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Fuller’s idea of the comprehensive designer, as addressed by Turner (2006:56), left me reflecting on the two very different inflections given to technology in this chapter. On the one hand there is an association of technology with the Cold War and the possibility of a Soviet invasion of the U.S. At the beginning of chapter two, Turner underscores how this vision of the influence of technology on society is also imagined in relationship to the hierarchical bureaucracies that already exist in the U.S. Turner (2006:42) stresses these two senses of invasion. This first understanding of technology is what Turner is defining as “technocracy.” But the vision of technology related to the work of Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan is remarkably different. I’ve included the following a rather lengthy quote from Turner because it does a good job of illustrating the different vision of technology that he is attributing to McLuhan, Fuller, Brand and others affiliated with New Communalism.

“McLuhan offered a vision in which young people who had been raised on rock and roll, television, and the associated pleasures of consumption need not give those pleasures up even if they rejected the adult society that had created them. Even if the social order of technocracy threatened the species with nuclear annihilation and the individual young person with psychic fragmentation, the media technologies produced by that order offered the possibility of individual and collective transformation. McLuhan’s dual emphases [his simultaneous celebration of new media and tribal social forms] allowed young people to imagine the local communities they built around these media not simply as communities built around consumption of industrial products, but as model communities for a new society” (Turner 2006:54).

These two visions of technology illustrate the different ways of approaching social institutions in the 1950s, as conceptualized by the New Left and the New Communalists. On the one hand the New Left views this relationship as one of power and resistance, and on the other hand Brand views technology as a means for dismantling an institutionalized, hierarchical power. In thinking about these two visions of technology, I found myself returning to Taylor’s work to consider what she adds to this discussion, particularly as she indicates how exploitation is implicit to our participation in creative labor/leisure online. On this point it is interesting to think about the Turner characterizes Brand’s interest in Native American tribes. His interest in visiting Native American reservations is not driven by the injustices these people have lived through. Instead he views Native Americans as symbolic figures for an authentic community. As Turner (59) explains, “If the white-collar man of the 1950s had become detached from the land and from his own emotions, the Native American could show him how to be at home again, physically and psychologically.” What should we make of this techno-vision of relatedness where inequality is a symbolic reminder of what “home” might be?

Hi everyone,

I’ve said this in class, but I want to thank all of you again for bringing so much energy and insight to the themes and issues addressed in this course. You are all so thoughtful and have made this class really fabulous.

For your interest, I want to tell you about another course I’m teaching this spring. This is in addition to the Urban Sociology course we discussed in class. This is a hybrid course on the family (I think it’s listed as Sociology of the Family.)

I’m not quite done with the syllabus yet, but there will be some interesting connections to the work we’ve done this semester. We are going to explore Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labor, a concept not unrelated to the “free labor” connected to digital economies online.

In addition, and I think this might be particularly interesting to some of you, we will explore how the shape of the family (in the U.S. and around the world) is influenced by war. There is a lot of really smart work that has been done about how the Korean War impacted family life, both there and here. We will discuss how traumatic events like war can have structural impacts on the family. Alongside these impacts we will ask after the psychological implications of war on family life, considering how war can lead to an unresolved trauma unconsciously passed from one generation to the next through the family.

Thanks again everyone and see you Thursday!

Elizabeth

In response to the question posed in this week’s reading, about what distinguishes the New Left from the New Communalists, many of you noted the change of consciousness that was sought by the New Communalists in contrast to political efforts to eliminate the hierarchy of power prevalent in the US in the 1960s. There is an interesting relationship to institutionality that is implicit to the way Turner distinguishes these two groups. Where members of the New Left were fighting the University, “laying their bodies across the stairways and office floors of the institution” (Turner 2006:13), Turner proposes the New Communalists sought freedom from the institution itself. More over freedom from the institution is characterized in relationship to matter, and an identity that has no body. As former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, John Perry Barlow, writes “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based in matter, and there is matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge” (Quoted in Turner 2006:13).

But equally as curious as the identity that Barlow describes is the way Turner is linking this social identity to the institutional context of MIT’s Radiation Laboratory (the Rad Lab). He describes Rad Lab as “a site of flexible, collaborative work and a distinctly nonhierarchical management style” (Turner 2006:19). Turner suggests that the new interdisciplinary networks that produced technologies for fighting the war were at the same time generating new ways of thinking and speaking. Drawing on the work of Peter Galison, Turner writes that “scientists, engineers, and administrators in the wartime laboratories worked not so much as members of a single culture, but rather as members of different professional subcultures bound together by common purpose and a set of linguistic tools they had invented to achieve it” (2006:19). Turner suggests the process of computation emerged from this context: where cybernetician Norbert Wiener and electrical engineer Vannevar Bush alongside others pursued scientific work in the boundaries between their varying disciplines.

All this is even more interesting when we consider how Turner connects the metaphor of computation to Wiener and Julian Bigelow’s visions for the automaton and the self-regulating system. Wiener and Bigelow suggest that human beings are machines on some level that can be programmed as mechanical information processors. Understanding the relationship of behavior and purpose for these processors in connection with information theory is how Wiener defined the field of cybernetics. Cybernetics can also be understood as altering the way that society is defined. As both an organism and a machine, Wiener viewed society as a self-regulating system that uses the TV screen to measure and adjust its performance.

In her essay “Whatever Blogging,” Jodi Dean (2013:) points to the affective spaces that are connected to the world of blogs and social networks, where we “express ourselves, share our feelings, and reach out with little hope that someone will be touched and reach back.” In this sense, as many of you note, Dean is registering an indistinguishable character that is joined to our participation in social networks, where “[t]here is belonging, but not to anything in particular” (2013:169).

As a form of communicativity, whatever blogging is described by Dean as a deflection of the effort to communicate. Dean suggests we consider our status as the recipient of a message such that, as a subject, we are exposed to the obligations of the sender. At the same time, she indicates this status is altered by the affective spaces online as we can alter the direction of the message and where communication has no register of affirmation or rejection. As she (2013:171) writes, “the only affirmation in ‘whatever’ is of communication as such. Another has communicated. This communication in no way obligates me to the recipient of the message. […] ‘Whatever’ asserts no preferences. It neither affirms nor rejects. And it doesn’t expose the subject as a desiring subject to whom something matters.”

If we believe the distinction between public and private life has always been somewhat artificial, as Diami suggests in his response to Dean’s work, a point I’m inclined to believe Dean would agree with, there is a question about the way computer processing and human experience are drawn together, such that cognition is embodied differently. This is a question that N. Kathleen Hayles takes up in her book How We Think (2012). R. Joshua Scannel has recently written a review of Hayles’s book that I think you will enjoy as he touches on many of the same concepts and readings covered in this class.

“Return to the Crowds,” the title of Ahyan Aytes’s essay about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, already gives us some clues about the relationship between Amazon.com’s micropayment-based crowdsourcing platform and the 18th-century Automaton Chess Player from which its name is derived. If we can begin to understand the mechanical function Aytes affiliates with the crowd for the 18th-century chess player, I believe we will come closer to understanding the argument he is making.

Kempelen himself admits that the automatic function of the chess player is just a “happy deception” (Aytes 2013:105; Cook 1995). The general public or “crowd” is made aware of their status and privilege through their knowledge that the chess master assistant is the one who actually operates the automaton. But Aytes’s interest is not just in the automaton. He suggests aspects of “immaterial labor” pertinent to our contemporary political economic conditions can be understood as deriving from the game of chess itself, as it is connected to conceptualizations of subjectivity during the Enlightenment era. He argues that the game of chess is a representation of all that is possible for subjects in the Enlightenment universe, and suggests therefore that the actions of subjects are already coded by regulations, of the power and structure of the game (Aytes 2013:107).

Aytes views subjectivity in the era of Enlightenment as already limited by a power that is inherent to the way society is conceptualized and structured. But how then should we understand the relationship Aytes describes between the subject of enlightenment and the docility he attributes to the Oriental? As he (2013:107) writes, “the chess-playing Turk embodied an integration of the self-regulating liberal subject with the mechanical docility of the Oriental, performed within the coded socioeconomic universe of the game of chess.” Aytes proposes that the self-regulating liberal subject and the mechanical docility of the Oriental are functioning in tandem in this game.

Pointing to the work of Aihwa Ong (2006), Aytes argues that neoliberalism is a global system of exception. The mechanical function Aytes attributes to cognitive labor is described in relationship to crowdsourcing, but for this work there is “labor arbitrage” as well. Labor arbitrage “breaks apart the traditional relationship between the national labor legislations and the worker as citizen” (Aytes 2013:114). So we have a crowdsourcing system operating in a global market where the experience of exploitation depends primarily on whether interest in Mechanical Turk is motivated by the novelty of the experience, as it is in the U.S., or as a primary source of income, as Aytes suggests it is viewed by workers in India and China.

In her chapter, Tiziana Terranova (2013:46) describes the excessive activity online that is “free labor,” activity she views as at once both a feature of the cultural economy and a source of value, albeit unacknowledged, for advanced capitalist societies. To elaborate on this concept, she directs our attention to the work of Italian autonomist marxists including Maurizio Lazzarato and Paul Virno. With his concept “immaterial labor,” Lazzarato stresses two different aspects of labor. On one side we have the “informational content” of the commodity or the transition of labor processes once performed by workers to computers and cybernetics. On the other side we have the “cultural content” of the commodity, activities that do not appear as work because they are more a matter of “defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumers norms, and, more strategically, public opinion” (see Lazzarato 1996:133).

Connected to Lazzarato’s immaterial labor, is the collective dimension of a networked intelligence that these scholars view as a force in the historical development of capitalism. Paul Virno notes passages in Marx’s Grudrisse where scientific knowledge is described as “the principle productive force” a force that will “[relegate] repetitive and compartmentalized labor to a residual position” (1996:266). No longer driven by human labor, the productive force of capitalism is driven by scientific knowledge, what Marx describes as “incarnate.. in the automatic system of machines” a “horrific monster of metal and flesh” (1996:266).

I highlight these passages relative to the question Terranova raises about subculture so we can begin to recognize some of what is difficult to address in a digital economy and the transition to cultural production online. As I’ve tried to convey with the advertisements and blogs we’ve surveyed, we are tempted to believe that we have within us the elements of a movement to resist capital “from the outside.” Marx himself predicted production would become a process where labor is no longer a governing unity and appears instead “merely as a conscious organ scattered among the individual workers at numerous points of a mechanical system” (Marx 1973:693). We should keep these passages in mind this week, particularly as we move forward to consider Ayhan Aytes’s discussion of the Mechanical Turk.

Hi everyone,

One of your classmates was struggling with the reading and our hybrid assignment for this week. I’m posting my response to her question in case there are others searching for a little more guidance.

We can begin to understand Terranova’s argument by breaking down the concepts she uses. With this question I want students to begin to think about the relationship of capitalism to culture and sub-cultural movements in particular (see Terranova, pages 52-53).

A good place to begin is by making sure you understand what a subcultural movement is. Some would argue that the 1970s punk rock movement was a subcultural movement, but there are many other examples. Try to come up with a good working definition of this concept. What is the function of a subcultural movement? Next, return to Terranova’s text to try to see the point she is making. Why might we be tempted to think such movements are outside the reach of capitalism? Terranova makes a compelling argument for why this is not the case. With this assignment I want you to try to understand and explain what you think her argument about subculture is. This will help us begin to understand her argument about free labor and the digital economy.

See you Thursday!

Elizabeth

I apologize for the late posts!  I just completed a three-part portfolio of my Life Experiences with Professor McDonald.  Each portfolio is approximately 45 pages long.  It was due at the beginning of the month!  It started last semester when I entered Professor McDonald’s class to gain Life Experience Credits.  Each portfolio can equal up to 4-credits totaling 12 credits.  I think all students with college course based experience should look into this course.

I just learned that I only had to submit 16-pages per portfolio, but I don’t know if 16-pages would have sufficed.  I’ve experienced so much in my life’s journey.  I also want to say Thank you to Diami for helping to properly organize the portfolio.

Simone

Commenting on Ross’s argument, that digital media gives us a cheapened or discounted labor, many of you noted the different feelings that come with “no collar” work or with labor that can be done anywhere, requiring so little concentration that the word “labor” hardly seems to qualify. Others noted how uneven the playing field has become, when, for example, those who can afford to buy unpaid internships in hopes that these opportunities will lead to fruitful employment later in life. Meanwhile those less fortunate are forced into “precarious work,” or a marketplace for work that doesn’t come with the same regulations afforded to standardized forms of employment. Still others of you focused on the implications of machines taking over tasks that people were once paid to do, noting how the age of “self-service” is cheapening labor by making production part of the process of consumption.

Relative to all these issues are questions about whether and how technology contributes to the production of capital. Understanding Ross’s perspective on this issue requires we focus on his reading of Marx. He stresses that “cheapened” labor should be understood alongside Marx’s discussion of “living labor” and “dead labor.” In Capital Vol. 1, (1867:217), Marx notes how the production of capital involves “dead labor,” or a labor that is already embodied in the materials used to produce a new commodity. For Marx (and I think for Ross too) technology cannot directly produce value. Instead it alters the social conditions of human labor, on which Marx’s labor theory of value is based. We should keep this point in mind as we move through Scholz’s edited volume, as so many of these essays return to this point, to ask: what is the relationship of digital technology to the wealth that is produced in our contemporary political economy?

Sensational lede from Gawker (not a surprise.) Includes direct link to The Information’s report.

The basic breakdown – majority of tech venture capitalists are middle aged white men.