User:Lidia.Pereira/GRS5/ThDr
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 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 1930's 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 measuring social relationships which he founded. Diagnosing the problem as one embedded in the existing network of social relationships between the girls, he conducted a simple survey to help him "map the network" - thus creating a sociogram, which consists of a graphical representation of said relationships in terms of nodes and links, where every node represents a person and every link represents a relationship. By studying the girls answers (e.g.: "Who do you want to sit next to?") and juxtaposing them to the current dormitory arrangements, he was able to avoid conflicts by re-allocating the students. This proved effective in solving the problem - through the re-engineering of the girls' social relationships, Moreno was able to create a better functioning, more productive network. If at this phase it is already perfectly clear the formal 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.
Social engineering is a discipline in social science respecting the efforts undertaken by governments, media or other private groups to influence popular opinion and attitudes.
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). This research is all the more accurate if every social atom participates.
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.
In the ninth chapter ("Aestheticism, Perfectionism, Utopianism") of "Open Society and its Enemies", 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" (Popper, Karl, "Open Society and its Enemies", p.162) instead of postponing action until more favourable conditions are reached. In Popper's opinion, this approach is the most methodogically reasonable.
It is interesting to note the utilitarian connections between social engineering and Taylorism, also known as the scientific organization of labor, whose purpose is one of improving economic efficiency with the application of 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. Alexei Gastev, the founder of the Central Institute of Labour whose work most contributed to the spreading of taylorist ideals, believed that revolution could only be recognized as such if the workers were empowered to control the work processes. He trained workers to behave and think in a rational way, going so far as to build the social engineering machine, whose ways nobody, to this day, understands.
Ayn Rand, another Russian, fled the country in the 1920's to move to California. Her philosophy was that of "objectivism", deriding human altruism and propagating, instead, the "virtues of selfishness". Like Gastev, she was obsessed with the idea of rationality. However, instead of rationality being seen as a means of state control, the only rational option, in the objectivist point of view, was to free human kind of all forms of political control and live life according only to one's own selfish desires.
Societies of Networked Control
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.6). As the stronghold for individual freedom, "Atlas Shrugged" was especially influential amongst Silicon Valley entrepeneurs, where reading groups were formed to spread Ayn Rand's ideas. They saw themselves as Randian heros, that is, rational individuals who trace their own destiny. According to Adam Curtis ("Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace - Love and Power"), this project also intended to set the computer as a means to turn everyone into their own hero, thus encouraging the ideal that no central government was needed - order in society would be achieved through networking.
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, whose language is quantitative. Its defining technology is the computer, and its management style is the protocol (Galloway, Alexander, "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization", p.3). Within this context, Galloway defines the protocol, a standard for technological implementation, as that which allows control to exist after decentralization. It exists within the distributed network, of which the Internet is the most prominent example, which Galloway considers to be the diagram representing the society of control.
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). According to Castells's "The Rise of the Network Society", the information technology revolution was fundamental in the restructuring of the capitalist system that took place from the 1980's onwards, revolution which was, in turn, shaped by but not reducible to the logic and interests of capitalism. However, 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 "protocolized 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 allows access not only to people and their interpersonal relationships, but also liked pages, events, photos and the links between them. This expansion of the sociogram to nonpersonal 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 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. Where these thinkers asked how human subjectivities were 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.
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 Social Graph 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.
If this is a rather contemporary tendency, these same ideas of studying the subjective preferences and traces of an individual appear in Moreno's experiment at the New York State Training School for Girls Hudson. It was by studying the girl's intersubjectivity that Moreno was able to devise the sociogram, the model through which he would re-engineer the school dormitory arrangements.
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. In that sense, the database, as a record of our digital self, captures our activities, preferences and even relationships, albeit in a highly bidimensional way. By feeding the algorithms that partially control the content of what we see in large social media spaces, it becomes the central model through which our "social" 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", a capitalism which has, under Sillicon Valley's ideological banner, successfully labelled our current mode of exploitation under the "social" tag.
However, has it was 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 and social 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. We participate willingly but not always knowingly in our own incarceration. According to Maurizio Lazzarato's "Immaterial Labor", this leaves no space for innovation, as in the end all comes down to the management of social relations through the control of public access to information.
Participatory immaterial labor
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 now implicitly takes part in the process of production by means of his/her interaction with cultural commodities. Immaterial labor, then, both satisfies and produces a demand, ultimately forming subjectivity. Lazzarato sustains that subjectivity is now the "raw material" of immaterial labor, conspicuously producing a social relation.
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.
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, 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.
Strategies, case studies and difficulties in organizing the multitude
-> 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.