{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":15,"pdf_page":14,"physical_index":14,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"75a8046c4a14a6a3dde1511d6e819d85a00b8549d3b447a1e346adc8450c4da3"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Each rejects imitation, a basic crowd dynamic, Surowiecki to avoid bubbles and riots, Holland to guarantee difference. They may use the term “crowds,” but their crowds neither become collective beings nor force a gap. In the complex networks of communicative capitalism, the so-called “wisdom of crowds” isn’t a matter of the intrusion of the many into politics. It’s the generation and circulation of the many in order to produce the one.\n\nCrowd Struggle Is Class Struggle\n\nNot all crowds install a gap. The networks of communicative capitalism generate and rely on crowds, that is, massive pools of many. State and capital try to keep them in check, to absorb them back into the state of things, into the incessant circulation of spectacles we collectively produce for the private accumulation of the few. For example, when the 2009 protests following Iran’s presidential election were described as the “Twitter Revolution” and the 2011 overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was called the “Facebook Revolution,” the disruptive acts of a revolutionary people were inscribed into a US-centric technophilic imaginary. The crowd opening was subsumed into communicative capitalism, proffered as more evidence of the liberatory character of the networked media practices that support and extend economic inequality. The question of the crowd’s politics, what it was for or against, what in fact was going on, was subsumed under the story of masses using media. The story confirmed to those with smart-phones and laptops that nothing different was happening here. It’s all the same activity, just in a different place.\n\nAt the same time, the terms “Twitter Revolution” and “Facebook Revolution” mark these social media platforms as crowd fora. Twitter and Facebook are not just tools. They are manifestations of the affective intensities associated with crowds—cascade effects, enthusiasm, band-wagoning, contagion, and imitation. To describe revolutions in terms of their platforms is to imply that the networked crowd may incite an anticapitalist, even communist, collective political subject, the revolt of the many against the few. Put in the vocabulary of dialectics, crowds can become “in and for themselves.” Capitalists know this—and fear it. Consider the warning from a business writer advising companies how they can leverage the creative power of the crowd to cut costs. He admits that even though people will work for free, they “will want a sense of ownership over their contributions” and may “develop proprietary feelings over the company itself.”<sup>25</sup> This business writer is expressing in capitalist terms the Marxist insight that people will start to become conscious of the disconnect between their work and someone else’s ownership of their work. At a moment when twenty-first-century capitalists are lauding the wisdom of crowds and celebrating crowd-sourcing as the future of business, to say “Twitter Revolution” and “Facebook Revolution” is to broach the possibility that the posting and sharing many could seize the means of communications.\n\nMainstream commentators on the last decade of protests have thus been right to link them to ubiquitous communication networks. But they are wrong when they imply that protests are occurring because people can easily coordinate with social media, that they are primarily struggles for democracy, or that they are indications of a push for freedom on the part of networked individuals.<sup>26</sup> The crowds and riots of the last decade— particularly those associated with the Occupy movement, Chilean student protests, Montreal debt protests, Brazilian transportation and FIFA protests, European antiausterity protests, as well as the multiple ongoing and intermittent strikes of teachers, civil servants, and medical workers all over the world—are protests of the class of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. These are not struggles of the multitude, struggles for democracy, or struggles specific to local contexts. Nor are they merely the defensive struggles of a middle class facing cuts to social services, wage stagnation, unemployment, foreclosure, and indebtedness. They are fronts in global communicative capitalism’s class war, revolts of those whose communicative activities generate value that is expropriated from them.<sup>27</sup>\n\n15","previous_page":14,"next_page":16}