Patrice Riemens on Sat, 12 Apr 2014 05:11:18 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Two, section #1 |
Part II The Libertarian World Domination Project: Hacking, Social Network(s), Activism and Institutional Politics. (section 1) Online Ideologies: Google as Heir to the Enlightenment, and Facebook the Libertarian one. We are now coming to the issue which is concerning us directly and is also the closest to our heart: politics. Even though politics appears to have very little connexion with social network, it is precisely the political ideology behind their respective business model that makes out the major difference between online sociality's two giants and long time competitors: Facebook and Google. Our Ippolita Collective spared no effort to attack wholeheartedly the totalitarism of Google [*], the platform where the world's information transits through. Yet one may also somehow position Google within the tradition of the Age of Enlightenment. Google pursues the old dream of global knowledge accessible to all who benefit from its benign and enlightened tyranny. To liberate the human being from her/his 'minority position' and making her/him more autonomous was the aim of Enlightenment, and one will surely gladly adhere to that ideal. But then, the dark side of Google is also the Enlightenment's dark side: its unrestrained display of scientific rationality, of technological advances, and of all myths that go with them. Ratio's regressive moment comes with the advent of the barbary of total control, of human alienation - and of the life-world as a whole - all in the name of a machinic religion. There is no doubt that Google represents the icon of the mega-machine in all its positive and negative aspects. Google develops innovative algorithms and filters providing snappy search results, as outcome of scientific research and technical invention. Yet Google's contents are not solely the offshoot of profiling its users, they are also, and even mostly so, the result of a creative tension born out of a stock of freely available information resources, (but) this within the limits of a freedom to access which is managed by a technical subject - and thus not by the users (themselves) - who intends not to be malevolent (the famous "/Don't be evil"/ motto), all this within the context of a capitalist 'free market'. In the United States, Google is being seen as politically 'liberal', which is tantamount to left of the center in European parlance. In the rest of the world, Google is perceived as supporting the freedom of expression and to be inimical towards repressive (and usually anti-American) governments. Its dissensions with China have earned it a reputation as a firm holding up democratic values, or at least, abiding by the democratic framework when it comes to access to information. There is undoubtedly something good about the idea of making all information accessible to all comers. In a certain sense it is (also) about furthering the American Dream. Google reproduces the saga of the Frontier by transmuting (the advance of) the conquest of the Far West online. Progress here is about accumulating ever more data, making the network denser, and, in the universalist outlook towards an community (/koinè/) at the world-scale, about building up an intensely collaborative encyclopedia, embracing everything, absolutely everything - searches, e-mails, cards, books, articles, images, etc etc. So actually, if one just glosses over the huge problem that is the management of all knowledge by a private entity, and if one decides not to care very much about the issue of technological transfer of authority, well, then, Google is not bad at all! Of course, there will be more and more conflicts - due to Google's humongous material interests, and the global reach of its services. These conflicts will include both with private individuals as well as national and international authorities and they will be about infringements of the fundamental right to privacy, suspicion of abuse of its dominant (market) position, cartel-forming, undue collaboration with intelligence agencies, etc. But it is also true that, as a firm dealing with global knowledge, Google does not lean on a clearly definable political position. This is certainly not the case with Facebook, which is supported and sponsored by the libertarian extreme right in the US - or to use that strangely apposite oxymoron: the anarcho-capitalists. But then it is not easy to describe this particular ideology in a few sentences, especially from an European perspective. Libertarian ideas (in Europe) may come in many shades, from municipal libertarism to anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, individual anarchism, etc. - yet they all are historically linked to anarchism, and hence to socialist internationalism. Therefore, a fundamentally anti-socialist reading of anarchism doesn't make logical sense (in our parts). And yet, as we shall see shortly, libertarians US-style (or /right libertarians/, who have nothing in common with /left libertarians/ - the real anarchists) not only play a central role in the everyday practices and corporate politics of Facebook, they are also prominent in shaping a whole set of values which has emerged over the past twenty years in the digital world. There are (also) significant connections between the world of hacking and libertarian ideas. In this perspective, we are not out to explore the (epistemic) avenues between political philosophy and economic theory, as much as we are trying to uncover the governing principle linking phenomena like Facebook, Wikileaks and Anonymous - to name but a few - together, even though, de prime abord, they do not have anything in common. (to be continued) next time: Libertarians - or a brief history of capitalism on steroids ................. [*] See http://www.ippolita.net/en/dark-side-google-abstract Full version (in English): http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publication/no-13-the-dark-side-of-google-ippolita/ An earlier version of the original Italian book's translation has been 'serialised' on nettime-l in 2009. ----------------------------- Translated by Patrice Riemens This translation project is supported and facilitated by: The Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/) The Antenna Foundation, Nijmegen (http://www.antenna.nl - Dutch site) (http://www.antenna.nl/indexeng.html - english site under construction) Casa Nostra, Vogogna-Ossola, Italy # 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