Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?
Facebook's biggest problem, at the moment, is to live up to its reported $100 billion valuation -- a big challenge for a company whose material assets and actual revenues fall far short of warranting such a big number. So brace yourself Facebookers, for increasingly aggressive forms of "monetization"! I heartily agree with Brian that understanding how the "subtler forms of domination work" is an important task in the emerging online economy. Not so much because I'm particularly anxious about the forms of exploitation to which Facebook users are subjected -- more because I'm concerned about how these fit in with an exploitative system that continues to rely on brutal de-humanization, immiseration, and direct violence and cruelty. I'm particularly sensitive to the critique (which has been repeatedly directed toward me) that it's hard to get worked up about the ways in which people who are spending hours of "free" time networking with friends and posting photos of themselves are "labouring" under conditions of exploitation and appropriation. Why not spend our time worrying about "real" forms of brutal exploitation -- there is certainly enough of this to go around? But the more I think about this critique, the more I'm worried about the way in which it fetishizes and abstracts the Social Web from the larger system of which it is a part -- indeed it reproduces a series of potentially misleading rhetorics about the new "information economy", the "attention economy", "immaterial labour" and so on that posit a clear discontinuity between what takes place online and off (or in the "new" economy vs. the "old"). I'm less sanguine about the notion that there is a discontinuity or a qualitative shift taking place. If you boil it down, the valuation of Facebook is based on the promise of the power of the social graph and detailed forms of targeting and data-mining to do what? To serve the needs of advertisers. What needs? To move products and sell services. There may be all kinds of fascinating networking going on, but in economic terms, Facebook is about selling cars and iPads, mobile phones, diet supplements, beverages, and so on. OK, it's also about selling online dating services -- but I'm not yet ready to imagine that these online services are going to eclipse and displace the non-virtual, non-"affective", quite material forms of production upon which the capitalism continues to rely. I enjoyed the way Brian frames the capture of user data: as a form of enjoyment in getting ripped off as you walk down the street, though I'd probably qualify it. Facebook (and other social media companies) harvest data as part of their terms of entry. It's like those nightclubs that stipulate on your way in that, by the very act of entering, you agree to be photographed and have your image used in any way they see fit. If you don't like it, don't come in. It just so happens that this nightclub is the one where all your friends are, where your history is -- it's one that you've devoted a lot of time and effort to helping construct, and if you went somewhere else you wouldn't be able to take either your friends or the fruits of that labour with you. Because it's a privately owned "space," Facebook can set the terms. As Marx observed, separation begets separation: once you have a privately owned commercial site, the privatization of that platforms allows for the appropriation and privatization of what takes place on it. This is why the post about how venture capital shapes what types of applications get developed is, to my mind, right on target. Social media companies argue that acceptance of terms of use constitutes a kind of informed consent of the terms on offer: turning your pockets inside-out to get into the club, but this is a vexed argument for a number of reasons: a) people don't understand the terms b) people know they're going to use the site so they don't even bother to read them c) the terms change all the time d) the terms are so vague has to cover almost anything. To the extent that participation in such sites becomes a requirement for particular kinds of jobs, the "freedom" of this exchange is further called into question. So the economic model of Facebook is predicated on the promise of advertising, and that, in turn, is predicated on other parts of the economy devoted to selling goods and services. Advertisers would like us (as opposed to their clients) to believe that advertising and marketing don't really affect us, except insofar as they perform the service of informing us about goods and services we might be interested in. In fact, advertising had a crucial role to play in transforming the US (amongst others) into a consumer society over the course of the 20th century, which meant changing patterns of domestic production and consumption, changing expectations regarding levels of consumption, and encouraging patterns of debt and spending associated wit
Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value ab...
Mark writes: >Jon (Michael): > >> Let me ask a slightly different question, whether >> capitalism can survive its necessary generation >> of abundance? > >Two questions (implied by yours) -- what do you mean by "capitalism" and why >do you presume that >whatever-that-is has "survived"? > Good point, but that is why i then wrote: "Would either of these results of dealing with abundance still be capitalism?" and asked "whether it can do any of this within whatever we decide are the fundamental relations of capitalism?". and "Capitalism may continue to change as it has over the last 2-300 years, and perhaps what was fundamental at one time is not at another. I don't know." So my answer is the obvious one, that things and processes are in flux and that what we call capitalism in place A at time b is not necessarily the same as what we call capitalism in place A time C, in place D time B and so on. Linguistic categories are not generated by processes of definition - which is a Socratic/Platonic error - they are much more complicated, but yes it makes life confusing and inculcates paradox if you believe human processes should be static or have fundamental unchanging properties. >Many have referred to the 1917-1989 Soviet economy (and now the Russian >economy) as >"state capitalism" -- not "Communism." Ditto for China's before-and-after >economies. Indeed they have, and perhaps that is a better way of describing them than as 'State communism', which Marx might think as a contradiction in terms. The naming also leaves the possibility of improvement open, and possibly points to an inherent paradox in revolutionary process, that after the 'disorder' generated by the revolution, the revolutionaries are vulnerable to counter revolution and the easiest solution to that problem is to impose a powerful and oppressive state, which then impedes the revolutionary process. Certainly it might be worth bearing in mind. >While this may make "communists" feel better about their favorite "utopia," it >clearly raises questions >about our terminology (as well as, why "grammar" matters, why "equations" >don't work and why >language is inherently *equivocal*!) I agree. lets remove grammer from the equation :) >If you don't mind, could you consider the possibility that INDUSTRIALISM is >really what happened >in the "developed" economies -- both those we call "Capitalist" and those we >call "Communist" -- >and, indeed, is what is still happening in the BRICS + TEN? Again, the name is bit of a problem - personally I'm not in favour of terms which suggest technology is the sole determining factor - although industrialism can imply a mode of organisation as well as a technology. But yes, for what it is worth, I've often toyed with the idea of calling the 'present day' in the West, 'information industrialism' or 'digital industrialism' as it implies the displacement of most knowledge, art and symbol work to an industrial process in which most workers don't own or control the products of their labour and are disposable and offshorable, and proft acrues to managers and share holders. and this is were what is determined to be valuable by the more powerful is not always what is sold. But i also suspect that the 'capitalists' or the Right or whatever you wish to call them, would seize on the use of the term industrialism and declare that industrialism is already dead, and we just need more business (or managerial) sense to sort everything out Capitalism is still a term of controversy and disturbance, and therefore still retains an analytic and politically valuable edge - as long as we don't get too caught in definitions that are superseeded. Personally and naively i'd say that in capitalism profit becomes the whole point of activities and exchange. >In other words, can *industrialism* survive abundance? I don't think so. In >fact, is has already "expired." It is more likely possibly expiring and taking most people with it in its abundance of waste, but it is still expanding. The mining industry is booming, the coal industry is growing, industrialism is flourishing in what used to be called the third world, with massive suppression of working people (as in the latest Apple scandal), there seems to be little sign of industrialism currently expiring as a mode of operating. We might even think it is expanding. >Yes, the ideology of the US/EUROPE/JAPAN (aka the "Trilaterals") was that what >they were doing >involved "free-markets" and so on -- just as the ideology of the Cold War >"opposition" was that they >were "Communists" (or Stalinists or Maoists) -- but, stepping back from this >elaborate ideological >"cover-story," wasn't what *all* of these economic systems were really about >was *industrial* development, They were also about particular forms of 'exploitation' and power distrubution. There is a difference between the ideology of the 50s and 60s, and the 90s and beyo
Re: What do you think about .art?
Hi, I happened to meet Desiree last night and therefore think that her mail does not explain the issue as well as she did in our conversation. Our old 'friend' ICANN (Ted, we miss your comments on that;-) is releasing new generic Top Level Domains. It is posible that some business interests would grab .art to make a lot of money from already suffering artists. So Desiree was wondering if it was possible to launch a last minute bid to mobilise people really interested in and involved in art. Maybe the necessary application fee could be crowdsourced and maybe an art friendly internet business could be found to manage the gTLD. Desiree's business model is, if I have understood that right, once the domain starts generating profits to channel that back to artists in need. Good idea. Of course for some on this list this will trigger memories of namespace etc. cheers Armin On Tue, 2012-03-06 at 23:59 +, Desiree Miloshevic wrote: > Hi > > There is a limited opportunity to apply for dotART domain name by April 12. > <> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value ab...
On 06/03/12 16:56, newme...@aol.com wrote: > If you don't mind, could you consider the possibility that INDUSTRIALISM is > really what happened in the "developed" economies -- both those we call > "Capitalist" and those we call "Communist" -- and, indeed, is what is still > happening in the BRICS + TEN? That is even more narrow, if by "industrialism" you intend to refer to the post-steam, electric age. Maybe my view of insutrialism is too narrow and I am merely taking this opportunity to distribute it. However, if you read The Magna Carta Manifesto (Peter Linebaugh), for example, you will encounter a narrative that, to my mind convincingly, stretches the current era - which may or may not be coming to an end - back into the late 12th and early 13th centuries, incidentally around the time that the master of algorithms, al-Jazari, translated Greek myths into the mechanical age by producing drum machines, automatic soap dispensers and other material conveniences. Linebaugh speaks of the metrics associated with the rise of the trading classes - who carved out a niche, now called capitalism, between the nobility/aristocracy and the commoners - while a reading of the history of the Islamic Golden Age suggests that a mechanical age commenced alongside it. On the other hand, McLuhan mentions somewhere that the village formations occurring around 800CE in what were to become perhaps the most significant colonising force and which were pre-requisite for all of this (metrics, trading, mechanics and later steam and electricity) were results of royal decrees that commoners regionally must produce a knight in shining armour. That, of course, requires an "industrial effort" - you have to live close together to process the materials - and if that is what you mean by the term, then I tend to agree as far as language facilitates such potential at all. Conversely, what words can really signify the shit we're in? mp # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
capitalism; will socialism survive?
Hello In regards to will capitalism survive question I am posting this interview will Alain Badiou where he shifts the discourse in a worthwhile direction. cheers Allan Van Houdt >From Kant to Husserl, and now to your work, the move to transcendental philosophy has, for the most part, taken place in times of ?crisis.? For Kant it was the potential failure of classical accounts of rationality at the skeptical hands of David Hume, for Husserl it was the collapse of the spirit of philosophy under the joint pressure of modern science (the critiques of psychologism) and the onset of Nazism (the Crisis), and for you the problem is what you call ?the crisis of negation.? How do you define ?negation? and why it is in crisis today? Badiou My answer is a simple one, in fact. The very nature of the crisis today is not, in my opinion, the crisis of capitalism, but the failure of socialism. And maybe I am the philosopher of the time where something like the ?Great Hypothesis? coming from the nineteenth-century?and maybe much more, for the French Revolution?is in crisis. So it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behind the idea of revolution is the crisis of the idea of another world, of the possibility of, really, another organization of society, and so on. Not the crisis of the pure possibility, but the crisis of the historical possibility of something like that is caught in the facts themselves. And it is a crisis of negation because it is a crisis of a conception of negation which was a creative one. The idea of negation is by itself a negation of newness, and that if we have the means to really negate the established order?in the moment of that sort of negation?there is the birth of the new order. And so the affirmative part or the constructive part of the process is included in negation. Finally, we can speak also of the ?crisis of dialectics? in the Hegelian sense. In Hegel we know that the creative part of the negation was negation of negation, so the negation of negation was not a return to before, but was on the contrary, the degradation of the content, the positive content of negation. And there are so many things of the failure of this vision that so proves that very often negation is under a negation. And that is the crisis of negation. On all sides today we know that the pure views of negation are practically very often militant to negation, and to the future of negation?s negations. Exactly, that the future of revolution, victorious revolution, has been finally a terrorist state. The complete discussion of all that is naturally much more complex, necessitates dates, and all that, but philosophically there is something like that. So therefore we must pronounce that there is a crisis of negation, and from this problem, there are two possible consequences: first to abandon purely and simply the idea of revolution, transformation of the world, and so on, and to say that the capitalist world, with moderate democracy, and so on, is the best world after all ? not so good but not so bad, and finally we have with that answer, the first vision. And so it is a vision where in some sense the relationship between philosophy and history is separation. Because it is my conviction that if the history of humankind has as its final figure the figure of our world, it is proof that history is of no philosophical interest, that there is only left a pragmatic position, and so the best is business. In that case, the best is not philosophy but business! So that is why if, precisely when I speak of the ?crisis of negation,? I name ?negation? the revolutionary conception of negativity which was dominant from the French Revolution until sometime at the end of the last century; it was the 80s I think. The 80s, something like that, the time of your birth, maybe? The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou http://www.berfrois.com/2012/03/the-80s-i-think/ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Future of Copyright
Hi all, Modern Poland Foundation has launched the Future of Copyright Contest, in which we want to collect best international works on this topic. The prize is set by people supporting the project, by means of IndieGoGo (a crowdfunding platform). We would like to invite You to share and promote this initiative, in order to gain maximum exposure to potential supporters and contestants! The main website of the contest is http://www.indiegogo.com/future-of-copyright For more information about Modern Poland Foundation please visit http://nowoczesnapolska.org.pl/about-us/ All the best, Jarosław Lipszyc # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: What do you think about .art?
Armin - thanks for helping out here and explaining I was going with my email. Ted, it's been a while, but I hope you still have time to follow ICANN let us know what you think of the latest ICANN gTLD process. As I've been working on .art for some time - am interested to see if we could mobilize artists to pledge: a) written support b) crowd source donations for the application fee (185,000 USD), c) between 10-100 USD per person or any close number to that. That would give the bid a credit, if the application is supported by the artists themselves and we can show the track of money pledge. My idea is simple: since artists would be buying and registering domain names, that money (after the op costs) should be channelled back to the arts world. Money should be channelled annually by regular calls for grants giving schemes, free websites or other digital technologies that stimulate arts and would be curated within .art space. A revenue share of up to 25% of domain name sale. The bid should be as global as possible and the revenue should be shared globally to artists and art organisations in needs. An idea of first 100,000 free websites is there as well, but one needs to have a price to avoid spam. If accepted domain would go live only in 2013/2014. The new TLD ICANN process is very aggressive - if there are multiple .art applicants all bids go to an auction. If there are players who would pay up to x mil USD for .art just to resell and auction domains, and do f* all with art. Or it could be a single rich gallery bidding for ownership of .art. So although the support from artists and art organisations may not cut it (one can never win 14 evaluation points to win on a basis of it being a pure community string bid), in my opinion it is worth to try and do something that would channel money back to the artists, since ICANN would not do that. i'll send the kick-start page, if there are any takers here, but most interested in what people think. Des -- On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 9:05 AM, Armin Medosch wrote: > Hi, > > I happened to meet Desiree last night and therefore think that her mail > does not explain the issue as well as she did in our conversation. > > Our old 'friend' ICANN (Ted, we miss your comments on that;-) is > releasing new generic Top Level Domains. It is posible that some > business interests would grab .art to make a lot of money from already > suffering artists. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: What do you think about .art?
Hello Armin, Desiree's concerns are valid, and it is a good proposition. Sivasubramanian M On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Armin Medosch wrote: > Hi, > > I happened to meet Desiree last night and therefore think that her mail > does not explain the issue as well as she did in our conversation. > > Our old 'friend' ICANN (Ted, we miss your comments on that;-) is > releasing new generic Top Level Domains. It is posible that some > business interests would grab .art to make a lot of money from already > suffering artists. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
