Google and the Production of Curiosity (1 Feb 2012)

On Twitter, PJ Rey resurrected this August 2010 op-ed by William Gibson that has new currency given the hullaballoo about Google's privacy-policy changes. Gibson argues that Google is an unanticipated form of artificial intelligence, "a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products." But this description sounds less like artificial intelligence and more like Marx's notion of the general intellect. Anticipating the intensification of technology, Marx claimed that machines would eventually subsume "the process of social life" and integrate it as a form of productivity.

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

This is pretty obscure even by Marx's standards, but autonomist Marxists (Negri, Lazzaurato, Virno) have extrapolated from this a definition of general intellect that embraces, as Virno puts it, "formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language games’." Because of the membranous nature of the general intellect, when harnessed and integrated with capital, it can recuperate all social behavior as "immaterial" production -- enriching the valence of signs, producing affects, etc. -- it means that "even the greater ‘power to enjoy’ is always on the verge of being turned into labouring task." That is, our consumption, especially of information, is a mode of production. The general intellect is the sum of all that information circulation.

Google, then, is the reification of the general intellect. It manages to take human curiosity and turn it into capital.

The consequences of that are profound. Our curiosity is no longer a sign of our leisure; it's an enormously important economic factor. To a degree this has always been true. Our willingness to pay attention to things is at the root of consumer demand. But it is now far more productive of informational goods in and of itself, thanks to ubiquitous online surveillance and data-storage capabilities. Much of the way we express our human curiosity can now be recorded and fed into algorithms and plotted on graphs of connections to generate more information, stimulate more curiosity, produce more demand. That's why, as Gibson points out, Google's Eric Schmidt claimed that people "want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." Google doesn't end lines of inquiry; it gives users momentum. The point of Google is to try to keep you Googling. Not only does that make their ad space more valuable, but it adds value to their search products; it thickens the membrane. As Gibson notes, "In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory."

What that means is that Google's instantiation of the general intellect captures not merely human cooperation and collaboration, as the theorists tend to emphasize when discussing post-Fordist production and the productivity of interpersonal "virtuosity". It also captures and perhaps even emphasizes the lateral surveillance aspect of sociality -- each implementing control on everyone else, recording what they do and annotating it. Human curiosity is intensified and directed at one another. The general intellect becomes a giant spying machine. (Facebook is probably a more explicit example of that than Google, but Google seems more powerful as the received source of answers, the index of approved information.)

Gibson notes how Google makes personal identity a productive factor, a kind of capital it owns. This makes it something we are therefore stuck with. What we have done and would like to have forgotten is part of Google's "fixed capital" that they are loath to relinquish, despite Schmidt's suggestion that teens be issued fresh identities when they become adults. (Gibson ridicules "the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs.") Instead we must adapt our understanding of who we are and what identity consists of. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, before launching into a discussion of the ideological usefulness of the term network, Boltanski and Chiapello discuss our demand for the intelligibility of shared social values.

Young cadres in particular feel a need clearly to identify the new forms of success and the new rules of the game in the economic world, in order to know how to conduct themselves and prepare their children. This demand for intelligibility exerts significant pressure for greater explanation and formalization of the rules of conduct, which will then guide action. In fact, the people tend to conform to these emergent new rules, if only because they confer meaning on what would otherwise merely seem like an arbitrary proliferation of ad hoc mechanisms and locally convenient improvisations.

I don't know about that being a "fact," but it seems plausible that social media have taught us all something about "locally convenient improvisations," for good and ill. And the explosion of Facebook and Google into our lives has disrupted the old version of intelligibility -- prompting new rules that are consistent with the new form of capitalism these media are driving.

So our common sense understanding of what it means to have a self is changing under this pressure. We no longer have the luxury of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals who make themselves as an expression of their iron internal will. Now we have our identities explicitly shaped (or maybe even dictated) by our contingent place in social networks and we can't hide that fact from ourselves. We have to relieve the dissonance of our data trail by surrendering the prerogative of claiming to be self-created and learn to love the self the data tells us we are or should be at any particular moment. We let Google tell us what to do next.

Gmail's Priority Inbox (31 Aug 2010)

I suppose it's a measure of my social insignificance that I don't get very many emails to my personal account in a day -- no more than dozen or so tops, and a few of those are from automated mailing lists. I have never had much trouble keeping up with that influx. So I can't say that the priority inbox feature that Google is rolling out -- described here by Slate's Farhad Manjoo -- is targeted at me. But it bothers me nonetheless, and for the usual reasons. They want to assume responsibility for some of our tedious decision-making tasks so as to better develop a simulacrum of our thinking processes, to anticipate what we want as an intermediary step to knowing better how to dictate our desires.

Google proposes to collect information about your priorities so that it can sort your mail for you before you see it and perhaps even ensure that some emails deemed unworthy of you never offend your eyes, much the way most spam is effectively banished to junk folders. Manjoo describes how it is supposed to work:

Priority Inbox looks for signals that a message is especially valuable. Among other things, it analyzes your experience with a particular sender—is a message from someone whose mail you tend to open and reply to? Was the e-mail sent only to you, or was it part of an e-mail list? Did the message contain keywords that have proved interesting to you in the past? If a message makes the threshold for importance, Gmail marks it with a small yellow tag. These messages will appear at the top of your inbox, above the rest of your mail.

That seems semi-innocuous, automating a process you can set up manually with Gmail's existing filtering features. What makes this whole thing sinister is this: Manjoo notes that "Priority Inbox promises to get better the more I use it. Google has added two buttons that let you train the system—you press one button to mark a message as important, and another to mark it unimportant." To call it "training the system" is to put a benign aspect on what's really the collection of highly intimate personal data about your social life and encoding in a way that makes it immediately operational. It's in effect a Google initiative to get a hold of some of the "social graph" data Facebook is designed to collect and own -- who cares about who, what, when, and why. Facebook spits out its status update feed on the basis of such information and is always refining it through its monitoring of our interactions with the site. No doubt Google would like to offer future marketers something similar in terms of proof-of-concept: "See, we can mimic their own decision making so well that they accept it as their own!"

The things we do for Google (25 Feb 2010)

Google, as we know, makes a lot of money by providing "relevant" ads alongside its search results. As this cheerleading Wired article by Steven Levy details, Google can provide relevance to users because it has devised ways to harvest the data users provide in their various searches and in what they subsequently click on. This makes the search operation a quid pro quo exchange, even though it seems as if we are getting something for free when we use Google.

Singhal notes that the engineers in Building 43 are exploiting another democracy — the hundreds of millions who search on Google. The data people generate when they search — what results they click on, what words they replace in the query when they’re unsatisfied, how their queries match with their physical locations — turns out to be an invaluable resource in discovering new signals and improving the relevance of results. The most direct example of this process is what Google calls personalized search — an opt-in feature that uses someone’s search history and location as signals to determine what kind of results they’ll find useful. (This applies only to those who sign into Google before they search.) But more generally, Google has used its huge mass of collected data to bolster its algorithm with an amazingly deep knowledge base that helps interpret the complex intent of cryptic queries.

The egregious use of the word democracy in this passage gives a hint of how corporations would like people to view this immaterial or affective labor (the production of meanings or emotion) that its consumers perform. When you do work for Google, it's not work per se, but an expression of your significance as a digital citizen in the great internet super-regime. Your privacy isn't being invaded; no, instead you are getting to vote your desires automatically and have your voice registered in the way Google molds our common shared reality online. The "amazingly deep" company then can sort out the "cryptic" nonsense that its users type in and tell them what they really wanted to know, as if they weren't so ignorant and could ask for it intelligibly.

Michael Hardt argues that affective labor, the way we collectively "make" emotions in society, used to occur by and large outside of capitalist production, but the shift to an information and services economy brought it inside. "Just as through the process of modernization all production became industrialized, so too through the process of postmodernization all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalized.... production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalized, and 'elevated' to the level of human relations -- but of course a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital." In other words, the effort we put into making emotional bonds with one another have been co-opted in part by capitalist production, which exploits our human desire to cooperate and like each other and get more done and share things with each other and so on. My sense is that internet platforms have completed that project of cooptation.

The point is that Google and companies like it will increasingly use both promises of convenience and efficiency and celebrations of the democratic joys of open participation to justify privacy invasion and the annexation of the information work users do for their own private purposes. Web 2.0 is an ideological phenomenon more so than a technological one. It's a matter of persuading us to live publicly so that our lives can become the by-product of the data processing we do in the course of living.

Wave Hello, Say Goodbye: Google Wave Seeks to Supplant Email (12 Oct 2009)

I don't have an invitation to use Google Wave, so I can only rely on journalist reports as to what it actually is. But these reports don't seem especially objective; tech writers have every incentive to hype the next big thing and drive traffic. That seems to be the idea behind this WSJ piece by Jessica Vascellaro announcing the death of email at the hands of Google Wave and Facebook, which Wave most likely endeavors to supplant.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

As Nicholas Carr points out, the assumption here is that real-time communication is something that everyone is clamoring for and will be experienced as a joyous improvement over the delays and distance of email. Carr recalls email's early days, when its main workplace benefit was that it freed people from the tyranny of the phone -- of being disrupted by it and the demands of callers. Email in theory could be read and answered on one's own schedule. But since email has next to no transaction costs, personal communication, Carr explains, became broadcasting. We get inundated with trivia and simultaneously we cease to recognize when others might think what we have to say is distracting. So parents forward religious inspiration and "funny" pet videos to their agnostic children and so on. As the internet has merged with phones, email has become merely a more intrusive and all-consuming version of phone communication -- both disruptive and trivial. Wave will worsen this, making email even more immediate and presence-demanding than it already has been become thanks to BlackBerrys and iPhones. Carr's conclusion seems spot on:

The downside of synchronous communication has been repackaged as the upside of realtime communication. Asynchrony, once our friend, is now our enemy. The transaction costs of interpersonal communication have fallen below zero: It costs more to leave the stream than to stay in it. The approaching Wave promises us the best of both worlds: the realtime immediacy of the phone call with the easy broadcasting capacity of email. Which is also, as we'll no doubt come to discover, the worst of both worlds. Welcome to the conference call that never ends.

How perfectly awful. I still don't get why instant messaging is preferable to email. I don't want to share my thoughts with people "instantly" -- I am not aspiring to telepathic connection with the random people in my Gmail address book. I want to actually take a moment and think about what I want to communicate and how best to express that in words. And I appreciate it when other people do the same. I certainly don't want to blurt out blasts of type under the pretense that it conjures immediacy over the digital data cables.

One of Google Wave's "features" is that it allows correspondents to see what others want to say as they type it, so one best not misphrase it or reveal to much in the initial formulation of a thought. As someone who often forms thoughts in the process of typing, this is an untenable feature. I backspace over what I've written and cut and paste and insert too much for what I first type to be coherent, let alone something I want to communicate. My thought process is private; I don't want it exposed because of other people's casual impatience. The private staging ground for our communications is being eroded under the mistaken notion that this fosters immediacy and possibly even intimacy. But the "immediate self" is not a true reflection of what we mean or what we want or what we are.

Vascellaro, who throughout writes fatalistically, as if this change from email to instant communication and permanent accessibility is irreversible and inevitable, offers this depressing scenario: "No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they're interested, can watch it unfold in real time online." Notice how normal the idea of surveillance has become, let alone the insane idea that someone else wants to experience my vacation in real-time. It's my vacation, not theirs; I don't need their validation in the midst of it. And I hope I never do. I hope this sort of technology doesn't start to change me, change the sort of recognition I need to feel okay about myself. The article adds that in the future we'll be "complaining that our cellphones aren't automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we're nearby." Perhaps I am officially a citizen of yesterday. I never want to accept that using digital technology to dispense with the haven of privacy is a good idea. In any pluralistic society, privacy should not be an opt-in concept; it should remain the default.

It seems social networking tools are going to extract more and more from people, bind them more fervently to devices, make the unmediated life seem irrelevant, drained of its being. Our most grandiose impulses of self-importance now have a tool set to support them, promote them, produce them, rationalize them, normalize them, make us dependent on their fleeting narcissistic pleasures. The self we develop in that matrix of perpetual publicity will be more malleable than ever before; there will be no reserve for the individual to draw from, no private experience to shore up a sense of self that the social network rejects or doubts. The endless real-time communication foretells a perfect system for imposing dispersed power on an individual at every moment -- to have that individual compulsively referring everything that he regards as significant that he does to the public sphere for comment and recognition, a never-ending compulsion to confess, to invent the anticipated sins and perform the social penances.

The stream of real-time information to which we are continually supposed to contribute may seem a spontaneous eruption of expression, but it is an expression of pure administration. It is designed to simulate the reality from which it parasitically sucks, only it is more amenable to ideological correction. In real time, of course.

How to fight Googlephobia (10 Sept 2008)

Google's apparent control over the information society in which we live (no, not that information society) has been a robust topic lately, with much fretting over whether search engines have permanently damaged the depth and persistence of our thinking. 3 Quarks Daily linked to this article by Geert Lovink about Google's having moved us from the society of the spectacle described by DeBord to a "society of the query." The essay seems to have been dubiously translated into English from another language; otherwise I don't know how anyone familiar with the subject would report Google's motto as "Don't do evil." Anyway, drawing on computer critic Joseph Weitzenbaum, Lovink notes that the advent of a huge information repository requires

the acquisition of a proper education in order to formulate the right query. It's all about how one gets to pose the right question. For this one needs education and expertise. Higher standards of education are not attained by making it easier to publish. Weizenbaum: "The fact that anyone can put anything online does not mean a great deal. Randomly throwing something in achieves just as little as randomly fishing something out." Communication alone will not lead to useful and sustainable knowledge.

But people aren't "throwing" material online "randomly." Such a conception betrays the off-hand elitism of much of this sort of criticism, which detests "amateur" contributions mingling with material made by professionals -- held accountable by the need to make a living -- or some other sort of official who is accountable to the state. In the past, those forms of accountability seemed sufficient to establish "truth", but of course, that truth was merely a matter of convenience and no guarantee of the Truth. The truth conveyed therein simply aligned automatically with the version the state and other powerful institutions wanted to propagate. Now, in post-modernity, such guarantors of truth are distrusted in part because of all the other contesting voices able to publish their versions. This cacophony leaves some nostalgic for the the days when truth could be force-fed to us.

So naturally, "critical thinking" needs to be taught more effectively to teach us how to process all the information of varying levels of quality, and how to frame queries so the information returned to us is useful to us. Knowing how to search effectively is becoming an important component of our human capital, along with the other intangible aspects of the habitus that facilitate success. But in order for critical thinking to develop, there needs to be a space in which it can be exercised -- something akin to a Habermasian public sphere where critical insights can be voiced and tested and, well, critiqued.

The capacity of capitalism to absorb its adversaries is such that, unless all private telephone conversations and Internet traffic became were to become publicly available, it is next to impossible to argue why we still need criticism – in this case of the Internet. Even then, critique would resemble "shareholder democracy" in action. The sensitive issue of privacy would indeed become the catalyst for a wider consciousness about corporate interests, but its participants would be carefully segregated: entry to the shareholding masses is restricted to the middle-classes and above. This only amplifies the need for a lively and diverse public domain in which neither state surveillance nor market interests have a vital say.

The internet is precisely not that. Though anonymous browsing is become more user-friendly, the default mode of internet presence -- it many ways its raison d'etre -- is to have everything we do logged and publicized. And our primary way of navigating is through shallow searching and sorting rather than through deliberate, exhaustive moves prompted by careful critical thought.

Why? Because of the time crunch brought on by so much accessible culture. Digitization, fomented "cynically" by Google's various scanning programs, transforms culture into data, which reduces it to its instrumental value in generating profit. A consequence of the accessibility of all this digital stuff is to pressure us into valuing novelty and making efforts to speed up our consumption (which I try to argue here among other posts). Keeping up with culture becomes a matter of opportunity costs; marketers tout novelty to glamorize and boost consumerism and technology facilitates our quick flitting around from subject to subject, which makes us believe we derive more utility from the practice than from slow reading. It becomes easier and easier to spiral into dilettantism.

So the war against Google is war over time. As Lovink puts it:

What is necessary is a reappropriation of time. At the moment there is simply not enough of it to stroll around like a flaneur. All information, any object or experience has to be instantaneously at hand. Our techno-cultural default is one of temporal intolerance. Our machines register software redundancy with increasing impatience, demanding that we install the update. And we are all too willing to oblige, mobilized by the fear of slower performance. Usability experts measure the fractions of a second in which we decide whether the information on the screen is what we are looking for. If we're dissatisfied, we click further. Serendipity requires a lot of time.

I wonder if that's true though -- sometimes serendipity happens in an instant, particularly when we don't know what we are looking for and might view anything that's kind of cool as destiny. But it does seem to me that reducing our temporal intolerance -- ridding ourselves of data rage -- is key, though it's basically counter to every trend in our culture, all of which encourage convenience and rapid consumption.

Lovink argues that we should stop fighting the inevitable:

Rather than trying to defend ourselves against "information glut", we can approach this situation creatively as the opportunity to invent new forms appropriate for our information-rich world.

But in this article, there are no hints as to what those new forms would be. The only thing that comes to mind is the intellectual equivalent of mashups -- link-saturated blog posts like this one, I guess.