[iDC] Some notes on value...
Adam Arvidsson
arvidsson at hum.ku.dk
Wed Feb 20 09:14:36 UTC 2008
This came out of a discussion with Bob Jessop in Lancaster a couple
of weeks ago.. I'd like to share and would be happy for comments-
it's all tentative.
Adam
---
BRANDS, ETHICAL CAPITAL AND THE ETHICAL ECONOMY
Brands can be understood to embody a third important form of capital
in the knowledge economy, along with material capital and knowledge
capital. Like knowledge capital (IPs) they work to establish a
monopoly rent from a resource that is essentially socially produced.
Unlike IPs this resource mainly consists in accumulated affect and
sociality. (The value of a brand depends on a mass of people
maintaining a relatively stable pattern of affectivity around it, a
brand is in this sense something a kin to, almost , a loosely knitted
community, or maybe a community of weak ties) This way brands are a
form of ethical capital: they build on the ability and desire of free
(that is not entirely commanded) actors to create community, in the
absence of given hierarchies or monetary obligations (cf.
Aristoteles’ etikos).
Brands thus establish a third circuit of value (M-C-M’) that is
central to informational capitalism. The first, material, circuit of
value is the classic one described by Marx, value is extracted by
submitting commanded labor to discipline. In this situation the means
of production are monopolized by capital and labor time can work as
an (approximate) measure that allows the systematic abstraction of
concrete labor into abstract value. The second circuit is that of
knowledge capital. This builds in part on the direct command over
salaried labor and the ‘classic’ abstraction of surplus value. To an
increasing extent however it builds on the ability to appropriate
socially produced resources that are not directly ‘owned’ by capital
and that, consequently cannot be directly commanded. This can be the
results of state sponsored investments in research and development,
it can be the synergic productivity of social interaction among
knowledge workers, research institutions and knowledge intensive
firms (learning regions, creative cities) and increasingly it is a
matter of the direct appropriation of knowledge and innovation
generated in the everyday interaction among ordinary consumers (user-
led innovation systems, crowdsourcing, etc.). Brands constitute a
third circuit that appropriates and commodifies the ethical practice
of ordinary consumers: their ability and desire to build community.
This ethical practice is itself the dialectical result of the
(virtual) completion of the capitalist subsumption of the social.
That process has produced two important outcomes. First, the
diffusion of consumer goods, media culture and ultimately networked
ICTs has greatly enhanced the ability of ordinary people to produce a
symbolic and affective – ethical- framework for life. What Marx has
called ‘General Intellect’ has thus come at the disposition of
everybody, as mass intellectuality. Second, the subsumption of the
social has shattered traditional life forms and generated a
widespread isolation and alienation. Networked ICTs enable people to
overcome this condition by generating new forms of sociality. Indeed
as new media scholars like Danah Boyd and Jean Luis Prada (among
others) have argued it is mainly the desire for sociality that
motivates the use of social media.[1] The source of brand value is
thus the immanent ethical productivity of the social, its new and
empowered ability and desire to produce community.
But how is the value of this ethical productivity established. This
question is important not only in order to understand how the
information economy works today, but also in order to understand the
future potential of the free social productivity that capital
increasingly relies on. We clearly have a new mode of production,
what I call an ethical mode of production, manifested in important
phenomena like brand value, Open Source Software, peer to peer etc. I
call this mode of production ‘ethical’ for two reasons: One it is
mainly based on the desire to construct community (and be recognized
by that community). Two, its valuable outcomes consist in forms of
community that can maintain (however temporary) forms of order in a
complex environment. The valuable contribution of Linux is not
primary a result of the labor time invested by its participating
programmers, but of the social organization of those efforts into a
productive community able to generate a complex outcome. So in the
ethical mode of production the creation of use value (wealth) no
longer depends directly on the investment of labor time, instead it
depends on the ability to create community.
Today such instances of an ethical mode of production are subaltern
to, if not directly subsumed by the capitalist economy. The question
is whether this ethical mode of production constitute itself as an
ethical economy: that is a world economy in the Marxian sense able to
trade (in some way) the produce of one particular productive network
with that of another and in that way establish an objective price
that reflects the socially necessary amount of community construction
(affect!?) deployed in its production. Can the ethical economy
develop its own value form? To begin to answer that question we must
investigate its existing ‘value form’. A good place to begin is to
look at the brand, the actually existing value form of the ethical
economy.
Brands have a double nature. On the one hand they are commodities,
objects with certain monetary values that are traded (mainly) on
financial markets. On the other hand they are a form of ethical
capital. Their ethical values consist in the investments of mass
affect that they have been able to accumulate. This is what the
managerial literature calls ‘brand equity’ (the capacity of a brand
to generate value) and it is what is understood to underpin monetary
brand values. This ethical value is also what brand valuation
companies try to estimate in order to produce a legitimation for the
financial values of brands. So, in the self-understanding of
contemporary capitalism, the monetary value of brands are based on
their ethical values, their ability to accumulate mass affect.
What creates these ethical values? They are not the direct results of
investments in labor time. You can work as much as you want on your
music and style, that, in itself will not make you a rock star.
Rather, suddenly something happens and then, you’ve made it. What
determines your value are the quality and quantity of affect
(attention) that you have been able to accumulate. The relation
between the productive time invested in a project and the mass affect
that it is able to attract is non-linear, or viral, to use a popular
marketing term.[2] Models could be found in contemporary mathematical
theories of network dynamics, and perhaps in Gabriel Tarde’s theories
of the role of public sentiment.[3] Indeed, the logical relation
between value and labor is rather the reverse of that usually
associated with the capitalist economy. Once you have a sufficiently
attractive brand, you will attract an abundance of free labor as well
as other resources. Linux has no problems recruiting new programmers:
people want to work for them for free; people pay to use brands in
their everyday life and thus freely co-produce their ethical value
through their constructive consumer practices. On financial markets,
capital flows to the most attractive brands. More means more in this
case, if you have accumulated a significant stock of ethical capital,
people will freely give you their time and further attention, or, on
financial markets, their capital.
The logic behind ethical capital is political rather than economic.
Or better it pertains to what Weber saw as the charismatic,
irrational side of politics. If you, or your brand, can mobilize the
affective energies of the polis, its members will freely put their
resources at your disposition. (Fight for your cause; work for you;
vote for you; give to you of their hospitality- indeed, as Weber
claimed, peaceful charismatic leaders mainly live off donations from
the community that they have created[4]). The source of this valuable
charisma is, as in Weber’s classic analysis, the ability to create
community. (By contrast the economic logic of value would be based on
the ability to command labor (as in the oikos) and thus measure its
contribution in terms of labor time.) The predominance of brand
value, reputation, ‘ethical capital’, corporate ethics and similar
entities as elements to the immeasurable intangible values that are
increasingly important to contemporary capitalism is an empirical
indication of the fact that this political logic of value is becoming
increasingly influential in informational capitalism.
Today such political values can only be translated into one abstract
equivalent, monetary exchange value. The question is however, can
such political values be made tradable in other ways; and how, in
that case, would such a system look like?
One point of departure could be Brennan & Pettit’s idea of an
‘economy of esteem’. Coming from a background of academic economics,
they show how that discipline has continuously devalued the
importance of honor and esteem (central to its precursors like Smith
and Hume) in favor of a monetary economy of commodities. Yet, they
argue the economy of esteem is still at work as a powerful force in
everyday life, in particular within academia (from which most of
their examples derive). The point of the ‘economy of esteem’ is that
esteem is a scarce good conferred on an actor by the public in
relation to his or her performance in some area. This means that even
though the actor might be motivated to perform well in an area in the
prospect of achieving esteem, performance is never directly exchanged
for esteem. There are two reasons for this. One, because esteem is
subjectively and voluntarily conferred at the actor in question:
there is no point at which he or she (or they) can righteously claim
esteem from the public. And, two, because doing so, claiming esteem,
goes against the principle that the charismatic actor must appear not
to act directly in order to increase his or her charisma. A brand
like Nike can acquire esteem if it donates an empty building wall in
Berlin for young people to express themselves on. It will loose
esteem in so far as the strategic intentions behind this ‘gift’
become apparent and talked about. So esteem should not, as Brennan&
Pettit do, be understood as something that is directly exchanged for
performance. [5] Since the relation between esteem and performance is
not subject to rational calculation- it is rather an unpredictable,
non-linear relation, there is no possibility for any rational
exchange. Rather the relation between esteem and performance should
be understood along the lines of a gift economy. If I give this
performance to the community, I can expect to receive roughly that
amount of esteem. But there is no legitimate way I can complain, take
action or withdraw my performance if I receive less esteem than I had
expected. But can esteem in one community be exchanged for esteem in
another?
Traditional systems of honor and esteem have worked in close-knit
communities. Scaling them towards the contemporary information
economy will necessarily entail making esteem transferable between
different communities with different value standards. What is needed
to accomplish this is a general medium of exchange, which like
monetary exchange value can guarantee the transferability to values.
Such a medium would be different from traditional currencies however:
The amount of esteem an actor can acquire thus has a non-linear
relation to his or her measurable performance. This is mainly because
esteem is a multifaceted affective quality that originates in
subjective judgment that cannot be entirely rationalized: it is an
irrational quality in the Weberian sense of that term. So any
objective measure of esteem- the first precondition for making it
tradable- could not depart from some common measurable standard (like
labor time)- but would had to consist in an aggregation of a
multitude of subjective judgments. It would be a sort of bottom-up
currency, where values are defined by the continuous input of public
ratings.
Two factors speak for the possibility for the emergence of such
general media of exchange of esteem. One factor is the increasing
transparency and visibility of social action. The flip-side to
increasing surveillance is in this sense the possibility for a new
ethics: everything you do will be potentially visible to everyone.
One’s public person could thus form a common point of reference that
unites estimates of esteem from different communities. Personality
becomes a generalized medium of communication. The second factor is
the socialization of the means of organization in networked ICTs. The
establishment of representative money from the Sumer and onwards has
been contingent on the administrative capacity of the state apparatus
controlling the money supply. Now such administrative capacity is at
the hands of virtually everyone, and consequently we already see the
emergence of alternative currencies like LETS or Open Money. Some of
these currencies could be esteem-based. Indeed the world’s second
largest currency, air-miles, already is.[6] Essentially air-miles is
a measure of the affective appreciation that an airline has of you as
loyal customer, and they can be traded for a wide range of gifts:
free trips, upgrades, car rentals etc. (Again air-miles do not have
an objective exchange value, strictly speaking, since their relation
to possible gifts is subjectively and variably determined by the
airline itself. Relationship should rather be understood as that of a
stable gift economy. I give my loyalty to the airline. I can
reasonably expect the airline to give me a certain kind of gifts in
return.) Slashdot Karma is another one, quantifying the esteem you
have accumulated by contributing to various blogs, by systematically
integrating a multitude of subjective ratings of your performance.
With the likely proliferation of such alternative currencies two
scenarios are possible. One, a new common standard of value emerges.
One platform or tool for calculating esteem becomes hegemonic, on
that platform a number of generally accepted values emerge. The
likelihood of the emergence of such a new common value system is
supported by what seems to be a common value-structure among the
knowledge workers who are the primary users of ICTs: a combination of
post-materialistic ideas of self-realization, a quest for
atuthenticity and sustainability with a planetary environmental
consciousness.[7] Indeed a number of alternative currencies that
measure esteem in terms of precisely these values are emerging, like
the The Interra Project, sponsored by VISA founder Dee Hock: "a
payment card and transaction platform, that rewards customers for
purchasing from locally owned and sustainable businesses, donates
automatically to community organizations and facilitates connections
to like minded members in a self organizing manner." One would thus
acquire esteem points in relation to one’s performance in relation to
these common values. Such esteem-points would make one the recipient
of different kinds of gifts.
Alternatively a plurality of such currencies might proliferate.
However the socialization of ICTs and common standards will make them
easily convertible. As Paul Hartzog imagines the scenario in his ‘The
future of money’ :
So, here’s a scenario for the future. You go to a rock concert, and
you’ve never seen the opening band before. You like their music, so
you get on your mobile device (PDA, cell phone, etc.) and hit the
band’s "mobile commerce" exchange. Your software negotiates with
their software to determine what currencies they accept and what
currencies your various bank accounts carry, including automatically
getting you the best currency exchange rate at that instant. The
system discovers that because they are opening for a major musician
who has his own currency based on his popularity, the opening band
has agreed to accept the headliner’s currency for the duration of the
show for people who are actually at the concert. You verify that you
are there using some kind of brokered authentication (GPS or a ticket
number); the two systems complete the transaction for you, and you
have access to the music.
At any rate such esteem-based currencies can develop alongside the
monetary economy. For example:
My activity as a blogger earns me esteem. That esteem is converted
into a quantification pf my ethical standing. On the basis of the
quantification I receive particular forms of gifts (discounts, access
to certain services etc). Alternatively it is converted into a
currency that I trade for certain kinds of goods.
A service allows workers, consumers, subcontractors and other kinds
of ‘stakeholders’ all along the value chain to rate the performance
of a brand according to their ability to live up to their own
corporate values (or some other standard). Swiping my cellphone over
a branded product I get an index of its ethical value. That index
will affect my decision to purchase the product, or what I want to
pay for it.
I subscribe to a service that calculates the environmental impact and
sustainability of my consumption patterns. according to the index
thus produced I receive certain kinds of discounts or access to
certain services or goods.
In any case such quantifications of esteem will serve to rationalize
the ethical economy that we can already see emerging, both in the
ethical value logic behind intangibles., and increasingly popular
blended value strategies like Ethical Consumerism and Socially
Responsible Investment. Indeed the implementation of such systematic
alternative value standards will give business and other actors a
stronger incentive to adapt to an emerging ethical economy, or which
is the same thing, to begin to act politically, with the polis in mind.
In capitalist societies value is embodied in money: we work (ideal-
typically) in order to get paid. In many non capitalist societies
value is rather embodied in public displays of honour, standing,
hierarchy- ethical standing. Such societies generally use what Turner
calls ‘concrete media of circulation’ (as opposed to money as an
abstract medium of circulation) such as public rituals, to
communicate and embody value. Most such value-conferring rituals
unfold in societies that have elaborate and relatively static social
structures. This is clearly not the case for the information society
where structure is dissolving into flexible networks. On the other
hand, there are examples, like the Baining of Papaua New Guinea, that
have little in terms of an elaborate social structure, but still
largely envision value as ethically embodied.[8] Among the Baining,
the embodiment of value occurs through a continuous giving of gifts,
a practice so common that it is part of virtually every social
encounter. Now social media could work as platforms for such a
continuous embodiment of ethical value, enabling some sort of ranking
(conferral of esteem in a quantifiable way) mechanism become an
integral part of most social interactions.
[1] Prada.J.M. ‘Web 2.0 as a new context for artistic practices’
Paper presented at !st Inclusiva-net meeting, Medialab, Prado,
Madrid, 2007 (posted to IDC-list, 22/12, 2007), Boyd, D. ‘Identity
production in a networked culture: Why youth heart MySpace’, http://
www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html, accessed 5/2-08.
[2] Gladwell, M. The Tipping Point. How Little Things Make a Big
Difference, New York; Brown & co, 2002.
[3] Barabasi. A. L. Linked: The New Science of Networks, Cambridge
(MA);Perseus Publishing, 2002. , Tarde, G. Psychologie économique,
Paris, Alcan, 1902.
[4] Weber M. ‘The sociology of charismatic authority’, eds. Gerth,
H.H. & Mills, C.W. From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology, London;
Routledge, 1948, p. 247.
[5] Brennan, G. & Pettit, P. The Economy of Esteem, Oxford; Oxford
University Press, 2004, p. 72.
[6] The air-miles in circulation in 2002 were worth more than $ 500
billion, making air-miles second only to the dollar in terms of value-
in-circulation, see ‘Air-miles threaten dollars dominance’ BBCNews,
22/5, 2002 (available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/
1966290.stm accessed 26/1-2008).
[7] Ray, P. & Anderson, S. The Cultural Creatives. How 50 Million
People are Changing the World, New York; The Rivers Press, 2000.
[8] Turner, T. & Fajans, J, ‘Where the Action Is: An Anthropological
Perspective on “Activity Theory”’ with Ethnographic Implications’,
unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago, 1988, as cited in
Graeber, D. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, New York,
Palgrave, 2001, pp. 69, ff.
Yours Sincerely,
Adam Arvidsson
Actics Profile:
http://www.actics.com/adam_arvidsson
Associate Professor, Media Studies
Department of Media, Cognition and Communication
University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 80
2300 Copenhagen S
http://web.mac.com/adamerica/iWeb/AdamArvidsson/Intro.html
tel +45 35328124
fax +45 35328110
cell +45 26174875
+46 702416473
Skype-ID adamerica70
Blog: http://blog.actics.com
www.media.ku.dk
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