[iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory

Sat Jun 13 03:31:59 UTC 2009

I find the temporal interpretation below very debatable, and contrary to my own experience.

Before 2001, the internet was massively infused by investment and speculative capital, co-existing with isolated TAZ's from the postmodern arty left (not meant as pejorative), which was communicating amongst itself. In 2001, the bubble crashed, and instead of withering away, an enormous amount of extra non-capital driven innovation was released (risk capital was nearly absent after the crash, and major innovations like Bittorrent were achieved with zero risk capital), which would eventually lead to Web 2.0 business models which made the platforms sustainable in the long run, and caused a quantum leap of participation, no longer confined to the isolated TAZ's, but massified to nearly the total wired population. The nostalgia you feel is the same as that of the early internet pioneers of the late eighties and early nineties, the sense that the frontier has been invaded by the masses. But was is nostaligia for you, is an enormous emancipatory progress for
 the mass of the population. Yes, you pay a price, the sheriff has moved in as well, but he has still moved in a new territory which wasn't there before.

Of course, I'm putting into brackets the business models and enclosures, and this is a important debate, but it in no way diminishes the fact that participation far from diminishing, made a quantum leap forwards, though at the price of abolition the dominance of a political minority congregating in its own isolated forums.

That nostalgia is the feeling of a tiny minority and fully understandable, but it is time to get over it and secure more autonomous participation by everybody,

Capital has not won, it is merely recognizing the victory of participation and adapting to it, turning it to its own use and benefit; what "we" have to do is exactly the same, and it is of course what your are saying despite the nostalgia argument, i.e. the struggle and the construction continues. My position would be: how can we use capital, just as it is using us.

The future is not being built in the laments of nettime, but in the millions that are creating real life and business alternatives, on their own terms, sometimes adapting to the realities of capital, but always to fullfill their own new structures of desire, which are infused with open, participatory, and commons oriented values.

Michel

----- Original Message ----
> From: Sean Cubitt <scubitt at unimelb.edu.au>
> To: Jean Burgess <jean at creativitymachine.net>
> Cc: "idc at mailman.thing.net" <idc at mailman.thing.net>
> Sent: Monday, June 8, 2009 7:57:07 PM
> Subject: Re: [iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory
> 
> 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 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" 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 wrote:
> > 
> >> This is the nub -- what is a social good?
> >> 
> >> 
> >> On 7/06/09 7:29 AM, "Joe Edelman" 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
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