Forced connectivity (17 Dec 2010)

I suspect this post by Will Davies about an advertising poster for the city of Birmingham, England, might be a hard sell, and I would probably have just linked to it on Twitter (my feed is @marginalutility -- I would stop pushing it here if had some way of making it appear permanently on this blog somewhere) if I could have found some teaser quote that was fewer than 125 characters. But the post's key passages seemed uncondensable, and that I was even looking to truncate them for the expediency of my Twitter feed is a pretty strong argument against the whole Twitter concept. Alas, I want to share links that I find interesting, but I want to have space to give my reasons for wanting to share it. I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea that simply linking to it, marking it with my personal brand's seal of approval, is sufficient to convey its significance.

Anyway, Davies notices a poster touting Birmingham's interconnectedness ("Discover networking on another level") and how that makes it suitable as a business hub: "200,000 annual conferences and access to over 400 million people by road, rail, and air." These numbers seem a little fishy and grandiose; Davies comments, "Maybe they should have mentioned that Birmingham's telecom networks offer access to basically everyone in the world." But the key point is that these sorts of figures imply a sheer quantitative understanding of networking that has been invalidated by the ways things have progressed since the internet has become ubiquitous in Western business practices.

The confusion lurking within this advert is partly due to a total failure to understand economies of presence, a failure that was not uncommon in the mid-1990s. The notion that knowing or meeting more and more people, of being more and more connected, was somehow advantageous has come to appear rather old-fashioned.

In the early days of the networked information society, getting more connected supplied a competitive advantage, but the ease of connectivity has all but eliminated that. Now virtual presence is taken for granted. Here's how Davies puts it, incidentally making an excellent connection along the way between the person Time named its person of the year, and the runner-up some thought should have been so designated:

We were told that power would consist in having more and more connectivity (so the telecom industry hoped), making charisma and bandwidth the most important forms of productive capital. By this account, the city of Birmingham could have been a contender. Instead, power resides with Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange, individuals with few friends or capabilities, other than to break down whatever norms, rules and institutions used to enable society and communities to cohere (for better or worse).... The only people who definitely gain from more and more connectivity are the sociopathic founders of the networks themselves. Everyone else is caught in various balances between knower and known, follower and followed.

Embedded norms in local communities are made meaningless by omnipresent connectivity; all specific places become anyplace, just another node. Likewise, the local norms about what makes a person seem charismatic -- the situational, improvisational aspects of personal charm -- are everywhere supplanted by what characterizes charisma online, a generic computational matter of how linked one is. Charisma is not necessary to conduct information; its role in making certain information seem more significant is a matter of how one is placed in the hierarchical structure in the network. That is to say, charisma is not something internal to the person -- all those qualities require presence and are becoming more irrelevant -- but something imposed on people by their position in the network. Charisma becomes a strict matter of the numbers one can drive in the quantified universe of social media. That has always been the case with commercial media, but because of social networking, the norms of commercial media have replaced all those local, more idiosyncratic norms and institutions that once served as the field of charisma. That field is disappearing, and we are more or less forced online.

At that point, our being networked serves to reinforce our powerlessness, our communicative servitude: "network connections are not always symmetrical, as twitter has now helpfully made plain: I can 'know' (or 'follow') as many people as I like, but if they don't know me then my 'inclusion' in the great network does not equate to power." By participating in online sociality, we feed our various utterances into a huge sorting mechanism that spits out our place in the hierarchy. Unlike the subtler sorting that takes place in real-life social interaction, the online results, construed in numerical data, seems inarguable and open to less interpretation. And being able to broadcast ourselves certainly doesn't allow for us to transcend that hierarchy and reach some higher democratic vista. It embeds us in hierarchy in a more thorough, more autocratic, more centralized way -- an emplacement untempered by local, temporal circumstances. (Thus I end up feeling like I have to promote my Twitter feed in posts.)

In short, getting everyone connected does not set them free; as the word connected suggests, it leaves us more entangled.

The prophets of networks thought that the greatest loser in the digital age would be the child without a modem. Instead, the greatest losers are those who are being forcibly plugged in, and losing authority and status as a result - state institutions, American embassies, old boy networks, publishers, families, political organisations, MPs and so on. It's not so much that these traditional forms of organisation are left behind by the rise of open access networks and fluid forms of association, it's that they are strategically undermined by them, sometimes to the point of unviability.

The true signifier of power is becoming the freedom to be disconnected, unavailable, without detrimental consequences.

Collaborative consumption (28 Oct 2010)

Over at Generation Bubble I have a review of a business book called What's Mine Is Yours, about what the authors dub collaborative consumption. What they mean by that is things like car-sharing services and Freecycle -- basically ways to use the internet to facilitate peer-to-peer exchange. In part because it was a book geared toward management types, it rubbed me the wrong way, and I ended up at a very skeptical place about the whole idea. I don't think it's a terrible thing to give away your stuff through Freecycle or to use a bike-sharing service, but these are not necessarily things to be particularly proud of either. Ideally these practices would disappear into the fabric of everyday life rather than constitute a "revolution" in retail that entrepreneurs and investors need to bandwagon into ubiquity and that consumers need to trumpet as triumphant proof of their evolution into post-individualist subjects. It just doesn't seem a good idea to have a subjectivity or to form communities that are anchored in shopping practices.

Is music still a product? (5 Sept. 2008)

Rob Walker links to this long, compelling post by Rhodri Marsden about the difficulty musicians have in making money. Marsden paints a picture of the misery of pre-internet record distribution, when warehousing middlemen absorbed the brute facts of consumer indifference, to contrast that with the current state of affairs, in which the internet lets bands track their own sales metrics. That blessed space of ignorance of the marketplace, which once bred fantasies of stardom, is now gone.

Now that we're put in touch directly with our audience and that distributors can be completely removed from the equation, and replaced by MP3 aggregators who (a) don't need warehousing space for your MP3s, (b) will put them into a range of online stores for a flat fee and, crucially, (c) don't care whether you're brilliant or whether you're bloody awful, we have exactly the same problem selling the music as the distributors had. Just because the songs are available to buy, doesn't mean we can sell them -- in the same way that (and excuse the often-used analogy) installing a landline doesn't mean that the phone is going to ring. And we can't blame the distributors any more. The only people that are left to blame are ourselves. And that hurts.
It hurts because web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they're from, even which web browser they're using. We've got information about the reach of our music that we couldn't have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they're listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can't fucking sell music to them. And we're starting to obsess about it. We can't stand the fact that we have 2,739 friends on MySpace, several of whom have posted highly encouraging messages such as "thnx 4 the add", and yet none of them are prepared to dig in their pocket, or Paypal account, and just send us a few quid – despite the fact that we've poured our heart, our soul and our cash into the whole endeavour.

So lots of people may be listening, but these listeners, when consuming music on the internet, are not shoppers. They are not in a mode where they are browsing for something to spend money on. Instead, they are paying for the music by paying attention, and that's all they are willing to give, and really, that should be enough, considering all the competition for it.

As Marsden points out, despite the hype about the long tail and Web 2.0, the internet doesn't give musicians new ways to make money. It creates conditions in which musicians are paid instead in a different currency, recognition, and whether or not this has any value depends on the context one's working in. If you need to sell music to feed yourself and pay rent, you are not cheered by the number of views your song's video has received. But if you are making money through some other job and make music for a feeling of cultural participation, the clicks count.

In the unlikely event of anyone wanting my advice, it would be to stop worrying about selling recordings. Just give them away. Let them go. Put them online for free, and tell people that they're there. And if, against the odds, you've been given some cash, you've managed to release an album commercially, and you see that someone has posted it on a blog for readers to download – for god's sake don't get angry. Don't see it as being down £20. See it as being up 20 listeners. Yes, your music might conceivably have been stolen, but there are no police. So get used to it. And now you're freed of this burden, pursue all the other things that you want from being in a band – writing songs, rehearsing, doing gigs, building relationships with other bands, going on wallet-busting tours, receiving unmemorable blowjobs. Because seriously, you're almost more likely to get a blowjob after a gig than sell an MP3. And remember – just because music doesn't make you money, certainly does NOT mean that it's worth nothing.

The point is that the intense commercialism of our society prompts us to measure the worth of things by their saleability, by their price tag, and it encourages us to regard the value of our effort as residing in a paycheck rather than in the work itself. But making art is its own reward; it's a considerable luxury to be able to have the time to do it at all. It's extremely unsympathetic when artists then complain that the people who spend their own precious time acknowledging other people's art (instead of, say, making some of their own) are somehow ingrates because they won't pay for the chance. Popular music, a social art whose power rests in its ability to be shared, ultimately doesn't lend itself well to becoming intellectual property.

The gift economy (18 Feb 2007)

It might be useful to contrast Bataille's vision of potlatch expenditure, of competitive destructive waste, with the "gift economy," production by technology-assisted volunteers rather than paid labor -- open-source projects, shared amateur entertainment, Wikipedia, etc. Justin Fox has an article in Time about this phenomenon, pondering what sort of alternative it presents to capitalism's assumptions of rational self-interest. We assume that people behave rationally by getting paid what they are worth -- by making every marginal unit of effort or expenditure yield the most additional utility, however we construe that. Bataille seemed to want to imagine an escape from the prison of rational calculation with behavior so destructive it could yield no such utility, but utility can ultimately be rehabilitated to capture that desire to escape from it.

As Jameson notes in Postmodernism, the idea of the market ("Leviathan in sheep's clothing") exerts a totalizing force, with economists such as Gary Becker explaining how any possible desire, conscious or unconscious, can be configured to conform to production functions -- mathematical models of inputs and outcomes -- and thus be rendered rational. Jameson sees this as a desperate attempt to salvage the promises of freedom and equality capitalism rests on but never can deliver. In his view, spontaneous order is an expression of despair at how individuals are never really free in the sense of being able to intervene in their destiny, which remains governed by motives dispersed throughout the system and directed by no one. Instead "cynical reason" (Peter Sloterdijk's term for "enlightened false consciousness") in the form of semi-ironic consumerism reigns as the only freedom we know, and we accept it as compensatory.

But does the gift economy, productive volunteerism, do anything to disturb that analysis? Is there an alternative form of freedom from market rationality in working hours for free on a Linux patch or in distributing your fan fiction online? Or has the compensation changed from money to attention or recognition. (if this is true, what does it say about the devaluation of money, which can no longer secure a fundamental human need such as community recognition?) Fox talks to Yoachi Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who posits a sweet spot between exploitation and cooperation whereby corporations can capitalize on this outpouring of volunteer labor: "The key, Benkler says, is 'managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.' " His view is opposed by Nicholas Carr, who argues the market will eventually co-opt volunteer labor by learning how to value it and price it. It seems like work being done for free is either being subsidized elsewhere (as perhaps with Benkler's book; he's a Yale professor and may have been paid by the university to research and write the book) or is pleasurable in its own right, the way most work is markedly not -- we do it on our own time, with our own goals in mind and via methods we've improvised that make us feel most engaged.

But does the gift economy recuperate Bataille's notion of expenditure -- does it serve as a refutation that any act can truly be nonproductive? Also, does it refute the strange notion that true freedom is incompatible with production, that it must consist in some free play that yields only abjection? It seems more likely that people enjoy being useful but have that natural impulse perverted by a market system that insists that gratifying that impulse alone is not enough. The market encourages to suspend that impulse and pursue profitable but personally meaningless activities. Then we rescue the impulse in our private hobbies. The wealth of networks lies in bringing to account all that energy expended in hobbies without corrupting it with the taint of market-driven thinking that makes the work seem inadequate in itself.