[ICTs-and-Society] Blogpost about Google’s “New“ Terms of Use and Privacy Policy: Old Exploitation and User Commodification in a New Ideological Skin

[Jonathan Beller]

Thanks Sylvain for that paragraph from Fraser, there are definite similarities, however my dystopian vision is not quite as bucolic as her already dreary picture. While I do see that representation and semiotics have been increasingly flattened, a la Orwell and Marcuse, by a vast internalization of the apparatuses of oppression  (in which "thought" is the (productive) thought of the (capitalist) Party), I do not think that hierarchy/class has gone away. Indeed, today thought is all about maintaining hierarchical society (capital is nature, capital is eternal, capital is information is nature, or, in a more pedestrian mode: human beings are naturally acquisitive and competitive, etc.) and advancing one's place in it by any means necessary. There is programming (the big Other, as distinct from the racial other, become self) but it is violent, competitive, hateful and alienating at the same time as it is cooperative, simpering and abject. Of course this is a huge generalization, but it sums up your average TV show or comments section on youtube. It is Bateson and Deleuze's schizophrenic become the capitalist norm -- one who struggles to negotiate hierarchical society while reproducing it.

Since no one else has yet taken up my question about internet understood in a post-fordist framework (What if it is all advertising?), I thought I would develop the point myself. The argument, which I sketched more thoroughly in my previous post is that in the context of virtuosity and the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital, sociality itself has become what I called advertisarial, a ceaseless waging of capitalized exploits designed to garner attention/value for oneself and one's capitalists. The micro-management of desire, the production of new needs, the capturing of the imagination all in order to induce behavioral shifts in others is no longer merely the provence of advertising but of human interactivity. From Smyth's claim in the Blindspot essay that all leisure time has become labor time to Virno's virtuosity we have seen aspects of this model for the capitalist overdetermination of apparently unremunerated time before, but we need to investigate its implications in the context of a discussion of radical media practice.

I'll make two points here:
1) If, as I have argued in the CMP, the means of representation have become the means of production, the questions of and models for political agency are radically transformed. Language and images are neither inside nor outside, they are part of the general intellect. We have seen that the general intellect was once largely held in common, increasingly it is being privatized, which is precisely the pre-condition of the real-subsumption of society by capital. The media themselves have become forms of capital. The means by which we most intimately know ourselves and our desires (our images and words) are themselves vectors of capitalization, intent upon converting our very life-process into surplus value (which is to say value for capital). Again, this, I think, is what Stiegler means by the proletarianization of the nervous system -- which would include pathways of feeling and thought. Our affective capacities are put to work in the social factory, and their product is alienated, which is to say it produces ever intensifying and ever accumulating dispossession as the dialectical antithesis of its production of unprecedented wealth.

From a historical perspective, this encroachment on the means of representation indicates that the individual, itself a platform for sociality that developed with the rise of capitalism (as the subject for the market, the thought of the commodity), is defunct. It's an outmoded technology which still appears as a skeuomorph in updated techno-social apparatuses -- like films, games, romance and national politics -- for the purposes of providing a sense of familiarity and orientation, but it is no longer a viable, which is to say sustainable fantasy. This expiration is not necessarily a cause for lament. However, from a political perspective it means that within each concrete individual body there exists, in differing quantities and qualities, capitalist and non-capitalist striations or sectors. There are, to be a bit simplistic, aspects of desire that are programmed to produce practices that function in perfect accord with capitalist accumulation strategies and aspects of desire that are atavistic, or collectivist, utopian, communist or just plain lonely. In reality, of course, desire is more singular, but we are speaking of politics here and therefore necessarily of the abstract forms available for the conceptualization and deployment of concrete emergences. For the moment, allow me to put it thus: In Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin showed how imperialist dividends complicated class issues in England since so many people, otherwise part of the working class, got a share of the dividends of imperialism by clipping the coupons of their investments in racist, exploitative British enterprises. Today, this fractionalization is fully internalized, on our ipads built by Chinese slaves we feel like nobles, on the job market we are abjects: even the concrete individual is composed of class fractions.

Of course this is still somewhat simplistic and also class specific as many never get to participate as an enfranchised global citizen in any aspect or moment of life. A more complex view is that we are the product of the world system and thus, everything we are has been made vis-a-vis globalization and thus bears the trace of the system in its entirety -- again in varying proportions. This is not to erase class, not in the least, however it suggests that just as A. Cesaire saw the European metropoles as the product of third world labor, we are all products of the global south. It is internal to our being. How does one inventory those relations and produce them as formations of solidarity rather than as disavowed residuum? 

To add to my point about the shifting character of political actors that goes so far as to suggest that we can no longer think of actors but rather must think of vectors, I'll make a second observation:
2)A political intervention in the advertisarial relations that have this planet headed towards environmental armageddon requires not only revolutionary policy but revolutionary culture. This culture must take into account that for many on this planet armageddon is not the future but the now. My call here, which in ways is similar to Dean's and Deuze's concerns as expressed on this forum, is to politicize affective structures and practices, including and perhaps especially those we can control -- namely our own utterances. Of course to call them "our own" seems to contradict what I said earlier about the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic, but it is here, precisely, that we confront one of the significant material contradictions of our time: who or what speaks in us? This question, which I shorthand using the phrase "the politics of the utterance," and which you can experience palpably right now, seems to me to insist that our idea making actively produce its solidarity with the dispossessed -- who and whatever they (we) might be. Furthermore, to insist upon the relevance of culture and cross-cultural transnational solidarity helps to avoid platform fetishism because it sees the internet not as set or collection of autonomous technologies, but as a historically emerged system of expropriative communication-organization built directly on older but nonetheless contemporaneous forms of inequality and embedded in the flesh of the world. 

All of which implies, that the internet is not all advertising, but neither is advertising all advertising. Marx himself saw capitalism as vampiric, and today's processes of capitalization are even more totalitarian, more widely distributed and more blood-sucking than in prior eras. Thus we recognize that capital still needs labor, and furthermore, that it wages war on many fronts to secure labor power, it's product. The refusal of capital's encroachment is itself a creative act. Perhaps we have only begun to glimpse what a total refusal might achieve.



Un saludo,
Jon





Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 (office fax)		
				



On Mar 1, 2012, at 10:43 AM, Sylvain Firer-Blaess wrote:

> Jonathan,
> This " "us" becoming" "we" is a very interesting thought. With advertising capitalism colonising even the core of the construction of identity, then "mass self-communication" would not be normatively different from "mass media" because it vehicles the same ideology. To give my own contribution I would like to share a paragraph written by Nancy Fraser in which she discusses the possibility of a fully panopticised society, which offers willy-nilly the same logical conundrum:
> 
> "Certainly, early forms of hermeneutical subjectification involved the sort of asymmetrical, hierarchical distribution of power in which a silent authority commanded, judged, deciphered, and eventually absolved the
> confessional discourse and its author. But the reading now under consideration holds that Foucault does not assume that asymmetry and hierarchy are of the essence of disciplinary power. Nor does he believe, it
> is claimed, that they are what is most objectionable about it. On the contrary, one can imagine a perfected disciplinary society in which normalizing power has become so omnipresent, so finely attuned, so penetrating, interiorized, and subjectified, and therefore so invisible, that there is no longer any need for confessors, psychoanalysts, wardens, and the like. In this fully "panopticized" society, hierarchical, asymmetrical domination of some persons by others would have become superfluous; all would surveil and police themselves. The disciplinary norms would have become so thoroughly internalized that they would not be experienced as coming from without. The members of this society would, therefore, be autonomous. They would have appropriated the other as their own and made substance subject. Class domination would have given way to the kingdom of ends. The ideal speech situation would have been realized.
> But, it is claimed, this would not be freedom."
> 
> Replace "normalising power" with the advertising ideology of capital Jonathan presents, and here you have a good presentation of the problem!
> 
> Sylvain
> 
> 2012/3/1 Jonathan Beller <jbeller at pratt.edu>
> Christian, James, All,
> 
> This is a significant, lucid discussion and Christian's last post moves it a decisive step forward: "being productive in the corporate internet factory is being exploited" -- there should be no back-peddling here. 
> 
> Indeed, this is what I argued in The Cinematic Mode of Production: cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye, to look is to labor, the attention theory of value, etc. Today, the internet, as means of production, is both pre-condition and paradigm for the screen mediated social factory. Currently, this social-factory is capitalist and it functions through the expropriation of labor. And labor has changed its form. Expropriation, as you all will no doubt recall, is dyssemtrical exchange, the worker gives more to his/her capitalist then s/he receives -- indeed the wage is leveraged down so that the worker receives subsistence and the rest of the workers' product accrues to the capitalist as profit. There have been some attempts to work out what this looks like mathematically, but I will leave that for another time. At any rate, we are all familiar with the various cognates that, with differing emphasis name this phenomenon: immaterial labor, attention, prosumer, playbour, cognitive capitalism, virtuosity, etc.
> 
> The point I want to make, which is also a challenge to the category of "advertising" has to do precisely with the idea of real subsumption that is implicit in the post-fordist model of production indicated above. Although it is necessary to insist upon the role of the screen in organizing the relations of post-fordist production, it is a mistake to think that once one leaves the light of the screen, work grinds to a halt. The point of virtuosity is that the cognitive-linguistic has been commandeered by capitalist production -- one thinks and speaks capital and constantly cooperates in productive processes everywhere to purchase survival. WIth a slightly different emphasis, this is also the ultimate point of Flusser's work on the photographic apparatus, namely the camera, which is a collection of programs that fundamentally alters the character of  language and sociality but also of history and metaphysics, and of Steigler's current work on Political economy in which he remarks on  the “grammatization of gesture” by industry, and of audiovisual perception and cognition by what he calls “retentional systems”, meaning media technologies (Stiegler, FNCPE,10).  THis latter harnesses the libido and institutes a "proletarianization of the nervous system." Therefore, the screen, while a command-control nexus, continues to organize the social factory even in the apparent absence of said screen: it organizes places like the imagination as well as the planet of slums.
> 
> Which is to say, in other words, that "advertising" has become a general condition, the real name for informatic throughput in capitalism. Data mining is a vast uptake of the commons, of our common practices, designed to intensify the imposition of an advertisarial relationship on everything. Real subsumption marks the conversion of representation itself to advertising: after all, virtuosity means that we speak for capital which is precisely the role of advertising. It also happens to be the role of the news and of the state.
> 
> So my point here is not to disagree with Christian, nor to undercut his policy recommendations. However, the difficulty here is with the us/them perspective: it is a disturbing possibility that we are them. Remember, "they" program "our" language and "our" imagination, "we" speak "their" thought -- indeed that is our work, or rather, our labor. As capital did to its colonies and colonial subjects, we make ourselves over in their image. This is particularly true if one considers the material conditions (race, class, nationality, education, language, etc) of the participants in this discussion. Without submitting ourselves and our own aspirations to radical critique we run the risk of merely trying to set up a competing corporation with a new business model, particularly if we do not think about the materiality of social production from top to bottom: class, yes, but also race, nation, gender. The lumpen, that is, the two-billion living on two dollars a day, also labor to survive in the post-fordist social factory. However, from the standpoint of capital, their role is to serve as substrate for image-production and semiosis. Starving hordes, irrational populations, subjects for policing, encampment and bombing, these excess populations are troped to organize (via the screen) to organize military production, national policy, and market projections. Any programme that does not admit this excluded planet into dialogue is still floating in the realm of the ruling ideas. And these ideas are the ones whose density and weight threatens to crush the post-modern poor out of not just representation but of existence. It should be clear, that banning advertising on the internet is not adequate to address these issues of representation and social justice.
> 
> To conclude for the moment: the forms of sociality which are the condition of possibility for internet run through every sector and register of planetary life. The internet, while recognizable, as a cause and effect of contemporary planetary production, cannot be considered in isolation if it's historical role is to be properly understood. To do so is a form of platform fetishism that disavows both the histories and material conditions of its emergence, which are, in short, the capitalist suppression of global democracy -- meaning, of course, economic democracy. To ban advertising is a good start, but what if the whole thing is advertising?
> 
> 
> Un saludo,
> Jon
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Jonathan Beller
> Professor
> Humanities and Media Studies
> Critical and Visual Studies
> Pratt Institute
> jbeller at pratt.edu
> 718-636-3573 (office fax)		
> 				
> 
> 
> 
> On Mar 1, 2012, at 5:50 AM, Christian Fuchs wrote:
> 
>> Dear James,
>> 
>> Thank you for the thoughtfull discussion about Google.
>> 
>> I agree that the question is what the limit of the use of personal information for advertising should be. I think I have a somewhat different answer than you have.
>> 
>> For me the question is what the role and effects of advertising culture are in society.
>> 
>> I am not at all arguing for opt-out advertising, but rather for a worldwide legal provision that makes opt-in advertising mandatory and outlaws opt-out. I agree with Oscar Gandy that personalised ads are a form of panoptic sorting and of social discrimination.
>> 
>> The problem is not data processing as such, the problem are the class relations into which Google services (and other corporate Internet services) are embedded.
>> 
>> Google's unification of terms simplifies and joins up the economic surveillance of users, as you say. From Google's business interests, this is a logical step because it promises more profits. At the same time, Google wants to ideologically sell this step as bringing about more user privacy, control etc, which it does not.
>> 
>> I do think that advertising culture, the existence of advertising, is problematic and that it is the outgrowth of the commodification and commercialization of the world. We were better off with a world without advertising. I think for Critical Internet Studies, we also need (among a lot of things) Critical Advertising and Consumer Culture Studies.
>> 
>> In the case of advertising-based audience commodification (as with Google), advertising is not only a privacy-violation, but - and this is my crucial point - it is the exploitation of user labour.
>> 
>> I have problems with self-regulatory data protection, where companies choose whatever they want to do with user data and one tells users: oh, here are some great ways of how you can reduce the amount of data we use about you (opt-outs, privacy settings where the standard option is always the high use of user data for advertising, privacy-enhancing technologies, etc). THe thing is that for consumer privacy protection, it should not be required for the user/consumer to take action for not having ones data processed for advertising purposes, companies should in the first place not use data for such purposes and should be obliged to in the first place use no advertising. If a user wants his/her data to be used for advertising, then s/he should have the possibility to enable it, but the standard should be "no advertising". These are questions of choice, power, action, negative and positive freedom.
>> 
>> I would not argue for keeping the user data of different Google services separate and not joining them up for advertising. I think this is too short-sighted. It is like not working in one factory and being exploited there for 8 hours and monitored by workplace CCTV, but working in 4 different factories 2 hours a day, being monitored by workplace CCTV, but not allowing the factories to compare the recorded data. I am in favour of not letting them exchange the data, but much more I think that the problem is that the workers is forced/has to work in these factories in order to survive. So what I am questioning is factory life as exploited life as such and that we should limit the commodification of everything, which requires legally limiting targeted advertising possibilities.
>> 
>> And the Internet is a factory of surplus-value generation, Google being one of the primary Internet factories, in which we all work and create economic value. And in this factory, advertising culture has become a productive space, depends on a high-level of total instantenous real-time economic surveilallance of online activities and the transformation of all (or a lot of) online time into labour time. But being productive in the corporate Internet factory means being exploited.
>> 
>> There is a difference between work and labour, the latter is value-generating and exploited. We work on Wikipedia and Diaspora, we labour on Google and Facebook. What I am questioning is the existence of the Internet factory, the labour it requires and the total commodification of online activities. Advertising is at the heart of the problem.
>> 
>> Best, Christian
>> 
>> 
>> 
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