[iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory

Mon Jun 8 12:57:07 UTC 2009

There's a kind of pay-off with democratisation: what we "all" get is always
less than the haute bourgeoisie had (fashion, art, comfort, privacy . . . ).
I posted the following to <empyre> on the problem -- it isn't just about the
environmental imprint of the internet (far from weightless) but about the
necessity to Keep Going

Sean

Until the dot.com crash of 2001, the web was one of the longest-lived
Temporary Autonomous Zones our generation ever knew. Capital failed to
understand. Not until the years after 2001 did it begin to build business
models based in the Web rather than imported from magazine publishing and
the broadcast industry.

Marx had established the principles in the famous Fragment on Machines (pp
690 ff) in Grundrisse: the social intellect / general intellect is manifest
in two processes. In one, the skill developed over generations in making
things is ossified into machinery and turned to purposes of exploitation. In
the second, the ways workers organise themselves in factories so they can
get longer breaks or leave earlier are systematised by Capital. But as Virno
argues in Grammar of the Multitude, this innovative power to make new
systems is no longer a side benefit of employing workers: it is written into
our contracts. 

The risk capital always runs is that the endless revolutions in the means of
production (machinery, organisation) constantly run ahead of capital's
ability to assimilate them. This is what happened when the Web turned the
internet into a mass medium. Capital had no idea how to respond, and the
result was a fantastic flowering of creativity, of new kinds of cultural
practice, new types of service, now modes of organisation, among which
perhaps the Battle of Seattle can stand as a decent monument.

Now of course with Web 2.0, capital has finally managed to catch up and turn
that innovatory impetus into a profit-making enterprise, although it damn
near blew itself up in the inflationary vapourware moment of the early
2000s. 

What is left of the revolutionary Web is marked by nostalgia, as people have
been suggesting on nettime lately (Political Work in the Aftermath of the
New Media Arts Crisis). But that is no reason to give up fighting for a
piece of it; or to build alternatives inside the belly of the whale. Nor is
it a reason not to pursue alternatives to the monetarised Web, in particular
FLOSS and P2P. The mysterious, fluid, granular "we" can no more afford to
give up the struggle for the Web than we can afford to give up struggling to
find new alternatives to it.

There are huge risks involved: the slow but certain approach of IPv6 might
flag the splitting of the Web into two, and if two why not many more. I find
that thought frightening. Other scenarios involve freeing more radio
spectrum from the dominance of TV signals, making wireless the new terrain,
probably a more hopeful variant. But for now we have to admit the battle of
the internet is over and capital won. The question is how do we operate now:
Tactically? Strategically? And how do we minimise or at least delay the
assimilation of whatever we invent into the reproduction of capital?

(and to pre-empt discussion, a) call it biopower if you prefer and b) the
market is neither inevitable nor beneficial: the sixty years since Bretton
Woods have failed abjectly to provide even survival levels for the majority
of the world's population)

On 8/06/09 8:43 PM, "Jean Burgess" <jean at creativitymachine.net> wrote:

> You're right, Sean - this is the nub - cars looked great until
> everyone got them.
> 
> Some of the most radical  developments in the population-wide
> extension of access to online communication in the last 10 years are
> also the most aggressively commercial (even if, as in the case of
> YouTube, they make no money).
> 
> This moment raises questions without easy answers (unless one just
> already hates the masses and/or "capitalism" in which case it is very
> easy), and I am not yet convinced either by the banal celebrations or
> any available critique.
> 
> We live in interesting times.
> 
> On 07/06/2009, at 23:33, Sean Cubitt <scubitt at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> 
>> This is the nub -- what is a social good?
>> 
>> 
>> On 7/06/09 7:29 AM, "Joe Edelman" <joe.edelman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I won't rest until we get to the
>>> ubiquitous availability of physical resources like cars and trucks,
>> 
>> Cars are not a good. As a lifelong cyclist, I know how dirty,
>> dangerous and
>> anti-social cars are. And as to the ubiquitous availability issue,
>> there are
>> not enough  rare earths on the planet for even China to have the
>> density of
>> wasteful duplication of devices we have (even with careful
>> shepherding I
>> have four DVD players in my house)
>> 
>> Tye proliferation of consumer goods, and the detouring in desire
>> towards
>> consumerism, is about as utopian as the desire - instinctive I
>> believe - for
>> order when it becomes the fascist manipulation of anxiety towards the
>> terrorised society
>> 
>> 
>> "Universities, who have long claimed to elevate
>> and connect through scholarships and the like, are closed to most
>> participants, and can take six years and a great deal of expense to
>> effect the same power shift that can be accomplished by a disempowered
>> group on facebook or twitter in a few weeks."
>> 
>> The kind of change we bring about in education is rather longer term
>> than
>> what can be achieved on Twitter. We have, admittedly, the luxury of
>> thinking
>> forty years into the future -- the likely working life of a student
>> graduating today.That means we balance between the usual corporate
>> horizon
>> of three to five years (like any other business) and the longer
>> term, which
>> entrepreneurs and corporations cannot afford to thing about. More
>> critically, the more "advanced' capital gets, the more *schools* -
>> by which
>> I mean schooling between 5 and 14 years of age -- become
>> competitive, with
>> the bestschools going to the children of the wealthy
>> 
>> Capital is now, as it always has been, a lie founded on a bad pun: the
>> "freedom" of the market has nothing whatever to do with human
>> freedom, any
>> more than the 'survival of the fittest' describes the fit of a
>> species in an
>> ecological niche.
>> 
>> Sorry to be argumentative: it's late, I'm tired, and I blew the
>> weekend
>> writing when I shd have been outdoors
>> 
>> sean
>> 
>> Prof Sean Cubitt
>> scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
>> Director
>> Media and Communications Program
>> Faculty of Arts
>> Room 127 John Medley East
>> The University of Melbourne
>> Parkville VIC 3010
>> Australia
>> 
>> Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667
>> Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494
>> M: 0448 304 004
>> Skype: seancubitt
>> http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/
>> http://www.digital-light.net.au/
>> http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/
>> http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/
>> http://del.icio.us/seancubitt
>> 
>> Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
>> http://leonardo.info
>> 
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Prof Sean Cubitt
scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
Director
Media and Communications Program
Faculty of Arts
Room 127 John Medley East
The University of Melbourne
Parkville VIC 3010
Australia

Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667
Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494
M: 0448 304 004
Skype: seancubitt
http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/
http://www.digital-light.net.au/
http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/
http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/
http://del.icio.us/seancubitt

Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
http://leonardo.info