Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

From Generation to Seriality

Reapproached from within the horizon of logistics and the assemblages organized according to its systems of measure, the work of translation as a social-technical dispositif and modality of organization shifts from generation to seriality. What is the generative role of communications media in the production of politics beyond the actionable and invention of the common? Jonathan Zittrain’s analysis indicates that generative technologies are typically found in their nascent phase, where the rules of operation can be built upon to contribute innovative adaptations to the population of the common. Stand-alone technologies such as the PC and iPhone, by contrast, are defined by proprietary, static, and preprogrammed systems that lock out any generative potential, at least according to Zittrain’s argument. The social technology of occupation and encampment indexes a generative capacity for political intervention across geocultural scales. Proprietarization or enclosure can go beyond juridical architectures and take the form of net-cultural practices that become absorbed into mainstream social-political organization. Look what happened to flash mobs: very quickly they became empty gestures of commercial stunts and lost whatever political potency they may have harbored in their gestation phase. TED Talks and Pecha Kucha could be seen as equivalents of netcultural absorption into the mainstream, except they never even went through a generative stage of producing political subjectivities and new modes of expression.

How, then, are generative political technologies and their concomitant practices distributed across networks? In a recent opinion piece, Hardt and Negri draw a long line of afiliation from Seattle to Cairo to Wall Street, indicating what, in efect, is the seriality of political organization as interventions across time and space.²⁴ Some of the connecting devices along the way to Occupy Wall Street and the thousand or so afiliated occupations in cities across the world include WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the Arab Spring—itself a series of connective devices that encourages us to invoke theories of assemblage despite frequent criticism of their unwieldiness as heuristic, let alone analytical, instruments.²⁵ Across these disparate, even incommensurate spaces of occupation and encampment we see the production of the common through the mobilization of desire and a seriality of formats. The tipping point registered once a critical mass has galvanized itself into and then beyond action appears crucial in each instance. In these occupations, the emergence of organized networks as proto-institutional forms becomes manifest. Whether they can sustain themselves over time is a question we have asked ourselves repeatedly. Shortly after its political victories, the Arab Spring was confronted with a problem Foucault identified as common to revolution: how to maintain the production of diference when inheriting the political architecture of the state?²⁶ This is why we speak of organized networks as new institutional forms, bracketing the statist conceptualization of the political not to ignore the actuality of state apparatuses and their geocultural reconfiguration, the material dis- and rearticulation of elements of state sovereignty at sub- and suprastate levels, but to create figures of the universal capable of grasping the political dimension of processes of collaborative constitution at an unprecedented scale.

The network practice of seriality should not be mistaken for the Frankfurt School critique of standardization, which relegated cultural production as an industrialized output of the assembly line. While seriality assumes an element of repetition, the diferential work of translation bestows upon network practices a set of social-technical contours specific to the situation, event, and production of desire. When seen in terms of seriality, the uncertain capacity to sustain network politics and culture appears less of an issue. There is a passage of communicating tactics, strategies, and concepts across network settings. In this sense, seriality is best understood as an iterative process over time and space that corresponds loosely with the remix logic of digital culture and the shift toward strategies of a stream-based sharing of serialized content.²⁷ Both in social and technological terms, it is the work of translation that indicates organized networks are much more robust new institutional forms than their often shortterm, even ephemeral, composition suggests. The political and organizational question, therefore, becomes less one of whether Occupy Wall Street can transform into a social movement or whether the Arab Spring can produce state-based forms of governance and more a case of how the techniques and concepts from any particular network instantiation will move in time and across space to another situation. What sort of social-technical transformation and production of new organizational concepts, subjectivities, and desires will define this grammar of iteration, of its constitutive practices and modes of relation?

Algorithmic Futures

If, as we believe, culture in the networked condition must be understood as “algorithmic culture,” cultural translation and the politics it may articulate must include the cultures of code.²⁸ To afect a politics of the universal on its computational terrain is to take this condition of variational territories and topologies of code seriously. Such an action goes beyond the organizational capacity of social media to help oust authoritarian political regimes, and intervenes instead at the algorithmic level. We have already seen the tendency toward such a politics of the universal in the practices of Anonymous and WikiLeaks, even if the rise of pirate parties founded in response to governmental interventions in the technosocial fields of peer-to-peer culture seems to fold such dynamics back into the mechanisms of representation.

Yet to return to the question of code as the terrain of organization is not simply a reafirmation of the politics of free software as the dominant—indeed, paradigmatic—net-cultural dynamic.²⁹ Instead, we see the question of algorithmic interventions as linked in a more concrete, substantive sense to the new geopolitical and geocultural configurations of information, labor, and economy wrought by the force of infrastructure associated with the global logistics industries. The year 2009 saw not only the initial peak of the ongoing financial crisis, it also occasioned the entry of Chinese state-owned shipping and logistics company COSCO into a 35-year lease agreement with Greek authorities to access and manage port space at Piraeus, one of the largest shipping ports in Southern Europe.³⁰ Along with upgrading port facilities and dramatic increases in productivity, local Greek workers have found themselves confronted by employers with substantially diferent ideas about working conditions, pay rates, and safety. As Greece cedes its sovereign authority to more powerful economic actors, Greek citizens and organizations such as unions have diminished ground upon which to contest perceived and experienced inequalities. With software programs devised to manage key performance indicators and global value chains, algorithmic cultures are key agents that govern subjects and things in logistical operations such as those found at Piraeus, among countless other global sites.

This does not mean that political organization within a logistical world ipso facto submits to algorithmic technologies of control. As Galloway puts it, “What is an algorithm if not a machine for the motion of parts?”³¹ WikiLeaks has shown it can handle the U.S. arm of the military-industrial complex, so what might it do to scramble the system of more socially and economically pervasive powers embodied by the logistics industries? We imagine a WikiLeaks or Anonymous raid not on modern institutions of control (the state, firm, military, union, etc.), but rather on the algorithmic architecture that increasingly determines the experience and conditions of labor and life.

At the same time, the concerns of a more conventional politics of representation are never far away, suggesting that the seriality of emergent political forms may translate across a representation/ nonrepresentation divide whose enthusiastic conceptual afirmation in the name of a “post-representative politics” has rarely done justice to the ontological heterogeneity of actually existing political assemblages. In the end, the same processes of informatization that support and sustain the becoming-cultural of labor and life are the material conditions of possibility for contemporary regimes of financialization. As big data—data sets too large to be processed in small-scale infrastructures—becomes the new watchword of stock markets and governments alike, a new brand of “cultural analytics” has already emerged, waiting to be harnessed for activist ends.³² These new encounters between data analysis and information visualization once again call on us to restage aesthetic interventions in emerging publics and engage, above and beyond the demand for transparency and the investigative heroism of freedom of information inquiries, in the algorithmic constitution of new publics.³³

If new figures of globality emerge in the realm of financial politics, so be it— it is perhaps no accident that the peer-topeer currency Bitcoin (money without banks) ofers us a political metaphor not unlike that of Virno’s “republic without a state.”³⁴ We are still waiting for data hacks tracking the money hidden in “secrecy jurisdictions.”³⁵ And a new politics of multimodality brings reverse engineering to the latest generation of motion capture devices, signaling the autonomous creation of multidimensional data and the possibility of a tactical relationship to the “sentient city.”³⁶ Because in the end, “It is the body, and the body alone, that can act as a libidinal force breaking through the containment of the virtualised ‘circuits of drive’ that attempt to capture the restless desire of the contemporary subject for the encounter in public with the unknown other.”³⁷ These open spaces are not simply spheres of unmediated free speech and democratic deliberation but are structured by algorithmic medialities.

Finally, a misunderstanding perhaps exists—that new technologies call for radically new forms of political organization. Needless to say, this is not the case, and the exaggeration of the role of real-time social media has justly been ridiculed.³⁸ Instead, we want to stress the archival dimension of contemporary figures of the collective, not in the sense of a straight lineage but in the afirmation of the “will to connect” (Stuart Hall). Encouraging and sustaining a wide range of practices of relation, communication, and organization are part of a dynamic transcultural archive, stored and reproduced in a decentralized fashion, protected by its redundancy. We should not, therefore, allow the metaphor of the cloud to be understood exclusively in terms of corporate server networks and software as service economies. We are the cloud, and in acknowledging the forces of seriality we can invent new logistical protocols to draw more widely on this archive. And as we engage in the work of cultural translation—of relating, for instance, the codes that drive the algorithmicization of our communicative practices, to the social codes that emerge across new cartographies of the political—we may already find ourselves on diferent terrain, ready to once again reinvent our relationships to the political.

Notes

1 For an example of such a gloomy extrapolation of contemporary trends, see Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Needless to say, such an explicit exaggeration of contemporary trends is not meant to obscure the many creative uses to which such infrastructures have been put, or deny that corporate and military infrastructures can also provide public goods, but to counter the unbearable evangelism of decentralization-as-democratization. As Benkler notes:

For the first time since the industrial revolution, the most important inputs into the core economic activities of the most advanced economies are widely distributed in the population. Creativity and innovation are directly tied to the radical decentralization of the practical capability to act, on the one hand, and of the authority to act, on the other. The critical policy questions of the networked environment revolve round the battles between the decentralization of technology and the push of policy to moderate that decentralization by limiting the distribution of authority to act.

Yochai Benkler, “For the First Time Since the Industrial Revolution,” in Richard N. Katz (ed.), The Tower and The Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing (Boulder, CO: EduCause, 2008), 52, http://www.educause.edu/ thetowerandthecloud. On the transformation of action, see the discussion on Arendt and Lazzarato in Soenke Zehle and Ned Rossiter, “Organizing Networks: Notes on Collaborative Constitution, Translation and the Work of Organization,” Cultural Politics 5, no. 2 (2009): 237–64.

2 “Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have acquired undeniable historical relevance in the current productive process.” Paolo Virno, “Natural-Historical Diagrams: The ‘New Global’ Movement and the Biological Invariant,” in Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano (eds.), The Italian Diference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2009), 131–47, 142. On the role of language in contemporary capitalism, see Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, trans. Gregory Conti (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008). See also Jon Solomon’s critique of human speciation vis-à-vis translation and the diferential production of knowledge:

When repetition is required, it is called “translation”; where failure is present, it is attributed to exteriority.

Today, the historicity of these assumptions is becoming ever clearer. Needless to say, the fact that human beings are disposed to share signs does not guarantee successful communication anymore than sharing itself produces homogeneous community; neither can such sharing be reduced or equated to the notion of an individuated collective intentionality. Yet this is precisely what forms the basic presupposition for the modern thought of community, crystallized in the nation-state.

And:

To approach the problem of the trans/national study of culture without addressing the way in which knowledge, as it is embedded in various social practices of language, labor, and life, is intrinsically part of the speciation of the human is to continue to blindly defer to the defining search of colonial/imperial modernity for the ultimate technology of human population engineering.

Jon Solomon, “The Trans/National Study of Culture and the Institutions of Human Speciation,” Construction des savoirs en mondialisation. Changements de paradigmes cognitifs: Une révolution épistémologique? Colloque coorganisé par le Collège international de philosophie (www.ciph.org), la revue Transeuropéennes (www.transeuropeennes.eu), Paris, November 7–8, 2011.

3 Jacques Rancière, “A Few Remarks on the Method ofJacques Rancière,” Parallax 15, no. 3 (2009): 122.

4 See, for example, the central role of the common in Negri’s antinaturalist ontology of liberation, in which the common and the multitude exist in a relationship of mutual constitution. Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008). We think it makes sense to maintain such a conceptual distinction rather than conflate them; for a diferent approach, see, for example, Michael Hardt, “The Politics of the Common,” ZNet, 2009, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/ 21899. For reflections on “irreducible idiomaticity” in the context of translation, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Questioned on Translation: Adrift,” Public Culture 13, no. 1 (2001): 13–22. For a more elaborate typology of the commons, see David M. Berry, Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 79f.

5 Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 7/8: 55–66. See also Sandro Mezzadra, “Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude,” 2007, http://roundtable.kein.org/node/653, and Naoki Sakai,

Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

6 Hardt and Negri state: “Protection and oppression can be hard to tell apart. This strategy of ‘national protection’ is a double-edged sword that at times appears necessary despite its destructiveness. The nation appears progressive in the second place insofar as it poses the commonality of a potential community.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 106.

7 Christian Marazzi, “The Privatization of the General Intellect,” trans. Nicolas Guilhot (n.d.). See also Tiziana Terranova, “Another Life: The Nature of Political Economy in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 234–62; and Solomon, “The Trans/ National Study of Culture and the Institutions of Human Speciation.”

10 Boris Buden, “Strategic Universalism: Dead Concept Walking on the Subalternity of Critique Today,” transversal: under translation (February 2007), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0607/ buden/en. All quotations hereafter from Buden.

11 Étienne Balibar, “On Universalism: In Debate with Alain Badiou,” transversal: on universalism (February 2007), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0607/balibar/en. All quotations hereafter from Balibar.

12 http://occupywallst.org. It has often been remarked that the Occupy movement has failed to articulate specific demands. This is not where we see its greatest strength; rather, it reafirms the centrality of physical performative practices in any cartography of the political.

13 Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “The Logistical City,” Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, Digest 3, August 2011, http://transitlabour.asia/documentation/.

17 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 225.

18 See Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983).

schizoanalyticcartographies. See also David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

20 Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 5.

21 Ibid., 4–5.

23 On Arendt and the contemporary dissolution of the borders between labor, action, and intellect, see Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. James Cascaito Isabella Bertoletti, and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 49–51. See also Zehle and Rossiter, “Organizing Networks”: “How, then, to account for a politics beyond the actionable? Such work requires a conceptual constellation that foregrounds translation as a conflictual dynamic and social practice immanent to networks of collaborative constitution” (258, note 1).

24 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “The Fight for ‘Real Democracy’ at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street: The Encampment in Lower Manhattan Speaks to a Failure of Representation,” Foreign Afairs, October 11, 2011, http://www.foreignafairs.com. For a diferent account of such filiation, see Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Of Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (New York: Verso, 2011).

25 Arguably the most consistent articulation of assemblage as a social ontology scalable beyond analytical micro-/macrodichotomies can be found in the work of Manuel De-Landa. See A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York: Continuum,