The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 127 页

All of these are interested first in the extraction of some sort of surplus from a captured social domain over which they exercise a slightly resented monopoly, and each looks at the other — state-sanctioned company versus private holding — as an ambiguous variable in its own strategies. The Facebook model (including its Instagam property) is also of a visual Cloud. It boasts human history ’ s single most prolific consolidation of images. As a primary channel of User communication, here the image overwhelms text as the basic gesture of self-fashioning. Should the Facebook platform bend toward socialized video, then the future of the feed may turn into semi-random cinema, edited by one ’ s network affiliations, and circulated by peers as social currency: real-world Chatroulette as the future of our species ’ intersubjective symbolic thought. ⁵² From the Facebook platform ’ s perspective, the ability to glean information about Users from large-scale artificial analysis of image content also greatly amplifies the scale and scope of the social simulation project. ⁵³ The acquisition of Oculus, the virtual reality hardware company, may extend this into more immersive visual cultures, perhaps operatic platformscale multiplayer online games built from the personal media of Facebook ’ s User base (or perhaps just 4D Farmville hallucinations).

The Facebook model is also based on artificial currencies. The platform has spawned a secondary economy of twitch-and-reward game apps, which feed off the central graph like little symbiots. In the midst of the European financial crisis, Metahaven proposed only half-ironically with its Facestate project that perhaps Facebook credits could replace the euro as a common currency. In this inside-out microeconomics of social capital extraction, we are all World of Warcraft Gold Miners, spamming ourselves to get through the day. ⁵⁴ However, the final form of that currency is still undecided for Facebook (as it is for PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, bitcoin, and Walmart Banking, for example). How a functional “ social wallet ” might emerge from the consolidation and transparency of our linking and delinking, one to another, generating and paying debt with attention and reputation, is an important component of a truly interconnected Cloud Polis. None of the other digital currency projects is built on the core currency over which Facebook still has privileged position of access: the microeconomies of recognized social debt from which the value of money is primordially derived (at least for humans; HST algorithms are a different story). ⁵⁵ But to date, Facebook ’ s furtive and ill-conceived experiments at the monetization of that capital are based on strategies of rent more than mediation, such as reciprocal likes, selling post promotion, charging users to message each other, and so essentially taxing the graph ’ s own growth. This may be a doubtful recipe for the conversion of public obligation into private money and back again. The magical ontology of money requires a trust so trusting that it requires no deliberation, and while social graph-based platforms may be where new currencies will be sustained in the long run, Facebook may have soiled its own punch, and so perhaps we ’ ll see banks becoming social graph platforms before we see graph platforms becoming banks. Still Facebook is the most widely engaged social media site with well over a billion active users and so its potential for structuring human communication according to its own logics of platform sovereignty remains profound.

Cloud Layer

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