{"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":63,"pdf_page":70,"physical_index":70,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f4df5a67ffcd9c00c533c36288bba3f632b84392e6ef2c19cc2acc2fa02eceb7"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"This is the first stage in building cosmopolis. It takes us beyond the Westphalian nation-state as the unit of Kant's “cosmopolitan intent.\" It is, after all, almost conceivable that nations open their borders to migrants, conceivable enough to be the motor of fear and protest, activism and fascist backlash, in Europe and elsewhere. What is truly inconceivable is to extend beyond the migrant into more unimaginable zones where government extends without representation or voice.\n\nThis is the mode of “any difference which makes a difference in some later event\" (Bateson 1973: 351; emphasis in original), of the utopia without content, which Adorno and Bloch agreed in their last interview (Bloch 1988)was the grounds for political hope. Cosmopolis is the mode of politics after humanism, after we are forced to accept our cyborg assemblages—which enable population as concept and political fact, but do so only on the grounds that technologies, notably telecommunications, are excluded from the humans-only polity, which is all we have ever imagined—and after we accept the articulation of human with planetary futures. It is not a question of sustainability, because what is to be sustained in such discourse is always the exclusively human population. In any posthuman politics, the question of the good is no longer de facto defined by humans and is therefore no longer definable in the liberal regulatory and legalistic framework of rights. Contemporary humanist biopolitics has abandoneddebate over how we should live; the only value is efficient management of the market. Wealth alone provides the good life, in actuality a miasma of commodities and status, of half-understood energies and half-satisfied desires. Cosmopolis makes it possible to imagine that other goods, truer understandings, and deeper satisfactions may well turn out to be both achievable beyond the unitary political economy of biopolitical capitalism.\n\nTo turn the compulsory choice of consumerism into actual freedom, we must move from the schizo individual to the particulate crowd of the demand. But we needalso to recognize the interdependence of crowds, as opposed to theimagined autonomy of individuals. Twenty-first-century crowds exist in interdependence with technical and physical phyla beyond the humanist polity.Recognizing the failure of the system to encompass them in its illusory universality, the mediated crowd is the first political agency in human history with the capacity to cede autonomy to those unthinkable others: machines, animals, environments, geology, oceans, and atmosphere. The polis is not exclusively made of its population. It is rocks and earth, water and air, plants and animals, buildings, services, communications. “The creature that lives in cities\" is as good a description of influenza as it is of humanity. It is pointless to speak of the rights of viruses. Cosmopolis is the goal of politics, and is unimaginable because it is truly future, truly other than the world we inhabit. It is so deeply alien because it is not exclusively human and its polity is therefore not a matter of rights or citizenship or even of speciesbelonging of the kind that has structured our political philosophies as much as our actual politics. The function of human beings, Flusser (2000) held, was to produce randomness. But we are little capable of that in a self-regulating cybernetic regime dedicated to homeostasis. Our greatest hope is the unexpected, and we have vast reservoirs of that in the shape of the ancestral dead labor enshrined in our machines, and the great unknown of the natural world. As the dead capital of de Soto's poor, soMarx's dead labor of technology, and so, too, the unmonetized wealth of the living environment. What happens when we account this wealth in its own terms, not according to the correlationist economics thatconverts the universe into an environment for the human species?\n\nThe Political Economy of Cosmopolis\n\n63","previous_page":62,"next_page":null}