Prem Chandavarkar on Mon, 5 Mar 2012 04:57:33 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'? |
Are we getting into the right issues here? The debate seems to have moved to the ethics of sites like Facebook and whether they are exploitative, whereas this thread started with the question of whether capitalism will survive a world of "value abundance". To begin with this, my sense is that it will. See Kevin Kelly's essay "Better Than Free" at http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php While I do not agree with all that Kelly says, I concur with the thrust of the argument which is that in a world of value abundance a different set of activities will get monetized. So it is not likely that scarcity will disappear, it is just a question of what are the new activities that will be scarce. Moving on to the issue of where the thread has moved: I am not sure whether it is productive to see the problem in terms of labor. Lets imagine a couple of pre-internet physical-world instances to explore this further: INSTANCE 1: A well-known anthropologist, tenured at a famous university, publishes a study on the cultural life of a tribe on a little-known island in the Pacific Ocean. The study becomes widely known both in academic and general circles. The anthropologist earns substantial royalties from the book rights. The resultant fame creates highly paid opportunities on the lecture circuit, and also increases the wages that the anthropologist could demand at any reputed university. So you can clearly say that the anthropologist has profited very well out of this activity. Where does the life and labor of the Pacific island tribe fit into this? Have they been exploited? INSTANCE 2: There is a well-known coffee house in a large metropolitan city. A company realizing that many people frequent this place decides there is value in putting up a billboard advertising their wares on one of the walls of the coffee house, and offers the owner of the coffee house a substantive sum of money to do so. The advertisement is so successful that the advertiser offers the coffee house owner even more money for the right to place the billboard. Eventually the coffee house owner senses that advertising gains him more money, and begins to offer the coffee and other menu items for free so that more people will visit the place, and he can earn more from the advertisements. The basic activity in the room remains the same: people still enjoy the coffee and conversation here, which is why they visit; except now they no longer have to pay for the coffee. However the business model of the coffee house owner has completely changed. Now imagine this going one step further. The advertiser realizes that if he has more information about the kind of people who frequent the coffee house, then he can produce better advertisements and earn a greater profit. So he offers the coffee house owner some more money in order to construct and rent a high platform within the coffee house. He posts one of his employees to sit on this platform to watch the behavior of all the patrons of the coffee house, and draw patterns of information from his observations, which can be utilized to design better advertisements. How do the patrons of the coffee shop react when they see this man on the platform observing them? Each of these instances highlights some problematic issues. The instance of the anthropologist raises the question of opportunity symmetry. In any intersection of people within a space, do all the players involved operate with the same set of possibilities being offered to them? In this case the answer is no - and I would cite here Edward Said's argument of Orientalism where modernist scholars began to devote a fair level of attention to the Orient, and this might be seen as an ethical impulse to recognize the Orient. However this attention is found to be based on the portrayal of the Oriental as an exotic other who does not have a voice and therefore requires the Occidental scholar to speak on their behalf. The scholar enjoys all the freedom, mobility and possibilities that modernity offers. These benefits can be preserved only if the Oriental is retained as an exotic other, for the scholar's intellectual production depends on this. For this two operations are necessary. Firstly, the discourse is constructed in terms that only permit intellectual rationality, and any other mode of thought is dismissed as myth or folklore and therefore not worthy of entering the discourse; so an Oriental presence in the discourse requires another voice to speak on the Oriental's behalf. And secondly, the exoticism of the Orient is romanticized and portrayed as desirable, and therefore the Oriental should seek to preserve and remain within that world, and should not desire the options available to the modern Occidental scholar. The point of whether the Oriental finds his/her cultural world desirable is not the key point - what matters is whether he/she is given the option of remaining within this world or choosing other worlds. This asymmetry is to be found in virtual spaces like Facebook. The Facebooker's opportunities of friendship and networking are romanticized and constructed as desirable - and they may indeed find this desirable. But if one says that Facebook is actually a space, there are other people present in that space: the owners of the space and the advertisers in it. These people have a set of economic opportunities that are not available to the average Facebooker. In fact the world of Facebook is based on maintaining this divide: a small set of people who have tremendous economic opportunity, and a large set of people who have no economic opportunity, but their cultural opportunities are romanticized to the point where it is perceived that this is all they should desire, and the question of their desire for economic opportunity within this space does not enter the horizon of perceptions. Now it may be argued that everyone is making their choice, and is getting something from that choice. The problem is that in an unregulated space power gravitates to those with the greatest economic opportunity. Asymmetries of opportunity create asymmetries of power. And in this asymmetry of power, the notion of human engagement (friendship) is shifted from its central position of being one of the building blocks of culture towards the margin where it is just a zone for economic appropriation. Let us move on to examining the second instance of the coffee house. Here the problem is one of authentication of presence - a problem that is central to virtual worlds. Take the example of a shop selling pornography. In the physical world, if an eight-year-old girl walks into the pornography shop, the sheer physicality of her being authenticates her presence there, and the inappropriateness of her presence is immediately apparent to all. But when she visits the same store in its online version, her presence has a level of invisibility to it, and assessing inappropriateness becomes problematic. So returning to the coffee house example: if the patrons of the coffee shop see a man on a platform observing them they are likely to find that uncomfortable. The allure of the coffee shop may be its anonymity; you go there to find relief from the other spaces where you spend most of your time: the spaces of home and work where you are always under the judgmental or expectant gaze of parent, spouse or boss. You find the coffee house is a space where you are freed from any gaze, and therefore you can engage with your fellow beings with a level of freedom that you cannot find elsewhere. And this freedom allows you to construct your sense of self to a level of potential that you would not achieve if you were denied this anonymity. But if you suddenly find that in the coffee house there is a man on a platform watching you, your opinion of the coffee house would most likely change, and you will start seeking this anonymity and freedom elsewhere. If the man who watches you has no choice but to sit on a platform in the same space, his presence is unavoidably authenticated. You can then take his presence into account in making your choices. But if he moves behind a one-way mirror where you cannot see him, then is this now an ethical situation? You go to the coffee house for a certain purpose, but this purpose is being denied to you without your knowing it. And in the virtual world the one-way mirror is the rule rather than the exception, which is why people like Lawrence Lessig have argued that cyberspace needs its own specific laws. So the problem really revolves around opportunity symmetries and the authentication of presence - and this problem comes into sharper focus when we realize that cyberspace is in some ways similar to physical space. It devolves into hierarchies of space, with one major component of this hierarchy being a split into a private realm and a public realm. The expectations imposed on the behavior of yourself and others change drastically depending on where in this hierarchy you find yourself. If you are in your own private space, you have a freedom of behavior that you would not claim elsewhere, but when someone else enters your private realm it is expected that they will adjust their behavior to the codes and expectations of the owner of this realm. And you would accept a similar limitation on yourself, when you step into a private realm that belongs to someone else. So within the private realm the host and the guest are not subjected to the same expectations, and this asymmetry of expectations is considered acceptable and normal. But when you step into the public realm you are less willing to tolerate asymmetries of expectation. You believe everyone should have the same rights and opportunities in the public realm. And this is possible only when everyone's presence is adequately authenticated. Similarly, on the internet it is accepted that in privately owned spaces such as a personal or corporate webpage the owner of the space and the visitor to the space are not subjected to the same expectations and have different levels of opportunity offered to them. So this brings us to the question: what is the public realm on the internet? In the physical city the answer is visible and apparent: the public realm consists of the streets, plazas, parks and other spaces that belong to that abstract institutional entity called the government, and the government is supposed to belong to everybody ("of the people, by the people, and for the people"), so therefore the public realm belongs to everybody. Therefore it is expected that equality and symmetry of opportunity ensues to all in the public realm. Given that most websites are privately owned, the equivalent notion of public space is not so visible in cyberspace. To resolve this we need to extend the analogy of physical space, and realize that public space does not just mean the absence of private ownership. The public realm of the city or village forms the connective tissue that brings the multiple private realms to cohere into some notion of culture and society. Public space also performs a civic role: it connects people, brings them to engage with each other, and this connective engagement is the building block of culture, society and economy. So if you wish to construct an inclusive society, you need to ensure through the rule of law that any space that forms a part of this connective infrastructure must offer equality of opportunity. Once you assign central importance to connective infrastructure, the dividing line between public ownership and private ownership of space becomes blurred. A space could be privately owned, but if the owner decides to make this space usable as a part of the connective infrastructure, it is expected that the equality of opportunity available in publicly owned space will also become available here. For example, a person may operate a restaurant in a privately owned space, but it is considered reasonable that the law stipulates that allowing or denying admission cannot be done on the basis of racial origin. It has also been widely argued that the 2008 financial debacle was a regulatory failure, and banks form part of the connective infrastructure, so should be subjective to regulatory controls that other corporates may not be subjected to. Websites such as Facebook or Google clearly project themselves as forming the connective infrastructure of cyberspace. So it should follow that they should be subjected to regulatory control that may be different from the controls that other cyberspaces are subject to. And these controls should demand certain thresholds on equality of opportunity and authentication of presence. All this implies that spaces that form connective infrastructure should be subjected to the demands of human rights. This spatialization of rights is a terrain that has not been adequately explored. We tend to treat the idea of human rights as axiomatic, but often forget that its history is very recent. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights happened only in 1948, and in historical terms sixty four years is an extremely short duration for the development of a political ideal. The notion of human rights existed much earlier, but before 1948 was typically construed as selective and not universal. So you would have countries with established doctrines of human rights, that at the same time indulged in colonization or failed to implement laws that controlled widely institutionalized racism. The compulsion to perceive human rights as universal is a process that began only in 1948. And the development and ratification of the subsequent covenants on civil, political, economic, social and political rights took another 28 years achieving completion only in 1976. Human rights remain an abstract ideal, and are concretized in daily life only once there is a spatial entity that enforces them, and one's location within that spatial entity is formally recognized by others. This brings us to the question of what level in the spatial hierarchy should rights be recognized. So far, they have been recognized only at one level: the nation state. To achieve this recognition the nation state has to choose to imagine itself as an inclusive, non-hierarchical, secular and ethical community. This is a deliberate choice that must be made, and as is apparent not every nation has opted for this choice. But those nations that have made this choice seek to construct themselves on the foundations of democracy, constitutional protection of rights, rule of law and an institutionalized system of checks and balances (legislature, executive, judiciary and free press). The problem is that the nation state is typically a complex, geographically dispersed and highly heterogenous territory. This makes it difficult to evolve any doctrine of rights that is integrated with daily routine. At the level of the nation state, one can only devolve mechanisms for redressing the violation of rights (and this redressal could take place at many levels). But if we seek to prevent the violation of rights we have to bring this notion of rights to the spaces of daily life: the spaces that form the connective infrastructure of our cities, villages, and (in recent years) the internet. These spaces have to also make the choice of imagining themselves as inclusive, non-hierarchical, secular and ethical communities. And if they are to connect with a doctrine of rights at the level of the nation state, it will be necessary to force this imagining through the rule of law. And if this is the way we will have to imagine ourselves, we must devote our attention to the spatial, political and legal theory that derives from this. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org