[ICTs-and-Society] Plenary 7: “The Internet and Critical Theory Today” (Mark Andrejevic, Andrew Feenberg)

[James Losey]

I wouldn't go as far to suggest that Facebook is a commons anymore than a
shopping mall is one but I think conceptually the Internet is a commons
because of the potential for users to create or interact with various
spaces. I think we're in agreement on the rent seeking that take place but
I am suggesting that it could be valuable to assess a greater portion of
the stack.

I am very much looking forward to Mark's examination of how social networks
are in a position to monetize the activities of their users. I was
responding to the framing of sharecropping and suggesting that it could be
more fruitful to explore a framing that has applicability beyond the
relationship between Google and a user but also an example such as an ISP
and Google. After all, the power an ISPs has over the system could
foreclose on a social network that attempts to create a commons such as the
concept proposed by Diaspora.

Best,
J

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Jakob Rigi <rigij at ceu.hu> wrote:

> I Think, from the point of users both Google and Face book are commons,
> there is no enclosure there, every one can use them. But from the point of
> view Owners, they are virtual spaces, through which the owners extract rent
> from wage labor outsides these virtual spaces.
> best
> Jakob
>
> >>> James Losey **04/11/12 5:23 PM >>>
>
> I think there is some validity in describing the relationship as
> sharecropping but it might be more useful to find the similarities between
> the private influence over online spaces and the enclosure movement of the
> 15th and 16th centuries in England. The challenge of a  "digital
> sharecropping" frame is that it suggests that different spaces are
> independent fields rather than reflecting the interdependence of the wide
> range of stakeholders that create what we know as the Internet. On the one
> hand we have the potential for an Internet commons - one where a user is
> able to define their experience, build innovations, or even the freedom be
> a craftsman. However, on the other hand, we have a hierarchical stack of
> largely private players from ISPs to protocol developers (or
> protocol licensing bodies) that attempt to exert the power the have over
> their respective layers to enclose others. This includes Facebook mining
> data of users but this only observes the interaction between a service and
> a user, not the types of control a spectrum license holder or the push for
> a private video standard creates rent seeking mechanisms or other controls
> across the stack. Rather than sharecropping perhaps we could examine a more
> complex system of digital feudalism where a wide variety of stakeholders
> are attempting to enclose the Internet commons.
>
> Best,
> James
>
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Jan Nolin <Jan.Nolin at hb.se> wrote:
>
>>  Mark,
>> This is a very important discussion. For some of the reasons you
>> mentioned, I find "exploitation" to be a bit misleading for these
>> phenomena. I think we need to develop new and more specific concepts for
>> the things that we analyze. One concept that has some promise is "digital
>> sharecropping", suggested by Nicholas Carr. This creates a parallel to the
>> traditional forms of sharecropping where the farmers worked the land while
>> the land owners reaped the profits.
>>
>> /Jan
>>
>>
>>  ..........................................
>> Jan Nolin, PhD
>> Professor
>> Bibliotekshögskolan/Institutionen för biblioteks- och
>> informationsvetenskap
>> Högskolan i Borås
>> 501 90 Borås
>>
>> http://www.hb.se/wps/portal/forskning/forskare/jan-nolin
>>
>> Telefon: + 46 (0)33 435 43 36
>> Fax: +46 (0)33 435 40 05
>> >>> Mark Andrejevic <markbandrejevic at gmail.com> 2012-04-11 03:11 >>>
>> Thanks Christian,
>>  I'm looking forward to the conference -- and have greatly appreciated
>> the pre-conference discussions. I'm very interested to see that there are
>> at least a couple of talks that focus on the question of exploitation. The
>> term has become an important one for me because I'm trying to come up with
>> a formulation other than privacy to explore areas of concern about the
>> collection and use of personal information in the digital era. Recent
>> events in Europe and the US related to Google and Facebook's handling of
>> personal information demonstrate how powerful the privacy "frame" is for
>> talking about the wholesale capture of personal data for commercial
>> purposes is -- and yet, in many cases we are talking about processes of
>> information capture that do not violate conventional expectations of
>> privacy (such as looking at aggregate patterns without attempting to drill
>> down and identify individuals) and in other cases we are talking about
>> forms of privatization (the capture and proprietary use of particular types
>> of data) that rely on conventional understandings of the relationship
>> between privacy and property.
>>
>> The notion of exploitation looks like a useful one to me because it
>> points to the underlying patterns of commercial ownership and control of
>> communication infrastructures that are coming to colonize an increasing
>> range of social interactions and behavior. The seemingly "free" and
>> ubiquitous character of services provided by Google and Facebook has led to
>> our treating them as if they are public utilities, when of course they are
>> private, for-profit, commercially driven companies whose decisions play an
>> important role in shaping the information environment upon which we are
>> becoming increasingly reliant. When I started studying the mass media --
>> then considered to be primarily TV, newspapers (magazines), and radio (with
>> some cinema and sound recording thrown in) -- there was a strong critical
>> emphasis on "media monopoly" and the political economy of those industries
>> that shape our information environment. The advent of the World Wide Web
>> and attendant forms of techno-enthusiasm seems to have had the perhaps
>> temporary effect of sidelining such questions as core elements of media
>> studies, and one of the reasons I am looking forward to this conference is
>> that it brings together people who have been challenging this tendency from
>> the start.
>>
>> I have been taken to task on occasion for enlisting a term traditionally
>> associated with critical approaches to the analysis of human suffering and
>> immiseration in the realm of production to critique apparently voluntary
>> forms of behavior that take place outside the realm of production "proper"
>> -- intriguingly such challenges have, on occasion, come from people who
>> have otherwise worked to destabilize these oppositions (by highlighting the
>> convergence of consumption and production, etc.). I am sensitive to the
>> observation that providing data for Facebook is qualitatively different
>> from laboring under sweatshop conditions, and yet, I continue to think that
>> the notion of exploitation usefully points to the structured relations of
>> power that allow for the capture and use of personal information -- often
>> as a tool that can be turned back upon those who generate it. I also think
>> that it is important to note the ways in which the online economy is not
>> isolated from the broader economy that continues to rely on more brutal
>> conditions of exploitation, shored up by the very same relations of
>> ownership and control.
>>
>> As part of the lead up to the conference I'd be interested in hearing
>> people's thoughts about the potential and limitations of the critique of
>> exploitation as a way of thinking about the forms of value production that
>> take place in the context of social media.
>>
>> As a side note, Facebook's reframing of its privacy policy as a "data use
>> policy" is perhaps a suggestive one -- privacy advocates I know saw it as a
>> move by Facebook to attempt to distance itself from privacy concerns. To
>> me, this looked to like an opportunity to focus on the question of data use
>> and perhaps sidestep the way in which the commercial sector has been
>> working to exploit the ambivalence of the notion of privacy.
>>
>> I'd be interested in people's thoughts.
>> best,
>> Mark
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Christian Fuchs <christian.fuchs at uti.at>wrote:
>>
>>> Friday, May 4th, 2012
>>> * Mark Andrejevic (University of Queensland, Australia): Social Media:
>>> Surveillance and Exploitation 2.0
>>> * Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University, Canada): Great Refusal and
>>> Long March: How to Use Critical Theory to Think About the Internet.
>>> Chair: Christian Fuchs
>>>
>>> Mark's and Andrew's talks will bring up questions like the following
>>> ones: How do corporations use social networking sites? What is exploitation
>>> 2.0 and how does the exploitation of labour work on social media? How is
>>> online life commercialized, branded, and monetized? What is the role of
>>> surveillance in online exploitation? How can critical theory adequately
>>> reflect and criticize these developments?
>>> How relevant is Herbert Marcuse's thinking and critical theory today?
>>> What is an adequate strategy for transforming the Internet? Does it require
>>> a "Great Refusal" (Marcuse) or a "Long March through the Institutions"
>>> (Dutschke, Marcuse)? Does Critical Theory require a blanket condemnation of
>>> the Internet? Does Critical Theory need a long march strategy that assesses
>>> the Internet's reality against its potentials? What is the essence of the
>>> Internet? What is the existence of the Internet? Is there a difference
>>> between essence and existence of the Internet? What is a true Internet?
>>> What a false Internet?
>>>
>>> Pre-conference discussions on these and related questions are welcome
>>> over the mailing list.
>>>
>>> ***
>>>
>>> MARK ANDREJEVIC
>>> University of Queensland, Australia
>>>
>>> Social Media: Surveillance and Exploitation 2.0
>>>
>>> ABSTRACT: This presentation explores the ways in which social networking
>>> technologies are being taken up by the commercial sector as ways for
>>> integrating social and work life. Thanks to the popularity and ubiquity of
>>> social network technologies in some sectors of the population, companies
>>> are finding ways to exploit the social connections of their employees,
>>> customers, and clients, leading to start-up companies that seek to monetize
>>> social network data by linking it with consumer relations databases and
>>> other technologies for target marketing. When important aspects of people’s
>>> social lives migrate onto commercial platforms these become subject to
>>> marketing imperatives, self-branding becomes a new (or updated) form of
>>> employee asset. The goal of the presentation is to develop a theoretical
>>> approach to the commercialization and monetization of online social life.
>>> To what extent might the critique of exploitation be updated and brought to
>>> bear upon the productivity of social networks? What aspects of this
>>> critique help illuminate the wholesale commodification of social
>>> relationships, and what are the implications of relying upon a privately
>>> owned commercial infrastructure for their development? The critique of
>>> exploitation directs us back to these questions. It urges us to consider
>>> the ways in which the commercialization of the platform turns our own
>>> activity back upon ourselves in the service of priorities that are not our
>>> own, and it reminds us of the double duty done by the privately controlled
>>> interactive infrastructure. This infrastructure might serve as a platform
>>> for new forms of creativity, deliberation, communication, interaction, and
>>> consumption. At the same time, though, it works to assemble the most
>>> comprehensive system for mass monitoring in human history. The accusation
>>> associated with the critique of exploitation reminds us of the ways in
>>> which new forms of marketing driven surveillance help turn our own
>>> productive activity back upon ourselves in the service of ends that are not
>>> our own.
>>>
>>> SPEAKER INFO: Mark Andrejevic is a media scholar at The University of
>>> Queensland, Australia. He writes about surveillance, new media, and popular
>>> culture. In broad terms, he is interested in the ways in which forms of
>>> surveillance and monitoring enabled by the development of new media
>>> technologies impact the realms of economics, politics, and culture.
>>>
>>> ***
>>>
>>> ANDREW FEENBERG
>>> Simon Fraser University, Canada
>>> Great Refusal and Long March: How to Use Critical Theory to Think About
>>> the Internet
>>>
>>> ABSTRACT: Herbert Marcuse suggested two different strategies at
>>> different points in his career. The Great Refusal implied a strategy of
>>> non-cooptable demands. This notion stemmed from a dystopian sense of the
>>> total systematization of society and was in harmony with the uncompromising
>>> opposition of the early New Left. But in the later period of what Marcuse
>>> called the “preventive counter-revolution”, he adopted Rudi Dutschke’s
>>> slogan of “the long march through the institutions”. The choice at this
>>> time was between withdrawal, terrorism and participating critically.
>>> Marcuse advocated the latter.
>>> I want to think about our critical stance toward the Internet in terms
>>> of these two strategies. Does Critical Theory require a blanket
>>> condemnation of the Internet? This seems to be the conclusion drawn by many
>>> observers. Hypothetically, this could lead one to a Great Refusal of the
>>> Internet and all its works, withdrawal to an Internet-free zone of some
>>> sort. I will argue that we need a long march strategy based on a much more
>>> nuanced critique. We need to measure the Internet against its real
>>> potentials and defend it against real dangers rather than condemning it
>>> unqualifiedly.
>>>
>>> SPEAKER INFO: Andrew Feenberg holds the Canada Research Chair in
>>> Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
>>> University, where he directs the Applied Communication and Technology Lab.
>>> His main areas of research are Critical Theory and philosophy of technology.
>>>
>>> ______________________________**_________________
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