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/