{"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":171,"pdf_page":178,"physical_index":178,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"080208507219e7627c04b1c34002637b8d401a5abfbf91077cbadc3fb3ef9fd8"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"[W]e are manipulated by photographs and programmed to act in a ritual fashion in the service of a feedback mechanism for the benefit of cameras. Photographs suppress our critical awareness in order to make us forget the mindless absurdity of the process offunctionality, and it is only thanks to this suppression that functionality is possible at all. Thus the photographs form a magic circle around us in the shape of the photographic universe.14\n\nIn a nutshell, the camera's program creates an evolutionary vector that at once incorporates and exceeds human self-definition.\n\nFlusser's account of the quantum character of the apparatus above clearly owes a debt to Turing's conception of the steady-state machine, and might even be said to endeavor to construct the historical conditions of possibility for Turing's stillpenetrating insights into the machinic aspects of all orders of information processing, from the simplest information transfer to the highest forms of behavior and cognition—forms that may well include cosmic processes such as galaxy formation. However, while Flusser would not agree, I would argue that when tracking the emergence of digitality, we ignore the rise of the money system and capitalism at our extreme peril. Privileging the emergence of “the apparatus\"represses the socioeconomic determinations that provide the ground for its emergence. The rise to social preeminence of the general equivalent—thatis, money—alongside the organization of production in accord with the split register of the commodity form (use value/exchangevalue) inaugurates a transformation whose ultimate consequences have not been drawn. At the origins of capitalism, commodification (use value over exchange value—that is, quality over quantity)already provided a general method for the extension of cognition into matter. Profit, alienated production, and the accumulation of private property was itself a program—one that extended digitality (in the form of exchange value) into the deepest recesses of matter and continues its ramifications to this day. As has been said (by Fredric Jameson, among others), the emergence of the commodity form, the ability to quantitatively and thus abstractly compare specific and otherwiseincomparable qualities is similar in historical import to the neolithic revolution. Thus, the Cartesian subject should be understood as exercising the mode of cognition slated by money—the vanishing mediator. Likewise, the Cartesian coordinate system, with its transposable 0 point (0,0,0) and axonometric grid that can be thrown over any space whatever lays the groundwork for the numerical calculus of space and time. We may agree with Sohn-Rethel that the real abstraction that is the money form is the condition of possibility for abstraction in classical philosophy.For Marx, it was clear that the rise of individuality and the modern subject coincided with the emergence of markets in which structurally equivalent owners of commodities came to exchange the qualities of their commodities for quantities of the general equivalent.\n\nDigitality and the Media of Dispossession\n\n171","previous_page":null,"next_page":null}