[iDC] Fwd: "How (bravely) the mammet twitters!”
Martin Lucas
mlucas at igc.org
Thu Jun 18 16:14:45 UTC 2009
> New arenas for social action/ interaction and yet the network
> manufactures inequality? I would tend to support Sobol, but ask to
> look carefully at cases. The fact is, we are jumping into pools of
> social consciousness, not willy nilly, but not totally exploited
> either. It is, and it will continue to be, difficult to make
> overriding judgments of internet-based communications technologies
> as either "machines for generating inequality" or as 'tools for
> empowerment". The Iranian twitter campaign, and the Iranian use of
> technology developed by/for the Falun Gong suggests that people use
> the tools at hand. Are there limits to this kind of
> consciousness? Does what's happening in Iran express a kind of
> shared consciousness that is revolutionary? Only in a fairly
> limited sense. And the current dilemma of the US government, which
> doesn't want to support a movement too heavily when that support
> would be the kiss of death in a context where all politics is anti
> US, is suggestive of the problems of human rights/civil rights
> discourses and their relation to mass politics.
>
> One thinks of the SMS-based rallies in Manila. In the Philippines
> these suggest an over-riding popular desire for an end to a
> politics that has been the fate of Philippine democracy since its
> beginnings, and one that has everything to do with the continued
> control of that society by a small land-owning elite that has no
> more imagination than to export its citizens to pull capital from
> other economies. Does the departure of Estrada change things? Yes,
> but the networked consciousness, which can bring literally millions
> of people out on the street at the same time, has yet to show
> itself capable of replacing the oligarchy in a systemic way. On
> the other hand, the amazing use of ringtones to de-legitimize
> government coverup there suggests the long term creation of a
> shared culture of playful resistance. http://www.pcij.org/blog/wp-
> files/ringtones.php
>
> There are massive increases in subjectivity afloat in cyberspace.
> The specific cases are often ambiguous. Look at China, where a
> snappy logo went from cell phone to cell phone as part of a boycott
> of Carrefour, (http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/04/16/
> chinacarrefour-under-boycott-threat/) a company that was French in
> the run up to the Beijing Olympics when Tibet was an issue. Is
> that mob think, incipient nationalism?
>
> A current human rights poster-child app is Ushahidi, an SMS/GPS
> system used in Kenya in early 2008 to map election violence and
> more recently in South Africa to map anti-immigrant violence. In
> South Africa, SMS systems were first used to encourage violence.
> So Ushahidi is a counter-mobthink tool. This starts to suggest
> that what is created when one creates social networks is neither a
> panacea nor a nightmare, but a new field of social action and
> engagement. One that people people have to deal with the way we
> often do, consciously, but playing a small role in a large drama
> that we don't know totally. The politics are ones of greater
> participation, always potentially scary, and potentially
> liberatory. What that liberation consists of needs to be mapped.
> And how we do that mapping is very key. What is a mass
> consciousness in the factory of social networking? Can we run that
> factory ourselves? Should we vote on it?
>
> Meanwhile, as John points out, the providers make out either way.
> Globally, the average SMS message costs about 11 cents US to send,
> and as you can imagine, the provider's costs are minimal. And what
> about all that coltan?
>
>
> Martin Lucas
> martinlucas.net
Begin forwarded message:
> From: Martin Lucas <mlucas at igc.org>
> Date: June 18, 2009 11:12:51 AM EDT
> To: john sobol <john at johnsobol.com>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] "How (bravely) the mammet twitters!”
>
> New arenas for social action/ interaction and yet the network
> manufactures inequality. I would tend to support Sobol, but ask to
> look carefully at cases. The fact is, we are jumping into pools of
> social consciousness, not willy nilly, but not totally exploited
> either. It is, and it will continue to be, difficult to make
> overriding judgments of internet-based communications technologies
> as either "machines for generating inequality" or as 'tools for
> empowerment". The Iranian twitter campaign, and the Iranian use of
> technology developed by/for the Falun Gong suggests that people use
> the tools at hand. Are there limits to this kind of
> consciousness? Does what's happening in Iran express a kind of
> shared consciousness that is revolutionary? Only in a fairly
> limited sense. And the current dilemma of the US government, which
> doesn't want to support a movement too heavily when that support
> would be the kiss of death in a context where all politics is anti
> US, is suggestive of the problems of human rights/civil rights
> discourses and their relation to mass politics.
>
> One thinks of the SMS-based rallies in Manila. In the Philippines
> these suggest an over-riding popular desire for an end to a
> politics that has been the fate of Philippine democracy since its
> beginnings, and one that has everything to do with the continued
> control of that society by a small land-owning elite that has no
> more imagination than to export its citizens to pull capital from
> other economies. Does the departure of Estrada change things? Yes,
> but the networked consciousness, which can bring literally millions
> of people out on the street at the same time, has yet to show
> itself capable of replacing the oligarchy in a systemic way. On
> the other hand, the amazing use of ringtones to de-legitimize
> government coverup there suggests the long term creation of a
> shared culture of playful resistance. http://www.pcij.org/blog/wp-
> files/ringtones.php
>
> There are massive increases in subjectivity afloat in cyberspace.
> The specific cases are often ambiguous. Look at China, where a
> snappy logo went from cell phone to cell phone as part of a boycott
> of Carrefour, (http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/04/16/
> chinacarrefour-under-boycott-threat/) a company that was French in
> the run up to the Beijing Olympics when Tibet was an issue. Is
> that mob think, incipient nationalism?
>
> A current human rights poster-child app is Ushahidi, an SMS/GPS
> system used in Kenya in early 2008 to map election violence and
> more recently in South Africa to map anti-immigrant violence. In
> South Africa, SMS systems were first used to encourage violence.
> So Ushahidi is a counter-mobthink tool. This starts to suggest
> that what is created when one creates social networks is neither a
> panacea nor a nightmare, but a new field of social action and
> engagement. One that people people have to deal with the way we
> often do, consciously, but playing a small role in a large drama
> that we don't know totally. The politics are ones of greater
> participation, always potentially scary, and potentially
> liberatory. What that liberation consists of needs to be mapped.
> And how we do that mapping is very key. What is a mass
> consciousness in the factory of social networking? Can we run that
> factory ourselves? Should we vote on it?
>
> Meanwhile, as John points out, the providers make out either way.
> Globally, the average SMS message costs about 11 cents US to send,
> and as you can imagine, the provider's costs are minimal. And what
> about all that coltan?
>
>
> Martin Lucas
> martinlucas.net
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 17, 2009, at 10:04 PM, john sobol wrote:
>
>>
>> On 16-Jun-09, at 12:27 PM, Ulises Mejias wrote:
>>>
>>> In the new economics of 'mammet-generated content,' the users are
>>> mindless, sub-human.
>>> They are too small to count except in the aggregate. They performs
>>> mindless repetitive tasks;
>>> they twitter. But they are also dangerous. There is a potential
>>> threat living inside these
>>> Mechanical Turks, a dwarf genius. They are the masses who could
>>> potentially discover --if
>>> sociable media wasn't so much darn fun!-- that of all possible
>>> configurations, the network is
>>> being actualized as a machine for generating more, not less,
>>> inequality. In this economy, there
>>> is no difference between toil and play, and that's not accidental.
>>> The new mammet must be
>>> kept engaged in endless twittering--otherwise, it might go jihadi
>>> all over the network.
>>>
>>> -Ulises Mejias
>>>
>>
>> A couple of days ago I started writing an atypically benign response
>> to the above, atypical as I have on this listserv been pretty
>> hardcore in the past in challenging what I see as the extreme one-
>> sidedness of the argument that Ulises so effectively articulates
>> here, but the extraordinary events in Iran have been so distracting
>> that I only now find myself with a few minutes to continue writing,
>> and as I do so I see that these current events constitute a far more
>> compelling real-world rejection of the mammet metaphor than anything
>> I could have written. For lo, here we have the mammet rising up and
>> almost literally 'going jihadi all over the network' but without
>> leaving the Mechanical Turk! It is in fact the golem with a flower,
>> the Mechanical Turk dancing for peace.
>>
>> Is it not so?
>>
>> How is it that these once 'mindless sub-humans' have ridden the back
>> of Twitter to rise up and smite their oppressors? Does this not make
>> a mockery of experts in theoretical revolution, who have insisted
>> that capitalist networks are inherently anti-revolutionary,
>> inherently anti-human, anti-inspiration? Not that cyberwarfare can't
>> be waged from both sides. Or course it can. But these mammets
>> bravely tweeting understand that human agency lies within human
>> actors, and that 'the system' is never monolothic. That freedom is
>> not necessarily abdicated by participating in a techno-social-network
>> within a capitalist structure, especially when participation consists
>> of telling a meaningful story to real human ears. In fact, it is
>> enhanced, regardless of the ads inserted nearby.
>>
>> So may they tweet on in Iran, and come to enjoy the fruits of their
>> user-generated revolt, even as Twitter gains value and somewhere
>> stockbrokers giggle in anticipation of its IPO.
>>
>> John Sobol
>> --
>> www.johnsobol.com
>>
>>
>>
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