User:Lidia.Pereira/GRS5/thDr2

Abstract

A vast amount of our daily lives, both professional and personal, is now embedded within computational network logic. The boundaries between work and leisure become blurry, which oftentimes means the commodification and monetization of the latter. Social media monopolies, in particular, make clever use of the 'network effect' (where the number of users determines the value of a service) for marketing purposes, extracting profit from user activity. The current mode of exploitation is now being labeled under the "social" tag, alienating the user further from the perception of his/her condition as a worker. The problem is that, with business dictating all the rules, the conversation becomes rather unilateral.
A possible solution would be to strive for the organization of a political force that represents the 'produsers' and provides them with a voice and better control over their data. But how to deal with the political, social and cultural assymetries or the users' lack of awareness of their own condition? In order to answer these questions I will analyse the potential and problematics of translating traditional union forms to the digital space by studying projects such as the International Data Union, Networg and Social Networking Unionism.
Following such trajectory I will defend 'produser' unionism, that is, social media labor organization, whose necessity lies in providing workers with the much needed tools for the articulation of legal demands regarding their online data. The expectation is that this will, in turn, open up new possibilities for peer-to-peer projects in alternative social media.

1. From the Sociogram to the Social Graph

Studying the genealogy of the Social Graph it is possible to begin to fathom the patterns which pervade contemporary modes of production. From the concepts of cybernetics/governance, abstraction of complex social subjects into sterile graphic representations and an ideological attempt to enforce positivist paradigms in normative structures, the history of the Social Graph guides us through the concepts of social engineering, sociometry, relational databases and other tools for governance.
Using this genealogy as pretext, the chapter will lay the historical, economical and political grounds in which the network society emerges, radically restructuring the working class and its struggles.

Social Graph

A vast amount of our daily lives is now embedded within computational network logic. The Social Graph, a graphical chart of Internet users, objects and relationships between them, is precisely the attempt to map such network in an analytical, all-encompassing way.
Initially introduced during the Facebook F8 conference in 2007 within the context of the Facebook Platform, the Social Graph has now expanded to become an attempt at the graphical representation of relationships between everybody and everything on the Internet. In 2010, just three years after its introduction, the Social Graph became the largest social network dataset in the world. The underlying ideas of efficiency and productivity the word "graph" entails, however, echo previous attempts at engineering the social, of which the sociogram might be the closest relative.

Sociogram

It was the late 1930s when psychologist Jacob Levy Moreno accomplished quite the successful intervention at the New York State Training School for Girls Hudson, in an approach faithful to the principles of sociometry, a discipline for quantitatively measuring social relationships, which he founded.
Moreno started his intervention by conducting a survey - or sociometric procedure - which consisted of questions regarding the girls' preferences towards each other - who would they rather work with, or live in the same dormitory with, for example. However, these responses can only acquire their status as sociometric facts when charted diagramatically in such a way that allows not only their presentation, but more importantly their exploration (Jacob L. Moreno, "Who shall survive?", page 96). As such, Moreno devised several diagrams of the girls' social network in terms of nodes and links, where every node represents a person and every link represents a relationship. This sociometric tool goes by the name of sociogram. On the basis of such observations, Moreno diagnosed the problem as one embedded within the existing dormitory arrangements - the position held by a girl within the community might increase her runaway risk. Indeed, the use of sociometric tools such as the sociogram can help the researcher predict and prevent possible escapes. And that was exactly Moreno's legacy in Hudson - juxtaposing these socio-technical charts upon current dormitory arrangements, a better functioning, more productive network emerged.
Making use of the sociogram as tool for re-engineering the social, Jacob L. Moreno not only succeeded in solving the school's problem, but also in demonstrating the governative power of social mapping in controlling the behaviour of the charted community. Governative in the Foucauldian sense of "governmentality", that is, when technologies of power which objectify their subjects meet technologies of the self - the sociogram charts happiness and general well-being of subjects in order to better organize them. Technologies of the self are, according to Foucault, that which allows the subject, either alone or with the help of others, to effect change in him/herself with the intent of attaining "a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality" (Foucault, "Technologies of the Self"). Indeed we might argue in favor of the sociogram as being in itself a techonology of the self, in the sense that, with the help of others, subjects are expected to attain their most productive state of well-being.
If at this phase it is already perfectly clear the parallels between the sociogram and social graph, it is necessary that we look further into the concept of social engineering to better navigate the consequences entailed for the mapped network, albeit on different scales.

Social Engineering

"The aim of social engineering was to make society rational and train the state for maximum efficiency in the same way my father trained workers. He believed society could be controlled like a machine. The aim was to install these social engineering machines all over the USSR. These machines would make society function totally rationally. Man would become a rational component of the machine." Alexei Gastev Jr.

The mainstream definition of social engineering characterizes it as a discipline in social science regarding the efforts undertaken by governments, media or other private groups to influence popular opinion and attitudes. What this means is that social engineering is a powerful apparatus for enforcing ideology, guaranteeing the elite's dominance over the functioning of the whole economical system. Simply put, social engineering is an instrument at the service of economical reproduction.
In his work "Foundations of Sociometry" (1953), Jacob Levy Moreno aknowledges the importance of informational technologies over networks by observing the distorting effect of the printed page over human spontaneity. Such observation made him realize the effects of the superimposition of a "mechanical-social network" upon a "psycho-social network" in removing society from human control. Being human spontaneity at the core of social sciences, it is important for the construction and planning of human society, according to Moreno, to have full knowledge of the central infrastructure of human relationships. This is the fundamental aim of any given sociometric experiment. "The social scientist must, of necessity, acquaint himself, in the research phase, with the individuals themselves and the interrelations between them. Analysis and action, social research, and social construction, are interwoven."(Moreno, J. Levy, "Foundations of Sociometry",p.19). What this means, especially the last sentence, is that charting apparatuses such as the sociogram, which ultimately validate the data gathered through sociometric procedures, are only as meaningful and accurate as the research process is thourough - the consequential analysis of the social diagram which ultimately conducts to intervention and action over the network is dependent on the participation of every social atom involved. Participation entails better tracing of patterns, habits and relations, in this way making social engineering all the more fine-tuned towards general productivity. If this was true for the sociogram, it is also discernible within the Social Graph's long-standing goal of mapping the Internet.
Social engineering is not, however, appanage only of capitalist societies, but of industrialist societies in general. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Alexei Gastev, founder of the Central Institute of Labour in the USSR, was also a firm believer in the role of social engineering in rationalizing the social for efficiency purposes. Gastev perceived this process as emancipatory, since a revolution could only be recognized as such if the workers were empowered to control the work process. To this end he employed taylorist ideals to train workers to behave and think in a rational way. Taylorism, also known as the scientific organization of labor, is a management theory whose purpose is one of improving economic efficiency with the application on positive scientific laws to the analysis and implementation of workflows. Taylorism enjoyed widespread acceptance in the early stages of the Soviet Union, namely by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Gastev eventually materialized his utilitarian taylorist notions by building a social engineering machine, whose ways nobody to this day understands, but whose goal, if we are to accept his son's account of it, was one of turning men into rational components of itself.

Societies of Networked Control

The precursor of the Internet, ARPANET, was a network architecture devised by the U.S. Defense Department Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a response to the Cold War. In the even of takeover, American communications would be secured since the whole of the network could not be controlled from any central point. Such architecture was constituted by a vast amount of computer networks linking to each other in numerous ways. (Castells, Manuel, "The Rise of the Network Society",p.6). Funding of the research leading up to this project was the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), also part of DARPA.
If we are to agree with Manuel Castells, the birthplace of a new technological paradigm around information and communication technologies was greatly influential in its development, for it reflects the culture of freedom and entrepeneurship which characterized American campus culture of the 60's (Castells, Manuel, "The Rise of the Network Society", p.5). This might be due to the fact that, as described by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon in "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", networking infrastructures were installed at universities per request of IPTO contractors of more advanced computer resources, who where there conducting their research. In an attempt to cut costs, ARPA built a system of links between machines which allowed for resources to be shared more effectively. That way, everyone could virtually access the most advanced machines without them having to be physically present. This academic freedom culture allowed for the rupture with old patterns of behaviour, both in society and business. The growing influence of the widespread use of personal computers as a means of achieving freedom, placed networking structures at a place of redefinition of the ideology concerning governance - there would be no place for central government in the networked society (Curtis, Adam, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Love and Power").
This shift in governance towards decentralization and modularity is described by Gilles Deleuze in "Postcript on the Societies of Control" as a system in constant change, no longer territorial, whose language is quantitative. The technology at the center of this shift is the computer, without which, as put forward by Castells, the social phenomena cannot be understood. The representation - diagram - of this society is the network, modular and fluid, the instrument which organizes the governed in carefully managed data flows. That which allows for such management is the protocol (Galloway, Alexander, "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization",p.3). Within this context, the protocol is that which allows control to exist after the foundations of central governance disappear. Computer protocols define the standards through which technology is implemented, regulating the way through which different technologies communicate between each other and ultimately how users interact with it (Galloway, Nicholas, "Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization", p.7).
The protocol exists within the decentralized, distributed network, of which the Internet is the most prominent example. Most of the protocols regulating its use are archived in RTC (Request for Comments) documents. Other protocols, like the ones used in the World Wide Web are mantained by the World Wide Web Consortium. Thanks to the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP), to name the most relevant of many examples, every computer on the network is able to communicate with the others.
Deleuze's account of the society of control exists within an evolution of capitalism no longer a capitalism "for production but for the product" (p.6). What this means is that where the emphasis used to be placed on property and production, the latter is now, for the most part, dispatched to third world countries. It is a capitalism for services and self-marketing. This restructuring of the capitalist system that took place from the 1980's onwards saw the information technology revolution as a fundamental factor which allowed for its birth. This revolution was, in turn, shaped by, but not reducible to the logic and interests of capitalism. Likewise, the close relationship between the restructuring of capitalism and the rise of informationalism does not automatically mean that both processes are indistinct from each other. In order to better understand what this assumption entails, it is necessary to distinguish between modes of production and modes of development. As defined by Castells, modes of production are rules determined by social structures regarding the distribution and uses of the surplus, whilst modes of development are the tecnhological conditions which define how labor shapes matter, thus determining the quality of the surplus. That which defines the mode of development is the primary source of productivity in the process of production. Being capitalism the mode of production, informationalism is the current mode of development associated with the new social structure. Its main source of productivity is the action of knowledge upon itself.
A relevant example of "protocological control" (Galloway, Alexander, "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization", p.8) would be the Open Graph protocol, which facilitates the integration of other pages within the Social Graph. It does so by authorizing web developers to embed their pages into the social graph, where they acquire the same functionality as other graph objects. This means that it becomes possible to access not only people and their interpersonal relationships, but also liked pages, events, photos and the links between all of them. This expansion of the sociogram to non-human nodes opens up the question about the human subject - if social engineering explains the management of social relationships, how does one explain the management of the subject's notion of self?

Soul Engineering

"The larger-than-life personalities of fearless dissidents that melted the icy heart of the Stasi officer in The Lives of Others are barely visible to the Internet police, who see the subjects of surveillance reduced to one-dimensional, boring database entries." Evgeny Morozov, "The Net Delusion"

In "Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self", one of the general problems that Nicholas Rose proposes to address concerns the social shaping of the human subject. Social thinkers such as Karl Marx and Adam Smith reflected on the relationship between social context and its inhabitant subject; sociology and psychology were not separated entitities. (Rose, Nicholas, "Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self") Where these thinkers asked how human subjectivity was socially determined by the surrounding apparatus, Rose asks: "how have persons been shaped by prevailing ways of thinking about human beings and acting upon them?". With the "birth of a new area of expertise" in the area of the psy sciences, it has become evident the tendency towards the engineering of the soul - never before was human subjectivity so carefully managed, so instrumental to the general economical efficiency of society.
Rose argues that psychological sciences are that which allows for the inscription of the human soul into categorized, calculable structures. Such inscription enables power to affect change upon human subjectivity through "human technologies", which quantitatively arrange the human subject in networks of power (Rose, Nicholas, "Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self", p.8) In this sense the sociogram, as well as its contemporary surrogate, the Social Graph, might be placed under the concept of "human technology", insofar as they inscribe the subject's psy in view of a certain outcome - efficiency. Nicholas Rose underlines the consequences of these networks for the human atom in terms of infiltration of power in the human soul, actively redefining the self and its ways of thinking about itself.
The choice of the word "graph" in Social Graph is everything but innocent, as it entails ideological assumptions of rational mathematical analysis - thus representing one step further towards positivist ideals of fixed, simplified, predictable and rigid social structures. The concept of the Social Graph eerily echoes Rose's notion of psychological examination as that which allows subjectivity to become calculable. With the introduction of non-human nodes, the Social Graph is a megalomaniac attempt to fully inscribe its subjects within its rigid structure, and would be better described as an hybrid between a relational database and a sociogram. It is here interesting to understand the reason that witnessed the birth of the relational database, as introduced by Edgar F. Codd in 1970, within the realm of computation: intended to substitute the hierarchical database, the relational database was yet another means towards the goal of increasing productivity. Instead of presenting data in a navigation unfriendly hierarchical way, where one's means of addressing data is by position, relational databases present the data and relationships between them in a table format, where information is accessible by value. Likewise within the Social Graph data accessed by value allows for tracing of all relative data that is linked and linking to it.
With its arrogant project of turning all human subjects into rational, productive components of itself, the Social Graph might have come closer to accomplishing that which Gastev's social engineering machine ultimately failed to do. Is it possible that the Social Graph, then, is serving also the process of taking the governance of our soul a step further, to use Nicolas Rose's words? In the digital space, the management of the multitude of immaterial produsers calls for more efficient methods of classifying, analysing and engineering the psy. The Social Graph, despite and thanks to its blatant bidimensionality, is sucessfully transforming the digital space into the realm of the quantified subject, the privileged structure for power infiltration within the human soul. By feeding the algorithms that partially control the content of what we see in corporate social media platforms, it becomes the central model through which our "soul" is engineered.

Immaterial Digital Labor within the context of Social Media

Relational approach database

In "Social Media, or Towards a Political Economy of Psychic Life" (Unlike Us Reader, Institute of Network Cultures) Ganaele Langlois analyses the socio-economical impacts of the opening up of psychic life to the markets. The observation that social media provides a platform for the extraction of surplus off of the human psyche further confirms Rose's point according to which subjectivity has become a fundamental aspect of economical efficiency. Langlois (p.52) references the psychoanalysis concept of 'relational approach', the process through which one opens up to the world. According to such approach, intersubjectivity, that is, our relationship with others, is what determines our identity. However, as Langlois points out, social media opens up that intersubjectivity to data processing algorithms which determine which ads, page suggestions or friends' updates we get fed. Social media become platforms for soul engineering, and relational approach appropriately gives way to the relational database logic of the Social Graph as a primary means for subjectivity formation. The commodification of user's psychic life furthers Deleuze's conceptualization of "capitalism for the product".
This same process of marketing audiences for economic surplus was exposed and analysed in Dallas Smythe's 1977 essay "Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism". According to Smythe, the fundamental marxist question about which economic function communications serve capital with, remained, at the time, unexplored. Criticizing positions which attributed mass communications with a mere ideological function as burgeois and idealistic, Smythe's upheld the view by which mass media engage simultaneously in superstructure and infrastructure. His argument can only be understood if we accept the commodity of mass media under monopoly capitalism to be, instead of "images", "messages" or "manipulation", the audiences themselves. The meaning of such an assumption is that all non-sleeping time is work that we commit to the communications industry, by means of our labour power being sold to advertisement agencies. When consuming, audiences actively produce and satisfy a demand.
Corporate social media appear to further Dallas Smythe's commodity audiences to the level of ever more pervasive algorithmic automation. In fact, to his answer of the question "What institutions produce the commodity which advertisers buy with their advertising expenditure?" one might now add social media moguls such as Mark Zuckerberg or Eric Schmidt to his list of the owners of TV networks, newspapers, magazines, etc.
As outlined in the previous chapter, the management of subjectivity has been a constant in all previous institutional attempts at efficiency. In this sense, social media should be understood as being the latest development of such tendency. The major upgrade, however, resides precisely in its successful capture of psychic life for economical revenue. Andrew Keen warn us that the prison of the 19th century, the Panopticon, has reappeared within the social web (or, as Reid Hoffman puts it, Web 3.0), but with a plot twist: it is now considered as pleasurable and entertaining. Social media architecture derives from an utilitarian approach of obtaining the most efficiency out of the human subject it yearns to control. As "human technology", power enters the self at the level of the algorithm which determines the subject's access to information. According to Maurizio Lazzarato's "Immaterial Labor", this leaves no space for innovation, for such processes highly engineer the social at the subject's expense.

Participatory immaterial labor

Smythe's commodified audiences are actively performing immaterial labor, which both satisfies and produces a demand, ultimately forming subjectivity. Lazzarato's key text "Immaterial Labour" sustains that subjectivity is now the "raw material" of immaterial labor, conspicuously producing a social relation. In Lazzarato's understanding, immaterial labor can be seen as incorporating most of post-industrial production characteristics: cooperation, self-directed management, autonomy, networks and flows. However, one must bear in mind the normative character of said characteristics as a means of achieving the most efficiency possible. Immaterial labor combines intellectual, manual and entrepeneurial skills and its cycle of production operates on a social level, there where social communication corresponds to economic value, the "social" directly identifying with the "economical". This assumes that the public/consumer implicitly takes part in the process of production by means of his/her interaction with cultural commodities.
Mirkos Tobias Schäfer's chapter two - "Claiming Participation" of his book "Bastard Culture" further explores the idea of self organized communities interacting with culture in a variety of ways, questioning the extent to which we participate in it and how. Technology both enables and shapes participatory culture. According to Mirkos Tobias Schäfer, participatory culture marks a shift between cultural participation, in which users take part by an intelectual deconstruction of cultural artefacts, participation which is still very much restricted to an intelectual elite, and the fading of barriers between amateur culture and professionals, users and producers, in which action, construction and modification are common interactions of the user with cultural artifacts. This participation extends beyond media text production and modification to software development, which is "the means of production of the digital age". This shift is allowed by new technologies and the architecture of Web 2.0. The way we perceive participation has been shaped by the employment of media technology for social interaction and political activism. Participation here is viewed as a critical practice. In popular discourse, participation comes associated with the idea of promoting new technologies, whilst a more academic discourse perceives it as a cultural phenomenon which can help explain contemporary media practice. New terms have been coined to describe this user-generated culture: "produser", "prosumer", DIY culture, peer-to-peer and the ideas of a collective, of community and collaboration often come associated with it.
However, one must not incur in common misunderstandings regarding participatory culture, which comprise the assumption of social progress, that participation is always explicit and based around communities sharing similar motivations and which ignore design choices which implement this participation, as well as neglect that when we participate in culture, participation in power structures and general revenues is still out of our reach. This is a point Langlois also attempts to get across within the context of social media: "I might be free to communicate, but what I express can be privatized, put under surveillance and monitored without my consent" (p.54).
So, in order to better understand participatory culture, one must keep in mind two key aspects, which declare that participants don't share a common motivation determined by an homogeneous socio-political background and do not always participate in areas dependent of big media industries; participation is not always explicit, but often times implicit, so that it becomes more difficult to assess the extent to which cultural production is affected by user generated content.
Explicit participation is driven by extrinsic or intrinsic motivation, which varies according to the different users' skills. It should not be reduced to altruistic motivations, or critical activism against hegemonic culture, but perceived as heterogeneous in the sense that concerns users from the most different backgrounds whose range of skills vary greatly, from different contexts such as paid labour, leisure or unpaid voluntary work. It relies on the appropriation of technology by users, and further development of technical skills.
Implicit participation is a consequence of design choices that take advantage of user activity and habits by automating and facilitating. It doesn't necessarily require conscious activity of cultural production or problem-solving by users, nor is there any need for them to collaborate and communicate. There's no need for interaction, shared values and common goals. These are platforms which benefit from user generated content contributing to information management systems, which can be exploited for improving information retrieval or gathering user info for market research.
Schäfer's mapping of the domains of user participation divides internet labour in three main areas: accumulation, archiving and construction, which can sometimes overlap and often occur in conflict areas in which user activities converge with the interests of culture industries.
- Accumulation describes all user activities which comment or interact in any way with massified popular culture. Within this domain one can stumble across the principles of "remixing": combining, changing and adapting pre-existing cultural artefacts, often belonging to major media companies. However, even if some of these activities are protected by fair use, it is not always the case since Copyright Law has been becoming more and more restrictive - cultural industries are not too keen on having their profits under menace. This causes for many Digital Millenium Copyright Act letters to be sent and disproportionate lawsuits to take action.
- Archiving is defined by user storage of artefacts, building online data collections and reorganizing cultural resources and knowledge bases. Again, this domain often clashes with copyright law, namely in the case of bit torrent sites and web storing and sharing services which not always survive copyright's holders attempt to have them shut down or their content removed.
- Construction refers to production not dependent on culture industries, where distribution and production means are not subjected to a centralized power. An example of this type of production is that of software, in collaborative environments which abide to free/open source principles. Not unlike the previous domains, within the field of modification of software-based artefacts new interactions between amateur cultural and big media industries occur.
Social Media labour is thus mappeable within the overlap of these areas, capitalized by entrepeneurial ventures which, as Schäfer puts it, have realized social media users' importance in the distribuition of commercial messaging.
-> Digital Economy (Tiziana Terranova)
-> What is Digital Labour? (Christian Fuchs)

Multitude of Social Atoms

Nonetheless, whilst social media is ideologically framed and presented as a tool for interpersonal connection, the graphical reduction of individuals to atoms prevents the formation of a shared community project (Halpin, Harry and Yuk, Hui, "Collective Individuation: The Future of the SOcial Web" p.106). Whilst a community might be defined by something more than just the mere sum of all the parts, Social Graph's mathematical structure attempts at eliminating such dangerous fluidity, and it is this control over networks which, as stated by Harry Halpin and Hui Yuk, presents risks to the formation of a collective intelligence.
This phenomena, which which does away with the collective identity of the laborer and mutes the political voice of the masses of the industrial era appears within the context of the shift from the Foucauldian disciplinary society to the Deleuzian control society, which allowed for the birth of the multitude. The worker becomes thus alienated from his/her class conscience. Due to social media's ability to contribute to the blurrying of boundaries between work and leisure, the worker doesn't even perceive him/herself as such.
-> Capital's attempts to get rid of labor - MAKE THIS MORE VISIBLE

Strategies, case studies and difficulties in organizing the multitude

-> What are the consequences of the restructuring of capitalism within informationalism for the labour struggles? New level of alienation, alienation of one's own conscience as a worker
-> Cultural, geographical, social and all other assymetries existent within the multitude - what challenges does it present?
-> Traditional Labour Unions - ontological or structural flaws?
-> Translating to the Digital Factory - Internationalism, case studies (Networg, Social Networking Unionism, International Data Union) -> Following such trajectory I will defend 'produser' unionism, that is, social media labor organization, whose necessity lies in providing workers with the much needed tools for the articulation of legal demands regarding their online data. The expectation is that this will, in turn, open up new possibilities for peer-to-peer projects in alternative social media. Insert 'produser' unionism in terms of Karl Popper's Piecemeal Social Engineering.
-> In "Open Society", Karl Popper distinguishes between Utopian Social Engineering and Piecemeal Social Engineering. Utopian Social Engineering dictates that all rational actions must be taken in light of a ultimate aim. Thus, this aim must be the first thing to be specified and only then can a plan be drawn. Politically speaking, this aim represents the Ideal State. Piecemeal Social Engineering, on the other hand, may or may not have an idea of the Ideal State, but takes such stage as distant. Therefore, it aims to search and fight the immediate problems in society, avoiding unhappiness whenever possible, doing the possible to "improve the lot of men" instead of postponing action until more favourable conditions are reached. In Popper's opinion, this approach is the most methodogically reasonable.