Collective Intelligence or Collective Labor?

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I'm only about 1/2 way through Jenkins as of right now, so he may address some of my comments later in the book...but I'm more in the writing (less in the reading) kind of mood right now. Blogs are about moods, right?

I find it upsetting when theorists give up the question of resistance altogether and try instead to fashion some utopia out of the impoverished materials of the culture industry with which they find themselves surrounded. It's so...1990s.

Here's a polemical statement (but probably not too controversial): I find no way of sustaining any argument that posits some redemptive value in so-called "collective intelligence," because the very term is a category error. We are talking, instead, about collective labor. What is intelligent about collective intelligence? The individuals involved are using problem-solving skills, but this hardly qualifies as "intelligence." Shouldn't intelligence be on the side of the multitude, reserved for describing those activities which work against, or exit from, empire?

I wonder if there is some rhetorical work being done by the slippery and indiscriminate application of "intelligence" to the activities of both humans and machines. This becomes especially problematic in the term "collective intelligence," which designates instances in which humans perform tasks in networks that mimic the structure of machine networks, and which also generally refers to carrying out large-scale surveillance operations, data mining and sifting, and strategic coordination of resources. If the answer weren't so obvious, one might be tempted to ask: What is it that these machines are training us for? We live in a world where "intelligence" has been redefined by cognitive science, engineering and electronics. Perhaps the true political gesture today would be to return to Heidegger's question and ask "what is called thinking?" Heidegger writes: "Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking," and "This situation is grounded in the fact that science itself does not think, and cannot think--which is its good fortune, here meaning the assurance of its own appointed course. Science does not think. This is a shocking statement. Let the statement be shocking, even though we immediately add the supplementary statement that nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking. That fashion, however, is genuine, and consequently fruitful only after the gulf has become visible that lies between thinking and the sciences, lies there unbridgeably. There is no bridge here--only the leap" (372-73).

Heidegger demarcates two modes of mental activity: scientific research and thought. There is no bridge between them, and we should take note of this. We should also take note that the modes of mental activity common to "collective intelligences" lie decidedly on the side of science: classificatory, scopic, operational, surveillant, etc. I would not prescribe Heidegger as a political corrective to the messiness of the collective intelligence folks (Levy and Jenkins)--it wouldn't really make sense since Heidegger is writing about what falls under the purview of philosophy, not politics. I would suggest, however, that we be careful to differentiate between one kind of brain-work and another, because such distinctions are political.

P.S.--Google trends is the coolest thing ever.

Conference dates...

As you ponder Jenkins, Free Labor, Convergence, and your paper for this class, I just wanted to remind people about a few conference deadlines that are coming up if you want to submit your work to further academic scrutiny:

Computer Culture Topics for Southwest Popular Culture Conference
Location: New Mexico, United States
Call for Papers Date: Due by 2007-11-15
Website: http://www.h-net.org/~swpca/
What's needed: a 150-word abstract in an email to jchaney@iusb.edu

Exploring New Media Worlds: Changing Technologies, Industries, Cultures, and Audiences in Global and Historical Context
Location: Texas A&M
Call for Papers Date: Due by November 20, 2007
Website: http://comm.tamu.edu/mediaworlds
What's needed: "Send papers or proposals (abstracts or annotated outlines) with a 50 word professional biography by email attachment to mediaworlds@tamu.edu. Panel proposals are also acceptable."

Cass Sunstein

I just came across a recent post by Cass Sunstein, whom Jenkins mentions in passing in his intermittent discussions of the relation between democracy and consumerism (which he has a tendency to conflate). I thought it might be interesting to see someone whose discussion of politics is a bit less oblique than Jenkins's.

The obscene father

Take a look at the latest Tancredo ad, set to air ASAP across Iowa. Remember Jodi Dean: under current conditions, we face, "the return of the obscene father. On the one hand, this reappearance of the father of enjoyment smears symbolic authority with all sorts of obscene excesses." Tancredo refers to those frothing with hatred, and works up quite a lather himself.

Worshipping at the altar of convergence

It would be exaggerating to say that everything we've read so far is meant to prepare us for the kinds of arguments Jenkins tries to get away with. Nevertheless, I am hoping that some of the theoretical foundations we've outlined might help but his claims within a broader context. Jenkins is good at telling the representative anecdote and at collecting information about the commercial deployment of the promise of interactivity. He's a lot thinner on the theory -- and especially the critical theory, which he tends to see as a form of reverse ressentiment directed by academic elites toward the pleasures of the mass audience. He's less fun to read, I think, without having gone through the immaterial labor literature (let's hear it for affective economics) and even Dean's arguments (who possesses the "secret" of Survivor?). Which is another way of saying that I tend to think of his book more as an object of theoretical inquiry/critique than an exposition of it. Can we bring the theories of the multitude, of immaterial labor, of the decline of the big Other to bear on the examples/analysis that Jenkins lays out? And what useful points do we think he makes?

More questions about productivity and free labor

I would like to call on the General Intellect of the class to try to get more of an answer to the question that was posed but never answered at the end of Tuesday’s class. This is especially for those who know their Marx better than I, which I figure is just about everyone reading this. If these questions fire up references or associations rather than clear answers, post these and I will do the exploring.

Mark’s question spoke to the issue of what is productive in what we might otherwise label as consumer behavior around consumption. It seems that a significant portion of what we are talking about as “immaterial labor” is the translation of various consumer behaviors into digitalized information. This generated data is valued by advertisers and by producers, for related but ultimately distinct reasons. Producers believe that this data will result in more or easier (i.e., less costly) sales. Advertisers believe that they can use this data to convince producers to buy more advertising. Ultimately it would up to the producers to make the empirical judgment as to whether or not this consumer data does really increase profits (either by generating more sales or by making sales less expensive to complete).

My question, then, is: what does Marxism have to say about this end stage of the capitalistic process, the behavior leading up to the actual purchase? Is producer profits the same, or essentially the same, as the extraction of surplus value that Marxism focuses on as one of the basic exploitations of capitalism?

Any process, whether via new media or not, that allows the capitalist to sell a product at a lower cost of production would result in greater profits for the producer. Does this mean that anything that I as a consumer do that contributes to lower a producer’s cost is, in some sense, “productive”? Is it “productive” if I shop on-line, allowing certain producers to bypass having to set up retail stores and the distribution and personnel costs associated with retail? This sort of “consumer choice” behavior seems somehow different from the more overt “free labor” in which someone engages in a behavior (without direct monetary compensation) that adds value to a product, such as an uncompensated webcam watcher “guarding” a nuclear plant. But are these two types of activities really different? Is the point that the structures of these new media systems we have been discussing make opting out of these free labor contributions virtually impossible (e.g., you generate usable data whether you want to or not)?

Or, if anyone would like to bring Stahl into this series of questions, can we reverse the “gametime” explanation (i.e., from warfare back to consumer capitalism) and say that new media systems embed (or seek to embed) everyone within their interactive systems so that they also “overcome the temporal space of ethical reflection”? Your own interactivity as a piece of the system becomes so much a part of who you are that “alienation” from free labor becomes a psychological impossibility—the free labor becomes part of who you are.

netwar strategies

You might have already seen this pic, it's a bit old, but I thought I'd post it anyway.

The class discussion about gametime and the role of military-themed videogames reminded me of how similar strategies can be used for anti-capitalist purposes. If you like punk rock and police cars on fire this music video (by Italian anarchist skinheads Klasse Kriminale) comes highly recommended: