{"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":61,"pdf_page":68,"physical_index":68,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"533f4f532105e7744d7b9b7719e5c01497474184ad86794619a8f2bbd1a04782"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"The only true action is thus one that breaks the rules. But since the rules have emerged from consensus, breaking them is unethical. The only choice is between compliance and evil—and we know from Arendt that, at least in certain circumstances, compliance may itself be evil. This is the point at which we find ethics opposed to action, ethics as the excluded other of politics defined as the realm of action. From this standpoint, we have to acknowledge the shocking inference drawn by Esposito: \"Not only is there no contradiction in principle between evil and politics, but evil, as such, is from a certain point of view always political\" (Esposito 1993: 183).\n\nThe evolution of new strategies, then, depends on an escape from ethics as code of conduct. The uniqueness of every situation requires consideration if it is to provide the grounds for action. Considering where we are (and what we are to do as a consequence of how we find ourselves situated) is quite different from either the application of rules or modeling possible future scenarios in which, in the long run, we are all dead. Consideration of the actual situation should therefore seek out what is unique in it: what is unforeseen, unaccounted for in the rulebook. It is on the basis of these unforeseen elements in the situation that it becomes possible to act, to change the world as given into the world as potential. The terrain of managed possibilities debarring us from action (de Carolis 1996) reveals its contradictions. The givenness of a contingent and probabilistic world becomes future-oriented capacity for bringing about genuinely new situations.\n\nThe Crowd\n\nThe entity that best expresses this new, postindividual condition is the crowd. Inherently contingent in its complexity, it is probabilistic not in the sense of statistical management, but ofvirtuality; the crowd is an organ of demand that is never complete, universal, or integral—that is, it fails to exist as a unified and coherent whole (In other words, the indeterminacy is our best hope and hence a call to arms), pitching itself instead into action, which converts the actually existing into the raw material of futurity. But the new crowd is also target of capital's latest colonization, crowdsourcing. Socíal networking commercializes the gift of labor, not as individual activity but as aberrations from the average, which can be read as tendencies and thus both governed and exploited as such. Hence, the virtual nature of the crowd, its potential or power to act, is removed by a process of forecasting how much deviance is tolerable—and profitable—in a population. This may indeed be the actuality of the process Rossiter and Zehle in this volume refer to as “a politics beyond the actionable.\" Disciplinary identity no longer produced the requisite unforeseen behaviors that capital requires in its endless expansion The capitalization of friendship by Facebook is a new trajectory, paralleled by the extension of prosumer status to the vast populations of the global South in schemes such as O3b (http://www.o3bnetworks.com), an alliance of search and telecom giants to build a satellite network capable of inducting the Other 3 Billion of the developing world into Internet culture. Geographical extension, sociological intension, and cultural diversity embrace difference as an engine of growth.\n\nThe Political Economy of Cosmopolis\n\n61","previous_page":60,"next_page":62}