Annotated bibliographies trimester 1

Society in Ad-Hoc Mode (2004)

Armin Medosch.

The Article talks about how technology has changed society severely in many ways and how society is often also the reason why technology has effected society to such an extent. Society creates technology and not vice versa and just like the article states that today we live in a “society capable of inventing and constantly questioning its own rules” and that it “celebrates one triumph after the other, often referred to as "revolutions", in social terms,". Society however does have a problem with making a link between technology and social change. “The human factor is more or less ignored and social change is interpreted as a direct function of technology, reflecting a vulgar techno-determinism that is sadly hard to root out”. But when criticizing technological development society must keep in mind that “The primary objective of new technologies (besides those used for military puposes or as instruments of power) must be to serve economic growth” and that this idea is also the breeding ground for technological development. The central idea of this article is the “peer-to-peer” which is a system that is based on sharing and the common good. Technology has made it possible to reach areas that where unreachable before, life has become a lot smaller and big discisions within society are now made together thanks to these technological advances, such as social networks. A entire new society has been created online thus creating more and more possibilities for further development.

Antisocial notworking

Cox, Geoﬀ

The article starts of with how impersonal social networking sites are, and that it has become a connected and disconnected society. The focus of the article is on social networking sites such a Facebook and Hyves that allow you to collect friends and share information within self -made profiles. These websites however have become a lot more than a simple social realm of friends, instead “the production of non-antagonistic social relations has become central to, production and social control”. An example of this is Facebook with its 59 million users. This social network website reveals personal information of every user and this information can be accessed by agencies reflecting pervasive viral marketing techniques hegemonic corporate ownership and capitalistic economic principles all designed to derive profit from friendship. These sites are also continuously pushing you to add more friends to your network, thus making nearly half of your network weak ties.

These websites are called ‘social networking’ sites, but the word social has lost its meaning due to these new communication technologies. Sociology means the science of living together, and its Latin etymological root ‘socius’ meaning someone following someone else, a follower or an associate. This meaning has been lost and instead social networking sites have become a connection an assemblage opposed to a follower. And because it is a connection the question of relative power arises because not all connections in any network are equal and certain connections are granted more privileges than others. This has created a type of organization of power within the system.

The term networking has also almost lost its meaning. It has become the key organizational principle for understanding contemporary politics., society and life in general (from the activities of peer-to-peer file-sharing to the viral operations of economic and financial markets.) These networks have become controlled structures, neatly organized and ranked by importance. These ‘social’ networks, just like Martin Prada puts it, ‘it tends not to sell any product at all to the consumer, but rather sells the consumer to the products” in such ways the participatory work ethic of social networking is interpreted as an expression of new forms of control over subjectivity.

The article finishes of by saying that the networked computer works like a factory, and has redefined social practices and relations. The control of communications, and the labor related to communications have become the key sites of antagonism . The article concludes that social networking becomes ‘notworking’, the reason for this is because when work and action became unclear and hidden action has to be uncovered from non work,. The strategy of ‘notwoking’ does not have to do with liberating oneself from work but has to do with exploiting the work through a self-controlled production. The position of refusal derives from Mario Tronti’s essay ‘The Strategy of Refusal’ of 1965, following the logic that capital ‘seeks to use the workers antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor for its own development. He suggests that without the identificaion of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged.

How Control Exists after Decentralization (2006)

Alexander Galloway

This book is about a diagram, a technology and a management style. The diagram is a distributed network, the technology is the digital computer and the management style is computer protocol. These three elements come together and form a new way of control, but the question is how can control exist after decentralization. A new society has been created that are focused and based on third generation of machines with information technology (specifically the internet) and computers. At the heart of network computing is the concept of protocol. Computer protocol is a set of rules governing the exchange of transmission of data electronically between devices, and this is how, according to Foucalt, technical control exists after decentralization. Protocols cannot be centralized like internet cannot be centralized therefore if communication is a decentralized system everywhere where there is communication between two things protocols have to be developed in such a way that they are able to communicate with each other thereby sharing the same language. And this is what makes protocols important in the system, and controls who is connected to who.

Hail the Multitudes (2005)

Hardt, Michael, ADBUSTERS The Magazine

This articles starts off by saying that the most distinctive feature of successful powerful political movements of the past few years was their refusal of central leadership and unified programs. These movements focused on the idea that there is not only one single movement, but a movement of movements, communicating in horizontal, decentralized networks. They call this new form of social organization “Multitudes”, which focuses on the idea that different people work together collaboratively, but do not deny each other’s differences, freedom and independence. The question that emerges is whether or not this new form of political organization can challenge and hopefully defeat the present structure of power. To make this “multitude” movement work it needs to be able to find a way to act in common and create a consistent and powerful political project whilst maintaining their differences and singularity.

The way that the present political structure was emerged was by simply reflecting the already existing society, and the way we act around each other in our daily lives. The idea is that because we are use to having a boss ordering us around at work, we automatically expect to have a political boss directing our political organizations. But times have changed, and when we now look at the organization of labor today we notice that it is not focused on centralized command structures anymore, but mostly focuses on cooperation, collaboration and communication amongst various produces, thus creating a horizontal network. Even though this form of production is not seen everywhere around the world yet, it is clear that it has become very popular in a short time span, and one can conclude that it will spread much more over a period of time. This shows that society has changed and is slowly becoming more familiar with horizontal networks because it is becoming part of our everyday lives. This familiarity and trust in this new form of organization will help create this political movement that focuses on making decisions collaboratively, it will challenge the present forms of power, and propose an alternative society.

The article concludes by saying that horizontal collaborative networks can be created slowly over decades as the primarily and most powerful forms of political organizations

Ten Theses on Non-Democratic Electronics: Organized Networks Updated (2007)

Lovink, Geert and Rossiter, Ned

1. Welcome to the politics of diversion. There is a huge inconsistency between the real existing looseness on the one hand, and the desire to organize in familiar structures on the other. Both options are problematic. Networks are known for their unreliability and unsustainability. These two models are diverging, they do not compete, but they do not overlap either.

2. Uphold the synthesis. Think Global, Act Local. The question is how to arrange temporary coalitions, being well aware of the diverging interests and cultures. Instead of ‘managing’ disruption technologies, it should be also taken into consideration to radically take sides with the new generations and join the disruption. Lets get rid of moral pedagogies and shape the social change we envision.

3. Applied scalability is the new technics. With the tendency of networks to regress into the ghettoes of self-affirmation (the multitudes are all men), it can be said that in many ways networks have yet to engage ‘political’.

4. Where are the social networking sites for activists? Indy media for instance has not changed since 1999; its conceptual basics are still the same as when it started. There is an ongoing confusion between the alternative newsagents model, the practical community organizational level and strategic debates. Indymedia is used to often as an alternative ‘CNN’, their by showing that the nature of corporate news industry itself is changing.

5. The revolution will be participatory or not. The problem is that trans-scalar movement still remains. This has become clear in the multi-stakeholder governance model adopted by several organizations throughout the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society. As civil society participants scaled the ladder of political/discursive legitimacy, their logic of their networks began to fade away. And this is exactly the problem that we face with seemingly structureless networks and structured organizations.

6. The borders of networks consist of the “non-democratic” elements of democracy. Networks are not by default open horizontal or global. There is no politics of networks if there are no borders of networks. We should not enforce ‘democracy’ onto networks but instead study its nature. Networks usually thrive on small scale informality, especially at the start.

7. The borders of networks are the spacing of politics. These borders offer both limits and possibilities. In the process of growth the kernel of a network crystallizes a high energy, after some time the insides disappear and what remains is only the ruins of the border. The challenge is, how to engage the border as the condition of transformation and renewal?

8. There are no citizens of the media only users, and they have rights too. However these right work differently on networks than in the real world therefore what is needed then is total reengineering of user-rights within the logic of networks. Organized networks are equally insistent in maintaining a ‘non-democratic’ politics (Non-democratic does not mean anti-democratic or elitist) Networks are not nations! People want more choice when it comes to obtaining information and networks offer this luxury, but it also allows you to create own network thereby allowing you to filter friends. Wasn’t this what so many activists dreamt of?

9. Governance requires protocols of dissensus. If the borders of networks consist of governmental and non-governmental elements then we can also say that the borders of networks highlight their inherent fragility.

10. Design your education. Organized networks have a crucial role to play in the refusal of subjugating labor and life to the mind-numbing and life-depleting demands of post-Fordist capital. And it is through these ‘edu-networks’ that we see some of the most inspiring activities of new institutional inventions. Over the next decade of the of the world population will own a mobile phone and two billion the internet. We should use this potential wisely.