{"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":65,"pdf_page":72,"physical_index":72,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ee25cee113cf601fc8b3daee73cc5d91c44ff88d5566f3069154e19af8912442"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"Contemporary political activism begins as it has before: in the dialectic of these contradictions, which intellectual fashion, shaped by what we have taught ourselves to recite as a litany of defeat, has placed in the dustbin of residual concepts.\n\nThe greatest of these contradictions is the human exception: that whatever constitutes the good is good exclusively for humans. The founding moment was the triumph of monotheism over animism, the dark secret of the Enlightenment's attack on superstition—ostensibly against the Roman Church but in actuality against belief systems that privileged the persons, multiple and protean, of nature rather than the single, unified and unifying Godhead. The long construction of God (Debray 2004) is a history of the brutal suppression of animism at home and in the colonies. That indigenous peoples have maintained and developed this animism should humble andinspire us.\n\nAnimism is not the religion of an atavistic Hobbesian war of each against all. Against the illusion of universality, which is the common claim of democracy, it contests the meticulous exclusion of the politics of the nonhuman. In thinking that unthinkable, we open the space for a different politics, and a different economics, that we cannot reach through shopping and voting. Under the regime of universal human rights, the much-desired goal of U.S. armed imposition of human rights is that all identities be subsumed under the single identity of humanity. What is at stake in the opening of politics to the nonhuman is the end of such a spurious and self-contradictory identity.\n\nWe possess a model for posthuman politics. As Sassen (2006) establishes, the market is no longer invisible. It is actively realized in network communications. This immense technological system is now an undeniable agent in political life. At the same time, as Knorr Cetina and Bruegger argue, the characteristic feature of markets is\n\ntheir essential incompleteness of being, which is transposed into a continuous knowledge project for participants. From a theoretical point of view, the defining characteristic of the market as an object is its lack of object-ivity’ and completeness of being, its non-identity with itself. Markets are always in the process of being materially redefined, they continually acquire new properties and change the ones they have. (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002: 168)\n\nThis nonidentity is what we stand to gain in sacrificing identity as humans in a posthuman politics, which includes not only technologies, as the market already does, but the natural world as well. A central difference between market traders and us Greens is that they care far more about the liquid object of their engagement than we do. The reason why is interesting in its own right: nonidentity is, from Habermas to Deleuze, a characteristic of subjects. The market is not just an agency; for these traders it is a living, breathing subject. In many respects, we could say that it is The Subject of the contemporary globalizing political economy. The question is, then, how to move from the actor-network theory that ascribes agency to both physical and technological actors to a new political theory that recognizes their subjectivity.\n\nThe Political Economy of Cosmopolis\n\n65","previous_page":null,"next_page":66}