andrew ross (by way of Pit Schultz <pit@icf.de>) on Fri, 27 Jun 1997 08:10:09 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Jobs in Cyberspace 1/2 |
Jobs in Cyberspace by Andrew Ross Remember all the giddy talk about the "information superhighway"? Well it never got built. At least not the way that Time Warner, Microsoft, and AT&T imagined it. As recently as 1993, the media Goliaths were spinning blue-sky fantasies about delivering 500 cable channels and personalized pay-per services to your home, while collecting access tolls for the individual use of vast corporate libraries of information and entertainment product. The fantasies are still kicking around, and, unlike in 1993 when phone-cable mergers like Bell Atlantic-TCI were the model for interactive use, they are currently being traded between cable companies and software giants like Microsoft. With Microsoft's acquisition of Web TV along with the cable operator Comcast, in June 1997, its hopes are pinned on consolidating high speed Internet access via cable as the pipeline for vertical and horizontal integration of all entertainment and information services. Whether this strategy will prove anymore financially viable than the earlier attempt at media convergence, there's no doubt that those revisions of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 and the Telecom Competition and Deregulation Act of 1995 which facilitate multimedia corporate mergers have laid the legal groundwork. Our hard-earned paranoia about the growth of monopolies within the world of old media has prepared us for the worst. And yet, as in all matters related to New Media, it seems as if the theory has preceded the practice. Everyone thinks they know what is supposed to happen....but it always hasn't happened yet. The example of WebTV is a case in point. Its main purpose, after all, is to deliver the Internet to Middle America. Four years ago, it was unthinkable that the Internet would even figure in this kind of scenario. It was not supposed to be invited to the corporate cyberparty. Once earmarked as a nigh obsolete relic of the pioneer days of digital communication--reserved primarily for academic communication--it has now truly become the network of networks that was once its faux-grandiose moniker. Practically speaking, the Internet now functions as the information superhighway, and the big corporate players have reluctantly come to accept this fact. Microsoft's wholesale switch to Internet-oriented strategies ("Embrace and Extend" is the company motto) in December 1995 and the spirited entry of its Internet Explorer into the browser wars with Netscape Navigator has been one massive attempt to catch up with what many predicted would have been left sucking dust. Of course, since it entered the open standards environment of the Net, Microsoft has done its level best to insinuate a proprietary architecture onto the World Wide Web (WWW). Both the Explorer, and Netscape in response, began to create proprietary HTML tags which the other cannot recognize, making it increasingly difficult to design webpages that work with both browsers. While the Internet has absorbed the new corporate presence much more easily than anyone might have predicted, overtly proprietary moves like these are perceived as riding roughshod over its resident crypto-anarchist philosophy. Physically speaking, the Internet's infrastructure of cables, routers, and switches has proven less than adequate for the massive volume of new traffic. In place of the early projections of the National Information Infrastructure's (NII) Gigabyte Testbed Initiative for huge bandwidth serviced by billion-bit-per-second wires, the reality is more claustrophobic : brownouts plague major intersections on the Internet's regional backbones where waves of data packets converge and often disappear because of insufficient bandwidth. The explosive growth of multimedia applications--realtime audio, shockwave, video, animated gif files--for the graphic-intensive WWW is responsible not only for the traffic jams, but also for the rapid ascendancy of the Internet itself. In April 1997, the one millionth Web site address was registered, by Bonny View Cottage Furniture of Petroskey, Michigan. For those boosters who proclaim that the WWW has ushered in the greatest publishing breakthrough since the printing press, this is perceived as a million new "publications." But for those weaned on old media definitions of public communication, the geography of the Web is a strange landscape to host a new public sphere. After all, it was the Web that brought the shopping malls and cyberstores, the advertisers, the financial real estate, indeed the entire world of commercial agents in hot pursuit of good addresses from which to promote and shop their wares. Once the barbarians were on the Web, there was no looking back. While distasteful to Net purists, the new commercial presence had little difficulty, initially at least, in fitting in with the open architectural milieu of Net culture. Nothing in the house religion of Net libertarianism seemed at odds with the laissez-faire ideals of the corporations. Except, of course, when it came to paying for stuff ("information wants to be free" is a Net mantra). A free market and freedom of speech are one thing, free products and shareware ethics are another, inevitably at odds with each other. But that little contradiction could be deferred for a while, at least as long as Wall Street was boosting Netscape (with the largest IPO in financial history in 1995) and other public offerings of Internet stocks through the roof, and the venture capitalists were helping to fund start-ups right, left and center. Optimists had some reason to believe that, against all odds, some unholy marriage of cultural content, commerce, and community autonomy might provide a sustainable basis for the brave new world of self-publishing, remote in ethos and practice from an old media environment where the press was only free for those who own one. In a classic example of theorem preceding evidence, Josh Quittner, writing for Wired magazine, had even coined the anticipatory term, "Way New Journalism." If ever there was a technoculture setting itself up to be frustrated, this was it. Predictably, then, 1996 was the beginning of the great shakedown. New York's burgeoning Silicon Alley, the locus of the new content-driven revolution, suffered one setback after another. Multimedia mainstays like Prodigy and Voyager withdrew their operations, the Murdoch group collapsed iGuide and Delphi, Pipeline was sold and and Mindvox went under, and many of the established webzine indies died off or were gobbled up by media giants. In California, Wired's failed attempts--twice--at an IPO, tarnished its pretensions to espouse a high-minded kind of Jeffersonian digital populism. Other indies like American Cybercast and Out (run by Out magazine) ceased publication. Larger corporate content-oriented websites like Politics Now (a collaboration of the Washington Post, ABC, and National Journal, Inc.) shut down, while Time Warner's Pathfinder supersite was reputed to be running at a loss of $10m a year. Industry pundits began to doubt whether any profits could be generated and sustained from media whose users have always taken "freedom of information" at its literal meaning--i.e. no billing, please! Currently, none of the business models--banner-based advertising, subscription, pay per use, metered bits, digital cash, microtransactions, consumer branding--used to sustain content-oriented Web sites are working. The current wisdom pronounces that successful Web shops will need 4-5 years to show a profit. While this anti-commercial outcome could be viewed as some kind of victory for the resident anarchist philosophy of the Net, it does not augur well for those who are willing to equate this new culture industry with the possibility of honest job creation. The Bad Hand of Government While the Internet, in common with most modern technologies, is an offspring of military and other government contracts, its users have long since developed an antipathy to the hand that once fed it. Anti-federalist sentiment is as fervent among some Net communities as among the militias. For example, the consciousness event of 1996 in the U.S. was the fight against the Communications Decency Act's ban on online indecency and offensive speech, overturned in the courts after intensive activity by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other lobby groups from the Internet community (as well as the ACLU and a number of gay/lesbian civil-rights groups). If you were a netizen in good standing, you would have received a barrage of email notices circulating about this life-or-death crusade for free speech. By contrast, the fact that Congress threw the welfare state down the toilet that year barely registered at all, except on specialized listserves and Usenet groups. So fierce is the Internet doctrine of untrammelled individualism that it sometimes translates into a general phobia about any government activities, and not just those directly affecting the New Media. A portion of this response is well-founded: the pro-encryption, pro-censorship crusades of the Clinton-Bush adminstrations have been klutsy and cynical moves, undercutting the official state rhetoric about the glorious liberties promised by the new information order. But the cyberlibertarian response is often bereft of a sober appreciation of the regulatory frameworks that are necessary in order to ensure civic freedoms and equities. This is a familiar paradox in liberal theory: forms of regulation prevent corporate monopolies from gobbling up all of public speech. The most extreme illustration of this near-myopia was EFF maven John Perry Barlow's now famous response to the indecency provisions of the Telecom Act, flamboyantly couched as "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace": Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature an it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. .... We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here [.....] In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. [....] In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be are humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. You would be hard put to find a more lucid expression of the unfettered individualism at the core of Net libertarianism, California-style. It's all there; the disdain for the obsolete order of industrialism, the desire for self-liberation from the social life of mortals, the retrofitted nostalgia for a Rousseauesque state of nature, and the aspiration to outrun transnational capital in the race to enjoy sovereignty beyond the boundaries of any petty state bureaucracy. Add to this the powerful legacy of countercultural, not to mention anti-colonial rhetoric, and the result is a clean, messianic break with the world most of us inhabit. This is the freedom we have always been falsely promised, let us emancipate ourselves from technical slavery by taking the new tools with us into secessionary exile! Many critiques have been offered of this kind of hauteur, both from within and without the cyberspace community. The one that concerns me here is the resident blindness to what could be described as the "material conditions of production" of cyberspace. Far from heralding a Tofflerian end to either the age of "factories," equated by Barlow with "pig iron," or the age of government intervention, equated with "public construction projects," the aery layer of cyberspace inhabited by Barlow's self-liberated Netsters is underpinned everywhere by a new industrial economy that is the engine of the emergent information order. Masses of people work in cyberspace, or work to make cyberspace possible. It is not simply a medium for free expression and wealth accumulation, it is a labor-intensive workplace. In recognizing this there is no need to spurn the liberatory impulse that drives the Barlovian world-view. What's more important is to turn Barlow on his head, as Marx once did of Hegel, and to see how and where this impulse can be generated within the labor process--the core of social sustainability. First of all, it must be acknowledged that the hand of government is not exactly inactive. While the bulk of Net attention has been focussed on the issue of censorship and civil liberties, state policies are everywhere more and more oriented to facilitating, if not directly governing, the shape of information industrialism. The massive revisions of the Telecommunications Act were a clear example of the use of the affirmative power of the state to sanction the aspirations of the giant multimedia corporations, legislated at a time when the US state was withdrawing those same powers from its committment to social welfare. Government sponsorship of the NII, presented as a "creative investment," has been tied to ensuring national competiveness in the information industries, and under the rubric of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII), to US dominance in the transnational field. Nurtured by US federal investment, the Internet is now perceived as a leading asset in the game of comparative advantage, not to mention a decisive force in the long war over English-language global dominance. Policy initiatives like Clinton-Gore's "Next Generation Internet" agenda in 1996 rebut the prevailing mythology that government finally withdrew from its wardship of the Internet in 1995, when Net traffic was handed over to commercial service providers. Nor has the military--the original source of the impulse to decentralize communications in the interests of reducing vulnerability to attack--withdrawn its hand. Take the Internet naming system, known as the "domain name system," which has its roots in the US Dept. of Defense bureaucracy, and was designed to identify the purpose of computing locations on the Internet. The "com." domain was the division given to commercial network addresses, who at the time the system was established, were a minority of networks on the Net--the majority being "mil." "gov." "edu." and "net." In 1995, administration of the name registry system was handed over to the InterNIC (internet network information center) of Network Solutions, Inc. which has enjoyed a highly profitable monopoly through charging considerable sums for the once gratis name registrations. InterNIC has had effective control over the creation of domain name scarcity, the engine of its profits--since registrants (around 50,000 new applicants each month) were willing to pay more and more for the shortest, customised addresses. It is also owned by Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) a 2 billion dollar company with very strong ties to the Pentagon and the NSA. Its current board of directors include former NSA chief Bobby Inman, Former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and the former head of research and development for the Pentagon, Donald Hicks. Ex-CIA director Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense William Perry and CIA Director John Deutsch have been past board members. A vast majority of its annual revenue comes from government contracts, including defense, intelligence and law enforcement contracts. SAIC is designing new information systems for the Pentagon, helping to automate the FBI's computerized fingerprint identification system, and last year won a $200 million contract to provide "information support" to the IRS. In brief, independents have no fully functioning way of using the Internet unless their rootservers are sanctioned by Internic's Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). In effect, the administration of top-level domains--the bureaucratic center of the Internet--remained in the grip of the military-industrial complex, with its infamous tangle of interlocking directorates. In April 1997, the self-appointed International Ad Hoc Committee of the International Telecommunications Union recommended a series of new global top-level domain names, such as .FIRM, .WEB, .ARTS, .NOM, .STORE, and others. The IAHC recommended ending InterNIC's monopoly of name registration. None of these examples of government or military involvement invalidate Barlow's case--indeed they provide fuel for his fire--but to ignore these vested interests is pure self-indulgence. More important, if more abstruse, is the principle Barlow refers to as the social contract between legislators and users. Without a representative public stake in the regulation of the information sector, the axiomatic committment to universal access, resonating, in political rhetoric, from Hoover's "chicken in every pot" to Gingrich's "PC in every lap" is even more hollow than the rhetoric itself. (There is simply no point in talking about people's access to high capacity information prior to their access to employment, income, health, and environmental safety--witness the frothy promises that the "Internet will liberate the Third World"). Regulation, then, is not simply a fetter on free expression, it can create the conditions for freedoms and rights, paramount among these being the right to equity among freedoms. Such claims, stakes, and obligations have no moral authority in the commercial marketplace, although, if the shoe fits, they sometimes coincide with the effects of that marketplace. The most acute problem with Barlovianism lies not with its ultralibertarianism but with its neglect of material labor conditions. Net intellectuals in Barlow's camp, no less than most information professionals, have little sense of the labor that produces their computer technologies, nor are they very attentive to the industrial uses to which these technologies are put in the workplaces of the world. This blindness is understandable, though not excusable, when these sectors are remote and invisible, on the other side, as it were of the international division of labor. But it is difficult to exonerate the neglect of working conditions that lie at the heart of the cyberspace community itself. Like all other sectors of the economy, the Internet industries have been penetrated by the low-wage revolution--from the janitors who service Silicon Valley to the part-time programmers and designers who service Silicon Alley. Just as Silicon Valley provided a flexible model for post-industrial employment, Silicon Alley may be poised to deliver an upgrade. The initial indications show that there are indeed jobs in cyberspace, but most of them don't pay that well or offer much job security. In the brief analysis of Silicon Alley that follows, I will focus on the particular example of cultural labor in an employment market--New York City--which famously enjoys a surplus of such labor. No less than in the arts and education, creative work in Silicon Alley can be, and generally is, undercompensated because of the invisible wages that come in the form of psychological rewards for personally satisfying work. At a time when noone seems immune to the plague of low-wage labor it's important that artists, educators, writers and designers see this discount arrangement for what it is--exploitation of the prestige of cultural work to drive down wages in a market where the labor supply will always outstrip demand. The Great Wired Way Silicon Alley has been hailed as the first new urban industry to emerge in New York in well over a generation. In a city associated as much with its independent culture as with its forced financial meltdown in the 1970s, its decaying infrastructure, and a chronic habit of hemorrhaging jobs, it is notable that the new presence is also a culture industry of sorts. Breathlessly heralded in all of the city's media organs as a superrush of adrenalin to the urban economy and culture alike, the Alley is customarily described as running in a thin strip from the Flatiron District above 23rd Street down to lower SoHo, and as staffed by creative East Coast hipster geeks (as opposed to Palo Alto techies and Bay Area self-styled supergeeks). Its multimedia webshops not only provide corporate and public institutions with Internet design and programming services, and entertainment software, they also harbor a neo-bohemian community of online publishing and graphic art. Among other things, the much lionized emergence of the New Media's small, independent entrepreneurs drew upon the human resources and skills of the downtown artworld, creating some accomplished new art sites like ada 'web (http://adaweb.com) and Artnetweb (http://www.artnetweb.com), and The Blue Dot (http://www.thebluedot.com) (adding to older, invaluable artworld resources like Echo [http://www.echonyc.com] and The Thing [http://www.thing.net/thingnyc] and newer ones like Rhizome [http://www.rhizome.com]). These sites contributed to the flourishing electronic arts movement, and ada'web's projects by Vivien Selbo, Matthew Ritchie, and General Idea were the first online works to be acquired by a major museum institution, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in February 1997. By 1996, pioneer Silicon Alley webzines like Word (http://www.word.com), FEED (http://www.feedmag.com), Urban Desires (http://www.desires.com), Total New York (http://www.totalny.com), Stim (http://stim.com), and NY@work (a labor-oriented site) had formed an independents sector of original content publishing, distinct in feel and opinion from Microsoft's power-oriented Slate, the industry lifestyle-oriented Hot Wired, and Time Warner's megasite Pathfinder. In the spring and summer of 1995, when half a dozen local would-be publishers had followed Urban Desires into the Web publishing arena, the heady expectation was that native New York creativity would steal a march on the West Coast and launch a more independent, and sociable, sector of the hi-tech community, drawing an audience and advertisers to a new medium where no one controlled distribution. The alternative, countercultural ethos of hacker vintage suffused the indies sector, and fuelled a classic culture clash when venture capitalist groups from the West Coast, or from NYC ( Flatiron Partners--the VC arm of Chase and Softbank, and the city's own Discovery Fund) came calling all along the Alley. Today, FEED is the only first-generation Web site that still functions solely as an online content publisher (helped along by recent deals with Wired and the New York Times Electronic Media Company). The others have either folded, been sold, or are serving as creative window displays or calling cards to attract clients for their web developer owners. In the meantime, the potential of the medium remains largely unfulfilled. The graphic scrolldown space is still clunky, slow and wearisome to read after a few screens, and while feature articles have been developed in ways that are appropriate to the medium, the webzines have yet to break a big story. The deliciously irreverent and heavily hypertexted daily media commentary from Suck (http://www.suck.com) is the only publication in this field to win itself a must-read audience. No one yet believes that "way new journalism," art and multimedia performance have matured--the scene is often likened to early TV, when radio shows were reissued in new formats--but there is much that is promising and much more to come. While none of the delivery schemes, the ad tracking mechanisms, or the direct marketing plans have been able to support the content boom on Silicon Alley, it's clear that the appeal of online independence is now a formative part of youth culture, and that, down the line, the second- or third-generation wave is likely to alter the New Media landscape for good. The sense of living within and contributing to, a "revolutionary" culture, or at least a new paradigm, may prove powerful enough to propel segments of youth culture through some of the managerial constraints exercised by information bureaucrats and venture capitalists alike. Silicon Alley was in part the creation of city politicians and real estate investors looking for a way to revive the ailing early 1990s downtown economy with its alarming building vacancy levels (as high as 23%) ; in part the response to an immediate need for WWW content providers and designers directed at the vast local labor pool of creative workers (many of them would-be artists and journalists); in part, the entrepreneurial outcropping of the self-publishing movement driving the great WWW boom; and in part, the result of a new generation of twenty-something trust fund babies looking for a glamorous outlet, much like the collectors and gallerists who frequented the East Village art scene in the 1980s. In an age of outsourcing, and virtual decentralization, why should such an industry exist, at the heart of a core city like New York? The The reasons usually cited (and recorded in a Coopers and Lybrand report of 1996) focus on access to editorial and artistic talent, access to clients and strategic partners in advertising, publishing and entertainment, and access to the cultural prestige of New York City. Ironically, for a digital work culture often oblivious to its physical location, the capacity to maintain face-to-face social contact also ranks high. Contrary to all the Internet hype about the elimination of centralized workplace through virtual networking from remote terminals, the "schmooze factor" is an important, cohesive part of the social space of Silicon Alley. This is no less the case in New York's garment industry, where buyers, manufacturers, designers, and retailers still like to schmooze on Seventh Avenue in the garment district; this highly social feature of daily industrial life may be just as important as fast turnaround time in production--habitually cited as the main cause of job retention in an age of offshore production. For those who still worry that post-industrialism is a contradiction in terms, it's not clear that the neo-bohemian dot.com corridor of Silicon Alley constitutes anything like an industry, in the sense of producing and distributing a product far beyond its borders. Among other things, it is a service developer for corporate website promotion, a low-overhead R&D test bed for software tools and applications, a source of multimedia expertise, a subcontractor of low-wage HTML labor (the cliche is that high school kids are willing to labor for cappuchinos because website work is cool), and a welcome, if underpaying, non-union employer of a generational cohort that might otherwise have ended up being "warehoused" in graduate seminars. The 1996 Coopers and Lybrand study of the economic impact of New Media in the New York region showed more employees, in 1350 companies--over 700 in Silicon Alley alone generating over a billion dollars in gross revenues--working in New Media than in television and books. The figures of 18,000 plus jobs in Silicon Alley, 27,000 in New York City as a whole, and 71,500 in the tristate area, were variously interpreted , since they included a high percentage of part-time and freelance employees. Nonetheless, these numbers were fast approaching the media industry's larger segments (and projected to outrank them all in the next few years) at a growth rate that outstripped any other business in the city. But the average salary of New Media full-time employees, at $31, 421, was well below every other segment, ranging from book publishing and movie production, at $47, 824 and $48, 907 respectively, to advertising and TV broadcasting, at $62, 559 and $63, 261. (While this salary may seem comfortable in comparison with global wage levels, it does not go far in go-go New York City these days). Ironically, the report, with its prediction of a 138% increase in full time equivalent jobs over the next three years ( 120,000 new jobs--doubling the full-time employees, tripling part-timers, and tripling full-time equivalent freelancers), appeared at a moment when some pioneer companies were beginning to go under. Many of the surviving Webshops were soon to make deals over the course of the year with the likes of Microsoft, Omnicom, Sun, AOL, Time Warner, and Viacom--deals, admittedly, that remain the underwritten goal of most startups. When the smoke cleared, the roads to sustainability were more starkly defined, and certainly the prospects for a critical, IndieNet culture were much thinner and more circumscribed. Many of the new battles were being fought, for example, in the hometown listings wars--exactly the same wars being waged over securing the block advertising revenue of the big entertainment conglomerates by alternative newspapers (the last grassroots attempt to create an independent publishing medium) in cities all over the country. With the addition to the market of Microsoft's Sidewalk New York in May 1977, there now existed several such sites, devoted to informing the surfing public whether Jurassic Park was still playing at the theater down the street. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de