photo credit: irina slutsky

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

photo credit: jfpickard

Notes, as ever, under the cut.

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Digital Media – Critical Perspectives, Part 1

The Uses and Meanings of ‘Technological Objects’, a guest lecture by Prof. David Morley. If the two ‘pure’ approaches to digital media are (1) technological determinism and (2) cultural constructivism, Morley was all about the constructivism.

Unfortunately, this equating to a two-hour session of him tilting at illusory windmills, for – however determinist we may appear – ‘pure’ technological determinism died with McLuhan. Equally, ‘pure’ constructivism can no longer be held as a tenable position, as it tends to radically underemphasise the novelty of new media’s technical affordances.

Technological objects as symbolic, as well as functional (Silverstone). Barthes’ notion of ‘the superlative object of [its] time” – car, washing machine, mobile phone, USB memory stick. A specific artefact which becomes metonymic of technology as a whole (see: Anth & Representation, Wk 3: marked vs. unmarked terms). The technocultural transubstantiation of consumer appliances, fuelled by ubiquity. It’s why this works:

Audience studies? Morley’s accusation is that much of new technology studies operates with old models of media effects. It’s important to recognise that people use media in different ways; audiences bring their own cultural baggage to the … home entertainment centre.

No television? “So what does your furniture point at?” (Friends)

Take the mobile phone. The single most frequently lost item on the London Underground. And that’s a place with no mobile connectivity. What are people doing, without connectivity, that means they can leave their phone on the tube? Seriously. Mobile as security blanket, as social barrier, as portable private space, as identity vector, as St. Christopher Medallion …

So, the important question: how much determinacy do you want to give the object? How much agency can you cede? Think of our discussion of virtuality and cybernetics in the Cold War, and the abstraction of human responsibility (see Digital Media #5). What is technology, even? Language, sanitation, cartography? I’m thinking Civilization II (1996), and the tech-tree:

Technology – neither good nor bad, but intensely political in its affordances and capabilities. Important discourse-clusters (memeplexes?) relating to novelty, upgrade, innovation, and hacking.

“I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” as symbolic warfare (see Anth & Rep #8). A semiotic tennis of campaigns and counter-campaigns:

Morley >> “It’s about the non-material meanings we attach to technology, as much as its capabilities and affordances.”

Us >> “Well, yes. We thought that was the point.”

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21st Century American Fiction

Two weeks worth of seminars, amalgamated into a four-hour LitFest. The novels: Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust. Finding the former a work of baffling scale, and far too diffuse to absorb properly, my surrender followed with relative speed. On the Meyer, however, I was doing my presentation …

Presentation notes, as a .pdf:

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Anthropology & Representation

A time-shifted seminar, with footage of a lecture from the reading week shown in the room where it was initially filmed – a phenomenon both recursive and faintly unsettling.

Economic anthropology. Gifts. Colonialism as an economic exercise. Debt as a moral excuse. The infinite desire of the conquistador. Economics as justice, as “common sense”. Communism – not as totality, but economic mode within capitalism (open source software vs. Apple / Microsoft). The breakdown of market economics in times of natural disaster, or when the cost is sufficiently low (asking for a light, for directions, for the time). Societies in which you cannot eat your own pigs, but must eat the pigs of your neighbour – permanent artificial dependencies. Contrast with: commercial exchange as a relationship that cancels itself.

The man in action. Well, not “the man”, but this man. We are all already communists (reconsidered). Yes:

The reciprocal act of taking-out-for-dinner only works when the two parties are assumed to be equal. Questions of hierarchical debt, or precedent. A continuum between theft and charity, with neither extreme implying an ongoing relationship.

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Digital Media – Critical Perspectives, Part 2

Technoscience, and how to do it!

Watch as new media slides peculiarly into science & technology studies, with a convergence/remediation of information, communication, and … biotechnology. Wait, what?

Evolutionary psychology, artificial life, genomics >> hegemonic discourses, based on information, and much more conservative than they initially appear.

Media about science, questions of content & form. We’re talking embodiment, affective computing, intelligent media. It’s all made of the same stuff – the same technobabble, the same framings. The so-called ‘science wars‘ have broken down, giving way to wetware, synthetic biology (see: ‘At home with the DNA hackers‘), and the rapid proliferation of biologic metaphors pretty much everywhere.

Hmm.

photo credit: shareski

We’re left with McLuhan as revenant. Scrapping the determinism in his work, Kember reckons we may yet need his physicalism and notions of embodiment. In 2010, let us talk of media not as agent, but prosthesis.

END OF {AUTUMN TERM}

PLEASE REBOOT

“Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter.”

- Prof. James Boyle, The Public Domain

(via @mathpunk)

“We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassains patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.”

- Randall Munroe, xkcd

Spent a significant chunk of my Saturday afternoon watching Allan Sekula‘s documentary The Lottery of the Sea (2006). Here’s the blurb:

“Iconoclast photographer and documentarian Allan Sekula unfolds a series of variations shot in the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Japan and other maritime countries around two of his major obsessions: globalization and the sea. In this rumination on the sea as a “primordial source of sublimity,” Sekula explores a matrix of narratives – Greek myths, American movies, and stories of longshoremen, lost sailors and displaced populations – and rejects on the globalizing effects of Adam Smith’s notion of the seafaring life as a form of gambling.”

At 179 minutes, it’s a bit of an endurance test, with the unashamedly grim and grubby worms-eye-view of global capitalism thudding regularly, as a hammer pummelling you into submission. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad documentary, because it isn’t. And if it was, that wouldn’t be the point. Sekula’s VO work is lyrical and seductive. There are some really striking sequences, particularly those focusing on the Panama Canal and the Prestige oil spill. The politics is a bit heavy-handed, but there’s an interesting contrast between the diffuse “affective politics” of the anti-globalisation movement and the more overtly class-based syndicalism of the dock workers.

It does hang together well, with the pieces least relevant to the narrative trajectory being interesting enough to warrant inclusion on their own merit. More importantly, it’s a powerful antidote to the digitality of most media coverage of globalisation (the BBC Box being a rare exception, but still – by its very nature – hitched to the digital) … focusing instead on the gunk of the oil spills, the metallic bulk of the shipping containers.

Overall, it’s a gruelling and unevenly paced documentary, but with enough interest to sustain a viewing. Doesn’t require much active brain work, but will leave you with questions and images – a beached squid dragging itself back to the water // a domestic servant, behind glass, moving to the drumbeats of the anti-globalisation protesters in the streets outside // bored-looking junior Panamanian government personnel, overseeing the endless rubber stamping of paperwork for flags of convenience …

They’ve given me a platform to rant and rail against Baroness Susan Greenfield; made their interview rushes available for people to download, embed, and remix; and actually seem to be listening to the comments and suggestions they’ve recieved.

This clip – in which web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee turns the camera on his interviewer, Aleks Krotoski – is one of my favorite videos of the year:

Two people sharing a passion – it’s intimate, authentic, and utterly of-the-moment. So zeitgeisty it hurts your teeth. And I love it.

(Admittedly, this video is an off-the-cuff clip from Tim, rather than an official output of the documentary, but the BBC enabled this meeting of minds – so my point on the BBC being awesome stands.)

The above is a slide lifted from Growth After the Financial Crisis, a fantastic lecture from Venezuelan techno-economist Carlota Perez at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Audio available here. Surprisingly accessible, with moments of pure clarity, it comes highly recommended …

“there is *always* over-investment in infrastructure, and that’s one of the reasons for the bubbles …”

Shaking the unpleasant memories of bone dry theories of international political economy ingested then regurgitated as part of my undergrad degree (mostly about tulips), Perez‘s is an approach which excites me.

Although I haven’t (yet) read her book, the core thesis of her work seems to rest on the relationships and interlinking of technology, institutional structures, innovation and speculative finance in a way that – gasp! – actually seems to explain things.

In the field (political economy?), Perez seems to be what’s known as a neo-Schumpeterian – someone whose work builds on the work of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Now, while remaining relatively unknown outside the academy, one of Schumpeter’s ideas does seem to have crept into the popular consciousness: “creative destruction“.

Interestingly, in the link just given, Wikipedia’s contributors have chosen to illustrate “creative destruction” with the image of a camera. Outpaced by digital photography, the assumption is that the Kodaks & Polaroids of our business landscape are dinosaurs: in their death throes, if not already extinct.

But then something weird happens. Polaroid is reclaimed as a cultural icon by the analog-fetishists, the enthusiasts & the hipsters … and it all goes a bit new media, a bit long-tail. End result: The Impossible Project. Professional amateurs + photography + the internet. Weird, but deeply, effortlessly cool.

For a “refocusing” Kodak, meanwhile, we see something equally strange. A (hypothetical) future incarnation of the firm (“Kodacell”) is claimed by Canadian journalist / science fiction author Cory Doctorow,  as an important actor in his upcoming novel Makers … currently unfolding as an internet serial on the website of its publisher, Tor Books. Still with me? Good.

So, from the mouth of the ‘new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell’, we get the following:

“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.”

Occasionally, there are moments where Doctorow’s writing becomes thin & (unapologetically?) didactic. Characters become authorial mouthpieces; puppets of a higher narrative power. This opening monologue from Landon Kettlewell (Doctorow’s Hubertus Bigend?) shows this kind of didactic writing – setting the book’s tone, hinting at themes & context.

Doctorow’s novel is still being serialised: at the time of writing, we’re not even a fifth of the way through (13/81).  But while I only have the first chronological “section” to work with, and even if it fails as prediction, Makers seems more important than your average sci-fi novel. More believeable.

When Doctorow shows us what life’s like for those driving developments in “new work” – the Kettlewells, the embedded journalists & geeks on the ground – he’s giving us a literary look at the origins of a Kondratiev wave. In this case, a wave rooted in the technologies of desktop manufacturing & rapid protovation. A wave which comes crashing down at a point of economic stagnation; when it is becoming increasingly apparent that, to quote Chairman Bruce:

“The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.”

And our new frontiersmen? Our Kondratiev surfers? They’re the dumpster divers & shed-dwellers; the squatters with weight problems & their own 3d printers. The everygeek. The target demographic of BoingBoing and Make magazine. And when Kettlewell & his contemporaries hand these Makers the key to the company jet, revolution is in the air.

Hmm? Us? Don’t worry, we’re only reconfiguring the techno-economic paradigm …

(excerpt from Carlota Pérez’s Technological revolutions and financial capital, 2003)

So, the first “chunk” of Makers appearing to compress the installation stage to a matter of months (?), by the end of which, “new work” accounts for something like 20% of US employment. The section concludes with a bursting bubble, as Kettlewell realises -

“Sure, if you looked at [the numbers] our way, they were great. If you looked at them the way the Street looks at them, we were in deep shit. Analysts couldn’t figure out how to value us. Add a little market chaos and some old score-settling assholes … and it’s a wonder we lasted as long as we did. They’re already calling us the twenty first century Enron.”

The “Kodacell” iteration of the technology withers on the vine, but something survives: the techno-economic paradigm shift continues elsewhere.  And with an abrupt temporal leap at the start of the thirteenth instalment, we’re around to see our beloved “new work” stripped of its gleam, absorbed by the margins, and – minus the marketing and distribution channels of the corporate dinosaurs – return to the junk yard. The revolution has stalled, and we’re looking at transition to nowhere.

C’est tres favela chic, non?

And it’s here that we realise we’re rooting for “new work”, a model of innovation & employment, far more than any of the characters. I want to see the paradigm shift complete. Although interesting, I find myself caring far less about the intricate, self-defeating loops of Suzanne’s love life or the body image issues of the geeks on the ground. For me, the characters matter in narrative sense only in as much as they are the revolution – less Kondratiev surfers than agents of the wave, enabling the paradigm to shift through their actions and reactions… But this is starting to sound a bit weird and, well, Hegelian, so I’ll leave that there.

Ahem.

Returning to the main thrust of my argument (ramble?), the reason I believe Makers is an important book is that it’s simultaneously blueprint, voice, and analysis. “New work” is presented as something desirable; a positive alternative to the ossified hierarchies and bureaucracies of the Fordist economy (Perez’s “Post-war Golden age”), but – at least in its early stages – dependent upon those very same structures. From the current section, it’s clear that the first configuration of the relationship between “old” and “new work” was untenable, and if “new work” is to succeed, it’ll have to find an alternative way of self-organising, free from the patronage & indulgence of the Kettlewells of the old order.

It’ll be interesting to see how that happens, exactly how rocky & obstacle-laden Doctorow chooses to make the road to revolution, and the balance of attention given to characters and milieu. Regardless, this looks to be a fantastic book, and contains the seeds of a potently optimistic and (despite what I was muttering earlier about Hegel) SEHI-driven future.

To conclude – Makers is exactly what we need right now. I expect it to make a big splash when it’s released in dead-tree format come October, and I’d like to see more (science) fiction in a similar, neo-Schumpeterian mould.  The 21st century is, after all, when it all changes Schumpeter’s Century.

(Ford Model T image by dave_7)

From what I can make out, Open_Sailing = seasteading + SEHIs + Oekonux + Driving Over Lemons, with the scary libertarians replaced by something like the old-school, Victorian scientific expedition.

In other words, a more palatable brand of seasteading from the Sundance generation – far more likely to win round the sympathies of venture altruists, social entrepreneurs, and the general public.  There’s a full presentation (opens pdf), with some useful stuff that resonates with quantum governance, stigmergy, open source infrastructure, aquaculture, and all that Superstruct-y goodness. A welcome departure from the global guerillas & Somali pirates, and a potent booster shot for those looking to top-up their optimism.

So raise the kite and steer us westward – to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and beyond!

I’ve restructured one of my undergraduate dissertations as a hypertext, mixed in some video footage and CC-licensed images, and thrown it up as its own site.

‘Containing the Uncontainable: Guantánamo Bay and the Limitless Threat‘ – it’s about terrorism, geography, theology, aesthetics and the apocalypse.  It might be a bit dense, and I admit to have been a bit overkeen on the subheading front, but there’s definitely some good stuff in there.