Patrick,
Lots of interesting thoughts here! I partially agree with Alan -
Facebook and Twitter I find it difficult to get along with, but I've
developed online acquaintances with some very interesting people via
Instagram, and I'd certainly miss the connectivity and
instant-availability of Web 2 if it were suddenly taken away. All the
same I do hanker for the old days of the World Wide Web, version one -
HTML, JavaScript and all that stuff - when you could just build your own
website and it was as good as anybody else's. Not really, it wasn't, but
for a while you had that feeling. I don't suppose the web was ever free
really, but it's a bit like the difference between tap water and bottled
water - tap water is controlled by commercial interests too, but bottled
water is so much more obviously a commercial product.
People use things like Zoom, Facebook Rooms, Microsoft Teams, Facebook
itself, Twitter, Instagram, etc etc pragmatically - some use them
experimentally or counter-culturally: just because the platforms are
commercial, it doesn't necessarily mean that the the people using them
buy into the commercial ethos, or that the activity taking place on them
has no human value... but it'd be nicer if you didn't have the uneasy
feeling that they're hoovering up all of your personal bits of
information and storing it all away somewhere, to be used against you
later in the form of manipulation. It'd be nicer if you didn't feel that
you're always putting more money and power in the hands of people who've
already got far too much of both. And as you say, Patrick, their
objective is to have all of your attention all of the time. Sometimes
it's just nicer to switch them off and do something else instead.
Edward
On 21/07/2020 13:44, Patrick Lichty wrote:
Agony and the Ecstasy: Net-hanging in the age of Covid
The era of Covid lockdown is Zoom-time. Although at the time of this
writing, the crest of the wave is starting to pass, its impact is
evident. In over three months of lockdown, stay at home, 24/7 Zoom
culture has come to dominate global telepresent communications,
standing in for ever-present cyber vernissages, online conferences,
talks and visits. The need to work, communicate, and even socially
function has necessitated the rise of platforms like Zoom and Adobe
Connect, and what I have come to understand as platform politics and
their neoliberal connotations. Although places like The Well and John
Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Cyberspace Independence call and were
founded under the notion of cyberfreedom and fluid congregation
outside of the agendas of capital, the Covid pandemic has created a
scenario where the private sector has found tenterhooks into the
foundations of institutional communications. This is not to say that
Social Media does not do this, but one of the differences I want to
allude to is the institution-in-itself (facebook) as opposed to
platform as channel of communication for institutions. Unlike a public
utility, Zoom, as well as others like Adobe Connect, and Facebook
Rooms, and so on are portals in which institutions found a necessity
for network that was not facilitated by a commons, but by
corporations, and by agendas of maximizing connections and
communications. These two effects(institutional adoption of private
protocols [Galloway] and the necessity of a will-to-connect) are the
poles in which capital has pushed further into the control regimes of
markets, networks, and political engineering as to where private
interests further govern sociocultural concerns. It even got the UAE
to release its national ban on VoIP communications. That isn;t so much
about any particular country, but the effect that Zoom has had on
global communication under the Covid crisis.
This isn’t the first time the idea of having online platforms be the
lens for focusing social interaction. Second Life, with its inherently
capitalist foundations, tried to tout itself as the 3D World Wide Web,
almost like an analogy to the 3D Internet analogue in the Robert Longo
movie, Johnny Mnemonic. With the neoliberal dream of the Linden
Dollar superceding John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Cyberspace
Independence, FOMO-driven corporations from Domino’s Pizza to Playboy
flooded into the platform. christian von borries, documentary, The
Dubai in Me, imperfectly compares financial speculative evangelicalism
between Second Life and the “Dubai Miracle”, much of which operated on
the notion of rotating real estate speculation. For some time, this
was reflected in Second Life, when the mythology of Chinese real
estate trader Anshe Chung announced that she had made her first
million dollars on virtual real estates. However the differences
between a foundation based on a technology (HTTP) and that based on a
single-provider platform (Second Life) in that a provider often takes
a majority of the profit, and that the upsurge of traffic caused
multiple technical issues, caused most of those glittering dreams to
collapse within 2-3 years. Another difference is that while the
interaction with the World Wide Web is relatively simple Second Life
required a relatively powerful machine and at least a couple days
learning SL’s rather cumbersome interface. In interaction and commerce
design, the rule is that the least friction yields the greatest returns.
But then, the socio(economic) frictionlessness is one of the biggest
problems with platforms like Zoom, or Adobe Connect, or whatever
flavor you mention. In the artworld, I always saw the necessary
friction that artists thought had to happen was exclusivity or access,
to an event or an object. But then, I had not inhabited Istanbul or
Dubai, which are big enough cities with capital to support a
contemporary cultural community, (and even Chelsea is similar), but
with accessibility comes the expectation to access. Once you are
there and become part of the community, there are expectations to be
met, places to be seen. And this is a crucial point – the demand to be
seen. Further linkage to privilege in the case of Zoom is
multilayered, from communities that wish to engage, and from the
company, wishing to focus social capital through its portal.
What is important about this will-to-access is not that it is
resultant from the community, it is resultant from the platform. The
first layer of a demand-to-access is expectations to attend, but the
other is that of the platform, and in the end, the platform is a
cybernetic system that os a control apparatus. Although Adobe Connect
has also been adopted widely, the frictionlessness of the Zoom
platform has allowed it to be quickly adopted by the institutional
community, and without having a professional account, interactions are
limited to 40 minutes. This has a number of effects from further
socioeconomic limits to access to further neoliberalization of
communications. The emergence of a solution in a panic event-space
mitigates an acritical adoption in light of necessity. This means that
Zoom, although possessing the least friction, is corporate, requires
payment for the best experience, and still mitigates certain resources
for optimum connection. And the notion of panic adoption has resulted
in the institutionalization of Zoom as one de facto standard without
full security or best practices development. There is a need, there
has to be a solution, and the market supplies one, and it has to be
adopted as soon as possible.
The other problem with post-COVID networked society is that the notion
of access falls under the optical control regime of neoliberal
capitalism. What this means is that, as Sara Cook noted in the
discussions surrounding the Sleep Mode exhibition at Somerset House,
that internal documents by companies like Facebook consider sleep a
challenge to their business model of attention optics. The show
described sleep itself as a tactic against neoliberal infocapitalism’s
need to consume and convert every possible resource into use-value. In
another text, Event Horizons, I describe that even if sleep were to be
conquered, there would be the Malthusian limit of the sidereal day
itself. How do you multiply the cognitive load of the attention span
of one human being once the physical limits of the system are met.
Perhaps there are exotic solutions like parallel cognitive loading
across multiple machines, or even more abstract metaphors likening the
deterioration of attention to the evaporation of a black hole due to
Hawking Radiation, but the reality is far more simple. A human being
is simply not going to stay awake 24 hours a day to comment on your
cat video, and taken to extremes, we simply cannot fulfill zoom’s
Second Life’s, or whoever’s desire for us to be together constantly,
forever public, forever panoptic. It is an ontological equivalent to
the 2008 financial collapse – expectations for access, like capital
productivity, continue to balloon until all methods to appease the
machines collapse, mitigating solutionism.
It’s just not going to happen.
Things have changed. With the Coronavirus not going anywhere soon,
and the automation of the labor-site, even if that labor is
visibility, collapses into the home, institutions see no need to be
entirely physical anymore, and like the “gig” economy, investiture in
the physical space is no longer entirely necessary. Therefore look
for a more “hybrid” ontology. Relating to New Media Art of the 1990’s,
There are some parallels, when the network was the necessary channel
for connection, then due to the small size of the community, now due
to the necessity to distance. But the frictions of infrastructural
support are less with the privately funded model of Zoom. In the
neoliberal environment, when governments pull away from funding of
infrastructures, favoring market politics, the ability to link capital
to the network facilitates the platform. Period. Even incrementally,
with minimal cost, this is a wringing out of the socioeconomic frame
of need to solution, and Zoom life is the solution.
It’s a cost-benefit solution. Online portals like Zoom create less
frictioned telepresence give access to more programmes, create more
opportunity to interact by the screen. But on the other hand, there is
the pressure to take ten classes a month, be at twenty vernissages,
call ten friends, up your productivity tenfold – from your home. It’s
a win-win. Actually, it’s more like The Matrix, where we are tied into
our scopophilic pods, viewing and being viewed. Zoom as new
Panopticon, regulate by the frictions of the platform, epidemiology,
and socioeconomic politics. As I see the age of 60 on the horizon, I
realize that the cost-benefit of being increasingly online has not
always realized itself, and when I move back to America in 2021, I
want to be truly “hybrid”, that is, more engaged with the real, like
time with my family cooking, seeing nature, and being physically
present with friends. This is also ironic in that VR artists are
becoming more obsessed with realism through programs like Substance
and ultra high rez scans.
But from this writer’s perspective, this is the frission that
venturing closer to the event horizon of total access leads; the lure
of connectedness while being paralyzed at the computer screen. This is
the paradox, and a site of resistance, as it is neoliberal forces that
encourage this effect, and as Sarah Cook suggested, perhaps sleep,
managing willful disconnection and social intentionality are the
things that will shape the post-Covid culture.
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