{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":168,"pdf_page":175,"physical_index":175,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"acff043da49473a86f4f919be11b5f15a7ffc737422c931c41b61af3a3c72ad8"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"The Violence of Participation\n\nThe role of digitization and its relation to the money form is a central question in both the history of political economy and our own period. The rise not only of Newtonian calculus (a calculus of space and time) but of a calculus of cultural form—and emphatically of a calculus of the image—is paramount. Marx's account of capital was a parsing of the process of integration—the taking of the integral of capitalist production cycles along various points in the trajectories of production. Too, the artist has long used her work as a wager or exploit to gain a foothold in the socius—an effort to convert attention into a means of subsistence that increasingly has meant the cash nexus. Cinema, advertising, and banner ads clearly function in a network of politic-economic relation that convert affect to monetary units and are machines for the mining of attention, but these later forms are the key to the anatomy of their precursors: painting and photography, which must also be grasped as techniques of capture and strategies of control. Taken as whole, we could say that what was once, for the artist at least, only a more or less embarrassing presupposition and but one dimension of visual-cultural production has become the overriding component. Crudely put, these media (what is meant by “the media\") convert attention into cash—quality into quantity. Yes, there are many mediations, but the accountants (i.e., bankers) always do their best to have the last say. Just read the papers for their latest take.\n\nVilém Flusser, in his brief but nonetheless monumental work entitled Towards a Philosophy of Photography, sees Descartes as the pivotal figure in which alphabetical writing begins to be displaced by numerical notation. This is a significant development in the already profound disruption occasioned by linear writing. Referring to the camera but also to apparatuses in general he says:\n\nAll apparatuses (not just computers) are calculating machines and in this sense “artificial intelligences,\" the camera included, even if their inventors were not able to account for this. In all apparatuses (including the camera) thinking in numbers overrides linear, historical thinking. This tendency tc subordinate thinking in letters to thinking in numbers has been the norm in scientific discourse since Descartes; it has been a question of bringing thought into line with “extended matter\" constructed of punctuated elements. Only numbers are suited to a process of bringing thought into line with “extended matter.\" Since Descartes at least (perhaps since Nocholas of Cusa) scientific discourse has tended towards the re-encoding of thought into numbers, but only since the camera has this tendency become materially possible. The camera (like all apparatuses that followed it) is computationa thinking flowing into hardware (italics mine). Hence the quantum (computational) structure of all the movements and functions of the apparatus.3\n\nOne could obviously trace the overlap between Flusser's idea of the apparatus and Norbert Wiener's understanding of cybernetics in The Human Use of Humar Beings: Cybernetics and Society—characterized by what I think of asthe welding ot a set of intentions to future attention through calculated metrics (a principal that, we might note, already inheres in writing). I want to dwell, however, on Flusser's understanding of photography and its relation to writing. For here one can observe the consequences of the technical image for writing as well as the digitization of images (and thus discourse) already in the 19th century. Flusser asserts that the photograph, “the first post-industrial image,\" is a “technical image\"—and therefore an abstract image—whose internal mechanics derive from the operation of written concepts. Thus, the photograph is a form of programming. Indeed, for Flusser, despite the appearance of transparency, the technical image is triply abstract. Very briefly, its genealogy is as follows: In what he calls the “pre-historical\" era, the pictographic image (think cave painting) is a first abstraction from the visible world, mapping it to a two-dimensional picture plane that can be visually scanned. In the “historical\" era, linear writing “\"tears up the image,\"organizes its pieces in a linear manner, and imposes a temporal sequence. Flusser has given the example of an image containing stick figurations of a sun, two people, and a dog, which can then be written grammatically in “Mesopotamian tiles\" as a linear sequence of these four elements.4Linear writing is thus an abstraction of the image, which for Flusser is its “metacode.\" Where the image is once abstracted from reality (three dimensions into two), writing is doubly abstracted (two dimensions into one). Furthermore, its strict imposition of linearity and temporal process gives rise to a new experience of time, which Flusser calls \"history.\" Thus, historical consciousness and writing are inseparable. The technical image, whichfor Flusser inaugurates our current “post-historical\" era, is made with an apparatus (literally a black box) that is designed vis-à-vis the application of written—that is, abstract— postulates. Linear writing, which for Flusser is now also mathematical notation and therefore science, and which was already an abstraction from images that reduced its two dimensions into a temporal line, writes the program that is then put into operation to build the camera. Thus, while the technical image seems to be a window on the world, it is in fact an image—one that is triply abstract. Each photographic or technical image has as its condition of possibility (and istherefore a result of) this increasingly complex process of abstraction that at this point extended thoughtinto matter via digital notation. Fromthis point of view, no transparency exists in the technical image, and its legibility is a question with radical implications. For his part, the photographer, sometimes referred to by Flusser as “the functionary,\"is locked in a struggle with the overdeterminations imposed by the programming of the apparatus—an apparatus that clearly takes on cultural dimensions—given the dialectic of usage and innovation in which the apparatus is itself engaged. The camera is an interaction of programs, and the resultant image functions as a social program.⁵\n\n168","previous_page":167,"next_page":169}