[iDC] A Curmudgeonly Look at last month's Conference.
Michael H Goldhaber
mgoldh at well.com
Tue Dec 15 09:55:53 UTC 2009
Missing the Forest for the Trees: A Curmudgeonly Look at the IPF
Conference.
As with others, if a bit belatedly, I join in offering kudos to Trebor
Scholz and everyone else involved in bringing about and running the
conference, handling the complex logistics, volunteering their time,
etc. The conference was a success for me in stimulating a lot of
thoughts, introducing me to some quite interesting new people, as well
as renewing a few old friendships. What I heard from Catherine
Driscoll, Gabriella Coleman, Fred Turner and Chris Kelty seemed
especially fresh a nd insightful, and it was probably no accident that
the last three spoke in a session delightfully moderated by Ted
Byfield. There were more than a few other talks I was sorry to miss.
However, based on the majority of the sessions I ended up attending,
including the final plenary — and maybe I chose badly — what I heard
had also had a negative side, which I think is worth addressing.
The Internet is arguably the largest collective creation of humanity
in all of history. In various degrees it has incorporated an ever-
growing series of inventions, modes of participation and very
widespread involvement in one or another of its forms, from e-mail to
blogs to social media to search engines etc, etc. All of this activity
I think fits neatly under the broad rubric of work and/or play, to
which the conference seemingly was addressed. Yet I think from
Trebor’s intro on, the conference on the whole mischaracterized this
vast and unparalleled achievement, seeing it as primarily a source of
profits for capitalists. The prime evidence, beyond an ideological
bias in favor of such views, comes from the fact that corporations
officially own many websites and try, sometimes with some success to
make money, principally by selling advertising and by offering data
they collect as tools for advertisers.
In order to be outraged at this, a number of speakers at the
conference take it for granted or loudly proclaim that very bad
results can come from this, including the highly nonsensical claim
that extracting data on from the actions, say, of Facebook users,
amounts to infinite exploitation. This is a total misuse and
misunderstanding both of what goes on with advertising and of Marx’s
(anyway antiquated) formulations. Marx would have laughed
uproariously at this absurdity, I suspect.
Incidentally, the same person who made that bizarre claim misstated
Google’s stock policy — falsely asserting that employees do not own
shares — and misunderstands Facebook’s terms of service — implying
that the company asserts rights to use personal creations in other
settings for its own reasons, rather than to permit users to post
pretty much where they expect to while still acknowledging their
ownership of their own “intellectual property.” In each case, the bias
is towards making capitalism re the Internet seem considerably worse
than it actually is.
It is not just one person's shocking incomprehension that is at issue,
for a number of other speakers focussed on the practice of collecting
data from users as the basis for their intense criticism of the
Internet, as well as for proof that it is fundamentally a capitalist
tool. Advertising is an annoyance at best, in my view, but the idea
that there are some highly vital data about personal preferences that
advertisers can grab hold of and somehow influence purchases strikes
me as exaggerated, unimportant and of basically trivial impact on
individuals. That's so even assuming, which is often not the case,
that these data are at all useful in drawing Internet users' attention
to what is advertised. These ads rarely work, because we are already
inundated with too many ads, leading us to ignore them however they
are presented. Further, knowing that somebody was interested in a
category of item or service as recently as as a few minutes ago may
be utterly useless in reaching that person now, because they quite
likely already made a relevant purchase and do not want more ( A new
suit? A new mortgage? A new plane reservation? —Too late, already
chosen or rejected.)
Likewise, we are supposed to be very worried about governments finding
out our political convictions or other damaging information. Since
when do inquisitions bother with accurate fact collection? Domestic
spy agencies from the KGB to the FBI act on the basis of
misunderstandings, rumor, innuendo, outright lies, prejudice,
corruption, etc. By asserting that “Big Brother is Watching” we only
help spread the paranoia that in Orwell’s novel the slogan was
designed to create. Detailed and precise data collection has very
little to do with it.
Anyway all such data collection is done only because capitalist firms
have found few other ways to make the Internet — and the services
through it that people enjoy — pay for themselves. Advertisers and
governments are always desperate for new tools, but that doesn't imply
that the tools on offer will be of any great use to them, or even
that very much will be paid for such data or for very long. Meanwhile,
the Internet keeps functioning in other ways of much greater import.
As I have long argued, and find more valid than ever, the Internet is
primarily a system for individuals to obtain attention for themselves,
even if they do make use of channels provided by corporations. (By the
way, Lenin supposedly said, more or less, “the capitalist will be
happy to sell you the rope you will use to hang him;” why do I suspect
some at the conference would say, ”Don’t buy the rope; the capitalist
will make a profit” ?) Using these tools adroitly we may get some form
of socialism, or we may simply find that those who do use them have
created a new kind of post-capitalist class economy. In the latter
case, would-be supporters of socialism would certainly need to
understand the new system if they hope to make progress in their
preferred direction. For those wearing the heavy blinders that many
did at this conference, no such enlightenment would be possible.
As is typical of most academic conferences, a great many of the papers
only discuss trivia because that is the route to academic success.
This seems particularly true in the sorts of theories put forward
under the guise of cultural studies; I found it indicative that after
the conference several people think the most exciting thing that
occurred was a discussion of in terms of Said’s “Orientalism” as
applied to a miscellany including the “Mechanical Turk” and and
Chinese ‘World-of-Warcraft gold” hunters. The point is not wrong, and
it may reveal a bit of bias, but given that numerous participants in
Internet firms hail from or work in various Asian countries and are
treated with just about the same respect as anyone else, the charges
of Orientalist exoticization seem overwrought and beside the point.
This is simply not anything to get excited about except for scoring
purely academic points. It says nothing about the value of the
Internet, or even about how it might better promote international
exchange and understanding.
Along the same lines, another conference participant is fond of
asserting that billions of people have been disposessed by capitalism.
As he uses it, this seems more a rhetorical stratagem to criticize
capitalism than any indication that he wants to try to see how the
Internet might be used to help ameliorate that suffering. In some ways
capitalism is to blame for such immiseration, but the situation is
complicated. So many would not be suffering were it not that since the
advent of industrial capitalism population has grown rapidly as
famines and infant mortality have been much reduced, even in the worst-
off countries. This due in part to better food distribution, higher
crop yields, better hygiene, vaccination, some spread of drugs such as
antibiotics, and the like, for which capitalism certainly deserves
some credit.
In most social systems historically, there were many who were
supernumerary; in the past most such people were killed in infancy,
starved to death or had to to take up vows that kept them from
reproducing. Less of that happens now, though they still live with
much less than others in the same culture, and very often live
permanently quite close to starvation. It is a huge and horrendous
problem, but not one that should be used for scoring purely rhetorical
points. The Internet does hold out great promise in this regard, but
that is not a promise that many at the conference seemed much
interested in investigating, forwarding or even discussing.
Another comment at the final session, from Jodi Dean, struck me. It is
that she had finally been convinced by Christian Fuchs that
“communism” cannot be achieved without “computers.” One reason this
struck me is that it is such an old idea, dating back to the 1950’s,
when the Soviets and others — such as the Western economist Wassily
Leontief — in fact devoted considerable efforts to investigating how
to use mainframe computers to do better with central planning. But I
also found it odd that in the context of this conference Professor
Dean would say “computers” rather than “the Internet,” which has much
more promise in terms of bringing about some sort of participatory
socialism.
Jodi Dean is well-known for promulgating the thought of “communicative
capitalism” to describe the Internet,,etc. It’s very easy to claim
that whatever change has occurred is just some new sort of capitalism,
but this hardly an analytic success, as I see it. Of course any term
can be stretched to mean whatever one chooses, but hiding distinctions
in this way is not necessarily perspicuous. To be sure, Dean is far
from alone in engaging in such broad use of terms like capitalism and
capital. “Human resource” people widely speak of “human capital,”
though it hard to see how a human a can be capital (for herself), and
certainly not simply by being educated as they imply. Likewise, Pierre
Bourdieu was fond of such terms as “cultural capital,” which again is
certainly not capital in the Marxian sense, and does not suppose the
same sort of exploitation as plain old capital. Many on the left, such
as David Harvey, and many not at all on the left take most changes in
the life around them to be proof of the continued strength of
capitalism, when an entirely different possibility is utterly
neglected. Inflating a formerly precise term in this fashion should be
avoided if one wishes to speak with any sort of intellectual or
analytic precision, certainly in a conference such as this one. But
that is not widely done.
All this highlights for me that what some cleave to as “theory” does
not seem deserving of that name. I started out my professional life as
a theoretical physicist, and as I changed fields still referred to
myself as a social theorist. I love theory, if it is good theory — of
many sorts from astronomical to zoological, from political to literary
theory. By good theory I mean a search for new understanding , often
through new concepts of what the world is, how it works, how it can
work, and what it should be. Such theorizing has to be self-examining,
subject to doubt and critique, always a bit tentative, and certainly
constantly tested for its coherence and meaningfulness against new
ranges of experience, as well as in comparison with other theories. It
should of course strive to be rational, but it can never and probably
should never be that purely. To get anywhere, not all hypotheses can
be put in question at the same time, yet nothing should be beyond
examination. Theory must always be seeking to add new kinds of
observations and predictions, examining how it comports or contrasts
with other theories, whether it can be improved in its logic and
strength of conclusions, where it is on possibly shaky grounds , in
what ways it can be useful rather than merely descriptive or
pejorative, when it is prematurely reductionist, when it can no longer
easily be extended, when there are aspects of the world it has has
overlooked, etc.
Good theory must always be — to use a favorite post-modernist term —
transgressive —as well as audacious, surprising and offering up new
concepts, which lead to new percepts. But even the best theory, by the
time it is articulated and typeset, is surely wrong in some
significant aspects. It always must be subject to critique,
modification, enlargement, and eventual abandonment. Any textual
formulation of it is by no means Holy Writ. It is not to be quoted
with an air of devotion, or as if by itself it stands for or can prove
anything.
For too many people at the conference, I found, too much is taken for
granted; too much is asserted without compelling argument; existing
texts are treated as if sacrosanct and unarguably correct, as if they
were bits of the Bible and we were fundamentalists; and metaphoric or
analogical points are taken for logic or careful analysis. (Though
thought — as Derrida among others has indicated — can never fully
escape metaphor, that is no reason not to seek to do so.) Again, too
much that is said seems to be intended as nothing other than academic
preening. That leads to highly mistaken assumptions, focussing on
trivia, unwarranted smugness, and other irksome behavior. It makes
intrinsically intelligent people come off as fools or jerks.
Three things are widely held to be true in the western world today:
first, that we live in a more or less strictly capitalist society;
second, that, except possibly for some sort of socialism, nothing
other than capitalism is possible; and third, that capitalism is much
to be preferred to socialism. (What socialism is generally taken to
mean — especially in the US, but increasingly elsewhere — is usually
some variant of Stalinism. With this definition, if the first two
hypotheses are taken as correct, a good argument can indeed be made
for the third.) Many or even most participants at this conference
reject only the third hypothesis, pointing to or taking for granted
the evils of capitalism, while also leaving unstated and little
thought how a humane socialism would work. But how do we know that our
system is primarily capitalist? Certainly not just by assertion. Nor
by metaphor. And equally not by superficial observation of capitalist
forms and notions, for the question has to be what other forms might
be present at a less explicit level. In other words, without new
concepts we cannot clearly perceive what is around us.
But having made the conceptual break with capitalism, perhaps most
participants find it too hard to take a further step; perhaps many of
you already feel yourselves too far out on a limb. Or, as I suspect,
an adherence to Marxism is enough to secure a comfortable academic
niche, so why even think of questioning it? One can publish endless
papers finding some way to criticize, say, the Internet as inherently
and irrevocably capitalist, without having to have any thoughts of
doing anything about it. (One speaker even sneeringly joked that he
was going to use Facebook to organize a march on Washington in favor
of single-payer health care. Many smaller but effective organizing
projects have in fact been accomplished through Facebook, but the
built-in sneer evidently better preserves his academic pretenses.)
That’s not how to do good theory. The humanist tradition quite
honorably has taken up exact quotation, and a desire to get back to
the text, in the case of poetry —in the largest sense — or in
studying what a particular author thought or said. Such activities
are commendable, but they should not be mistaken for theory, any more
than a portion of a painting or snatches of a symphony would be . Not
even a mathematical formula, not even “E equals m c- squared,” can
rest in that light.
All this is true of scientific theories, but it is even more vital to
consider when dealing with theories that refer to the state or the
future of humanity, for through its own actions the human word is in
endless flux. What were indisputable “laws” cease to be, what was the
state of affairs has changed. Marx himself wrote in 1851, “The
tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brains of the living.” Whatever he exactly meant by that then, it has
value for us only if reinterpreted to apply to now. Marx’s own work
and that of everyone who came after him — in whatever tradition — is
today part of a similar “nightmare.” To live now, we must be fully
awake to now, not letting the clanking chains of our dreamt ghosts
entrap us in fears and formulations of the dead past., not the past of
the1860’s, nor the 1960’s, nor even more recent times.
Best,
Michael
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