Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

[Newmedia]

Felix:
 
Thanks -- I was hoping (okay, anticipating) that you would reply!  
 
1) Castels: "Manuel Castells immediately springs to mind" -- of course
he does and I've read your excellent review/analysis of his work. How
has he been received among his peers? I've talked with a few of them
and they all said that his "tour" of various sociology departments
in the late 90s was a flop. Has he picked up any traction? It is
interesting that Berkeley has been involved in multiple attempts to
deal with the "ignoring" of technology by social scientists, including
the effort to "endogenize" tech in economics.
 
2) Concreteness: "But even technological development always takes place in  
concrete historical settings."  Indeed.  As someone who once followed  20 
companies on Wall Street, I'm convinced that the *very* peculiar details of  
every situation must be known to have any intelligent ideas about  outcomes. 
 However, for-better-and-worse, nowadays that sort of  behavior can send 
you to jail.  Btw, McLuhan's "business" consulting  was always someone else's 
idea and fly-by-night at best.  Perhaps my record  of giving such advice 
would be a more "organized: example -- including my "price  target" of $2000 
for Google. 
 
3) McLuhan:  "The trouble with McLuhan-style analysis is that in order  to 
avoid these complexities, one has to resort to extreme abstraction."   Not 
really.  Frameworks like McLuhan's -- which was only published  posthumously 
in the 1988 "Laws of Media," and which few have read and fewer have  tried 
to use -- only make sense when applied over-and-over to the specifics  at 
hand.  Derrick de Kerckhove, who seems to be the primary path-to-McLuhan  for 
Europeans recently noted that he *never* uses the Tetrad (i.e. the  heuristic 
presented in LoM) -- so, based on the score-or-so Continentals with  any 
interest in McLuhan who I've met, I'd suggest that there is very little  
"McLuhan-style analysis" going on.
 
4) Soviet Union:  "Castells bases his analysis of the collapse of the  
Soviet Union on its inability to move out of an industrial and into a networked 
 
mode."  Yes, that's an important insight.  Or, alternately, to use a  
McLuhan phrase, they failed to shift from "hardware communism" to "software  
communism."  To this day, there is no viable Silicon Valley equivalent in  
Russia.  The final "straw" in the Cold War, "Star Wars," was a joint  
DoD/DARPA/Valley project and that same military-information complex is now  
responsible 
for yesterday's Google I/O keynote.
 
5) China:  "Yes, life was different in the 'East' and in the 'West'"  -- 
especially if you keep on trucking down the Silk Road.  In particular,  given 
the historic importance of "Needham's Dilemma" (i.e. how could the Chinese  
"invent" everything but not allow any of it to shape their society?), the  
deliberate efforts now to build a "ubiquitous society" based on networked  
technology, combined with a detailed "roadmap" for scientific research for the 
 next 40-years, taking us into quite different technological realms, has no 
 historic precedent and no counterpart in the West.
 
6) Scale:  "So, if you shrink the scale, things become more  difficult."  
Absolutely.  However, micro-without-macro only compounds  those difficulties. 
 If you don't have any "theory" to work with and are  simply, or let's say 
robotically, collecting data until some handy "pattern"  emerges -- ala 
today's Big Data efforts -- you will rarely get much  insight.  As Kurt Lewin 
said, "There's nothing as practical as a good  theory."  Without a theory 
about how technology shapes society -- which  certainly need not be the *only* 
way you try to understand and anticipate events  -- you are operating without 
the benefit your own critical facilities and, in  the process, resembling 
the very technologies that you set out to comprehend  (just as McLuhan 
predicted you would ).
 
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY




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Re: What if a work of net.art sold for $34 million?

[Edward Shanken]

My aim is to place in tension two different sets of values: those of
the commercial art world (CAW) and those of telematic art (TA). To
this end, my question proposes a scenario in which a work of art that
does not satisfy CAW's basic conventions (e.g. as Florian notes, ease
of exchange, signature, etc.) rises to the top of the heap in terms of
market value. One might argue, following Stallabrass (nod to Matthias
Kampmann's Fb comment),
that any artworld in which an artwork - be it an abstract painting
or a telematic network - attains values in the tens of millions of
dollars reifies neoliberal ideology and its inherent commodity (and
luxury) fetishism. In the first Fb response, Caroline Seck Langill
shrewdly suggested that "the money would be distributed like the
artwork."

And why not? There are economies in which the creation and
hording/multiplying of wealth for its own sake is not valued as highly
as sharing, gifting, and ritual expending. Yves Klein understood
that over 50 years ago in his brilliant challenge to CAW "Immaterial
Pictorial Sensitivity Zones." This work could only be acquired through
an exchange of gold (cast in the sea by the artist), for which s/he
attained a certificate of authenticity, which was valid only when
burned.

Returning to ease of exchange, signature, etc., the basic conventions
of CAW are not neutral qualities or formal characteristics. Rather,
they embody deeply held ideological commitments, just as the basic
conventions of Ascott's TA embody deeply held ideological commitments.
So what are the implications if these worlds collide and CAW ends
up valuing most highly (and putting its money where its mouth is)
a work that challenges CAW's traditional values? If, as Langill
intimates, CAW embraces Ascott's "La Plissure" and its ideology of
distributed authorship, it would be logically consistent for CAWs
actors to express those commitments by distributing the economic
wealth generated by the sale of the work.

But let's say CAW embraces Ascott but retains its capitalistic
imperatives. Althusser might argue that any critical value of
telematic art would be evacuated once it becomes interpellated by the
hegemonic forces of the CAM. At the same time, by gaining the sort
of public recognition that comes with great market success, Ascott
commands a much larger stage (to say nothing of financial resources
and cultural/political power) from which to infect CAM with ideas that
undermine its economic system.

One final thought (for now). In terms of art's use value, defined
as the cultural capital accrued by a CAW collector today, a Richter
painting has a great deal to offer. The appreciation in price of
Richter's work also suggests that it has great investment value,
hence the high price tag, i.e. its exchange value. I'm no economist
but an artwork is not like a standard commodity in the sense that it
has potentially significant value in terms of its contribution to the
history of art and to the larger history of ideas (histories that
are perpetually reconstructed and retold from various, ever changing
future perspectives). Let's call that its posterity value. The
history of western art from contrapposto to conceptual art celebrates
innovation and embraces work that challenges the status quo. I suspect
that a Richter painting has little posterity value, compared to
Ascott's "Plissure" . In other words, at some point in the future,
Ascott will be generally recognized as having made a more valuable
contribution to the history of art and visual culture than Richter.

The disparity between use value and posterity value, and between
posterity value and exchange value, is at issue. Over time, as
posterity value is established and renegotiated from various present
perspectives, it becomes closely aligned with exchange value. Jaromil
Rojo pointed out that "The sword is double edged, investments in art
aren't good just because they move market value *today*. Actually,
they might be epic fails as well - and that's what is happening all
over - as we speak - to several big capitals."Jaromil's point is
insightful here, because I think $33 million for a Richter is destined
to be an epic fail when the correction between posterity value and
exchange value takes place - not because the art market is overvalued
but because from the perspective of the future, it will be seen to
have valued the wrong things.

Ed Shanken

www.artexetra.com



On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Florian Cramer  wrote:

> On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Edward Shanken
> wrote:
>
> > What would the world be like if Roy Ascott's "La Plissure du
> Texte" (1983) > sold at auction for $34.2 million instead of Gerhard
> RIchter's ?Abstraktes > Bild?? In what sort of world (and artworld)
> would that be possible?


<...>





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Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

[Felix Stalder]

On 05/15/2013 05:40 PM, newme...@aol.com wrote:


Is there any body of research that does this -- with or without
McLuhan?


Manuel Castells immediately springs to mind, who not only wrote a book
called "Internet Galaxy" (by far not his best, though), but premises
his entire analysis on the transformation of the cultural-material
basis of social institutions (i.e. the ground, in ML's parlance),
that is, the emergence of ubiquitous digital networks and associated
infrastructures, which create, what he calls, the space of flows.

But even technological development always takes place in concrete
historical settings, in which all kinds of dynamics unfold in
different rhythms and at different scales. The difficulty is, of
course, that they interact in ways that are unpredictable. The past
never disappears. My favorite example here is the fact that a sizable
portion of EU agricultural subsidies ends up with in the coffers of
the aristocracy. So, you have basically the Acien Regime operating
through the network state.

The trouble with McLuhan-style analysis is that in order to avoid
these complexities, one has to resort to extreme abstraction. McLuhan
thought in very large historical periods and concentrated on very
foundational patterns. So, in this view, little happened between 1800
and 1900, and there is little difference between Fordist capitalism
and soviet communism, after all, they are both based on assembly
line production (print linearity), rigid division of labor (again,
print induced specialization and separation), and bureaucratic
administration (typographic man).

Fair enough, and anyone who disregards this is really missing
something substantial. Castells bases his analysis of the collapse of
the Soviet Union on its inability to move out of an industrial and
into a networked mode (or, if you like, to manage its way out if the
Gutenberg Galaxy). This is, in my view, the most lucid part of his
entire work, because it manages to connect the movement of history
with the experience of life.

Because, seen from the scale of a human life, a lot of things did
happen between 1800 and 1900, and, yes, life was different in the
"East" and in the "West".

So, if you shrink the scale, things become more difficult. It's a
commonly held misunderstanding that long-term social analysis is more
difficult, more ambitious than short or medium term analysis. It's
exactly the other way around, and not just because "in the long run,
we are all dead" (which, incidentally, is correct even if you have
children, but that's another story.) Just look at McLuhan when he was
trying to dispense business (i.e. short-term) advice. Pathetic.





--

-|- http://felix.openflows.com  books out now:
 |
*|Cultures & Ethics of Sharing/Kulturen & Ethiken des Teilens UIP 2012
*|Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa. transcript 2012
*|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studienv. 2009
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions. Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society.Polity P. 2006
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed Futura / Revolver, 2005
 |


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Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

[Morlock Elloi]

It has nothing to do with 'digital' and everything to do with
productivity and near-zero friction distribution.

No one needs 95% of 'producers' in the culture industry. The 5%
are giving us all we need (and only tiny fraction of these 5% are
employed by MSM - the rest are independents catering to all tastes and
psychosis.)

We cannot consume any more. Just go die quietly somewhere.



> comparing those effects to the ones *caused* by newer technologies.

 


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