Re: nettime Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
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. # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
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. ScheideggerSpiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society.Polity P. 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed Futura / Revolver, 2005 | # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
Felix: Thanks -- I was hoping (okay, anticipating) that you would reply! g 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. g 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 g). Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
Mark - and others, Whatever the name of the (class) beast, or the nature of the (digital) technology, my only interest is to have the vast majority of the people have a decent, interesting, enjoyable, and healthy life - from birth to death. The present dispensation does not provide for that. Period Technology will not provide for it by itself. Period. And the economy, pace ideologists to the contrary, is not a natural or meteorological phenomenon. Period. So back to politics, fissa! Cheers from the craddle of machiavelism, p+5D! # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
Mark writes: But, before you roll up your sleeves, if you want to have any useful ideas on the structure of labor (and leisure and consumption) then you must begin with a CRASH effort to understand the impact of *digital* technology on the economy. You could also begin with a crash course on the impact of the economy on technology, or the impact of social organisation or the impact of power relations, on technology as well. People use stuff, stuff uses people, and what arises is often unexpected and then exploited by particular groups of people - and that involves politics, and politics involves social organisation... Some tech may even be more important in its social effects than others :) If so what kind of tech has what kinds of effects - ie the differences would be interesting to specify. Economists -- including the heterodox ones -- uniformly treat technology as an externality. That means there is no place in their models or narratives for fundamental technological change. Mainstream economists tend to treat social, political and psychological factors as externalities as well, so this is not that big a deal. There is perhaps a slight change recently with behavioural economics, but that is not mainstream. If you look at the origins of modern economics, you can see them deliberately decide to cut out all the complexities of human (social) life, in order to have a discipline of their own, immune from philosophers and other theorists and more manageable. When I asked the editor of Real World Economics Review last year if he had *ever* (in 10+ years) had any articles submitted to him about these basic relationships his answer was No, why don't you submit one? for what its worth i own a couple of books by schumpeterian economists which discuss technological change, so it does exist. Sociologists convinced themselves 40 years ago that it would be better to be constuctivist instead of operational and have steadfastly clung to the CONDEMNATION of anyone who proposes a primary role for technology as being a determinist -- including on this list. social theorists tend to dislike other theorists who say the secret of life is that everything is controlled by one factor X, whether that be technology or whatever. Especially if the theories seem pretty vague. Before the rise of post-modern social science in the 1970s, there was a very lively discussion about what technology was doing to the economy and society. Post-Vietnam that discussion *stopped* and has not been revived since. Ok We obviously live in different worlds, because there seems to be quite a lot of this discussion going on What was once called post-industrial -- which is in fact what is going on not over-devlopment, making it *unexplored* territory for those who try to understand industrial economics -- then became late-stage capitalism or neo-liberalism, which *deliberately* obscures what is happening and recasts the discussion in terms of a political framework that ensures nobody has a clue about what is really happening. Of course it is equally easy to say that if you just talk about tech . and ignore the social formations and the politics of technology then . you really will have no clue about what is 'really' happening For me . the internet allows the intensification of capitalism. It also sets . up some obvious paradoxes which could undermine that order, or at. least cause the mechanisms of the state to be intensified to control . those paradoxes . So, is he [Mr Lanier] going to be taken seriously? No. On this list alone, I think one person said he has just bought the book after hearing about the interview, so have I. another has said we really need to discuss this issue. So the 'No' is perhaps a bit excessive. If you want to get to work on the problem of a disappearing middle-class (which, as an *industrial* artifact should be *expected* to disappear when the economy shifts to post-industrial) then you'd better explore the factors that are driving the tectonic shifts in the economy. Are you (or anyone else) ready to do that? Of course. Heaps of people are again writing about the growing precariat, as it is sometimes called. (Personally i think that ignores history. Now my parents really did grow up precariously but that was in 'industrial times'). My understanding incidently was when the cotton looms of manchester came into play within the politics of Empire, then Bengali weaver's starved but i'm not an expert in indian history Usually who starves and who doesn't is a matter of politics and force, as it plays out in a disruptive ecology. i personally also don't think you can ignore the apparently deliberate, but perhaps unintended, politics of weakening the middle class which has played out in the anglophone world since the late 70s, but it is easy to ignore if you just focus on the technology - and focusing on the technology makes it much
Re: nettime Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
Jon: As i said it appears to me that people have been struggling with this since the 90s and i see no sign of it stopping. Thanks! You are certainly correct that the various professions have circled their own wagons and not stepped up to the challenge of understanding the effects of digital media. So, most of what has been said is in the popular press etc (i.e. Lanier, Johnson, Carr, Morozov etc). Since I've been a part of those discussions -- which is how nettime found me and invited me to keynote Metaforum III in Budapest -- and I probably personally know most of the people who have been writing about these issues for the public, my observation is that -- 1) While there are lots of opinions there has been little careful thought, very little science and even less attention to the underlying history. 2) As a result, most of what has been said becomes special-pleading with almost no legitimacy (outside of the author's fan-base) and is just more background noise in a world beset by information overload. 3) To the extent that there are policy-makers who count, this lack of any coherence (or even peer review) just encourages them to ignore the problems caused by fundamental technological changes. I'd just guess life did not stop with Mcluhan Exactly! And, therein lies the problem . . . McLuhan lived in the television era and his most-remembered comments (i.e. those which were turned into ad-copy) are best for understanding the ONCE new effects of television (i.e. in the 1950s/60s) -- specifically when compared to radio (i.e. HOT and COOL) and books (i.e. Global Village etc) but, since he died in 1980 (and was largely ignored after the early 70s), he did NOT have much-of-anything to say about computers or networks or the effects of *digital* technology. The McLuhan revival beginning in the 90s at WIRED etc wasn't McLuhan at all but the version of him that passed through the intestines of the Whole Earth gang. Their interest was in co-evolution of humans and machines, as reflected in Kevin Kelly's books about What Technology Wants, which has nothing to do with McLuhan (except perhaps in reverse.) Grasping the *differences* between the effects of DIGITAL technology -- social, psychological and economic -- and the corresponding effects of television etc (i.e. what McLuhan actually wrote about) would require a) first understanding what television did *to* us and b) some method/technique of comparing those effects to the ones *caused* by newer technologies. Is there any body of research that does this -- with or without McLuhan? There have been a couple books published in the past few years that purport to deal with this on McLuhan's terms but, alas, they really don't (and, I'll guess that you never heard of them) -- an unfortunate result of being published as text-books hoping to capitalize on high-priced media studies college courses. The Schmidt/Cohen metaphor of living in two *civilizations* echoes the work of Sherry Turkle (and others?) and, IMHO, is valuable precisely because it requires an analysis that is based on *differences* and not treating the Internet as if it's just another version of ad-supported mass media. If you know of any serious work along these lines, please tell us . . . Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
But isn't it all just a bit Luddite? What kind of work were all those Kodak employees doing? Putting transparencies in plastic boxes to post to the owners. It's just a rearrangement of social labour, like when Manchester Actually a substantial chunk of their work was related to the military-industrial complex -- as photography (especially unusual techniques and processes) was crucial to early (airborne) surveillance, global mapping, and weapons research. JH -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD Watching the Tao rather than watching the Dow! http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
On 13/05/13 18:11, Keith Hart wrote: Thanks for posting this. It's a great interview and I downloaded the book onto my Kindle. Lanier's ideas about the middle class as an artificial product of modernity are interesting That sounds similar to Paul Graham's interesting opinions about unions - http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class (2)
I'm sorry, I should have given the source for my observation about the return of high-wage and low-wage jobs in the US, compared to the devastating loss of mid-wage jobs. It is here: http://bigstory.ap.org/interactive/interactive-great-reset It's an amazing little animated graph, dated 2013. What you have to do is click on replay recoveries and then on the arrow below. You will see that 42 months after the recovery of 2009, only 85,380 mid-wage jobs were regained, out of 3,764,120 mid-wage jobs lost during the so-called great recession of 2007-09. The net job loss in the mid-wage range was 3,678,740. A very big number. In the high-wage sector, 908,990 jobs were lost, but 1,011,210 were created: that's a net gain for high-wage earners. In the low-wage sector, 2,803,390 were lost, and 2,421,010 were gained. There you had a net loss of 382,380 low-wage jobs. But that's only 10% of the net loss of mid-wage jobs. The failure of mid-wage jobs to come back is absolutely staggering. Jarod Lanier sees this through the lens (indeed) of Kodak vs. Instagram, or music file-sharing etc. Yet he's basically right, you just have to amplify his explanation. As the video included with the graphic explains, both mid-wage manufacturing jobs and a host of white-collar service jobs have either been outsourced or automated (or both, for that matter: there is a lot of partial automation, so that one worker in China or India can do what ten used to do in the US). Web 2.0 functions have indeed made many white-collar workers redundant. It's technological unemployment with a vengeance. This heralds a major change in US society, and undoubtedly the same applies to European societies after austerity is over (if ever). I believe that what happened - why we didn't see this coming - is that the stagnation of mid-wage earnings was compensated by credit and rising home equity for a generation, from the mid-1980s to 2007. Then the Great Recession (or Depression, or Repression, or whatever you wanna call it) came and choked back all that credit and middle-class wealth-effects. The entire economy of the mid-wage jobs then collapsed: no profit margin for those companies anymore, because sales plunged. It was necessary to implement the automation and outsouring in order for those kinds of businesses to stay afloat. So you still have many of the businesses: just not the jobs. Somebody should research this further, to verify if the Reuteurs article was right, what the comparable situations are in the different advanced economies, etc. I will do so when I have time. Right now I am headed to Spain to look at the future up close. all the best, Brian # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
Brian: Let's get to work on this. Great idea! But, before you roll up your sleeves, if you want to have any useful ideas on the structure of labor (and leisure and consumption) then you must begin with a CRASH effort to understand the impact of *digital* technology on the economy. Are you prepared to do that? You and what ARMY? g Economists -- including the heterodox ones -- uniformly treat technology as an externality. That means there is no place in their models or narratives for fundamental technological change. When I asked the editor of Real World Economics Review last year if he had *ever* (in 10+ years) had any articles submitted to him about these basic relationships his answer was No, why don't you submit one? When I asked a fellow I know who sees most of the grant requests for new economic research if he has seen *any* applications to study this his answer was, Not one -- all we're seeing now are people who are interested in studying complexity. Sociologists convinced themselves 40 years ago that it would be better to be constuctivist instead of operational and have steadfastly clung to the CONDEMNATION of anyone who proposes a primary role for technology as being a determinist -- including on this list. Recently a group (mostly in the UK) have launched a sub-field called Digital Anthropology with a book of that name. From what I can tell, their work is interesting but its still doing anthropology *about* activities that occur when using digital stuff (therefore attracting companies who make that stuff) -- not FLIPPING the inquiry to ask how digital technology should drive a reexamination of anthropology itself. Before the rise of post-modern social science in the 1970s, there was a very lively discussion about what technology was doing to the economy and society. Post-Vietnam that discussion *stopped* and has not been revived since. What was once called post-industrial -- which is in fact what is going on not over-devlopment, making it *unexplored* territory for those who try to understand industrial economics -- then became late-stage capitalism or neo-liberalism, which *deliberately* obscures what is happening and recasts the discussion in terms of a political framework that ensures nobody has a clue about what is really happening. Addressing the fundamental issues got re-framed out of consideration by *euphemisms* . . . !! Jaron (who I know pretty well) is a very clever guy who has the benefit of NOT being any of these things. Yes, he's a musician but, more importantly, what he says he just makes up (i.e. rarely footnotes and mostly has no collaborators) and he doesn't care what some *profession* has insisted is the proper method. Good for him. So, is he going to be taken seriously? No. He is mostly being treated as an oddity who, because he comes from the Sili-Valley tech industry (a point he highlights repeatedly in his book) gets attention for being anti-technology. And, he's not alone in the category of what many are calling (inaccurately) neo-luddites. MAN bites DOG (i.e. Internet destroyed the middle class) . . . reads the headline! If you want to get to work on the problem of a disappearing middle-class (which, as an *industrial* artifact should be *expected* to disappear when the economy shifts to post-industrial) then you'd better explore the factors that are driving the tectonic shifts in the economy. Are you (or anyone else) ready to do that? Or, would you prefer to talk about 3D printing and a revival of (industrial) manufacturing . . . ?? g Recently, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen published their The New Digital Age, in which they argue that we now live in two *civilizations* -- one physical and the other virtual. So what are the economic, social and psychological implications of living in two very DIFFERENT worlds? Any takers? I've written a review (unpublished) of the book that focuses on this question but I've watched/read a dozen interviews/reviews and NONE of them have dealt with this at all. It seems to go right over their heads. The name of this list is NETTIME. The implication is that there is something *different* about living in NET time, as opposed to other sorts of time -- but what are they? Who has the *courage* to tackle these questions? Without doing this, all the calls to get to work will be just more impassioned chatter and breast-pounding . . . !! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
The middle class is of course a construct. It seems to me what is happening in the disappearance of that class is that we simply can no longer pretend it has an existence beyond a political will to work with this construct. And did the idea of the middle class not result from a desire to make a system of economic exchange--never pure, always haunted by symbolic exchange, as Baudrillard reminds us, by the sovereign word--politically legitimate by stating that most of us, i.e.the middle class, are actually protected from the inevitable cruelty of such a system? That this cruelty does not concern us? That it is truly only the very poor and the very rich who are affected by the negation of social time generated by economic exchange, that is is they who live on borrowed time, either worrying about how to buy the next meal, or about how not to lose their riches and stay out of prison? In my view, the reason that this fiction is crumbling, and with it the power of all those politicians who present themselves as advocates of the middle class (cf. the rise of the right in EU and the US, return to socialism in South America) does indeed have to do with digital technology because of its inherent difficulty of representing scarcity. And without scarcity, we may not need a global system economic exchange, and no sovereign intervening in it because you share, and that is something completely different. Perhaps we understand more about the disappearance of the middle class if we look at the economy from a point of view of excess and abundance. Bataille's idea that the most fundamental problem of humankind is not necessity, but luxury, may provide an entry point to this kind of discussion. Wolfgang ++ http://www.wolfgangsuetzl.net http://www.uibk.ac.at/medien/ # 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 Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
On 05/13/2013 07:11 PM, Keith Hart wrote: Lanier's ideas about the middle class as an artificial product of modernity are interesting and of course I loved all that stuff about the digital revolution generating a shift from formal to informal economy. The middle classes dependent on a neo-imperial division of both labor and global market opportunities are on the way out, for sure. In the US, the jobless recovery has actually created lots of low-end and high-end jobs to replace those lost (not the manufacturing jobs lost years ago, I mean the ones lost in 2008). But what it has not created are jobs in the middle range. The question for us on this list is: what are WE gonna do? The jobs lost are those we could have had. And yet probably a lot of us never wanted to work at Kodak, or as low-end management, etc. In a great bifurcation of the social order, at least part of the future is open. so how do people want to live? Is it possible to create a society where informal, culturally-oriented work is economically viable - not on the level of the swimming pool and the three-car garage, but on the levels of decent lodging in the city or the countryside, access to tools, health-care and retirement without fear? Since nothing has changed since 2008, the global economy is headed either for another big crash, or for a series of smaller and more controlled ones. Either way, it's not goin' back to what it was. But neither is the present situation stable and viable. If the former middle classes of the formerly overdeveloped world don't think about what they want to become next, well, someone else will do that thinking for us. In this case it's not Bartelby anymore. I prefer to. Let's get to work on this. best, Brian # 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
