Technological Fetishism and Online Democracy

Professor Dean writes in the Digital Media and Democracy book that we now have a system of communicative capitalism. She says that instead of being heard, messages are "circulated, reduced to the medium." This reduction results in part from a technological fetishism. We believe that now, more than ever, technology and online contribution equate to democracy and democratic values. Part of this is something (which she mentions in the article and I've mentioned in a previous post) that Slavoj Zizek calls interpassivity. We allow the technological object to act (democratically) for us, and while we feel that we've "done our part," no change actually occurs.

This is backed up, in part, by Clay Shirky's essay, "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." In it he says that only a few blogs today are read widely, while a huge number fly under the radar and are rarely visited, regardless of whether or not they have a valuable contribution to make to any number of discussions.

Professor Dean says that "to ontologize the political is to collapse the very symbolic space necessary for politicization, a space between an object and its representation, its ability to stand for something other than itself." This destruction of the symbolic removes real hope for political action online, and is simultaneously happening in other regions of our society as well. In the consumer realm, the symbolic has all but disappeared - instead of actual political action, we buy "fair trade" coffee and invest in products which are political for us. Likewise, "by sending an email, signing a petition, responding to an article on a blog, people can feel political."

All hope is not lost, however. While thought like this seems to indicate that any entry onto the web should come with the disclaimer "abandon all hope, etc etc," it does not mean that things cannot change. If we can stop the fetish surrounding technology and break away from the idea that passively "acting" online is akin to political action, then real political action becomes a reality once again. As Professor Dean puts it, "politics in the sense of working to change current conditions may well require breaking with and through the fantasies attaching us to communicative capitalism."

The Campaign Game

In Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark writes that "The era of the great openly declared villains is over. In topological times, the bad guys pass as normal or they corrupt the law." For one reason or another (I'll let you decide how it happened), this reminded me of the current presidential race. Each candidate is saying two things - one, the other candidate is a "good man," and two, the other candidate is friends with terrorists, misguided in all of his policies and essentially evil.

The forum, at least when they are face to face, is more like a game show than anything else. As Wark says, "The key genres for working out the subsumption of the topographic into the topological are the situation comedy and the game show. On a game show, anyone can be taken out of everyday life and brought into the magic circle of television . . ."

On an unrelated note, Wark also writes: "The romance of the outsider is dead." Obama has left his image of being an outsider behind - mainly because it was never true, but partially, it would seem, because that image was not benefitting him. McCain and Palin still trumpet the word maverick all over the press and the debates, but it clearly has not helped if the polls are to be believed.

"You can change the form of Government but there's not much you can do to change the underlying form of production," Wark says. McCain and Obama can talk about change all they want, but neither of them is talking about fundamental change. Neither is even talking about changing the form of government. They want to "eliminate corruption" and all that jazz - but as long as gamespace is structured by algorithms and allegorithms, corruption is just another algorithm politicians will figure out and utilize in order to win the game.

Enjoy Yourself. Categorically.

I've been formulating an idea in my head for the past couple days, and I suppose there's no better time to let it air out online than at 1:45 in the morning.

Andrejevic introduced us to the idea of the digital enclosure and drew a parallel to the land enclosure movement forming the basis of capitalism. Just as the land enclosure movement (the creation of private property) led to the development of distinct classes, so the digital enclosure leads to a distinct separation between prosumers and the state/corporations.

Todd McGowan, in The End of Dissatisfaction?, posits another monumental transformation of society. It is, he says, "the transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction)." One of the authors (I'm not sure which, at the moment) in Rebooting Democracy wrote that millenials have an individual sense of self-purpose, but no sense of collective duty. What if, on the other hand, "the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible.?" McGowan believes this is true, and it begs the question: is the only maxim that we can will to be universally applicable, simply put: enjoy yourself? If, as Kant believed, morality rests on the categorical imperative, what does that say about the morality of the millenials?

Enjoyment is particularly individual. If the digital enclosure creates a new kind of class antagonisms, and the latest generation is too involved in enjoying themselves to notice, what does that mean for the future of civil society?

Deliberation or De-Liberation?

There is a certain sense of optimism permeating the readings for today in Rebooting Democracy. Much the literature is concerned with how to make the internet, blogs and "echo chambers" work in such a way to increase the democratic potential of the medium.

I hesitate to be so optimistic, however. The democratic potential of the internet is there, to be sure, but it rests on control being in the hands of the people. So far, that has not been the case. While D. Travers Scott, in "Tempests of the Blogosphere," from Digital Media and Democracy says that blogflops can be attributed to a lack of a sense of storytelling, is that really all there is at play? He says that "Communicative agency, expanded through technology, allows more individuals to better join the mediated public sphere and thereby participate in civic deliberation." The question, then, becomes how to define deliberation.

While David Weinberger, in "Echo Chambers = Democracy," says that echo chambers actually increase deliberation and reasoned discussion, Scott notes that "participation in the mere proliferation of messages is by no means necessarily engaging others in antagonistic, productive, political debate." It may be true that most people will not put their ethics aside to sit down and have a reasoned conversation with those who hold diametrically opposed viewpoints, this does not mean that the answer is to continue this trend online. Perhaps the answer, instead, is to encourage exactly the kind of reasoned discussion that Weinberger discounts as unrealistic. If we believe that our representative democracy works because of deliberation, it makes very little sense to say that real deliberation is impractical.

The liberation of online discussion and the "freedom" it offers - is this real or perceived? Are we simply substituting passive participation online for actual participation in politics? Is our liberty to have a hand in how our government works gaining ground - or is the ground itself crumbling?

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.