fdiami.virgilio has 17 post(s)

Pirate Politics describes the actions of political parties established to advocate for the ethics of online piracy. With the rise of peer to peer services and torrent sites, file sharing has become a global phenomenon and was eventually conflated with an individual rights struggle. The Swedish version of the party is perhaps best known due to widespread cultural tolerance for piracy in Sweden (even allowing for a religious protection under the Church of Kopimism). The German Pirate Party has enjoyed the most political success owing to its upstart Parliamentary wins.

The party characterizes itself as neither left nor right leaning and focuses its energies primarily on promoting government transparency, online and offline privacy and copyright reform (Taylor, p.160).

Pirate politics elevate to a human right the ability to share anything, be it ideas, content, government data or formulae for life saving patent protected pharmaceuticals. The ethic is both anticapitalist and fundamentally reliant on the production of the capitalist system, without which there would be considerably less to pilfer. While there is an economic justice slant that couches piracy in redistributive terms, there does not seem to be a call for an outright abolition of private property. Instead, the goals seem limited to more esoteric concepts such as liberating creativity and equalizing access. There is as much an affinity to creators of content as there is a contempt for big business as the intermediator of content, which leaves piracy enthusiasts in an awkward position as those same companies they revile are responsible for granting wealth to  the creators they celebrate.

While Taylor makes some good points in this chapter, the advertising schemes she decries are not exactly new to the digital landscape. The techniques of tailored market research and targeted advertising have existed in television and print advertising for at least the last half century, perhaps most notably through Nielsen’s data collection methods for television and via survey informed advertorials in newspapers and magazines. Today these tactics simply fall under new names such as SEO and Native Advertising. What distinguishes the actual application of these new technologies is that they are individuated and tend to have a cumulative effect as the number of data points to identify a user increase. While native advertising is certainly a disreputable way to make a living as a journalist, in a way it’s an evolution of a well established practice within the field. It can be argued that this more personalized advertising has more utility for the reader, the ethics of it are highly dubious as the reader may believe they are reading earnest product or service reviews. Again, the problem here seems to have less to do with the tools in the digital milieu than it does with the normalization of exploitative practices toward consumers so prevalent in American society.

More disquieting is the creation of reputation silos within the personas created by our aggregate searches. These silos, which label users into categories of targets or waste reinforce inequality by beginning their search result steering using a fairly comprehensive, but uncritical set of data including our social relationships, our geography, our demographics and our (online) behavior. Again, however, these tactics are not new as the credit industry has used analogous methods in determining who can participate in the economy practically since its inception. What is threatening about this practice online is that it will inevitably insulate certain users from experiences in the name of personalization. Further, the lack of forgetting online means there is little opportunity to rehabilitate one’s online persona short of using private browsing services. Tailored search is useful, and in e-commerce, almost preferable, but algorithms can sometimes produce baffling results that alienate rather than reassure users.

The copyright landscape has perhaps been the most affected by the rise of digital media over the past two decades. What it means to own a thing or idea has been fundamentally altered by the ease of reproducing and sharing digital content. The film, art, writing and music industries have been dramatically reshaped in response to the losses they are incurring as a result of digitization. But beyond simple losses, artists are confronted by digital media cheerleaders for being on the wrong side of what can increasingly take the tones of a moral argument. The “information wants to be free” mantra of the digerati is difficult to reconcile for artists and industry workers whose whole foundation is built on extracting value for as long a time as possible on a piece of art. Copyright defenders are attacked as authoritarians attempting to defend monolithic entities that want to restrict everyone’s access to creative output. Copyright antagonists are seen as being willing to enable theft.

What is often lost in the debate is that free simply isn’t free. “The basic divide at work here is between those capitalists that make money by selling access to content, and those that make money by controlling the content distribution networks” (Taylor, p. 152). But the battle between content publishers and distributors is age old and has permeated every industry from music to film to comic books to actual books. An uneasy alliance has always existed between distributors and publishers, for example, with some publishers electing to manage their own distribution, but new digital tools have in effect taken control of distribution out of the content provider’s hands and put it somewhere else. The salient question is where? New media enthusiasts often point to the distribution being in the hands of “the people,” when in reality the torrent and P2P networks most content is distributed on do make revenue due to the actions of their user base. Lost in the discussion is the actual content producer, the author or musician or filmmaker who seemingly never had a say where their work ended up anyway as long as it made back more than it cost. In the world of digital piracy, there are no residuals that find their way to the artist beyond the purchase of the original uploader.

Speaking for myself, I have a strange relationship with piracy. As a creator of content, I’ve actively enabled getting my work onto common piracy sites because it was more important to me that people have access to it than it was to make profit, but that pessimism over the possibility of making profit is in part due to an understanding of the contracted market for conventional content releases and a sense that piracy is inevitable. I have certainly enjoyed my fair share of pirated material, but have shifted in recent years to trying to buy things, though I’m not entirely sure why.

Online Content farms are websites that traffic in appropriated content from other sources. This content is selected and prioritized according to the rank in search indices so that there is built in demand for it before it is even assembled. They consist of both reposts from other sites and quickly written articles by a horde of freelancers on subjects that can be algorithmically determined to have a high advertising value based on their popularity either in common search engines such as Google or Bing or on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Providers such as Demand Media and Buzzfeed are perhaps the most well known for this method of presenting news and information, though little of it can be truly deemed either newsworthy or informative.

Then again, as ever, there is a place for populist journalism and in the case of determining how popular content might be, it would seem there’s nothing more democratic than an algorithm. Much of what these sites provide is either already packaged elsewhere or based on whatever limited information may be available about a new or trending product, service or experience. In the case of Buzzfeed, the product is mostly the proclivities of people themselves as endless quizzes create an immersive experience that keeps the clicks coming on a site, pumping more revenue into their coffers. When search engine optimizers tweak content, they are basically trying to insert the words Google prioritizes as many times as is reasonable. While this practice is most associated with blogs and content farms, it is actually a part of the way almost any modern website is designed. Gaming social networks and search engines comes at a much lower cost than traditional advertising, but it relies of an initial devaluation of the meaning of content and a willingness to invest more time in data mining than content production.

Taylor (2014:50) argues that the fate of creative people, in the new economy, is to “exist in two incommensurable realms of value and be torn between them–on the one side, the purely economic activity associated with straightforward selling of goods or labor; on the other the fundamentally different, elevated forms of value we associate with art and culture.”   Your hybrid writing assignment this week is to describe these two realms and the challenges they pose for artists, teachers, activists and others who view their work as serving “the public good.”

In the latter portion of the second chapter of The People’s Platform, Taylor elaborates on a concept raised perhaps most enthusiastically by Richard Florida in his descriptions of the “Creative Class.” In Florida’s vision, a natural consequence of the digitally networked economy and increasing automation is a reorientation of the bourgeoisie as a class of creatives who traffic in ideas, creativity and information rather than material goods or everyday services. There is a deterministic rationale behind Florida’s writing as he uses data to parse a descriptive rather than normative claim about the changes in society, but by discounting the near term pain of technological displacement and offering no solutions outside the framework of market capitalism, Florida’s writing does indeed take on a normative tone. The message seems to be “leave your hotel front desk job and take up a graphic design course or face obsolescence.”

Missing also from Florida’s analysis is how precisely creatives, notoriously inept at salesmanship, will collaborate and compete in the supposedly freer market. Taylor addresses this head on in the above quote where she is describing the transitional pains being experienced by creatives at present. In our economy that has been diluted of middlemen, artists nakedly face a public ill suited to parse through massive swaths of content. The effect on art has been commercial success for those who know how to navigate the byways of social media and marketing or ascend into the mass market from popular content sharing platforms (as in the case of EL James). Those who lack such skills, knowledge or time are marginalized from an artistic community that once held a strict firewall between sales and creation. This has the effect of turning artists into salespersons first and creators second, in effect culturally sanitizing the work as appeal and the bottom line have to be considered alongside artistic vision.

This tension, however, is not new and is the byproduct of living in a commercial society that attempts to extract value at the lowest possible margins. In my view, Taylor laments an era that was already cemented in privileges of cultural curation. The privilege now has shifted to those with a particular set of skills; namely creativity alongside marketability whereas previously it was networking and culturally insular notions of taste that led to artistic success. It is difficult to say if the “wisdom of crowds” that Lanier and others lament is worse than the prior system, but it is certainly different and the change comes at a cost. Taylor describes the bias against the longer produced more content rich forms of art as a consequence of the efficiency culture the new media milieu begets. Efficiency is touted as something to aspire towards, which discounts that some taste may not be divined algorithmically and that some excellent work may be woefully inefficient. The market, as ever, is reductive to culture as it is principally concerned with utilizing culture to enlarge the wealth of individuals rather than preserving it for its own sake.

Beyond art, other public good professionals (which Florida would also lump into his creative class) such as educators, activists, and scientists must also survive in our present system. As growing amateurization and automation dilute the value of labor across the board, professions such as these find themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack. It is not difficult to imagine funding in the sciences shifting to companies who own proprietary algorithms set to work in server farms to calculate complex proofs or genetic datasets. Likewise, it isn’t difficult to imagine virtual reality classrooms and wiki-homeschooling displacing public education while philanthropy and activism is reduced to crowdfunding campaigns. As long as the market economy continues to dominate, we will see either a brain drain in these sectors, should these scenarios come to pass, or we will see them become less accessible and thus contributory to inequality. The notion that art, activism, or education are or will be done “for the love” is missing the basic ingredients of quality control and a need to place a higher valuation on those who grant our society these critical services.

Part 2 (hybrid). Taylor (2014:6) argues that how questions about technology are framed is important, and that we “[grant] agency to tools while side stepping the thorny issue of the larger social structures in which we and our technologies are embedded.” In your own words attempt to describe what Taylor is trying to tell us.

In this selection from the preface to The People’s Platform, Astra Taylor makes the case that our examinations of the influence of technology on our lives concentrate too much on the effects of the tools rather than asking questions about the cultural environment that gives rise to them or enables certain use cases. The crux of the argument is a capitulation to technological determinism where humanity is shaped by the tool, rather than utilizing the tool to build out (or tear down) the society we’ve already conceptualized. That technology is inherently deterministic is a question unresolved by anthropologists and social scientists. While it can certainly be said that certain tools have altered the global landscape, there was typically a material or social need that gave rise to the creation of those tools and a cultural engine that drove expanded use of the tool.

It brings to mind the idea of whether objects have lives of their own rather than an inherently anthropocentric meaning or whether objects and users exist in a kind of symbiosis whereby neither are more relevant than the other. Latour and Harman, branching out of Heidegger, examine this concept at length. It is only recently that this principle is being applied to contemplation of the digital landscape, particularly through the lens of unpacking the orientation of design as in Tony Fry and Clive Dilnot.

Divining the agency to objects exists within a larger metaphysical realm outside the bounds of what can be adequately quantified by the promised data deluge that we are breathlessly told my techno-optimists must be mined to best understand our relationship to the world around us. Taylor seems to suggest that no such mining can take place without first examining the structure of the world we live in, including its trenchant inequalities and the governing ideologies. Further, there is the implication that it is our reluctance to question our social structures that may foment techno-deterministic sentiments.