Saturday is the 5th anniversary of twitter: in 140 characters (or less!)

It’s not the tec it’s the people using it! Says twitter founder Jack Dorsey.  Western tec leads to global revolution! (Of wisdom?!) 65 million daily tweets. Follow snooki.      

Google Tells us How to Manage Each Other

Folks, I know my relationship with Google has concerned some of you. I admit, we’ve had our ups and downs, I’ve called Google a know it all and far too prying. Google says it just wants to help and even if it won’t smell the flowers with me, it’ll tell me everything I want to know about flora - including where I can buy it. I appreciate your worries, but will not be ending my relationship any time soon. We’re too close, and I know it sounds silly, but I don’t think I can live without Google.

 I’ve been typing to Google about this a little bit, and we’ve decided that the best way to make this work is if we keep things transparent. Google wants to know my worries so it can take care of them. I want to be able to discuss my uncertainties so you can help me cope. I know some of you are also close to Google, I think we can all be friends, but maybe just on facebook for now. .. we’ll see.

First item to Google today: “How To Be a Boss” the algorithms whirring along have be working on a lot of our problems. One of them, the NYT explains, is called project Oxygen. Oxygen spent the last two years figuring out the top eight traits of a good manager Adam Bryant’s only got as far as number three before drawing attention the absurdly of the study. Some highlights from the article:

“Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.”
“Help your employees with career development.”
“Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”
The list goes on, reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of “The Office.”
“My first reaction was, that’s it?” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Googlespeak for human resources.

It’s comparable to Douglass Adams trying to answer the meaning of life with a computer answer=42 time to figure out= millions of years meaning= ? Bryant- probably a google user- tries to find an upside to Oxygen he writes:

  “In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”
Project Oxygen doesn’t fit neatly into the usual Google story line of hits (like its search engine) and misses (like the start last year of Buzz, its stab at social networking). Management is much squishier to analyze, after all, and the topic often feels a bit like golf. You can find thousands of tips and rules for how to become a better golfer, and just as many for how to become a better manager. Most of them seem to make perfect sense.
Problems start when you try to keep all those rules in your head at the same time — thus the golf cliché, “paralysis by analysis.” In management, as in golf, the greats make it all look effortless, which only adds to the sense of mystery and frustration for those who struggle to get better.
That caveat aside, Project Oxygen is noteworthy for a few reasons, according to academics and experts in this field.
H.R. has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions.

Data-driven approach to human interaction= disconcerting.

The Internet’s (in)Perfect Economy: How the Internet is and Should Function in the Context of Capitalism

 

 Image conceptualizing the global IT economy taken from the "The Big Picture" think tank.

The Internet has brought about profound changes in how people interact in both the developed and developing world, it has altered how we think, shifted how entertainment is consumed and produced. The Internet has also created massive economic upheaval; hastening globalization, introducing new business models and erasing old practices. It is challenging capitalist assumptions and creating new stratospheres of wealth and inequality. Yet, even as the Internet strengthens and extends the clench of capitalism, it has also acted as a catalyst for conceptualizing alternate approaches to socioeconomic life.  The Internet has huge potential and was quickly seen as a way to upend the capitalist framework, however, the Internet was also quickly co-opted into the capitalist system and has resulted in heightened inequality.  As a result there has been a reflexive backlash that attempts to reconcile how the Internet settled into its current framework and how that framework should change. In this paper I will discuss how Tiziana Terranova and Jaron Lanier conceptualize the economic agency of Internet and what they think should happen to the stratified hierarchy that they agree the Internet has strengthened and facilitated. I will argue that although the Internet has changed the economy, it has not created a free or gift economy, as argued by Chris Anderson and his ilk, nor that the online economy should be purely capitalist as envisioned by Lanier, I will conclude by agreeing with how Terranova explains the dynamic Internet market place and raise questions about what this means for society and the future.

Capitalism creates inequality.  By default the system dictates that there will be winners and losers. Part of this flaw is a result of the impossibility to reconcile a fair exchange of goods and services. Control over necessities swiftly creates divisions with some having more access to goods than others. This leads to the separation of individual means and thus an economically unbalanced system. The inherent inequality in practiced capitalism is by no means exclusive to capitalism, but it is particularly acute, as has been demonstrated by the many and ongoing societal capitalist experiments.  Furthermore, as capitalist experiments are ongoing it is possible for the system to improve, decline, collapse, strengthen, and oscillate. Today the extent of capitalisms convolutions are being displayed in the systems evolving relationship with the Internet.

The recent development of the Internet has made an alarming turn towards extreme winner(s) take all capitalism. This has accelerated the fragmentation of the populous, extending and strengthening the preexisting hierarchy. Lanier draws attention to this trend, writing, “while the relative number of desperately poor people is decreasing income differences between the rich and the poor are increasing at an acceleration rate” (Lanier, 77). He proceeds to liken this development to a short of neo- feudalism, where the gatekeepers, architects, and mass manipulators of Internet systems can be likened to new royalty and the scrolling, clicking, producing masses, whose content is controlled by the new royalty, are the new peasants.

Lanier’s high minded analogy may not be shared by other academics exploring the shifting socioeconomic mesh, but the underling reality of his concept has traction as the Internet is creating new global class of ridiculously wealthy elite who owe much of their cash to opportunities facilitated by digital networks. Terranova  has a much more nuanced view of the economic dynamics of the Internet then Lanier, but nonetheless recognizes the same short of problematic  division of labor that have been created in the already multiple incarnations of Internet capitalism. She identifies how the Internet has created unbalanced labor, in the form of those who work untenable undercompensated hours for Internet companies. Terranova calls these toilers netslaves (Terranova, 73).  Additionally, she explores the capture and control aspects of the digital economy, in which capitalist agents gain and determine the fate of online information and in extension online behavior.  This means that similar to Lanier’s view of the lords and peasants of online computing, Terranova identifies that Internet capitalism has extended and strengthened capitalist divisions of labor.                 

Terranova explains that the Internet has already seen evolving models of capitalism. In the early days of the Internet techno-libertarians and Silicon Valley neo-hippies envisioned the Internet as a way to subvert the inequality that the mainstream capitalist system created. Surfacing from the early pools of Internet messiahs, Lanier writes, “one of our essential hopes in the early days of the digital revolution was that a connected world would create more opportunities for personal advancement for everyone” (Lanier, 81).  Overwhelmingly, those at the vanguard of digital networks believed the new systems would be liberating and limit inequality by creating new fairer methods for transferring goods and services. Yet as Terranova and others explain, the utopian collectivist casting of the Internet was swiftly co-opted by the heady get rich quick (then use the new wealth to address societal problems) neoliberal ideology of the ‘90’s and early ‘00’s.

 This New Economy, which ruled during the dotcom era, was notable for its opportunistic conceptions of access, the way it subverted labor and crashed into the reality of demand.  Terranova argues that the Internet economy has since transitioned into the digital economy, which is marked by a paradigm of a mutant offshoot of the gift economy and extreme capitalism. Terranova stresses that the forms of Internet capitalism that have risen should not be considered anomalies, but should instead be seen a stages in the evolution of the capitalist economy. From this it follows that the foundations and trappings of the earlier incarnations remain, Terranova explains,

The high-tech gift economy is a pioneering moment which transcends both the purism of the New Left do-it-yourself culture and the neoliberalism of the free-market ideologues: money- commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis (Terranova,77).

In other words not only does the digital economy have aspects of the New Economy, but it also maintains aspects of the early libertarian semi-communist gift economy. Individuals can use a site like “Craig’s List” to find free goods, and have access to thousands of academic articles without paying for them, yet a click away is the biggest shopping mall in the known universe which extends the now classic consume/ control dichotomy that defines contemporary capitalism. According to Terranova, these two seemingly paradoxical systems can and do co-exist.  Regardless of the long term feasibility of this dichotomy, it is currently causing massive tension.

               Many have tried to reconcile the divergent aspects of the Internet economy. Terranova unhappily settles on co-existence, while others, perhaps still wearing the rose tinted glasses of the early Internet years, struggle to marry the different branches of the Internet economy.  Chris Anderson thinks the Internet has created, and is continuing to facilitate the implementation of an entirely free economy. In Anderson’s mind, on the Internet, everything can, should, will, and is free. Anderson argues that the Internet provides the means for commodities to be exchanged for free as auxiliary exchanges can account for the value of the desired content or object. Anderson writes, “it’s now clear that practically everything web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned (Anderson, 3).”  Anderson draws on the massive and infinitely expanding amount of ‘free’ content accessible online to argue that the Internet has and will continue to create a system in which consumers no longer need to pay for the goods and services they are attempting to acquire.

However, Anderson’s attempt to clutch the early gift-economy models of the Internet begins to shred when market realities are accounted for. Anderson fails to fully conceptualize the distinction between written and unwritten cost.  He associates monetary cost with total cost and discounts the value of cost benefit rationalizations that consumers are forced to make in the type of barter economy he is inadvertently describing.  Trading personal information for the privilege to create a Facebook page is a cost, having to view advertisements while viewing that personal information on Facebook is also a cost.  It may be hard to trace some Internet charges that cost time and non-monetary informational commodities, but the difficulty of detangling said relative costs, which are sacrificed in exchange for Internet content, is by no means a free exchange as there is no mediator balancing the cost in relation to the benefit. This view could be critiqued, as it implies the even a pure gift economy would inevitably create tradeoffs that could disadvantage those engaged in the exchange.      

In a ‘free economy’ capital generating opportunities on the Internet would be limited, as there would be no direct connection between the provider and consumer, but Anderson says he is not stupid enough to think this is a reality.  He writes, “just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money” (Anderson, 5). Anderson uses Google as an example of how a company can be profitable without charging anything. Google allows anyone to use its search engine.  Anderson argues that this means the system is free. In reality, to use Google one must sacrifice information to machine algorithms while also viewing ads constructed to sway behavior. This is by no means free, but some argue that the avenue of capital generation opened by online advertising is a good way for capitalism to exist online.

Lanier, who is locked in a capitalist framework, dislikes online advertising, but admits it is a great step towards the capital driven content approach he advocates. Lanier thinks that the free content and hive mind approach to the Internet is a massive and imminent threat to humanity. Lanier worries that the remix, repost nature of the Internet, and the reduced lack of incentive to create when there is no monetary incentive, will turn humans into intellectually mute slaves to the mainframe. He writes that within the current framework, “human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd...the algorithms remove the risk of creativity…” (Lanier, 99). Lanier’s paranoia of the loss or even potential loss of creativity rests on extremely tenuous ground. Under every form of modern and pre-modern governance, that has existed and been implemented for more than a few years, creative masterpieces have been produced.  There is no reason that the spectacle of the current economic transition Lanier and his peers helped usher in will change the deeply rooted human desire to create.

Regardless, Lanier tosses around examples of free creative content like illegally downloaded music and “Youtube” videos to claim creativity is on its deathbed. He argues there is no longer mass incentive to create. Lanier maintains that we are in the extraordinary position to head off the end of creativity. He believes this can be done by re-incentivizing creative human produced content like magazine articles and his music by creating a pay to play system in which all content is accessible for a price, he believes that if a stronger capitalist system were adopted, “creative expression could then become the most valuable resource in a future world of material abundance created through the triumphs of technologies” (Lanier, 103). In his ideal system artist and other content producers –like writers- would become rich.  Lanier thinks that re-incentivizing real original content, rather than rehashed noise, would help offset the new elite rulers of the Internet economy. Lanier neglects class access problems and thus knowledge fragmentation that could proliferate under his system.

 Lanier also makes several good points about the problem of putting too much faith in machines, drawing, for example, on the 2008 finical crisis. Unfortunately, he also puts too much credence in the alleged democratizing nature of capitalism. Terranova, who brushes on a Marxist approach to the internet economy stresses the increasingly problematic nature of digital capitalism, she writes, “the digital economy cares only tangentially about morality” (Terranova, 96) instead the economy cares about mass production, here she over laps with Jodi Dean who argues that the Internet is creating meaningless loops of reflexivity. Terranova worries about the increasing capture and control aspect of the Internet.  She draws attention to the uncomfortable reality that both the gift exchange aspects of the Internet, which have netslaves engaged in unbalanced labor, and the capitalist functions of the system, which are creating new levels of societal segmentation, are problematic. People are increasingly devoting themselves to this flawed system.

The mass adoption of the Internet has been exciting to many who actively consider the socioeconomic dynamics of life as the new communication system provided alternate ways to approach the exchange of goods and services. However, as I have argued in this paper the Internet cannot be conceptualized a homogenous economic system, but instead needs to be viewed, as explained by Terranova, as an evolving dynamic system. The system is constantly changing and has yet to become locked in to a concrete form. It is unclear if a cohesive economic system will emerge on or through the Internet. Some aspects of the system that are currently divergent, yet still coexist and seem to have already been locked in. Yet it is hubris to believe that once in place a system cannot be changed, or if necessary be overthrown. None of the proposed Internet economic frameworks explored in this paper are optimal, nor would they do much to shift the current expanding hierarchy of wealth. This means people need to actively engage in finding ways the system can improve. The Internet it is here to stay.  

Works Cited

Anderson, Chris. "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business." Wired Magazine. Conde Nast, 25 Feb. 2008. Web.

Dean, Jodi. "Hive Meltdown Imminent (from Fractal Ontology)." LocationS11.  <http://locations11.blogspot.com/2011/03/ask-about-autonomous-university-5-exam.html

Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory. Cambrigde: John Wiley And Sons, 2010. Print.

Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

Shirky, Clay. "Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet. 8 Feb. 2008. Web. 08 Mar. 2011. <http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html>.

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto, 2004. Print.

Blog Theory Chap's 1-2 Outline

“Just like the spread of lily-pads in a pond, the analogy goes, so will blogs and other innovations emerge and die, flourish and struggle” (P31).

“Drowning in plurality, we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system. React and forward, but don’t by any means think” (P3).

“I take the position that contemporary communications media capture their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance” (P 3).

The term for this is “Communicative capitalism” -> The combination / convergence of democracy in networked communication and entertainment.

In other words, the internet is the vehicle and terrain for politics and economics, which are converging/ combining.

Social acceleration, largely attributed to the Internet and its family of technologies, is making these changes happen very quickly.

Symbolic efficiency  -> defined by Zizek’s reading of Lacan “There is no longer a master signifier stabling meaning, knitting together the chain of signifiers and hindering its tendencies to float off indeterminacy” (P6).

USE BLOG

Instant gratification fills in the lack contusive of desire

“The result is a situation of non-desire, non-meaning, and the unbearable intrusion of enjoyment. This decline in symbolic efficiency is a fundamental feature of communicative capitalism” (P9)

Unknowns can and will have massive unforeseen effects- our reaction to the world is reflexive (reactive)

Buck Soros and Taleb argue “The reflexive structure of communicative capitalisms fast ubiquitous networks increase the likelihood and impact of high consequence events” (P13).

Dean argues they don’t go far enough. -> “The endless loop of reflexivity becomes the very form of capture and absorption” (P13).

Addressing counter arguments:

Dean offers a lengthy argument against techno-enthusiasts who write as if reflexivity were the solution to a wide range of social and political problems  

Links this to new communalist’s flawed beliefs that:

1.       Technology will save the world

2.       Adopt faith in IT, while denying institutions it’s modeled off

3.       Say tech is liberating as it contributed to political economic and cultural change-ie neo liberalism

(“Neo liberalism entails the governmentality of active, multiple vigilant and omnipresent intervention in society, an intervention exercised through and by multiple networks traversing micro and macro domains” (P18) emphasizes the market competition rather than exchange)

Thus the ‘counter culture’ is really the status quo.

“Even if geeks are ‘about’ justice and equality, the consequence of the widespread adoption and extension of their work is the most extreme economic inequality the world has ever know” (p23).

Dean proceeds to string up Christopher Kelty, who thinks free software is re-orientationg knowledge and power in a good way. Dean argues that the re orientation is OUT of the hands of the people.

 Displaced mediators- mediators, whose functions have been displaced from their pervious role,.

On page 28: Widespread intake in participation on a commercial social network like Facebook or Myspace may displace other practices and activities-pick-up basketball or going door to door to collect signature for a campaign- say –practices and activates that then come to be viewed in media terms. So texting enables kids to arrange basketball games or online petitions make signature gathering faster and easier. What’s displaced from view are the pleasures and benefits accompanying the prior mode of being “

Enter the Blog

In the framework laid out there are implications of blogs/ blogs can be used to display this theory.

-          Blogging emerged as a practice in communicative capitalism

-          Blogs are displaced mediators

“Blogs acess key features of communicative capitalism; the intensification of mediality in reflexive networks (communicated about communicated) the emergence of ‘whatever beings’ (beings who belong but not to anything in particular) and the circulation of affect (as networks generate and amplifty spectacular effects).” (p29)

Chapter 2

The blog is dead!

“The audiences before whom we perform our identities- child, expert, collector, lover – converged, under-mining the separations and distinctions that told us who we were, rendering us nothing in particular, but still something” (p56)

Blogs highjacked by capitalism, “By 2009 70 percent of bloggers said they blogged about brands” (p34) incredibly global.

Was the intention to make money?

Dichotomy of new journalism and journaling never really worked.

“Blogging is parasitic, narcissistic and pointless- and that’s is why internet users all over the world blog in ever increasing numbers” ( P37) .

Did people ever want blogs?

The lure of the newness

Early link between search and blogging. A blog was a way to navigate the internet with a guide—someone who could thus be trusted. –both search and blogging flawed (p 43)

Major historic shift in how info/ reading /writing is consumed/ produced

Gey Rundle: “…network capacity, which makes everyone producer and consumer, and hence collapses the notion of an audience (since time does not expand, while blog numbers do)” (p 46)

“The decline of symbolic efficiency is accompanied by a convergence between the imaginary and the Real” (p57)

Drive->  a kind of compulsion or force, that fragment and disperse.

“Blogging after the death of blogs persists in an analogous domain of the drive. Caught in the curtits of communicative capitalism out of which it emerged, it persists, whether in the form of fully automated splogs, the remnants of past posts excavated and ranked by Google, or our compulsions to make ourselves seen” (60)

 ----

  Questions:

 Why are there only a minority of students posting on the blogs when they are a requirement? Would having to hand in a ‘hard copy’ be any different? 

Discussion in the blogs has raised the point that neo liberalism-largely through communicative capitalism is not a bad thing, as increased wealth and is leading to the development of the third world, is this the case? Is the reality more nuanced then Dean lets on?

What is the difference between Terranova and Dean’s accounts of network politics?

Cyber bulling -- 58

Singularity, Indian Terminator, and Why Computer Scientists Don’t get it

Last night I was lounging around with some friends. Longfellow had a computer and was surfing blogs to some jazz.  Among the several entertainment items that surfaced was clip from Enthiran, the most expensive Indian movie ever made. The –dare I say- film, is centered around a scientist who creates a seemingly uncontrollable android, the robot, or terminator as some have tagged it, upgrades itself and the 2.0 version is able to self replicate. The rouge machine grows to massive proportions, and slithers into some of the most ridiculous action scenes produced this side of “Turkish Star Wars” in this clip the most impressive action begins about two and a half minutes in, take a look:

     

The clip was the catalyst for a conversation about the concept of singularity, and the possibility of sentient technology. The idea of singularity, in broad strokes, is that one day the intelligence of machines will surpass that of humans.  The concept has several branches that stretch into spirituality utopia and dystopia. It is not a ridged principal.  One school of thought sees singularity occurring when machines gain the intelligence to reproduce and design themselves- as seen in Enthiran.  Another camp believes singularity will occur when computing power becomes integrated with human power, creating a breed of super intelligent human machines- also seen in Enthiran.

  

Among my fellow watchers was Clemens, a student headed for a top tier computer science grad program. He brought up an argument against singularity that is also employed by Jaron Lanier in his book, “You are not a gadget” Lanier stresses that singularity is mostly a fantasy. Clemens agreed, arguing that without humans computers are just a collection of bits, that don’t know what to do. Lanier compared singularity to the rapture. Coyly writing that maybe a form of it will happen, in biological sense, but it might be awhile.

What?!  Is this really what the experts think?! Have they seen the Matrix? Read Phillip K. Dick, USA Today? –okay, so few read that paper unless their desperate, but seriously, most computer experts have seen SOMETHING about how the machines are about to take over.  It took warehouses full of programmers to create the graphics in Enthiran. What were they thinking as they tinkered with the pixels?  Did they render with fear of what could be, or hubris in the beauty of what only they and their human peers know how to create?

  

Lanier says, “A computer isn’t even there unless a person experiences it (P26).”  I disagree. Ontology aside, there have already been a number of examples of systems operated by computers that have impacted prices, traffic, and yes even something that would be around without us, the environment, on their own (for details of these comp-events stay tuned for future posts) . Computer systems designed by humans, are often made to do what the humans cannot do, like trade stocks in milliseconds, or what humans think could be done better, like regulating power plant emissions. Often these systems are built with the on the premise that once in place they will run without problems, and not require human supervision.  Such advancements have done wonders in terms of productivity. 

However, there have been some glaring examples of where the technology, left to its own devices has caused massive upheaval. Did you watch the Enthiran clip? You should. If that does convince you look up the “Flash Crash” which happen on May 6, 2010, when computers caused a mass selloff on the Dow Jones, causing it to plunge 600 points in five minutes. The loss was recovered by human traders about twenty minutes later, but the index lost about 1000 points on the day, and market jitters rippled around the world for weeks, as no one knew why the drop had happened. A subsequent investigation found that a computer algorithm, unable to account for the days irregular volatility caused much of the selloff. It was not the first time computers roiled the markets.           

It worries me that Clemens and Lamier brush off singularity with such ease. In posts to follow I will continue to explore this issue. For now, as Enthiran and the stock market show: Watch out!              

Google is texting me!?

Google knows my phone number and has started texting me. I'm playing it cool-- for now. It happened causally. Before setting up this blog Google wanted to verify that it was really me. I gave out my number (Google- I thought you already had it) and Google texted me a code to put in it's sever.  Put it in I did.  Google and I go way back, we've known each other for a few years now. It seems like ages ago when I set up my first Gmail account back in 2005. It's true, Google's seen me grow, and has grown too. And grown a lot. Now it's time for the next step.

We've shared a lot over the years.  You saw me send resumes to ski mountains and wondered if I would like a new set of mittens - I did. Thanks! You've been there for me. Since I met you I've come to you first when I want to know something. I love your friends. It was so nice when you a Youtube started hanging out! You've even been real with me. Back in 2008, when I spent more money then I had, and kept getting emails about it from another- not so good- friend boa (bank of america) you nudged me repeatedly with sidebar ads about financial planning and available local women... I'll come back to that later...Anyway, I feel like over the years you've really gotten to know me, it looks like our relationship together will only grow in the future! 

 So what's my post text plan?

First, I'll let Google marinate on me a little. Then BAM! I'll soot off a sext -more about these (and how to write them) later. Google wont be able to resist. Soon it'll be knocking at my suburban door with flowers and sliver toughing me for ALL my personal information.
Second, I'll hand it over, even grandma's secret cookie recipe.
Third, I'll let Google do whatever it wants to me.

I can't wait!