{"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":175,"pdf_page":182,"physical_index":182,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"19decfe3820531203c5817a3b2b26f2ad6367260f3b1d2ec1ad22026b0bb121e"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"These critiques of what we are now calling media platforms and their functions or exploits, along with Flusser's understanding of the postindustrial character of photography, should be further linked to the more recent extrapolation and development of what Regis Debray christens mediology. In Media Manifestos, Debray theorist of the foco movements, volunteers the mnemonic, “Submission rhymes with Transmission\" “because to transmit is to organize, and to organize is to hierarchize. Hence also to exclude and subordinate.\"21 Debray suggests, in effect, that the history of sign function is organized by what we might now think of as media platforms and the apparatuses, institutions, and practices that sustain them. “Let us agree on the propriety of calling ‘medium' in the strong sense the system of apparatus-support-procedure, that which a mediological revolution would unsettle and disturb organically.\"22 We see from this text that, in addition to whatever else it may be, sign function is clearly extrasemiotic——in other words, practical-material. Whether thinking about writing and the institutional system of books, libraries, and print media; television with its networks, power grids, and editing suites; or computers with their servers, protocols, and globally disaggregated factories for the assemblage of both the machines and the platforms, Debray allows us to consider more concretely the material operation of the apparatus proper in the organization of what Althusser called “ideological state apparatuses\" but also in ostensibly nonstatist media forms.23 Furthermore, the hypermediation of language (and hence its radical denaturing) is everywhere evident.\n\nIn light of these critical—and let's admit it, radically pessimistic—takes on media history (and therefore History), I hope, for the sake of further disenchantment, that it will be worth revisiting and further elaborating my own brief history of visuality as laid out in The Cinematic Mode of Production, which understands the highlights of 20th-century intellectual history as inflection points describing the decreasing purchase of sign function (that is, “natural\" language) on reality. It is only by examining the codevelopment of sign function and technocapitalism that one can really understand the situation of linguistic function described phenomenologically by the Italian post-Marxists. More importantly still, taking a mediological approach explains how the effective short-circuiting of language function has been a necessary achievement of capital's worldwide suppression of democracy. It requires the world media system to convert nominal democracy into its antithesis. Mass cynicism, irony, farce, and indifference are mere symptoms of this historical transformation.\n\nDigitality and the Media of Dispossession\n\n175","previous_page":null,"next_page":176}