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# DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

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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.

This 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.

To 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?

The Political Economy of Cosmopolis

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Correcting de Carolis, we must understand the environment as alien, or historically alienated, to the extent that it is now no longer even the raw material of manufacture but a hostile Gaia gathering itsstrength to cast off its cancerously overgrown human population. It's a good time to strike an alliance, when the alternatives are all too thinkable. The alternative that holds out greatest hope for the self-replicating system of capital is the path of perpetual innovation. Technical inventions will provide sustainability; perpetual innovation will fuel perpetual growth. But innovation must come from an increasingly homogenized population, and from a technical infrastructure whose engineering solutions and organizational shape are more and more isomorphic with capital itself, that is the very forms which it is charged with renovating that are increasingly normalized around de facto standards. As a political economy premised on permanent growth, capital faces the finite limits of the unmonetized environment (accounting as carbon credits is a farce, credible only to neoliberal fundamentalists; there can be no market in theunmarketable). We cannot place our faith in a universal, popular platform ofinnovation through user-generated content, because the infrastructure that would permit it is itself finite. That it is also plagued by the very private property regime that enables capital—forcing each user to store his or her own intellectual property, each corporation to create silos of password-protected data, doubling, quadrupling, googleplexing the energy requirements and material infrastructure of the cloud—makes it even less likely that it will provide anything other than the short-term patch for which capital is beginning to be notorious.

Those who have rights they do not possess; those who consume least but are the most castigated; those who own enough to save for retirement but have no control over their money; those who suffer because wehave divorced the making of wealth from the making of use-values; those who vainly seek accountability from those who are responsible for disaster; all of us lose when emergency overtakes pragmatism. Political economy is about value, and about the changing nature of value (Graham 2006). In late lectures, Adorno argued that any sacrifice of happiness to some other, putatively higher, always later goal is an imposition. Deferral is “a kind of economy of thrift," but “the compensation promised by civilization and our education in return for our actsof renunciation is not forthcoming" (Adorno 2000: 138). The sacrifice of happiness to rationality or to deferred gratificationis a truly tragic sacrifice. Happiness is not to be passed over. But nor is it to be undersold, passing it off with nostrums and trinkets. Capital fails continuously to address famine and poverty, and thrives on pandemic and war. It hasfailed globally and consistently, and yet it poses itself as global necessity.

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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.

The 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.

Animism 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.

We 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

their 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)

This 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.

The Political Economy of Cosmopolis

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Rancière's concept of the political as constituted by its exclusion points to such a phenomenon of incompleteness, of nonidentity of the putativeuniversal, is what draws market traders to the market's lack in being. Culturalists, sociologists, and political philosophers cling to the concept ofidentity—gendered, regional, cultural, ethnic, sexual, but always already biological. This bounded unity is the felix culpa of political philosophy—the radical evil that makes possible a new world. We have three potential subjects of political economy: the market, the individual, and the crowd. All three are foundationally nonidentical. We recognize the cyborg nature of all three but have yet to recognize the dependent imbrication of the rest of the nonhuman world—a relation that is the utopian content of Harman's anticorrelationist stance (see Clough's contributionto this volume), which, however, defuses his insistence that objects precede and exceed their relationships. The political (as opposed perhaps to the ontological) is affective and mediated because it is relational in the first instance, and objectiveonly as a product of thatinitial ontological standing. To stand as object of political economy is to be excluded and, by that token, governed and exploited. That is why, in the first instance, the challenge for Internet political economy is to reveal and release the natural and technical (ancestral) participants excluded from both wealth and citizenship. Only in such radical steps will the possibility of a human future be made possible, and a goal beyond the tyranny of instrumental reason and cash. We might begin with the only tribe who have a passion equal to Knorr Cetina's traders: the hackers celebrated by Parikka (2007) and Mackenzie (2006). We have yet to discover the passion that will make the green world integral to the problem of a new political economy of the Internet.

A fundamental question, in this framework, is whether the play we witness in social networks constitutes a demand for a political subjectivity or, indeed, extends the argument by analogy to the economic sphere, for an economic subjectivity. The peer-to-peer movement clearly articulates a new economics, and increasingly a new politics,in ways Facebook and other social networking sites absolutely do not. A traditional condition of subjectivity is awareness of the relations one has enteredinto. Such awareness may not be a property of immersion into social networks. Awareness is characterized by demand: by a demand for something beyond what is on offer. The demand for inclusion is only a foreshadowing. The demand isfor a realignment of that Good, for the purpose of which the political exists in the first instance. This demand is not voicable, I suspect, on Facebook, but it is integral to peer-to-peer networks and to the SLOC (small, local, open, connected) model proposed by Ezio Manzini (2009). Such models, to the extent that they are practiced already, are gateways, not roads; the whole point about the future is that it is unknown. An administered future is no future at all A political future isnot constituted by emerging markets but by the unforeseeable demands of the excluded for a new polity, which must be achieved in the context of struggle with the old that renews, radically, its presuppositions, including its ethical basis.Since we cannot help but think ahead, we plan, but plan for what is genuinely unknownand unforeseeable. So a future that is imaginable but not administered out of existence. Imagine: a world of communication between a polity including the demands of the governed and excluded phyla. . . .

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References

The Political Economy of Cosmopolis

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The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets

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CONSIDERATIONS ON A HACKER MANIFESTO

McKenzie Wark

Here in the overdeveloped world, the bourgeoisie is dead. It neither rules nor governs. Power is in the hands of what I called the vectoralist class. Where the old ruling class controlled the means of production, the new ruling class has limited interest in the material conditions of production, in mines and blast furnaces and assembly lines. Its power rests not on the ownership ofsuch things but in control of the logistics by which they are managed

Vectoral power has two aspects: intensive and extensive. The intensive vector is the power of calculation. It is the power to model and simulate, butnot only that. It is the power to monitor and calculate. And it is also the power to play with information, to turn it into poetry and narrative. The extensive vector is the power to move information from one place to another. It is the power to move and combine anything and everything as a resource. Again, this power has not just a rational meaning but also à poetic one

Vectoral power can thus dispense with much of the machinery of the old capitalist ruling class. It is a matter of indifference who actually owns a furnace or an assembly line. The vectoral class contracts out such functions. The rise of the manufacturing industry in China and of the service industry in India is not the sign, then, that these underdeveloped states are joining the capitalist developed world. Rather, they now confront an overdeveloped world ruled by vectoral power.

The vectoral class is united only in desiring a world free from the compromises with labor that its capitalist predecessor was obliged to make. For all its tragedies, the twentieth century was the century of socialism—but its victories were mostly confined to the West. In the West, labor fought capital to a draw. Capital was obliged to concede to a substantial socialization of the surplus. We got free education, health care, the vote, and the emancipation of women. The tenets of the Communist Manifesto were indeed realized—in the West. This is the compromise thatis now unraveling.

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The vectoral class has few fixed assets. It tries to avoid actually owning factories. It avoids paying wages directly. It has less and less interest in the viability ofnational spaces of production and consumption. Fordism is dead.1 What the vectoral class desires is a relationship with the world in which the world makes its body totally available in exchange for no commitments at all. Which is perhaps why the cultural form that best explains vectoral power is pornography.

And yet the vectoral class is not coherent in its strategies and interests. It has at least two factions. The vectoralist class as a whole we could describe as a military entertainment complex. What distinguishes its two factions is that while one pursues entertainment as a military strategy, the other pursues military strategy as entertainment. Between them is what WilliamGibson, in his novel Spook Country calls the cold civil war.²

What we see playing out on the surface of U.S. politics in the early twenty-first century is the surface effect of this cold civil war. One faction is interested only in the strategics of resources. It thinks it acquired in Iraq the last untapped source of oil and natural gas and tried to build the logisticalinfrastructure to secure it Far from being a failure, its Iraq adventure has proven a complete success. It never had any interest in Iraq as a democracy. In many ways, the more unstable it is, the better. The bases being built are to secure the oil, not the people.

The other faction within the vectoralist class is increasingly worried about the costs of this strategy, however. Its interest is not in the strategics of nature but in the logistics of second nature. Its business is the business of coordinating all aspects of life under the power of the brand, the patent, and the copyright. If capitalist power reduced being to having, then vectoralist power reduces having to appearing.³ The actual qualities of things become secondary to the logistics and poetics that decorate the commodity

This faction of the vectoralist class confronts quite different issues. The dematerialization of the commodity threatens to undermine the very principle of the scarcity ofvalue. As soon as digital technology perfected the separation of information as content from material form, the way was open for a massive socialization of cultural material. To some extent, this took the vectoral class by surprise. It did not quite occur to them that private property is not the natural form of culture.

We are witnessing a massive, nameless, faceless social movement, which takes the raw material of commodified culture and turns it back into common property. And the good news is that this movement has essentially won. After centuries of privatization, culture is ours again. This victory is partial and limited, of course, just as the victor of socialism in the West was limited. It only applies to culture and not to many of the other aspects of vectoral power. But, still, it is worth celebrating.

Politics now for the vectoralist class is the politics of attempting to recommodify some aspect of the value of culture, to make it scarce and rare again. Consider the politics of Apple's iPod, which attempted to make a fetish object of the device.

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Or Facebook, where the proposition is that we should all entertain each other and put up with advertising merely for this privilege. Far from being a step forward, such media are a decadent form of the “society of the spectacle." Not only are we to passively consume these images, we have to make them ourselves.

The model here is to reduce the paid labor force in the production of images as close as possible to zero and pay them only in the currency of recognition. We have to pay for the privilege of producing our own spectacle. The power of the vectoral class retreats from the direct ownership of the cultural product but consolidates around the control of the vector. We get all the culture; they get all the revenue.

Parts of the vectoral class are heading in quite the opposite direction—to completely closed, proprietary worlds. Online gaming is usually like this. In a game like the popular World of Warcraft, you pay for the privilege of laboring to acquire objects and statusthat are only artificiallyscarce.⁴ And you never get to own them. They remain private property. You rent back the product of your own labor. World of Warcraft is the nullity of the commodity economy perfected. World of Warcraft is the fantasy version of the power of the vectoral class perfected. You pay to rent everything, and they can deport you at any time.

Caught between the social movement that tries to liberate information and that faction ofthe vectoral class that seeks to control it is the hacker class. Anyone who labors for someone else producing so-called intellectual property is a hacker. It's an ambivalent class. On the one hand, we depend on the vectoral class, who own the means of realizing the value of what we produce. On the other hand, we hardly profit from private property in information. If anything, it is a fetter on our own productivity.

I first proposed the idea of the hacker class in 2000, and in the intervening years have repeatedly been told that even if it exists, it can never become conscious of itself as a class. But frankly, I think the recent politics of information bears out the thesis. The hacker class does not march down the boulevard behind red banners on May Day. But it is fully capable of organizing around net neutrality, creative commons, open publishing in science, challenging stupid and harmful patents, and so on. The contemporary equivalent of the trade union consciousness of the old labor movement has well and truly arrived. It even has its vanguard, although an anonómous one.

Andrew Ross dismisses the projects of the hacker class as those ofa “thwarted technocratic elite whose libertarian worldview butts up against the established proprietary interests." There is some truth to that. However, if one were to look with too coldan eye at the practices of organized labor in the United States, one might come up with an equally cynical take. There's always a gap between what a class is in practice and what it could make of itself.

It's a question of pushing the often local or issue-based approach to hacker class consciousness into an entire worldview, or rather, worldviews. The challenge is to think the whole social totality from our point of view—to imagine worlds in

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72 The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets

which our own interests and the interests of the people are aligned. The way to do this, I think, is to push beyond the compromise formations of things like creative commons. What would it mean not to liberalize intellectual property but to conceive of the world without it altogether? What would it mean to really think and practice the politics of information as something that is not scarce and has no owners?

It's important, I think, to cultivate a studied indifference to the cooption of our movement by compromise formations, which offer limited liberties but leave the ownership and control of the vector in the hands of the vectoralist class. No good tactic goes unrecouperated, not least those of the most extreme of avant-gardes, the situationists. According to Christine Harold, “Perhaps this is because, like all good brands, situationism is easily appropriated towards new ends."Yet sometimes what looks like bankrupt tactics prove themselves again later, and what look like serious, professional, and mature developments of a movement can end up collapsing under their own weight. There is still a role for an avant-garde that has left the stale forms of art and politics behind and that confronts the emerging forms of power of our time with the possibility that they, too, will pass

It was a sign of the times, of the strength of the free culture movement, that when the musicians Radiohead were released from their contract with EMI in 2007 they offered their new album In Rainbows via the Internet for fans to purchase at the price of their own choosing. You could even choose to pay zero pounds and zero pence, and still have it. There's a certain understanding of the gift implied in this. The gift always creates obligations in the receiver. IfI sell you something, I am obliged to you. I must provide the goods and services to which we agreed. IfI give you something, you are obliged tome—or at least are under a weak and very general obligation to return the gift, somewhere, to someone. Radiohead understood this. The gift of the new album created publicity, goodwill, future concert ticket sales, and even the gift of money. Many fans really want to pay for their music, but to pay as a gift because they want to honor an obligation, not because they are being forced to pay or risk legal sanctions for alleged theft or piracy.

But the limit to making a gift of culture to everyone is that doing so adds value to the vector through which it is distributed, and that is not free. The more forward-thinking strategy of the vectoral class is to retreat to this stronghold but to insist on it. This is why I suggest that free culture be considered a tactic rather than an end in itself. I think the hacker practice is to keep asking questions about property rather than just settle on one model.

An example might be what I call copygift.6 Besides copyright there is copyleft, but both copyright and copyleft take the property form for granted. Copyleft is the dialectical negation of intellectual property. It turns it against itself. But perhaps there are other, nondialectical strategies, not for opposing intellectual property but for escaping it. What if, rather than giving one's culture to everyone in the abstract but no one in particular, one made it always a particular gift to particular people?

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