Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

Washington in October 2002, when 25o,ooo people surrounded the White House. Nonetheless, myriad progressive, alternative, and critical left news outlets supplied frequent and reliable information about the action on the ground. All in all, a strong antiwar message was out there.

But the message was not received. It circulated, reduced to the medium. Bush acknowledged the massive worldwide demonstrations of February 15, 2003. He even reiterated the fact that a message was out there: the protestors had the right to express their opinions. He didn't actually respond to their message, however. He didn't treat the words and actions of the protestors as sending a message to him that he was in some sense obliged to answer. Rather, he acknowledged the existence of views different from his own. There were his views and there were other views. Al had the right to exist, to be expressed. But that in no way meant, or so Bush made it seem, that these views were involved with each other, that they inhabited a common space, that they were elements to be considered and integrated in the course of reaching a consensus on American foreign policy.

The terabytes of commentary and information, then, did not indicate a debate over the war. On the contrary, in the days and weeks prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the antiwar messages mo'.i-phed into so much circulating content, just like all the other cultural efluvia flowing through communicative capitalism's disintegrated spectacles.

We might express this disconnect between engaged criticism and national strategy as the diference between the circulation of content and oficial policy. Both are politics, just politics of diferent sorts, at diferent levels. Terms like democracy, it would follow, confuse matters by blurring these levels. So on the one hand, we have media chatter-from television talking heads, radio shock jocks, and the gamut of print media to websites with RSS (�eal Simple Syndication) feeds, blogs, podcasts, email lists, and the proliferating versions of instant text messaging. In this mediated di� mension, politicians, governments, and activists struggle for visibilityj currency, and, in the now quaint term from the dot-com years, mindshare. On the other hand are institutional politics, the day-to-day activities of bureaucracies, lawmakers, judges, and the apparatuses of the police and national security state. These institutional or state components of the system seem to run independently of the politics that circulates as content. They go about their work, the business of politics, and the other level reports on it, talks about it, treats it as content about which it opines.

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Anyone even slightly familiar with democratic ideals should reject out of hand this distinction between politics as the circulation of content and politics as the activity of oficials. The fundamental premise of liberal democracy is the sovereignty of the people. Governance by the people is exercised through communicative freedoms of speech, assembly, and the pressj it relies on norms of publicity that emphasize transparency and accountability; it consists of the deliberative practices of the public sphere. Democratic communication steers, influences, or, more minimally, informs politics as the governing and legislating activity of elected oficials. Ideally, the communicative inter�ctions of the public sphere, the circula� tion of content and media chatter, not only impact but also constitute oficial politics.

In the United States today, however, they don't. Less bluntly put, there is a significant disconnect between politics circulating as content and oficial politics. Pundits gesture to this disconnect when they refer to the bubble of concerns "inside the Beltway" and the "real concerns" of "ordinary voters:' So multiple opinions and divergent points of view express themselves in myriad intense exchanges, but this circulation of content in dense, intensive global communications networks actually relieves toplevel actors (corporate, institutional, and governmental) from the obligation to answer embedded in the notion of a message. Reactions and rejoinders to any claim are always already present, presupposed. In this setting, content critical of a specific policy is just another story or feature in a $2 4 / 7$ news cycle, just another topic to be chewed to bits by rabid bloggers. Criticism doesn't require an answer because it doesn't stick as criticism. It functions as just another opinion ofered into the m.edia-stream. So rather than responding to messages sent by left activists and critics, top-level actors counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communications-new slogans, images, deflections, and attacks; staged meetings or rallies featuring their supportersj impressive photo-ops that become themselves topics of chatter. Suficient volume (whether in terms of the number of contributions or the spectacular nature of a contribution) gives these contributions their dominance or stickiness.

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Contestations today rarely employ common terms, points of reference, or demarcated frontiers. In our highly mediated communications environments we confront instead a multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive as to hinder the formation of strong counterhegemonies. The proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communicative access and opportunity result in a deadlocked democracy incapable of serving as a form for political change. I refer to this democracy that talks without responding as communicative capitalism. 1

The concept of communicative capitalism reformats as a criticism the neoliberal idea of the market as the site of democratic aspirations, indeed, as the mechanism by which the wil of the demos manifests itself. In Thomas Frank's words, "To believe in the people is to believe in their brands:'2 Consider the circularity of claims regarding popularity. McDonald's, Wal-Mart, and reality television are depicted as popular because they seem to ofer what people want. How do we know they ofer what people want? People choose them-they must be popular.

This equation treats commercial choices as the paradigmatic form of choosing. In so doing, it displaces attention from the fact that the market is not a system for delivering political outcomes, even as many of us can't tell the diference between political campaigns and advertising. Unlike marketing's catch-phrases and jingles, political decisions-to go to war, say, or to establish the perimeters of legitimate relationships-involve. more than the mindless reiteration of faith, convic:tion; and unsupported claims. They rest on contestable and divisive assertions of justice and right generally, potentially universally. Unlike the economy under neoliberal capitalism, moreover, the political is not a domain for the extraction of work and value from the many to enrich the few. It is, rather, the terrain upon which claims to universality are raised and defended. Political claims are partisan claims made in the name of and on behalf of a larger group, indeed, of �n al that can never be fixed or limited (and so remains nonal), a group perhaps best understood as composed of anyone. Such claims are general rather than individual, and they require those who make them to think beyond themselves as specific individuals with preferences and interests and consider what is best for anyone.

The concept of communicative capitalism designates the strange merging of democracy and capitalism in which contemporary subjects are produced and trapped. It does so by highlighting the way networked comunications bring the two together. The values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies. Ideals of access, inclusion, discussion, and participation come to be realized in and through expansions, intensifications, and interconnections of global telecommunications. Changes in information and communication networks associated with digitalization, speed (of computer processors as well as connectivity), and memory I storage capacity impact capitalism and democraC)lj, accelerating and intensifying some elements of each as they consolidate the two into a new ideological formation. 3

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Expanded and intensified communicativity neither enhances opportunities for linking together political struggles nor enlivens radical democratic practices-although it has exacerbated left fragmentation, amplified the voices of right-wing extremists, and delivered ever more eyebals to corporate advertisers. Instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and influence, instead of enabling the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles coincides with extreme corporatization, financialization, and privatization across the globe. Rhetorics of access, participation, and democracy work ideologicaly to secure the technological infrastructure of neoliberalism, an invidious and predatory politico-economic project that concentrates assets and power in the hands of the very, very rich, devastating the planet and destroying the lives of billions of people.

Saskia Sassen's research on the impact of economic globalization makes clear how the speed, simultan.eity, and interconnectivity of electronic communications produce massive distortions and concentrations of wealth.4 �ot only does the possibility of superpro:fi.ts in the finance and services complex lead to hypermobility of capital and the devalorization of manufacturing but financial markets themselves acquire the capacity to discipline national governments. As David Harvey explains, neoliberalism's endeavor "to bring al human action into the domain of the market" requires "technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyze, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace."5 Sassen's and Harvey's work supplies powerful empirical evidence for the convergence between networked telecommunications and globalized neoliberalism into communicative capitalism.

In the United States, the proliferation of media has been accompanied by a shift in political participation. 6 Rather than actively organized in parties and unions, politics is a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations, and rapid adaptation to changes in the technologies and practices of communication. The commodification of communication reformats ever more domains of life in terms of the market: "What can be bought and sold? How can a practice, experience, or feeling be monetized ?7 Bluntly put, the standards of a finance- and consumption-driven entertainment culture produce the setting of democratic governance today. Changing the system-organizing against and challenging communicative capitalism-seems to entail strengthening the system. How else can one get a message across? Doesn't it require raising moneYJ buying television time, registering domain names, building websites, making links, and increasing awareness?

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I am not claiming networked communications never facilitate political resistance. One of the most visible examples to the contrary is the experience of B92 in Serbia. Radio B92 used the Internet to circumvent governmental censorship and disseminate news of massive demonstrations against the Milosevic regime. ⁸ My point is that the political eficacy of networked media depends on the setting. Under conditions of intensive and extensive proliferation of media, conditions wherein everyone is pre• sulied to be a producer as wel .as a consumer of content, messages get lost. They become mere contributions to the circulation of images, opinion, and information, to the bilions of nuggets of information and afect trying to catch and hold attention, to push or sway opinion, taste, and trends in one direction rather than another. What in one context enhances the potential of political change, in another submerges politics in a deluge of circulating, disintegrated spectacles and opinions. Diferently put, the intense circulation of content in communicative capitalism occludes the antagonism necessary for politics; multiplying antagonism into myriad minor iss es and events.9 In relatively closed societies, that antagonism is not only already clear but also apparent at and as the very frontier between open and closed.

Communicative capitalism is a political-economic formation ·in which there is talk without response, in which the very practices associated with governance by the people consolidate and support the most brutal inequities of corporate-controlled capitalism. One way to unde'rstand the hold of communicative capitalism is to consider its animating fantasies, fantasies that, for many on the left, are inextricable from their faith in democracy. This chapter takes up three such fantasies, those of abundance, participation, and wholeness. The hold of these fantasies on the political imaginary, the promises and aspirations they inscribe in the ideological structure of our most basic communicative activities, helps account for the persistence of belief in democracy in the face of knowledge of the way that the democratic form continues to strengthen the place and power of the wealthy and diminish the lives and opportunities of the poor.

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In the months before the 2002 congressional elections, just as Congress abdicated its constitutional responsibility to declare war to the president, mainstream media frequently employed the trope of "debate:' Democratic leaders, with an eye to this "debate;' asserted that questions needed to be asked. They did not take a position or provide a dear alternative to the Bush administration's emphasis on preventive war. Giving voice to the ever�present meme regarding the White House's public relations strategy, people on the street spoke of whether Bush had "made his case:' Nevertheless, on the second day of Senate debate on the use of force in Iraq, no one was on the floor-even though many were in the gallery. Vhy, at a time when the means of communication have been revolutionized, when people can contribute their own opinions and access those of others rapidly and immediately, why has democracy failed as a political form? "Why has the expansion and intensification of communication networks, the proliferation of the very tools of democracy, coincided with the stunting of left political ideals and the diminshment of progressive political struggle? These are the questions the idea of communicative capitalism answers.

The Fantasy of Abundance:

From Message to Contribution

The delirium. of the dot-com years was driven by a tremendous faith in speed, volume, and connectivity.10 The speed and volume of communicative transactions would generate new "synergies" and hence wealth. Although that bubble burst (to be followed by a smaller one encompassing social networking sites, the user as producer, and the Web 2.0 meme), a similar belief underlies the conviction that enhanced communications access facilitates democracy. The belief begins with the observation that more people than ever before can. make their opinions known. The Internet enables millions not simply to access information but to register their points of view on websites and blogs, to agree or disagree, to vote, and to send messages. Communications, media, and information enthusiasts point to this abundance of messages as an indication of the democratic potential of networked technologies.

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Optimists and pessimists share this fantasy of abundance.11 Those optimistic about the impact of networked communications on democratic practices emphasize the wealth of information available on the Internet and the inclusion of millions upon millions of voices or points of view into "the conversation" or "public sphere:' Pessimists worry about the lack of filters, the data smog, and the fact that "al kinds of people" can be part of the conversation.12 Despite their difering assessments of the value of abundance, both optimists and pessimists characterize networked communications in terms of exponential expansions in opportunities to transmit and receive messages.

The fantasy of abundance covers over the way facts and opinions, images and reactions circulate in a massive stream of content, losing their specificity and merging with and into the larger flow of data. Any given message is a contribution to this ever-circulating content, a drop in the ocean of cultural and political stuf engulfing us. This morphing of message into contribution is a constitutive feature of corimunicative capitalism.

One of the most basic formulations of the idea of communication is as a message and the response to the message.13 Under communicative capi� talism, this changes. Messages are contributions to circulating contentnot actions to elicit responses. The exchange value of messages overtakes their lise value. So a message is no longer primarily a message ^from a sender to a receiver. Uncoupled from contexts of action and application-as on the Web or in print and broadcast media-the message is simply part of a crculating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant. Who sent it is irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant. That it need be responded to is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the pool. Any particular contribution remains secondary to the fact of circulation. The value of any particular contribution is likewise inversely proportionate to the openness, inclusiveness, or extent of a circulating data stream: the more opinions or comments that are out there, the less of an impact any given one might make (and the more shocking, spectacular, and new a contribution must be in order to register or have an impact). In sum, communication functions symptomatically to produce its own negation.

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Communication in communicative capitalism, then, is not, as Jirgen Habermas would suggest, action oriented toward reaching understanding.14 In Habermas's model of communicative action, the use value of a message depends on its orientation. A sender sends a message with the intention that the message be received and understood. Any acceptance or rejection of the message depends on this understanding. Understanding is thus a necessary part of the communicative exchange. In communicative capitalism, however, the use value of a message is less important than its exchange value, its contribution to a larger pool, flow, or circulation of content. A contribution need not be understood; it need only be repeated, reproduced, forwarded. Circulation is the setting for the acceptance or rejection of a contribution.

How a contribution circulates determines whether it has been accepted or rejected. Does it circulate widely, among a variety of diferentiated groups such that teenagers in the United States, accountants in Estonia, and indigenous groups in the Amazon speak in its terms, wear its logo, or hum its jingle? Does it circulate narrowly and influentially? Does it catch on but in an ironic, counterintuitive way, a way potentialy counter to its original intention or reception? The questions alert us to how the sender (or author) becomes imaterial to the contribution, just as the producer, labor, drops out of the picture in commodity exchange. The circulation of logos, branded media identities, rumors, catch phrases, blog posts, urban myths, even positions and arguments exemplifes this point. The popularity, the penetration and duration of a contribution, marks its acceptance or success.

Thinking about messages in terms of use value and contributions in terms of exchange value sheds light on what would otherwise appear to be an asymmetry in communicative capitalism: the fact that · some messages are received, that some discussions extend beyond the context of their circulation. It is also the case that many commodities are not useless, that people need them. But what makes them comodities is not the need people have for them or, obviously, their use. Rather it is their economic function, their role in capitalist exchange. Similarly, the fact that messages can retain a relation to understanding in no way negates the centrality of their circulation. Indeed, this link is crucial to the ideological reproduction of comunicative capitalism. Some messages, issues, debates, are efective -public relations, advertising and political consulting are some of the industries depending on the production of such eficacy. Some contributions make a diference. But more significant is the system, the communications network. Even when we know that our specific contributions (our messages, blog posts, podcasts, video uploads, books, articles, films, letters to the editor) simply circulate in a rapidly moving and changing flow of content, in contributing, in participating, we act as if we do not know this. This action manifests ideology as the belief underlying action, the belief that reproduces communicative capitalism.15

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The fantasy of abundance both expresses and conceals the shift from message to contribution. It expresses the shift through its emphases on expansions in communication-faster, better, cheaperj more inclusive, more accessible; high-speed, broadband, and so on. Yet even as it emphasizes these multiple expansions and intensifications, this abundance, the fantasy occludes the resulting devaluation of any particular contribution. It presumes that all contributions, all sites, are equal, equally likely to be heard or to make a diference. Enthusiastically reiterating the idea that anyone and everyone can participate, contribute, express themselves, and create, the fantasy of abundance also prevents us from recognizing the underlying inequalities inextricable from complex networks.

Recent developments in network science demonstrate structure in seemingly random networks. On the Web, for example, sites are not equally likely to have the same number of links. Nor are links randomly distributed among sites in a predictable, bell-curv� fashion. Instead, there are clusters and hubs wherein some sites are nodes to which many sites link. These hubs serve as connectors for other nodes. In his path-breaking work on structure in complex networks, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi finds hubs on the Web, in Hollywood, in citation networks, phone networks, food webs in ecosystems, and even cellular networks where some molecules, like water, do much more work than others.16

Barabasi explains that degree distribution in networks with hubs� most real networks, follows a power-law. He writes, "Power laws mathematically formulate the fact that in most real networks the majority of nodes �ave only a Jew links and that these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links. The few links connecting the smaller nodes to each other are not suficient to ensure that the network is fully connected. This function is secured by the relatively rare hubs that keep real networks from falling apart" ( 70) . In most real networks, nodes don't have an average number of links. Rather, a few have exponentially more links than others. Barabasi describes the diference between random networks and networks that follow a power-law degree distribution with the term scale. In random networks, there is a limit to the number of links a node can have as well as an average number of links. Random networks thus have a characteristic "scale:' In most real networks, however, "there is no such thing as a characteristic node. ·we see a continuous hierarchy of nodes, spanning from the rare hubs to the numerous tiny nodes" ( 70). These networks don't scale. They are "scale free:

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Barabasi notes that others have observed power-law degree distributions. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that 20 percent of his peapods produced 8o percent of the peas-nature doesn't always follow a bell curve. He also found that 8o percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. In business and management circles, Pareto's law is known as the 8o /20 rule (although he did not use the term) and is said to apply in a variety of instances: "8o percent of the profits are produced by only 20 percent of the employees, 8o percent of customer service problems are created by only 20 percent of consumers, 8o percent of decisions are made during 20 percent of meeting time, and so on" ( 66). Further examples might be Holywood's "A. list" o r the "A list'' that emerged among bloggers. Like scale-free networks, Pareto's law alerts us to distributions that folow power-laws.

How can power-laws be explained? Is some kind of sovereign authority redirecting nature out of a more primordial equality? Barabasi finds that power-laws appear in phase transitions from disorder to order (he draws here from · the Nobel prize-winning work of the physicist Kenneth Wilson). Power-laws "are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems" ( 77). Analyzing power-laws on the Web, Barabasi identifes several properties that account for the Web's characteristics as a scale-free network. The first is growth. New sites or nodes are added at a dizzying pace. If new sites decide randomly to link to diferent old sites, old sites will always have an advantage. Just by arriving :first, they will accumulate more links. But growth alone can't account for the power-law degree distribution. A second property is necessa.ryj preferential attachment. New sites have to prefer older, more senior sites. Diferently put, new sites will want to link to those sites that already have a lot of links. They don't link randomly but to the most popular sites which thereby become hubs.

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