Re: nettime [SPAM] Re: tensions within the bay area elites
I would like to recommend the work of my friend and collegue Astrid Mager here, regarding the ideological and socio-cultural implications of the Google-effect: http://oeaw.academia.edu/AstridMager There is always ideology, and with an infocapitalist economy these are of course not lessened by the sorts of economies of scale with witness with Google: Google has been blamed for its de facto monopolistic position on the search engine market, its exploitation of user data, its privacy violations, and, most recently, for possible collaborations with the US-American National Security Agency (NSA). However, blaming Google is not enough, as Mager suggests in this article. Rather than being ready-made, Google and its ‘algorithmic ideology’ are constantly negotiated in society. Drawing on her previous work Mager shows how the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ gets inscribed in Google’s technical Gestalt by way of social practices. Furthermore, I look at alternative search engines through the lens of ideology. Focusing on search projects like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, YaCy and Wolfram|Alpha Mager exemplifies that there are multiple ideologies at work. There are search engines that carry democratic values, the green ideology, the belief in the commons, and those that subject themselves to the scientific para-digm. In daily practice, however, the capitalist ideology appears to be hegemonic since 1) most users employ Google rather than alternative search engines, 2) a number of small search projects enter strategic alliances with big, commercial players, and 3) choosing a true alternative would require not only awareness and a certain amount of technical know-how, but also effort and patience on the part of users, as Mager finally discusses. Astrid Mager, In Search of Ideology https://www.academia.edu/5717495/In_search_of_ideology._Socio-cultural_dimensions_of_Google_and_alternative_search_engines I suggest further reading of Dr. Mager's work (she would love me calling her Drha ha) /James James Barrett PhD Candidate/Adjunct Department of Language Studies/HUMlab Umeå University Sweden http://about.me/James.G.Barrett From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org [nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org] On Behalf Of michael gurstein [gurst...@gmail.com] Sent: 13 May 2014 07:31 To: nettim...@kein.org Subject: Re: nettime [SPAM] Re: tensions within the bay area elites Glad to see Google getting it's due but I'm wondering if the deeper significance and risk posed by Google isn't being a wee bit overlooked here... ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?
Dear Alexander, I have enjoyed hearing you speak on this topic numerous times and there is one thing I have long wanted to ask regarding the idea that: those who use The Internet to their own advantage and who strengthen their power by successfully creating social networks within which they pursue their social intelligence and trained social skills What I wonder is how does this become quantifiable and meaningful? By your logic, Justin Bieber (51 million followers on Twitter) and Lady Gaga (41.3 million) are the most powerful people on the planet. Is this what you believe? I question this logic. I believe power is not held, it is either resisted or complied with: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ?general politics? of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true? (Foucault, in Rabinow 1991). In this sense the so-called 'netocrats' are not the agents of power, but are its instruments, its police. Celebrities online are authored by millions of people contributing to their personae via a propagated interest realized materially, in this case in a fan-based production composed of images, text and audio. The acceptance of these figures as meaningful and important does not bestow power to anyone. It locks people, (including the celebrities themselves) into webs of trivia and brand-based marketing. Alongside the misrecognition of frequency for agency, Power has always operated in networks. The Medici could not have been the most powerful family in Tuscany without a network of communication, media and bureaucracy that was based on 'Truth' to support and exercise that power. With a massive media system now in place globally we are not seeing a revolution in the network. In fact I would argue that your logic follows a similar path to Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks: Benkler tends to overstate the novelty of social production. Firms, for example, have long employed internal markets; delegated decision rights throughout the organization; formed themselves into networks, clusters, and alliances; and otherwise taken advantage of openness and collaboration. Many different organizational forms proliferate within the matrix of private-property rights. Peer production is not new; rather, the relevant question concerns the magnitude of the changes. - http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=721 I would go on to argue it is the small, the unknown, the rare, secret and the enclosed where power is more likely to be realized in terms of autonomy that can lead to more definite social change and new ideas. Finally in a slightly more paranoid observation, I do not believe the most powerful organizations and people on earth are on Twitter and Facebook. Those that use social media and have roles in powerful organizations, for example the World Economic Forum, (which actually has no policy and decision making powers but does include major stakeholders) are not the superstars of social media. I support this idea with the attached graphic from the last WEF in Davos that shows the tweeting was pitiful - 12 278 in total and most of them coming from the USA (from http://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2014 /social). The smokescreen of truth in the form of mass attention to something that says very little and does not share Power with anyone. Critique remains all we have. /James James Barrett PhD Candidate/Adjunct Department of Language Studies/HUMlab Ume? University Sweden http://about.me/James.G.Barrett # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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: nettime industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible
the resource to be put to some other use. The salient characteristic of commons, as opposed to property, is that no single person has exclusive control over the use and disposition of any particular resource in the commons. Instead, resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some (more or less well-defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from “anything goes” to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are effectively enforced. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks Peer Production and Sharing p61 I believe that so much of what could be playing out in societies dealing with massive network systems is being established below the official levels of administration, production and distribution of goods and services. Peer to Peer file sharers, people smugglers, mercenary armies, Folksonomies, G8 protesters, SMS political sends - Burma, South Korea, Philippines, an so on and on are parts of a more general revision of practices based on networks. The solar farm mentioned above is an example of a horizontal system based on a network. If one panel is taken out, the system continues. Solar farms can be built by communities and there is no need to involve the national electricity grid at all (unless the community chooses to sell their excess). The same can be said of wind generators. Where does this leave the large (or in the case of Sweden - state) energy producers which have enormous amounts of their capital tied up in industrial modes of production and therefore find it difficult to transition to networks that are less centralist than these present systems? The large one-to-many production of commodities such as electricity will attempt to assert their dominance by maintaining outmoded systems of production and distribution for as long as is possible. We are currently seeing the same artificial protection in the music and film industries, where old modes of distribution, and to a lesser extent production, are being protected by the industry through their lobbying of governments using copyright laws. James Barrett PhD Candidate/Adjunct Department of Language Studies/HUMlab Umeå University Sweden http://about.me/James.G.Barrett From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org [nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org] On Behalf Of olivier auber [olivieraub...@gmail.com] Sent: 19 March 2014 11:16 To: nettim...@kein.org Subject: Re: nettime industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? Everything is based on the assumption that energy will remain rare. Other NASA researchers believe the contrary .. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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
