gmane.culture.internet.nettime

Re: the disappearing middle class and snake oil salesmen

Michael Eisenmenger — 2013-05-21T01:40:43

I have to agree with Allan. Clearly those VR goggles blinkered Jaron 
from seeing the past. The one insight of a disappearing middle class 
informed by the Kodak story seem rather accidental - though that is 
worth pondering . . .

On 5/16/13 11:17 PM, allan siegel wrote:

 <...>

Moishe Postone

Joss Winn — 2013-05-18T23:46:50

Does anyone on this mailing list follow the work of Moishe Postone? I am
trying to think about how his reading of Marx's Capital can ground a
critique of 'hacktivism' and other hacker/geek related social movements.
In particular, his book:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GwDxsHOxd84C

and his article on anti-semitism:

http://josswinn.org/2013/05/writing-craft-and-method-postones-notes-on-the-german-reaction-to-holocaust/

There is much to admire about his approach, but in particular, the way
it leads to a critique of social movements that fetishise the concrete
over the abstract.

A number of writers have referenced Postone's work, but I have yet to
find anyone writing about technology and society really sustain any
engagement with this work. It is not easy to extend the logic of his
argument to everyday life, but it seems to me like such effort could be
very fruitful.

cheers
Joss

Facebook as a Facebook Game

wolfie christl — 2013-05-17T15:14:02

Dear nettime,

we´re a group of developers, open source evangelists, activists,
theorists and artists - mainly based in Vienna, Austria. Please consider
the following game as a contribution to an "immanent net critique".
We´ve been working hard on that for the last 2 years.
http://datadealer.com

"Privacy? Screw that. Turn the tables! Become a data dealer and get all
the dirty details on your friends, neighbors and the rest of the world.
Learn how to trick your users and make cash with their personal data!"

"Data Dealer" is a critical online/impact game about digital culture and
collecting, processing and selling personal data.
[to play it Facebook is not required]

In the digital age virtually everything we do is recorded, monitored or
tracked in some way. Nearly every device we use today is connected to
the Internet. Due to the rapid evolution of ICT the collecting,
processing and exploitation of personal data has become part of all
areas of life. Emerging businesses in the fields of social media, mobi

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

Felix Stalder — 2013-05-17T08:44:27


Marc, I had the Tetrad explained and demonstrated to me by Eric Mcluhan 
himself and I was, I admit, suitably unimpressed. It's basically a set 
of four general purpose questions (what does a thing obsolesce, 
retrieve, flip, enhance) to help you examine the thing's relation to its 
environment (a.ka. the ground). It's interesting in as much as it is a 
very unusual forms of theory (it's actually more of a method), but as 
with any such general question, you can basically stick any answer to 
it. For example, we discovered in one of our sessions that the (frozen) 
pizza had obsolesced the house wife and retrieved the butler (home 
delivery). At this point, I really had to excuse my self from the 
discussion.



Darpa etc ended up creating the infrastructure on which the US 
transition was eventually engineered, but it did not cause the Soviet 
collapse. This is a Reaganite myth.

If you follow this analysis, both systems entered a phase of stagnation 
and decline in the 1960s because they could no longer m

the disappearing middle class and snake oil salesmen

allan siegel — 2013-05-17T06:17:52

hi there,
well, to tell the truth, after reading just the infamous (so it seems) Jaron Lanier interview it is not his shabby analysis that is shocking, i.e. "Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible." Duh! What ahistorical rubbish; seems that these kinds of prognostications a great for those swimming in the kiddie pool (the shallow level of political discourse in the MSM) where Marx is still a dirty word (something like polio before Jonas Salk). Hard to figure out what the future might look like when one's image of the past is

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

2013-05-16T13:55:28

Felix:
 
Thanks -- I was hoping (okay, anticipating) that you would reply!  <g>
 
1) Castels: "Manuel Castells immediately springs to mind" -- of course
he does and I've read your excellent review/analysis of his work. How
has he been received among his peers? I've talked with a few of them
and they all said that his "tour" of various sociology departments
in the late 90s was a flop. Has he picked up any traction? It is
interesting that Berkeley has been involved in multiple attempts to
deal with the "ignoring" of technology by social scientists, including
the effort to "endogenize" tech in economics.
 
2) Concreteness: "But even technological development always takes place in  
concrete historical settings."  Indeed.  As someone who once followed  20 
companies on Wall Street, I'm convinced that the *very* peculiar details of  
every situation must be known to have any intelligent ideas about  outcomes. 
 However, for-better-and-worse, nowadays that sort of  behavior can send 
you to jail.  Btw, McLuhan's

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

Morlock Elloi — 2013-05-16T03:31:41

It has nothing to do with 'digital' and everything to do with
productivity and near-zero friction distribution.

No one needs 95% of 'producers' in the culture industry. The 5%
are giving us all we need (and only tiny fraction of these 5% are
employed by MSM - the rest are independents catering to all tastes and
psychosis.)

We cannot consume any more. Just go die quietly somewhere.

Re: What if a work of net.art sold for $34 million?

Edward Shanken — 2013-05-16T07:01:08

My aim is to place in tension two different sets of values: those of
the commercial art world (CAW) and those of telematic art (TA). To
this end, my question proposes a scenario in which a work of art that
does not satisfy CAW's basic conventions (e.g. as Florian notes, ease
of exchange, signature, etc.) rises to the top of the heap in terms of
market value. One might argue, following Stallabrass (nod to Matthias
Kampmann<https://www.facebook.com/matthias.kampmann.75>'s Fb comment),
that any artworld in which an artwork - be it an abstract painting
or a telematic network - attains values in the tens of millions of
dollars reifies neoliberal ideology and its inherent commodity (and
luxury) fetishism. In the first Fb response, Caroline Seck Langill
shrewdly suggested that "the money would be distributed like the
artwork."

And why not? There are economies in which the creation and
hording/multiplying of wealth for its own sake is not valued as highly
as sharing, gifting, and ritual expending. Yves Klein under

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

Felix Stalder — 2013-05-16T06:50:56


On 05/15/2013 05:40 PM, Newmedia-YDxpq3io04c< at >public.gmane.org wrote:


Manuel Castells immediately springs to mind, who not only wrote a book
called "Internet Galaxy" (by far not his best, though), but premises
his entire analysis on the transformation of the cultural-material
basis of social institutions (i.e. the ground, in ML's parlance),
that is, the emergence of ubiquitous digital networks and associated
infrastructures, which create, what he calls, the space of flows.

But even technological development always takes place in concrete
historical settings, in which all kinds of dynamics unfold in
different rhythms and at different scales. The difficulty is, of
course, that they interact in ways that are unpredictable. The past
never disappears. My favorite example here is the fact that a sizable
portion of EU agricultural subsidies ends up with in the coffers of
the aristocracy. So, you have basically the Acien Regime operating
through the network state.

The trouble with McLuhan-style analysis is that

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

2013-05-15T15:40:13

Jon:
 
 
Thanks!  You are certainly correct that the various "professions" have  
circled their own wagons and not stepped up to the challenge of understanding  
the effects of digital media.  So, most of what has been said is in the  
popular press etc (i.e. Lanier, Johnson, Carr, Morozov etc).
 
Since I've been a part of those discussions -- which is how nettime  found 
me and invited me to "keynote" Metaforum III in Budapest -- and I probably  
personally know most of the people who have been writing about these issues 
for  the public, my observation is that -- 
 
1) While there are lots of opinions there has been little careful  
"thought," very little "science" and even less attention to the underlying  
"history."
 
2) As a result, most of what has been said becomes "special-pleading" with  
almost no "legitimacy" (outside of the author's fan-base) and is just more  
background noise in a world beset by "information overload."
 
3) To the extent that there are "policy-makers" who count, this lack of a

Re: What if a work of net.art sold for $34 million?

Florian Cramer — 2013-05-15T17:34:06


This question is above all an economic one, as your wording implies. The
answer must therefore be economic as well: Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes
Bild is (a) an object that can be conveniently traded as a commodity and
(b), on top of that, a unique object and an autograph. Since Roy Ascott's
work is neither of them really, it does not have the same collector's value
- aside from issues of art historical canonization.

But to spin this question further: Roy Ascott's work may still have a
decent art market value compared to other, earlier artistic collaborative
writing projects that didn't qualify as media art but were more ephemera:
for example, the letters of Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance [sic]
School of the 1960s/1970s. You still find Johnson's 1965 artist book "The
Paper Snake" for $100-$120 on abebooks. Or the "Anecdoted Topography of
Chance" by Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Dieter Rot, Robert Filliou and
Roland Topor, collaboratively written between 1962 and 1968 and, in my
humble opinion, mo

Re: the middle class doesn't exist

Patrick Lichty — 2013-05-15T15:50:51

What I find interesting is the realization of the Randian dream through the
refocusing on skills rather than credentials - one of my students just quit
school because of the crushing debt he was going to incur because of the
turning away of the state from higher education, privatization of loans,
lack of funding, and all of this setting up a profitability model for the
MOOC.  I also love the recent article asking whether it's even worth going
back to school for a credential when everything is being atomized to
skillsets as typified by services like Lynda and MOOCs.  For some odd
reason, I feel like I'm playing BioShock and listening to the narratives as
I watch the blogs.  

However, I also see the trajectory of the last 35 years, downsize,
outsource, deskill, decredential, molecularize, while efficiency goes up and
the capital accumulates in the upper .5%.  The neoliberal dream for the
proletariat last decade was infinite flexibility - "Lost your job? Go back
to school!", not knowing that this was a trap to

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

Jonathan Marshall — 2013-05-15T11:14:02

Mark writes:


You could also begin with a crash course on the impact of the economy
on technology, or the impact of social organisation or the impact of
power relations, on technology as well.

People use stuff, stuff uses people, and what arises is often
unexpected and then exploited by particular groups of people - and
that involves politics, and politics involves social organisation...

Some tech may even be more important in its social effects than
others.... :) If so what kind of tech has what kinds of effects - ie
the differences would be interesting to specify.


Mainstream economists tend to treat social, political and
psychological factors as externalities as well, so this is not that
big a deal. There is perhaps a slight change recently with behavioural
economics, but that is not mainstream.

If you look at the origins of modern economics, you can see them
deliberately decide to cut out all the complexities of human (social)
life, in order to have a discipline of their own, immune from
philosophe

Re: the middle class doesn't exist

Brian Holmes — 2013-05-15T08:11:09

On 05/15/2013 08:56 AM, allan siegel wrote:


This is exactly it. What's happening is massive proletarianization, 
caused by the rapacity of the rich.

In the 1930s, the emergence of the social state and the rise of 
middle-management as a major category of corporate employment created 
that ambiguous social category, the middle class. Clearly its members 
had an interest in the status quo, but to protect themselves from both 
politicians and bosses, they created professional organizations, imposed 
college-degree requirements and built up (so-called) ethical codes which 
made their professional behavior subject to peer review rather than 
outside discipline. Bourdieu described this relative autonomy in his 
theory of fields, a thousand sociologists have described it. It's hardly 
a joke because it structured society for seventy years, cold war, moon 
shot, air-conditioned nightmare and all. And then there's another thing: 
Access to professional status pretty much guaranteed access to assets: 
house, retir

Black hat, white hat, green hat hackers

nettime's avid reader — 2013-05-15T07:21:11


http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/

Last week I [Moxie Marlinspike] was contacted by an agent of Mobily, one 
of two telecoms operating in Saudi Arabia, about a surveillance project 
that they’re working on in that country. Having published two reasonably 
popular MITM tools, it’s not uncommon for me to get emails requesting 
that I help people with their interception projects. I typically don’t 
respond, but this one (an email titled “Solution for monitoring 
encrypted data on telecom”) caught my eye.

I was interested to know more about what they were up to, so I wrote 
back and asked. After a week of correspondence, I learned that they are 
organizing a program to intercept mobile application data, with specific 
interest in monitoring:

     Mobile Twitter
     Viber
     Line
     WhatsApp

I was told that the project is being managed by Yasser D. Alruhaily, 
Executive Manager of the Network & Information Security Department at 
Mobily. The project’s requirements come fro

the middle class doesn't exist

allan siegel — 2013-05-15T06:56:03

"Twenty years ago, class was not in the vocabulary of Swedish pundits and mavens. Class was something that belonged to the past. Today, however, it is back with a vengeance. Recently the Swedish Occupy movement "Allt åt alla" (Everything for Everyone) organized a bus "safari" through exclusive Stockholm suburbs to take a look at the millionaires' villas there and "fuel class hatred". Every leading newspaper has already had its own "class debate". Class is simply everywhere in Swedish society. 

"Anyone who wants to understand both the age in which we live and the future will have to talk about class," write editors Malena Rydell and Mikael Feldbaum in Arena. But not just any class. The cover of the new issue spells it out: "The middle class doesn't exist." The slogan is from poet and pundit Göran Greider's "54 theses for a new class awareness", a manifesto for a new Left packed with sound bites such as: "Treat the very word class as a teenager: it grows; it's unruly; it doesn't obey; it stuns you." Or: "T

Re: Digital Politics <--> Digital Economics

Dan S. Wang — 2013-05-14T18:48:05

Mark, Flick:

On the question of whether and how is ³democracy² relevant to an
understanding of Chinese politics, I lean towards Mark¹s views.

To add to them, Flick¹s characterization of the CCP as a ³supreme² ruler, I
must say, is far from the reality (and as for its ³legitimacy,² at the level
of the citizenry most Chinese people got over that a couple of generations
agothey haven¹t even been able to buy it back). The CCP bans Facebook,
fights with Google, dictates to Yahoo, and stages their elections precisely
because their actual control over the society is so tenuous and slippery.
When the power of the Chinese authorities shows itself in terms of
suppression of the citizenry, it is invariably blunt-force, clumsy, and
indiscriminate. One might say the brutality is a culture of their
government, but understand that the domestic sphere is in non-stop crisis
mode. It¹s called the Art of Governing 1.3 (more likely 1.5, based on food
consumption stats) billion: stomp it out, whatever it is.

I ha

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

Keith Sanborn — 2013-05-15T02:08:08

Ok, I'll bite: why does digital technology entail the disappearance of a middle class ? Why cyber serfs instead of a cyber middle class? Some of the answer IS political and started when Reagan broke the air traffic controllers's strike and fired every one of them. The negative effects in terms of poor safety and the erosion of organized labor are still being felt. The new flex time in Spain is Orwellian in its language and  implications. The Economic IS Political. What's need is not healthy ignorance or cool detachment or neo-MacLuhanism aka the Californian Ideology, but connecting all the dots. I'm not talking about boohoo liberalism, but active defiance of the system. Not passive acceptance of what originates in the world of finance capital or the Politiburo. 

Btw: to disagree with a techo-determinist stance is not naive. It's a difference of opinion. Social analysis does not preclude economic analysis. One of the problems is the confrontation of the quantitative with the qualitative as modes of analysis

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

Patrice Riemens — 2013-05-14T21:26:53

Mark - and others,

Whatever the name of the (class) beast, or the nature of the (digital)
technology, my only interest is to have the vast majority of the people
have a decent, interesting, enjoyable, and healthy life - from birth to
death. The present dispensation does not provide for that. Period
Technology will not provide for it by itself. Period. And the economy,
pace ideologists to the contrary, is not a natural or meteorological
phenomenon. Period. So back to politics, fissa!

Cheers from the craddle of machiavelism,
p+5D!

Re: Jaron lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

2013-05-14T14:06:02

Brian:
 

Great idea!  
 
But, before you roll up your sleeves, if you want to have any useful  ideas 
on the structure of labor (and leisure and consumption) then you must  
begin with a CRASH effort to understand the impact of *digital* technology on  
the economy.
 
Are you prepared to do that?  You and what ARMY? <g>
 
Economists -- including the "heterodox" ones -- uniformly treat technology  
as an "externality."  That means there is no place in their models or  
narratives for fundamental technological change.  
 
When I asked the editor of Real World Economics Review last year if he had  
*ever* (in 10+ years) had any articles submitted to him about these basic  
relationships his answer was "No, why don't you submit one?"
 
When I asked a fellow I know who sees most of the grant requests for new  
economic research if he has seen *any* applications to study this his answer  
was, "Not one -- all we're seeing now are people who are interested in  
studying complexity."
 
Sociologists convinced themse

The eyes of the milpa

Eugenio Tisselli — 2013-05-14T16:13:55

Dear nettime,

Here is a tiny step towards gathering the collective of humans and non-humans...

"The eyes of the milpa"
Families from Santa Mar?a Tlahuitoltepec, Oaxaca (Mexico) use mobile phones to create an online community memory about everything that grows in their fields.?

http://ojosdelamilpa.net

Los ojos de la milpa (The eyes of the milpa*) is a community memory that captures, through images and voice recordings, a moment of transition in these complex times. It all takes place somewhere in the mountains of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a community where the elders tell stories to the youth about how maize was planted many years ago: without fertilizers or sophisticated technology. The young ones listen as they witness how maize can no longer grow without chemical fertilizers, nor survive without synthetic pesticides. This is a place where the precious pace of the passing seasons coexists with a growing pressure to produce more, to extract from the earth not only nourishment, but also more