Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory

If there are grounds, network communications will provide them. Neither weightless nor immaterial, networks accumulate debt to the most important of all the nonmonetized domains: the global environment. The server industry alone already has a greater carbon footprint than the airline business (Boccaletti, Löfler, and Oppenheim 2006). Smart server design and innovations in the generation and delivery of energy are partial solutions, but the fact remains: there is an environmental cost—in the extraction of materials, manufacture, distribution and retailing, use, and recycling—to computer-mediated communications. The exclusion that defines democracy, and that provides information capital with its core resource, is not exclusively human. Actor-network theory notes the exclusion of the natural world from political process (Latour 2004); we cannot imagine giving a vote to the environment, or to machines. But then our ancestors couldn’t imagine giving the vote to artisans or slaves, women, blacks, servants, landless peasants, youths, and colonized or indigenous peoples, and today we cannot imagine giving votes to migrants. The challenge, of course, is that we cannot, nor could we ever, simply assimilate these others into an unchanged system. The system must change, radically, as it opens its political life to the now incessant demands of the ecosphere.

Environmentalism is presented largely as a matter of behavioral change—of new criteria in consumption, fundamentally as ethics rather than politics. As in the normative practices of the professions, environmentalism is presented as code of conduct. These ostensibly ethical strictures do not provide communal grounds for action—the root meaning of the word ethics—but rules for smooth functioning. They are self-replicating systems that, far from demanding commitment to the Good, the good life, or the infinite demand of the other, ensure that no decision need ever be taken. This is the point of Derrida’s challenge:

If I know, for example, what the causes and efects of what I am doing are, what the program is for what I am doing, then there is no decision; it is a question, at the moment of judgment, of applying a particular causality…. If I know what is to be done … then there is no moment of decision, simply the application of a body of knowledge, or at the very least a rule or a norm. For there to be a decision, the decision must be heterogeneous to knowledge as such. (Derrida 2001: 231–2)

The only true action is thus one that breaks the rules. But since the rules have emerged from consensus, breaking them is unethical. The only choice is between compliance and evil—and we know from Arendt that, at least in certain circumstances, compliance may itself be evil. This is the point at which we find ethics opposed to action, ethics as the excluded other of politics defined as the realm of action. From this standpoint, we have to acknowledge the shocking inference drawn by Esposito: “Not only is there no contradiction in principle between evil and politics, but evil, as such, is from a certain point of view always political” (Esposito 1993: 183).

The evolution of new strategies, then, depends on an escape from ethics as code of conduct. The uniqueness of every situation requires consideration if it is to provide the grounds for action. Considering where we are (and what we are to do as a consequence of how we find ourselves situated) is quite diferent from either the application of rules or modeling possible future scenarios in which, in the long run, we are all dead. Consideration of the actual situation should therefore seek out what is unique in it: what is unforeseen, unaccounted for in the rulebook. It is on the basis of these unforeseen elements in the situation that it becomes possible to act, to change the world as given into the world as potential. The terrain of managed possibilities debarring us from action (de Carolis 1996) reveals its contradictions. The givenness of a contingent and probabilistic world becomes future-oriented capacity for bringing about genuinely new situations.

The Crowd

The entity that best expresses this new, postindividual condition is the crowd. Inherently contingent in its complexity, it is probabilistic not in the sense of statistical management, but of virtuality; the crowd is an organ of demand that is never complete, universal, or integral—that is, it fails to exist as a unified and coherent whole (In other words, the indeterminacy is our best hope and hence a call to arms), pitching itself instead into action, which converts the actually existing into the raw material of futurity. But the new crowd is also target of capital’s latest colonization, crowdsourcing. Social networking commercializes the gift of labor, not as individual activity but as aberrations from the average, which can be read as tendencies and thus both governed and exploited as such. Hence, the virtual nature of the crowd, its potential or power to act, is removed by a process of forecasting how much deviance is tolerable—and profitable—in a population. This may indeed be the actuality of the process Rossiter and Zehle in this volume refer to as “a politics beyond the actionable.” Disciplinary identity no longer produced the requisite unforeseen behaviors that capital requires in its endless expansion. The capitalization of friendship by Facebook is a new trajectory, paralleled by the extension of prosumer status to the vast populations of the global South in schemes such as O3b (http://www.o3bnetworks.com), an alliance of search and telecom giants to build a satellite network capable of inducting the Other 3 Billion of the developing world into Internet culture. Geographical extension, sociological intension, and cultural diversity embrace diference as an engine of growth.

The challenge, then, is to confront network activity not with negation but intensification. What is essential is not the actual, certainly not the enforced identities of consumer capital and the management of the self, but precisely nonidentity: the nonidentical nature of the world to which Western thought perpetually ascribes identity. Beyond the shattering of the individual self, what remains to be thought is the nonidenticality of the crowd, or the masses, or populations. The implication of the shattered self is that the crowd is no longer conceivable in terms of a relation between individual and collective. For Laclau, any social or political group emerges neither because the group exists “naturally” (as in some descriptions of nationalism), nor as an aggregation of individuals, but as the concatenation of a more primal human condition:

The unity of the group is, in my view, the result of an articulation of demands. This articulation, however, does not correspond to a stable and positive configuration which could be grasped as a unified whole: on the contrary, since it is in the nature of all demands to present claims to a certain established order, it is in a peculiar relation with that order, being both inside and outside it. As this order cannot fully absorb the demand, it cannot constitute itself as a coherent totality. (Laclau 2005: ix)

But in the database economy, demand is always the object of management. Demand management demeans demand as engine of socialization. Even where it is most lauded as the new mode of extraction of surplus value from populations, in crowdsourcing, the crowd is treated as an emergent property of probabilities whose behaviors, however, are held to be foreseeable. In this actuarial foreknowledge, it is crucial to discern the object of biopolitical management, an object that is singular. The population managed in biopolitics is a single entity. This is the sovereign people of constitutional representative democracy, the sovereign consumer of the market economy. There is only one market in the global economy. But that entity is incomplete and contradictory: neither whole nor universal, it fails in its quest for totality.

We live, politically, in a world governed by the distinction between the rights of the citizen and the rights of man. As Anthony Downey (2009: 109) expresses it, “What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects?” Like Agamben (1995), who provides his premise, Downey misses a key issue—that the refugee, along with those other others, is not a subject, because she is not within the population. Assimilating the stateless and the excluded will remove the last great barrier to cosmopolis, the last political refusal of a system which today encourages the free flow of money and goods and only restricts the free flow of people.

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 diference which makes a diference 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 abandoned debate over how we should live; the only value is eficient 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 need also to recognize the interdependence of crowds, as opposed to the imagined 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 species-belonging 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, so Marx’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 that converts the universe into an environment for the human species?

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 its strength to cast of 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 the unmarketable). We cannot place our faith in a universal, popular platform of innovation 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 passwordprotected 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 shortterm 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 sufer because we have 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 acts of renunciation is not forthcoming” (Adorno 2000: 138). The sacrifice of happiness to rationality or to deferred gratification is a truly tragic sacrifice. Happiness is not to be passed over. But nor is it to be undersold, passing it of with nostrums and trinkets. Capital fails continuously to address famine and poverty, and thrives on pandemic and war. It has failed globally and consistently, and yet it poses itself as global necessity. 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 and inspire 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 diferent politics, and a diferent 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 ‘objectivity’ 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 diference 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.

Rancière’s concept of the political as constituted by its exclusion points to such a phenomenon of incompleteness, of nonidentity of the putative universal, is what draws market traders to the market’s lack in being. Culturalists, sociologists, and political philosophers cling to the concept of identity—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 contribution to this volume), which, however, defuses his insistence that objects precede and exceed their relationships. The political (as opposed perhaps to the ontological) is afective and mediated because it is relational in the first instance, and objective only as a product of that initial 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 entered into. 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 ofer. The demand for inclusion is only a foreshadowing. The demand is for 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 is not 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 unknown and 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….

References