In contrast the legal culture of the creativity clampdown is onto death, to use Lacanian parlance. All that is good about culture and life is long dead, enchantment with the future is not just gone, but the hegemonic articulation is driven forward by getting everyone involved in the death drive, like the child who delights in telling others that there is no Santa Claus.

My argument runs like this; what ever provisional solutions are written up in law reviews or other places can't deal with the prior psychic question. Law is an injunction of the superego that allows some to be onto death. The symbolic law has failed and faith in the future is no longer existant; if your entirely sure that you have passed through the first death, then it is quite easy to take others with you. Zombies would be the best metaphor here. Zizek argues that the figure of the Zombie is threating in that it is pure drive, no life, no slippage. Short story long, until we restore the fundamental enchantment with the future (traversing the fantasy) there is no shot at stopping the culture killers. The following is from Richard Sherwin's (professor of law at NYU) book about Lacan and the American legal system, "When Law Goes Pop.":

It is one of the crueler ironies of our time that uncertainty, fear, and a sense of human frailty can be so great in an era when science and technology have advanced so far. Never before have so many enjoyed so much in the way of material security and comfort and in refuge from sickness and calamity. Yet it is as if our intolerance of loss, pain and suffering, and even death itself only increases in proportion to our collective power, and desire, to triumph even more completely over the vicissitudes of everyday life. In law it is no different. In many ways, law today offers more protection against loss and suffering than in any previous era. Yet public outrage, even in the face of diminishing criminal activity and attenuated civil wrongdoing (such as exposing others to secondhand tobacco smoke) seems never to have been greater.2 Laws proliferate. But the forces of irrationality and disorder are not so easily tamed. And as the perception of law's defeat grows, the modern faith in progress, rationality, and the human ability to ensure order and security unravels a bit more-prompting more un¬certainty, more resentment, and more law.

Convergence/Enclosure

Nilo already touched on this, but the portrait that Lessig paints goes Jenkins one better -- it may be true that, potentially, convergence culture makes cultural resources more widely available than ever before, but the legal regime directly opposes this development. As Lessig puts it, "Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now." We might imagine a pitched battle here between what the technological enables and what the law restricts. But that, I think, would be misleading. Lessig's point, as I understand it, is that the technological developments themselves facilitate forms of restriction and enclosure that go far beyond what was possible in the pre-digital era. This is in part an issue of law, but also an issue of architecture. Empirically it's tempting to side with Jenkins -- I can have a lot more fun with collage culture now than ever before, and I have much wider access to information, texts, video, images, etc., than ever before (although this access is of course limited in important ways). For the moment it seems as if there's more slack than ever before. Lessig suggests this may be temporary -- and in terms of legitimate commercial culture the degrees of freedom and the slack is rapidly being eliminated. Nilo's observation regarding the BFF status of Jenkins and Lessig is a provocative one: to what extent, beyond their apparently opposed takes on the freedom of convergence culture, to they share an understanding of an underlying, implicit, commonality of interests between those who control culture past and those who seek to create the culture of the future? What happens if we replace this notion of underlying harmony with one of irreconcilable conflict?

I own this post, Google!

Does everything we right for the class belong to Google now that it’s on Blogger? Does it belong to the University of Iowa? I take it for granted that it doesn’t belong to me. I feel totally alienated. This is truly an incentive to create a shoddy product. Take that, big media!

I wanted to start by noting one point in the Huws reading that really struck me. Huws describe fixed and variable capital in an interesting way that seemed to really add to the discussion of intellectual property rights. She notes that there is a fixed capital embodied in the machinery and the raw materials and capital used to set the enterprise up. The variable capital is the living labor of the workers. So far, nothing new. She then goes on to describe how this fixed/variable capital breakdown occurs in the realm of immaterial labor” the fixed labor corresponds to the ideas of the past which we build upon, with living labor in the form of knowledge workers, both deskilled process workers and more creative, originating workers (140-141).

In this context, the question of intellectual property comes into play as a device whereby capital seeks to turn variable capital into fixed capital, in a process similar to the automation described by Marx in his Grundisse. She goes on to explain that the ownership of the idea of these originating workers is fairly ambiguous and how this is a new dilemma in capital-labor relations: “On one level, this can be regarded as a simple dispute between labor and capital, with workers fighting for a larger share of the products of their labor. However the concept of ownership is rather different from that which pertains in a typical factory. It is now over two centuries since workers effectively gave up their right to a share in the ownership of the product of their labor in return for a wage. The knowledge worker, who insists on a royalty, or on the right to reuse what s/he has produced, is not behaving like a member of the proletariat; s/he is refusing alienation” (141). I just thought that this idea of intellectual property as fixed capital provided language that was helpful when thinking about it in the context of the class. It seems particularly relevant in light of our speaking about the autonomist view of the General Intellect which includes the inalienable positioning of the human laborer who “owns” the means of production, and how the collapse of the public domain undermines this idea (not to mention the knowledge community Jenkins seems so excited about).

I must admit that I’m wondering about the role of free labor in all this. It seems that the idea of a gift economy really relies on the idea of non-remunerated labor with the assurance that the product/idea is non-appropriatable. Is it then okay to labor for free? I did think that Boyle’s point that this non-appropriatable commons relies on intellectual property and licensing provided an interesting nuance to the property-public domain binary he problematizes. You may want to check out Creative Commons which provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

Lessig and Jenkins must be BFFs, right? Lessig sees the glass as half-empty; Jenkins always sees it half-full. Lessig makes an important distinction that immediately reminded me of Jenkins, “a distinction that the law no longer takes care to draw – the distinction between republishing someone’s work on the one hand [i.e., copying/piracy] and building upon or transforming that work on the other [i.e., poaching]. Copyright law at its birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both” (17). Granted, we did not read the chapter on fan fiction and Harry Potter in Convergence Culture, but surely Jenkins’ poaching is increasingly constrained and outlawed by the collapse of the public domain that Lessig describes. Lessig’s description of the power of the blogosphere is identical to Jenkins defense (215): “Blogspace gives amateurs a way to enter the debate...It allows for a much broader range of input into a story...and it drives readers to read across the range of accounts and ‘triangulate’ the truth” (Lessig 32). But how politically effectual can this photoshop democracy be with an “orphaned public domain”? Jenkins wrote a piece in defense of free culture and the encroachment of big media: Digital Land Grab

I think that the shift that Lessig describes between the twentieth century and twenty-first century is also something we’ve seen when speaking about different notions of participatory culture. For Lessig, the twentieth century is typified by the read-only, passive recipients of culture “Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century” (28). The efforts to expand intellectual property rights is read as an attempt to continue the passive, consumer-receiver of the mass media age. Without the ability to build, transform, and poach freely, we will be unable to “both read and write.” This is very reminiscent of the shift described in Stahl, who uses Debord to describe the shift from the passive spectacle-receiving consumer to the subject engaged as interactive participant, who nevertheless plays a questionable participatory role (despite what Jenkins might say!) (Stahl 115).

Check out Lessig’s home page
Students for Free Culture (apparently the University of Iowa has a chapter)

Simulation without surveillance

Does anyone else out there feel that Bogard's attempts to connect simulation and surveillance seem more than a bit forced? Were it not for his admission early on that he started out trying to write a history of surveillance, I would have trouble making sense of this at all. I, for one, feel that this connection is a pity, because the whole idea of new media as simulation is rich enough on its own to sustain many thoughtful discussions--and I am working on surveillance as my final project for this class.

And while I am enacting the role of class grump, I will also say that reading Bogard and Baudrillard together made me long for straightforward writing. I know that Baudrillard especially is supposed to be "provocative," but I still feel that many of his provocations conceal mistakes of observation or reasoning rather than revealing creative insights. His whole discussion in "Precession" of how "medicine loses its meaning" when confronted by an individual's ability to simulate symptoms just seems wrong. He seems to equate here "sumulatable" and "simulated" (i.e., "every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated")--I assume I am missing some subtle point of argument here, but I cannot figure out just what.

I also am unsure that grumpy reflections really add much to the general intellect, but that is what you get when you make posting mandatory. Then, if you do not make posting mandatory, many people fail to post. I do not see a good resolution to this dilemma. Perhaps postings that the writer does not recommend for reading could be done in a funny color. That would be cheerful.

new google thing

http://www.grandcentral.com/

A break-down of the code

I've been thinking about baudrillard's Requiem in relation to 9/11. His latter work on 9/11 indicates the possibility of a horrific transcendence of the code in an act of terrorism that epitomizes a new kind of symbolic exchange beyond the normalcy of the code of the reified exchange system. Here is a model of the code of exchange before I move onto how 9/11 complicates this entire structure

Capital (value exchange) Media (image/info exchange)

Products	Events (including speech or communication events)
Labor value, fetishization, reification, etc…	Prestructured models of interaction (fait divers all becomes organized into political categories)
Control of Surplus Value, immateriality of labor, social factory, etc	Mass Mediatization and the logic of reproducibility
Too numerous to mention	Singularity of revolutionary act, immediacy of communication, Symbolic exchange beyond or against the code, democracy beyond decentralized authoritarianism
Resistant Poaching or Interactivity or Exit or “new Communism” of the multitude, etc….	The mortality of speech over the prescripted/preordained referendum style of writing, politics of surface immediacy without truth referent

“Stuff”

“Filtered”

through

“Effects”

(or causes)

Political Loss

(requiem)





Solutions

Privacy & Publicity

I think what Bogard wants to say by stating that “in the telematic imaginary, total privacy is fully consistent with total publicity” is that actually there is nothing we can hide because everything of individuals has already been open to control. What we experience everyday on the web is an imaginary, which conceals that “reality no more exists outside than inside the bound of the artificial perimeter” (Baudrillard). The privacy performed on the web and based on this imaginary is a simulacra. And this imaginary world requires you to submit information. According to Baudrillard, a simulacra does not have origin. However this imaginary without origin is more real than real reality. Therefore, it is hypereality.
Discussing new biosurveillance technologies (p. 129), Bogard borrows Baudrillard’s theory again: “in fact, by this time real privacy, the master signifier, like the real body, is already lost, and the apparent mechanisms to which it has been lost (surveillance apparatuses) are the very mechanism that now generate it as a hyperreality, launch it into orbit.”

Simulation. Surveillance, and Risk Society?

Bogard said that surveillance is not just about maintaining and reproducing social order but it is also "a fantasy of power" driven by simulation, which Baudrillard defines as "feining what one doesn't have." I kept on thinking about risk society and how Bogard's concept of surveillance as not just controlling things that are happening but controlling what can happen (imaginary happenings) in the real world can apply to risk society. America has become a greater risk society post 9-11 (fear, anxiety, panic have driven Americans to prepare for diasters that have not happened but COULD happen by stocking up duct tapes, altering schedules according to the color coded security system, and most of all, preemptive strike). It was the imagination/simulation of what could have happend with the WMDs that triggered the Bush Administration to invade Iraq. I think this is where Baudrillard's use of the word, "deterrence," comes in handy as it is a strategy of preempting reality.

MSNBC's reality show, To Catch a Predator, seems to best capture the trinity of simulation, surveillance, and risk society. The show uses hidden cameras to monitor and capture the POTENTIAL child sex abusers who have made contacts with children (who are posed by volunteers from Perverted Justice, an online watchdog group for child sex offenders). The problem with this show is that it is not about punishing people who have committed the crime but who MIGHT violate the law (a very Minority Report like situation). The show is not about correcting the broken system that enables children sex labor, sexual abuse, and kidnapping to continue but rather covering up that the system is broken by highlighting one or two individuals that might violate the law. In this sense, To Catch a Predator is like the Watergate Scandal, which Baudrillard argued was a scapegoat incident to cover the pervasive corruption in the political field. By preempting strike on the potential lawbreakers through a simulated surveillance, the show provides a false sense of security in the risk society that crimes will be prevented when in reality (if there is such thing), the system remains broken.

I Hyperrealize?

(1) Cyborgs have no privacy (unless it’s simulated). After Tuesday’s class, I started thinking about how he posits a telematic society where publicity and privacy coincide. I have to admit, one of the things that really resonated, especially after class, was this idea of the Korean RRN. In Venezuela, we have a similar national ID number. We use it for any form, any public comment (e.g., letters to the editor are signed with this ID number). I kept on wondering why it is that these countries use this ID number so liberally whereas the confidentiality of the SSN in the USA is sacrosanct. It’s almost like in the USA we preserve this secret which means that we are entitled to privacy. If you take away secrets (total publicity) we have no ‘real’ privacy to preserve.

Bogard seems to posit a similar scenario, a cyborg or clone with an overcoded and precoded body (not private, already exposed because the code is known) that is perfectly known, is totally exposed, with no secret to keep and nothing to keep private, is perfectly anonymous and undistinguishable – total publicity = total privacy. This idea of the undistinguishable yet unique was tricky, but I was able to wrap my head around it a bit, when Bogard says, “As that path opens to all, fame itself definitively vanishes as a mark of distinction...everyone is instantly famous, instantly forgotten” (Bogard 141). “The orbitalization of privacy through the erasure of machinic-organic boundaries, and the forging of an indissoluble connection between simulation and surveillance technologies. The cyborg and the clone as the paradoxical figures of the hyperization of privacy and its fantastic, absurd crash into nothing. The clone and the cyborg are the ultimate Others, inscrutable because they are perfectly known” (Bogard 145).

Privacy is restored through simulation (the privacy/truth paradox Bogard goes into): either through simulated private space and intimacy or through information saturation (using language similar to Dean’s always frustrated conspiring subject): “Information saturation always leaves one with the suspicion that nothing has been understood, that in fact the crucial information has been left out or excluded...The very information that encloses and saturates them gurantees that they won’t be known, that they will always remain obscure and mysterious” (Bogard 151).

(2) The Soft Control of Simulated Surveillance. We (and Bogard himself) may dismiss Bogard’s telematic society as fiction, but his discussion about the control effected by this simulated surveillance was also really reminiscent of Terranova’s soft control. Simulated surveillance seems mighty similar to the forms of soft control we discussed in class weeks ago. Bogard explains, “The biomachinic assemblage works to erase permanently the already tenuous distinction between the individual and the totality, and substitute instead a kind of pure, cybernetic operationality or connectivity...This assemblage masks a rather simple aim to develop a closed system where all process can be translated and managed as flows from and back into information – no longer conformity to a historically variable and continuously contested system of norms, but rather, if you will, production, from and return to a singular, universal norm of norms” (Bogard 30). He continues, “[Simulated surveillance’s] strategy is always control in advance, hyperized, front-end, programmed control – regulation as a matter of feedback, models, circuitry design, interface, and integration” (Bogard 32).

Terranova discussed soft control in a similar way when discussing control mechanisms for acentred multitudes involving different levels: “the production of rule tables determining the local relations between neighboring nodes; the selection of appropriate initial conditions’ and the construction of aims and fitness functions that act like sieves within a liquid space, literally searching for the new and the useful” (Terranova 115). Terranova continues (and tell me this doesn’t sound like something straight out of Bogard), “The new place of the individual in the mode of immanent control is not as a model for the organization of a multitude, but as a tool that allows the overcoding and the ultimate containment of the productive power of flow...to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of the multitude, corresponds an over-coding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code” (Terranova 123).

(3) Cyborg Work. Bogard’s description of cyborg work were also uncannily similar to a lot of the readings on immaterial labor, with a few additions that seemed answer some of the outstanding questions about and implications of this immaterial labor. For Bogard, in telematic societies, the project to extract surplus value (and exploit labor) entails exchanging “living labor for simulated labor, or what I call ‘cyber work,’ which doesn’t mean just work using computers, but the informatization and virtualization of the entire work environment (Bogard 98). Bowring described a similar trend when discussing Hardt and Negri’s Empire, “The increase in non-working time brought about by the expansion of large-scale industry outstrips the power of fixed capital, so that ‘the surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth.’ Instead we have the development of the collective powers of labor as an autonomous productive force (Bowring 115).

“In telematic societies, cyborg work is not simply unproductive, or even not-productive; it is in fact, ultraproductive, production as information and information as production...Information is what cyborgs ‘produce’” (Bogard 109). Similarly, Hardt uses the idea of a prosthesis and Haraway’s cyborg when discussing affective labor, “Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves...This type of immaterial labor is called ‘symbolic-analyitic’” (Hardt 95).

There are two concepts pertaining to our discussion of immaterial labor that Bogard problematizes (a) the collapse of valorization and the apparent end of Capitalism, and (b) the unalienated immaterial laborer. With regards to the former, “As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth” (Marx, Grundisse). Bogard seems to allude to this same shift, “It is in the effort to transgress this limit, to consume the totality of living labor, that capital simulates labor, and in so doing begins the transition from a material productive order to a rematerialized, informated order of simulation, a cyborg order” (Bogard 103). But he uses Baudrillard to discuss the decline of the commercial law of value and instead describes, “The evolution of third-order simulacra constitutes the regime of simulation proper, governed by the structural law of value and the emergence of a hyperreal economy”(Bogard 109). I am having trouble understanding what this structural law of value is and whether it responds to this contradiction that Marx brings up in the Grundisse.

With regards to the latter, Bogard mentions this idea that labor owns the means of production [i.e., their brains] in the realm of immaterial labor, “The movement to close the gap between production and control also explodes the very principle on which Capital was founded, the alienation or externality of the product and the producer. Cyborg labor, in a paradoxical movement, supports capitalist production only to subvert historically sedimented relations of power in the workforce...when virtual production substitutes for production, control slips from the grasp of Capital” (Bogard 110). Bogard uses Baudrillard to kind of say, “So what if you own your brain?” “Cyborg work represents nothing more than a radical intensification of these processes: surveillance now saturates work to the point of defining it. Instead of ‘informing’ on work as it occurs, it informates work in advance, closing the gap between activity and its sign...the product of labor is simultaneously its record” (Bogard 115). Your options, your choices, your labor are already afforded by the program, the code.

(4) Beniger 2.0. This entire narrative could be the epilogue to Beniger’s The Control Revolution. Beniger’s narrative of continuity – discussing the need for speed and the rise of technologies in response to a crisis in control – seems to coincide with the historical growth of the technologies of surveillance in the 18^th and 19^th centuries that Bogard mentions: “The coevolution of energy utilization, processing speed, and control, the gains from control technologies that accrue through increasing reliability and predictability, and the increasing control required of control technologies themselves – account for the Control Revolution that has continued unabated from the 1880s to the present” (Beniger 293). Bogard also claims a narrative of continuity, “As a strategy of control [the simulation of surveillance] is a simple and ancient idea...the observation machine of postindustrial societies – is dromological; it operates on speed, on the time of movement...In the abstract, power is the policing of speed, of material flows, by the machinery of observation” (Bogard 26).

(5) Telematic Perversions. The paradoxes of the simulation of surveillance were very reminiscent of the perversions mentioned by Zizek in “The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversions.” Zizek posits the juxtaposition of the two aspect of perversion, “on the one hand, reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitray rules that can be suspended” (omnipotent subject); “on the other hand, the concealed truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity” (mediatized subject). Bogard echoes this almost verbatim, “Simulated surveillance refers to a paradox of control. It is a fantasy of absolute control and the absence of control at the same time, total control and the end (perfection, cancellation) of control” (Bogard 22).

Perfect Deterrence?

One of the initial problems I had with Bogard (and I am now realizing it might be with Foucault, whose discussion of panopticism he relies upon) was how the logic of panopticism “induces offenders to police their own behavior, transforming them into ‘subjects…’” And it is this turn on “subject” that Foucault, and arguably Bogard too, is making. It seems that panoptical surveillance creates at once a subject and object of the surveilled – object in so far as it is the “prisoner” on whom the disciplinary gaze falls, and subject in so far as that same prisoner ends up playing a proactive role in his/her own discipline, ensuring “docility.”
I’m not sure if I can wholly digest Bogard’s claim that in perfect form, simulation leads to perfect deterrence, which is “a state where deterrence is no longer necessary” (32). On the one hand, this might coincide nicely with the above, with the seeming hybridity that exists in the object/subject. If I am the object of my own gaze, my own disciplinary subjectivity, have I surpassed the point Bogard is referring to, where deterrence is no longer necessary? But isn’t that a type of deterrence in itself. Having an individual or a population self-monitor, I think, is not some form of perfect deterrence. It might be a sophisticated one, and it might reduce the amount of information processing or even pre-processing that authorities have to do, but it is still deterrence, more hidden but not, I would say, perfect.

More non-digital free labor

Just in case you did not catch it, this is a story from the NYTimes about a stylish entrepreneur who moved his free labor digital writers into the print media world. I like the part where he explains that not having to pay writers means that he can use higher quality paper in the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/business/media/24mag.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Virtual Sex, Actual Adultery?

A concern running through Bogard's work revolves around the concept of intimacy in relation to simulation and surveillance. As we get a hint of the first page of the next chapter dealing with "Sex in telematic societies" I do not feel as if I am off base with this assertion.

I would like to primarily focus on the "privacy/trust simulacrum" and try to link this with developing concerns of online spousal or romantic partner infidelity.

In the privacy/trust simulacrum section, Bogard notes on p. 149, "Likewise, intimacy is not lost, but purified and hyperized (in virtual space it is possible to be 'closer than close,' more than intimate, but still keep a safe 'distance,' just as it is to be 'farther than far,' but still retain an operational closeness. In our societies the screen is what is close and far, intimate and distant, private and public."

Even the Wall Street Journal seems to pick up on "hyperized" intimacy - see this article "Is This Man Cheating On His Wife?" This is an article concerning a man who has a real life wife and a wife on Second Life.

Some highlights from this article that are relevant to the conversation include the husband's assertion that, "it's only a game." A second highlight is the commentary of the real life (RL) wife "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon."

The couple is "closer than close" but still at "a safe distance." He is married, is intimate with someone online, but it is "only a game."

On p. 150 Bogard offers further useful commentary to understand a situation such as this, "You don't escape, you sacrifice yourself."

I figure this online infidelity concept is a useful way to mobilize the work Bogard does in this piece. Other concerns such as the one Mark raised in his post about class issues, I will just have to leave for class-time exploration.

Just for clarification - it does not seem that the couple highlighted in the WSJ article agreed to a polyamorous relationship.

Superhyperultrablogamatics

Although it sometimes reads like it was written by a heavily caffeinated ferret, I like Bogard’s book. As a sci-fi fan, I am forced to assent to the argument that the technological imaginary is a powerful force in shaping the specific character of social fantasies. I’ll just offer a short note on the relation of his idea of the simulation of surveillance to Lacan’s insistence on the future anterior as the “matrix for the historicity of the subject” (Weber, Return to Freud, 7).

Bogard writes that “Simulation technology, for all we hear about the exciting possibilities of its future development, is in fact more about a nostalgia or melancholy for the future; it produces a sense that the future is not ahead, but in some fundamental way already over, in the same way the life of a clone is predetermined, already over from the start, or the way a video game or artificial intelligence machine contains all its possibilities in its program” (23). Incidentally, I think this melancholy can be felt in the examples he uses to illustrate his points throughout the book—isn’t there something extremely anticlimactic in the writing when he pins a theory to an actual (virtual) phenomenon? At other places in the book, Bogard does not refer to simulation technologies as producing nostalgia or melancholy, but rather a kind of satisfaction that all eventualities have been accounted for, and humans possess the means to control, order, and administrate the social world: “some form of coded information (sign-image) anticipates an actual event in order to control its outcome (20). The reason for this ambivalence, or better, the reason that all of these effects are produced simultaneously, is related to the fundamentally uncertain status of the future anterior (future perfect in English), an issue to which I will have returned momentarily. Bogard is arguing that simulation determines the field of possibilities for the emergence of the actual, and thus the actual is always-already fully “virtualized.” What makes the video game in the quotation above different from a novel is that the video game presents us with a scenario in which choice is possible within a limited range of control mechanisms that determine what choices are possible (action must remain goal-directed for instance). In the novel, we just follow a script, and choice is irrelevant. This idea is reminiscent of Zizek’s “mediatization,” which in which control masquerades as choice.

For Bogard, the issue of simulation seems more complex than just outlining the dominant form of control in information societies. Aside from control we have these strange surplus productions: nostalgia and melancholy. At the same time that simulation saps affect from daily life by removing unpredictability and reducing all events to the status of simulacra (Jameson’s “waning of affect”), it creates affect in the form of melancholy (as well as, I’d argue, ecstatic mania). How does this happen? I believe that it is in simulation’s inability to completely circumscribe the real that these remainders are produced. The future anterior (the register of simulation), according to Samuel Weber, “designates a surmise, a conditional prediction, and hence, a proposition bearing on an uncertain state of affairs.” The status of the future as uncertain, as always yet-to-be, haunts the simulation. As Lacan writes, “The subject…always has an anticipatory relationship to his own realization which in turn throws him back onto the level of a profound insufficiency and betokens a rift in him, a primal sundering, a thrownness.” Similarly, it is the “profound insufficiency” of the (actual) simulation that produces a “primal sundering” between it and the (virtual) future. For Lacan, this split is the precondition of becoming a subject in the world: in recognizing a distinction between self and other, to become a subject means to be alienated from a fantasmatic image of pre-subjective wholeness. The subject is forever alienated, in other words, from the object of desire. Temporally, this object maintains an uncertain status: it never really exists except as a fantasmatic construction postulated to have been at some point prior to the subject. Weber explains: “In invoking the future anterior tense, Lacan troubles the perfected closure of the always-already-having-been by inscribing it in the inconclusive futurity of what will-always-already-have-been, a “time” which can never be entirely remembered, since it will never have fully taken place. It is an irreducible remainder or remnant that will continually prevent the subject from ever becoming fully self-identical”

Weber is explaining the status of originary trauma in psychoanalytic discourse. Without going into it too much, we can say that part of the work of therapy includes constructing this trauma (not remembering it) as the origin point of the subject; “memory” in psychoanalytic discourse has the status of a construction—a simulation of the supposed past that helps construct a history of the subject which in turn helps to determine what the subject is in the process of becoming. This is a confusing concept—Lacan explains it more clearly: “What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.” What is realized in constructing a history is a “simulation” of what one was for who one will be. This construction always entails a narrative of loss, of the institution of a primal rift. It is not surprising then that simulation produces melancholy (although mourning would be more precise since there is a specific object: the future), since each simulation forecloses a future from actually happening. We might say that the simulation continually prevents reality from ever becoming fully self-identical, to paraphrase Weber, calling our attention to the rift in the social.

Rain, snow or apocalypse; the US Mail Delivers

There is a secondary aesthetic issue that precedes this writing, the dialectical reversal of the promise of technological utopia. Writing the distopia is presented as a particular strategy designed to counter the pernicious effects of a simulacrum. My argument is not that the two are not opposed, but that they truly are two sides of the same coin. Both modes of writing are predicated on the Sublime. Niko might speak more to the background here, but briefly the sublime for Kant a like a force of nature that is beyond the limit of comprehension as a thing in itself. My argument here will roll this way: the Sublime character of the fictions keeps the narrative away from the body and the lived experience there to.

The easy answer to this characterization is to handle the articulation of the utopian vision of the status quo as sublime. There is no fundamental difference here except the willingness of individuals in media studies to be earlier adopters of technology. This is an even easier answer. Hard answer follows: The power of terrible nanobots, surveillance technology run amok or the matrix are just as much fiction as the story of the end of privilege. At the end of the technological utopia story a great force somehow erases the history of the characters in that very story. Similarities between the stories outweigh the differences; particularly the crux of both stories is the flattening of identity. Interesting that the end of the excerpted work seems to find escape in an attempt to flood the channel with data, a highly personal liberation, a parallel to the highly personal practice of the self that Foucault described?

The rapid movement from Foucault to Baudrillard covers some of the detail we could get from the former. Although the Foucault cited in the opening paragraph uses writing as a technique of self-discovery if not creation. Baudrillard and Virillo come in to answer the simple question, to what end? The skepticism of the death built into the accelerating structure of modernity is clearly a core focus for Virillo at least. The task for the writer of a social science fiction then is to present a particular fictional text for oppositional deployment. Balance would be achieved in a juxtaposition of the utopia of the status quo with the distopian fictions crafted by the authors. Truth as such is not the goal here, but the creation of a polemic. I will/am brining Virillio’s Unknown Quantity for a more graphic display of the argument. The real robust part of this reading is the defense of writing polemic fictions, as a technology of the self these would create the contrast that would distinguish dangerous forms of social control from those that are fundamentally less important. In regular space/time there isn’t a good way to make arguments predicated on the slippery slope fallacy fly. All too often, the banality of reality intervenes as the reality as such has far fewer interesting characters.

Since I am obligated to answer all rhetorical questions and explain my jokes, the title of the post was a tip off to the multiplicity of things that could be characterized as sublime, mainly natural disasters, then I thought, even in the result of nanobot attack, the mail will still come. That will be totally boss.

--dan

The Simulation of Surveillance

He's a little bit repetitive, but I thought Bogard's argument(s) about the relationship of surveillance and simulation are interesting ones that advance the discussion. Open ended response: how useful are these formulations? How far are we willing to follow him into "social class differences don't matter in the least" land? Or into the realm of the cyber-perruque?

Asterisk to the previous post

Turns out crucifixes are also being made by sweatshop labor. This sounds like an Onion story -- I'm not sure if I trust it. Anyone care to verify it? The truth is out there.

Excerpt: In the Junxingye factory in China, the mostly young women—including several 15- and 16-year-olds—making crucifixes are forced to work 14 hours to 15½ hours a day, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. or 11:30 p.m., seven days a week. They also work frequent 18-hour and 19-hour shifts ending at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. Before shipments of crucifixes must leave for the United States, there are even mandatory, all-night 22½-hour to 25-hour shifts, from 8 a.m. straight through to 6:30 a.m. or 9 a.m. the following morning. Workers are routinely at the factory more than 100 hours a week, including being forced to work 51 hours of overtime, which exceeds China’s legal limit by 514 percent. Young women go for months on end without a day off.

Reality Check: It's not all cybernetic

This NYTimes story about the outsourcing of manhole cover manufacturing drives the point home:

"The scene was as spectacular as it was anachronistic: flames, sweat and liquid iron mixing in the smoke like something from the Middle Ages."

It does seem to shed some light on globalization and, in particular, transportation costs versus labor costs.

Free Labor: The Policing Version

The feds are tapping into the surveillance capacities of cell phones -- one of the key moves in the emerging information economy is the individuation of interactive devices, unlike terrestrial lines, cell phones are typically associated with a specific individual (and her/his movements through space and time).

Free Labor Kool-Aid

For those of you who have drunk the Kool-Aid of the commercial power of digital free labor, I have this mildly behind-the-scenes link to a company whose primary purpose is to organize and encourage this. I am working (for another class) on the ideology of baby monitors as presented in consumer reviews on commercial websites. This is a company that helps other companies incorporate consumer reviews onto their own websites as a way to boost sales.

The link is: http://www.powerreviews.com/social-shopping/solutions/

Nitpicking Jenkins?

Let me be clear. I thought Jenkins was fun to read. It was the easiest to read among all the readings we had to do this semester so far (well, Rheingold too). But I see so many gaps in his arguments that it's hard not to talk about them.
So my first discontent would be...his refusal of seeing digital divide or "access to technology" as an economic gap between cultures and countries. He seems to think that participation gap would be overcome once the "cultural factors" that prohibit different groups from paticipating would be confronted. However, these cultural factors that Jenkins talks about is deeply rooted in the economic gap between different groups of people and culture as well and I find it problematic that Jenkins argues that the "cultural factors that diminish the likelihood that different groups will participate" can be overcome merely through public education. This seems to be the kind of argument that privileged people with "cultural capital" (scholars such as Jenkins) would be saying.

My second problem with Jenkins' arguments may be an extension of my first problem. He seems to argue that participatory culture is democratic because people get to be involved in the process of production and distribution of cultural products, which is a very populist message. However, for one to participate, a certain amount of knowledge and access to technology are prerequisite. Even Jenkins admits that people of participatory culture (for now) are mostly white, middle-upper class, men. Then, how can this be a democratic process if certain people becomes excluded (for economic, cultural, and social factors) in the participatory culture? Would it be a far stretch if I say that Jenkins seems to believe that those who engage in participatory culture are better citizens (ahem...I mean, consumers) than those who don't?

Another paradox in his argument about the democratic characteristic of particpatory culture and knowledge community. Jenkins does acknowledge that some people have more access to information and knowledge ("brain trust") which makes them experts in certain fields. However, he seems to see these experts functioning outside of the knowledge community. I think he tends to dismiss the idea that hierarchy (in terms of possession of knowledge, access to technology, etc.) exists even within the knowledge community (okay, he does acknowledge that some people are more "experts" than others and when people like ChillOne and others participate as "experts" it threatens the "more open-ended and democratic principles upon which a collective intelligence operates" (p. 54) but he still argues these experts are needed for the fun of "spoiling" to continue in the community) when it is clear that experts emerge within this community. When experts emerge in the community, the non-expert participants begin to rely on these experts for their knowledge and pleasure (of course, non-experts' trust that experts will deliver their needs has to established first). Doesn't reliance on experts contradict to the "equal participation, equal responsibility, etc." principle of democracy? Or am I reading too much out of nothing?

Another thing that Jenkins makes his argument confusing is his labelling of McChesney and others as "pessimists" because they are focused more on what the media do to people than what people do to media. It seems like a fair argument but I'm just wondering whether Jenkins and McChesney et.al are focusing on the same matter. Whereas Jenkins's focus is in the "content layer" of communication, McChesney et. al's focus is on the "physical" (and also "code") layer of communication (their concern is how the monopolization of the physical and code layer of communication influences the content layer of communication). I think it is possible that people can have an influence on the content layer of communication but if the physical and code layer are controlled by media conglomerates how much of an impact can people's participation have? Even the Star Wars spoofs, culture jamming tactics, etc. that try to subvert the media conglomerate's content layer seem to get controlled by the media giants.

I have more to write on what I got from Jenkins...such as redefinition of leisure, comparison with Lessig's argument, and the possible future of democracy after training to become a better citizen through pop culture. I will post these after class.
Sorry if my arguments seem like nonsense. I'm confused myself.

Collective? Intelligence?

Some rather disjointed thoughts about Jenkins and his concept of collective intelligence:

Jenkins finds the distinction between "media" on the one hand and "delivery devices" on the other to be particularly important. How, then, is the "new" collective intelligence anything but the old collective intelligence repackaged into a new delivery device? People have been consulting the hive mind since time immemorial. At one time, when people's community activities were more varied and took them outside of their homes and neighborhoods more often, perhaps the minds with whom they interacted brought more diverse information to the table, as well. I'm envisioning, for example, a person faced with, say, a problem pertaining to some repairs done to his home. If that person was an avid churchgoer, for example, he might as a congregation member who is a contractor a question about the usual standards for doing these repairs, a congregation member who is a lawyer a question about whether he might sue, etc. How does what Jenkins envision as the new media version of the collective intelligence do anything but perhaps add more warm bodies to that model? And is some form of electronic collective intelligence simply supposed to replace the type of community that we're allegedly losing in real life?

Also, I'm interested in considering how Jenkins's ideas about the collective intelligence might tie into the discussion about deskilling and reskilling. I think, at heart, the Jenkins model works the best when everyone is an expert about something. He refers to collective intelligence as, "the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question" (27). Fine. Yet, he also argues that the difference between his concept of collective intelligence and the concept of the expert paradigm is that "[w]hat holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge- which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge- which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group's social ties" (54). What?

When Jenkins talks about how the knowledge community is this extraordinary source of energy in the community, it sounds like he's on the verge of becoming one of those people who uses crystals to heal cancer. Or maybe I'm just particularly cranky before I've had my coffee.

Deliberativeness

I have noticed my own difficulties in maintaining the mindset that Free Labor had so wisely suggested we assume at the beginning of the semester: one in which I try to understand what ideas each author genuinely has to contribute, rather than jumping right in to critique and problematize everything each author asserts.

I have had to remind myself of this mindset advice especially frequently with the Jenkins reading. Perhaps these efforts will be useful for my final paper, which is on self-surveillance and mental self-disciplining.

I am impressed by the parallels and intersections in the descriptions of the (digital) world offered by Jenkins in Convergence and by Stahl in his "gametime" construction. Trying hard to maintain my Zen-like non-judgmental mental control, I could say that Jenkins and Stahl see much of the same empirical data and draw very different conclusions about its potential long-range outcomes. Jenkins appears not to buy (capitalist pun) the Stahlist assertion that immersion in the digital world significantly deactivates deliberative capacities. Could it be that one of the characteristics that Jenkins wants to attribute to the collective intelligence evidenced by ad hoc "knowledge communities" (57) is a sort of deliberative effect that is greater than the deliberativeness of any of its individual (somewhat overwhelmed and non-deliberative) players?

It is interesting to note here the two distinct meanings of "deliberate" associated with its two distinct pronunciations: "to think about issues and decisions carefully" and "slow, unhurried, and steady." Jenkins may believe that the group process of knowledge communities can link these two meanings, even if each of the individual participants cannot.

I think Jenkins is likely to be wrong in this belief, and that the belief itself could serve to blunt useful critiques of communicative capitalism. Okay, maybe the whole purpose of the belief is to deflect critiques of communicative capitalism. Away goes the Zen mindset again! I would like to think that Jenkins could be proven false empirically if the investigation could be framed and conducted with enough deliberateness.

Who's poaching who?

From the Blue Man Group: "Right now, there is a virtually invisible network that links together millions of people who would be otherwise be completely isolated form each other. This exciting technology has grown to become an incredibly complex web of connections, that is so large and difficult to track that is would be practically impossible to estimate its total size. And even though most of us live alone in urban isolation, this system represents one of the few ways, all of our lives are intertwined. This system is... modern plumbing."

How about a parallel: Since World War II, American culture has survived multiple protests, the threat of nuclear annihilation from Soviet Russia, and a difficult transition into a new globalized economy. But now, a tide is turning, culture is shifting and attacks are mounted once again. This time, we cannot see the enemies as clearly for they are revolutionaries working from the bottom-up, bent on changing civilization as we know it; these radicals are... fans of the tv show, "Survivor."

Now that I've stolen a page from the blue men, let me proceed to comment on stealing in general. I suppose I am operating under the assumption of an author here, telling you want I want to tell you. I will find some quotes and pictures and "riff" on a few things... then "rip on" a few ideas...maybe rip off some too. However, I am concerned that this assumption is only that - a synthetic a-priori postulation that I in fact control some of the narrative directions of story lines, intentions and the antagonisms that make them go. Here is my question - am I, are you, are we really textual "poachers" in the free associative thinking context that seems to subsume this idea? I fear not (another story brought to you by the machine of late 20th century antihumanist thought). I raise this question for two reasons:

Superficially, with regard to Jenkins, there seems to be a problem squaring the social antagonism of participatory/fan culture with respect to its positive valence as contrasted to the centralized power of corporate media vs. the notion of "free" textual poaching. Antagonisms are structuring operations or conceptual matrixes of understnding, or that which or rather through which understanding is molded, maintained. If Jenkins is right, it seems he is more in line with Stuart Hall - as opposed to dominant readings there might be resistant readings (along with negotiated ones). However, resistance is resistance to something, not the creation of communal participation and the production of an internal aesthetic or logic ex nihilo. If this does in fact arise emergently, then and only then could Jenkins solve his own problem of accounting for a more productive notion of "collective" intelligence (I think Chad is on the right track in terms of calling this collective free labor or a set of skills; I'd say its collective resourcefulness or a mistaking of the immaterial product with the notion of immaterial knowledge).

Secondly then, it seems a fantasy that we are poachers. The lack of developing this idea of idea of intellection come selection and deflection more fully shows, I believe, that Jenkins lacks a nuanced discourse of post-Foucaultian ideology where superstructural elements of micro-resistance (fandom) are already accounted for and networked to produce a cultural episteme. Alas, I rob from a Michel to pay a Mark.