Wu Ming, Fetishism of Digital Commodities and Hidden Exploitation: the cases of Amazon and Apple on MUTE. NB that Wu Ming is a mysterious collective of guerrillla novelists from Italy - not a singular individual.

Posted because this is a useful reminder following my last post Seeing Like A Database - which closed on the question of whether whether open data analytics may offer a real - or only illusory - potential for mass use and liberation, alongside the current asymmetric monitoring and surveillance.

This would be a statue of Lenin at the Chaos Communications Camp hacker festival somewhere outside Berlin.

Photo by Emerson Tan.

A couple of days ago I quoted former Open Rights Group head Becky Hogge claim that:

To a hacker, architecture is politics: how you build something will dictate how it will get used.

Architects beg to differ.

The Architects’ Journal has asked a number of prominent architects and spatial thinkers (and Alain De Botton) to comment on the riots and civil disturbance that have spread across Britain last week - Why Britain Is Burning.

Jeremy Till makes a good point:

At least the architects are not blamed this time, as we were with Broadwater. Nor could we be, because (quoting Simmel) the city is not a spatial entity with sociological consequences, but a sociological entity that is formed spatially. Here the riots spatialise years of ramping up of social inequality. So when my Twitter feed calls for the reintroduction of Jane Jacobs, I blanch (because space is not the solution, just the symptom) and when the Tories say it is ‘pure’ criminality, I rage (because of the implicit disavowal of their political responsibility). One way out? Act on the New Economic Foundation’s Great Transition

However, both Hogge and Till remain somewhat reductionist - Hogge reducing social behaviour to the result of spatial form; Till making the opposite reduction of space to sociology. But:

Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or the aggregate in the procedures employed in their removal? The answer must be no.
[Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p.11]

What we need is the dialectic approach of Henri Lefebvre:

The Production of Space is a complex work, at once historical, philosophical, semiotic, and Marxist. It was written at a time when both Althusserianism and deconstructionism were salient, and there are many asides to thinkers who follow these persuasions. It is also a mature work, in which Lefebvre`s command of his dialectical thinking is quite masterful. In Fichtean dialectics and in much deconstructionist or structuralist thought, analytical categories are perceived as oppositions or antinomies. Lefebvre wants nothing to do with this Manichean view because it usually results in static contrasts. Marx’s dialectical moments were flowing, manifold, and complex, especially with regard to “the negation,” a concept that I believe only Adorno and Lefebvre have really understood. According to Lefebvre, dialectical moments are expressed as “triplicite” – as three terms, not two. The third term instantly deconstructs static oppositions or dualisms, and adds a fluid dimension to social process.

The most important “triple” concerns grasping the importance of space according to its manifestations as perceived, conceived and lived. Ever since his early break with orthodox Marxism, Lefebvre had been concerned with avoiding reductionist economism. This triple is meant to convey that space has a complex character and enters social relations at all levels. It is at once a physical environment that can be perceived; a semiotic abstraction that informs both how ordinary people negotiate space (the mental maps studied by geographers) and the space of corporations, planners, politicians, and the like; and, finally, a medium through which the body lives out its life in interaction with other bodies. Social relations also are spatial, relations; we cannot talk about the one without the other.

In working with this triple relation, Lefebvre attempts to avoid reductionism, whether it is of the economistic (Marxist) or the idealistic (deconstructionist) kind. He proposes a unitary theory of space that ties together the physical, the mental, and the social. Developing this generalized approach to space even further, Lefebvre introduces a second triple that amplifies the first. Space is simultaneously a spatial practice (an externalized, material environment), a representation of space (a conceptual model used to direct practice), and a space of representation (the lived social relation of users to the environment).

[Gottdiener, Mark, 1993. ‘A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefèbvre and The Production of Space’ in Sociological Theory, available here.

Digging through my old draft posts I found this quote from Adrian Ivakhiv from his blog Immanence, in a post called Belief in expired wor(l)ds, & in wor(l)ds to come…, 14th March 2011.

Reminded me of the debate that kicked off on the philosophical interwebs (or the corner of it I follow on Twitter) following the Hardt article mentioned above Reclaim the common in communism (3rd Feb 2011), an edited version of his essay in the Douzinas / Zizek book The Idea of Communism (Verso, 2011)

The level of idealism on the “pro-communist” side of the discussion that ensued across several blogs - the disdain for history and material events - I found staggering. It brought about much bewailing of the academy - oh, why must these philosophers make such sophist arguments that seem designed to be misunderstood by non-specialists - and, worse, to be aiming for this kind of opacity as if it provided some evidence of the genius at hand?

Yes, the commons is an idea we can and should be doing something with - but it neither requires an argument for Communism as a politico-economic system, nor for some attempt to reclaim some abstractised concept of communism from the human mire it produced for its Soviet subjects in practice. As Ivakhiv says, there are other words in the world we can use!

John Harris: The world needs a new Marx, but it keeps creating Malcolm Gladwells

Soundmoney: Capitalism has resolutely failed to crumble under the weight of its own internal contradictions

Eques: Yeaaaaa probably the wrong time in history to be saying that.

Australian university asks, “What class are you struggling with and why?”
Student answer: “The bourgeoise b/c they control the modes of production.”

Everyone who lives above the poverty line but isn’t wealthy pretty much has no choice but to work for a living doing something which rewards them with survival tokens.

Working as a telemarketer, for example, allows you to have food, clothing and shelter, but doesn’t put you directly in charge of creating, growing or killing those things you need for sustenance. Instead, you trade in tokens for those things. As a result, you have a lot of free time and some leftover tokens. We don’t directly compete with each other for resources like we did for the millennia before mass production.

Before this setup, people were often defined by their work, by their output. The things they owned were usually things either they handmade, or were things other people made by hand. There was a weight, an infusion of soul, in everything a person owned, used and lived in.

Today, everyone is a consumer, and has to pick from the same selection of goods as everyone else, and because of this people now define their personalities on how good their taste is, or how clever, or how obscure, or how ironic their choices are.”

Source: Selling Out « You Are Not So Smart

Nice post about how there’s no such thing as “selling out”, detailing how status works in youth scenes and/or counterculture and arguing that the drive to stay one step ahead of the mainstream serves consumer capitalism very nicely thank you.

 I want to unpick the quote above, however - the bit about what our relations with material culture were like “before this setup”.

It’s interesting because it’s a Marxist argument, even though You Are Not So Smart appears rather too skeptical to be a blog advocating anti-capitalist revolution. The paragraph draws on the basic Marxist distinction between two groups. Under capitalism, workers do not own their ‘means of production’ (e.g. the factory or company they work for) and are thus alienated from their own labour by being paid a wage that does not fully compensate them for the increase in value their labour has generated. The resultant commodity is thus:

“a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”

[Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, chaper 1 section 4]

So much so obvious, I’m sure, to anyone who might be reading this. As I recall off the top of my head, though (That’s ok, right? This is Tumblr rather than academic?), Marx formulates the relationship between the pre-capitalist producer and the things s/he makes as the converse of the quotation above: the value of goods is recognised as the value of the labour that went into it, and as the labour is not alienated from the worker, the value of an item remains a social relation between the worker and whoever subsequently uses/buys the item.

In short, things are not just objects but social relations - social relations between people who know each other in a “before-this-setup” pre-capitalist situation, yet now social relations that are ‘alienated’, i.e. impersonal and mediated by money.

You Are Not So Smart essentially mystifies this distinction in saying that “before this setup”, the things people owned had “a weight, an infusion of soul”. That seems to be a poetic way of saying that goods used to have meaning, way back when - except that of course that they’re also arguing that goods have meaning now (as commodities). Rather, this talk of “weight” and “soul” would seem to be saying that meaning created through direct social relations is superior, more emotionally profound, to meaning created as part of broader commodity culture.

Is that true? It seems sentimental. Commodity culture is still itself a set of social relations, even if they are weaker social ties than those embodied in “that dress my mother made for me” – and it generates a much vaster array of meanings than were available to most in pre-capitalist societies.

Also, “people were often defined by their work, by their output.” Were they? When everyone’s a self-sufficient farmer, does the food you make define you? It sustains you and those around you, and it’s indubitably imbued with social meaning - but surely people in agrarian & nomadic societies are instead defined much more by their relationships with each other and by their relationships with place and land. You Are Not So Smart seems to have got it backwards: the things people produced didn’t define identities; instead the things they produced were defined by the people who made them.

In fact, I wouldn’t assume that people in pre-capitalist societies had identities in the way that that term’s familiar today. The concept of “the individual” is much more culture-bound than we usually realise. For example, the UK Borders Agency is deporting gay asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East on the grounds (against UNHCR advice) that they can be “discreet” about their sexuality and move to another part of the country to avoid those who know about their past. (See the Somali Gay Community website.) The reality: in many parts of the world a person without family is not a person – identity is understood as your position within family & community relationships, such that the atomised individual cannot be socially legitimate.

We in the West – and now the urbanising developing world – define ourselves through our relationships with commodities precisely because we no longer live family-oriented, community-based lives, and must thus search elsewhere for meaning.