The proliferation of social networking and current developments in service-based platforms (what has become known as 'cloud computing') provide explicit examples of the privatization and commodification of social production. What becomes clear is that our experience of the web is bound to inherent paradoxes that are reflected in its technical organization. One of the foundations for its critique relies on the recognition of the ways in which the energies of peer production and social exchange have been expropriated from the commons by the market.

Notes on 120days of *buntu
Geoff Cox

120days of *buntu is a project by Gordan Savičić, and Danja Vasiliev, that proposes 120 modified Ubuntu Operating Systems.

What kind of transgressions are imagined in the naming of this project? The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinism, written by Donatien Alphonse François (aka Marquis de Sade) in 1785, famously depicts scenes of sexual violence and sadism. In what ways might the alternative operating systems offered here be transgressive in line with de Sade's understanding of the liberation of desire, and thereby offer speculation on how libertarian attitudes might exceed the masochistic desires of free/libre software development? The connection is not so strange as it first appears. Indeed software, like language in general, is bound to the constitution of subjectivity as an act of violence at source (as with the Althusserian call to order). In other words, violence is always embodied in source code: it symbolizes and enacts violence on the thing and executes it. Hence the user is necessarily violated by the operating system (OS) they use. It ab/uses them, not the other way around.

With Ubuntu as object of choice (the popular end of free/open source software development), the OS treads a fine line between usability and the replication of proprietary and normative forms. This identifies one of the paradoxes of free software development more generally: its ready recuperation, and that its very success is part of the problem. Any related notion of freedom stands for a paradoxical belief in open standards and at the same time the means to capitalize on sharing and free labour. Moreover, radical sharing communities that have emerged through projects like GNU/Linux are not simply alternatives to capitalism but also new forms that express its unerring ability to absorb social innovation and pervert it; capturing critique, as well as the desire and imagination invested in it in the first place. Perhaps this is also what happened to some extent when Ars Electronica decided, in 1999, to award its Golden Nica not to an artwork but to the Linux operating system and in this way unwittingly absorbed it into instrumentalised understandings of creativity (exemplified by the giving of awards). [Further irony is that 120days received a Honorary Mention at Prix Ars in 2011.]

So is the project not simply doomed to failure, especially given that alternative technical systems and creative activities once released are soon after effectively absorbed by free market ideology? Has it also not become an orthodoxy these days for cultural producers to work “operatively” at the level of the apparatus like technicians or engineers (as Benjamin recommended in his “The Author as Producer” of 1934; or Savičić and Vasiliev's own “The Manifesto for Critical Engineering” of 2011)? What is the effect of the intervention here in terms of operating systems more broadly; of art, of politics, of the body, and so on? By taking de Sade as inspiration, something rather different seems to be exposed, more in the realm of excess where useless production becomes a preferred technique to escape the determination of existing imperatives of capitalism (Bataille). Something else is also revealed, in that political struggle is characterised between operating systems for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary (Berardi). Perhaps 120days of *buntu manages to reactivate excess, desire and imagination in these ways, thus opening up new possibilities for socio-technical transgression.

References:
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation.” In Mapping Ideology. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 1997. 100-140. Print.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volume 1. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Print.Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” In Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927-1934. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland & Gary Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999. Print.
Berardi, Franco 'Bifo'. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation. London: Minor Compositions, 2009. Print.
“Linux Torvalds Wins Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica.” In Linux Today. <http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-05-29-003-05-PS>.
Oliver, Julian, Savičić, Gordan, & Vasiliev, Danja. “The Critical Engineering Manifesto.” 2011. <http://criticalengineering.org/>
de Sade, Marquis. The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Print.

 

Notes on #ordure

“In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about this crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk.” (Marx, The Grundrisse)[1]

It is clear that the valorisation process necessarily leaves waste behind, as Marx identified in 1858. In the social factories that produce the shit of telecommunications these days, not much has changed, and the workers who build the devices are treated like shit: “treated inhumanely, like machines.”[2] While ‘smart phones’ litter the streets, the human costs correspondingly multiply. In addition, the environmental consequences of over-production are there for all to see, as more and more environmental pollutants are dumped around the world as a consequence of the demands of an ever-expanding demand for telecommunications gadgetry.[3] Like the tradition of examining faeces to determine the organism’s health, the economy’s health can be judged by its management of waste. As Roberto Saviano confirms: “Waste grounds are the most concrete emblems of every economic cycle.”[4]

The pervasiveness of mobile technologies is symptomatic of the waste production of mass communications, and the overproduction of information that we are hardly able to process or make much sense of.[5] Contemporary alienation includes a kind of dyslexia, leaving little hope for effective action when people have become incapable of maintaining concentrated attention on the same object for a significant period of time.[6] In The Soul at Work, Franco Berardi uses the example of mobile phones to demonstrate the “network dependency” that underpins the social factory, such that info-workers continue to work even when not working.[7] The digital network more generally facilitates the spatial and temporal globalization of labour but the cellular qualities of this recombine semiotic fragments endlessly to produce what he calls ‘semiocapitalism’.[8] The most important commodity of late capitalism, the mobile phone, is the instrument of this, melting our brains both literally and metaphorically.

In The Human Condition (written in 1958), Hannah Arendt states that the political realm arises out of acting together, in the sharing of speech and action.[9] But despite the wild claims for social media revolutions, the restrictive register of Twitter’s 140 characters seems indicative of the economisation of speech and affect – as empty speech acts. The coalition between consumer capitalism and forms of democracy is evident in relation to the exaggerated claim to allow active participation in the political process. Freedom to voice opinions is offered but is rendered illusionary by the forces of the free market. Technologies, like the mobile phone, play a significant role here in distancing speech from affect in a situation where action and words have lost their power (to echo Arendt).

The intervention of Dominique Laporte, in the History of Shit (first published in French in 1978), is to verify that modern power is founded on the aesthetics of the public sphere and in the agency of its citizen-subjects but that these are conditions of the management of human waste.[10] He insists that in parallel to the cleansing of the streets of Paris from shit, the French language was similarly cleansed of Latin words to establish official French without “foreign leanings” (according to an edict of 1539). Thus he contends that language was purged of its “lingering stink” to become purer and invested with authority, “elevating it to the divine place of power freed from odor.”[11] The desire for clean language, as well as clean streets, sublimates shit and demonstrates an expression of new biopolitical forms of control over subjectivity (indicated by the bodily functions of speaking and shitting) and one where the market becomes sovereign (rather than the State). The same can be said of the technologies that are now found on the streets (installed in mobile devices and such-like) that are purged of their stink.

The move towards service-based platforms (so-called ‘cloud computing’) provides a further example of purified forms and the privatisation of collective speech-acts. This is the Apple paradigm of software development with specially conceived proprietary “apps” (for iPhones and iPads) that close off users from the underlying impurities (‘stink’) of code (think of the cleanliness of the App Store for instance [12]). These developments are crucial for a fuller understanding of the suppression of political expression in the public realm and the ways in which the voice is becoming promoted but through ever more privatized forms, underpinned by the coalition of pervasive technologies and free market logic. In other words, the social potential is stolen from the public realm and commodified. Only the separation of the public body from the free market can save us. The health of the body can be detected in its shit and current mismanagement is clear for all to see in its vile products.

Geoff Cox

 

Notes:

1. Marx, The Grundrisse (1858), 273.
2. See Gethin Chamberlain, “Apple’s Chinese workers treated inhumanely, like machines”, in The Guardian (5 May 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/30/apple-chinese-workers-treated-inhumanely).
The article claims that more than half a million Chinese workers are paid around 65p an hour, working over 60 hours a week to cope with the massive demand.
3. For instance, enormous amounts of exported e-waste ends up in Guiyu, China, a recycling hub with the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world (for full story, see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870485,00.html#ixzz1HMrhkfVP).
4. Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (2006), cited in Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation, 2009, 53.
5. For instance, 4chan is the largest English imageboard on the web where users generally post anonymously (including by the activist group Anonymous) (http://www.4chan.org).
6. See Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008).
7. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009).
8. Ibid., 89.
9. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
10. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
11. Ibid., 18.
12. iCapitalism is the name of a game, created by Forumwarz in 2011. It was rejected from Apple’s App Store for no reason despite fulfilling their published criteria of acceptance, and despite the seemingly indiscriminate and endlessly trivial apps that are widely available for the iPhone. The game is simple: the person who pays the most wins.
Available at http://blog.forumwarz.com/2011/02/01/irejected-how-apple-took-nine-weeks-to-arbitrarily-reject-our-app/

Sculpting the Flow of Reality
Bruce Sterling

It's conceptual art, but it leads him into the streets of London to distribute free credit cards.

Paolo Cirio, the "sculptor of data", is always "structuring unexpected forms". Commonly these unexpected forms bring him lawsuits and death threats. What you are seeing here, however, are the flows of reality as Paolo perceives them, the basic flows that he "sculpts". This is the analysis that makes his artwork possible, and in some sense even inevitable - his historical public duty.

Only programmers think like this 32-year-old Italian artist thinks. One could spend an entire lifetime, even a lifetime of intense political engagement and avant-garde art practice, without ever encountering "PHP + DOM parser scripts" or "network consistency tuning". In Paolo's world, however, phenomena like these are a given.

Obviously Paolo takes a certain aesthetic pleasure in assembling these graphs. He likes the way they look, but he is especially interested in the affordances they offer him for interventions. They are maps of vulnerabilities assembled, in a word, for hacking. Paolo's reality can't be left alone to gently flow through its sets of boxes and arrows; reality has to be hacked.

His means of sculpting data are the typical methods of modern web design: aggregation, fabrication and contextualization. For instance, about a million Facebook profiles can be "aggregated", and then "contextualized" in a new way - computer-searches for the attractive faces - and then "fabricated" into an involuntary dating site.

Facebook is already a vast dating-site of sorts, and much of what goes on there is invisible to common users. Facebook and its corporate allies are already aggregating, contextualizing and fabricating, all the time. They never ask permission of the users to restructure the data that Facebook users naively contribute. And neither does Paolo; he rarely asks permission, either.

The engineers and the interface designers of Facebook spend amazing amounts of time and energy contemplating elaborate sets of charts, boxes and arrows. This is what they are paid for, and their efforts look remarkably like the charts, boxes and arrows on display in the Aksioma exhibition. Periodically, there is an upgrade review in which the boxes and arrows are reinterpreted and rearranged - commonly in a way intended to generate more money.

However, those professional attempts at reshaping commercial reality don't always succeed. Reality is resistant to change and reality seems to have an anticommercial bias. For instance, the lamentable MySpace has just as many boxes and arrows as Facebook, yet MySpace is bleeding away its users and transforming into a ghost town. Friendster is already a ghost town, where the arbitrary reality of its programmers has long since ceased to flow through the boxes and arrows. These may be vast young industries, but their mortality rate is colossal.

There is an inherent and even pitiable vulnerability to these costly, elaborate, fragile data structures. However, you won't be seeing much pity for them from Paolo Cirio or his widely-noted collaborator Alessandro Ludovico. They are relentlessly oppositional figures. They are attuned entirely to the historical guilts of our modern data titans: Facebook (for privacy invasions), Amazon (for piracy of books), Google (for turning the organization of knowledge into mere for-profit advertising), and, in a recent London effort, Visa (for turning credit into a failed industry).

There can, it seems, be no peace with the undemocratic dictatorship of the management of public knowledge in an information era. Knowledge is, it seems, unethically exploited by corporations that seize ownership of information resources that should properly be freed for the public benefit of the planetary population. Seen from this stark point of view, the elaborate software structures of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Visa are mere obfuscations. These enterprises, familiar to all of us, are the constructors of a false social reality. They are circuit-ticking contrivances for generating false information-consciousness.

Every Paolo Cirio effort is a propaganda of the deed intended to illuminate this mordant state of our public affairs.

The colossal popularity of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Visa - they are well-nigh beloved everywhere, except in China, Iran and North Korea, and even there they have their ardent fans - may seem to make this a distinct minority viewpoint. However, this bothers Paolo Cirio not at all. On the contrary, it allows his artistic fame to grow with the gigantic size of his enemies. Paolo's fame is indeed growing, around the world, and probably his fame grows most of all among the employees of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Visa. Not the shareholders, not the users - these profiteers and victims merely represent two classes and sheep. It is the constructors of the systems, those who patch the crumbling codes together every day, who are the key demographic for artworks of this kind.

These are the people most likely to appreciate the ingenuity of his efforts. They are under attack, and they are offered appeal; they are the battleground where the boxes and arrows mingle.

 

This text was first published for Paolo Cirio's solo show REALITYFLOWHACKED, Aksioma, Ljubljana, 2011.

 

An interview with Paolo Cirio, for Digicult (April 2011), by Tatiana Bazzicehlli, When Stealing Becomes Art , is also available online.

 

 

Democracy 2.0
Geoff Cox

Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It’s called Democracy. Alan Badiou [1]

Critique is an essential part of capitalist production. The ability to express one's opinions in public allows the system to verify itself as democratic. Through such means, it is able to generate its own critique and then quickly neutralise it. Within the neo-liberal spaces of contemporary culture, thereby some opinions not readily acceptable in other public places can be displayed but the politics easily contained. The critic offers soft politics that is easily recuperated to legitimate the art culture's self-reflection. But it’s not quite that simple – and far more dialectical. On the one hand, culture appears to have lost its critical power as any form of critique is automatically recuperated; but on the other, the new situation opens up different strategies of opposition that respond to the ways in which power is organised.[2]

What is required is a more detailed examination of the power relations at work, and how they are configured as part and parcel of informational capitalism, and how social relations and control structures are managed. With no longer a centre of power to be found or established opposition as such, it is clear that the (class) enemy is increasingly hard to identify across its networks, and yet power continues to produce its own vulnerabilities. Correspondingly, the recommendation of those developing oppositional tactics is to take advantage of the vulnerabilities in networks (much like successful computer viruses do) – by exploiting power differentials that exist in the operating system.[3] Such tactics draw on methods informed by network and information theory, as well as reverse engineering mass culture.[4] The approaches offer direct responses to recuperative processes, and yet the effect of tactical media is paradoxical, as Geert Lovink contends, leading equally tactically to ‘benign tolerance’. To explain in more detail, he says:

‘The ideal is to be little more than a temporary glitch, a brief instance of noise or interference. Tactical media set themselves up for exploitation in the same manner that “modders” do in the game industry: both dispense with their knowledge of loop holes in the system for free. They point out the problem, and then run away. Capital is delighted, and thanks the tactical media outfit or nerd-modder for the home improvement.’[5]

That may be sadly the case, but the reappraisal of recuperative processes and interventionist responses is necessarily ongoing, not least in the context of how social media are changing the face of the representational political process. This is partly evident in the apparent success of various campaigns that hope to influence the outcomes of elections and in the rise of services that offer effective participation in the political process.

The tactics of dissent have changed too. Seppukoo, a recent hack of Facebook by Les Liens Invisibles (2009),[6] provides an example where users were able to commit virtual suicide in a ritualistic removal of their virtual identity.[7] Critique here operates in the challenge to the living-death user-experience of Facebook and other similar programs that express the social relation in restrictive form. The action provoked a litigious response by Facebook not least.[8]

Part of the friendly (inter)face of capitalism, restricted social relations are perpetuated through networks of friends (everyone is more a potential friend rather than enemy), such that antagonistic social relations are masked and the politics nullified. Evoking Carl Schmitt’s notion of enmity (in The Concept of the Political, of 1927), the political differentiation of friend or enemy (aka Facebook or Seppukoo) lies at the heart of this, and offers a certain definition of politics. Schmitt explains that: ‘The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.’[9]

The reference to the Japanese ritual suicide of Seppuku (literally stomach-cutting) evokes the stubborn refusal to fall into the hands of the enemy – and the preference for autonomy even at the cost of one’s life. In turn, the project is also inspired by to Seppuku!, the ritual suicide that some members of the Luther Blissett Project committed in 1999, to declare the end of their multiple identities project (and the death of net.art as a relatively autonomous zone).[10] Virtual suicide stands as the refusal to operate under intolerable conditions of service and as an affirmation of creative autonomous practice. Refusal responds to the way in which those in power regenerate themselves through constant upgrades to break opposition; the position derives from Mario Tronti’s essay ‘The Strategy of Refusal’ of 1965, following the logic that capital ‘seeks to use the worker’s antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor for its own development’.[11] It is clear to Tronti that capital does not develop through technological innovation per se, but from the inventive power of labour (and this is the basis of the concept of immaterial labour).

Crucially, Capital does not wish to destroy critique entirely, as it is fundamental to its operations, but obscure its origins and subdue its effectiveness and appropriate its energies. Moreover, this is its friendly face whether you like it or not. For instance, in the case of Facebook, they keep your account details for perpetuity and commercial exploitation. The Seppukoo ‘about’ page explains: ‘Suicide is a free choice and a kind of self-assertiveness. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't give to its users this faculty at all, and your account will be only deactivated.’[12]

Democracy and authoritarianism operate dialectically. This is in keeping with the liberal tradition, as Etienne Balibar explains, and the distinction between individual opinions and collective actions in the ways they ‘reciprocally “underwrite” each other’.[13] Individuals voice their diverse opinions, both for and against the ruling power, in order to legitimate its effects. Expressing the violence of participation, this is the basis of liberal democracy as well as the basis of its democratic renewal – what we together refer to as participatory democracy. Liberal democracy exerts a friendly power that doesn't appear violent at all, and individuals actively imagine their participation in what ultimately is part of their subjugation. This comes close to Maurizio Lazzarato’s discussion of participative management in the workplace as a technique of power in restructured form, and one that appears to grant special privileges to creative labour. Indeed, Lazzarato thinks the technique is more totalitarian than the production line as it involves the willing subjectivity of the worker in the participatory process.[14] He explains the logic thus:

‘If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the “raw material” of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the “ideological” environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduction of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator – and to construct it as “active”. [...] The fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capital has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge.’[15]

Again, popular social media platforms like Facebook come to mind, and more specifically applications such as Causes through which users can imagine the effectiveness of their political engagement by creating petitions in support of a particular cause. The ‘about’ statement expresses the ambition of no less than changing the world:

'Facebook Platform presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation, most of whom are on Facebook, in seizing the future and making a difference in the world around us. Our generation cares deeply, but the current system has alienated us. Causes provides the tools so that any Facebook user can leverage their network of real friends to effect positive change. The goal of all this is what we call "equal opportunity activism." We're trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world.'[16]

Another project by Les Liens Invisibles, commissioned by Arnolfini in 2010, uses the tactic of over-identification to respond to such tendencies.[17] In the age of over-mediated democracy, Repetitionr provides a platform for activism with minimal effort, an online petition service with a difference; offering advanced web 2.0 technologies to make participatory democracy a truly user-centered experience.[18]

The success of every campaign is guaranteed as just one click is all it takes to generate a whole campaign with up to a million automatic fake signatures. The project reflects the acknowledged need for new institutional forms that challenge existing systems of governance and representational structures, as a blatant expression of non-representational democracy - in other words, a form of democracy uncoupled from sovereign power. As Ned Rossiter puts it: ‘while networks in many ways are regulated indirectly by the sovereign interests of the state, they are also not reducible to institutional apparatuses of the state. And this is what makes possible the creation of new institutional forms as expressions of non-representational democracy.’[19]

The approach challenges the limits of representational democracy and the discourse of neo-liberalism in general, offering a means to rethink politics within network cultures. If Repetitionr is an example of over-identification with real existing participatory democracy, then the provocation is that we need to develop far better strategies and techniques of organisation.

As an example, in opposition to informational capitalism lies commons-based peer production. Indeed, concerns over the commons are encapsulated by the title of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent book Commonwealth, to indicate the ‘common-wealth’ of land, water and the atmosphere. They argue that, ‘love provides another path for investigating the power and productivity of the common. [… Such a] notion of love gives us a new definition of wealth that extends our notion of the common and points toward a process of liberation’.[20]

Current political, economic and ecological crises derive from aggressive and primitive forms of property (such as disputes over copyright and intellectual property) and energy production (geopolitical disputes over carbon fuels) – a lack of recognition of the common (and love towards others). Historical parallels between the ways in which the commons were turned in private property (through the enclosure movement), and the ways in which intellectual property is being privatised have been well established in contemporary commentaries.[21] The way that code as an intangible object outside the marketplace is being forced into the property regime offers a useful focus to discuss wider issues of organisation and power struggles. The question for James Leach is how technologies that establish collaboration are more and more central to economic production are effected by and effect ‘ownership regimes’. When it comes to creativity, ideas are extracted from the commons and modified by creative and intellectual labour such that the issue of ownership and property arises as a problem in a (Western capitalist) culture that has stressed creativity as inextricably bound to individualism.

The cultural significance of this is somewhat captured by the term recursive public to account for the ways in which the public is ‘a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives’.[22] Somewhat related to the concept of the public sphere, a recursive public is capable of modifying itself through participation, relatively unmediated by higher authority. For Christopher Kelty, the collective technical experiment of the Free Software movement is an example of a recursive public that draws attention to its democratic and political significance and the limitations of our understanding of the public in the light of the restructuring of power over networks, struggles over intellectual property rights and sharing of code. In this sense, the concept of the public sphere itself is taken as open to modification and reuse – and is made recursive. As a consequence, a reconceptualisation of political action is required that combines traditional forms of expression such as free speech with coding practices and sharing associated with Free Software. To Kelty, this is encapsulated by the phrase ‘running code’ to describe the relationship between 'argument-by-technology and argument-by-talk’.[23] Software is both expression as in speech or writing but also something that performs actions. Making reference to the work of Hannah Arendt, Kelty’s intervention is to extend a definition of a public grounded in discourse - through speech, writing and assembly – to other legal and technical layers that underpin the Internet in recognition of the ways in which contemporary power and control are structured – through both discourses and infrastructures.[24]

Such a reconsideration of public space or a politics of the common exposes the sad reality of lived liberal participatory democracy. To Jacques Rancière, the origin of the political lies in the properties of its subjects and in how they come together, how they ‘part-take’, or in other words how they participate in contradictory forms of action. ‘Politics is a paradoxical form of action’ according to Rancière, and hence can be defined in the contradictions at the heart of action - between acting and being acted upon. He explains:

‘Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined in its own terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity), not the other way around.’ [25]

According to Rancière, it is the very ‘axioms of democracy’ – of ruling and being ruled – that require rupture to open up discussion of the constitution of the subject and its relations. New publics are required – in coalitions of human and non-human agents involved in radical networks – to engage with and to modify the infrastructures they inhabit as an extension of the public sphere. Evidently publicness is constituted not simply by speaking, writing, arguing and protesting – but also through acting on, and modifying the domain or platform through which these practices are enacted.

Moreover, publicness cannot be a positive public force unless it is at the same time political. Paolo Virno, asserts this issue: ‘if the publicness of the intellect does not yield to the realm of the public sphere, of a political space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying effects. A publicness without a public sphere: here is the negative side - the evil if you wish - of the experience of the multitude.’[26]

The production of free software might illustrate the point to some extent: to make public as a result of shared labour. This, again, is a positive force, but only if it as the same time a result of political action and thinking. Also making reference to the work of Arendt in this respect (in her The Human Condition of 1958), Virno thus explains the current crisis of politics, and ‘the disrepute into which action has fallen’.[27]

Democracy requires further modifications but only on condition that it is released fully into the public domain.

 

images: Les Liens Invisibles
This essay was first published in Art, Activism & Recuperation, Concept Store #03 (2010)

Notes:

1. Alain Badiou, ‘Prefazione all’edizione italiana’, in Metropolitica, Naples: Cronopio, 2002. There are far too many other references to mention here that take a critical view of Western representational democracy, but a particularly polemical view appears in the first section of Muammar Al Qathafi's 'The Solution of the Problem of Democracy' in his The Green Book.

2. I prefer the word ‘antagonism’ to ‘opposition’ in recognition of how important it is for neo-liberalism to dilute it in order to function effectively. Amongst others, this is in keeping with Chantal Mouffe’s position in ‘Artistic and Agonistic Spaces’, in Art & Research, vol 1, no. 2, 2007, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html

3. Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Electronic Mediations, vol. 21, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

4. The exhibition Craftivism, at Arnolfini Nov 2009 - Feb 2010, is an example of  'reverse engineering' aiming to question and disrupt the prevailing codes of mass consumerism, http://www.craftivism.net/

5. Lovink quoted in Rita Raley, Tactical Media, Electronic Mediations, volume 28, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. 28. ‘Tactical Media’ broadly refers to contemporary forms of dissent somewhere between creative experimentation and a reflexive engagement with social change; particularly important are the collaborative writings of Lovink, as in ‘The ABC of Tactical Media’, 1997 (with David Garcia), and ‘New Rules for the New Actonomy’, 2001 (with Florian Schneider) and the Next Five Minutes conferences, held in Amsterdam from 1993.

6. Les Liens invisibles is an imaginary art-group from Italy, comprised of media artists Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini, http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org/

7. Seppukoo, http://www.seppukoo.com/ - also note similar projects, such as Cory Arcangel’s Friendster Suicide, http://www.coryarcangel.com/2005/12/friendster-suicide-live-in-person-dec-2005/ and moddr_lab’s Web2.0 Suicide Machine, http://suicidemachine.org/

8. See the ‘cease and desist’ letter from Facebook’s lawyers, and the reply - both linked from the Seppukoo home page, http://www.seppukoo.com/

9. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 1927, p.30.

10. Thanks to Tatiana Bazzichelli for pointing out this reference, http://www.lutherblissett.net/archive/452_en.html

11. Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, in Autonomia: Post-political Politics, Semiotext(e) vol. 3, no. 3, New York: Semiotext(e), (1980 [1965]), pp. 28-34.

12. http://www.seppukoo.com/

13. Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, London: Verso, 2008 [1998], p. 27.

14. Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Forms of Production and Circulation of Knowledge’, in Josephine Bosma et al, eds. Readme! Filtered by Nettime: ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, New York: Autonomedia.

15. Maurizio Lazzarato, 'Immaterial Labour', trans. Paul Colilli & Ed Emory, in Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt, eds. Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p.142.

16. http://apps.facebook.com/causes/about

17. The psychoanalytic term ‘over-identification’, often associated with Slavoj Zizek, has been taken up as a tactic by many activist-artists, including The Yes Men to expose a position by exaggerating a position wildly, pushing the system to its extremes in order to conclude that it is unacceptable.

18. http://www.repetitionr.com/

19. ‘Non-representational democracy’ describes democracy decoupled from sovereign power, as discussed in Ned Rossiter’s Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi, in association with the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 2006, p. 39.

20. Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. xi-xii.

21. See James Boyle, ‘Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the Disappearance of the Public Domain’, in Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

22. Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, p. 3.

23. Ibid., p.58. Kelty later refers to how the free software recursive public turns from a 'class-in-itself to a class-for-itself' as a radical transformation, p.116.

24. Ibid. p. 50.

25. Jacques Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, in Theory & Event, 5:3, 2001, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html

26. Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, New York: Semiotext(e) 2004, p. 40.

27. Ibid. p.51.

 

New Scythians
Wayne Clements

"Double-dip - official, as current slump lasts longer than 1930s recession," says KPMG chief economist.
Source: www.kpmg.com (2012)

"New media artists are able to work internationally and, at least in part, outside of the traditional gallery system, facilitated by the great number of expositions of new media art. These festivals and events do not, as art colleges do not, have an express 'mission to sell'. Rather they rest on the basis of an inscrutable mix of cooperation, voluntarism, private beneficence, and public funding."
Source: Scrivener, S., & Clements, W., "Triangulating Artworlds: Gallery, New Media and Academy", in Art Practice in a Digital Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

Socrates: … but what would you say of another man, who fights flying, instead of remaining?
Laches: How flying?
Socrates: Why, as the Scythians are said to fight, flying as well as pursuing…
Source: Plato, Laches.

The KPMG's chief economist Andrew Smith (quoted above), commenting on the Office for National Statistics' estimate of UK Gross Domestic Product in the first quarter of 2012, states: "output remains broadly unchanged from its level in the third quarter of 2010 and, four years on from its pre-recession peak is still some 4 percent down– making this slump longer than the 1930s Depression." Capitalism has not offset its long-term tendency for the rate of profit to decline – nor the protracted social and political crisis attendant upon it.

The four legs whereupon the flat surface on which formally sat new media art's public display (a mix of cooperation, voluntarism, private beneficence, and public funding) are attacked by the same loss of subsidy as the art colleges also mentioned above. The traditional gallery system may continue to sell pricey artwork to mining magnates and the like. Outside that system, is the best we can look forward to the digital equivalent of stewing-up grass in the rain?

Clearly we cannot rely upon the latter pair of our funding quartet. That might seem to leave only cooperation and voluntarism. But add, like the Scythians, to fight flying as well as pursuing, and new and more scrutable alchemies.

http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/CommonPractice

A1026 a conformist colour map of influence.

Documentation of the performances in Second Life.

Documentation of performance at The Slaughterhouse,
Royal William Yard, Plymouth.

Folksomy was presented as part of Arnolfini's Craftivism exhibition (December 2009 - February 2010).

http://www.folksomy.net/

use Poetic::Violence;

# Software for the aggressive assault on society.
# Thank GOD It's all right now — we all want equality —
use constant EQUALITY_FOR_ALL 
=>

"the money to be in the right place at the right time";
use constant NEVER = 'for;;';
use constant SATISFIED => NEVER;
# It's time to liposuck the fat from the thighs of the bloated 
# bloke society—smear it on ourselves and become invisible.
# We are left with no option but to construct code that 
# concretizes its opposition to this meagre lifestyle.

   package DONT::CARE;
   use strict; use warnings;
   sub aspire {
       my $class            = POOR;
       my $requested_type   = GET_RICHER;
       my $aspiration       = "$requested_type.pm";
       my $class            = "POOR::$requested_type";
       require $aspiration;
       return $class->new(@_);
    }
    1;

# bought off with $40 dvd players

sub bought_off{
      my $self = shift;
      $self->{gain} = shift;
      for( $me = 0;
           $me <= SATISFIED;
           $me += EQUALITY_FOR_ALL ){

           $Exploit 
           = 
           push(@poverty_on_someone_else,$self->{gain});
           die "poor" if $Exploit 
           =~ m / 'I feel better about $me' / g;
      }

      foreach my $self_worth ( @poverty_on_someone_else){
           wait 10;
           &Environmental_catastrophe (CHINA,$self_worth)

      }
}

# TODO: we need to seek algorithmic grit 
# for the finely oiled wheels of capital.
# Perl Routines for the redistribution of the world's wealth 
# Take the cash from the rich and turn it into clean 
# drinking water

# Constants
use constant SKINT => 0;
use constant TOO_MUCH => SKINT + 1;
# This is an anonymous hash record to be filled with 
# the Names and Cash of the rich

%{The_Rich} = {
    0 => {
            Name => '???',
            Cash => '???',
     },
}

# This is an anonymous hash record to be filled 
# with the Price Of Clean Water
# for any number of people without clean water

%{The_Poor} = {
      0 =>{
          #the place name were to build a well
          PlaceName         => '???', 
          PriceOfCleanWater => '???',
          Cash              => '???',
      },
  }

# for each of the rich, process them one at a time parsing 
# them by reference to RedistributeCash.

  foreach my $RichBastardIndex (keys %{The_Rich}){
       &ReDisdributeCash(\%{The_Rich->{$RichBastardIndex}});
  }

# This is the core subroutine designed to give away
# cash as fast as possible.

sub ReDisdributeCash {
      my $RichBastard_REFERENCE = @_;

      # go through each on the poor list 
      # giving away Cash until each group
      # can afford clean drinking water

      while($RichBastard_REFERENCE ->{CASH} >= TOO_MUCH){
            foreach my $Index (keys @{Poor}){
            $RichBastard_REFERENCE->{CASH}—;
            $Poor->{$Index}->{Cash}++;
            if( $Poor->{$Index}->{Cash} 
               => 
               $Poor->{$Index}->{PriceOfCleanWater} ){
               &BuildWell($Poor->{$Index}->{PlaceName});
               }
          }
     }
}

Notes in support of Antisocial Notworking
Geoff Cox

Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy.¹

By 'anti-social', I do not mean (to be) unfriendly but to highlight that social networking platforms are already anti-social in as much as they display contradictory tendencies - both connecting and disconnecting socialities. In this way, and undoubtedly part of a backlash to the popularity of social networking in general, I am not referring to 'antisocial web' sites such as Hatebook that enable you to create a list of people that you don't want to be friends with (as opposed to Facebook that allows you to collect friends).² Rather, the application of the term anti-social is meant more in the tradition of 'negative dialectics' to highlight the paradoxical nature of positive criticism.³ Despite focussing on issues of ownership and distribution, some criticism is misdirected; for instance, in emphasising the threat of social networking to established hierarchies of expertise and a defense of copyright.⁴ Better to begin negatively.

With this in mind, the emphasis in these notes is to draw attention to how the production of non-antagonistic social relations has become central to economic production and social control. To take a typical target, the politics of Facebook,⁵ with its 59 million users, reveals how social exchanges are mediated by the wider culture and political economy. Personal information (ID and consumer preferences) is voluntarily submitted and can then be accessed by agencies reflecting pervasive viral marketing techniques, hegemonic corporate ownership and capitalistic economic principles – all designed to derive profit from friendship.⁶ Furthermore, the social relation is based on weak ties (as opposed to the relatively strong ties of peer production for instance) and an 'unstable social contract' between users and platform owners.⁷ That services are provided on the basis of latent profitability indicates the capitalist logic of producing value as cheaply as possible and making sure ownership is kept in the realm of private property.⁸ A closer look at terms of service agreements reveals more detail here and confirms that ownership is carefully managed. The contradiction is clear: 'The social web facilitates an unprecedented level of social sharing, but it does so mostly through the vehicle of proprietary platforms.'⁹ In such ways, the social relation is produced in restrictive form.

No less significant is the issue of security in the challenge of managing the networked relations between technologies and biologies – in the management of life itself (referring to Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between 'bare life' and the political subject).¹⁰ In other words, the network needs to distinguish whether you are a friend or not, and as such is a neat example of biopolitical control. The network has evidently become a manifestation of ideology in itself - and one in which connectivity remains a security threat beyond a purely technical form (in offering a platform for terrorism or counter-terrorism alike).¹¹ Evoking Carl Schmitt's notion of enmity (in The Concept of the Political, of 1927),¹² the political differentiation of friend or enemy (facebook or hatebook) lies at the centre of this. Nevertheless the starting point for these notes is antithetical not simply oppositional (or anti-semitic or anti-America like Schmitt), and draws upon an understanding of the 'negation of negation' to understand how dialectics is not simply a method that proposes a reversal of one thing with another but a deeper and more reflexive engagement.¹³

With this in mind, these notes are arranged as a series of speculations that examine the paradoxical nature of the terms in common use: 'the social' (making particular reference to Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social) and 'networking' (with reference to Ned Rossiter's Organized Networks); moving to the antithetical term of 'notworking' (after Antonio Negri) to shift attention to social relations that are unfriendly in character. The suggestion is that without the identification of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged. (Do I need to add?) Without politics, our friendships are empty of meaning and our exchanges lead to nothing but the commodification of life itself.

The Social

The use of the term 'social' has become commonplace and somewhat emptied of meaning especially where communications technologies are concerned. It is only vaguely defined at best. By returning to the first principles of sociology (the science of living together, and its Latin etymological root 'socius' meaning 'someone following someone else', a 'follower', an 'associate'), Latour proposes to examine what is assembled within social formations (literally Reassembling the Social as the book title confirms).¹⁴ As a consequence of expansions in science and technology, he claims that a problem arises, such that the 'social seems to be diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular'.¹⁵ It is not that there is no such thing as society (as Thatcher famously put it) but there is a problem in regarding it as a given homogenous thing. Rather, it is possible to designate it as a tracing of associations of heterogeneous elements, according to Latour. It is not a thing but a type of connection, an assemblage.

In striving for a more 'relativist' definition of the social and drawing upon the 'uncertainty principle' (where the observer cannot be disentangled from the observed), Latour tries to develop 'uncertainties' over key concepts: the nature of group formations, actions by multiple agents, objects demonstrating agency, as well as ongoing disputes over the nature of facts and the truth claims of social science.¹⁶ The uncertainties do not represent confusion but an opening up of the performative dimension of the social. This comes close to action in as much as action is understood as a coming together of complex, diverse, and interlinking agencies locked into uncertain relations. This is the 'actor-network' that describes not a source of action but a 'moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it'.¹⁷ Indeed, other agencies are participants in action (participant-observers) that produce new fluid (liquid) associations that reflect the socio-technical operations of networks.¹⁸ If agency is embedded in subject-objects and object-subjects under dynamic mesh-network conditions, then in the case of social networking platforms, agency is evident in the software, the networks/spaces, users/subjects, and so on - in the production of a social relation and the networking platform through which it is reproduced.

Herein lies part of the problem (of ANT) that in describing such fluid and contingent relations the network is seen as having a determining effect on interactions therein. The assumption that 'society is ontologically flat is an excellent starting point, but a weak ending of the analysis' as Felix Stalder puts it.¹⁹ This becomes a question of relative power in that not all connections in any network are equal and certain connections are granted privileges over others. This is a description of network power that follows 'power laws' of variable, uneven and unequal distribution, and that has learned from history to use all varieties of authority and organisation at its disposal. Correspondingly, counter positions need to take advantage of the vulnerabilities in networks by exploiting power differentials that exist in the system.²⁰ What is required is more detail on network topologies and how power is organised.

Networking

The difficulty is, as with the term 'social', the term 'network' has become so pervasive that it in danger of losing its meaning or of over-determining its effects. All the same, and in general terms, it seems clear that the nework represents a key organisational principle for understanding contemporary politics, society and life in general (from the activities of peer-to-peer file-sharing to the viral operations of economic and financial markets). Indeed network forms of organisation appear to increasingly prescribe power relations and control structures.²¹ Emergent forms are dissimilar to the ways in which social relations have been traditionally organised, but, in general, they appear to reinforce existing power structures. According to Rossiter,²² there is an urgent need for new institutional forms that reflect 'relational' processes to challenge existing hierarchical and centralising systems. In contrast to what he calls 'networked organisations', emergent 'organized networks' are horizontal, collaborative and distributed in character offering a distinct social dynamic and new forms of agency appropriate to networks (based the movement and flow between multiple agencies). The difference, not least, is how they have responded to developments in networked communications technology and the issue of intellectual property rights: on the one hand, using this as a regulatory mechanism to enforce or extend existing power structures, and on the other, advocating a loosening up of property rights. The contradictions between these characterisations reflect the political complexities and uncertainties associated with sociality and life in general.

The potential to transform social relations is somewhat demonstrated in the dynamics of social networking technologies. But it is the institutional nature of this, as a description of the organisation of social relations, that makes it thoroughly political issue and why the many popular examples can be seen to be deeply compromised. For instance, Facebook demonstrates the potential for self-organisation through its networked capacity and at the same time the drive to commodify collective and communicative exchanges. Organised networks evidently represent relative institutional autonomy but they also need to operate tactically, engaging both horizontal and vertical modes of interaction. Rossiter stresses the point:

'The tendency to describe networks in terms of horizontality results in the occlusion of the “political”, which consists of antagonisms that underpin sociality. It is technically and socially incorrect to assume that hierarchical and centralizing architectures and practices are absent from network cultures.'²³

The plurality of nodes in networks does not guarantee a more inherent democratic order, indeed it is arguably serves to obscure its totalitarian substructure.²⁴ This is the trick of social networking in offering the promise of democracy but though centralised ownership and control where the web platform itself mediates relations (unlike peer to peer file sharing for instance). Crucially, the software and the knowledge to shape it, is no longer stored locally on the user's hard drive but through the browser interface (and in this sense amateur production does become a pressing issue of lack of access to the means of production).

Network power can also be seen in the ways work is reconstituted and how as a consequence of more emphasis on socialised and communicative work new management techniques tend to stress horizontal rather than hierarchical organisational structures. As with the discussion of network control, this in itself is a technique of power that Maurizio Lazzarato takes to be more totalitarian than the production line, as it involves the willing subjectivity of the worker in the process.²⁵ He explains the logic thus:

'If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the “raw material” of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the “ideological” environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduction of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator – and to construct it as “active”. [...] The fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capital has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge.'²⁶

The quote reflects the operations of social networking sites where social relations are produced as friendly rather than antagonistic. As the market outsources manufacture to its consumers, it resolves the contradiction between producers and consumers. It: 'tends not to sell any product at all to the consumer, but rather sells the consumer to the product'.²⁷ In such ways, the participatory work ethic of social networking is interpreted as an expression of new forms of control over subjectivity. The value that is stolen no longer relates simply to labour power but to subjectivity too.²⁸ The worker-user voluntarily generates themselves as complicit with the user-generated content they produce.²⁹ Correspondingly, a shift is required in rethinking the social as a shared and common definition of what it means to be part of the same collective. This is important, as Latour emphasises, because: 'If there is no society, then no politics is possible'.³⁰

Notworking

The parallel between social networking and working in general (or the network and worknet, if preferred)³¹ is encapsulated in the way the networked computer has become like a factory, and has redefined social practices and relations. This is the 'social factory' in which work is no longer confined by the walls of the factory, and is more dispersed, intellectual, immaterial and communicative. The dislocation of class antagonism in the social factory is close to what Marx referred to as 'real subsumption', to conceptualise the way that exploitation is dispersed and subsumed into the wider social realm. Consequently, the control of communications, and the labour related to communications, have become the key sites of antagonism.

Furthermore, as labour time has become more difficult to measure and is less distinct from time outside work, much of it now practised as 'nonwork', outside of traditional production processes - 'notworking' as opposed to networking. The confusion over what constitutes work and non-work turns attention to situations where work takes the forms of nonwork. This point is extended by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, by drawing on Virno's observation that work and action have become indistinct. They argue for uncovering latent action in non-work.³²

As forms of work become ever more undifferentiated, it is work itself that needs to be transformed and made more autonomous according to Negri, not by the reappropriation of work but by the refusal to work by notworking. The position of refusal derives from Mario Tronti's essay 'The Strategy of Refusal' of 1965, following the logic that capital 'seeks to use the worker's antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor for its own development'.³³ The strategy of refusal represents not a liberation of work, but from work associated with exploitation and thus affirms autonomous production. But is simply refusing to use certain social networking sites effective refusal? I might refuse to register my acount details and assemble my friends on facebook or enemies on hatebook, but the challenge is to make this into a more strategic political issue by identifying what Latour describes as redefining the 'well-assembled collective'.³⁴

This is a socio-technical issue required better assembled collectives of people and machines. There is need to identify the invisible architecture of the network and its protocols locked down by proprietary interests in order to make it more open, participatory and more public in the truer sense. of distributed infrastructures. For Rossiter too, organised networks offer a positive opportunity to develop strategies and techniques of better organisation. For instance, peer production offers an obvious example of the opportunity to explore the limits of democracy and rethink politics from within network cultures.³⁵ In such scenarios, a challenge is mounted to definitions of social wealth: a distinction between revenue and benefit sharing that the commons is founded upon (on the one hand, extracting monetary value from social processes and on the other imagining more sustainable alternatives to capitalist economy that have collective benefit). A peer to peer system in this respect might be considered 'post-capitalist'³⁶ in the production of a social relation based on sharing and the common good.

A similar point is made by Virno, in A Grammar of the Multitude, when he argues for a political space in which 'the many' tend to common affairs.³⁷ In such descriptions, terms like social networking holds the potential to transform server-client relations into peer to peer relations but only if held within the public realm, outside of private ownership and as part of the commons. In contrast, the rise of social networking as we know it with its participatory ethic has been largely stolen from free software development - interpreted by Dmytri Kleiner and Brian Wyrick as 'capitalism's preemptive attack against p2p systems'.³⁸ However, social networking demonstrates underlying contradictions: also standing antithetically for relations that reflect the dynamics of network architectures and contestational politics.

Political struggles need to reflect these socio-technical dynamics that seem to be encapsulated by conflicts over sharing digital content, such as those over peer to peer filesharing. In what Angela Mitropoulos refers to as the 'softwar',³⁹ work and nonwork related to social networking software clearly invoke antagonistic not friendly relations. The suggestion of these notes - in support of 'antisocial notworking'⁴⁰ - is that without the identification of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged.

Notes: