Bourgeois Apathy

Felix Stalder, in Bourgeois Anarchism, says that it is cheaper and easier than ever to communicate across time and space with individuals and groups. Every step of this communication is carried out by algorithms that create and store a record of it - what Andrejevic termed the digital enclosure. One of the dangers inherent with this is that it vastly increases the surveillance capacities of large (and, I would add, small) organizations such as the state or private corporations that bid on surveillance work.

Freedom-oriented groups in the '60s provided an "artistic critique" of capitalism, says Stalder, but this was co-opted into the current "creative industry" - anyone can be an artist online. It has lost it's revolutionary edge to the point that it is barely recognized that it ever had one.

In much the same way, small networked organizations have arisen today and have the ability, in Stalder's view, to challenge the state. Although he does talk about the privatization of security and surveillance, Stalder fails to see how even these small organizations can be co-opted to prevent any potential for real change. He even goes so far as to say that the "liberal democracy" we have and its civil society, is being weakened by these small groups. What he doesn't say is how this is not a threat to the state - but a means to the end we've been on the road to since at least the Great Depression, the New Deal and the massive expansion of executive power that came with it.

Interpassivity

Andrejevic writes, in Chapter 7 "iPolitics," that "interactive networked technologies come with a built in, passive information-gathering capacity that promises broader coverage and decreased audience awareness of monitoring practice." He goes on to say that it is passive because it happens, for the most part, as a "by-product of using the technology itself." It is, he notes, what Slavoj Zizek has called "interpassivity." This is a concept from Zizek's book, The Plague of Fantasies. Zizek writes that "it is commonplace to emphasize how, with the new electronic media, the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over: I no longer merely stare at the screen, I increasingly interact with it, entering into a dialogic relationship with it . . ." This, in and of itself, is not all that bad. Dialogue, even of a passive kind, is encouraged. One of the dangers, as Zizek says, is the interpassivity of real world suffering. Although he doesn't make this specific connection, I am tempted to say that increasing interpassivity online will enable us to deal with interpassivity (of all kinds) in the real world more easily.

Interpassivity supposedly allows for us to have passive satisfaction, "so that it is the object itself which 'enjoys the show' instead of me . . ." This, then allows us "to propose the notion of false activity: you think you are active, while your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive . . ." Want to be involved? Join a group on Facebook. Think you need to be more active in politics? Be a fan of a politician online. Meanwhile, we can believe that this fulfills some sort of civic duty even though it is an entirely passive enjoyment of the activity of the object. As an added bonus, anyone who happens to look through our information can now see - my political beliefs are such and such, my religious beliefs are - , my musical tastes are - , and this is how i conceptualize myself. The potential for exploitation is massive, all while we believe we are "having our say."

1984 Revisited

I was more than a little surprised on Tuesday at just how many people had little or no problem with being monitored - constantly. At this particular moment in time, sure, the government and/or corporations may not be doing anything wrong with your information. But is it really so difficult to see the potential for misuse of said data? We might think that we have a say, for now, in how government works, but can we not imagine a time when that might not be so (I'm not so sure we have any say in how it's run now, but that, as they say, is another can of gigabytes)?

Needless to say, I have my doubts about the good graces of the faces at the top. Furthermore, being watched unceasingly might be efficient, I'll give you that. But would you rather have a state run in the interest of efficiency, or in the interest of humanity? I assume most of us have read, or at the very least have a notion of, 1984 by George Orwell. If not, it is the story of a dystopia run with the utmost - you guessed it - efficiency. But the efficiency we believe can be reached through surveillance doesn't include a notion of freedom. If they take away our agency - what next? A lost agency is a lost identity. Maybe it would be efficient, and maybe crime would disappear, and maybe no one would have to die pointless deaths - but we would all lead pointless lives.

Audience Labor and Alienation

In iSPY: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era, Mark Andrejevic introduces the idea of the digital enclosure, which he says is the "creation of an interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself." He connects this term to the land enclosure movement that took place with the move from feudalism to capitalism - which is to say, he connects it to the creation of private property which communist theories have so derided. This is because, as Andrejevic notes, "the enclosure movement leads to the formation of distinct classes: those who own the means of production and those who must sell their labor for access to these means . . ."

This idea has led some critical theorists, writes Andrejevic, to assert that "watching advertising might be considered a form of audience labor - value-generating work that is compensated for by access to "free" program content." He describes two forms of consumer labor, that of the work of watching as well as the work of being watched. The language he uses is also markedly Marxist, as he writes about an "ongoing struggle" and the efficiency of work done by "consumers" - the new proletariat.

This can, in my view, further exacerbate the alienation and tensions that Marx was so concerned with. Marx attributed this alienation to both the fact that the laborer saw extremely little money for his/her labor as well as the absence of the enjoyment gleaned from making use of the product. In the case of consumer labor, not only do we not see any money from this labor, but we actually pay the companies to engage in this interactivity. The product - the gained information about our preferences - is one we are similarly distanced from. It seems to me, then, that this is not an increasing "democraticization" of the process of production, but is instead a form of increasing the alienation and subjugation of the consumer-proletariat by the corporations at the top of the capitalist hierarchy.

Facebook Politics

For people interested in the current campaign, there was an article in the New York Times today: Facebook Politics. The author talks mostly about McCain's facebook profile, but ends with some interesting questions.

Coalition of the Willing

I know that Inconvenience is conveniently interested in the implications of the online world to political theory, philosophy and the such. I'm wondering if anyone else is interested in this, and if they'd like to form some kind of coalition to pursue it. Concepts of privacy, surveillance, marketing and online ethics play into this as well, so anyone concerned with those topics could join in too . . . as long as you're not put off by abstractions and the late-night brainstorming sessions I'm so fond of.

I blog, therefore I

The blog platform (and, for that matter, the structure of the web itself) allows for a certain amount of freedom, both for the blogger and the reader(s). The question becomes how much freedom particular bloggers or websites want to allow.

I wonder if Mill's concept of freedom of speech/the press still holds in an arena like the internet. He was a proponent of allowing all in a society to express their ideas, no matter how extreme or deviant. Mill believed that only when all ideas were out in the open could the truth of each be tested against the others, making space for the "best" of them to wade their way through criticism and emerge victorious (best for whom, is what I want to know). Anyway, Mill preceded blogs by a pretty substantial period of time, so I digress . . .

In a New York Times article The Trolls Among Us, Mattathias Schwartz writes, "Today the Internet . . . is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and others." If this is true, do users get to pick a) who they are defined as and b) who they are defined to? The first questions seems like the answer should be painfully obvious: you are who you define yourself as. In a space full of "trolls," however, this truth becomes less absolute. Instead, there is the possibility that I could be defined by anonymous strangers/hackers who may or may not have the same sense of ethics and morals I do. I could, of course, block them from viewing my blog/Facebook/whatever - as Professor Dean says she did to Bill White (Bad Subjects: Blogging Theory), but this is literally no obstacle when all a troll has to do is create another identity (or several more, you know, just in case) to continue harassing whomever they please.

The second question has no obvious answer, and is even more unsettling because of this. In the age of the Internet, we have little to no control over who can see our information - or how it is used. Some may be as harmless as marketers who simply want to know what we like, so that they can better shape products to our preferences (or shape our preferences to their products - I often wonder how much of this already happens on the Internet, which is to say, how many pop-ups, flashy banner ads and corporate websites have I seen, and what part they have played in the creation of my online consumer-persona). On the other hand, how would we feel about the government having complete access to all of our most personal information hidden away in "secret" files on our computers, or being able to keep tabs on every word we write to friends on AIM? If this information is never used, the illusion of privacy persists.

A Quick Recap

On the small group discussion on where this semester might take us:
We began speaking about ethics in the cyber-world, which led us immediately to the idea of how much surveillance is possible when everything occurs in a semi-accessible space (for those who know how to access it, i.e. the state and/hackers). We then thought it might be interesting to look into this concept of surveillance in terms of the legal system - with telecom companies providing data about average citizens to the government, whether or not they can use this information against us in court becomes extremely pertinent. Whether or not it is even legal for the companies to provide this information without violating privacy laws is another question entirely.
Surveillance brought us to yet another topic, that of marketing. When our information is available to be bought and sold by online corporations, it can be used to create profiles of our likes and dislikes - "plugging us in" to the system whether we ask for it or not. This, again, raises the question of who actually has access to this information - and if we really want them to have that ability.

Also, a quick thought on one of the readings for today:
Ong, in "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought," notes that the "interior transformation of consciousness" occurring through writing is also alienating. It is an alienation from what is immediately natural, which is say, oral communication. I wonder what Marx would have had to say about this, given his preoccupation with the concept of alienation. There is also the possibility that these are two unconnected ideas of alienation, and I'll simply be spending too much time in the near future delineating something that was never there at all.

Body Presence

Faces bring with them a certain amount of expression - and, in doing so, can also cast meaning onto the words being said. Without facial expression/interaction, it would make sense that words themselves would take on more meaning. There is a sense (whether illusory or not), on the other hand, that accountability decreases with the disappearance of facial interactivity. Given this physical disassociation and the diminished sense of accountability, words actually take on more or less meaning depending on the receiver - the reader, the "face" on the other side of the screen.
Richard Rushton, in "What Can a Face Do?" notes that it is intuition which rules the reading of facial expression, not interpretation of "certain preformed codes to the markings one sees expressed on a face . . ."
We could see this, in a way, through the way the first class played out on Tuesday. Although there was, through the projected screen, the "presence" of a professor, there was no physical presence. As such, we lost the ability to intuit what was wanted from us based on body language or facial expressions. We instead had to rely solely on our readings of the words on the screen. That what was taken from this depended on the receiver was immediately obvious - some may have left right away, content with finding out that class was cancelled, some may have waited nervously until the very end, anxious that it may all have been a trick and some would have taken the screen at it's word and followed it to the letter.