Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

6 There is much to say about calculation and what is incalculable. I would point to David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (2011) for its thinking of these questions in philosophical terms befitting the object-oriented philosophies and the process philosophies being discussed here.

7 In response to a draft of this essay, Sean Cubitt asked me an important question and made a request for clarification. I will answer here with regard to the political implications of his question about singular measure and a changing metric with each measure. Cubitt points to repetition of units of measure in his comments to me, but what I am after here (and I think, as I said above, it resonates with his essay in this collection) is that what we have thought of as immeasurable and therefore vibrant and supportive of a resistance to the foreclosure of chance may become measureable, asking us to think diferently or think again about chance or indeterminacy or an open future. I am suggesting that nanotechnology and its mathematics is already asking us to think diferently about virtuality, potentiality, and indeterminacy with regard to dynamic matter, because it is bringing a new way of measure that makes the ongoing manipulation, if not capture, of indeterminacies possible and not merely as a repetition of the same. The question of politics is a large one, and I am suggesting that measure must be central to the answer to that question. Cubitt grounds his politics in those who are excluded from the probabilities of crowds or populations. I have argued elsewhere that the politically excluded often are economically included as populations (targeted for social services and/or policing) (Clough and Willse 2011). This is another way that the afective capacities or incapacities of these populations are open to measure and the productivity of the profitable labor of the measuring of afect. This understanding of the economic inclusion of the politically excluded populations is the contribution Foucault makes in his discussion of neoliberalism and biopolitics to which Cubitt also is responding.

8 It is far from clear whether object-oriented ontologies of speculative realism constitute an unhealthy symptom of the current capitalist mode of production or they are ofering a ground for a criticism and politics. I only want to emphasize that these philosophical trends ought to be linked to transformations of technoscientifc development invested by capital.

References

Whatever Blogging

Jodi Dean

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In 2007, e-commerce types were agog at the success of American teenager Ashley Qualls. By the time she was seventeen, Qualls was making over \$1 million per year from Whateverlife.com, the busy pink website she designed to market MySpace page layouts. Market is not quite the right word, though. Her layouts and addon weren’t for sale. They were free. Her income came from advertising. Because Whateverlife.com gets more than 60 million hits per month, exceeding the circulation of several of the most popular English-language teen magazines combined, it supplies advertisers with a valuable commodity: the eyeballs of teenage girls. Qualls, or AshBo as she calls herself, started Whateverlife.com in 2004. By 2007, she had expanded her site into a sort of community for girls, a go-to site where girls could find tutorials for making their own layouts as well as a variety of images, banners, captions, buttons, and boxes for decorating their MySpace pages. In addition to the revenuegenerating ads, Whateverlife.com (with its growing staf of writers and designers) features a magazine and a link to AshBo’s blog on her MySpace page.

Although Qualls’s popularity is exceptional, her profile fits the dominant one for U.S. bloggers: she is under thirty and female.¹ The Pew Internet and American Life Project report on Teens and Social Media provides some context: only 8% of adult Internet users in the United States have created a blog, but 28% of online teens blog, and these are most likely to be girls. Describing her site as “a place to express yourself,” Qualls repeats the reason most U.S. bloggers give for blogging: a wish to express herself creatively.² By 2007, she was earning enough from Whateverlife.com to drop out of high school and purchase a house. 3

Ashley Qualls provides an image of blogging as a popular technological practice of content production, media use, and multiple platform integration inscribed into everyday life such that there is little diference between being on- or ofline. Together with the statistical snapshots provided by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, this image might create the sense that we are accessing a truth about blogs and social networks: they are by and for teenage girls. Both blogs and social networks produce afective spaces where girls express themselves, share their feelings, and reach out with a little hope that someone will be touched and reach back. Accessed through the intense emotional world of networked adolescence, blogs aren’t confined to a sphere separate from other media. They are situated in a rich communicative habitat consisting of multiple platforms and applications (mobile phones, social network sites, video, music, and photo-sharing sites). Blogs seem then to be ways that any of us could report on, share, experience, and even market our social lives. With a little luck, we could even earn revenue on ads accompanying each and every heartfelt expression. Feelings can be profitable.

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The image constituted through the combination of statistics and the experience of a single blogger is too easy, even as it highlights the juxtaposition between the singular and the many characteristic of contemporary networked media. Rather than relying on one to stand in for an impossible whole, we do better to consider the rise of personalized media as a mass phenomenon and practice. By 2008, there were from 80 million to 120 million blogs.⁴ The overwhelming majority of these blogs appears and dies in a matter of months, having been seen by few, if any, readers. Blogs are many and innumerable, an open, changing set of unique expressions. At the same time, the standardization supplied by blog services—the basic page layouts, archival features, titles, banners, ads, and widgets—format blogs as ultimately interchangeable, the same, one virtually indistinguishable one from another.

The common format that makes blogs blogs is a condition for the unique productions of singular bloggers. And vice versa: without the unique oferings, indeed, the promise that each voice can be heard, each experience documented, each opinion expressed, blogging has no point.

We can approach this same entanglement from a diferent direction: blogs ofer exposure and anonymity at the same time. As bloggers we expose ourselves, our feelings and experiences, loves and hates, desires and aversions. Yet we often write as if we’ve opened ourselves to nearly no one, to just a select few, to a small community of those we trust, perhaps because we cannot see them. Knowing full well that we are one among millions, we may find ourselves relieved not to have so many hits, so many comments. Strangers and opponents remind us of our exposure, our visibility, vulnerability, and ultimate lack of control.

Blogs can be useful political tools: they let activists report on their activities, plans, and aspirations. They help them meet up and coordinate. At the same time, they deliver a lot of knowledge to activists’ opponents—the university oficials wanting to know which students are responsible for the sit-in, the law enforcement oficials trying to diminish the impact of planned demonstrations to discourage activists from going too far. Privacy and consumer protection advocates remind us of the accumulation of data on consumers, data easily mined for the sake of the increasingly specific and personalized targeting of ads. Yet this information in need of protection is the open content of millions of blogs and social network profiles. Blogs make monitoring easy. There’s no need to spy! I’ll tell you everything—and more! In short, blogging relies on a fantasy of exposure without exposure correlative to the indistinguishable mass of the singularly unique. It’s like the thrill of telling a secret without being burdened by anxiety over its being told—exposure without exposure.

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Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook deploy a similar fantasy—one can share one’s life with one’s friends without repercussion. On the one hand, because one has specifically friended those in one’s network, one can rest assured that one’s secrets are safe. If you can’t trust your friends, whom can you trust? On the other hand, the drive to grow one’s network (Look! I’m somebody! I’ve got thousands of friends—they like me; they really like me!), to friend people with whom one works, people from diferent parts of one’s life, belies the illusion of control over one’s personal information. Not only is one’s data shared with third parties, but the surveys and games that flourish in social network environments expand third-party access: access to my friend is a way of getting access to me. A typical Facebook profile reveals a person’s name, age, birthday, location, occupation, high school and/or university, relationship status, sexual orientation, political afiliation, religion, and personal appearance. Add to this the fact that most users mention events they attend, groups to which they belong, and causes they support, and the result is a 5 high degree of exposure.

Typically, we respond to these seemingly paranoid lines of thought with deflection—it isn’t me about whom data is collected; it’s us—an aggregate. It’s our patterns, not mine. It’s how many of us refer to a new movie or click on an ad, not whether I do. As with blogging, our participation in social networks relies on the supposition that we expose but are not exposed, that we are unique but ultimately indistinguishable.

Developing a notion ofered by Giorgio Agamben, Dominic Pettman considers the problem of the interchangeable yet irreplaceable in terms of “whatever being.” For Pettman, as for Agamben, whatever being points to new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging. Describing the character actor as exemplary of whatever being, Pettman glosses the concept as “an enactment of existence without qualities, or at least qualities so interchangeable and obvious that they erase all identity.” In positive terms, whatever being is a tag for the “sheer generic potentiality of being.”⁶

Agamben emphasizes that the “whatever” in whatever being relates not to singularity as indiference to a common property, “but only in its being such that it is.” He writes:

In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself. Thus being-such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging (“there is an x such that it belongs to y”) and which is in no way a real predicate, comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is lovable.⁷

There is belonging, but not to anything in particular. Something in particular is, insofar as it belongs. Asking “to what?” Pettman and Agamben suggest, mistakenly prioritizes the set over the very condition of belonging. What matters is belonging, not that to which one belongs.

At the same time, mattering triggers an intervention into what could seem little more than another way of designating indiference. Mattering matters. It’s the interjection or scission of love and desire, of wanting. What matters stands out from the mass or multiple because it matters. As Pettman suggests, that I love it, desire it, separates it from the endless, open, uncountable set of indistinguishable members.

There are over 100 million blogs. At least one of them is mine.

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In U.S.-American popular vernacular, “whatever” is an afective, verbal response that deflects another’s comment. It is not generally uttered in response to a question, but to a statement or observation through which another might be attempting to harness the recipient or hearer.

“You haven’t cleaned your room.”

“Whatever.”

One of multiple video mash-ups of Liam Lynch’s punk-pop “Whatever” combines images of George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, Lynch’s guitar tracks, and a Bushimpersonation voice-over. Bush yells:

I’m George W. Bush, leader of the free world. I want to bomb Iraq. And when the world says, “no!” I say, “whatever!” Saddam has started to meet our demands. Yeah, whatever.

He sings the refrain, “’cause this is my United States of whatever.”

The response “whatever” registers the fact of another utterance, of a communicative efort or engagement. It acknowledges communicativity through the deflection of the communicative efort. The sender’s message (whether understood in terms of its content or its intent, whether conscious or unconscious) is neither accepted nor rejected. Rather, the “whatever” response distills the message into the simple fact of utterance.

“Whatever” resembles the response of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener who replies, “I would prefer not to,” when given a task or instruction.⁸ For some contemporary philosophers (for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), Bartleby provides a figure of refusal, opposition, or resistance; a model of escape or disentanglement from the relations of power constitutive of contemporary capitalist control societies. The argument is premised on power’s dependence on resistance: the transgression of the law calls law into being. Or protestors need police brutality in order to demonstrate the validity of their protests. Bartleby, then, suggests a way out of the dialectic of law and its transgression. Sidestepping resistance, he deprives power of its hold.

Yet even as Bartleby evades the circuit of power and resistance by refusing to refuse, he continues to rely on his position as a singular subject: he says “I,” referring to himself as a subject—and not just any subject, but a subject with a view, a preference. As such, he remains exposed to power. He still cares. In response to a request, Bartleby does more than acknowledge communication, the fact that a message has been delivered and received. His answer afirms the intelligibility of the request even as it challenges the normative expectations informing it. And rather than challenging the sender of the message’s authority to make the request, Bartleby asserts himself as what matters—he would prefer not to. He is a subject with preferences, and these preferences must be attended to.

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