"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

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