Google and goon squads (15 July 2011)

This December 2010 post by Peter Frase, addressing how capitalism might cope with technology's diminishing the need for labor inputs, has deservedly been put into broader circulation by Matt Yglesias and Metafilter. Frase sets up a thought experiment based on the Star Trek fantasy of a world in which productive labor has been rendered unnecessary, energy supplies are inexhaustible, and all humans apparently share in universal prosperity. Given these conditions, Frase wonders "how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?" Would capitalist relations continue to organize society even in the absence of the scarcities that legitimize those relations? If so, how? (Also, are we headed to this sort of society, given the persistence of unemployment and the arguably structural problems with Western economies that economist Michael Spence discusses here?)

Frase imagines that such a society would lean heavily on intellectual property law, presumably enforced by a draconian, all-encompassing surveillance state. It's not too hard to imagine Google facilitating this under the Orwellian auspices of "Don't be evil," especially after reading this article by Evgeny Morozov. "History is rife with examples of how benign and humanistic ideals can yield rather insidious outcomes—especially when backed by unchecked power and messianic rhetoric," he notes, and cites Said Vaidhyanathan's argument from The Googlization of Everything that asserts "the triumph of neoliberalism has made the 'notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good ... impossible to imagine, let alone propose.' " As manufacturing increasingly becomes a matter of information rather than manpower, Google's control of the information economy will potentially afford it the opportunity to implement a social structure. We would all essentially work for Google, whether (to draw on Frase's categories of post-productive labor) we are producing, sorting, and circulating content to attenuate its social value -- immaterial labor, by Lazzarato's definition, which Hardt expands to affective labor; I've written a bunch of posts about this sort of thing -- or whether we are muscle for intellecual-property enforcement (lawyers and "guard labor," to use the term Frase adopts from this paper).

Both immaterial labor and lateral surveillance seem to be expanding under the auspices of commercial social media and, as Frase notes, gamification, establishing the infrastructure and the mores to prevent informationalization from leading to an expansion of the commons, as P2P enthusiasts hope. Frase links to Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, which sounds an optimistic note about the increased role of sharing and cooperation in production. Benkler's analysis resembles in some ways the Marxist theories regarding the "general intellect" that have evolved out of this cryptic section of the Grundrisse. (My effort at decoding it here.) Hardt and Negri extrapolate from the productive cooperation of the "general intellect" -- the development of which capitalists theoretically must foment to sustain productivity -- something they call the Multitude, a emerging political force that transcends state power and instantiates some sort of spontaneously self-organizing communism made of networks and flows. But it seems as though Web 2.0 companies are developing precisely to pre-empt such possibilities, to enclose the emerging commons and fuse them to structures that emphasize competition and individualism in the midst of enhanced sociality, that foreground status hierarchies rather than dissolve them, that articulate class distinctions rather than undermine them, and so on. Social media foster new forms of "artificial" scarcity (in attention, fame, relevance, identity, etc.) at the same time it eases inequalities in access to cultural goods. We can all download all the music and movies we want and remix them to our hearts content, but this doesn't touch the inequalities that form the basis of class. And reproducing class, guaranteeing that pre-existing inequalities in wealth and power can be reproduced and carried forward even in the absence of more-traditional methods of labor exploitation, is capitalism's primary raison d'etre (not increasing productivity or freedom or the "wealth of nations").

That's an implicit point of Frase's thought experiment, I think -- to suggest that no amount of prosperity or labor reduction will get rid of the class system and the exploitation it engenders structurally. It's not a set of social relations designed to promote equality, but its opposite. It creates a dynamic set of values that protect privilege in the face of abundance, in the face of technological improvements, in the face of developments that threatened to invalidate the aristocratic pretenses to inborn and inaccessible superiority.

Frase wonders where the money will come from to sustain the society of the future if zero-marginal-product workers have no right to expect to earn anything (according to neoclassical economic models) in a post-productive economy.

Thus it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti-Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers.

He wonders if capitalist ideology would be flexible enough to permit the guaranteed wage system this dilemma seems to require -- people get issued some token amount of money to keep the wheels spinning -- and if this nonetheless implies stagnation, the end of capitalist growth (and possibly capitalism itself). The issue seems to hinge on the difference between that minimal wage paid out (which stultifies its recipients, locks them in class position) and the creation of economic value that continues to accrue to capitalists. The value creators -- the minions of the general intellect -- need some nominal amount of money circulating among themselves to lubricate the gears of the social factory, but enough real value must be extracted from that factory to sustain the class divide -- to forestall redistributive effects. (My postulate is that capitalists will not create or sustain enterprises that redistribute wealth, only ones that concentrate it.) That value probably can't continue to be denominated in the same currency as the wages. Perhaps this is perhaps why more people are becoming content to work for attention, especially in the sectors most transformed by information technology, the ones subsumed by code. Google has indeed rolled out "badges" to reward users for consuming and processing news stories through its interface, as Rob Walker notes here.

In the dystopian Google-run world of the future, workers will have attention rankings and goon-squad thug power to oppress one another and promote general insecurity; meanwhile real power and privilege will adhere to the corporation, its big shareholders, and those politicians it patronizes to protect itself.

Rent to Pwn (22 April 2011)

I am all for people buying less stuff and sharing more of their stuff with people. I think it is great when people figure out how to give stuff they are getting rid of to people who want to use it. But I am fairly skeptical of "collaborative consumption," which wants to monetize these impulses in new tech startup companies. A current Fast Company article by Danielle Sacks covers this emerging sector, what Silicon Valley investor types apparently call "underused asset utilization" ventures, which includes car sharing and other co-op-like schemes, peer-to-peer rental services, and eBayish resale sites. There is so much scary dystopian potential in what Sacks reports that I almost choked on the omelet I was eating while reading it (at which point it occurred to me that if I coughed it up, maybe I could re-sell it to a underfed peer).

"Underused asset utilization" strikes me as a far more honest term than "sharing," and it certainly sheds a new light on what Facebook is doing: getting us to conceive of ourselves, our social lives and our identity as "underused" assets to exploit. (My web-surfing history is really too valuable to keep to myself -- and really, how can I monetize my friends? What else are they good for? Are they even my friends if I can't profit from them?) The governing principe with all these ventures is to use the deeper mediation of people's personal lives (through smartphones and social media) to get them to behave even more like little capitalist firms. Consider the way Sharable founder Neal Gorenflo talks about his own life:

One afternoon, after a jog through the parking lot of his Brussels hotel, he quit his job. Since then, Gorenflo has deconstructed every aspect of his personal and working life, "removing all the things that don't add value and concentrating on the things that deliver value." Andrea made the cut -- she's now his wife.

Is there anything more to life than adding value? Not from this point of view. "Sharing" might evokes images of potlatch and competitive altruism, but in the world of underused asset utilization, sharing has nothing to do with gifts and everything to do with efficiency, with bringing rationalized use of capital resources to ever single nook and cranny in one's life, even if you had no intention of being a entrepreneur or a capitalist. The backers of these ventures imagine the purpose of the social web and "connections" is merely to make self-entrepreneurializing easier, near automatic. So when you are about to "underuse" some "asset" in your everyday life, your smartphone can intervene to rent it to someone else (and let some Silicon Valley venture capitalists get their cut). "I'm looking at virtually every resource and finding ways to extract additional value or productivity from it, from food to gardens to skill sharing," says one investor. That sounds awesome, a real recipe for joy. (It reminds me of Marx's "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!")

Gorenflo tells Sacks, "Business has spent centuries making buying really easy. We're just at the beginning of making sharing easy." This had me confused at first, because I don't really get how firms can be capitalist if they are not seeking profits through selling things. This confusion could prompt a person to think that the "sharing economy" is some sort of postcapitalist potentiality -- as when Rachel Botsman, the co-author of a book about "collaborative consumption" declares, "This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership." But these companies are not out to usher in the end fo private-property rights. Botsman says that she realized, ""I just can't help companies sell more stuff," but that doesn't mean that she's looking to decrease the volume of capitalist exchanges or slow the velocity of commerce. It means selling services rather than stuff, brokering the exchange of existing goods between parties, like a pawn shop owner. The for-profit sharing companies are still operating like capitalist companies; only they are now "platforms" that root exploitation deeper into the lives of the independent contractors (i.e. the customers they "serve") they use to generate work product.

The part of the article that struck as most depressing, though, is the development of private "reputation companies" that hope to create a "trust rating" similar to a credit rating based on one's online behavior, the "data exhaust" one's mediatized activity generates.

The challenge that worries everyone in the sharing world, of course, is trust. It's one thing to believe that a knitter on Etsy will mail you that crocheted beret. It's another to let a stranger sleep in your home or borrow your second-most-expensive asset, your car. "Sharing of the kind we're talking about really only works when there's reputation involved," says Freestyle's Felser.... Almost all (including AirBnB) require profiles for both parties and feature a community ratings system. But these ratings would carry far more weight if they traveled with you across the web, so that your eBay reputation helped inform your standing on AirBnB. Startups like TrustCloud would like to become the portable reputation system for the web. The company is building an algorithm to collect (if you choose to opt in) your online "data exhaust" -- the trail you leave as you engage with others on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, commentary-filled sites like TripAdvisor, and beyond -- and calculate your reliability, consistency, and responsiveness. The result would be a contextual badge you'd carry to any website, a trust rating similar to the credit rating you have in the offline world.

By all means, let's automate trust. Who doesn't love the arbitrarity of credit ratings and the way they rob one of a sense of autonomy? Yes! Let's extend that principle more generally, and let computers assign a number to the quality of our ethical character overall, based on how much garbage we look at online! That is a beautiful idea. Who wouldn't "choose to opt in"? (As if opting out won't come to signify having something to hide if, god forbid, these systems catch on -- you already can't really opt out of Facebook and belong socially in the accepted way in the U.S.) Let's let an algorithm score our cultural capital and make that number known so people can more efficiently judge whether it is worth their time to interact with us. Splendid! How efficient will my "sharing" and appropriating become then, when I know who the losers are after a glance at a spreadsheet?

I guess this is why Amazon is constantly pestering me to "rate my transactions" all the time. They can't leave me alone and let me have my book; they want me to volunteer my feelings to grease the wheels of their distribution and rent-extracting mechanisms. I don't want to help build reputations; I want to reserve the trust that my minuscule contribution to this world can build for something better. I don't want to be part of a panopticon that is deemed socially necessary to keep people from cheating one another under a generalized Hobbesean regime of hypercapitalism in which every single gesture and every single thing I think and do is theoretically for sale and is thus a theoretical cheat. Offshoring "reputation management" to private companies seems like a terrible way to build general trust in a society, as does assigning people a numeric rating. These are indications that trust doesn't generally exist, and shouldn't be expected from one another. It's a neighborhood watch society where people are only kept in line through fear, not sympathy.

One of the positive aspects of markets (and possibly the whole point of trust-building between parties) is that they can facilitate anonymous exchange and foster privacy -- granting a modicum of autonomy to getting and spending and owning. What you buy and collect is nobody else's business. But to the sharing czars, it's necessarily everybody's business -- that's where their profit opportunity is, having an itemized list of your stuff. Or even your opinions. In a world where value is primarily created socially at the level of affects and signifiers and brands and so on, privacy makes you into an "underused asset." And Silicon Valley can not let that stand.

Digital anarchy (17 June 2009)

Generation Bubble reports on the UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities and its most recent manifesto, which proposes an aggressive assault on intellectual property: the digital humanists movement "believes that copyright and IP standards must be freed from the stranglehold of Capital, including the capital possessed by heirs who live parasitically off of the achievements of their deceased predecessors." Thus, the manifesto proposes we "pirate and pervert materials by the likes of Disney on such a massive scale that the IP bosses will have to sue your entire neighborhood, school, or country" and "practice digital anarchy by creatively undermining copyright, mashing up media, recutting images, tracks, and texts." By these lights, Girl Talk is not a lame DJ but a Trotskyist firebrand leading the revolution from his laptop mixing board, one mashup salvo at a time. The manifesto regards media miscegenation as an inherent expression of freedom rather than a perhaps lamentable indication of the trap we are in, at a few stages removed from original creation, doomed to fabricate our material culture from shopworn digital remnants.

The manifesto suggests that eradicating intellectual property will lead to more cooperative intellectual labor, mediated by internet-distributed open-source software tools, while facilitating the "reinvention of the solitary, 'eccentric,' even hermetic work carried out by lone individuals both inside and outside the academy". That sounds somewhat sinister -- fomenting an effort to re-educate decadent individualists, perhaps through some rigorous self-criticism and a few self-denunciation sessions, and make them into better-functioning members of the collective, content to have their anonymous contributions to the new society recognized through its success at maintaining total control.

One need not be especially cynical to question the utopianism the manifesto trades in. Intellectual property is not merely some conspiracy cooked up by Capital but a flawed expression of the individual's pursuit for social recognition, which under capitalism is expressed through wages, salary, or payment of some kind or other. Perhaps we are to believe that in the future everyone will be content to disappear into the mass, to be mashed-up in the grand sociocultural remix to end all remixes, but I doubt it; the would-be technoutopians out there also seem to be those most highly networked, those who are most plugged in to the contemporary means of publicity. And it is not like academics in the humanities eschew recognition; their reputational squabbles seem to matter more to them than any aspect of their scholarly contributions.

So doing away with IP, society's current mode of administering recognition, serves only to alienate the creators the manifesto's writers seek to liberate. What must be found is a way to replace IP with a different system for doling out that recognition -- the attention economy's currency. Generation Bubble points out IP's enforcement problems, which have the tendency to invalidate the concept's moral grounding.

The age of virtual reproduction, where the costs associated with making cultural artifacts have in many cases become negligible (just about anyone can, with a little bit of know-how, record studio quality music on a desktop, for instance), has engendered an unprecedented situation. Gatekeepers of intellectual property now appear as veritable dogs in the manger. Each time they encode a sound-file to prohibit its copying, or each time they install crippleware on an electronic device to inhibit its full functionality, they betray the fact that scarcity is now more a matter of insistence than fact.

That's well put. But the fact that scarcity is is always going to seem poorly manufactured suggests that we'll move on to a different tack: encouraging the deluge and enhancing the value of reliable editor and filters. In such a world, an individual's reputation for discernment will become even more valuable, and the economy within which they exist more hierarchical.

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.

Trash treasures (6 June 2007)

Having recently had to dispose of a vast amount of stuff (part of an effort to stop being sentimental about objects rather than people and ideas, and restore valence to actual memories and imagination -- call it Project Spartan), I chose to leave it on the curb rather than take it to a thrift store. This was out of laziness rather than any particular scruple, but I felt better about it as much of the stuff -- books and records and the odd piece of furniture -- magically disappeared over the course of a humid afternoon. It surprised me what people were most interested in -- travel books from the 1990s, not Oxford paperbacks of Dickens novels; 3m Bookshelf boardgames, not indie rock from the 1980s on vinyl. People had no shame in treating the sidewalk in front of the house as though it were the shoe aisle at Target, throwing things they didn't want out into the street, turning boxes upside down and leaving piles of debris, and that sort of unruliness, which made me understand why the Sanitation Department is so vigilant in fining homeowners for putting out their trash early (I hope we didn't get our landlord in trouble.)

But what I found most strange was the moments when I would come back to my place and become momentarily fascinated with my own garbage. An instinct for scavenging would kick in as I'd forget for an instant that I had put it out there and that I was trying to rid myself of things. I would feel almost jealous that I couldn't root through my own things and be pleased about the stuff I was going to rescue from the landfill, the disposable items whose life I would extend, striking a small guerrilla blow against the consumer economy. My own junk, were it someone else's, would become treasure to me -- booty I was lucky enough to stumble upon. I had to admit to myself that had I come upon the same stuff I had placed on my curb in front of someone else's place, I would have carted a good deal of it home.

Not buying things is probably a place to start disengaging from consumerism (or more precisely, the mentality that shopping and consuming is the purpose of life -- it wouldn't be possible to cease being a consumer, but one can take pains to assure that it is not one's primary identity), but it doesn't do me much good if I still feel a magnetic pull to stuff for its own sake, to be simply fascinated by trash -- my own trash! -- in the hope that there might be something momentarily diverting in it. Rescuing things is not bad, but indifference to things would be better. It would be nice to get myself to the point where I won't feel obliged to peer into boxes of trash books and can instead rest assured with the fact that I already have in my apartment many volumes I'll never actually read as it is.

Economics of free (19 January 2007)

Julian Sanchez links to this series of posts about post-scarcity economics, the gist of which is this: ideas (and digital copies of intellectual property) do not become scarce once they are thought of, which means they are not subject to the law of diminishing returns. The marginal cost (what it costs to make one more unit of something) for duplicating an idea is nil, implying an infinte supply of the fruits of knowledge once it exists. (See David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations for a thorough explanation of this -- and the history of theorizing about increasing returns to scale -- and the paper by Paul Romer that brought it to contemporary economics.) The upshot of these posts is that  an "infinite" supply of a good should cause its price to approach zero in the absence of state-granted monopolies and other "artificial barriers" (copyrights) that are becoming unenforceable (but don't tell these people). Whether there really is an infinite supply of anything is questionable (human attention, if nothing else, is not infinite; neither is server space or the energy to maintain them). According to the management consultant writing these posts, this can be a good thing for producers if they focus on selling the medium rather than the information: "You don't sell 'ideas' you sell books, or consulting services, or reports or conferences (or a bunch of other things). You don't sell music, you sell CDs or concerts or T-shirts or access (or a bunch of other things). Basically, you look at the content itself (which is infinite in supply) to sell something that isn't infinite in supply." This, as is pointed out in the comments, is a matter of using captivating content to distract the customer from the fact that he is paying not for that content but an essentially empty package. (The content, infinite in supply, is zeroed out of the exchange.)

Several different commenters made the point that when post-scarcity economics kick in, so does the attention economy

What was missed however, is the premium on end users time - individuals have to deal with the scarcity of time, which forces them to make decisions on which content to spend their time with, or which freeware applications to invest one's time to learn and train on. What is interesting is as scarcity economics starts to fade, network economics starts to take hold. The very best free products will take the lion's share of users attention, which has tremendous value for different economic models. The irony of all of this is it isn't new. Traditional broadcast television lived off of a free to user model for decades, and end users were traditionally faced with the limits of their own time as to which show to watch.

When too much is available at no expense but your time and effort, you can make money by being the filter on the unlimited supply. If you have figured out how to monetize your filter, its to your benefit to have the spigot of free content opened ever wider. (Which explains why Google wants to digitize everything possible.)

But filterers would still need something to filter. Assume that there's not already too much stuff out there and that we need new "innovative" stuff. (I'm thinking of entertainment industry here, not an industry where "innovation" actually  is innovation, like the pharmaceutical industry.) If marginal costs for intellectual property is zero, the fixed costs (what it costs to make the original version, the R&D to come up with the idea) remain, and someone has to pay them. (You don't get a new Metallica record unless someone pays Metallica.) One rather utopian argument is that in the future artists will pay themselves in the sheer joy of creation -- kind of like most bloggers do now. The underlying implication is that anything worth doing in the field of intellectual creation is its own reward.

Another way to recoup fixed costs is via subscription services -- after enough people pay in advance, the musician delivers the new album. (This presents an obvious free-rider problem. Why pay if you are willing to wait for others to pay, and then you'll just copy the product once it's made.) Perhaps artists can go back to finding patrons, as they did in pre-Capitalist times. The Medicis didn't seem to mind everyone reaping the aesthetic benefits from the artworks they sponsored.