{"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":178,"pdf_page":185,"physical_index":185,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"078271bbf946b5f53b1ed4d017b3a012b154dc9bb846e3c60426abe4581056d4"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"The epistemic changes are bigger than man; we are finally starting to know that. I suppose the question here is whether or not one could say that Foucault's tiger is digital. This would allow us to assert that \"Man\" was the brand name for a once-popular (if still unspeakably violent) operating system. If contra Foucault and with his ruptures and discrete epistemes, we allow ourselves to be guided by Marx's dictum that“The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape,\" which argues that the later formations reveal the eschatological tendencies incipient in the former, we find ourselves not only collecting animal spirits but confronted by thefollowing paradox: retroactively, the ur-medium of “man,\" of “humanity\" is capital. Thus, “man\" was an early symptom of the digital.\n\nAt one level, this claim that “man\" is capital with a human face seems simple enough, obvious even: the same ur-medium that has produced the human has also produced the radical dispossession of the human. The only other achievement that can be understood to be of the same order as the achievement of humanityis inhumanity. In a refrain of Cesaire's surrealistic query into paradox from Discourse on Colonialism, we might also wonder, \"Civilization and Colonization?\"The charismatic dictator, the great family of man—all symptoms of the dialectic of capitalman. This is not necessarily to take this dialectic as the summation of modernity en toto. My project here is not to identify the ruling trope of an era and even less to offer a totalizing view of world history (really), but rather to explore the bankruptcy of the ruling ideas that continue to structure the cultural inflection of emergent media. Thus, it is significant to critique \"man\"and “the human\"not only because these are still operative but because the emergent considerations of a much-touted posthumanism negatively locate the human remainder as a central investment for Western (that is, Western self-identifying) culture. As critics such as Joel Dinerstein and Alexander Weheleya pointedly demonstrate, not just humanisms but also posthumanisms smuggle the white Western subject of liberalism back in as the metric for the measurement and the enjoyment of the drama of its—that is, his—own disappearance. Something similar might also be said of the literary function of the sublime in the work of Foucault: in the words of Walter Benjamin,“man experiences his annihilation as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.\" The payoff is in watching the air go out of the bag. Thus, from the Nietzschean nihilism of “Man would rather will nothingness than will nothing at all\" to the Benjaminian diagnosis of the aesthetics of fascism, one begins to understand the compensatory pleasures offered an enfranchised if still exploited citizenry Debord's “gilded poverty\"lived in exchange for new forms of marginalization and nonexistence. These relations are distributed through theencroachment of a new sociologistical media paradigm, reiterated at the level of philosophy and savored by theory. One could follow this thread through the contemporary rise of farce, blank irony, simulation, and reality TV, but that would lead us too far afield. The point here is that the demotion of language and the liquidation of the Real is orchestrated in direct relation to the intensive development of the first digital medium ofrepresentation.\n\n178\n\nThe Violence of Participation","previous_page":177,"next_page":179}