[iDC] Just Say Adorno

[Martin Roberts]

Once again, many thanks to Trebor for making this happen - Stuart Brand would be proud of you! Below are a few comments, intended as a somewhat devil's advocate account of what I saw as some of the aporias of the event, which was otherwise deeply thought-provoking, intellectually challenging, and, inevitably, Fun.

What I found most immediately striking was the reluctance of most presenters - including, myself, I must acknowledge - to stray beyond the comfort zone of certain theoretical platforms, most obviously Marxism. While many of the issues relating to digital labor explored at the conference are transnational in nature, the theoretical frameworks deployed to analyze them remained centered on European and Anglo-American models, in spite of the growing availability of translated work by Latin American, South Asian, and East Asian media theorists.

I was also troubled by the programmatic nature of certain statements, notably Christian Fuchs' call for a communist internet - as if one could somehow magically conjure it into existence merely by calling for it; as if it was something we all wanted - or should want - anyway. While such models seem overly normative, I'm interested in the emergent possibilities of the internet as a space for anarchist practices and organized resistance to capitalism. Unfortunately, anarchism - whether as an explanatory model or a political ideal - was entirely eclipsed by Marxist orthodoxy, in spite of the evident continuities between historical anarchist communities and contemporary piracy networks, both in terms of ideology and social organization. Siva Vaidhyanathan's works Copyrights and Copywrongs and The Anarchist in the Library explicitly characterize the contemporary struggle over digital property as one between anarchists and oligarchs, yet the role the internet has played as a medium for anarchist communities, and of anarchism itself as an alternative model to relations of capitalist production, were not explored. (If this sounds utopian to communists, to paraphrase Brecht, I would ask those who see it as such to explain why it is utopian.)

A second concern was the apparent displacement - once again - of the cultural by political-economic perspectives, at least at the panels I attended. While the cultural was a phantom presence at most of these, from references to Chinese gold "farmers" (a term which the young men in question repudiate) to Amazon's Mechanical "Turk," it remained incidental, and the cultural politics of such terms, and the Orientalist mythologies inscribed and reproduced in some of them, remained unexamined. (I wonder, for example, what my Turkish media-theorist friend Aras Ozgun might have to say about Amazon's "Mechanical Turk.") While I do understand that the focus of the conference was primarily on (im)material political economies, the assumption that the cultural is merely a superstructural epiphenomenon of these is - or so I thought - by now an antiquated notion.

In the latter context, a particular concern of mine has been the Japanization of the discourse on digital media, perhaps best exemplified in the Mac vs. PC commercial in which the two male protagonists encounter a mini-skirted Japanese "digital camera," with which the Mac, predictably, is magically able to communicate in fluent Japanese. Ludicrous as the ad is, it exemplifies the pervasiveness of gendered techno-Orientalist cultural mythologies in Western media, equally apparent in the cult of "Zen" on productivity blogs and the fetishization of Japanese culture by influential Western business "gurus" such as Gar Reynolds. But perhaps this is another paper (or conference).

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Martin Roberts
Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Eugene Lang College / BA Program in Liberal Arts
The New School
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011
212.229.5119
robertsm at newschool.edu 
http://www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty.aspx?id=1738 



--------
Martin Roberts
Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies
Bachelors Program in Liberal Arts / Eugene Lang College
The New School
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011
212.229.5119 (voice)
212.229.2588 (fax)
robertsm at newschool.edu
http://www.newschool.edu