[ICTs-and-Society] Fwd: Discussion post from m.andrejevic at uq.edu.au

[Bob Logan]

Dear ICT friends - for an excellent discussion of how media monopolies operated in the past beginning with the telegraph I highly recommend the book Masterswitch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu. There has never been a technology or medium that was without some form of exploitation. The technologies change but the nature of the users does not. The Internet is still the most democratic form of communication we have yet invented with the possible exception of speech, that is if it is free. Paraphrasing Churchill I  would say that:
The Internet is the worst form of communication except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
		-- Bob Logan after Winston Churchill
Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
		-- Winston Churchill

On 2012-04-12, at 10:16 AM, Matze Schmidt wrote:

> I would like to refer to old and dead media like telegraph systems which
> had, regarding Facebook's and Google's business models, a very similar
> concept of dispossession -- a technological and economical concept at
> the same time of course -- that is the act of communication (nowadays
> "agency" or the capacity to act in ICTs) has to be payed by the customer
> directly and/or indirectly. We can find this as well in other networks
> like electricity grids (remember Edison's monopoly model of controlling
> the terminal and the provider). 
> 
> The notion that Google (and others) gains money from users' acts is
> wrong (I am sorry), as the chain will never be just
> 
> 
> users' act - money
> 
> 
> but
> 
> 
> users' act - data mining - selling of edited data (mining) to third
> parties - money (realisation of value)
> 
> 
> The part of waged work is never (even in automatic chains) excluded,
> it's only (Foxconn assembly lines aside) shifted to a special intellect
> here.
> 
> So taking this into account plus the oldish notion of _people buying the
> service_ we could describe the field by getting a mediated or let's say
> brokered »costless cost culture« which is since 1994 and earlier the
> main problem for net companies, namely: how to make profit while giving
> away the mass product (communication services, not algorithms) -- due to
> historcial reasons -- created with or by waged work?
> 
> By selling data these firms have found (had to find!) a way how to
> mediate literally dialectically the two realms: paying and not paying --
> by masking the permanent payment* with nonpaying. The dispossession is
> -- after Marx et al quite clear, it is a) the wage labor condition and
> it is the macroeconomic b) disbalance of work here and appropriation
> there -- since every single act of agency is already payed by a) plus b)
> in the circulation of goods.
> 
> The virtual public of social plattforms is obviosuly a private one right
> from the beginning of networked computers. Even Netscape was not
> anti-private public domain, even Cern's WWW was private in the hands of
> states. Eben the Arpanet was not public and democratic. So considering
> some reasonings I am really concerned how a democratised military net or
> any other democratised intranet could look like.
> _____
> * Enhanced notion of payment = wage labor, subventions, indirect funding
>  of networks by taxes and paying simple bills paying the surplus.
> 
> All the best for the conference,
> 
> Matze Schmidt
> 
> Astrid Mager wrote:
>> Even though I think the notion of exploitation
>> is a valuable tool to explain how Google and others gain money from 
>> users' activities and marketing purposes (as Christian explained in his 
>> work very well)
> 
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______________________

Robert K. Logan
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto 
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan




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