For those who might be interested, moved this blog to marginalutilityannex.wordpress.com.

Thanks for reading!

data self ideas

so I don't forget:



boyd's paper sets the stage with basic ideas about constructed nature of the self, the way individuality emerges from social embeddedness and so on. I am speculating that this self is less likely to be read/experienced as inherent, as the revelation of one's true inner nature, as the ultimate expression of unique individuality — as "authentic. Instead it is postauthentic: the values of consumerist authenticity are being changed by "prosumerism" and the ease of broadcastability of consumer behavior and identity/status signifiers and so on. Social media feeding back an identity to users may prompt those users to eschew the idea of being true to a static inner self in favor of a more dynamic form of identity, as something we have reported to us and then try to live up to. The data self reported to us is kind of status update from ourselves that surprises us as novel, allows us to consume our own personality as novelty.

boyd notes that teens' "efforts to achieve privacy without relying on the control of information are still an important signal" that they have not given up on privacy altogether. In my "Hi Haters" essay, I try to get at something similar, what sort of practices of seeking control over identity and representations of self people turn to when networked society has taken it away or made it feel out of control. I argue that the subjective feeling of this condition is a kind of "cruel optimism" a la Lauren Berlant. We accommodate an immiserating condition rather than remove ourselves from the network.

I think that latching on to the post-hoc data self is another way of trying to evade the misery that can come from the loss of control over self-representation. It's not giving up on identity, but on the personal control and autonomy implicit in the individualistic ideal version of identity. (Maybe not the worst thing. As boyd writes, "In order to address networked privacy, we need to let go of our cultural fetishization with the individual as the unit of analysis.")

It's protective to embrace the data self, not the vulnerable inner-conjured self, which is conditioned/determined/interpreted inescapably anyway by all sorts of outside influences and always has been. We were just able to blind ourselves to that much more easily before. (This is why Simondon's idea of preindividuality — or at least what little I understand of it at this point — seems more relevant to me. Need to read something like this.) Looking to data is a defense mechanism, masquerading perhaps as a gesture of curiosity or discovery, or a kind of self-tracker yearning to know the real objective truth of the self. (Actually, looking to data self for "truth" prohibits or suspends the formation of a "true self" as we used to think of it, as the result of self-actualization, as an expression of emerging and uniquely personal will.)

Basically I'm trying to sketch out the subjective experience of having an alienated identity: When you know you can't control how you will be seen and that much of what you do is open to reinterpretation, how does one build narratives of identity, if at all? The contours of this subjectivity are not determined by some notion of inner "true self" or the search for it; instead it is dictated by the ongoing search for the represented self: now the true self is how others/machines see us and interpret our data, which we seek to have reported back to us.

We redefine the "true self" on the basis of ideological conditions and affective needs. We accept a true self that makes those conditions tolerable. But building walls around self with privacy no longer viable way of protecting ideology of individualism. Consumerism and capitalism seeking ways to move beyond individualism as ideological pillar, into subsumption of everyday life.

Marx's concept of the "general intellect"

The genealogy of the concept of immaterial labour is thus Marxist and is an innovative development of Marx’s notion of the ‘general intellect’ as described in the Grundrisse, in a section entitled ‘Fragment on Machines’ (1973). As summarized by Paolo Virno (1996), Marx identifies a future…

From here

That is a pretty good description. The point of using “general intellect” as a term is to indicate how the “real subsumption” of everyday life under capital generates this redemptive force, the general intellect, that might be brought to bear to end capitalism.

As I read it, the general intellect is only possible in a capitalist society that has developed means of production and associated modes of social organization to connect people in this hyperproductive way, so that social relations are always relations of production, and nothing more. Usually in the moments that this becomes clearer to me, I get filled with depair — the measure of the value of my relationships is always going to be referred in the end to the prerogatives of capital! I am measuring the value of my life on capital’s terms, even when I am focusing on the sorts of relationships that are supposed to transcend it — the kinds of “love” capitalist ideology elevates as a compensation for capitalism’s otherwise unmitigated immiseration.

But that’s just the reason to be optimistic, perhaps; the general intellect concept makes social productivity more explicit, more tangible, and perhaps more subject to an alternative way of being coordinated rather than through the profit motive. Yet the ubiquity of the general intellect means we can’t return to sociality that is not underwritten by productivity (if ever there was one). No pure relations, if “pure” is defined as uncalculating, unproductive, for its own sake.

Notes about early commercial fiction

Character is given, not developed in premodern fiction. It is a destiny, not a responsibility, and can be detected only by mystical means – astrology, intuition, phrenology, physiognomy.

A new kind of reading (as documented by Chartier) leads to a new kind of pleasure (as documented by Colin Campbell, delineated by readings of 18th commercial fiction).

New pleasure leads to new social order, oriented around a consumption economy producing disposable goods, disposable pleasures for the profit of capitalists, and to pacify more successfully the otherwise restless  proles whose labor is exploited.

Ads, social emulation, novelistic production invent interiority and motivational schemes, the identity quest, inventing motivations necessary for mobilizing consumer revolution.

Early commercial novel as a miscellany, read like a shopping catalog by bourgeois in the market for new emotional experiences. This approach to reading may have been linear but consisted of skimming, searching for peaks and valleys, affective intensities tied to a narrative predictable enough to not require careful or sustained attention. Identification is not with a specific hero or heroine but instead multiple choices are offered for a variety of potential pleasures, many of which are contradictory. Sustained identification was not yet necessary for a plentiful yield of satisfactory emotional titillation. It may not be required now, though such identification is ideologically indicated, supporting capitalistic individualism. Readers can always partake of vicarious pleasure in unrelated moments through characters who are diametrically opposed. Sometimes, too, readers can identify with the storyteller as well as with the characters within the story, for the peculiar pleasure that comes from being the presumably unimplicated observer -- the joy of transcendence and noncontingent invention.

Bath was a perfect location for English novels in the late 18th century: a locus of gambling, nascent consumerism, medical quackery. The tropes of the early commercial novel are products of the same family, with the same strategies and pleasures offered. The novel is a kind of patent medicine that works on level of emotional fantasy, which is produced as the most basic consumer good, with no intrinsic value other than the faith one puts into believing in it, in exchanging money for it.

From Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977):

Douglas argues that the marginalization of clergy along with women provided a whole sector of society interested in having a cultural influence because their real influence was negated. This cultural influence was inculcated through pop culture: novels and such that inculcated sentimental notions that ultimately provided the basis for a individual invested in formulating identity through consumerism. This social segment gains compensatory power for being masters of a discourse that ultimately strips them of “real” power – they can be masters of taste, while that taste is exercised in a field created by their marginalization, by their subordination to a social order that deprives them of “real” “meaningful” work.

A compensatory power was granted to the feminized (women and clergy) for their promotion of values (glamour, narcissism) that kept them marginalized from the true means of production. They could promote values that supported the existing relations of production while gaining only symbolic, cultural capital. This cultural capital is valorized through promoting “self-justification” instead of the “theological” concerns American religious writers began with.

Douglas describes the emergence of a new kind of reading: 

‘Reading’ in its new form was many things; among them it was an occupation for the unemployed, narcissistic self-education for those excluded from the harsh school of practical competition . . . .  Literature was functioning more and more as a form of leisure, a complicated mass dream life….  Literature was revealing and supporting a special class, a class defined less by what they produced than by what they consumed.  [Ministers and women] wrote not just to win adherents to their views, but to make converts to literature, to sustain and encourage the habit of reading itself.” (9).  

They were“ intent on claiming culture as their peculiar property, one conferring on them a special duty and prerogative” (10). 

Ultimately “sentimentalism provided the inevitable rationalization of the economic order” (12) – i.e. covered up the contradictions inherent to capitalism.  Sentimentalism is what is lost in the pursuit of masculine, expansionist goals – what is celebrated even as it's destroyed. These values come to seem to be lost "naturally," rather than as a cost of the implementation of an economic system. Nostalgia thus dismantles active protest, and critique. 

This applies to all Man of Feeling-type works of sensibility, too – sensibility is a demonstration that manners are being refined but also that capitalism is accepted as inevitable and what will be destroyed can be celebrated, its loss lamented as the sad way of the world and not the result of choices. Heroes of sensibility are nostalgized and marginalized as unable to exist in the real world of capitalist exploitation, which is just a fact of life, which feminized hereos nobly but futilely ignore. (They disdain "interestedness.")

In discussing the marginalization of women, Douglas makes the standard point about their removal from productive processes as home industry declined. To compensate, women became domestic managers, and this meant more often than not managing the emotional climate of the household -- along the lines of Hochschild's concept of emotional labor. This new role also stressed woman’s role as procurer and consumer. In this way, as domestic workers responsible for producing affect, women become explicitly productive through their consumption, mainly by latching onto the fashion system. (They become early "prosumers.") But literacy was the bait for the trap, according to Douglas.

The supreme product of feminine fashion, the chief emblem of the emerging female consumer, was not found in the lady’s clothing, but rather, odd as it may initially sound, in her reading and writing. The feminine proclivity for novels, the young miss’s resort to the pen and the confidante, a standard theme for jest in 18th and 19th century fiction, had its serious side. A Marxist might argue persuasively that American girls were socialized to immerse themselves in novels and letters in order to make their powerlessness in a masculine and anti-humanist society more certain and less painful. (71)

The stories they read and wrote were themselves courses in the shopping mentality, exercises in euphemism essential to the system of flattery which served as the rationale for the American woman’s economic position (72-3).  

A matter of compensatory flattery: reading/writing supports the value of this flattery of detailed attention to the things that trivialize women, that rationalize her social insignificance, or rather her significance as mere consumer/trophy.

Shopping for luxuries is where one exhibits taste, which certifies its possessors' value. Taste/judgement are constructed as active skills, rather than passive choosing; as meaningful and productive activity rather than a consolation for exclusion from the real meaningful decisions. She does not do for herself, but persuades, through her tasteful displays, others to do for her – “influence” in Douglas’s sense. She exerts influence through taste, because she has no direct access for power – this exercise of vicarious power is, in Douglas’s analysis, celebrated in the sentimental texts of Victorian America. Women should live by proxy and feel like they have achieved privilege by being reduced to mere shoppers. This privilege of taste becomes their function, what makes them at least feel indispensable. 

Male sentimentalists, according to Douglas, find their vocation in depicting and glamorizing female suffering, examining and explaining it: “Sentimentalist self-absorption, a commercialization of the inner life” (308).  Sentimentalism promotes the idea that the inner life should be subjected to standards of taste, to consumerist decisions, that feelings exist only to be displayed, to establish an identity in the eyes of others, where it may be affirmed, legitimated, substantiated.

In The Political Unconscious, Jameson argues that there must be, in culture

a process of compensatory exchange … in which the henceforth manipulated viewer is offered specific gratifications in return for his or her consent to passivity. In other words, if the ideological function of mass culture is understood as a process whereby otherwise dangerous and protopolitical impulses are ‘managed’ and defused, rechanneled and offered spurious objects, then some preliminary step must also be theorized in which these same impulses – the raw material upon which the process works – are initially awakened within the very text that seeks to still them (287).  

So popular fiction must evoke the conflict it wants to defuse, it must inscribe it with some urgency, and offer, in Jameson’s view, a “Utopian” solution: “visions of external life, of the transfigured body, of preternatural sexual gratification” etc.  So these wishes are traces also, hints that a problem is being masked, resolved, when these sorts of fulfillment are offered.  “A complex strategy of rhetorical persuasion in which substantial incentives are offered for ideological adherence.” These substantial incentives being satisfying mental habits. 

Serious action

I have a long essay in the latest New Inquiry issue about the metaphor of "microfame" and what sort of ideological work it performs. (It's not online yet, but it will be sometime this month.) I think I let the ideas marinate too long and they ended up saturating my thinking so much that the essay became a stew that I  threw whatever I came across into. Every kind of visibility is microfame, everywhere, all the time!

One of the dubious claims I was trying to make was that people using social media in a "microfame" sort of way are (1) seeking intensity to make up for the disappointments of everyday social media use, which stokes a far more intense need for affirmation than ordinary people in one's community can generally fulfill and (2) seeking a pre-emptive defense against the fateful loss of privacy by turning that eventuality (the transformation into oneself into what Mary Anne Franks calls a "unwilling avatar") into a self-defined risk.

After I finished writing my piece, I read Erving Goffman's "Where the Action Is" (one of the essays in the collection Interaction Ritual), which gave me a much clearer way of thinking about online risk-taking and reputation wagers (what Goffman in the essay calls "character contests"). The fringes of social-media connectivity offer a field for taking calculated risks, for what gamblers have always called "action," an intensity over ventured stakes that makes the present moment seem like the only thing that matters in the world. Gamblers' wagers are monetary and wait for the roll of the dice to decide the outcome; the anxious and microfamous risk their reputation and the immediate deciding outcome is likes, reblogs, and so on. This immediacy screens the larger ramifications of the risk down the line (much like gamblers aren't worried in the moment about being destitute outside of the casino).

Goffman theorizes that we seek action to call forth otherwise inaccessible dimensions of  "character," and prove our poise and "composure," a term of art for Goffman that amounts to keeping one's cool and earning a reputation for it -- the ability to act natural. "Excitement and character display, the by-products of practical gambles, ... become in the case of action the tacit purpose of the whole show." Goffman suggests that we are fundamentally "ambivalent about safe and momentless living" and we gravitate away from the comforts of everyday life to the fringes to seek "serious action."

At the same time, this makes us believe we can assert control over the way our lives our contingent and at the mercy of fate. Through action, we seem to choose the momentous occasions for ourselves. Goffman: "It is as if the illusion of self-determinancy were a payment society gives to individuals in exchange for their willingness to perform jobs that expose them to risk." Self-construction has arguably become one of those jobs for all of us, given the real subsumption of subjectivity to capital -- no ontological security without routing your thoughts and feelings through communicative capitalism's circuits. In my New Inquiry essay, I frame that real subsumption in terms of "the threat of invisibility" -- the feeling that one will disappear from meaningful society if one stops participating in online social networks. This is complicated, of course, by the threats inherent in visibility -- surveillance, context collapse, harassment, etc. The tension between these simultaneous threats leaves us craving action as a way of re-establishing control.

Most people aren't courageous enough to seek action outright, Goffman argues, so they pursue vicarious substitutes in entertainment (they consume the extreme risky behavior of heroes in books, movies, TV) or in packaged thrills like amusement park rides and whatnot.

Here's how Goffman attenuates the division between action seekers and (to quote Bud from Repo Man) "ordinary fucking people":

Looking for where the action is, one arrives at a romantic division of the world. On one side are the safe and silent places, the home, the well-regulated role in business, industry, and the professions; on the other are all those activities that generate expression, requiring the individual to lay himself on the line and place himself in jeopardy during a passing moment. It is from this contrast that we fashion nearly all our commercial fantasies.

Social media, especially highly structured sites like Facebook, are partly akin to the amusement park in providing a structured way to take risks with identity and behave in risky ways (stalking, sharing "too much," etc.) and partly akin to old vicarious entertainments, only the risk-taking heroes are peers, not fictional characters or celebrities. They are instead the microfamous; they are ourselves. The commercial fantasies are about ourselves. Like the action at plush casinos where you get to play at high-rollerdom, this social media action is "at once vicarious and real." The different social media sites offer different ways to calibrate this balance, but it is easy to get wrong and they encourage that we lose sight of the more far-reaching consequences of impulsive behavior. The vicarious thrill of being able to broadcast, to seize a moment of self-definition (which must be risky, shameful if you buy into Sedgwick's gloss on Silvan Tomkins's affect theory, to feel true) is social media's product for users.

Social media supplies high-risk opportunities to definitively establish our presence in absence, in a way that feels like something under our control, something we sought out. Through our composure in the risky performance of self, we prove that the identity we are constructing is also natural, who we really are. It has gravity; we are not simply deletable, ephemeral.

To experience action, people need to go where "the chances that they will be obliged to take chances" increase, Goffman notes. It seems like people figure out where these places are online, whether Tumblr or OkCupid or Craigslist, etc. Goffman's final line in the essay still resonates: "These naked little spasms of the self occur at the end of the world, but there at the end is action and character."

"Symbolic efficiency," "liquid modernity" and identity-capacity

I am mainly concerned lately with how "becoming oneself" has turned into a crappy job — a compulsory low-paying, low-skill job. Rather than work within the accepted constraints of an inherited identity and embrace the pleasures that that identity defines as possible and sufficient, we are sentenced to continually develop our identity in an unlimited field, finding only fleeting pleasure in the midst of perpetual structural dissatisfaction.

Somehow our capacity to have an identity has become someone else's capital stock; we are driven to add labor to that raw material to make profits for the owners of our digitized identity containers -- the social media sites and device makers and so on. Interiority has become a factory; social media the showroom floor.

But what turned our identity-capacity into alienable capital? Do we just blame modernity and technological change for eroding the traditions and limitations on which stable identity was once based? Or to invert that, is technology to be credited for expanding our identity capacity, for removing the time-space limits that once constrained it and made "working" on who we are a possibility no one thought to consider?

Related question: Is capital concentrating on the technology that opens up the field of identity making because it satisfies individuals' demands for "freedom" to be who they want to be, or is that how capital is selling an intrusive, invasive technology that aggressively dissolves personal integrity in order to make more malleable raw material? Technology makes workers more "abstract" in the sense that they are more amenable to doing "whatever" and even embrace the pursuit of novelty for its own sake as an expansion of their personal capabilities. (Oh, I know, evolution programmed us to love novelty, and various regions of the brain light up on MRIs when we are distracted by something new, and capitalism is a perfect expression of our evolutionary destiny as a species. Criticism is meaningless, etc.)

Jodi Dean's use of "symbolic efficiency" (borrowed from Žižek, who adapted it from Lacan) offers one way of theorizing this condition. For Dean and Žižek, the loss of symbolic efficiency means we have a hard time believing in the sort of expert systems and ideological constructs we are supposed to believe in to fix our identity within socially sanctioned limits. The problem of course is that society now sanctions chiefly limitlessness for personal identity; family, religion, etc. are mostly outmoded by the technologically enhanced pursuit of experience that we can record and recirculate to enrich the media circuits of "communicative capitalism."

Dean writes in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, "we never really know whether what we say registers with the other as what we mean as well as our sense that we are never quite sure what 'everybody knows:' There is no ultimate guarantor of meaning, no recognized authority that stops our questioning or assuages our doubts." No big Other to believe in or to do the believing for us.

In the absence of guarantees that the rightness or wrongness of our life choices is stable — a loss of faith in the language in circulation to talk about such things as duty, honor, virtue, etc. — we fall into the trap of pursuing quantity of experience instead. The given identity from society tends to be that of an insatiable consumer, the residual identity left after other identity groups are destabilized. "As a result of the critical work of these [social] movements, as well as the accompanying decline of the welfare state and empowering of neoliberalism, racial, sexual, and ethnic identities are less fixed, less stable, less available as determinate subject positions." The result, Dean argues, is a shift from a "Keynesian to a neoliberal ideological formation" in which identity is open-ended, not fixed by ISAs.

Neoliberal ideology does not produce its subjects by interpellating them into symbolically anchored identities (structured according to conventions of gender, race, work, and national citizenship). Instead, it enjoins subjects to develop our creative potential and cultivate our individuality. Communicative capitalism's circuits of entertainment and consumption supply the ever new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-fashioning-I must be fit! I must be stylish! I must realize my dreams. I must because I can— everyone wins. If I don't, not only am I a loser but I am not a person at all. I am not part of everyone. Neoliberal subjects are expected to, enjoined to, have a good time, have it all, be happy, fit, and fulfilled.

The end of the welfare state and decline of symbolic efficiency may appear to usher in a new era of freedom from rigid norms and expectations. But the fluidity and adaptability of imaginary identities is accompanied by a certain fragility and insecurity. Imaginary identities are incapable of establishing a firm place to stand, a position from which one can make sense of one's world. Moreover, their very mutability and normative indeterminacy, configure imaginary identities as key loci for operations of control (rather than internalized discipline), particularly those operations affiliated with desire and fear as they promise and provide enjoyment.

To put that another way, we are hailed not as somebody specific, but as someone with crucial potential and we must not disappoint. We are hailed as someone who should be happy and we must fulfill that expectation on alien terms. We are constrained to be strive for happiness; happiness is never allowed to be understood as complacency. It's personality kaizen: a requirement to constantly improve our capacity for pleasure and our efficiency in pursuing it and our flexibility in experiencing it. "The consumer today is imagined as excessive,
extreme, and unregulated. She is imagined, in other words, as a composite of the neoliberal market itself."

Zygmunt Bauman, in Liquid Modernity, offers a similar analysis of our anchorlessness, and how this leaves us vulnerable:

It is such patterns, codes and rules to which one could conform, which one could select as stable orientation points and by which one could subsequently let oneself be guided, that are nowadays in increasingly short supply. It does not mean that our contemporaries are guided solely by their own imagination and resolve and are free to construct their mode of life from scratch and at will, or that they are no longer dependent on society for the building materials and design blueprints. But it does mean that we are presently moving from the era of pre allocated 'reference groups' into the epoch of 'universal comparison', in which the destination of individual self-constructing labours is endemically and incurably underdetermined, is not given in advance, and tends to undergo numerous and profound changes before such labours reach their only genuine end: that is, the end of the individual's life.

There is no respite from self-construction; it's a cathedral that can't be completed. And the inevitable failures and shortcomings of our identity in progress, our inevitable disappointment with what we have and what we see being promised, what others seem to be allowed to enjoy, becomes our fault. Politics seems not to be a viable avenue to addressing our disgruntlement; instead soul-searching and more and more elaborate consumption, and just as important, mediated declarations of who we think we are by virtue of that consumption.

Networked individualism and oxymoronic "personalized communities"

From this paper by Barry Wellman, et al.

The technological development of computer networks and the societal flourishing of social networks are affording the rise of networked individualism in a positive feedback loop. Just as the flexibility of less-bounded, spatially dispersed, social networks creates demand for collaborative communication and information sharing, the rapid development of computer-communications networks nourishes societal transitions from group-based societies to network-based societies (Castells, 1996, 2000; Wellman, 2002).

Networked societies are themselves changing in character. Until quite recently, transportation and communication have fostered place-to-place community, with expressways and airplanes speeding people from one location to another (without much regard to what is in between). Telephone and postal communication have been delivered to specific, fixed locations. At present, communication is taking over many of the functions of transportation for the exchange of messages. Communication itself is becoming more mobile, with mobile phones and wireless computers proliferating.

Each person is a switchboard, between ties and networks. People remain connected, but as individuals, rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household. Each person operates a separate personal community network, and switches rapidly among multiple sub-networks. Even in more localistic Catalonia, people appear to meet their friends as individuals and not in family groups. In effect, the Internet and other new communication technology are helping each individual to personalize his or her own community. This is neither a prima facie loss nor gain in community, but rather a complex, fundamental transformation in the nature of community.

That seems like an accurate description of the transformation that we are in the midst of, but I'm puzzled by the implicit positive spin. My read of this transformation, folllowing people like Jodi Dean and postautonomist types like Virno, is that networked individualism is a boon for the communicative capitalism on which it depends, much in the same way that possessive individualism was a boon for consumerist capitalism. (Consumerism, conspicuous consumption, identity through shopping-based lifestyles, etc. -- the sort of stuff in Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self.) Community as defined by volume of communication persists, but community as a kind of collective subjectivity that prioritizes the group over the individual atoms is lost. The network formations emphasize this atomization, breaking the link to the pre-individual basis for subjectivity (a la Gilbert Simondon, described here).

A "personalized community" is an oxymoron; community is that which can't be personalized. That phrase is just a nice way of describing a network fromthe point of view of an individual node, which may be near or far from the center, rich or poor in connections. Once you've taken steps to personalize community, you are making it convenient, editing out or time-shifting the responsibilities it otherwise requires to suit the community of one.

Too much paranoias

Notes on Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiberoptics, chapter one (pdf)

Was excited to read this, given my recent interest in paranoia as a social-media state of mind, but ended up disappointed by this chapter, and may not read the rest of the book. But a few things struck me as worth preserving here for future reference.

The gist of it seems derived from the Deleuze essay on "control societies," though with a dubious emphasis on sexuality as the chief basis of subjectivity. Social technologies implement the control society, which makes freedom less a matter of open-ended possibility (freedom to) and more a matter of safety (freedom from). The attractiveness of the predominance of "freedom from" hinges on generalized paranoia.

The end of the Cold War has not dispelled paranoia but rather spread it everywhere: invisibility and uncertainty—of the enemy, of technology—has invalidated deterrence and moved paranoia from the pathological to the logical. This twinning of control and freedom subverts the promise of freedom, turning it from a force that simultaneously breaks bonds and makes relation possible to the dream of a gated community writ large. 

The internet medium becomes the field in which these affective shifts can occur.

Is the Internet a tool of freedom or control? Does it enable greater self-control or surveillance?... These questions and their assumptions are not only misguided but also symptomatic of the increasingly normal paranoid response to and of power. This paranoia stems from the reduction of political problems into technological ones—a reduction that blinds us to the ways in which those very technologies operate and fail to operate

I bolded the part that seems key. The kind of paranoia social technologies instigate aren't political; they are personal. They don't prompt users to become suspicious of state or corporate power so much as present an illusion of radically decentralized power where all peers are potential enemies, and privacy is the preserve of the elite and the status aspiration of everyone else.

I'm most interested in Chun's suggestion that "the delusion of constant surveillance" is performing certain ideological work; she doesn't say this in the chapter, but this delusion is at once the fantasy of becoming a celebrity, of being worthy of being watched, as it is a paranoid fear. This is reminiscent of Althusser's classic interpellation theory, which holds that we are enjoy being singled out by institutional power (or "ideological state apparatuses") because it individuates us. When the advertisement, says "Hey, you," and we are flattered and impressed with our own importance. Individuation feels like a recognition of our autonomy, but it is a manifestation of the way we are controlled. (I suppose you could trace a lot of that back to Foucault as well.)

Every moment we are afraid for our privacy, we are thrilled by our celebrity. We can fantasize about people following our every move captured in social media, but that is not the point. Most shit we put up is ignored or vanishes from people's consciousnesses. What does matter though is the way the data persists and its context degrades, leaving it available to pop up in search queries and be put to whatever use the social-media companies or the state decide.

Chun argues that "Digital language makes control systems invisible: we no longer experience the visible yet unverifiable gaze but a network of nonvisualizable digital control." I think that sounds right, but I would modify that to speculate that we imagine control as gossipy neighbors spying (which diminishes its threat to a degree and makes it partly appealing), making us overlook how control is systemic and sustained by digital networks' ubiquitous data capture (regardless of whether any human ever reads all of it). The point is not that our privacy is invaded by this or that person; it's that no one is permitted to be private by default. It's a privilege of power.

Not only are we individuated by receiving attention on social media; we are also individuated by giving it. Chun notes that "Even when ‘lurking,’ you constantly send information. It is impossible to resist subjectivity by doing nothing (as Baudrillard once argued and encouraged) if we jack in or are jacked in." That seems like something we can easily overlook in an effort to use social media to our ends without having it warp our subjectivity.

Boundary work

From: "Anything But Heavy Metal": Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes" by Bethany Bryson, American Sociological Review, Vol. 61, No. 5. (Oct., 1996), pp. 884-899.

I have been thinking a lot lately about social exclusion and online social networks, and the idea of boundary work seems relevant to that. Not that I have any hard evidence for this (if there can be such a thing for ideological matters), but the ideology surrounding social media and the subjectivity we are supposed to experience in using them hinges on the illusion that we are performing boundary work but are not subject to it. This illusion relieves social anxiety and encourages a steady flow of data contributions that the platform owners can monetize. Ideally for social media companies, the exemption from boundary work would be predicated on the user's continual contribution: the more you post, the less you feel subject to judgment or vulnerable to exclusion.

That sounds paradoxical at best, since the more you say, the more you can be judged for. But the accretion of information has a defensive purpose; posting more can be pre-emptive. It can make users into elusive chameleons, or convey the impression that one is merely playing with identity rather than evincing some essential truth about oneself in social media. The more we say in social media, then, the less pinned-down our identity becomes. Further disclosures are meant to raise more questions, and require further elaborations, which provide more self-protection and actual obfuscation under the guise of clarifying one's self-presentation.

So while the ability to post at will lets users think they can post their way into inclusion within ever-shifting social environments, the network controls that social media place in users' hands provide them the means of exclusion and at least the fantasy that these controls can be operated with autonomy and impunity.

The implication of this is that the kind of status policing that once depended on taste can now depend on other network mappings of social space — the social graph. Its tangibility makes taste displays less significant, less determining. The boundary exists without the taste display to draw it; the online social networks can preserve it independent of the repeated demonstration of superior cultural capital. Social networks are like banks of cultural capital that way; the influence accrued can be manifest and stored in them, freeing users to behave otherwise in other contexts. It is not necessary to dislike cultural proxies in order to establish cultural capital and one's belonging to an elite group. The stakes just aren't that high with any particular cultural self-presentation or taste display.

Not only does the social hierarchy inhere in online cultural-capital banks and social graphs, but social media record so many self-presentations that they are all diminished in ultimate importance. Social media flatten the sense of occasion (a parallel to Benjamin's notion of an art work's aura); all events are equally sharable and capturable. Moments at which we experience a heightened publicity are vanishing; all moments are in theory equally public, equally an occasion; so there is no sense focusing on how one comes across in any given special moment.

I also think there is a useful distinction in the passage above between behavior and attitudes. Social media make a great deal of effort of capturing our attitudes as behavior and collapsing the difference between the two, thereby eliminating (perhaps inadvertently) the work we need and expect to perform to translate one into the other, to make symbolic exclusion have social-exclusion effects. But social-media capture may just make users conscious of a different level of "attitudes" that can elude capture yet express or contain the sentiment necessary to perform the offstage, impolite, antisocial acts of exclusion that ultimately sustain a given social order.

There is probably a more straightforward way of expressing this. Social-media use may elide the step we are accustomed to taking of translating the exclusionary attitude (the cultural capital) we want to show off into the identity performance we think we have to make to show it off. This is, in part, because there are no particular optimal occasions to show off, as everything is theoretically recordable and important. (It takes more collective effort to establish an "occasion." They are rarer as life becomes more easily digitizable and transmissible.)

So the boundary work, which you would think would become more explicit on social media, actually becomes more obscure, retreating to some as-yet-uncaptured region of everyday life and behavior. The cultural displays online are not boundary work at all, though we might pretend they are; the boundary work is already coded at the level of the network links. Lower status people can try to cultural-work their way to more links and influence, but higher status people are under no obligation to tip their hand about what cultural displays earn status, and can risk silly cultural displays with less fear of losing status.

And to take that further, the network that is hard-coded online may be a distraction from the uncoded networks in which real power circulates; the "secret societies" of the "power elite" that are guarded and kept private and so on. These are not given to Facebook to trace.

In short: social media sell us the idea that we can perform boundary work (develop our tastes so as to improve our status at others' expense) without being subject to it (we always get another chance to defend our tastes when they seem to lead to our being excluded). This is all very profitable for social-media companies, and it distracts us all from the real arenas of power, the networks that are defined by their ability to escape social-media capture, to transcend it.

Notes from Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces

I took these notes when I read the book seven or eight years ago. 

Bataille’s notion that humanity wants to act with no end in mind, to commit free acts of “destruction” not linked to civilized utility. Humans, instinctively wanting to act destructive, are made by a civilized society to feel alone in their destructive impulses, but others share this repressed urge, which expresses itself in society’s dark vices: gambling, incest, prostitution, drug addiction, wasted potential of all kinds. The bourgeoisie have forfeited this kind of open pleasure (which once formed the potlatch, the humiliation that can’t be returned). Marcus sees punk as a kind of potlatch, an eagerness to destroy for no reason, and assert a primal sense of being alive as opposed to dead, rationalized bourgeois culture. (395)

Isou: “Let youth cease to serve as a commodity merely to become the consumer of its own elan.” (271)

Postwar project: “To prove that real life was back, and to restrict the definition of real life to the pleasurable consumption of material goods within a system of male supremacy and corporate hegemony.” (258). This goes hand in hand with the “reality principle” or the quasi-Hegelian notion of accepting the limits of reality, of seeing reality as compromise of one’s ideals. To be realistic is to accept the hegemony and seek circumscribed happiness there (which is always just not quite attained, the unquenchable thirst is what the hegemony instills)

From a leftist book in 1984: “ The sixties is merely the name we give to a disruption of late-capitalist ideological and political hegemony, to a disruption of the bourgeois dream of unproblematic production, of everyday life as the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.” Were the radical movements of the sixties products of capitalism overreaching itself, succeeding too well? “Too many people had too much of everything that was on the market, and so they had the leisure to think about what else they might want.” (133)

Good quote from Arendt: “The transformation of the family man from a respectable member of society, interested in all public affairs to a ‘bourgeois’ concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon… Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of a hangman.” This is the effect of bogus private life and pseudo-individuality divorced from social interaction, and the consequences of man lacking meaningful work.

The 190s perverted 1960s rhetoric about risk, adventure and personal fulfillment and freedom as an individual to underwrite dog-eat-dog capitalism without an ounce of civic decency or common empathy among citizens.

The “popular” must be fashioned, must be produced as a rabble, and are thus made to be constitutively unstable. Popular culture creates this unstable rabble. The rabble doesn’t precede the junk culture made for it, made to make it. (149)

The idea of being “blackmailed by utility,” that one can’t criticize something that functions even if it demeans. Since it works, it must be accepted, must be accepted as “real” as in the “reality principle” of compromise.

Life lived as spontaneous art, as a utopian realization of pure freedom, with no moment continuous from the previous one, a commitment to perpetual reinvention at every instant -- who wants this as a permanent state, even as an ideal? Isn’t this better experienced convulsively, in carnivalesque fits that surprise us, or are even planned -- it may be that this is all we can tolerate, that to live like that is insane.

           

Ads conjure a desire for this kind of unknowable spontaneous freedom, this kind of eternal retransformation at every instant in the name of maximum happiness, and diverts it to take solace in goods when we realize that it can’t be fulfilled, that we can’t live up to the daring of our own dreams (planted by the ads, of course, but we don’t recognize it). So we blame ourselves and not the ads for the impossible desires we come to possess, and consume the ads even more eagerly as wish fulfillment dramas for those dreams of metamorphosis.

Capitalist value and cool

This line of thought occurred to me while I was in the dentist's chair having my teeth scraped. Why do I worry so much about being cool? This feels like an alien imperative, yet it cuts to the core of my social being. It seems like an objective necessity that benefits no one in particular; it's something I just seem to owe to my particular slice of the society. Cool would seem to have no practical relevance whatsoever (things are cool because they somehow exceed functionality -- they express style, purity, etc.) yet it feels like an inescapable compulsion. I am saddled with a subjectivity that responds to cool, that is structured by it, even when I struggle to reject it, evade it.

Whenever I am worried about being "cool," I am caught up in the capitalist configuration of social relations and turning my consumption, my efforts to sustain and "reproduce" myself, and even my efforts to concretize and express my identity into labor on capitalism's terms. I am regarding social relations as intrinsically competitive with the reward being not reciprocation in the abstract but validation as a zero-sum thing -- I win the exchange when I am seen as cool relative to someone else, who is less cool. And the cool I have produced in my person, through my mediation of my everyday existence, will extend the tyranny of cool over social life that much further (I've enhanced the "value" of other commodities in symbolic terms, in terms of their coolness); in exchange I get to feel a little more secure in my status. I get to feel a little better about myself by feeling better than someone else.

The degree to which one accepts cool as a legitimate positive value, as something that enhances life, is also the degree to which one has bought into capitalism in its current stage. This is why I'm often puzzled when writers talk about something being cool without any shade of irony or apology; they are taking cool at face value as something that is making society better and not worse. Such people (Tiqqun calls them "Young Girls" in some allegedly nongendered way), I imagine, can shop at Urban Outfitters without a moment of hesitation because they actually respect what that company does in its cool hunting. It gathers the "valuable" things of culture in one place and distributes them to a broader base. Democratization!

But pursuing cool is always the pursuit of self-alienation as self-realization. It's accepting the purpose of self-actualization as winning approval in terms of the relative value of commodities one can display (or become). It's mistaking value (a specifically capitalist mediation) for wealth (a transhistorical value attuned to some more basic pleasure of existence). I'm deriving this distinction from Moishe Postone's analysis of value in Time, Labor and Social Domination, which is largely about how capitalism generates a confusion between value and wealth so that our energy is directed toward reproducing capitalism and its categories and social hierarchies rather than, say, ending poverty in the midst of plenty. All labor within consumer capitalism only seems to make useful things; in fact its main purpose is to make "value" -- what I'm calling cool. I just think passages like these from Postone make a lot more sense when you understand "value" as "cool" -- this weird social category of value that has nothing to do with use value but absorbs a great deal of effort and seems objectively important nonetheless:

Marx argues that what characterizes capitalist production is that the transformation of matter by labor is simply a means toward the creation of the social form constituted by labor (value). To say that the goal of production is (surplus-)value is to say that that goal is the social mediation itself.

This makes a lot more sense if you think about it in terms of "immaterial labor" as Virno and Lazzaurato describe it -- the enhancement of commodity values through our virtuosic consumption or deployment of them. When I'm posting a Faceook update, I'm creating value/cool via the work on my personal brand, and that is objectively relevent in capital though totally useless as a form of collective material wealth. I haven't added anything to the pile of stuff we need as a species, really, but I have produced value, I've made something that can circulate and add cool/value to other things. The point of posting to Facebook is "social mediation itself" -- the premise that doing so is a valuable thing to do, that we should all recognize it as such. That we should all acknowledge "cool" as value, whether or not our striving for it in any given attempt is totally successful. In other words, "surplus value" is another way of saying "cool" in consumer capitalism; its "surplus" because it has no basis in labor as such -- in the material transformation of stuff -- but in the way social relations are transformed by the work we do (on stuff, on ourselves, in communicating, etc.).

Postone argues that

The goal of the expenditure of labor power no longer is bound intrinsically to the specific nature of that labor; rather, this goal, despite appearances, is independent of the qualitative character of the labor expended — it is the objectification of labor time itself. That is to say, the expenditure of labor power is not a means to another end, but, as a means, has itself become an "end." This goal is given by the alienated structures constituted by (abstract) labor itself. As a goal, it is very singular; it is not only extrinsic to the specificity of (concrete) labor but also is posited independently of the social actors' wills.

Again, I think this is far less cryptic and implausible if you think of it in terms of making things "cool"  -- not that all work is about cool, but "cool" work is paradigmatic -- also "Cool" is what value is called perhaps in my hipster corner of the world; it might have some other name elsewhere, but would be describing the same phenomenon, the same capitalistic social relation. Anyway, the point of work is make "value" in the form of cool (value in the form of "value"), which then justifies the effort spent on it. Such "value" is limitless, not bound by material restraints, and thus suits capitalism's need for perpetual growth and the fantasy that wealth (personal and social) can be infinite. If we are measuring the worth of what we do in cool, we can never stop doing more to get more of it (and the distribution of this social "product" will never really be geared toward alleviating human suffering or mitigating inequality).

So yes, this is a product of my privilege that I can think of it this way, but I see the difference between "value" and "material wealth" as mirroring the difference between walking out the door full of anxiety over whether or not one is dressed in such a way as to be noticed positively (and then feeling reassured or depressed depending on what sort of attention one gets) or walking out the door and feeling immersed in the processes and abundance of life. When I am thinking about being cool, I am worried about producing value; when I manage to forget about it and stop worrying about being "productive" with my time, I am much closer to experiencing and perceiving the material value of being alive.

That probably sounds a little bogus and spiritualized. Mainly I am thinking of the difference between perpetual self-consciousness (which is an effect of capitalism requiring everyone to always self-commoditize, whether as a wage worker as a prosumer) and being able to see the world beyond oneself and not through that instrumental filter, looking for "value" everywhere.

Social media, etc., obviously makes this harder to avoid, extending the anxiety of leaving the house insufficiently cool into a full-time mode of existence, since every time you check Facebook, Twitter, etc., you are metaphorically walking out the door, worrying about how cool you are seeming. I've generally been afraid of going to Brooklyn because I am not nearly cool enough and the environment makes it hard for me to forget it, to see past that game, to escape that construct of value. Social media means Brooklyn everywhere.

Cool is a ramification of communication as commodity; social media are merely the latest means for capitalism to extend its form of value into everyday life and leave fewer spaces for respite from it. This is why social media represents "real subsumption" -- reshaping life to suit capitalism's functioning (rather than the adoption of precapitalist, transhistorical forms of life to capitalism's ends). Social media would not exist in a noncapitalist society; communication as mode of expressing "value" would not exist.

Anders Ramsay makes a similar point about value here. (I quoted this is a previous post; I added the bolding.)

As Heinrich states, "Value does not arise somewhere to then be 'there'." Value is not a thing but rather a social relationship. It emerges neither through production nor through exchange, but presupposes both. It is a property something is assigned in relation to other things, which then gives the appearance of possessing it quite apart from such a relationship. As Marx insists on repeatedly, value is a ghostly or over-sensual property, not a substantial one. The conception of a commodity possessing its value objectivity independent of these relations is a semblance that transforms a social property into what is taken to be a natural one.
...

The same situation applies to Pierre Bourdieu's non-economic concept of capital. One must both work for one's capital, get an education, practice, and produce something which is recognised by the field of science or art in order to become a scientist or an artist, or else one becomes neither, regardless of what one has produced for the drawer or the hard disc. Similarly, the value-relation does not arise in exchange without a labour process, but without exchange, concrete labour would never be reduced to abstract labour either, and thus, no value would emerge. One might also bring to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein's by now famous, and to modern social sciences so significant statement, that one cannot have a private language. The same thing applies to the value, one cannot decide it on one's own.

Cool is a damaged capitalist form of that shared social value. But it has the virtue of being social, at least, and there is no way backward from it. The point is to turn the self-consciousness cool induces into something that doesn't posit anxiety-inducing hierarchies and doesn't make us feel enslaved by notions of what is important that seem entirely alien and uncontrollable. The goal is to make self-consciousness and social presence not merely compatible but indistinguishable.

potentially useful quote from Lazzarato on immaterial labor, de-consumerizing

This is quoted in Coté and Pybus's article for Ephemera 7:

The activation, both of productive cooperation and of the social relationship with the consumer, is materialised within and by the process of communication. It is immaterial labour which continually innovates the form and the conditions of communication (and thus of work and of consumption). It gives form and materializes needs, images, the tastes of consumers and these products become in their turn powerful producers of needs, of images and of tastes. The
particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labour (seeing that its essential use value is given by its value contained, informational and cultural) consists in the fact that this is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but enlarges, transforms, creates the ‘ideological’ and cultural environment of the consumer. This does not produce the physical capacity of the workforce, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labour produces first of all a ‘social relationship’ (a relationship of innovation, of production, of consumption); and only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity shows immediately that which material production ‘hid’: in other words, labour produces not only commodities, but first and foremost the capital relationship. (Lazzarato, 2001)

Immaterial labor produces certain sorts of measurable, value-generating social relations. And like all labor, it reproduces capitalism as a set of relations revolving around commodities.

I guess I would argue that immaterial labor fashions a commodity in the form of relationship that veils the value that can be harvested in its "circulation," which has to be understood not as a transfer of property by as networked communication. "Immaterial" commodities mask the process of commodification and value extraction precisely because there is not tangible property involved, but instead a proprietary claim to communication flows. Immaterial labor is another way of saying the commodification of communication. It allows companies to extract a rent from meaning-making and symbolic exchange. Because it involves a relation and communication, it foregrounds the ways in which consumption is productive. It's "labor" insofar as it produces harvestable value, but it doesn't make the consumer a laborer; rather it hides the value that consumers create because their value creation doesn't appear to them as labor. This is why the critique is to stress consumer's productivity, and to try to strip the pleasure from this kind of production only so that consumer-producers will make an effort to disentangle their consumption from the reproduction of capitalist forms. We mustn't be distracted by how we are paid in affect for immaterial/communictive/consumeristic labor from the ways in which this labor reproduces capitalism. The question becomes how to withdraw affect from this circuit, how to extinguish its value in the process of consumption instead of producing it in a recirculatable way (i.e. in social networks). The trend is running in the other direction: we are being subjectivized to only experience pleasure (or positive affect) when our affect is captured in networks and "shared." It's only real feeling if it is mediated, preserved, not "destroyed." Pics or it didn't happen, even for yourself.

Not sure if that is theoretically coherent. Basically, consumerism reproduces capitalist relations because the consuming process makes capitalist value. Only the consumer can intervene and de-consumerize their consumption (I wonder) through a consciousness of the value they are producing and then ... what? An effort to destroy it or deny it or claim its value for themselves?

The authoritarian commodity

This manifesto from Tiqqun, "Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl"makes a lot more sense to me if you replace "Young-Girl" with "hipster." The idea of using "young-girl," which the authors insist is a "not a gendered concept," is apparently to suggest something about the sort of power this new cultural type generated at this stage of consumer capitalism can exercise through apparent vulnerability and submissiveness to fashion and peer pressure. Updating Marcuse's notion of repressive tolerance, Tiqqun suggests that social control is administered through the coercive appeal of youthful fun and permissiveness, through flattery and seduction, through transforming liberalist autonomy into debilitating desire and tractable envy:

The function of the Young-Girl is to transform the promise of liberty contained in the achievement of Western civilization into a surplus of alienation, a deepening of the consumer order, new servitudes, a political status quo. The Young-Girl lives in the same horizon as Technology: that of a formal spiritualization of the world.

I can't figure out what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I agree that technology is a prime culprit in lodging a higher degree of sensitivity to fashion deeper into our subjectivity. New communication technology -- smartphones, etc. -- allow for more self-surveillance and more access to the reassuring judgments of others. It amplifies our self-consciousness and our sense of the self as a performance. Identity doesn't drive our behavior but is the end result of it, a product. The "young-girl" epitomizes this, serving as a model (the "authoritarian commodity") that can direct the endless self-fashioning and give meaning to all the opportunities we now have to declare what we are.

"What we are" becomes a problem only when technology allows for it: Once we can mediate identity, we become aware of identity as a malleable, manageable thing, which of course makes our sense of self far more insecure. Tiqqun, I think, is using "young-girl" as shorthand for all the ways in which our sense of self is rendered more insecure in the social networks that are becoming more material, surveillable and elaborated. Subjectivity has insecurity built into it: "In the world of the authoritarian marketplace, the living recognize, in their alienated desires, a demonstration of power that has been made inside them by the enemy."

I think this is the legacy of the hipster, regardless of whatever new term comes into fashion to discuss them. The hipster is the authoritarian commodity that uses only soft power, regulating all who come into contact with it by inspiring feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, envy, boredom, etc. The effective hipster/young-girl signifies a plenitude of cool that it cannot actually possess but that nonetheless inspires a kind of hopelessness that you yourself will never measure up or be seen enough for what you are. The hipster/young-girl was the bellwether for the sort of subject that only understands itself through surveillance, through the assumption that its every desire is being judged, and that desire is pointless unless it can be displayed and surveyed. "Social" technology has made this sort of anxiety commonplace, the feeling that it's, say, pointless to read something if you are not going to Tweet out the highlights, or pointless to listen to something if Spotify won't notify everyone in your social network. I want to blame hipsterism for this, but they were merely the first victims of this more aggressive phase of the society of the spectacle. They were the first to see no alternative to seeing themselves as a commodity among commodities and to try to find the advantages of that, the pleasures.

Managers not to blame for capitalism

The main thing I am taking away from In the Age of the Smart Machine is Zuboff's effort to view technology as a possible way to save capitalism from itself and resolve the tension between capital and labor. If only information technology was used correctly, managers would share authority and all workers would become well-respected knowledge workers who are not alienated but enhanced and fulfilled by their working life. Authority would never again be a matter of exploiting anyone but instead would become a way of collectively negotiating the best way to seize the "innovative" possibilities that ubiquitous data about work processes make possible.

Zuboff never ceases to be amazed that managers would make the apparently petty decisions to use technology to spy on workers and shift blame and protect their prerogatives and power rather than to seize opportunities to "informate" the workplace and develop the skills of blue-collar "operators." She likens the belief in managerial authority to a spiritual faith, a sort of false consciousness holding back cooperation and the general intellect. "The informating process sets knowledge and authority on a collision course," she claims, but what that means in practice is that middle managers are getting proletarianized, having their managerial leverage eroded by automation.

As long as organizational members are unwilling to critically examine their faith in this system, individuals at every level will remain like weeds in the wind, able to do only as much as their roles prescribe, seeking the psychological equivalent of the graveyard shift in order to test one's wings, only to be pulled back daily by the requirements of the faith.

Capitalism is premised on those prescribed roles. They are not a flaw in the system but its essence. Capitalism is a way of organizing production precisely so that individuals become "reeds in the wind" without sufficient agency to redirect the system toward a goal other than profit (like, say, empowering or enriching the lives of all workers and not merely the managing elite or property owners). They are brought to be dependent on the system and generally have incentive only to protect their own interests. The system invests them in the existing hierarchy and precludes alternatives. It's not a failure of the individual imagination that such alternatives don't appear to workers and managers; it's a failure to organize, a failure to believe in a collective imagination worth fighting for. The alternative is to embrace class struggle.

Without a capacity to imagine an alternative, it is likely that our work organizations will continue to reproduce relationships that impede a powerful understanding of the economic and social potential of new technology.

Yes, that is capitalism's purpose — to reproduce its necessary relations, which are ones in which managers (representing capital) maximally exploit workers. Workers must organize resistance to this; they can't count on technology to resolve the struggle with better data and managers' sudden beneficent desire to communicate better. If communication is "improved" by management, it is in service of extending exploitive opportunities and subsuming more of workers' capacities to capital, to the production of surplus value. The "powerful understanding" of technology's potential involves undoing capitalism, so it's useless to expect capitalist managers to recognize it and nurture it. The extent to which they see it, they will thwart it in their institutional capacity. They have to operate outside or against the firm to nurture it.

Technology is neutral, but authority is necessary to exploitation, which is necessary to maximizing profit and justifying patently unfair distribution of the surplus. Technology, that is, doesn't automatically solve exploitive relations in capitalism but merely exacerbates them, moves then to a higher and deeper level, absent the sort of deliberate politics to prevent such deepening. Politics solves capitalism's inhumanity, not technology.

Quantified self as executive unfitness

Notes on Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988)

1. The effect of information technology and increasing mediation of personal interaction and communication in the workplace (and the social factory) is to make the "acting-with" skills of the executive function seem even more mystified and ineffable. Executive skills are defined by a negative theology; they are precisely everything that can't be quantified. As Zuboff puts it "the work of the executive has been, by definition, work that is not subject to rationalization." They are defined ex post as intuition or feel or comfort with authority or leadership. The executive function consists of the remainder after everything else has been rationalized. It is primarily a mode of distinction, not a tangible and transmittable set of skills. The transferability of other skills is what makes them non-executive. They are like all other information subject to digitization and redistribution: radically devalued.

2. In other words, information technology abets the process of purifying the executive function of its quantifiable components, leaving the perfectly mysterious executive, whose power can only be understood through a cult of personality, in terms of charisma. The boss operates on inscrutable hunches that can't really be challenged; these form the basis of the boss's authority.

3. When an individual's contributions to a productive process (and sociality is a productive process) are quantified, they can accrue no surplus. They lose the ability to negotiate for compensation on the basis of something arguable, intangible. ("Your tweets had a declining retweet rate of 24%, therefore your pay will be reduced accordingly.)

4. People who choose to self-quantify, who seek out ways to turn themselves into data, are in essence opting out of executive responsibilities, then. They are volunteering to be deskilled and controlled. The logic of their decisionmaking is not a matter of hunches but a matter of data, and thus a decision anyone could make for them, given the same data.

5. To put that in reversed form: the quantified self, the data self, is a means for excluding people from qualifying for executive decisionmaking. Because production is shifting to the social factory, and most people's social lives are being quantified in social media, that suggests that self-quantification is a way of extending the workplace hierarchy into the social sphere that once at least appeared to be sheltered from it. If your friendships are mediated and quantified, they are controlled; the network is stabilizing them and draining them of their potential for power or value creation independent of pre-existing systems of sociopolitical management. They are internal to the "System." Maybe sociality, identity, etc., are always internal to the System. But the quantification of sociality strengthens the prison bars. Sociality in everyday life ceases to be a resource for resistance to the system; it becomes a source of innovation for refining it, perfecting it, completing its totality. (Our destiny: Everything is subsumed.)

6. Maintaining the ineffability of social behavior becomes a primary form of resistance as well as a way to claim bureaucratically acknowledged power, since power in bureaucracy is distilled into ineffable, unquantified forms. That is, to maintain power in the social factory, one has to evade quantification and preserve the sense of being a subject of the social process more than its object. The more of your social life revolves around uncaptured face time, the more you are the executive of your own productive social life. The more your social life is captured in media, the more you are an employee in your own social life "acting-on" others rather than "acting-with" them, to adapt Zuboff's terminology. (Acting-on means you are a body transforming other objects through direct labor; acting-with means you coordinate, communicate, produce cooperation, do all that general-intellecty virtuosity stuff.) The quantification of the self implies the management by an outside force, even if the nature or identity of that outside force is known, or even if one believes it is oneself doing the managing. Self-quantification still limits one to instrumental tasks, even in the social realm, and prohibits one from assuming the power-accuring qualitative, charismatic tasks.

7. Leadership means refusing to be quantified.

8. Will Davies argues in this paper about the "Emerging neo-communitarianism" that neoliberalism is a technocratic means to guarantee liberalism's idea of freedom as rational choice. It's technocrtatic instrument is quantification to ensure efficiency, which verifies freedom in the way it understands liberalism.

Bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and so many other professionals are all ultimately trusted to take their own decisions in a neoliberal society, but only on the basis that their outputs are made explicit, so that this trust can be reviewed at regular intervals. The liberal faith in individual reason just about survives, but freedom is now located within carefully designed systems of audit and incentive management, which by the 1990s had become collectively referred to as ʻgovernanceʼ. The task of neoliberal government is to quantify the outcomes of social and economic behaviour, such that individuals are able to exercise choice in an informed way, whether inside or outside of markets.

That analysis fits well with my contention that Facebook and other social media are neoliberal policy tools, or how I usually put it, that they prop up neoliberlist ideology and support/constitute neoliberal subjectivity. The point is that quantification is a modality of control more than of information; it is about auditing and not self-empowerment. If you think it is about self-empowerment, that is because you are mistaking self-auditing as not being in service of existing external authorities. Quantification is confessing yourself to the authorities. (Foucault's view of confession's function applies here.)

9. Quantifying the self is doing the neoliberal state's work for it; it's collaborating rather than resisting. It is making oneself subject to power, circumscribing the space in which one might be free to operate. Instead one inscribes oneself in the space delineated by incentives and targets and goals, all of which are subject to optimization not on the self's behalf but for the state or the firm.

10. A quantified self is a neoliberal self is a postauthentic self is a data self. (?) It is the sum of information that can be known about itself and processed; its goals are to more precisely quantify itself, elaborate its connections, and perhaps perfect its feedback mechanisms to achieve some short of ecstatic short circuit of self-reflexive identity. Information wants more information. It doesn't want to be free, it wants to replicate and proliferate. That is, the data self wants to broadcast richer and richer data sets of itself in an attempt to make life more meaningful. It can no longer find meaning through action; it can only be processed into meaning.

notes from Machine Dreams

Economics as the search for a meaningful definition of "rationality" -- the impact of computer science on economics has been to dissolve the illusion of the individual as the "rational subject" or agent, and to instead regard individuals as cellular automata of a larger "rational subject" that subsumes them. Rationality in the economic sense -- the sense of the most efficient distribution of resources, etc. -- is an aggregate phenomenon that exceeds the individual's grasp.

The market is then viewed as the "rational agent," as a cyborg entity that computes and wills outcomes and so on. Individual humans, with their limited and irrational self-directed goals, are subroutines to the market's higher functioning and purpose.

Mirowski cites a 1993 paper by Gode and Sunder that pits autonomous automata against one another in a double auction, revealing that this framework "had managed to induce 'aggregate rationality not only from individual rationality but also individual irrationality.' ... aggregate rationality had no relationship to anything the neoclassicals had been trumpeting as economic rationality for all these years." (554) The most idealized neoclassical market model "produces its hallowed results in experimental settings with severely impaired robots."

The individual's calculations, such as they are, need not be "rational" to yield rational macro outcomes. Motives at the individual level are ultimately inscrutable -- their logic cannot be inferred from outside analysis of achieved outcomes. Their unique rational choices not necessary to the larger outcome, which can be produced by AI agents operating on simple automatic imperatives. People have reasons for what they do but they can't be connected with economically rational outcomes.

(Mirowski argues -- I think -- for regarding multiple market forms themselves as automata in an evolutionary competitive process seeking an emergent "allocative efficiency." The scary thing is we are enmeshed in the process, though the "efficiency" it discovers may have nothing to do with our limited human notion of individual thriving or social justice, etc. We may be agents serving the flourishing and reproductions of markets for their sake and their incomprehensible ends.)

I think there is an analogy to spy fiction and the chaotic behavior of individual spies caught in the infinite regress of double-triple-quadruple agents and simulated opponents and disinformation and the rest. Personal agency is meaningless in this context; the game is on a whole other level, so to speak. Individual spies may have all sorts of complex reasoning to defend their acts, but it is all local rationalization, irrelevant to the broader outcome or bigger logic. They are just individualist ideology that demands the assumption that their choices are constitutive of outcomes, but really the logic of the rational outcome only comes when their choices are merged with reactions and choices of a host of other agents whose moves can't be anticipated or incorporated in the individual's thinking process. Spies (like individuals in markets) don't know how their acts shape the rules of the game they are playing; they think the rules are perhaps already fixed (their limited individual scope -- the mistake the way they are programmed in their subroutine for the entirety of the software) when the whole system is calculating something they don't understand or even know of. Like the humans on Earth in Douglas Adams's books, part of an organic computer program determining the question of meaning.

The rationality of the espionage system perhaps exists at the level of national goals, or perhaps nations are players, automata is a larger game/market of war that has its own agenda, its own equilibrium that has nothing to do with human thriving or human goals.

Facebook, Projective City, Post-authenticity, Data Self

material on abstract labor cut from Theorizing the Web presentation

Another way of understanding the dynamism of capitalism is through its continual need to produce a flow of “abstract labor” as well as opportunities for profit. Capitalism presupposes an ever expandable amount of needs to satisfy with commodities and thus an ever growing amount of potential work to produce those commodities. Thus it requires a general sense that work is fungible or “abstract”, measurable as a certain amount of money (a wage). And it requires a sense that any activity whatever on the part of a worker can be productive, as value inheres in human effort itself. In capitalism, the value of labor is not contextual and contingent, not dependent on traditions and secure, stable structure of productive relations (think the mythical precapitalist community, with little class mobility and hereditary rank and occupations), but is “liberated” to be deployable in whatever ways suit capital; capitalism thus remakes local, traditional arrangements in its image. Workers becomes nothing (no integral identity is given, in theory), but have the potential of making anything, and must make something of themselves. This is the source of capitalism’s power to bring novelty into the social world. The formation of social bonds becomes a source of value -- the power of cooperation, the creation of value that exceeds the independent effort of any one person.

Capitalism must be able to attract or codify this sort of “living labor” and render it “abstract labor” amenable to rationalization, measurement and control -- the sort of labor that can be the input to a profitable production process. Hence a fundamental problem for capitalism: how to maintain a supply of workers who are (a) flexible, creative, and motivated at the same time they are (b) manageable, controllable, and predictable.

Living labor can be understood as identity-making effort (in the absence of traditional prescriptions); it is the productivity of open-ended potentiality
Abstract labor is the quantification of the self, making that labor of self-creation and identity shaping productive by allowing it to conform to pre-existing measuring tools that allow for commodification. A matter of fitting oneself to the yardstick.

The capitalist development of technology has in part been driven by a need to render “living labor” into “abstract labor” without snuffing it out altogether. Put another way, it’s not only machines that embody technical knowledge to improve productivity, but also subjects, who are freed to produce new needs and hence new opportunities for profit. Subjectivity becomes a developed from of capital, with an enhanced productive potential. (We think to want more; we are determined to express ourselves in original ways; we are driven to discover ourselves rather than take our identity as given and fixed.) The development of machinery and now computer technology and augmentation nullifies inherent differences and particularities in users, leveling pre-existing human variety while producing an urgent need to manufacture new distinctions. It takes pre-existing qualities, makes the quantifiable and then uses those quantities to impel production.

Capitalism requires labor as such (abstract labor). But this prompts the critique that work is personally meaningless, alienating. To answer this critique, capitalism must make the process of valorization in production into a kind of self-production for workers at the same time. What enables this is the underlying ability to transform life experience (self-production, self-expression, relationship forming, etc.) into something abstract and redeployable behind the scenes by capitalist firms: data. Work (now becoming -- in ideology, if not in actual fact -- a matter of “immaterial labor” -- the filtering of production through lifestyles, branding, symbolic layering) can become meaningful and social and self-fulfilling because it is at the same time generating data. The data self is the sort of capitalist subject that experiences its “alienation” as liberation and an open-ended process of self-discovery; it experiences the quantification of life (once strictly a matter of reducing human effort into abstract labor power measured in wages) not as alienating and reductive but as positive, descriptive, self-defining, revealing.

All Facebook profiles in theory are born equal; they allow the same exact repertoire of actions to shape and improve them. It seems like an opportunity and a medium in which to develop the self, but it is also a way to contain and control those efforts, making sure they are producing value within capitalism (rather than liberation from it).

Social media extend the experience and range of applicability of living labor while simultaneously transforming it into “abstract labor” -- into fungible data. They attempt to control and capture the productive capital of subjectivity engendered by capitalism in liberating us from our stable place in traditional hierarchies and so on. They give shape to the emerging social factory, integrating it into existing ways of doing business, prompting investment flows, and harvesting and distributing profit.

Social media are part of the new spirit, part of network-driven capitalism’s effort to justify and limit itself to make sure it doesn’t become too immiserating to continue. Social media presuppose the conditions of their popularity (network capitalism) are permanent, present themselves as solution to what they are actually instrumental in causing and perpetuating. They ameliorate the ideological crisis that stems from the conflict between abstract and living labor.

Social media are ways to contain and recapture the productive and potentially disruptive energy of the cooperation engendered by the capitalist production process, which depends on bringing workers together, dividing labor among them, and generating/capturing the surplus that emerges from their effort to work together. Cooperative efforts are captured within social media and made into data -- that is, they are made fungible, abstract, countable. This data can set cooperative workers back into competition with one another, now competing over and in terms of measurable influence, attention, contribution, network links and so on.

James Raven's Judging New Wealth; contradictions in the commodity form of the book

Raven examines the British book business in the second half of the 18th century, explaining how the book became more of an everyday commodity as the reading public expanded. The growing market led to a streamlined product to meet it, which in turn grew the market further. With books, this meant genre formulas were refined and generalized so audiences would know what they were getting. Critics of the period recognized this; one likened fiction to a "drug" engineered to be addictive through its standardized tropes and stereotypes.

But Raven's main concern, as the title suggests, is the prominence of stories about the nouveau riche, the demand for which was inexhaustible in the period -- unsurprisingly given the middle class makeup of the new reading public. The fiction of the era catered to a need in readers to disavow their own dubious origins and established a different means for establishing character than bloodlines, namely the sensibility to appreciate fiction and respond emotionally to it.

Part of what happens is that taste stops meaning aristocratic discrimination and starts meaning the ability to be ahead of the fashion curve. Those are often the same thing in practice, if you think fashions emerge from hierarchical emulation. But the shift in emphasis indicates a shift in imagined possibilities -- the new commodities allow one to believe that taste can be achieved. No longer a matter of blood but a matter of wise consumer choices. The book market is microcosm of the larger democratization of taste through open markets in fashionable goods. This has destabilizing effects throughout the class hierarchy, prompting an acceleration in the cycling through of signifiers of status. This acceleration with urgently spun as freedom by capitalism's ideologues, and who knows? Maybe they were right. We can't project backward and know whether we would have enjoyed the "ontological security" of being consigned for life to a particular social caste. Perhaps Gilles Lipovetsky is right and fashion is a small price to pay for social mobility (even uneven and imperfect mobility). But this is certainly an important basis of emerging consumerist ideology — the right to have Meaningful Taste and to find life's purpose in it rather than upholding one's place in the Great Chain of Being.

In 18th century England, the "new definition of social awkwardness" promulgated by novels of manners, Raven argues, drove an impulse for a standardization in fashionable objects, an orderly process for their passage through fashionability. This helps allow for the emulation that preserves the status hierarchy by making it legible. Commodities as a form, as a symbolizing medium, become a stable ground or field within which status can be derived and measured. (Books are just one salient example of this process of making goods, creating markets for them, and tolerably embedding those markets into existing social relations.)

Raven notes the apparent contradiction in the substance of commoditized books: They promise to inculcate proper social conduct, but their form is engineered to teach one simply to become addicted to reading more books. The form says "consume more," regardless of content -- this is basically true of all commercial media products. The worship of novelty is built in, so the allegedly permanent, always true ethical advice or aesthetic taste these early books could offer was always compromised. They offered the experience of having learned the "last word" about some moral or aesthetic question as something you could consume again and again -- moral certitude as a commodity. Experiencing morality (or connoisseurship) vicariously as entertainment replaces the need to act morally in the world to demonstrate that one has learned and understood some precept.

The new reader's yearning for permanence is leveraged into an appreciation for the exhilarating experience of ephemerality. This is how commoditized books, commercial fiction reproduce their market, making these contradictory desires cohere, coexist. Media consumption in general perhaps performs this work, manufacturing a necessary illusion for capitalism, that one can consume one's way to solidity, that one can experience stability serially, as a string of vicarious consumption experiences.