[iDC] "The first rule of data centers is...

Fri Jun 26 14:39:44 UTC 2009

I want to second Mark's comments here -- he hits the nail on the head.  
It is precisely this schism between the experience of users pursuing  
their own liberatory relations, entertainments, career paths or  
politics, and the generalized capitalization of their practices that  
needs to be registered in the strongest possible terms -- and Mark's  
reading of  that NYTimes essay does exactly that. Just as the cinema  
in an earlier moment dilated time, expanded space, elaborated race and  
gender and engaged fantasy in myriad new ways that shifted the  
character of sociality while still capturing and capitalizing the  
attention of audiences, the digital enclosure of the forms of fantasy,  
intellect and aspiration generated by culture represents a new order  
of alienation.

While it may not make sense to some on this list to speak of  
alienation (particularly if you no longer think that there is anything/ 
one to be alienated) the radical schism between the form of the  
interactive fantasies of users and their infrastructural conditions of  
possibility provide evidence that the real organization of biopower  
and the forms of consciousness this organization generates may not  
always correspond. The form of display does not indicate the form of  
the operating system. In other words the terms of the age old  
divisions between mind and body, intellectual and manual labor, etc.,  
may be shifting, but capitalist geo-politics continues to organize  
what we could still call bodies, what Hortense Spillers in an  
evocation of the pre-symbolic situation of the slave-body calls "the  
flesh." That so much of this flesh is taken as media for the  
expression of ideas, fantasies and practices that in their very  
constitution eschew an awareness of their dependence on the  
organization of the global bio-mass strikes me as the very problem we  
must learn to speak more about if we are to ask the most penetrating  
and therefore the most important questions about social justice. In  
what way has what for numerous reasons should no longer (not yet?) be  
called humanity itself become a medium?

As Mark says, "the server farms might better be described as server  
"factories" -- spaces where the productive aspect of monitoring is  
separated out from the range of monitored activities. The fact that  
these spaces are private, commercial ones, is neither natural nor  
necessary, but is the legacy of historical forms of enclosure -- the  
continuation of enclosure as a form of separation (of users from their  
date, data producers from the means of data processsing), what Massimo  
De Angelis has described as a process of continuous enclosure." We  
need to recognize that this legacy of enclosure is inseparable from  
the legacy of dispossession and impoverishment that has today reached  
apocalyptic proportions. The fact that so many do not recognize that  
for much of the planet the apocalypse has already occurred is at once  
part of the problem that is ours to overcome and a symptom that, read  
properly, might begin to reveal the nature of the solution. One thing  
is clear: no statement audible here (wherever that may be) escapes  
participation in the exploitative logic of media-capital.

As far as I am concerned, this statement also answers one of the major  
methodological questions pre-occupying this list serve -- the one that  
would focus solely on the specifics case-studies and would do so in an  
effort to imply that there are certain non-exploitative forms of  
interactivity. For the moment it seems that progress is not  
foreclosed, certainly, not all agency or organizational practices are  
the same -- by no means-- but it seems to me that none are entitled to  
a free pass, none of us are going to get off the hook so easily.

Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
and Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 fax

On Jun 25, 2009, at 10:34 PM, Mark Andrejevic wrote:

> 'Don't talk about data centers'" -- this from a piece on data  
> centers/cloud computing in the NYTimes architecture magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?sq=data%20centers&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all 
> ). Yes, it's a bit over-dramatic and conspiratorial, but I think it  
> usefully highlights the tendential omission of (infra-)structural  
> issues in some of the discussions of the status of online activity.  
> The repeated comparison in the article is suggestive: data centers  
> are to the digital "revolution" what factories are to the industrial  
> one. These are structures populated not by people, but by data about  
> them ("We used to think that owning factories was an important piece  
> of a business’s value...Then we realized that owning what the  
> [social?] factory produces is more important.”). What I find  
> striking about the article is the portrait it paints of the  
> emergence of galloping privatization -- the commercial enclosure of  
> information hithero unavailable (or stored in other forms), non- 
> existent, or too expensive to systematically capture and sort. The  
> energy statistics help to provide some indication of the scale of  
> this rapidly expanding digital enclosure ("From 2000 to 2005, the  
> aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled. The cloud, he  
> calculates, consumes 1 to 2 percent of the world’s electricity.").
>
> The servers, of course, provide convenient and useful services,  
> including the email application I'm using to compose and circulate  
> this post. They also represent the privatization of the products of  
> our communicative, social, and transactional data on an  
> unprecedented scale. What economists call the "non-rival" character  
> of this ownership (at least in some instances) creates a distinction  
> in control over the product of our information-generating activity  
> vis a vis industrial forms of production (one of the several reasons  
> contributing to the growing salience of intellectual property law in  
> the digital era). Obviously the fact that Facebook knows who my  
> friends are doesn't mean that I don't. However, Facebook also has  
> access to aggregate forms of data (as well as, increasingly, the  
> means of sorting, searching, and manipulating the aggregate). At  
> issue here are what might be described not just at a significant  
> portion of the means of communicating, transacting, and accessing  
> information, but also the means of data processing, of making sense  
> of tremendous amounts of data, including conducting ongoing, large- 
> scale, controlled experiments and interpreting the results. These  
> means of data processing or sense-making (albeit in instrumental  
> fashion) are inaccessible to the producers of the raw data, and the  
> products they produce are equally inaccessible (I may know who my  
> friends are, but I have no notion of the significance my pattern of  
> interaction takes on against the background of millions of other  
> patterns, the controlled experiments that generated them, and the  
> results of aggregating, sorting, and querying this data). In this  
> regard, products are generated based on the aggregate activity of  
> data producers that remains inaccessible to them. The question of  
> whether the data-producing activity is understood by participants as  
> work, play, consumption, etc., while an important one in many  
> regards, may not illuminate the complex process whereby private  
> ownership/control of the means of interaction relates to private  
> ownership of the technology, datasets, and algorithms for  
> transforming the raw data into information products inaccessible to  
> producers, products that appear to them only in forms that render  
> their original contribution indistinguishable, invisible, untraceable.
>
> The enclosure movement and the eventual forms of real subsumption  
> and technological transformation that accompanied it (the shift from  
> expropriation of surplus product to that of surplus value, the rise  
> of waged labor and the eventual transformation from piece-work rates  
> to hourly wages) favored the emergence of factory space, not just to  
> aggregate worker activity, but also, significantly to monitor and  
> eventually rationalize it. In this regard, the server farms might  
> better be described as server "factories" -- spaces where the  
> productive aspect of monitoring is separated out from the range of  
> monitored activities. The fact that these spaces are private,  
> commercial ones, is neither natural nor necessary, but is the legacy  
> of historical forms of enclosure -- the continuation of enclosure as  
> a form of separation (of users from their date, data producers from  
> the means of data processsing), what Massimo De Angelis has  
> described as a process of continuous enclosure.
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