[iDC] Exploitation....
Jonathan Beller
jbeller at pratt.edu
Thu Jun 11 13:35:13 UTC 2009
Marks response to Howard (I haven't had the pleasure of meeting either
of you, Hello) speaks to an urgent need (addressed to a degree by Nick
Knouf and my own earlier post): if we hope to accomplish anything more
than the advance of capitalist-technologies (and the advance of our
own pleasures/careers) we require a more thoroughgoing account of
exploitation than is generally available. One does not have to read
even much beyond this list-serve to see that the old ideas about
individual autonomy, choice, pleasure and yes, human nature -- ideas
that properly belong to prior centuries -- remain operative.
After providing an example (of writing for Wikipedia) discussed with
reference to exploitation in a kind of close-up, Mark writes:
When it starts to become tricky -- at least conceptually -- is when my
work on Wikipedia (or tagging, or participating in other forms of UGC
production) gets folded into the demographic/psychographic/geographic/
(eventually biometric) forms of profiling that form the basis for the
emerging online commercial economy. Still a meaningful conception of
exploitation might help distinguish between the different productive
roles of our online activity -- and between infrastructures that are
more or less exploitative.
I agree with this statement with one caveat -- it is always already
tricky. The autonomous user interfacing with the isolated media-event
simply does not exist. The preconditions to both sides of that
equation (user/technology) are nothing less than world history itself
(a history that includes, racism, colonialism, patriarchy and
genocide). One might wonder how participation in Wikipedia might leave
most of that history (for which we ourselves are part of its living
legacy) undisturbed, or worse, further buried in the unconscious of
our digital high. And we might also want to wonder how participation
in Wikipedia might actively redistribute the claims that a history of
violence and exploitation makes on all of us in a way that makes its
call more audible, more actionable. It is here, in this moment of
wondering about the politics of our own production, that we might
grasp the moment of the utterance, of the interface, as itself a
political moment. Put another way, a particular user of an interface
may have been conditioned to be satisfied with his/her wage of
pleasure/recognition in exchange for his/her attention/virtuosity, but
how does his/her cognitive-sensual labor attend to the 2 billion
people on the planet that live on less than two dollars a day --
people who may not be too worried about global armageddon, because for
many of them the worst thing in the world has already happened.
For what it's worth, pretty much all of my work has endeavored to
think about (and thus to transform) the dominant relationships between
mediation and exploitation. I am attaching a 2003 essay I wrote which
was later revised to become the introduction of my book The Cinematic
Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle
for anyone who might be interested. I should say that my sense of the
priority of cinema has shifted somewhat from the time of this writing,
but many of the analytical strategies utilized in this essay
(including the attention theory of value that dates back to 1993 or
so) I still find to be useful. Of course there is much more work to be
done -- and I am very excited to see that it seems that together we
are doing some of it.
All best,
Jon
Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
and Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 fax
On Jun 11, 2009, at 3:23 AM, Mark Andrejevic wrote:
> Howard's post got me thinking about the need to tighten up an
> understanding of what we might mean by the term "exploitation." The
> very broad sense in which it is often used -- to indicate that
> someone else benefits from our labor -- isn't a particularly useful
> one. Theoretically it remains amorphous (how might it distinguish
> between collaborative labor and working in a sweat shop?) and
> practically it isn't much of a rallying cry ("Help, I'm being
> exploited because the value of my neighbor's house went up when I
> painted mine!").
>
> I'd suggest (as a preliminary foray) that a meaningful political
> sense of the term (one that allows us to critique exploitation)
> would have to include at least two aspects:
> 1) a sense of loss of control over the results of our own productive
> activity (especially when these are turned back against us) and
> 2) structured relations of power that compel this loss of control,
> even when it looks like the result of "free" exchange.
> I don't feel a loss of control over my own productive activity when
> I contribute to a Wikipedia entry that may benefit others. On the
> other hand, I might be more likely to feel this loss of control when
> I discover, say, that details of my online activity have been
> collected, sorted, and packaged as a commodity for sale to people
> who may use it to deny me access to a job or to manipulate me based
> on perceived vulnerabilities, fears, and other personal details
> about my mental or physical well being. If I find myself in a
> position wherein I have to submit to this kind of monitoring as a
> condition of access to resources that I need to earn my livelihood
> or maintain my social relations in a networked era, I might be more
> likely to think of this situation as a truly exploitative one.
>
> When it starts to become tricky -- at least conceptually -- is when
> my work on Wikipedia (or tagging, or participating in other forms of
> UGC production) gets folded into the demographic/psychographic/
> geographic/(eventually biometric) forms of profiling that form the
> basis for the emerging online commercial economy. Still a meaningful
> conception of exploitation might help distinguish between the
> different productive roles of our online activity -- and between
> infrastructures that are more or less exploitative.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Howard Rheingold
> <howard at rheingold.com> wrote:
> Trebor asked me to introduce myself in regard to his post and the
> conference on "The Internet as Playground and Factory"
>
> I've written "Tools for Thought," "The Virtual Community," and "Smart
> Mobs." Two of those books are online at http://www.rheingold.com . I
> teach "Social Media" and Berkeley and Stanford and "Digital
> Journalism" at Stanford.
>
> I agree with much of what you say, Trebor, but I would only add that
> I'm entirely delighted to let Yahoo stockholders benefit from flickr.
> It's not only a great service for sharing my own images, but a place
> where I can find Creative-Commons licensed images to use in
> presentations and videos. Maybe that at the same time we look closely
> at the way commercial interests have colonized public behavior, we
> ought to look at the way profit motives have made available useful
> public goods. May Yahoo and Google live long and prosper as long as I
> can view and publish via Flickr and YouTube. And if this means that
> I've blurred the line between my recreation and my labor, I have to
> testify that even after reflection I don't mind it at all. It's
> pleasurable, in fact. And I'm equally delighted that Google gives away
> search to attract attention, some of which Google sells to
> advertisers. I remember that when I first got online with a modem, the
> cost of accessing skimpy information online via Lexis/Nexis and other
> paid data services was way beyond my means. Now I get answers for any
> question in seconds. How many times a day were YOU exploited by
> searching for something without paying a charge for the service?
> Informed consent seems to me to be crucial -- I choose to be
> exploited, if exploitation is how you want to see my uploading and
> tagging my photographs and videos. More people ought to reflect on who
> is profiting from their online activity, and it seems entirely
> reasonable to me that many would decide not to be exploited. I would
> never argue that people should refrain from witholding their labor, if
> that's what they want to do. Otherwise, I'm all for asking all the
> questions Trebor proposes, which is why I assign students to read
> "What the MySpace generation needs to know about working for free."
>
> Howard Rheingold howard at rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold
> http://www.rheingold.com http://www.smartmobs.com
> http://vlog.rheingold.com
> what it is ---> is --->up to us
>
>
>
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